There are a few movies that got so mercilessly slammed in theaters that you almost started to feel sorry for them. Was Ishtar really THAT bad? Was there nothing redeeming about Waterworld? Was Hudson Hawk the worst movie ever made? Not at all. Watching it again a decade and a half later in its great new Special Edition makes one thing clear - Hudson Hawk may be bad, but it's bad in its own amazing way. In fact, the last sixteen years have turned the Hawk into a cult comedy classic. As Bruce Willis points out in one of the new featurettes, the much-maligned film has actually made a profit by now. Anything can happen.

The fact that we're getting any new Hudson Hawk features at all is kind of mind-blowing, so we have to pick two for the best ones on the new special edition. Never-before-seen deleted scenes will make Hawk fans drool if just for the reason that it's amazing that it took this long for them to come to light. You can see why they were deleted but seeing them at all is a minor miracle. Even failures get their deleted scenes discovered in the world of DVD. The trivia track will be a real joy for the fans who have turned Hudson Hawk into a cult classic in the new millennium.

It eventually gets really interesting but "The Story of Hudson Hawk" opens with Willis and one of the producers of the film (and a good friend of Bruce's) singing. No kidding. The producer tickles the ivories because the pair are setting up for the interview in a studio and Bruce starts to jam. We love Willis as much as the next guy but an impromptu jam session pushes the boundaries of that love. The featurette itself becomes an interesting oral history of the project. Just skip the first few minutes.

The funny thing about Hudson Hawk is that the absolute hatred of it upon release might have actually helped the film. There are dozens of two-star films released every year that are forgotten by the time their theatrical run is done, but it's the zero-star films that last in the mind's eye. Think about what purely mediocre films came out the same summers as Waterworld or Ishtar. You can't. The irrational loathing of Hudson Hawk took a purely mediocre film and thrust on a trajectory that turned it into a cult classic. And now it gets the DVD treatment that fans thought it deserved from the very beginning. Thank God for bad reviews.