The World's Worst Movie

I had the misfortune, back in the late 90's, to see one of the worst movies ever to come out on celluloid. This movie was so bad that it makes the campy drug movie Tell Your Children (aka Reefer Madness) look positively brilliant.

I know you're sitting there scratching your head, saying, "What in the world are you babbling about?", so good old G will give you a little background info.

Back at my first job, my co-worker and I would read some of the various newspapers that we were microfilming with great interest. We would search out unusual articles and pictures of interest, and regale each other with our findings. One of the many things that we would find amusing, would be the old movie ads from the early part of the 20th century.

For those of you who remember shows like "Leave It To Beaver", you would hear them mention incredibly bizarre titles for horror movies. Well, we (meaning the both of us) would actually find movie titles like that in the old newspapers.

Anyways, we saw an ad for a movie called Lash of the Penitents*. We were immediately intrigued with the movie, simply because the ad featured a scantily clad woman in chains, which for the 1930's really was something, considering the Hay's Office was just around the corner ready to implement a thirty-five reign of prudery.

*You'll have to scroll down to the L's to read an incredibly brief synopsis of the movie. Sorry, this was the best I was able to find, as most everything else on my Google search was related to the actual practice of lashing yourself for your sins.

My co-worker decided that he wanted to see this movie, so he went on a two day search and destroy on the 'net (mid 90's there were no DVD's to speak of back then), and he managed to find a VHS copy that someone made of this movie. After he watched it, he told me it was the worst thing he ever saw. The dialogue was crappy, the plotting was crappy, and even the copy of the movie he found was crappy, because whoever created the copy, taped about three minutes each of two other movies and spliced them onto the beginning and the end of the main movie. He then asked if I wanted to see it, and naturally, I said yes.

Pfft~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~) [picture me on the ground clawing my eyes out]

This 'movie' was so bad, that the only memorable thing about it was this small piece of dialogue by an actor pretending to be a Mexican:

"No, no, senor! It is too dangerous!"*

*This small piece of dialogue became our personal running joke for anything that had a whiff of difficulty to it (and I do mean anything) for the rest of my librarial career (which ended in January 2003)

This movie in no way, shape or form, matched up with the advert. The advert gave the impression that it was about a young nubile woman ensnared in the spider web that was white slavery, or about a young nubile woman in religious peril (hence the name "Penitents").

So kids, should you ever, ever, ever, want to explore the underground 'sex' movie scene from the 1930's, don't. Instead, skip a couple of decades and watch the movies done by Betty Page. Even though her stuff had a flavoring of S & M/B & D/sexual fantasy, they still made much more sense than Lash of the Penitents.