Did they hand out the Oscars yet? The Dauphin hasn’t kept up much with movie news since being confined to a private clinic in Switzerland for an intricate blood draining operation, the kind where your life’s fluid is siphoned out of your body, then replaced with fresh, healthy plasma. You may have heard of the process—it’s been performed on several celebrated rock stars. In fact, when I checked into the sanitarium, they put me in Keith Richards’s old room.

But even as The Dauph’s absinthe-ravaged veins are being subjected to the ultimate refinement process, the telephone in the seepage chamber rings with a long distance call from CREEM World Headquarters in Birmingham with a request that, for yet another year, Edouard compile a list of the Ten Worst Films Of The Year.

To the maison de sante typewriter then, to confirm in writing what Hollywood watchers have been saying for some time now: that 1984 has been a year of artistic pestilence for moviegoers. Almost any reviewer’s Ten Best roster of ’84 would normally qualify as The Ten Rottenest of any other year. So where does even a bloodless Frenchman begin in cataloguing the cankered dross that passed for cinematic entertainment in this fabled year of Orwell’s classic when, if he has any sense at all, even Big Brother wasn’t watching?

But a list is a list, readers, so lace up your sump boots and let’s slog through the scum-encrusted ooze puddles once again. As usual, the roster is not alphabetical—why bother, they all stank on ice—and the producer of each film will be awarded a CREEM prize, this year a pair of pantyhose personally soiled by Dee Snider. Wear ’em in good health, guys!

DUNE—Many people read this book when it first came out back in the 1960s, but The Dauph was not among them. Reading required attention, and my usual conscious state in the '60s was such that I was visualizing The Decay Of Syria Under The Sassanids reenacted on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. Still, the novel had its followers and they waited nearly 20 years for the movie version, only to be rewarded with three minutes of Sting in a loincloth and the sight of Jose Ferrer talking to a gigantic vulva. Which only raised the question: Where’s the Amazing Colossal Man When you really need him? FALLING IN LOVE—Okay, ya got yer Streep. Ya got yer De Niro, right? Ya put ’em together in one picture, ya got a blockbuster. Not quite. You’ve got Falling In Love, a movie about two married people having an affair on the New York to New Haven commuter line. Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro generate less chemistry together than David Lee Roth looking in the mirror on a bad day. A film that could single-handedly put an end to extramarital nooky and Amtrak. BROADWAY DANNY ROSE— Far be it from The Dauph to criticize a movie in black & white normally, but coming after the zany and disturbing Zelig, this hapless tale of show biz lowlifes and organized crime blockheads offers nothing new unless you count the sight of a huge-assed Mia Farrow playing a blowzy blonde. Woody tries to lay a semi-serious veneer over his usual characterization of a nebbish, but the cheap gags and Jerry Lewis type slapstick undercut him. Best scenes: the bull sessions in the Carnegie Deli, using real, washed-up comics. Otherwise, a movie as appetizing as a Merv Griffin on rheum-soaked toast.

C.H.U.D.—Films with acronyms for titles—now there’s a trivia category. We’ve had M*A*S*H, The Tami Show and let us not forget the immortal C.H.O.M.P.S. But let us do forget C.H.U.D., an inept reptilian fiasco. Movie marquees on 42nd Street have a way of getting right to the heart of a picture’s problems. When they played this flick, the marquee read: ‘‘C.H.U.D. is in the Sewer.” May it stay there.

AGAINST ALL ODDS—If you saw the video, you saw the movie. If you heard Phil Collins’s song on the radio, you saw the movie. What’s that? You actually saw the movie? Then you have The Dauph’s sympathy.

THE RIVER—Third and dustiest of the so-called Dustbowl Trilogy

which also included Country and Places In The Heart. Audiences stumbled out of this film wearily as though they’d just spent several weeks tilling the soil. Two hours of cinematic fertilizer, the high point of which is a scene where Sissy Spacek catches her arm in a threshing machine. Now really. GARBO TALKS—Anne Bancroft plays a cranky old woman whose dying wish is to meet Greta Garbo. Her Mama’s Boy son spends 90 minutes of our time trying to arrange this meeting. Then when Bancroft and the fictional Garbo finally come face to face, the viewer is not allowed to hear the conversation!! A cheat from start to finish and for punishment Bancroft should have to meet the real Garbo and be pelted with Swedish meatballs.

RHINESTONE—What? You thought The Dauphin would make a Ten Worst list without a Sly Stallone movie? Haven’t you been paying attention?

STOP MAKING SENSE—When did the Talking Heads ever make sense? The Yuppies’ favorite band in a tiresome semi-documentary that shows us more of David Byrne in an outsized suit that any sentient person would ever want to see. And what about this man’s stage movements, these jerky spasms that make him resemble a giraffe on diet pills? Techno pop’s last gasp and not a minute too soon.

BODY DOUBLE—Latest and worst of Brian De Palma’s slavish homages to Hitchcock also borrows from Driller Killer for its only exciting scene. Leading man Craig Wasson’s performance stirred a public uproar with many moviegoers demanding that he be spayed!

Well, there they are, the Turgid Ten. You’ll have to excuse The Dauph now—the doctors just informed me that my red corpuscles are about to go into the rinse cycle.