Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This month we’re dancing to Bolero, nominee for nine Razzies, winner of six including Worst Picture, and such a toxic nightmare of a production that it became an old shame for the people who produced The Apple.
Oh hey, Bo! Fancy finding you here again!
Mark “silly hat” off on your Bo Derek bingo card.
If you previously missed the sordid tale of Bo Derek and her film career in the 1980s, go read my column on Ghosts Can’t Do It (and then watch Ghosts Can’t Do It, because it is hilarious). Given how much the Razzies loved picking on her throughout the decade – Ghosts was the last of her three Worst Actress wins – it was always only a matter of time before we’d be back with her. 1984’s Bolero was the first Razzie-winning doozy for Bo and husband John, before they decided to flip giant naked birds to everyone else in the film industry, and it contains a secret ingredient that Ghosts lacked. That ingredient was distributor Cannon Films, helmed by Israeli titans of trash Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
Truly, two men have never looked more at home in cheap cowboy hats.
Golan, fittingly, got his start in the film industry as a production assistant for master of the microbudget Roger Corman before establishing himself as a pioneering director in the Israeli film industry. Globus had not planned on entering the film industry at all, but he did have a degree in business, and when his cousin Menahem needed a partner with financial savvy, he was brought aboard. In 1979, the brothers bought the struggling Cannon Films, then owned by founders Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey. Cannon already operated on a business model that required keeping budgets to $300,000 or less, which worked perfectly for what the cousins had in mind. Throughout the following decade, they became two of the biggest names in B movies by buying up scripts no one else would touch and producing them. They rocket-boosted the career of Chuck Norris and the ‘80s ninja craze. And they decided – perhaps because they had seen the couple’s other two films – that they wanted in on Bolero.
Sometimes it’s spelled “Bo-Lero,” in case you didn’t get the joke. Also, that horse will be important later.
Golan and Globus were already feuding with MGM, their North American distributor, when John and Bo screened an advance cut of the film for CEO Frank Yablans. Yablans had hated pretty much every film that Cannon had sent him since 1982, and Bolero turned out to be no exception. In fact, Yablans hated Bolero so much that he used it to trigger a breach-of-contract clause and drop Cannon from MGM’s distribution deal.
So Cannon released Bolero itself with no MPAA rating, and it put in a lackluster performance at the box office in comparison to John and Bo’s previous outing. Here things start to differ depending on whether you’re more inclined to believe the Dereks or Menahem Golan. Golan claims John Derek refused to tame the film’s sexual content into something financially viable; the Dereks claim Golan pressured them to make the sex scenes more explicit. Golan claims the Dereks were profligate spenders who illegally fired half the cast and crew; the Dereks claim that Golan tried to make Bo do kissing scenes with an actor who had herpes sores on his face (this one’s largely agreed to have been false). Bo Derek claims that Golan and Globus even tried to seize her and John’s house as payback for how embarrassing the film was, which I have to admit sort of puts a thumb on the believability scale for G and G. In any case, Cannon Films went on to produce a bunch of Chuck Norris money machines and the Dereks went on to make Ghosts Can’t Do It, the greatest film of all time, so I think we all get to be winners here. Even Bolero, which “won” six Razzies.
Given what we know about the Razzies and their tendency to target films based on reputation, not to mention the presence of a pretty young actress, we have a strong candidate for reappraisal here. So is Bolero secretly great?
THE STORY
Bolero’s opening credits play over footage swiped from Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 The Sheik, which is being watched in theaters by two recent graduates of a snooty British prep school: Catalina Terry (Ana Obregon) and a girl whose name, depending on which source you consult, is either “Ayre” or “Lida” MacGillvary (Bo Derek). Whichever outrageously preppy first name she has is never mentioned in-film; everyone just calls her Mac. Derek was 28 at the time of filming, and Obregon was 29. Both were extremely attractive women. Neither could pass for recent high school graduates unless the entire audience was blind and deaf.
Couldn’t they have been grad students, or frustrated young housewives? It’s your movie, John Derek! You’re only limited by your own puny imagination!
Mac comes from a very wealthy family, and upon her graduation, she gains control of a large trust fund, which, inspired by Valentino’s exploits in the deserts, she will use to finance a trip overseas for herself and Catalina, so that they can both lose their virginity. Don’t imagine they must do this because they had no willing candidates at their snooty prep school. No, Mac already has a fellow student (Paul Stacey), who looks uncomfortably more like a teenager than she does, begging her to “be my Sheba and ride with me over the sand dunes.” This will not be the last time that the whole Bolero enterprise displays distressing hebephilic overtones.
Anyway, Mac and Cat need to go to Morocco so that Mac in particular can lose her virginity to a sheik. Only a sheik will do for a girl of her standards and taste, you see. They’re also going to take along Mac’s family driver, Cotton (George Kennedy) –
*record scratch*
Yes, that George Kennedy.
Well, now he’s this George Kennedy.
I don’t know what kind of dirt John Derek had on every elder statesman in Hollywood, but between this, Richard Harris starring in Tarzan, the Ape-Man, and Anthony Quinn playing Bo’s husband-ghost in Ghosts Can’t Do It, his record may still be unmatched for getting distinguished older actors to humiliate themselves. Anyway, Kennedy plays driver/trip chaperone Cotton, and he is one of the weirdest characters I have ever seen in a movie, and the first thing he has to do is deliver a monologue about the various times he’s seen Mac naked throughout her life, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more pity for a man who won an Academy Award.
Over in Morocco, Mac and Cat ogle some Rudy Valentino lookalikes. Mac meets her sheik (Greg Bensen). He looks very much like a British guy named Greg Bensen wearing a purple bedsheet and makes about as convincing a Moroccan sheik as Bo Derek does a teenager.
Mark another silly hat off your Bo Derek bingo card.
Mac plans to lose her virginity to this sheik, and he seems pretty enthusiastic about the idea too, but he falls asleep in the middle of licking honey off her spasming belly (something the movie seems to believe is sexy) and she leaves disappointed. Off go Mac and Cat and poor old Cotton to Spain, where Mac becomes infatuated with a bullfighter named Angel (Andrea Occhipetti). With the help of a local Romani girl named Paloma (Olivia d’Abo), Mac manages to spasm her way into Angel’s bed for the first of two uncomfortably long and awkward Bo Derek-centered sex scenes. But oh no! Tragedy strikes! The very next day, Angel is gored in the cojones by an angry bull, and the doctor doesn’t think he’ll be capable of sexual intercourse anymore. So it’s off to our next World Sex Tour stop in –
Oh, wait, no, Max has fallen in love with Angel, and it’s now her life’s mission to help him get his pre-bullhorns-to-the-goolies groove back, which she’s going to do by…learning to fight bulls, which, as the theory goes, Angel will find so unbearably erotic that his damaged penile nerves will fix themselves in their desperation to get inside Mac again.
The movie stops with a wedding. Normally one would say “ends” with a wedding, but “ends” would indicate the closure of a series of events. Bolero merely stops.
THE BAD
Let me rephrase my comment from earlier. Bolero would be a strong candidate for reappraisal if not for the fact that it was helmed by John Derek, a man so bad at directing movies that he probably shot the first take of every scene with the camera pointed at his own face.
The mere laws of chance would suggest that Derek would make one correct decision over the course of making this movie, but it defies the laws of chance. Let us begin with his script, which runs through abomination after abomination. “This door may, in this very night, hold in its bosom your sheik. Do doors have bosoms?” muses Cat to Mac, to make sure we understand how nonsensical what she just said was. “It’s a chauvinistic world! What I do is correct!” a character announces later, to justify his attempted kidnapping of Mac. It’s as bad as the dialogue in Ghosts Can’t Do It, but it lacks the breezy screw-you attitude of Ghosts Can’t Do It, so the whole cast ends up buried in a pile of lead balloons made of John Derek script fragments. Several snippets of dialogue, combined with their accompanying visuals, suggest that Mac’s real sexual attraction is to Angel’s horses.
NOT HELPING, JOHN.
And then we get to the direction! Scenes interrupt themselves. Subplots are introduced, only to be forgotten or abandoned minutes later. Relationship dynamics change from familial to flirty at the drop of a hat. Accents are attempted, then discarded. None of the actors look actively miserable, but the atmosphere across the film is one of dreamy confusion, as though John Derek has been giving directions in a language no one can understand.
Except Bo, who knows her job and does it nonstop.
That’s assuming Derek was giving direction at all, which, well, I’m not convinced. “Lazy” does not even begin to describe the construction of Bolero. At two points near the end, the movie loops the same series of shots of Bo on horseback three times in a row and just hopes we won’t notice. I guess if it didn’t involve anyone getting naked, John Derek couldn’t be bothered.
Then there are those sex scenes, the movie’s main selling point. The sex scenes are – what’s the word for it? – gross. But they’re not gross in the way you might be thinking – okay, no, they are, but they’re also gross because they’re wet and sloppy and covered in fluids. The substance that the sheik licks off Mac’s torso in the aborted first virginity loss attempt is supposed to be a mixture of milk and honey. It looks like snot, and we get to watch it drip off the sheik’s face like grease off a hot pan. Later, when Mac achieves actual virginity loss, she initiates the sexual act by jamming her tongue deep into her victim’s – sorry, her lover’s – ear canal. It’s a moment straight out of a body horror movie. Later still, we get to watch Mac and Angel attempt to tie each other’s tongues in knots in what looks like two aliens whose only reference is Japanese tentacle porn trying to mimic the human act of “kissing.” At a few points, the film abandons any pretense of not being porn when it treats us to lingering shots of connected groins. All of this is done in close-up, because John Derek really loves close-ups. The camera might as well grab the viewer’s face and shove it into Bo’s breasts, not to mention her enormous eyes, sunburned cheeks, and vast collection of headgear supplied by Mrs. Elizabeth Windsor’s House of Fine Pimpwear.
I have to admit, she rocks that backwards newsboy cap.
This may be the first time I’ve ever felt sexually harassed by a movie.
And speaking of sexual harassment, I now have to alert everyone to the most uncomfortable behind-the-scenes element of the movie: Olivia d’Abo was fourteen during filming, and she is shown on camera fully naked. Up close. Several times. She is never shown in a state of overtly sexual nudity, which is probably part of how they got away with this – it’s always in the bathtub, or in a sauna with the other girls – but John Derek has no problem encouraging us to gawk at her body the same way he demands we gawk at his wife. He also has no problem having her announce, loudly and repeatedly, sometimes while naked, that she also wants to have sex with Angel. I trust I don’t have to explain to anyone why that’s disgusting, and if you’d rather not feel like you need to go to jail after your movie nights, I completely understand why you’d want to skip this one.
Look, here’s George Kennedy smiling at a camel to make us feel better.
THE GOOD
Well, after that revelation, we might not be in the mood to talk about whatever Bolero does right, but this is Raspberry Picking and we have a way of doing things. Besides, there aren’t that many of them. Two. Three-ish.
Good Thing #1 is Greg Bensen as Mac’s first attempted conquest the Unconvincing Sheik. Mr. Bensen was never in another movie before or after Bolero, but he gives the closest thing to a good performance in the movie by acting like a believable protein-based lifeform. His sleepy-goofy delivery transforms the hallucinatory gobbledygook of John Derek-penned dialogue into something that sounds like a human might say it. The funniest moment in the movie by a good margin is when the sheik tries to kidnap Mac from Spain in his private plane, in part because Bensen is playing it with complete earnestness while the other actors could hardly be bothered to get out of bed that morning. The second funniest is the moment that he tells Mac that, while he might technically be a sheik, he spends most of his time being a poet at Oxford.
The third-funniest is when he falls asleep on honey-covered Bo and the focus is so soft it looks like he melted on her.
But the award for Greatest Understanding of the Assignment goes to no actor, but to the composers, father-son team Elmer and Peter Bernstein. Peter wrote most of the music, but the “love” scenes are credited to Elmer. And dear readers, Peter is a hero to the people in his own right with his hyperdramatic cellos drawling away in the background (foreground?) of every scene, but Elmer runs away with the film by making the sex scenes bearable at all. Elmer Bernstein scored more than 150 films, including actual masterpieces like The Magnificent Seven and Ghostbusters, but if you ask me, his artistry never shone through more than when he was composing for dreck and matching it note for note. The dramatic violin trill at the Moment of Virginity-Taking, the bass drums obediently pounding away on the beat to every thrust of Occhipetti’s hips, the swollen, breathless orchestrations suggesting that we are watching a Greek tragedy rather than a thinly-disguised softcore porno – he was a true professional, Elmer Bernstein was, and he understood (perhaps from his early experience with Robot Monster) that the music must complement the movie. Whatever that means, by any means necessary.
And then there’s Bo. This is our second Bo encounter and it will be our last for quite a while, and my final Bo assessment is that she’s not a great (or good, or adequate) actress, but she is a great screen presence. She has a classically beautiful face, but with uncannily wide and deep eyes and a devilish smile, and the combination, shot in close-up after close-up by her loyal husband, is difficult to turn away from.
Bolero isn’t nearly as fun as Ghosts Can’t Do It, but neither is it the slog it’s reputation would suggest. Dereks-style weirdness never permits anything to be boring for long. Besides, however sleazy he may have been, I have no trouble seeing what John Derek saw in wife, and I continue to not be able to fault them for the weird little lovers’ romp they took through cinematic history.
I can absolutely fault them for making reusing shots three times in a row, though. No excuse for that.
Quality of Movie: ½ / 5. It’s not as boldly inept as Ghosts Can’t Do It, but it gets downgraded for being much more boldly icky.
Quality of Experience: 3½ / 5. If you can overlook the naked teenagers, and it is right fine and good if you cannot, parts of it are funny enough to rank among all-time bad movie jaw-droppers.
Want to pick more Raspberries? Check out the rest of the columns in this series!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.