Tonight as I perused YouTube I came across a trailer for
Return of Sabata, one of a series of films (three, actually) starring Lee Van Cleef as the titular gunslinger. Usually, I'd think it just another cool trailer for another Spaghetti Western. But this one is a particular case....
Whatever you may think of Michael Medved, he and his brother Harry did write a favorite book of my youth, "The 50 Worst Films Of All Time (...and how they got that way)". At the local bookstore, I would go in every weekend and read that thing over and over until I nearly got thrown out for treating it like a library and not buying like I shoulda.
Anyways, a couple of years ago I got the same book out of the library and read it again./ Great nostalgia but I realized something: some of these films were pretty darned good. No
Battleship Potemkins of
Gone With The Winds or the like but still not bad; at any rate, not the worst.
And before you get all huffy, I understand that any list like this is subjective as far as the authors, the year the book was published, what films are available at the time and so on. It's just that, in my opinion, some movies age better than others.
There's something likable about films the likes of the aforementioned
Sabata,
Airport 1975,
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,
Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and the like (and it is because of the information in this book that I still long to get my sweaty hands on a copy of Dennis Hopper's
The Last Movie). After all, most of it may be a nostalgia thing as well, but still....
For those of you who aren't familiar with the list, heres' a quick and easy linkage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifty_Worst_Films_of_All_TimeSo, am I alone in this thinking? Are these 50 films
still the worst of their time (let alone all time), or have they mellowed in their old age?