THE 10 BEST OF THE WORST

No true survey of critics would be complete without a nod to the year’s wretched films. In 1985, the choices were legion, yet critics whittled them down to about 100. “I could have picked 1,000 worst,” sniffed Joanne Rhetts of the Charlotte Observer. She settled for 10, the operative number.

If it was a good year for the color purple (thanks to Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen), it was a bad one for any movie with “death” or “dragon” in the title. And the worst trophies might be nicknamed Chevy’s--in deference to Chevy Chase, who delivered a triple-whammy with worst votes for “Fletch,” “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” and “Spies Like Us.”

Considering the sheer volume of such movies, Al Walentis of the Reading (Penn.) Eagle compared the worst to Charles Bronson’s line about criminals from “Death Wish III”: “They’re like cockroaches. It doesn’t do any good unless you kill them all.”

Critics tend to save up their best (i.e., nastiest) salvos for their most detested, thus achieving a measure of vengeance that any bona-fide ninja could appreciate.

That is, Mike Clark of USA Today called “Perfect,” the body-beautiful melodrama, “on a one-to-infinity scale, the perfect.” The Village Voice’s David Edelstein described “Slugger’s Wife” as writer Neil Simon’s ultimate cri de bore. “If I had an enemy and wanted to leave him a mental wreck,” observed Kerry Drake of the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, “I’d strap him to a chair and make him watch ‘Goonies’ over and over.”

In deference to the besmirched, vote totals are withheld. In ascending order of worstness, they are:

10. “Invasion, U.S.A.”

9. “Maxie”

8. “Death Wish 3”

7. “The Year of the Dragon”

6. “The Slugger’s Wife”

5. “Perfect”

4. “Goonies”

3. “Rocky IV”

2. “King David”

And the truly worst . . . the runaway choice of the nation’s critics for the worst movie of the year . . . “Rambo: First Blood, Part II.”

“For pure vileness, megalomania and loathsomely manipulative insincerity for box-office’s sake, nothing came close,” commented Jeff Simon of the Buffalo News.

“The year of Rambo demands a body count more than a critical assessment,” said Desmond Ryan of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“The most insidiously awful of the lot,” agreed Joan Bunke of the Des Moines Register.

Indeed, not only did “Rambo” top this year’s cinematic junk pile, but Sylvester Stallone’s macho war fantasy drew more worst votes from the nation’s film critics than any other movie has in the six years of this survey.