YouTube Movies and 7 Deadly Sins (2013)

A couple of weeks ago, in my post for The Hero of Color City, I gave a tidbit of behind the scenes information about how I choose movies for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I wrote a paragraph about choosing newer movies to watch.  It was about how I pick out which new movies would fit into the overall feel of the blog.  This week, I’m going to take an in depth look at another way I find movies to watch and hopefully you will feel more a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies because of it.  I want this blog to feel more like a community than just me writing about bad movies.  This is one of the ways for me to let you feel like it is yours as much as mine, even if I’m the man behind the writing.

Before I get into any of that, though, I should tell you all about the movie that inspired this post.  The title of the post has probably already let you know that the movie was 2013’s 7 Deadly Sins.  I’m pretty sure that you don’t know anything about the movie.  You should learn what it is.  It’s a fun, no-budget movie about a guy named Dante.  When Dante is killed after being hit by a car, God/Devil tasks him with hunting down seven of the biggest sinners, each representing one of the seven deadly sins.  The movie is actually a compilation of a few online videos made by Misha Tot.  They come together to form a complete narrative at close enough to a feature length, hence my considering it a movie.  Every element of it is passable from the acting to the direction to the look to the music.  The only real setback is the minimal budget which prevents passable from moving into greatness.  However, everyone was having fun making the movie and that shows through what is on screen.  7 Deadly Sins is definitely worth checking out.

Where can you check this movie out?  That’s what the over encompassing theme of this post will deal with.  The title of the post kind of gives away where I’m going, but I found 7 Deadly Sins on YouTube.  It was never released elsewhere.  I’m not entirely sure about how I stumbled upon it, actually.  I know it was on YouTube, a place full of random videos that you would never find elsewhere.  And I know it was in the suggested videos for something that I was looking at.  Any more than that is gone from my memory.  I just remember stumbling upon it like any YouTube video and thinking I had discovered a perfect addition to the Sunday “Bad” Movies roster.

Let’s take a look at YouTube and the idea of stumbling upon things.  YouTube is an interesting place.  You can find videos of almost anything on there, and just by using the suggested videos, you can end up almost anywhere else.  The opportunities of what you can find are endless.  You can start by searching a solution to a computer error and an hour later end up watching pickles singing show tunes to the cast of Ocean’s Eleven.  I’ve spent nights diving deep into YouTube.  Most of the time it ends with me watching conspiracy videos.  Videos about the Illuminati, about the hollow Earth, or about 9/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center.  Every once in a while, though, I end up down a rabbit hole of movies I have never heard of.

The first time I watched a YouTube movie in the history of the Sunday “Bad” Movies was with Rock Paper Scissors: Fall of the Original Six.  Perhaps I am wrong in saying that it is a YouTube movie.  It’s a no-budget film that was very, very limited in theaters.  I believe it only played once or twice.  And I don’t think there was ever a home video release.  I know that my only available resource was YouTube, where I had to watch it separated into a bunch of 7-10 minute chunks.  However, the movie set the tone for what I consider to be a YouTube movie and what I consider to be a movie on YouTube.  A YouTube movie does not have a theatrical release (beyond a premiere and maybe a showing for family/friends), and it is not a made-for-TV movie.  There are few to no physical copies of which I can obtain.  And in many cases, they are movies that I discovered either through YouTube or through people who say they are on YouTube.  Rock Paper Scissors fit all of these criteria and wouldn’t be the only movie to do so.

A movie that didn’t quite fit the criteria, and I don’t consider a YouTube movie is The Craigslist Killer.  I found the movie the same way as any of the YouTube movies I will mention.  I was on YouTube and I saw the title in the suggested videos column.  The title sounded crazy enough to fit into the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I had never heard of it before, but the idea that someone would use Craigslist to find and murder people sounded intriguing.  The thing that I didn’t realize about it was that The Craigslist Killer was a Lifetime movie, which completely goes against the concept of a YouTube movie.  It had premiered on television and gotten a bigger audience than YouTube movies tend to get.  Add to that the fact that it features a few known actors like Billy Baldwin, Sam McMurray, and Judith Hoag, and you have a movie with more credibility than a YouTube movie.  It also would have needed a bigger budget.  The only thing that it had in common with a YouTube movie was that I found it in the suggestions column on YouTube.  It was simply a movie on YouTube, not a YouTube movie.

Now, before I get into more general looks at YouTube movies, I want to use one of them to show why I think that YouTube is the digital age version of recorded VHS tapes.  The movie I’m going to use is Science Crazed, the no-budget Canadian slasher movie.  In the late 80s and early 90s when VCRs became household mainstays, many people got movies by recording them off of television, burning them from another copy, or swapping tapes with friends.  (Not that I’m old enough to remember any of this, being born in 1990.  Just follow my train of thought, will you?)  Certain movies would only be known by people because of these methods, especially swapping.  One person would find some strange video tape.  They would then share it with all of their friends.  It would become something infamous within their circle of friends.  Nobody else would know about it.  The movie would be like an inside joke.  In the digital age, this concept of sharing unknown movies can be done using YouTube.  I discovered the movie Science Crazed when someone on my Twitter feed posted a link to the movie on YouTube.  (They also recorded a podcast about the movie.  That’s beside the point.)  When I eventually saw Science Crazed, I shared the link to the video with my followers.  It was spreading like if I had been given the VHS and wanted to get some other people to see the insanity.  I don’t know of any other way to see the movie, so I share the way I do know with the people that I know.  The awareness of the movie slowly spreads through this method, which makes YouTube movies very much similar to recorded VHS tapes of yesteryear.

The most recent YouTube movie I have watched, excluding this week’s 7 Deadly Sins, is The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale).  It was released online by The Actor’s Theatre Production Company.  I don’t know if they ever made any DVD copies of it or ever screened it in a theater.  The only way I know about it was that the person who suggested it for the Sunday “Bad” Movies said that I could check it out on YouTube.  Just as if they had handed me a burned VHS copy of it.  I did watch it on YouTube, and it perfectly fit in with what I think makes a terrible YouTube movie.  The acting was even worse than most no-budget movies.  The effects were some of the worst I’ve seen in any movie.  And there are so many extended shots that it feels three hours longer than it should.  Oh, and I can’t finish writing about it without pointing out that there is a second video which is a compilation of outtakes from the movie.  That’s one of the most amateur things to do with a movie, evoking the essence of a YouTube movie.

I’ve already written about this week’s movie, 7 Deadly Sins.  It’s the YouTube movie that I watched for this Sunday “Bad” Movie post.  Moving forward, I will likely watch more movies based upon my discovering them through the most popular video streaming site on the internet.  There are hundreds upon thousands of movies I could unearth simply my scrolling through YouTube.  About half of the time, they end up being as enjoyable as this week’s outing.  The other half of the time, they end up being as bad as The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale).  The fact that there are some good ones outweighs all the bad that can be found, though.  There’s nothing like finding a new movie to enjoy.

There are, like always, notes:

• I mentioned a few movies in this post.  I mentioned Rock Paper Scissors: Fall of the Original Six, The Craigslist Killer, Science Crazed, The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale), and The Hero of Color City during this post.
• You can find 7 Deadly Sins on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQcZPZYOpOM
• Have you already seen 7 Deadly Sins?  Have you discovered any unknown movies on YouTube?  Have you seen any of the other movies I mentioned?  Did you enjoy this post?  The comments section is open for answers to any of these questions, or anything else you want to say.
• You can suggest future Sunday “Bad” Movies to me in the comments, through email at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com, or by simply finding me on Twitter and telling me.
• Next week’s movie is Simon Sez, a Dennis Rodman starring vehicle from the late 90s.  I’ve seen some of it already and it’s wacky.  Can’t wait to see what I write about this one.