Films--200 Plus--That They Loved to Hate

More movies appeared on more screens in 1987 than in any year in memory. As their critics were quick to point out, that also meant more drivel than ever.

“Almost no week went by without the release of a couple of low-budget exploitation films on a one-way trip to Video Hell,” wrote James Verniere in the Boston Herald.

Opinion was considerably more divided about which films were, as Michael Jackson might have put it, “really, really bad.” One reviewer’s truffle was another’s death cup. For every dozen or so film critics who detested Robert Altman’s “Beyond Therapy,” there was a lone David Elliot of the San Diego Union singing its praises as one of 1987’s best.

No critic swam more against the tide than F. X. Feeney of the L.A. Weekly, who not only crowned the operatic epic “The Sicilian” the year’s finest movie, but pronounced Michael Cimino as “the greatest director living in America.” The movie received no other best citations, but not because it escaped the attention of Feeney’s colleagues, who voted it 1987’s absolute worst film. (In fairness to Feeney, his opinion was based on watching the longer version of the film in Europe.)

A few critics actually bypassed “Sicilian” as too easy a target, right up there with “Ishtar.” But “Sicilian” also was the rare film that could earn worst votes by word-of-mouth.

“I never saw ‘The Sicilian,’ ” admitted Roxanne Mueller of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “but critics and readers alike heaped so much abuse upon it that I feel like I’ve seen it and hated it.”

Critics use special criteria when meting out their worsts.

“My list of 10 worst movies of 1987 is made up of films which made me question the wisdom of my job choice,” wrote Joe Meyers of the Bridgeport (Conn.) Post.

“With more new releases than ever,” wrote Janet Maslin of the New York Times, “it takes a great barking dog of a film, an ‘Angel Heart,’ a ‘Who’s That Girl?,’ to stand out from the crowd. . . . “

Some eminent reviewers eschew the low road by assigning the “worst” wrap-up to a junior critic. They pretend to have erased the year’s sludge from the memory bank. Bad movies can be painful to watch, after all, and skewering them in print allows a small measure of revenge.

“Burt Reynolds said he made ‘Heat’ and ‘Malone’ to prove to the world he didn’t have AIDS,” wrote Jeff Simon of the Buffalo News. “Publishing his most recent blood test would have been much easier on us all.”

Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune singled out “Less Than Zero”: “On a scale of one to 10,” he reasoned, “it would get a less than zero.”

The much-aligned “Million Dollar Mystery” showed up on the list of the Portland Oregonian’s Ted Mahar, among many others. “What can you expect of a film co-produced by a garbage bag company (Glad)?” Mahar asked.

All sequels with the numeral IV, anything starring Whoopi Goldberg or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and especially “Ishtar”--these were objects of opprobrium. More than 200 different titles were mentioned in the poll.

If a few of the titles enjoyed some commercial success, that’s no accident either, at least according to Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle: “A bad picture . . . would show up in theaters on a Friday with nothing in that day’s Chronicle to prevent unsuspecting schlubs from paying to see it. Then a few days later, I’d swat these flicks like flies,” LaSalle wrote. “They could run, but they couldn’t hide.”