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But Valley of the Dolls feels, from top to bottom, like the creation of people who’ve never created anything before. Dionne Warwick’s theme song, with its clunky meandering lyrics and unpleasant melody haunts the soundtrack throughout the entire movie. It’s like a horror film where the hook is the Creepy Dead Girl that sings “Ring Around the Rosie” from the shadows, her creepy, desiccated falsetto chilling your blood solid. The dialogue sounds like it was written by people who’ve never spoken to other people before. Characters make foolish, spontaneous decisions that seem gratuitous and artificial. The musical numbers in the film, and the characters’ performance of them, are so horrifically terrible that you find yourself awkwardly cheering it on, like a badly overproduced Special Olympics event.

Andre and Dory Previn are Academy Award winning composers, but the material they created for this movie is nothing of the sort. The songs are competently written but I’m assuming the lyrics were written by the cinematographer. At the very least I would expect a good show tune to rhyme, if of course there WERE any good show tunes (zing!). The best part is when the characters are all gushing about how one thing or another is the greatest performance they’ve ever seen in their lives, and you’re sitting there thinking: “No it’s not.”

In some scenes, actors deliver awkwardly written dialogue with tremendous conviction, and then there are the scenes where the actors look as lost as the words. Maybe it’s because the way the film is edited and structured, it’s impossible to get a sense of how much time has passed from scene to scene. The story seems to cover a couple of decades but nobody ever visually ages, and it’s damn near impossible to distinguish one geographic location from another.

Mark Robson was an accomplished director, but here I genuinely wonder if he was even on set most of the time. Everything about this film is disastrously inadequate, and no one involved is beyond reproach. Each of the girls has a final, climactic scene that is meant to be poignant or thought provoking, but instead feels laughably absurd (Patty Duke's swan song can only be described as "Shatneresque" in scale).

Yes, this movie is bad. But I wouldn't be able to describe it with such loving detail if it hadn't entertained me on some level. Valley of the Dolls is so bad it's actually funny, and if that's all a movie does for you - whether it means to or not - it is, quite simply, a gift.

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