The “truly unspeakable” movie Roger Ebert called worse than the worst: “Not enough to be merely awful”
There’s a special place in hell reserved for the worst movies ever made, and there should be a special place in an altogether different realm of purgatory for those that aren’t even good enough to be considered among the worst. It’s a damning indictment, but one Roger Ebert was happy to apply.
Strangely, though, it fared better on his star system than the most egregious affronts to cinema. There were many films that Ebert refused to give even a solitary star, while there were plenty of truly terrible pictures that could only scrape together half of one, never mind the litany of single-star offenders.
By comparison, a picture earning a 1.5-star assessment from the vaunted critic isn’t too shabby, all things considered. And yet, despite scoring it higher than literally hundreds upon hundreds of other movies, which would hint they were exponentially worse by his own metrics, Ebert didn’t think 1983’s The Lonely Lady was so bad it transcended the star system to qualify as beneath the bottom of the barrel.
It sounds oxymoronic for Ebert to dish out a higher grade to director Peter Sasdy’s adaptation of Harold Robbins’ novel of the same name than some of his most hated features, but he did at least offer an explanation for why, in this case at least, 1.5 stars meant it was so irredeemably awful that it didn’t even deserve to be lumped in with the rest of the cinematic cack unleashed on unsuspecting eyes that year.
“If The Lonely Lady had even a shred of style and humour, it could qualify as the worst movie of the year. Unfortunately, it’s not that good,” he wrote. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there in Hollywood, and it’s not enough to be merely awful. You need something to set yourself apart. Pia Zadora tries, and she has pluck, but she’s just not bad enough all by herself.
Singling out the star from the offset, Ebert wouldn’t have been surprised when Zadora won the Razzie for ‘Worst Actress’, one of the flick’s six wins to go along with its unwanted prizes for ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Score’, ‘Worst Original Song’, and ‘Worst Original Screenplay’.
Woefully miscast and giving a performance to match, the story culminates with Zadora’s aspiring screenwriter, Jerilee Randall, telling the world the twisted ways in which she achieved her Hollywood dream while collecting an award. In the right hands, it could – and should – have been a powerful insight into how women are treated in the industry, but in these hands, it most definitely was not.
Ebert acknowledged that “the movie is bad in all the usual ways,” but he also noted that The Lonely Lady also contained some “truly unspeakable things.” They include horrific depictions of violence, but also more arbitrary things like an absence of proper nouns that made the film feel like it exists in a “generic alternative universe,” creating a narrative and tonal whiplash that left him feeling more bemused than anything.
The only notable thing about the movie is that it marked Ray Liotta’s film debut, which is something. On the other hand, Ebert summed up his feelings by repurposing the line of dialogue he hated the most: “I walked out of this movie saying to myself: ‘Why? Why!!!'”
