Cultish devotees of film often celebrate failure, box office, critical, or otherwise. By designating awards to the year’s worst movies, organizing midnight screenings of a film on the fringe, and writing endlessly about one flop or another, bad movies have a way of sticking around well beyond their typical cultural sell-by date. The phrase “so bad it’s good” is often ascribed to these movies when, in a pre-Internet, pre-Mystery Science Theatre 3000 world, they used to be considered so bad, they’re virtually forgotten. This week, as part of the Camp & Cult Blogathon at She Blogged By Night, Fear of a Ghost Planet is introducing a new feature that takes a good, hard look at the supposed jewels hiding in a cinematic junk heap. The first edition of Best Worst Movie, or Worst Movie? seeks to answer that question of Batman & Robin, long a movie the author considered a trashy favorite. How well does it hold up, fifteen years later?
Batman & Robin doesn’t take long to announce its intent to annoy. Before Robin proclaims that chicks dig the car, before our first shot of a Batcave decked out in unnecessary logos and drenched in dry ice fog, before even the first glimpse of a bat-nipple, there are the opening credits. There is Batman’s logo, quickly frozen by some neon-blue ice before giving way to the neon-red backdrop against which the primary offenders names are cast. Those two colors, not only are they among the worst man has created, but they come to dominate the color palate utilized by director Joel Schumacher, whose affectation for these two colors is, to the Gotham City styled by Tim Burton, a revisionist disaster on par with Ecce Homo.
There’s nothing good about Batman & Robin, that much I readily admit, but there’s rarely anything good about a Best Worst Movie. To appreciate something like this, to enjoy such a film, is to enjoy wallowing in muck. Well, I have been carrying this not-so-secret shame for some time: I have been a fan of Batman & Robin for fifteen years now. It’s beyond any reasonable basis of judgement, but for the better part of my life I have stuck up for this movie, in every conceivable way the ugly duckling of the Batman mythos. For the longest time, I’ve been planning to write something to that effect, to gather my reasons for liking this movie and stand my ground. Not to posit a secret genius to Schumacher’s work, per se, but to propose that, in the right frame of mind, Batman & Robin is actually enjoyable, indeed a candidate for the status of Best Worst Movie. But I recently caught the last thirty minutes on TV, and, well, they left me cold. Now, much to the chagrin of my inner-nine-year-old (who practically grew up at the local dollar theatre), I’m ready to repent. (more…)