Michael Musto is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine.
In what’s expected to a very good year for movie musicals, it’s important to glance back and remember the not so good, for the sake of contrast. As an aficionado of enjoyable stinkers, here are my Top 10 Worst Movie Musicals of all time. Believe me, they’re nothing to sing and dance about.
“Lost Horizon”
1973
This musical adaptation of the James Hilton classic is fine until the plane crash spews a bunch of Oscar-nominated types into time-stopping Shangri-La. That fabled destination ends up looking like a Marriott Courtyard in Toledo, Ohio, complete with fake foliage and dour spiritual processions in loincloths! And the stars look wildly uncomfortable as they try to wend their way around unwieldly Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs that are hardly up to the caliber of their 1960s hits. (“The world is a circle that has no beginning and nobody knows where it really ends. Everything depends …”) The library-stairs duet between Sally Kellerman and Olivia Hussey has to be seen to be disbelieved, and in the cast, John Gielgud is particularly cringeworthy as a pompously serene emissary named Chang. The entire Asian population of the world should have sued. No, the entire population, period.
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