Monday, November 25, 2019

Orgazmo (1997)


The mid-1990s was a transitional time for comedy. Television’s biggest comedy institution, Saturday Night Live, went through a major cast overhaul. Adam Sandler and Chris Farley were pushed into films in a bigger way when that overhaul happened. Farley would soon die. The Simpsons was going strong with a writing team that included some of the former Saturday Night Live writers. Ben Stiller was finding his place through his short stint on SNL, The Ben Stiller Show, and a movie career that was starting to take off. Bob Odenkirk went from writing on SNL to The Ben Stiller Show to Mr. Show, which would then produce a bunch of popular comedians.

Getting away from the Saturday Night Live connections, though, there was a lot more going on. The late night talk show landscape was changed when Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show in 1992. Jay Leno took over, David Letterman moved from Late Night to The Late Show, Conan O’Brien took over on Late Night, and Tom Snyder would soon be hosting The Late Late Show. There was also the short lived The Chevy Chase Show in 1993.

A bunch of other shows that would become comedy staples transitioned through the 1990s. Seinfeld found popularity in the early 1990s and ended in 1998. Friends began in 1994. MadTV popped up in 1995. The TGIF brand of teen comedies from ABC was strong with Boy Meets World, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Family Matters among other shows. Then there was animation with Family Guy and South Park starting up, and the aforementioned The Simpsons going strong.
South Park started up in 1997. It was the brainchild of two Colorado friends named Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The pilot was a stop-motion animated episode using paper cutouts. Every episode since has been computer animated to mimic the stop-motion style of the pilot. Many people took a liking to the edgy comedy, since it’s not something that tends to come through in most animated projects. The Simpsons wasn’t doing it. Family Guy wouldn’t do it. And none of the children’s animation was going to go anywhere near it. South Park was different, and people liked it.

That wasn’t the only thing that Trey Parker and Matt Stone would work on, though. It’s not even the topic of this post. They released another project that same year. It was a feature film involving the porn industry and a Mormon man. There was even a little bit of a superhero story thrown in there, a few years before superheroes would become a legitimate box office juggernaut. That movie was Orgazmo.
Joe Young (Trey Parker) was a missionary for the Mormon church, going door-to-door in Los Angeles, preaching God’s word. He found himself in the porn industry to make money so that he could marry his fiancée, Lisa (Robyn Lynn Raab). Director Maxxx Orbison (Michael Dean Jacobs) became more controlling as time went on, forcing Joe into endless sequels to the hit porn film Orgazmo. Eventually, Lisa would be in trouble. Joe teamed up with his friend Ben Chapleski (Dian Bachar) to take down Maxxx Orbison and his porn industry cronies.

There were a few elements that helped bring Orgazmo together. The first and foremost element was the porn industry influence. Lesser elements included the Mormon church and the superhero stuff, as well as some good old-fashioned extortion. They came together to create an amusing enough comedy.
The porn storyline drove Orgazmo through the plot. Joe Young was brought into the industry to play the lead in a pornographic film called Orgazmo. That porn film found such success that he was forced into a franchise by the director. Real porn performers were used to fill out the cast of Orgazmo. Ron Jeremy, Chasey Lain, and Juli Ashton were a few adult performers who leapt into roles in Trey Parker’s comedy. It was a comedic take on the porn industry that used talent from that industry to stay a little truer to what it was like. And it did so with the only nudity being asses. No boobs, no vaginas, no dicks… Just asses. That’s it.

The Mormon church was what drove Joe Young to become a part of the porn industry. He was going door-to-door to preach the word of the lord when he ended up knocking on the door of the mansion where Orgazmo was being shot. After fending off the guards using the martial arts skills that he had for some reason, Maxxx Orbison offered him twenty thousand dollars to replace the lead actor. Joe agreed to it on the condition that he didn’t have to have sex with anyone. He needed the money to marry his fiancée in the temple in Utah. When everything was said and done, Joe saw a vision of Jesus and they gave each other thumbs up. That’s what Jesus does. A note should also be made that the name Joseph Young is an amalgamation of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and Brigham Young, the second president of the Mormons and the founder of Salt Lake City.
Then there was the superhero action portion of Orgazmo. The porn film they were making was a superhero parody. The main character was Orgazmo, a superhero who had a machine on his arm that shot orgasm rays. By shooting people, they would stop whatever they were doing and orgasm. Then everyone would have sex because it was a porn flick. That’s what happens in them.

That’s not where the superhero aspects of Orgazmo stopped, though. As the movie went on, Joe Young turned into his own superhero. Okay, maybe not his own. The superhero was still Orgazmo. But he became a real life Orgazmo instead of a porn parody Orgazmo. In the porn, Orgazmo had a sidekick named Choda Boy, who was played by Joe’s best friend in the business, Ben. Ben was an MIT graduate who went into the porn business to have sex with good looking women. He invented things on the side, including a real life orgasm ray. When Maxxx Orbison started threatening the things in Joe’s life, Joe strapped on the orgasm ray and stormed Maxxx’s porn mansion. Joe Young became Orgazmo by using the real orgasm ray and his martial arts skills to take down Maxxx and his cronies.
All three of these elements came together to create a raunchy comedy that wasn’t too over the top for its own good. There were a few jokes that might not fly with movie audiences today, but for the most part it held up. Trey Parker and Matt Stone made something special that would put them on the map alongside their work on South Park. A year later, they would release Baseketball. Soon after that, there would be the South Park movie. And down the line they would make Team America and The Book of Mormon. Plus, more South Park. That show has kept going for twenty-three seasons now and shows no signs of stopping. Their career didn’t begin with Orgazmo, but it certainly showcased their brand of comedy.
The comedy landscape would be completely different without the 1990s. There wouldn’t be Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Many of the SNL people to come out of the decade wouldn’t be around on the same level as they are. There goes Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Spade, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer, Bob Odenkirk, and many more. MadTV might not be a thing. Michael MacDonald, Bobby Lee, and the many others wouldn’t be as popular as they are. No Austin Powers. No Wayne’s World. No Friends. No Family Guy. No South Park. Not to mention that That 70’s Show and Freaks and Geeks started at the end of the decade. Those casts just poof out of existence without the 1990s.

We’re still feeling the impact of the 1990s on the comedy world to this day. Much like any point in time, it changed the landscape for future generations. The 1990s led the way for the comedy of the 2000s which led to the comedy of the 2010s. The Seth Rogen starring movies needed Freaks and Geeks to come before. How I Met Your Mother needed Friends to set a template. And the adult animated comedies needed shows like The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy to come first. Trey Parker and Matt Stone were a part of that. Their work led others to make beloved work. They inspired those who came later. People might think Orgazmo is bad, but it helped lead to other, better things.
Here are a few notes to finish off the post:

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019

The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (1999) and Unique Movies in the Sunday "Bad" Movies


The modern movie culture is built upon familiarity. Sequels, reboots, remakes, and adaptations are all over the place. When you look at any cineplex, the majority of films fit into one of those four categories. Think about right now. There’s a new Terminator movie, a reboot of The Addams Family, a Joker movie, a Maleficent sequel, and a Zombieland sequel. The familiarity is ruling the box office through sheer abundance.

Even the movies that don’t come from an established property feel familiar. One studio will release a film to success and other studios will try and copy that formula to find their own success. Look at the Dark Universe (a reimagining of a property that already existed) and how it tried to capture the magic of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Almost everything that gets released to theaters, home video, or streaming services can feel like something else.

The Sunday “Bad” Movies can have that issue too. The first film that was ever covered, Starcrash, was an Italian rip-off of Star Wars. There have been sequels upon sequels throughout the nearly seven years of posts. There have been book adaptations, comic adaptations, remakes, and reboots. But every once in a while, a movie comes up that tells a story in a unique way. It might not be fully unique (no story ever is), but it at least tries something different with the way the story is told.

It’s time to look at some of the more unique movies to come through the Sunday “Bad” Movies. These movies tried something new with their material. If it wasn’t new, it was new to me. It was something I hadn’t seen before. These movies stood out as one-of-a-kind. Seven movies, seven unique aspects. One for each year that the blog has been around. Here we go.
Monster Brawl
Possibly the most unique of all the movies watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, Monster Brawl was released in 2012. It depicted many of the standard horror movie monsters that people knew and loved. It told their backstories in small vignettes. That might not seem like too much of an original story, and with that description, it wasn’t.

What made Monster Brawl stand out was the originality in the story that tied everything together. The reason that the stories were being told was that the monsters were coming together to battle it out in the ring. They were going to wrestle one another to see which monster would come out on top. It was a professional wrestling pay-per-view with monsters instead of professional wrestlers. Though, there were professional wrestlers playing the monsters, so it was really monsters and professional wrestlers. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think I will ever again.
The Terror of Tiny Town
From the beginning of film up until the 1970s, westerns were a force to be reckoned with. There were westerns that fit into pretty much any other genre. There were war westerns, comedy westerns, drama westerns, and musical westerns. Some of them stayed truer to history than others. There are still westerns, of course, but not nearly as many as there used to be.

The Terror of Tiny Town came out in the 1930s and played off many western tropes and stories that have been well worn throughout the genre. There was one major difference, though. The film was marketed as the first western with “an all midget cast.” It may have been the only western where the entire cast was little people. There’s not really much else out there like it, hence its inclusion in this list.
Funky Forest: The First Contact
This one made the unique list simply because of how weird it is. Between the dangly arm thing, the television vagina, the dancing scenes, and the techno forest music making love with trees scene, there’s a lot to unpack with Funky Forest. The film is a fairly standard anthology style movie. There’s no wraparound story, but it has a bunch of vignettes that play one after another. The vignettes are some of the weirdest out there, though, making for a wholly unique experience that needs to be seen to be understood.
God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
The opening of this post mentioned all the sequels, reboots, remakes, and adaptations out there. This is a sequel. That might make it seem like there wasn’t too much originality in it. It was coming off two successful Christian films about how Christianity should be taught and believed. The first one had a student rebelling against his teacher because the teacher wouldn’t allow his class to believe in Christianity. The sequel had a teacher being persecuted for even mentioning religion in her class. This one should have been more of the same, right?

Not quite. The difference between this and the others, and what made the third God’s Not Dead unique among so many other Christian films, was the moral of the story. The first two films were about Christians being the victims. They were about how Christians were right and they should preach their beliefs to everyone else until the other people agree with them. The third film took a different approach. It was about inclusivity. Everyone should be able to believe what they want to believe. A specific religion shouldn’t be pushed on people. Those who want to believe it have the right to believe. Those who don’t have the right to not believe. Everyone can make their own decisions.

It was a refreshing take from a film subculture that is usually all about Christianity being the only right way. To have a filmmaker say that they can believe in Christianity but it’s okay for other people not to was a nice compromise. It was nice to see that not everything had to be so forcefully propagandic. There’s a place for everyone.
Remote Control
There have been a lot of meta horror movies to come out since the release of Scream in 1996. This was not one of them. This one came out a few years earlier, at the end of the 1980s. But it was a precursor to what would come a few years later.

Remote Control was a movie about a movie called Remote Control that mind controlled people in the same way that the movie within the movie, Remote Control, could. Did you follow that? There were three layers. Remote Control featured a movie called Remote Control that featured a movie called Remote Control. What was happening in the top layer mirrored what happened in the middle layer, and that mirrored what was happening in the lowest layer. It was like an Inception of horror. Only, where Scream played off the slashers of the 1970s and 1980s, Remote Control played off of the sci-fi horror of the 1940s and 1950s. It was an interesting throwback while using the 80s style, all wrapped in a meta commentary that made it unique.
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
There’s no real way around what this movie was about. It’s right in the title. There was a bed. It ate people. For some reason, people kept sleeping on, playing on, or hanging around this random bed. If you found a random bed in an abandoned house, would you get on it? Probably not. But these people did, and they paid with their lives.

If that story wasn’t unique enough for you, consider that Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was presented like an art film. It wasn’t told in the standard horror way, even though the story was clearly B-movie material. It was presented as though it was a high form of artistic expression. It was the Terrence Malick of horror films, only with less nature. The bed did end up outside at some point, but the movie didn’t really involve nature. It involved a bed eating people, people shooting at the bed, and the bed eating more people. An arthouse bed eating people movie.
The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human
Rounding out the list of unique movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies is this romantic comedy done in the style of a nature documentary. A man (Mackenzie Astin) and a woman (Carmen Electra) met at a nightclub. They soon formed a relationship that would grow until they eventually got married and had a child. Throughout their whole relationship, there was narration from David Hyde Pierce.

Writer/director Jeff Abugov said that he got his inspiration for the movie after seeing a nature documentary on the mating habits of animals. That came through the movie in spades. The narration that was placed over everything was needlessly specific. The wording of everything seemed more technical than it needed to be. The way that the narrator spoke about humans as creatures that weren’t fully understood, while speaking with authority was true to nature documentaries. The narrator tried to be in the mind of the humans while not understanding the human mind at all. It was an interesting take on the romantic comedy genre that I’ve never seen anywhere else.
The Sunday “Bad” Movies has been filled with movies that aren’t quite like others. And some that are too much like others. There are rip-offs, remakes, and sequels. But once in a while, something slips through that feels like nothing else out there. It could be a Christian movie that isn’t preaching about Christianity being superior to everything else, or it could be a romantic comedy placed into a nature documentary shell. It could be a triple layer meta science fiction horror movie or it could be a bunch of overdone monsters placed into a wrestling ring. There are a bunch of derivative bad movies, but there are also ones that try new things. That’s the fun of bad movies.

In a world where remakes, reboots, sequels, and adaptations rule the theaters, it can be a delight to find something a little different. When filmmakers try new things, it can make for a pleasant surprise. These new things might not always work out, but they’re at least interesting. They foster discussion. Trying something new will always be better than doing the same old thing again. And it will maybe inspire others to think outside the box when they’re telling stories.
Now let’s get a few notes in here:

  • Here are the posts for Monster Brawl (week 99), The Terror of Tiny Town (week 326), Funky Forest: The First Contact (week 182), God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (week 319), Remote Control (week 246), and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (week 118).
  • Carmen Electra starred as Jenny Smith, the woman, in The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human. She was also in the movies Two-Headed Shark Attack (week 7) and Date Movie (week 164).
  • The male, Billy, was played by Mackenzie Astin. He showed up in Elf-Man (week 213) and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (week 345).
  • Lucy Liu made her return to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human after being in Ballistic: Ecks vs.Sever (week 33).
  • Marc Blucas is now a returning actor, thanks to The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human. He was previously seen in View from the Top (week 83).
  • Jonah Hex (week 249) was the first appearance of Lisa Rotondi, who returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies in The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human.
  • The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human was the second appearance of Linda Porter, who was in The Karate Dog (week 281).
  • Finally, Jack Kehler was in The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, the same year he was in Dudley Do-Right (week 336).
  • Have you seen The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human? Are there any other movies that you’ve seen like this one? Are there any that you think try something completely different from other movies? Did they succeed or fail? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
  • Speaking of Twitter, there are polls going on as I try to narrow things down to one movie for the seventh anniversary rewatch. Torment me. Or let me watch something enjoyable. Just vote on what I should rewatch. The polls are on Twitter.
  • Twitter and the comments are also good places to let me know about what movies I should feature in future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. New movies, old movies, doesn’t matter. As long as they fit with the “bad” movie idea. Suggest away.
  • There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies that has some fun stuff sometimes. Check that out if you want to keep up with the pictures and videos I put there.
  • Now it’s time for the next post. The next one is a movie that was suggested to me by @ImPABLO_i_WRITE. It comes from two great comedic Colorado minds. Orgazmo will be the featured movie on Sunday and I’ll be writing about that one. Come back then to see what I had to say. See you then.
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