"From Bad to Worse" series features 6 movies so bad you have to see them

Ridiculous script. Atrocious acting. Plot twist from Mars. Nauseating tonal shifts. Icky sex. Hubris.

These are, says Seattle writer/performer David Schmader, the six components of truly bad movies. "Showgirls," the movie he's spent much of the past decade exploring, impressively fires on all six, all the time — "it's like 10 bad movies fighting to kill each other." But the six movies he'll be showcasing in the film series "From Bad to Worse: A Six-Week Study in Cinematic Terribleness," starting tonight at Central Cinema, all feature at least two or three.

Schmader's love affair with bad movies began in 1999 when a friend insisted that he had to watch "Showgirls," the legendarily awful 1995 Paul Verhoeven film about a Las Vegas lap dancer. He saw it and was transfixed.

"It's an amazing bad movie," he said. "It gets bad really fast and stays bad in a million different ways." At home, he showed the movie to another friend, with some explanatory comment. Soon, Schmader was hosting screenings of the film at the Little Theater on Capitol Hill (now Northwest Film Forum), with an introductory lecture and commentary throughout. "It was very exciting to see that other people saw the same accidental comedy as I did."

He toured his commentary show around the country at film festivals, and even got a call from MGM, which owns the film's rights. "I was sure it was going to be a cease-and-desist call," Schmader said, but instead it was an invitation to record his commentary for the film's special-edition DVD.

Now he's branching out from "Showgirls" (which he says he's seen maybe 120 times) with this six-film series.

"Battlefield Earth," starring John Travolta, will kick things off tonight; subsequent Monday evenings will feature "Leonard Part 6" (whose first 30 seconds, Schmader says, are so awful "you wonder if something has happened to your brain"); "Can't Stop the Music" ("It's like a porn movie without any sex in it"); "Road House" (a lot like "Showgirls," says Schmader, except it's guys with knives instead of girls with fingernails); "Rhinestone" and "Gigli."

Schmader emphasizes that Central Cinema offers beer and wine, as well as food; key components of the bad-movie experience. The screenings are workshops, he says, for a full-length cinematic essay called "Nomi's Inferno: An Annotated Journey of American Cinematic Terribleness," which he hopes to premiere next fall. (Nomi is the character Elizabeth Berkley plays in "Showgirls" — but you knew that, right?)

Though Schmader's looking forward to a little break from "Showgirls," he acknowledges he'll be forever entwined with it. "It's definitely the work of art that I've spent the most time exposing myself to," he said. "I'll find out what that does to a man's soul at the end of my life."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com