Cinephiles who love behind-the-scenes stories about commercial failures will savor the entertainingly chatty Box Office Poison by Tim Robey, a film critic for Great Britain's Daily Telegraph. Box-office fiascos, he writes, are "the medium's weirdos, outcasts, misfits, [and] freaks." Some of them thoroughly deserved their grisly deaths, while others proved to have been misunderstood in their day. Robey covers it all, from silent misfires like Erich von Stroheim's 1929 "beautiful ruin" Queen Kelly to such 21st-century train wrecks as Oliver Stone's 2004 Alexander. His criteria for the ignominy of inclusion: each film had to be a "freshly entertaining" comedy of errors, and "their commercial fortunes need to have been genuinely atrocious."
As Robey notes in this well-written perverse pleasure, not every box-office dud is a stinker. Audiences avoided some films that were ahead of their time, such as 1935's Sylvia Scarlett, in which Katharine Hepburn's title character hacks off her hair "to become a boy named Sylvester." Others are well-made sequels that deviated from expectations set by the original, such as 1998's Babe: Pig in the City. But many of these movies were travesties, such as the 2019 adaptation of the "inescapably weird stage musical" Cats and, just as notoriously, 1967's Doctor Dolittle. The shoot for the latter was "a nightmare from the start," with Rex Harrison's prima donna behavior proving to be a far bigger problem than, say, the giraffe that "held up shooting for days when it reportedly stepped on its own penis." Readers of this gossipy delight will have a much better time than that giraffe. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer