The rotter's club

Time Out's Ed Lawrenson braves the Barbican's Bad Film Club.

Jul  7 2006

Last month moviegoers gathered at the Barbican's main cinema for a screening of what they were promised would be a 'shit film'. The bold assurance came during an onstage introduction from stand-up comic Nicko, co-founder with her comedy partner Joe of the Bad Film Club. Dedicated to public viewings of terrible films, the event has graced various comedy venues over the past year before reaching the Barbican. The first film to play in that hallowed shrine to high art was the dire SAS-themed thriller 'Who Dares Wins' (1982). But now Nicko and Joe threaten more, with a screening later this month of Village People's execrable musical 'Can't Stop the Music'.

Having endured last month's screening of 'Who Dares Win' for the sake of this column, I can confirm Nicko's assessment of the film. A staggeringly implausible action movie about Lewis Collins's Special Forces operative infiltrating a group of left-wing terrorists, it is a film of unpardonable awfulness. The Barbican audience were quick to recognise this, greeting its many dreadful moments with rounds of slow hand-clapping and derisive laughter.

The duo got the idea for the Bad Film Club while on tour, when they found that nothing alleviated the boredom of life on the road as much as laughing at terrible movies, so decided to repeat the experience with an audience. They have rules. Only films made after 1975 are shown, which rules out low-budget Ed Wood-style genre films. 'It's easy to make fun of science-fiction films from the 1950s,' Nicko says of other celebrations of bad movies, such as cult US TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Whereas these tend to attract weary, imperious sarcasm (think of Comic Book Guy from 'The Simpsons'), Nicko and Joe try to celebrate the films they love to hate.

Selected by comedian Stewart Lee, who was on hand to provide a running commentary, 'Who Dares Wins' was a masterly beginning to the club's Barbican residence, if not quite the 'Citizen Kane' of crap films, at least high up in the pantheon. At every level the film is wrong: Collins's performance is as wooden as a coffin, the action scenes directed with the flair of a 1970s public information short about road safety, the script riven with mad ravings. During the screening, Lee used a light pointer to draw our attention to the movie's most egregious throwaway details: the strange cute animal patterns on the woollen jumpers worn by Judy Davis's supposedly hardnosed terrorist leader, the habit the SAS have of blowing everything up during their training sessions, Collins's preternatural knowledge of London bus timetables… The film's crimes against art and reason are too many to catalogue here.

With a two-hour-running time the film did drag and I think I'd have used the fast-forward button had I been watching at home – which meant my mind was drifting when it came to the scene that raised the biggest laugh, when Collins visits his informant in a gloomy underground car park. Luckily, my companion informed me that in the background to this supposed moment of high drama were some young fellows on roller skates making some impressive moves. At what point did director Ian Sharp – you have been named – come up with that idea? What skewed and faulty logic led him to think that the inclusion of roller-skating youths would heighten tension?

I have a faint recollection that roller skates figure in the Bad Film Club's next selection, 'Can't Stop the Music'. In common with many witnesses of traumatic events, I've long suppressed my memories of this dire 1980 account of the Village People's rise to disco superstardom, but I seem to recall an opening scene featuring Steve Guttenberg's aspiring record producer hero skating through New York (to a brass band version of one of the VP's minor tracks) and my wishing a yellow cab would swerve into his path and put him out of action, and me out of my misery.

In truth, it's debatable whether anyone – the filmmakers included – ever took this shamelessly tacky movie seriously, which makes ridiculing its many faults all the more enjoyable. A beglittered and besequinned relic from the bad-taste nadir of the early 1980s, the film's camper-than-Christmas exuberance will find an appreciative audience – and probably drain the batteries of comedian Glenn Wool's light pointer, whose choice this is. It's sure to be received in the spirit of celebration that Nicko and Joe are keen to promote. Imagine 'Sing-a-long-a Sound of Music' with better songs. OK, different songs…

'Who Dares Wins' was perhaps a more ambitious choice. In an introduction that was as insightful as it was funny, Lee suggested the film was so spectacularly, gloriously awful because it was made in 'a spirit of hatred… and you can't make art in a spirit of hatred'. Rabidly right-wing, scornful of the anti-nuclear movement and deeply misogynistic, it's ideologically, as well as aesthetically, suspect. And laughing at the movie's innumerable ineptitudes somehow takes the sting out of its contempt for liberal values. How, for instance, can you take seriously its attack on the peace movement when its idea of a protest band is, in Lee's words, 'like Chas and Dave crossed with Hawkwind'?

I suspect this goes to the heart of the Bad Film Club's appeal. Watching bad movies is usually an achingly boring experience where you look at your watch more often than the screen: I'll go to my grave, for instance, resenting those three hours I wasted watching a French movie about a crockery factory a few years ago. Or the 138 minutes spent suffering 'The Matrix Reloaded'. Or... Well, I could go on. Taking the piss out of such movies in the rowdy, bear-pit atmosphere that Nicko and Joe encourage is, I think, a way of reclaiming some of the time we've lost to all those bad films. At the very least it's an opportunity for a comic like Lee to share the pain by inflicting his experience on us. As 'Who Dares Wins' mercifully came to an end, Lee asked 'Isn't that the most awful thing you've seen?' Yes, it was. And I hope 'Can't Stop the Music' is just as bad.

'Can't Stop the Music' screens at the Barbican at 7.30pm on July 19.

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