This month's B to Z is the perfect occasion to ride the Offscreen Festival's wave of camp with a double bill of the genre's finest. Join us for a nearly four-hour marathon of shameless over-acting, melodrama concentrate and gratuitous boobage. "Camp" is a generic term for movies that intentionally subvert the idea of good taste. It's the triumph of illusion over dramatic depth, where the packaging offers more than its content and things are just so unbelievably bad they're good. Camp is cringe-worthy, it's bad taste, and above all, it's fun as hell!

Mommie Dearest is based on a best-seller of the same name that Christina Crawford wrote as retribution for the traumatic, abusive education suffered at the hands of her adoptive mother: Hollywood legend Joan Crawford. The film is so... how can we put it... special, that the actual suffering happens for the audience. "No wire hangers—ever!" "Tina! Bring me the axe," and "I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the dirt" are just a few lines that cannot be unheard, nor unseen, by any self-respecting fan of camp. Every stare, every Crawford tick that Faye Dunaway tries to let shine through her inch-thick layers of makeup are moments of rejoicing for any public that knows what to look for. Faye Dunaway paints a ridiculous and cartoonish monster out of Joan Crawford. Add to that the indescribable direction, elaborate sets doused in oversaturated colors and supermarket lighting, and a script written on a napkin, and you get a soap-opera infused biopic flop that blithely mixes fact with fiction. The film gets more and more hilarious as it veers away from reality, good taste and any trace of coherence. Unintentionally funny, cringe-inducing and shamelessly bad, it's an unforgettable experience.

After the worldwide success of Basic Instinct in 1992, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven became a Hollywood heartthrob. Everyone was eager and curious to see his next film: an inevitably provocative vision of the Las Vegas underbelly that would turn actress Elizabeth Berkley into the next Sharon Stone. But destiny decided otherwise: Showgirls was crowned by American critics with a Razzie for the worst film of the year and was a box-office failure. Twenty years later, the movie has more than repaid its 50 million-dollar budget. Not bad for a spectacle of questionable, if not downright vulgar taste. Some manage nevertheless to read a kind of black and misanthropic satire on the American entertainment industry into this Verhoevian version of an MGM musical comedy, as they have with his other films Robocop and Starship Troopers. For our part, we're just as happy as countless other film junkies to consider it a classic in contemporary camp cinema and an authentic guilty pleasure.