As expected, this week’s edition of “Eric’s Bad Movies” at Film.com is “Batman & Robin,” the disaster that brought the Batman franchise to a screeching halt 11 years ago. One of my rules for this column is that I don’t want to do films that I already reviewed, but I made an exception here because my original review wasn’t a proper one. It was a he-said/she-said thing with another writer at my college paper, and it hardly counts. Plus, ’tis the season, what with that new Batman movie coming out tomorrow.

By the way, one of the reasons I don’t want to use already-reviewed films for “Eric’s Bad Movies” is pretty straightforward: If it’s bad enough to warrant EBM attention, that means it’s bad enough that I don’t want to watch it again. Time had dulled my memory of how awful “Batman & Robin” is, but it all came rushing back when I rewatched it, compounded now by the fact that I knew what was going to happen. At least the first time had the element of surprise, that flavor of fresh badness. The second time was like re-taking a crap.

Next week: a movie starring someone who has already been featured in “Eric’s Bad Movies” as a director, and directed by someone who has a prior directorial offense on our list, too. Using those clues, the EBM archives, and IMDB, you could actually figure out exactly what next week’s movie is. The first person to post the correct answer wins … something. Possibly nothing. But it would be cool, right?

So I was in the shower Wednesday morning, and I was thinking about the Rotten Tomatoes users’ unusually vicious responses to negative reviews of “The Dark Knight,” and you know me, I’m always looking for a little fun, so I thought, “I should post a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes just to see if they wish fiery death upon me, too.”

And so I did. I wrote a “review” of the film that simply said this:

This is easily the worst Batman film so far, and I include “Batman & Robin” in that statement.

Just kidding. It’s fantastic. My real review will be posted Thursday. I just wanted to see if a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes would get me the same kind of psychopathic comments that other negative reviews have gotten. If it does, I guess that means those idiots really are just going by the one-sentence quotes, and not actually clicking over to read the whole review.

At Rotten Tomatoes, I gave it a “Rotten” rating and posted the first sentence as my quote: “Easily the worst Batman film so far, and I include ‘Batman & Robin’ in that statement.”

(Didja know that the RT staff doesn’t assign Fresh or Rotten or choose the quotes, but that the critics themselves usually do it? I suspect the big-time critics like Ebert have interns do it for them, or maybe the RT people give them special consideration. But most critics — particularly those of us on the lower rungs — provide our own quotes.)

I did all of this just before 10 a.m. Within 45 minutes, there were 67 comments posted. You can read them all here. To my great surprise, almost everyone did actually click the link to read the whole review before they posted, and thus saw the joke and laughed at it. In fact, the sudden massive influx of traffic clogged my site for several minutes.

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