Actor-Directors and Freaked (1993)

Actors are one of the biggest aspects of making a movie.  Sure, you don’t need actors for all movies.  You could make a silent animated movie and not need any actors for it.  Or a nature documentary where you’re showing nature without any narration of any sort.  But when it comes to most films, actors are necessary to bring characters to life.  They portray the characters and the characters then become associated with that actor.  Aside from acting, the actors do a lot more behind the scenes.  They could manage to get friends into the movie, and thus become part of the casting process.  They might produce something they are in, or even something they aren’t in.  Sometimes they even turn to directing and writing.

Like anything in the movie business, actors becoming directors are sometimes successful and sometimes failures.  There are good actors who can transition into good directors, and good actors who transition into the directors of bad movies.  The same can be said for bad actors.  Some bad actors manage to become good directors and others not so much.  The quality depends on the actor’s ability to pick up the directing skills throughout their career.  Sure, there are actors who begin their career as a director, and they act in their own movies.  But I’m talking about the actors who begin as actors and make a career as an actor before moving behind the camera.  People such as Clint Eastwood and Rob Reiner began as actors on television and soon moved into movies and directing to great acclaim.  I want to look at some actors who didn’t fare as well when it came to directing.

The movies that I am going to write about are movies that tend to be looked upon as bad and are directed by people who made careers out of being actors before they were directors.  I am not going to be looking at the lesser works of good directors, unless the lesser work is terrible.  So, Clint Eastwood is safe from me.  I’m not going to be writing about Invictus, or Jersey Boys, or J. Edgar.  Instead I want to focus on the movies that are just plain bad.  These are the movies directed by actors that don’t match up to most of the cinematic landscape.  And I’ll start with this week’s movie.

Freaked

Most of you probably know about Alex Winter for his work in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.  He played the character of Bill S. Preston.  Yes, the Bill in the title of the two movies.  Ted was Keanu Reeves, but that’s beside the point.  I want to talk about Alex Winter for a bit.  After making the two Bill and Ted movies as well as the MTV sketch series The Idiot Box, he teamed up with some of his Idiot Box buddies to direct the movie Freaked.  It was met with mixed reviews.  Alex Winter has gone on to direct a few more things including the documentary he is currently promoting called Deep Web.

Freaked is about former child actor Ricky Coogin (Alex Winter) who agrees to go to South America to promote a chemical called Zygrot 24.  While there, Elijah C. Skuggs takes Ricky hostage and turns him into a mutant.  Ricky and other mutants from the days and years past make an attempt to escape and reverse their mutations while the bad guy prevents this at any cost.  It is a twisted comedy filled with random jokes that made me chuckle, but would be highly off-putting to other viewers.  I understand the lackluster reviews and the distaste that many people have with the movie.  It isn’t well made.  It’s just wacky enough for me to be entertained.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

Seth MacFarlane got a lot of praise for his directorial debut film, Ted.  His follow up came a couple years later, set in the Wild West.  A Million Ways to Die in the West told the story of a man (MacFarlane) who lives in the Wild West and is trying to survive in a world where death could always be, and frequently is, right around the corner.  Many people die in the movie.  The quality of the movie pretty much soiled all the goodwill that he had gained with his previous movie.

Does Seth MacFarlane only act in his own work?  Yeah, he really does.  But what he is known most for is Family Guy, a show he created in which he performs the voices for many of the characters.  It was the fact that he voiced many of the characters that he became a popular figure in entertainment.  It led to his hosting the Academy Awards, hosting Saturday Night Live, and directing some movies.  With Ted 2 coming out soon, can he turn around his film career from the disaster it has seemingly become?  Only the release of the movie will tell us for sure.

Jack and Jill

Did you know that Dennis Dugan had an acting career before becoming an Adam Sandler go-to director?  He’d been acting throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and continued acting after that.  He might not have been a big star like Seth MacFarlane, and he might not have had a character to fall back on like Alex Winter, but he was showing up in different television shows and movies.  He also directs movies, including many Happy Madison productions like Happy Gilmore, Grown Ups, The Benchwarmers, and Jack and Jill.

I’ve written about Jack and Jill a bunch already.  It got its own post in this blog.  Adam Sandler stars as Jack and his twin sister Jill.  Al Pacino is in love with Jill and Jack uses her to land Pacino for a Dunkin Donuts commercial.  Jill is one of the most irritating characters ever put to film and tarnishes what could have been a great movie due to Pacino’s excellent performance.  I’m not kidding.  Pacino is great in the role as himself.  One of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen in a terrible movie.  No doubt that Dugan had some influence on how terrible the movie is.

White Chicks

The Wayans family became famous in the early 90s because of the show In Living Color.  It was a sketch show made for black people who weren’t catered to by shows like Saturday Night Live.  It featured most of the Wayans family in the cast as well as a few other notable actors like Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, Jim Carrey, and Tommy Davidson.  It was created by Keenen Ivory Wayans, the second oldest sibling.  He was in a few movies, including The Glimmer Man in 1996, and was a featured performer on In Living Color before breaking through as a director with Scary Movie.

White Chicks happened a couple of movies after Scary Movie for Keenan Ivory Wayans.  It starred Shawn and Marlon Wayans as two police officers who had to pretend to be Caucasian heiresses for an undercover mission.  In order to do this, they put on whiteface.  That was basically the entire concept of the movie.  It was really, truly bad, and I find it almost unwatchable.  The only saving grave is Terry Crews who puts in a fantastic performance as a man who falls in love with one of the police officers (as a woman).

Harlem Nights

Eddie Murphy only ever directed one movie, and this is that movie.  It has mostly negative reviews and there is a reason why.  The movie could have been so much better than it was.  The three stars were Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Redd Foxx, three of the biggest black comedians of all time.  Putting the three of them together would surely make for great comedy, but the movie wasn’t a laugh riot like people were expecting.  It involved gangsters, corruption, and speakeasies, and was set in the 1930s.

I liken this movie to Eddie Murphy’s song Party All the Time.  I enjoy it when it’s on, and there are definitely some good aspects to it, but I can clearly see where people would have problems with it.  There are noticeably bad things in there.  As well, you expect it to be so much better because it is 1980s Eddie Murphy, which tended to be reliable.  The disappointment with the product, along with the flaws led to Harlem Nights being seen as a bad movie.

Many actors go on to have illustrious directing careers thanks to all of the experience they have gained being directed.  George Clooney has made a few critically acclaimed movies since he began directing.  Drew Barrymore made Whip It and people enjoyed that movie.  Elizabeth Banks was the director of the recently released Pitch Perfect 2, and that has done well with audiences.  Though I wrote about five of the bad movies from actor-directors in this post, there are just as many, if not more, good movies out there.  It all depends on the movie.

The one thing that I think helps actor-directors with their movies is that they are able to lean on friends to help them make good work.  Friendship can work wonders.  George Clooney is able to get many people he has previously worked with to act in his movies.  It helps the actors to make the transition, which could be a reason why it is usually fairly easy for them to transition to directing.

It’s about time that I wrap this thing up.  Freaked was a movie directed by an actor that didn’t fare as well as many of the others.  Whether it be the lack of experience, the inability to transfer skills to another aspect of filmmaking, or a plain old lack of quality in the movie, it is one that hasn’t been looked upon fondly.  Not all actors can successfully direct.  Though, sometimes they prove us wrong with subsequent efforts.  It takes time to learn, and sometimes that can turn something bad into something good.

There are notes that I have to give you guys before we finish up here:

• Freaked was suggested for the Sunday “Bad” Movies by @BettisM.
• Morgan Fairchild had a small role in Freaked.  She was previously featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in a movie called Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2.
• One of the actors in Freaked was Deep Roy, who was also in Flash Gordon.
• Lee Arenberg was in Freaked.  He was also in a movie called Warriors of Virtue.
• Then there was John Hawkes.  He was in Freaked, but could also be seen in Steel.
• I mentioned Jack and Jill in this post.
• Have you seen Freaked?  Did you like Freaked?  What other actor-directors do you know?  What movies do you like that are directed by actors?  You can answer any of these questions or just talk about this post in the comments below.
• If you want me to watch a specific movie in a future week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, leave the suggestion in the comments.  Or you can tell me on Twitter or in my email, sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week’s movie is Drop Zone.  I remember going to Canada’s Wonderland before Paramount pulled out, and one of the rides was called Drop Zone.  I haven’t seen the movie, though.  So I’ll tell you what I thought next week.