The two movies Stephen King calls “the benchmark of awfulness”
As one of the most heavily-adapted authors in history, Stephen King has had his name slapped on the good, the bad, and the ugly of cinema over the years, but it was a widely acclaimed Quentin Tarantino movie that opened the doors for the writer to anoint two films as having set all-time lows.
King has been known to pass judgment on the breadth of cinema history, and his opinions don’t always fall in line with the consensus. Famously, he’s one of the very few people out there who prefers the 1997 miniseries version of The Shining to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, and his favourite filmed version of his work is Storm of the Century, which he wrote himself exclusively for television without literary source material to lean on.
After a six-year sabbatical from cinema following Jackie Brown, Tarantino returned to multiplexes with his two-part and self-styled ‘roaring rampage of revenge’ Kill Bill. For the most part, it would be safe to say critics and crowds alike were suitably won over by Uma Thurman slicing and dicing her way towards David Carradine’s titular villain, but King wasn’t quite so enamoured.
Writing for Entertainment Weekly, he referred to the opening chapter as a “blah movie”. In fact, he was so discouraged by the wave of positive notices that greeted the film, he felt compelled to speak out. “Steve says you should remember that movie critics see movies free,” he posited. “They’re thus apt to rhapsodise over narcissistic stuff like Kill Bill, which announces itself as ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Fourth Film’. ain’t we la-di-da.”
From there, King decides the best way to further illustrate his point is to invoke the name of a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi caper and a psychologically-driven biopic without offering any further context. As much as he didn’t care for Kill Bill, he does at least concede that it “isn’t a benchmark of awfulness like Mars Attacks! or Mommie Dearest.”
Dredging up those two completely unconnected films has nothing to do with Tarantino or Kill Bill in the slightest, although it does outline a clear disdain King holds for them to invoke his feelings on each one. No further insight is added, so all that’s made clear is that the horror legend actively abhors a star-studded cosmic comedy from an A-list auteur and a scenery-chewing exercise in overacting from Faye Dunaway that came close to sweeping the board at the Golden Raspberry Awards by winning ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Actress’, ‘Worst Supporting Actor’, ‘Worst Supporting Actress’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’.
Mommie Dearest is a very bad movie, but Mars Attacks! has charm to spare and delivers plenty of fun, whereas Kill Bill is an excellent, visceral, and stylish martial arts-inspired thriller. There’s no connective tissue between the three, but despite King failing to derive much enjoyment from the latter, he didn’t quite go as far as putting it on the same lowly rung as the other two.
