My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 08 - Ringmaster (1998)

Ringmaster (1998; Artisan Entertainment)

Do you know what they should have made in the 90’s?  A feature-length episode of Jerry Springer complete with fake behind-the-scenes stuff!  Oh, yeah!  They totally did that!  It was totally horrible!  Ringmaster was a 90 minute recreation of what you see on Springer’s show only with slightly better production value (emphasis on slightly).  This is one of those bizarre projects where I think they were trying to draw more viewers to the already-successful (though inexplicably so) show.

Jerry Springer can’t act.  What he did on TV at the time was not technically acting.  He was on TV daily, presenting us with redneck wife-beaters,ghetto princesses and she-males, he stood there egging on fake stories with bad actors so studio audiences of lesser intelligence can cheer on the next staged fight with a queued chant of “Jerry!  Jerry!”  In the Ringmaster, he pretty much does the same thing, except this time it’s even faker because, as its a movie, I guess Springer thought he didn’t have to feign sincerity.  

The movie just feels like two episodes of his pathetic show, so the question is: why?  I honestly cannot answer that question.  I can only think that they wanted to try to lure audiences in to the theatres to see uncensored fake Jerry Springer crap, even though they could see that crap on video so I STILL can’t figure out why this movie exists.  It is just a shameless attempt to cash in on the popularity of a show made even more shameless by the fact that Springer himself was one of the producers, so I can only assume he thinks his audience dumb enough to pay extra money to see this sideshow.  The movie made its budget back, but it didn’t do well at all in the scheme of things.

When researching this series of articles (a very long process that began some time ago) I re-watched this one as it is sort of one of those notoriously bad movies and, since it has been more than a decade since I’ve seen it, I wanted to be sure I did not miss anything.  Yep.  So I hate this movie.  I also found it amusing that, while I was watching this movie, I realized that I’ve seen it before, or at least a part of it, I just forgot about it.  To this day I don’t know what compelled me to sit through this trash the first time, but one of the scenes with Jamie Presley triggered a memory of sorts from years ago.  I probably just blocked this one out subconsciously.