User Reviews

Deviant behavior abound in the Andy Warhol produced warped black comedy about a penny-pinching suburban housewife who rents out rooms to girls who agree to kill people(or dogs, if the job calls for it)! The assignments can be a bit grotesque such as stabbing a retired cop's beloved pooch, a crying baby,crushing the legs of an illegal who pushed a guitarist into a moving subway train resulting in dismemberment, suffocating an autistic child, etc.

I think one has to be in a particular mindset to watch a mother chunk her baby out an apartment window just to save cash on paying her hit woman while it splatters blood on a passersby as it hits the sidewalk below! Caroll Baker's character cares nothing about what her lodgers do except that she gets paid. Susan Tyrell steals the film as a pathetic wallflower, daughter-in-law to Baker, who seems to be the only one with any moral compass whatsoever. Perry King is a lech with no redeeming qualities, awaiting the call to kill the autistic child..he seems perfectly able to fulfill his task, but once it's go time, he weakens, perhaps showing that he isn't a completely cruel person, just more or less obnoxious. I think one must have an appreciation for this kind of demented humor as it features characters who are morally dubious. Stefani Casini(Suspiria)has a funny cameo as a hit woman who likes to ridicule and abuse Tyrell just for the hell of it, and removes a victim's finger so she can stuff it in Baker's ketchup bottle! The film also features two sisters, Glenda and Marsha(Geraldine Smith & Maria Smith), who like to play kinky sex games when they aren't mutilating dogs for an easily agitated client(Brigid Berlin)with uncontrollable body gas. Glenda is a pyromaniac who sets fire to a theater-house(killing 14 people!)and a car the sisters steal. Caroll also performs electrolysis treatments(hair removal)in her home and must contend with an unhinged cop always calling(or stopping by the house)to demand she supply him with killers to arrest after a homicide as a means to keep him happy! I think BAD will be accepted more by fans of trash who enjoy stuff directed by John Waters, where characters show a tendency to be psychotic in a cold-blooded manner, with little conscience or guilt for their actions. We see an ugly side to people who wish to be rid of annoyances which leave them unhappy..so miserable they will have people kill for them in order to do so. The humor is performed straight, unlike something you might see in a Water's film, but it doesn't make the acts presented any less shocking(if anything seeing a woman toss her child out a window to it's death with little expression or concern is even more shocking and potent than if it were Divine!).

A tough middle-aged woman, Carroll Baker, does electrolysis out of her home and runs a female-assassin service on the side. Enter a studly male lodger, Perry King, who joins the band of cold-blooded vixens and... this intoxicating indie follows the nightlife of the sick and twisted throughout New York city as they: drop a car on a mechanic, beat up an old man (Lawrence Tierney) and his dog, toss a crying infant out a window, plan the murder of an autistic child, and hang around talking about nothing.

This isn't a great so-bad-it's-good flick, but then again it's not a terrible b-movie (or rather, d-movie) either. Real actors deliver lines professionally, making you forget the anemic budget. And you'll be tempted several times to stop watching... the adventure gets trudgingly-painful, especially when the storyline centers on Susan Tyrrel giving another purposefully-annoying (though hypnotic) performance; and many of the perfectly-pointless diatribal-conversations drag on way too long.

But by the very end... As blues guitar icon Mike Bloomfield's pornesque instrumental rendition of "You've Got The Cutest Little Baby Face" plays (like in the opening credits)... You'll realize that what you experienced, for better or worse, was some really weird, and very original, stuff.

I finally watched Andy Warhol's Bad, from 1977, which I've had on DVD for years without running - yikes! Felt like I needed a shower when it was done --- it reminded me a bit of early John Waters, but with more bitter and less wit. I almost turned it off a few times - I especially can't handle violence against animals - but then I'd catch some Mike Bloomfield soundtrack music or hear a great line and decide to stick it out.

I've seen Carroll Baker from the original Lolita get pretty scuzzy in other movies late in her career, but this one was a shocker. And what a trip to see Susan Tyrell - who I just recently watched in the early Oingo Boingo brothers cult flick Forbidden Zone - as the lone "good guy" in the whole flick (well, until she drops her mongoloid baby in shock from finding Baker's corpse).

I think I get what the movie is saying RE rampant (& seemingly contagious) immorality overtaking both decency and sanity, especially circa '77 NYC (a cesspool indeed), but I find like-minded movies such as Jules Feiffer's Little Murders, those cynical Death Wish and Magnum Force movies (and even The Warriors) were far less abhorrant (and less abberrant) in the way they portrayed the psycho decline of civility and civilization.

I just watched "Andy Warhol's Bad" for the first time in 40 years, and it didn't disappoint.

I originally saw it at a midnight showing in late 1977 at the U. of Minn. with a raucous crowd, and we all hooted and hollered at various points. This time, I watched a DVD all by myself, and I was grimacing (in a good way) rather than hooting and hollering. This movie is still dark and shocking all these years later.

It was Warhol's attempt at a Hollywood-sized movie with a bigger budget to work with, but it's still filled with Warhol mid-70's "scene- sters" trying to act in supporting roles. However, three real actors (Carroll Baker, Perry King & Susan Tyrell) are the leads, and they all do fine work. And kudos to the late Charles McGregor, a 70's Blaxploition stalwart who plays a really creepy, crooked, "slacker" cop in his final role. He was excellent as well.

I kept waiting for the ***SPOILER ALERT*** "baby out the window scene", and it shows up late to churn your stomach in a thousand knots.

Check it out if you're looking for something a little different from a "blast from the past" movie.

Has a movie ever been more cast for me? I mean, not just Carroll Baker but Susan Tyrell? Can the screen contain that much magic? Directed by Jed Johnson, who also edited Andy Warhol's Dracula and designed the offices of his magazine Interview, it was written by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo, and was the last film that Warhol would produce.

Hazel Aiken (Carroll Baker) lives in Brooklyn, where she does electrolysis out of her home. But her real job is hiring out women like P. G. (Stefania Casini, who followed this movie with Suspiria and this fact makes me overjoyed) and R. C. (Cyrinda Foxe, who left David Johansen for Steven Tyler and was the mother of his daughter Mia) to perform dirty deeds for those who need them. Always women, until drifter L. T. (Perry King, coming off Mandingo) comes into her home and throws everything into a mess.

With $1.5 million to spend - the most of any Warhol film - this pretty much ended up being a non-John Waters John Waters movie. The cast is a mix of up and coming actors like King, non-actors from Warhol's orbit and, in her first U. S. movie in nearly a decade, Baker.

Her part was meant to be played by Vivian Vance - Shelley Winters also turned down the role - but she left the production. Baker was looking to escape the films she made in Europe, saying "I'm looking to get away from that. People don't realize you're acting. They just see you're sexy and they won't take you seriously." Oh Carol. I've watched every movie you made there - I recommend everything she did with Umberto Lenzi, like So Sweet, So Perverse, The Fourth Victim, Orgasmo, A Quiet Place to Kill, Knife of Ice and The Sweet Body of Deborah.

King and Baker struggled with their roles and asked Tyrell for advice, who told them their mistake was even reading the script. In a movie where everyone is horrible, the fact that Tyrell is the only somewhat good person is pretty insane.

Andy Warhol's final factory film production caused quite a hoo-hah when released in the UK back in the seventies, with the tabloid press running shock-horror stories about its content, especially the scene where the baby is thrown from the tower block window. Yet Bad is more than an exercise in bad taste - although it was clearly influenced by the work of John Waters - it's rather an anatomy of the social and ethical consciousness which Capitalist society creates in its citizens.

Hazel (a stupendous performance from Carroll Baker) is a middle-aged woman with a daughter-in-law on welfare who runs her own business: she gives electrolysis treatment as well as running a hit firm from her kitchen! What makes the film's portrait of Hazel and her milieu so extraordinary is that her money-making schemes are shown to be perfectly ordinary, reasonable and even morally equivalent; there's little difference between removing someone's unwanted body hair and removing a person who irritates or annoys them from their life. The most striking aspect of Hazel's routine of hit jobs - effected mostly by dumb young women, task-orientated as the Protestant work ethic has trained them to be - is that so many of the hits involve parents disposing of their unwanted offspring because there's something wrong with them, they get in the way of their comfortable lifestyle. The film shows the final product of late Capitalism's insistence on the consumer's right to their own lifestyle just as they want it once they've fulfilled their task of being a productive, money-earning citizens.

The people in Bad are stupid, petty, vindictive and, when they can get away with it, lazy. This form of consciousness is epitomised by Perry King's L.T., a wandering hunk who Hazel (who would prefer to employ women) promises a hit job. L.T. lolls around Hazel's house, masturbating over porn mags, laughing over the cruelties of daily life, arguing with Hazel and generally just waiting for someone to give him something to do; he's eye-candy but seemingly completely without any volition to create a life of his own. Yet at the moment of crux, when he is called upon to kill an autistic child whose mother wants to share more quality time with its father, L.T. refuses the job, his humanity somehow re-asserting itself. Elsewhere in the film, Hazel's mentally challenged daughter-in-law has mouthed protests against the immorality - but her dumb Cassandra act and L.T.'s sudden sense of revulsion against the prevailing nihilism are merely jerks of a dead human spirit, barely registering as more significant on the level of narrative-importance than someone committing an act of pyromania at a cinema, attacking a neighbour or getting some hair removed from your back.

Bad underplays its nihilistic scenes - the evils portrayed are banal and quotidian. It's horrifying portrait of a humanity reduced to spite, casual violence and idiot babbling is all the more shocking for it feeling, as a filmed portrait of daily life, more accurate a depiction of how people are than most Hollywood films ever achieve. It also feels very now - the people who populate Bad have multiplied throughout the Western world. Andy Warhol's final film makes you wish that more crazed, sarcastic, bitchy, ironic millionaire artists would plough their money into making films of their vision...

**SPOILERS** ANDY WARHOL'S BAD is not as disgusting or outrageous as, say John Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS or Pasolini's SALO, but it still ranks up there among the most disturbing and unpleasant movies ever made. While usually referred to (and marketed) as a comedy, it's a satire along the lines of Todd Solonz's HAPPINESS--there's humor, but of the extremely dark variety, the kind you laugh at only because you'd otherwise scream.

The story itself is as sleazy as they come. A bored housewife (Carroll Baker) runs an electrolosis business out of her Long Island house. In addition to that, however, she occasionally hires young women to commit various acts of vandalism, assault or murder for paying clients. The movie opens with a relatively mild example of this, when a girl enters a scuzzy midtown diner, overflows the toilet and trashes the place.

However, the darker side of Baker's business slowly surfaces as we soon witness acts of cruelty which are difficult to watch: a man's legs are crushed underneath the gears of a garage lift, a dog is stabbed repeatedly, and, in the movie's infamous highlight, an incessantly crying baby is hurled from a high rise window. This scene is chillingly grotesque, yet is followed immediately by a goofy joke (a mother yells at her son as they walk by, "That's what I'm going to do to you if you don't shut up!"). Whether or not you find that funny will pretty much determine your feeling about the whole movie--either it's a devilishly clever satire or a hideously immoral sick joke. Maybe it's both.

A subplot involves Baker hiring her first male hit-person (Perry King, in one of his best performances) to kill an autistic boy of whom the mother has grown tired. There's also an interesting scene between King and hit-girl Stefania Cassini (from SUSPIRIA and BLOOD FOR DRACULA). Also in the cast is Susan Tyrrell as Baker's dim-witted and clueless daughter-in-law, whom Baker treats like garbage. More sensitive viewers may find the use of a down-syndrome baby in the role of Tyrrell's child unsettling.

Overall, ANDY WARHOL'S BAD is as sick and depraved as it's reputation would suggest, but it's well-written and well-acted, with some clever and biting satirical elements. It's more similar in tone and theme to Warhol's early underground films than the in-name-only FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA films by Paul Morrissey. BAD was also the first "Warhol" movie in several years in which Warhol was actively involved in the production. While there's lots of sex talk, there's very little nudity (although we do get a nice look at Cassini's bare buns). But there's some graphic violence and rough dialogue that will likely turn off even jaded viewers.

Like Joel Reeds vastly inferior BLOODSUCKING FREAKS or Carl Reiner's cult classic WHERE'S POPPA, ANDY WARHOL'D BAD has actually grown MORE shocking and disturbing than when it was initially released. While it's certainly not for everyone, it's worth checking out for those who enjoy the occasional sick movie.

Starting with Oscar nominee Carroll Baker (who really could act when given a great script and helmed by a great director) and continuing with Susan Tyrell, going down the line to the angry woman who wants to commit petracide, all fantastic pillars of society. Baker takes over a part that Divine would have devoured like ribeye and turns it into a shrewish straight role where there are absolutely no laughs, including ones in bad taste or chuckles of irony.

She's a beautician as a legitimate profession, but the head of a kill for pay agency where all the killers are women, until she has to much against her will bring a man in. Her clients are all nut cases, and the closest this gets to a John Waters movie is the hesvyset woman with a grudge against a cop, a role perfect for Edith Massey had Waters directed it. I found very little amusing and the supposed distasteful moments just had me bored. A great well deserved outcome for Baker though.

It may have had the biggest budget of any Andy Warhol film but you'd never know it based on the crude production values of BAD. Nevertheless, this is a fun and frequently very funny movie. Carroll Baker, in a role reportedly turned down by Shelley Winters, is terrific as an electrologist/assassination broker who has her hands full with a useless husband, sickly mother and crazy daughter-in-law. Baker is a thief, sadist and racist. One of the film's highlights has her trying to rip off a blind newspaper peddler. Baker's "girls" are a mixed bag of pyromaniacs, dog-killers and overall mayhem- makers. Stefania Casini is the best, and most creative, of the lot. She overkills her victims and terrorizes Susan Tyrell, who plays Baker's shrill daughter-in-law. It's unlikely that Warhol had anything to do with BAD and it's closer to one of John Water's mid-career films like POLYESTER but it's still a lot of fun. Brigid Polk, nee Berlin, is a standout as one of Baker's more ornery customers.