The “inept” movie Roger Ebert refused to give a star rating: “Offensive to my intelligence”
Whether it’s a star-based or numerical system, the point of writing and publishing movie reviews is to give a prospective audience an inkling of whether or not they should bother going to see it. Roger Ebert only ranked films between zero and four, but he reserved a special place in cinema hell for those that weren’t even worthy of making the scale.
If the celebrated critic was judging a picture and didn’t even deem it worthy of even half a star, then it became abundantly clear that a woeful crime against celluloid had been committed. His half-star reviews were often withering, scathing assessments of terrible titles that he regularly urged people not to see, but the dreaded thumbs-down placed them in an entirely different – and demonstrably worse – category.
These were the features that, from Ebert’s perspective, had absolutely no redeeming features. Whether they were poorly written, shoddily directed, woefully acted, relentlessly gruesome, borderline barbaric, or any other excesses and extremes that ruled him out of his own star system, they didn’t exactly come highly recommended.
Up until November of that year, Ebert was confident that Hellbound: Hellraiser II, The Blue Iguana, Bad Dreams, and Johnny Be Good were locked in a four-way battle to be named the single worst movie of 1988 because they were the only ones to be awarded 0.5 stars. However, when he had the misfortune of watching director Donald P Bellisario’s Last Rites, a clear victor emerged.
After decrying it as the worst of the calendar year, he helpfully explained why. “Last Rites qualifies because it passes both acid tests: It is not only bad filmmaking, but it is offensive as well – offensive to my intelligence,” he wrote. “Many films are bad. Only a few declare themselves the work of people deficient in taste, judgment, reason, tact, morality, and common sense.”
Posing a pertinent question to the filmmakers that underlined his sheer disdain for the diabolical thriller, Ebert questioned why there was “no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film, and vomited?” Needless to say, he wasn’t a fan.
The story followed Daphne Zuniga’s Angela, who finds refuge in a church after watching her lover be murdered by his wife after discovering the extramarital affair, where she encounters Tom Bergenger’s priest. She can’t outrun her past, though, with the murder – and the priest – having ties to organised crime.
Speaking of the narrative, Ebert described it as “a feverish scavenger hunt through lurid melodrama, impossible coincidence, shocking exploitation of the religious material, utter disregard for the audience, and a cheerful contempt for the talented actors,” leaving Last Rites without a single redeeming quality that could elevate it onto the star system.
It was the only major release he reviewed in 1988 that didn’t qualify, and the fact that it also made a late charge to become the year’s biggest box office flop after failing to cross $500,000 at the box office and ended up as the one and only picture written and directed by Bellisario indicates that Ebert wasn’t alone in viewing it as an unfailingly atrocious failure on all fronts.
