I love "Battlefield Earth." More accurately, I love the fact that people really hate it, at least the film version of the popular L. Ron Hubbard book about an alien race of enormous meanies who enslave the human population of Earth.

Of course, seeing John Travolta dressed up in crazy dreadlocks and speaking in a made up language that only a teenage boy could find entertaining.

But what I have found entertaining from about the time I received my subscription to Rolling Stone magazine is the cold, cruel words that reviewers spew when they find a piece of work they deem worthy of their venom.

It really doesn't mean that I agree with them or the reviews are all that accurate. Sure, "Battlefield Earth" is awful, but worst movie ever? I can't imagine it is even in the same league as "From Justin to Kelly" (the first American Idol stars take to film like picante takes to strawberry shortcake) or even "Batman & Robin."

It is noteworthy that when the folks at the Internet Movie Database asked fans what the worst films of all-time were, "Battlefield" didn't make the top 100 list.

What matters, though, is that from the start, chum was in the water that the film certainly wasn't good, and the ensuing feeding frenzy on Travolta's pet project was spectacular to watch.

Below is a list of some of my favorite wicked reviews from the past and present

"Battlefield Earth" blues

The key to a truly fantastically wicked review is the lead. It sets the tone for the entire review. When the movie came out, I was working as the features copy editor here at the Journal and was responsible for picking out the review to run in the Friday Weekend entertainment section.

The kindest I could find was AP reviewer Christy Lemire, whose lead was the softest among the bunch. It included a sentence that said something like, "The first 20 minutes of 'Battlefield Earth' are as bad as 20 minutes of any film ever shot."

Needless to say, the critics clearly stepped up their game for this one. Perhaps the best of the bunch, though, came from the New York Times and Elvis Mitchell. Mitchell's brief piece on the film is one of the best reads in pop culture criticism, and it delivers from the get go.

"Man is an endangered species," announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump "Battlefield Earth." And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Sitting through it is like watching the most expensively mounted high school play of all time. The film is stocked with evil aliens who, in their padded body stockings, plastic armorlike fittings and matted hair extensions, resemble nothing so much as members of GWAR, the metal-rock parodists that Beavis and Butt-head loved. It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but "Battlefield Earth" may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century."

Hey Elvis, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think.

In it, he goes on to say that the film is beyond conventional criticism and picks apart the gaping hole plots with the glee akin to a boy who gets a new magnifying glass and can't wait to try it out on the nearest ant hill.

Rolling Stone Record Guide, an exercise in music snobbery, and the great Chase

I'm a music snob. I openly admit it. But I wasn't always.

It took years of reading Rolling Stone magazine and, more importantly, the magazine's bound counterparts, the Rolling Stone Record Guide, to become the snob I am today.

In a time when you're only recourse to new music was through FM radio, and even that was a scarcity as a teen listener in Deadwood, the words of rock critics were valued.

Of course, after picking up a few favorites highlighted by the critics such as anything by Kraftwerk or King Crimson, I soon developed a different way to seek out new music.

But that didn't deter my love of the big Red (first edition) and Blue (second edition) record guides.

First of all, they had a tool in their aresenal that few other reviewers carried: the dreaded box. Where most reviewers are limited by the star convention (one to four, one to five or one to 10), the RS record guides offered up a fate worse than the half-star. It was the bullet box, a black square.

By definition, it was the worst of the worst. I remember seeing it first on the review of the soundtrack to the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band" movie featuring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton (Oh, the hair! Oh, the polyester!). It caused paging through the index to find out what it meant, which was, in essence, there was no artistic or technical reason this album should have ever been made.

Yet, the greatest review was one I spotted shortly after I bought the original red book for a band I have yet to hear.

Dave Marsh, in reviewing the three albums of the jazz fusion group Chase, gave a one-word review: "Flee."

It has been more than 25 years since I first read that, and it still makes me giggle.

A bad view of Vista

Reviewers these days have a great many more field in which to spread their venom. In the past, food, film, the stage and music were primary culprits. Today, the explosion of media and the computer culture have presented an ever growing field for reviewers of all sorts.

One in which I've taken particular interest in has been software reviews, in particular, operating systems.

Whereas I learned long ago not to take music critics' word on pop music, I am even less likely to take a software reviewers word about an operating system. Part of this is from listening to ardent PC and Mac backers spend decades ridiculing the others system, even though they spent about five minutes working on them or did so at some point in the distant past when computers were less powerful than a standard pocket calculator.

Still, it doesn't keep me from reading the reviews. I find them fascinating in that in their description of mayhem, they strike a chord with computer users. No matter what kind of awful scenario they present (the computer getting hacked, important e-mail being flagged as spam, etc.), we as readers and computer users can feel the pain. That is, we've either already experienced said disaster or can imagine it happening.

One of the best has been for Vista, Microsoft's less-than-popular bridge operating system. It's a bridge because users hated it so much, they pretty much demanded a new one be developed. People were actually converting back to the previous OS, Windows XP, out of distaste for the Mac-inspired OS that won few fans and won little traction.

Steven Mane's review at forbes.com is among my favorite. Read it here.

Venus Envy and The Worst Review Ever

I've never read Shannon McKelden's "Venus Envy" and I really don't plan to. Still, I'm so happy it was written.

I suspect it is nowhere near the worst work or even close to it. That's the thing with books. There's so many, and there are so many bad ones, that even when you believe you have read the worst, there are always so many more waiting in the wings.

In reality, McKelden's work is probably darn near the middle of the pack. But thanks to the Internet and the popularity of blogging, there are scores, nay, hundreds, nay thousands upon thousands of would-be critics ready to make their mark in the world of literary criticism.

One of the main areas in which they practice their snake bite is the hugely popular Amazon.com, which encourages users to share their reviews. And there are plenty of others.

And much of what is written there is heartfelt, sincere praise, largely because those who buy books usually do so because they like the topic, or the author, or something that will generally influence their review of said work.

But there are a number of bruising, scathing and downright nasty reviews as well.

Enter The Worst Review Ever blog, a work so wonderful that it should earn a space in everyone's Favorites listings.

The idea of the blog is to allow authors to share the worst review they have received on a certain work and then have them review the review.With McKelden, the review was a fine piece of work itself, and the author's response was great.

But still, it begins with the Amazon review by Kevin Mcelroy.

If you hate Western Civilization, Moveable Type and The English language…

by Kevin M. Mcelroy

"Then you'll love 'Venus Envy!' Can I quickly point out that there are nearly 50 books on Amazon that have the same or similar title to "Venus Envy?" Does that singular fact not resonate with you gushing-praise-givers?This book could not be any more predictably and derivatively chick-lit if it was physically passed from Oprah's uterus onto paper made out of Helen Fielding's afterbirth. This book is bad. Like…worse than offensive to the senses. It's a holocaust of prose. That's all."

On second thought, maybe I will read this book after all.

A picture is worth a thousands words, a YouTube video a million

Most of the reviews I've mentioned are difficult to believe. That is, you pretty much have to take the reviewers word that they are awful. And even in that, it serves as more of a spur to one's curiosity, making you want to go and buy whatever is being reviewed (or at least borrowing from the library) to see if it is really that bad.

And that isn't good.

But the folks at Gamespot have a way of reviewing that allows the reader/viewer to get a first hand look at how bad something is without relying entirely on the reviewers point of view. Case in point is Alex Navarro's review of the video game Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

Without a single spoken word, Navarro is able to get his point across and give it a 1.0 rating, the worst score ever given a game on Gamespot.

The game may be no good, but Navarro's review is a true piece of art.