The “cretinous” film responsible for the “worst moviegoing experience” of Roger Ebert’s life
For many, the theatrical experience is sacred. For others, modernity has ruined what used to be hallowed ground, whether it’s phones with the brightness turned up, constant talking, or the endless crunch of snacks. Roger Ebert spent most of his professional life committed to the big screen, with one unfortunate evening seared into his memory as the worst.
While it’s definitely a first-world problem for someone who gets paid to watch and review films to complain about the circumstances of watching and reviewing said films, it must have been a nightmarish night from start to finish for Ebert to declare it was the ultimate nadir of his decades-long career.
Fittingly, the culprit hailed from a genre he was never too fond of. Ebert appreciated well-made horror flicks when he saw them, but more often than not, the preference for blood and guts over storytelling and character development left a sour taste in his mouth, which begs the question about why he thought he’d be able to derive any enjoyment from a double feature.
Maybe he didn’t have a choice, but one thing was for sure: he’d never forget it. Among the many low-rent horrors Ebert panned into oblivion, he reserved a special place in hell for I Spit on Your Grave, which he heartily savaged as one of the worst and most unforgivable pieces of cinematic shit he’d ever laid eyes on.
However, that wasn’t the picture behind the low point of his filmgoing life. It was cut from a similar cloth, though, with Paul Lynch’s 1980 cult favourite Prom Night starring Jamie Lee Curtis in the nascent stages of her early ‘scream queen’ years, being both a terrible movie and even worse trip to the theatre.
“Prom Night is merely an execrable movie, not despicable, like I Spit on Your Grave,” he prefaced a one-star review. “But the experience of watching it at the Adelphi Theatre last week was the worst of my moviegoing career.” That’s a daming indictment, even if it wasn’t entirely the slasher’s fault.
“On one of the hottest nights of the year, the theatre had no air conditioning (a fact revealed only after customers had entered),” Ebert ranted. “There was no ice for the soft drinks. The management relented and opened the theatre’s exit doors, and some of the crowd stood outside in the marginally cooler summer night.”
For anyone who thought the critic’s misery was entirely down to the stifling conditions, fear not: he thought Prom Night was crap, too. Following an “endless hour of buildup” in front of a “terminally bored” audience, the rapturous response to each gruesome kill pissed him off to no end. “To call such a response cretinous would be generous,” he explained before asking a question to which the answer had eluded him for years: “Why do people go to these movies?”
Because they like to be scared is the obvious answer, but Ebert wasn’t buying it. “Probably because they’ve been browbeaten by the hard-sell advertising campaign on TV,” he suggested. “So why bother making a good film?” Take one awful movie and a sweltering summer’s night, and the end result was the worst trip to the multiplex he’d ever taken.
