Gentlemen,
Truly awful golf courses, like movies, present themselves in many different shades - between aggravatingly bad and so fucking putrid you actually enjoy them in a twisted sort of way. Plan Nine From Outer Space spent little money and the result was something incredibly bad, but amusing in its glorious badosity. On the Doak grid, I think we need a series of letters to attach next to numbers.
On the other hand, Tommy Wiseau spent six million of his own fortune (from mysterious sources) to make The Room - considered to be the “Citizen Kane of Bad Movies.” Can we give it a true, no bullshit “Doak Zero?” Of course not, because - like Plan Nine From Outer Space - it occupies its own category of horribleness. The Ranch GC is similar - something so completely beyond the valley of ham-handed incompetence it manages to somehow leap from the bottom of a two-dimensional chart to a mysterious point that requires a three dimensional formula to find on the grid.
Tom gave the original Stone Harbor an unqualified Zero, but I vehemently disagree, Des Muirhead created a bizarre curiosity - but an absolute must-see. Therefore, whatever your opinion, something so far afield of the mainstream that it cannot be missed MUST have some merit - even as a cautionary tale. I was fortunate to be amongst the only audiences to see the original 4-hour cut of Heaven’s Gate. The critics destroyed it - it brought down United Artists and Cimino is still a Hollywood pariah to this day. You know what? It is worth seeing once - and has withstood the test of time. Whatever your opinion, it has not been forgotten.
And like Stone Harbor, once a series of revisions were forced on Heaven’s Gate (even a name change), the result is a chopped up, watered down piece of shit. In both cases, something unique that defied conventional analysis was eventually turned into unqualified Doak Zeros. By contrast, Steven Sommers obviously intended Van Helsing to be a noisy, overblown, steaming pile of exploitive excrement - a Doak Zero that spent 36 million dollars (72X what our feature film cost) to create a senseless mess, specifically aimed only at low-vibratory imbeciles.
There is so bad, its fun (Rocky Horror) - and so bad, you leave the theater aggravated and with a pounding head. I’ll put Atlantic CC in that category - if we had not been playing with a member, we would have gotten in the car and left after that silly par-5 that ends with a trek across the driveway to the next tee. I wasted an hour of my life on Van Helsing and the Redhead and I walked out in disgust.
I’ve not thought through how we might assemble a table of clarifying footnotes, but there are so many micro-levels at the bottom of the chart, we might start with dividing up the “Zero” ratings. Any suggestions?