On a cloudless January day in 1966, Los Angeles was such a dull small town that children could be alerted to something as small a skywriter at work. My parents must have been watching the Rose Bowl, as they did every New Year's Day. In those days we lived five miles or so away from the arena, on the heights over the Arroyo Seco. They saw the plane on TV buzzing the big game and urged me to go outside and have a look. Up in the sky, the small plane, low enough that you could hear the drone of the engine, spelled out the words in smoke B-A-T-M-A-N I-S C-O-M-I-N-G.

My friends, I just don't know. Falling in love with a real atrocity is a mystery for me. It's not all about pathetically proving my self-worth by laughing at someone else's failed effort: "better to have never made a feature film at all than to make a monstrosity like this! Haw haw! Oh, I'm so very superior." I know I ought to be saving my limited spare time for masterpieces instead of outlandish dreck. But I still have one particular friend who knows where to find this stuff, and we sit side by side on a couch and laugh ourselves into hypoxia. Companionship is part of the experience. But so is the out of body experience ... it's like my brain is trying to reject the very message the eyeballs are trying to convey to it.

Quick, what do H. B. Halicki and Louis B. Mayer have in common? They both went "from junk cars to movie stars" as the poster for The Junkman put it; both were scrap merchants who got into the film business. Wrecking shop owner turned auteur Halicki's homebrewed hit Gone in 60 Seconds led the 1999 remake by Dominic Sena, who reputedly worked on the original The Junkman as a camera man. The Junkman, the follow-up to the original 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds, is an even more extravagant car-cruncher. It's a film that makes Tarantino's great car chase in Death Proof look like an also-ran. (QT refers to this original by having Kurt Russell's character keep a row of sunglasses on his dashboard, just like Halicki did.) The Junkman is an all-out demolition derby with Hoyt Axton providing the vocals, a co-starring role by a pet pig named Farah and a finale with the Goodyear Blimp buzzing the Cinerama Dome. As the price of a gallon of gas reaches the inevitable $5 mark, let us return to this uniquely decadent actioner.

Can't get a ticket to The Hulk? Try The Brute. Movies give all kinds of different pleasures to all different kinds of people. But there's no substitute for the special dirty pleasure of class-card playing melodramas; this is a pleasure we usually deny ourselves. Our critical establishment, from wattle-shaking newspaper dinos down to acne-pocked bloggers, are very careful to detect a film's inhumanity to fictional evil landlords, conniving bosses and cruel millionaires.

Being a cartoon character, The Simpson's C. Montgomery Burns gets a pass. Burns is reputedly based on a real-life Hollywood type, but he has some other real-life predecessors. (Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller is one; he put a lot of people out of business, lived to be enormously old, and ... this is so Burns ... survived in his last years off the breast-milk of a hired wet nurse.)

Uh-oh.

Submitted for your approval: a berk named Merk in bed with his bird. The fuzzy photo cannot really sum up what's going on here. The still I would have preferred is this film's money-shot: a red-cloaked Milton Berle conducting a Satanic mass in convincing Latin. Somehow this is not available on the Internet. Here, instead: a relatively chaste shot of quintuple threat Anthony Newley (actor/director/co-writer/singer/composer) grappling his real-life wife (the beeyoutiful and talented Joan Collins).

The still is a relic of what I've sometimes thought was the worst film ever made by a human being in world history.

Before it opened, there was much public mulling over whether Harrison Ford had the stamina at age 65 to play Indiana Jones one more time. Apparently the box office grosses answered that question. It was an irrelevant question, anyway. In those Indiana Jones movies, the machinery is what mattered. Ford was there for the ride, just like the audience. I think what was missing in ...Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the elegiac qualities of a late period performance ... for example, the aging heroism in John Wayne's last great movie.

True Grit isn't just the sword outwearing the sheath, and the soul outwearing the breast, as Byron put it. It's also about remaining power in an old carcass. Wayne's rallying of that power in the film's memorable duel: blinking his one good eye at the shock of being called a fat old man, he takes his horse's reins in his teeth and rides down four gunmen. The film is often a comedy, with lines worthy of Mark Twain in it; so much so that the emotional content blindsides you. Every film class in the world quite justly talks about the end of The Searchers, John Ford's image of Wayne framed by a doorway, never at home or really at ease. True Grit has a scene to equal it: a gentle if tersely written scene at a snow-covered grave yard in the high country, with approximately the emotional fire power of the finale of James Joyce's The Dead.

NASA's Phoenix lander has its rendezvous with Mars, and that, as well as the upcoming Puerto Rican primary, gives a torn-from-today's-weblogs quality to this purported horror film, aka'd both as Mars Attacks Puerto Rico and Mars Invades Puerto Rico. But Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster is a film for all seasons anyway. Lou Cutell's alienating Doctor Nadir (above) in bald wig, goblin ears, and loads of clown white makeup, isn't even the most uncanny part of this particularly inexpensive sci-fi epic, which pits a disfigured robot Frankenstein against the gorilla-suited, skull-headed Mull: a sort of an alien attack dog.

Made by Robert Gaffney, a long-time second-unit director for Kubrick (this piece from dvdtalk.com considers Gaffney's career), FMTSM is a good-looking li'l crapburger. It's remembered fondly for Mull, and the hoity-toity aliens who keep him on a leash. Recently at the Super-Con in San Jose, I saw two separate TV horror hosts on a panel endorsing FMTSM as their favorite bad film. Could it give Plan Nine From Outer Space a run for its money? Hard to say, but it shares four essential qualities of Plan Nine; four things that may be completely necessary to the making of a memorable turkey. You've heard it said that it's as hard to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one. Fair enough: there are plenty of filmmakers out there who want to work hard making a bad movie.

Times may have changed, but for years conversationalists who knew nothing about France except that french fries came from there always had a great fall back position: "You know, they worship Jerry Lewis movies." Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope analyzes the urban legend, while passing on some of his own notions regarding "highbrow critics (the only kind France has)".

When I was Paris once, I can remember reading the newspaper Le Figaro's review of "Allo Maman, C'est Moi Encore" (Hi Mom, It's Me Again better known as Look Who's Talking Too). The review began, as I recall, "What's more droll than a talking baby? Two of them!" Sheesh, that's more highbrow than Richard Roeper even! The Lewis libel is what is the novelist Gustave Flaubert called "a received idea," a bit of folk wisdom passed down uncritically from one ignoramus to another.

As Jack Handey put it, "It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man." Crimewave is about that big kind of man, and his partner: two electrocutioners on a rampage. They prowl the streets in a truck with a hog-sized stuffed rat on top, with red light bulb eyes. The driver is Faron Crush, who looks like Paul Sorvino playing the Incredible Hulk. HIs sniggering partner Arthur (Brion "I'll tell you about my mother" James) wears a jumpsuit, fingerless leather gloves, and a flat leather cap the shape and color of a cow-chip. If you ever had a nightmare about Gallagher, that's what Arthur looks like. The two maniacs carry with them "a shocker," a killing-machine that has three settings: "Rat," "Man" and "Hero". And they have no motivation beside malice and sheer professionalism.

Here stands a rebuke to the idea that in the digitized world everything is available. Well, if you strain a bit you can get this notoriously out of print movie. The Brazilian version of the semi-legal Chimes at Midnight aka Falstaff aka Campanadas a Medianoche can be bought for a cool $40, and all you do is turn off the Portuguese subtitles. However, thanks to the poor sound of this masterpiece, English subtitles might be necessary. The entire film was post-synced: "not a word in direct sound," said the co-star Keith Baxter, who played Prince Hal. Led by the obtuse Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, critics of 1967 put their finger on this very obvious button. Few of them considered how few viewers come out of a movie saying, "Boy, the picture, the script and the acting sucked, but wasn't the sound great?"

Last Sunday, the local film archive showed Chimes at Midnight; me and 100 other people turned our back on a sunny afternoon, and treated ourselves to a rare 16mm screening of one of the most imaginative, stirring and beautifully composed Shakespeare films ever made. I mentioned it to Cinematical's Jeffrey Anderson and he pronounced Chimes at Midnight a better film than Citizen Kane. I don't have that kind of enthusiasm (Citizen Kane changes lives, and Chimes is a rougher sell). And still, everyone will tell you about Citizen Kane, whereas Chimes is not just a gem but a half-buried one.