The movie Roger Ebert hated so much he walked out: “One of the two or three worst ideas ever conceived”
Naturally, the job of being a film critic comes with watching many great movies, ones you know will become future classics and others that you will certainly find yourself returning to so that you can show your friends. Then there are the terrible films that you have no choice but to sit through; after all, you are getting paid to do so. Yet, some are just so mind-numbingly bad and such an inherent waste of time that you reconsider your whole career.
Roger Ebert watched many bad films during his long career as a film critic, and luckily, he had plenty of acerbic wit to make his reviews of these terrible movies considerably more entertaining than the material he was writing about. He never sugarcoated his words, claiming that he would rather watch a recording of his own colonoscopy than Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, and calling The Human Centipede “an ugly, artless affront to human decency.”
The writer’s talent for eloquently slagging off movies made him a hugely popular critic, one you could always rely on for brutally honest reviews. In fact, his reviews of bad movies were always more entertaining than his pieces about good ones because he really held nothing back. Even in the earlier days of his career, he expressed a strong sense of opinion, and in his 1971 review of The Statue, he proved his prowess as one of the most cutting but necessary film critics in the game.
Ebert hated the movie so much that he wrote, “In addition to being one of the worst movies ever perpetrated, The Statue is based on one of the two or three worst ideas ever conceived for a movie.” The critic couldn’t even believe that the movie had been greenlit because it was so awful.
“How it managed to get past the office mimeograph machine, much less get read, financed, produced, acted in and even released, is a mystery maybe only that helpful stranger, with his boundless optimism for bad plots, could explain,” he added.
The movie starred icons like David Niven and John Cleese, and follows a comedic plot that sounds ridiculous from the get-go: A man’s wife makes a giant statue of him, only for him to realise that the penis does not look like his. Thus, he accuses her of cheating on him.
It’s a bizarre idea, one that Ebert momentarily suggests might have had potential. “I suppose a funny movie might have been made of this material.” He quickly changes his mind. “No, on second thought, I suppose not.” The critic added, “Certainly not with David Niven looking so uncomfortable you wish, for his sake, he were in another movie, or even unemployed. Anywhere except under those pigeons.”
Ebert admits he walked out of the movie, which received pretty bad reviews across the board. The movie isn’t remembered as one of Niven’s finest moments; he is much better recognised for performances in movies like A Matter of Life and Death, Death on the Nile, and The Pink Panther.
