text: I know, I know, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" is the worst movie, or maybe "Manos, the Hands of Fate." But I can't get worked up over those sock-monkey movies. Of *course* they're bad. How could they be any good? But if you're talking about movies with respectable production values and bankable talent, the T. rex of all turkeys has to be "Yentl." All the treacly phoniness, all the self-absorbed asininity, that stains everything Barbra Streisand has done since 1964, reaches its culmination in this movie. From its lonely summit of awfulness, "Yentl" looks back to "A Star is Born" and forward to "The Mirror Has Two Faces." There is nothing else quite like it. What emotional undertow dragged Streisand out to make this movie I would rather not speculate, and what audience she was playing to I cannot possibly imagine, although I'll bet there's a nine in ten chance you aren't a member of it.<br /><br />Nobel Prize-winner and saintly guardian of Yiddish literature Isaac Bashevis Singer was so outraged by what Streisand did to his story that he blasted her in public for it. It is a tribute to Streisand's impenetrable vulgarity that she not only didn't commit suicide, but went on to make more awful movies.