This week's release of a remastered The Opposite Sex from Warner Archive -- not to mention the campy glow of a certain Cher film on the horizon -- serves as a potent reminder that we can only actively disdain so many movies at any given time.
For example: Over the past several decades, Sex has existed mainly as a Hollywood footnote, since it was an unsuccessful remake of the very popular 1939 comedy The Women, George Cukor's brilliant and brittle farce about New York society ladies and what they'll do to keep or improve their place in the pecking order. 1956's The Opposite Sex cast such cardboard stalwarts as Leslie Nielsen and Jeff Richards as the men (who remained off-screen in the original movie), while on the female side, leading ladies June Allyson and Joan Collins weren't exactly making audiences forget Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford in the original.
But then, from out of the blue, something happened to salvage The Opposite Sex's reputation: namely, Diane English's 2008 stinkburger The Women. After watching Meg Ryan and Annette Bening make unfunny, anachronistic mincemeat of Clare Boothe Luce's play, suddenly The Opposite Sex looked, if not good, at least better.
So if you're a director who's made a reviled movie, look on the bright side -- eventually someone will come along and make an even worse film that will make your clunker seem like a classic by comparison. Just look at:
Stinker: The original Clash of the Titans (1981) earned praise for the stop-motion animation from the legendary Ray Harryhausen, but Laurence Olivier's performance as Zeus typified the anything-for-a-buck roles the master thespian took on late in his life.
Stinkier: This year's dreadful Clash of the Titans remake -- Sam Worthington's cardboard presence as the film's hero made Harry Hamlin seem like, well, Olivier in retrospect, and viewers would gladly have traded the movie's headache-inducing 3-D for the original's dopey mechanical owl.
Stinker: Super Mario Bros. (1993) tried translating the popular video game to the big screen, but the end result was a messy, loud, and generally unwieldy kiddie movie that wasted the talents of John Leguizamo, Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper.
Stinkier: House of the Dead (2003), a video game adaptation that combined zombies and rave culture into a singularly un-scary horror flick. (Feel free to replace Dead with any of director Uwe Boll's other video game movies -- Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, Postal, etc. etc.)
Stinker: Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love (1975) was one of the most notorious flops of the 1970s, featuring the likes of Cybill Shepherd and Burt Reynolds singing songs by Cole Porter (live on the set, no less) and clomping around art-deco sets.
Stinkier: De-Lovely (2004), a misguided Porter biopic which turned the great songwriter's life into the dreariest deathbed flashback imaginable, with such awful singing by people who should know better (Elvis Costello, Alanis Morissette) that the handful of people who bothered to see it found themselves longing for Reynolds' vocal stylings.
Stinker: Showgirls (1995), director Paul Verhoeven's exploration of the Las Vegas skin trade, packs enough quotable dialogue, camp-level overacting, and truly odd sex scenes to make it one of the great drag-queen midnight movies of all time.
Stinkier: Burlesque, director Steve Antin's past-due exploration of the classic exotic-dance revival... hasn't actually opened in theaters yet, so we don't yet know if it's going to take the heat off of Showgirls. But if the trailer is any indication, Verhoeven might consider sending Antin a muffin basket as thanks.