Who says a great movie has to be any good?

The other night, I flipped past that SEINFELD episode where Elaine suffered for the fact that she hated THE ENGLISH PATIENT. I love that episode -- because, like Elaine, I hated it, too.

Hated.

This got me to thinking about movies, and why people like certain ones -- and why they might SAY they like certain ones because they think they SHOULD. For instance, tell someone that you hated E.T. (which I did), and people will look at you like you just kicked their grandmother in the stomach. (I'd love to kick E.T. in the stomach.)

Anyway, back to that sorry THE ENGLISH PATIENT. I went to a party not too long after it came out, and one of Raleigh's film critics was there. (How many do we have, come to think of it?) We were introduced: "You two both like movies a lot..." We got to talking movies, and quickly found that we were coming at cinema from two completely different directions.

Not only was it obvious we didn't like the same films -- aside from THE WAGES OF FEAR, I think -- but we didn't like each other, either. He was pretentious and went on and on and on, a lot like the movies he dug. Me, I prefer simpler, shorter films: westerns (7 MEN FROM NOW), crime films (FIVE AGAINST THE HOUSE), stuff with people in rubber suits tearing stuff up (THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON). Good, solid genre pictures.

Seeing that it would be easy, and a helluva lotta fun, to really get under this guy's skin, I cooked up a diatribe that I'm still quite proud of:

Movies are entertainment. You give up your money and a couple hours of your time, and hopefully you get something in return. With THE ENGLISH PATIENT, I looked at my watch a lot, wished the bastard would hurry up and conk out, and for days bitched about my lost six bucks.

But take something like ORGY OF THE DEAD, a piece of nudie junk written by Ed Wood back in 1965 or so: I laughed, my friends laughed, and we backed it up and watched a couple parts of it again. And we still talk about it -- years later.

As I see it, that makes ORGY OF THE DEAD a better movie than THE ENGLISH PATIENT.

The guy just walked away.

That's Ed Wood up top. He was a total loser of the variety only Hollywood can chew up and spit out. God bless him.

(By the way, I also hated PLATOON, JURASSIC PARK and TITANIC.)