I feel embarrassed at having previously claimed familiarity with the stupidest films ever made. In my overweening arrogance, I pretended to know the worst. Last night I glimpsed something that showed how little I knew, how sheltered I've been. It was Deeply, a Canadian-German movie made in Nova Scotia in 2000. Some drip of a girl who has a German accent wanders around her picturesque, remote, isolated fishing village, far far away from the big city. It's actually Hubbards, just down the road from Halifax. She mopes. She's angry. She tips a kerosene lamp over and burns the house down. She has a bad dream that makes her toss and turn and breathe hard. She considers jumping to her death, but there are too many seagulls. She's surrounded by locals who insist on talking like pirates all the time. Meanwhile, she talks to some old woman o' wisdom who smokes a pipe, except she obviously doesn't know how to smoke a pipe. (I think the problem is that most actors are familiar with hash but not tobacco.) Somehow the heroine finds out about a woman who lived in the village in the 1940's and had some sort of improper love affair. We go back in time and see the 19th-century villagers enjoying a traditional shindig or hoedown. We hear melancholy Japanese music. Or maybe it's Irish. As for the young woman, who has a southern accent, well she and her elfin little lover rush down to the beach, brilliantly lit up by night as usual, and they are pursued by angry villagers with torches, who are really looking for Dr Frankenstein. The two get into a boat and sail off into the bay. There the boyfriend decides to go for a bathe, so we know he's insane. Then it starts to rain really hard! Naturally, that causes him to drown. He plummets to the bottom like an old fridge.The girlfriend cries really hard. Next we return to the present, where the girl we met earlier is reading this story and starts crying really hard. She's crying way more than the other girl.

She's beside herself as she remembers falling off a motorcycle driven by her boyfriend while they were both drunk and stoned, and the boyfriend was killed.THE END. Now comes the most exciting part, because the closing credits roll by really fast. Kirsten Dunst Alfred E. Newman Unfunny Newfoundland Comedian Best gaffer Third grip from the sun Thanks to Telefilm Canada Alliance/Deadbeat.

Well, how bad was it, compared to similar efforts? Such as The Shipping News and the other two movies set in the Atlantic Provinces?

I think it's unfair to set one bad film against another, and ask "Which is the worst?" It's not a competition, you know. There's no quote worst unquote. Each is bad in its own way. Sure, there were five agreeable minutes in The Shipping News, as everyone knows, but look at the dull work Kevin Spacey did. I think he approaches Gordon Pinsent here.

All right, smart guy, how would you improve it?

Well, that's easy. Just revise the script a little so it has some point—you might have to introduce some new main characters and come up with an interesting plot—and then reshoot every scene, but with really good actors instead of really bad ones. Is that so hard?