Things (1989)

Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom. 

A truly horrible movie is something like Things.  This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props were slapped together with paper-mâché.  It still managed to get a wide release in video stores, trapping the unwary into an hour and a half of boredom and confusion.

Don (Gillis) and his friend Fred (Bruce Roach) visit Don's brother Doug (Doug Bunston) in his isolated cabin.  Doug is impotent but has been able to find a way for his wife Susan (Patricia Sadler) to have a baby, using an experimental procedure invented by Dr. Lucas (Jan W. Pachul).  Something goes wrong and Susan dies, giving birth to various killer insects that soon infest the house.

With no phone, surrounded by dangerous terrain and with Fred sucked into another dimension, Don and Doug try to survive the night while Dr. Lucas performs bloody experiments in his lab.  At some point Fred returns to help fight the bugs, while Lucas also shows up to find out what happened to Susan, leading to a final confrontation between him and Don.

This is one of those movies in which nothing happens for a good deal of the runtime.  Amber Lynn remains fully clothed.  She was making twenty-five thousand down the road to take her clothes off in a strip bar, so she wasn't going to do anything for $2500.00, especially Canadian dollars.  There is nudity, but it's in a dream sequence at the beginning, featuring a prostitute they picked up in Toronto wearing a devil mask - a casting choice which got Pachul in hot water with the police.  

Familiar Strangers has a couple memorable tracks on here, but a few years ago TerrorVision released the soundtrack, meaning if one wants some of the music - the only thing good about this movie - then it's available without ever having to see the film.  Otherwise, the entire movie involves two, sometimes three, guys wandering around a house, drinking beer and occasionally taking a chainsaw, a drill or a knife to some terrible props.  There are long spaces where nothing happens and, when something does, it's too poorly lit to matter.  It is also dubbed so badly that it is distracting.

There is a cult following for this film that revels in its supreme awfulness rather than its entertainment value.  It has none of the latter but does serve as a cautionary tale that not all dreams are worth pursuing.  The filmmakers have tried to put an artsy spin on what they created but, if anything, that just makes it worse.  Still, I would argue against this being the worst film ever made.  Maybe the worst to come out of Canada, but I have seen some abysmal European films that, even though they have better production values, have even less going on.  Still, it does make Manos: The Hands of Fate look like professional filmmaking. 

Things (1989)

Time: 85 minutes

Starring: Barry J. Gillis, Doug Bunston, Bruce Roach, Amber Lynn

Director: Andrew Jordan