The Dark Backward

Writer/director Adam Rifkin's The Dark Backward is set in a dark, grimy, garbage-strewn urban netherworld, where a company named "Blump's" apparently owns everything. Marty Malt (Judd Nelson of The Breakfast Club) is an unhappy garbageman who moonlights as an atrociously unfunny standup comic. His ...more

The Dark Backward may be most aggressively unpleasant commercial feature ever made. It clearly represents some kind of horrific apotheosis of the "bad-is-good" aesthetic. Judd Nelson, covered in a sheen of sweat, his hair slicked down with grease, plays the lead role as Marty Malt, a weak-willed, woefully inept standup comic who unexplainably grows a third arm. But it's Bill Paxton's egregiously over-the-top performance as Marty's unremittingly vile trash collection co-worker, Gus, that sets the ...more