The Wicker Man (2006)

Some actors have personas that are larger than life. Nicolas Cage is one such actor. He came from the Coppola family, one that you might recognize for all the movies they directed. However, he wanted to distance himself from his given last name. He decided that the perfect way to do so would be to change that last name before pursuing his acting career. The name he chose was the same last name as one of his favourite comic book characters, Luke Cage. His stage name was Nicolas Cage and it’s what he used to start his career. The strange thing was that his career began with family projects. Three of his earlier movies were Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and Peggy Sue Got Married, all of which were directed by his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola.

It wasn’t the early work that lifted Nicolas Cage to the larger-than-life status that he currently has. Many of the traits that he brings to his performances were present throughout those early movies and the others he was in, though. The early movies weren’t outliers. But it wasn’t until more recently that people began to hold him in a higher esteem. He was well known by the time he had his turn of the century action movie run. That’s how he became an action star. People knew Nicolas Cage. They enjoyed Nicolas Cage. It would take a few more years for that stereotypical Nicolas Cage persona to solidify.

I have a theory about when this persona really took hold for audiences, and this theory is tied into the release of The Wicker Man. Before I get into that, though, I should explain what The Wicker Man was. Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) was a police officer who witnessed the violent deaths of a mother and child after a car accident. In the aftermath, he received a letter from Willow (Kate Beahan), his ex-fiancée. She informed him that they had a child and the child had disappeared on an island off Washington state. Edward travelled to the island to find his missing child and discovered a cult-like population. The more he dug into the island and how the people lived, the darker things got.

Within Nicolas Cage’s filmography, The Wicker Man might not seem like the most outlandish movie. For the most part, it was a straight-forward mystery that devolved into horror. It came after there had already been a movie where he played multiple characters. It came before his career turned to direct-to-video. It was a middle-of-the-road Nicolas Cage movie, at least at that time, that was only notable for the final fifteen or so minutes when things went off the rails. Yet it became the turning point for Nicolas Cage, or how people would see him.

You see, there was something else that happened in 2006 that helps to build my theory. This other thing elevated Nicolas Cage beyond what he was already known as and pushed him into a new echelon of the public consciousness. Or, really, two other things. They kind of go hand in hand, though. The internet was growing in popularity. It had already surged through the AOL messenger days of the late 1990s and through the dot com bubble of the early 2000s. Yet, it still had a lot of growth to go. Much of that came with the public releases of both Facebook and YouTube.

Facebook might have been created in 2004, but that wasn’t when the public was able to use it. For nearly two years, it was a social network for American colleges. You’ve probably seen The Social Network. You understand the basic idea. In 2006, however, it was opened to anyone over the age of 13, no matter where they were. YouTube launched in 2004, and by 2006 was big enough to be purchased by Google. So you have the rise of the biggest social networking site and one of the biggest video streaming sites around the same time as the release of The Wicker Man. How does this relate to Nicolas Cage?

Well, with the rise of social media and streaming video came the rise of viral videos and memes. Sure, those things existed before. People who went to Newgrounds could see things like Numa Numa Guy or Star Wars Kid and get a chuckle. YouTube became such a household name, though, because people could put almost anything up there. Did you want to see someone’s day at the zoo? Did you need a quick tutorial on how to use an iPod? Did you want to watch a music video? YouTube could help. YouTube was also filled with movie and television clips that people enjoyed.

The Wicker Man hit at the time when YouTube was about to be bought out by Google. Some clips were bound to be uploaded on the site as people discovered the movie. More clips would be uploaded as people discovered the “Not the bees!” part in the Unrated home video cut of the movie. There were some wacky, you-need-to-see-this moments in the movie, and YouTube users wanted to put them on the site for quick reference. Go on YouTube now and search “Nic Cage Bees” and you’re bound to find multiple videos of that particular clip from The Wicker Man.

Putting a clip on YouTube wasn’t enough to have it go viral, though. That wasn’t a guarantee. I could put a video up on YouTube right now and, thanks to the algorithm hiding me, I’d get a couple views but that’s it. Part of what you need to do is share the video. What better way to do that is there than to blast it on social media. It’s the quickest and easiest way to get something to the people you know. We all have a group chat. We’ve all shared videos in a group chat. Some of them have probably been the same videos, even. The rise of Facebook allowed this.

It was this connectivity that bridged borders which propelled the clips from The Wicker Man into popularity. “Why is it burned?” became a thing. The bees became a thing. Nicolas Cage dressed as a bear became a thing. People who hadn’t seen the movie saw these clips, out of context, and concluded that the movie was ridiculous. They concluded that Nicolas Cage’s performance was ridiculous. It gave some people the idea to go back and look at previous Nicolas Cage movies to see if there was a pattern. There was. He always made strange choices in his performances, and they always made his movies a little more ridiculous than they needed to be. Movies like Vampire’s Kiss, Deadfall, and Never on Tuesday had more eyes on them because people sought out other wacky Nicolas Cage bits. It was all because The Wicker Man dropped at the perfect crossroads of streaming and social media.

Now, this is just a theory. It might be wrong. It most likely is. There are absolutely other factors that led to this idea that Nicolas Cage has become known for his crazy acting choices. Even in the height of his theatrical popularity, through the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was doing some odd things. People who saw Face/Off and Gone in 60 Seconds probably recognized a few of them. However, it had never been so easy to access the movies he was in. Blockbuster was as strong as ever. Redbox and Netflix were on the horizon. And YouTube would only grow. The access to Nicolas Cage output was only going to get easier.

That’s not the end of Nicolas Cage’s growth into a larger-than-life figure. It was only a turning point. It was a moment in time that opened people’s eyes to the fact that he was a special kind of actor. He had a unique quality to him. That unique quality would cross over to his real-life persona. He married Lisa Marie Presley in 2002 and divorced her later that year. He named his son Kal-El. He bought and sold multiple castles and the most haunted house in America. Nicolas Cage also ended up in debt that would cause him to take on whatever direct-to-video roles he could for most of the 2010s.

In more recent years, he paid off his debt and focused on making the types of movies he truly wants to. These newer roles have gained him critical acclaim once again, even allowing him to participate in an acting roundtable last year. That roundtable really brought out his larger-than-life personality as he told the story of filming a western and having his actor horse, Rain Man, try to kill him during most shots. It was a crazy moment in that roundtable that will live on in infamy the same way as screaming “How did it burn?” has been seared in people’s minds. And the reason we know so much about Nicolas Cage and his crazy performances is because The Wicker Man came out at exactly the right time.

I don’t have much more to say other than it’s nice to see people have turned around on Nicolas Cage. There was a time there, from around when The Wicker Man came out until, maybe, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, where people wrote him off. They appreciated his commitment but didn’t necessarily like his movies. He’s always been entertaining to watch, though. Even in the worst of movies, his choices and his presence would provide something good. I hope that continues for a long time.

Now let’s toss some notes in here:

• The Wicker Man marked the sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Nicolas Cage. His other appearances were Outcast (week 163), Ghost Rider (week 260), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (week 260), Never on Tuesday (week 387), and Vampire’s Kiss (week 517).
• Next up, we’ve got Matthew Walker. He has been in Blackwoods (week 115), Alone in the Dark (week 152), Futuresport (week 491), and The Wicker Man.
• Kendall Cross returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in The Wicker Man, after popping up in Space Buddies (week 270) and The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story (week 337).
• Joyce and Jacqueline Robbins were in both The Wicker Man and Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160).
• Two actors from In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220) were in The Wicker Man. They were Leelee Sobieski and Tania Saulnier.
• Diane Delano was in Surf School (week 42) and The Wicker Man.
• You might have noticed Frances Conroy in The Wicker Man. She was also in Catwoman (week 174).
• Aaron Eckhart had a small role in The Wicker Man. He was the star of I, Frankenstein (week 217).
• Do you recognize the name Anna Van Hooft? She was in The Marine 5: Battleground (week 237) and The Wicker Man.
• Monique Ganderton made a second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Wicker Man after previously showing up in American Ultra (week 261).
• In the theatrical version of The Wicker Man, James Franco was in the final scene. James Franco was also one of the stars of King Cobra (week 331).
• Michael Wiseman was in both The Wicker Man and Atlas Shrugged: Part III (week 490).
• Finally, The Wicker Man featured Simon Longmore, who was in Freddy Got Fingered (week 521).
• Have you seen The Wicker Man? What did you think? How do you feel about Nicolas Cage? Let me know in the comments.
• You can also leave a comment if you want to suggest a movie for me to watch for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies installment. I like suggestions.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram to keep up with the Sunday “Bad” Movies mayhem.
• Next week is a big week. It’s the tenth anniversary. I don’t have anything all that special planned for it. I wish I did, but I’ve been kind of short on time and, as I’m writing this, focus. I don’t know what it is. Anyway, I’ve got a rewatch of Clownado planned. So you’ll get that. I’ll see you then!

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

I am unsure what I’ll be writing for this post. I’ve tried to start it a few times now, and every time I do, it feels like the wrong way to start. This is my last-ditch effort, a Hail Mary, to try and kickstart things so that I can actually write something. Anything. It’s not that I don’t have things to say about the movie. I do. I just haven’t been able to break into it in a way that felt good. Everything has fallen flat, so far, and I thought I’d just write about that and maybe get somewhere.

As we approach the ten-year mark of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I decided to toss some major movies into the mix. October was horror movies or, at the very least, horror adjacent movies. The same as it is every year. I’d already covered things like Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Halloween: Resurrection, Sleepaway Camp, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I had to find more horror movies on those levels of notoriety to watch this month. That’s what brought me to this week’s movie, Vampire’s Kiss.

Here's a rundown of what Vampire’s Kiss was about. Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) was a literary agent in New York. He lived a good life. He had his own apartment that made it look like he was well off. He and his colleagues would go to the club on what seemed like an almost nightly basis. He was a little quirky, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, after a chance meeting with a woman at the club, Peter would start his path on the downward spiral of becoming a vampire.

If you don’t know what Vampire’s Kiss is, you probably do. You just don’t know that you know. It has been the source of many an internet meme. I’ll get into some of that stuff as well as many of the other ludicrous moments that it had. There were a lot. There was Nicolas Cage influence all over it, and not just because he was in it. He clearly helped shape a lot of what the movie would be, beyond his simple eccentricities.

There were two storylines in Vampire’s Kiss. The main one, and where the movie got its title, was that Peter thought he was turning into a vampire. This was due to a one night stand with Rachel (Jennifer Beals), a woman he met at the nightclub. One night turned into two nights turned into an obsession on Peter’s part. She had fangs, bit him on the neck, and he started feeling different. He was sensitive to light. He had a thirst for blood. He ate a cockroach and started sleeping in a makeshift coffin he built out of his couch. The thing is, the vampirism wasn’t real. It was all in Peter’s head. He may not have even taken Rachel home at all. For sure she didn’t bite him with vampire fangs. He had no bite mark in the morning, until he cut his neck shaving. She wasn’t there in the morning when he was talking to her. It was all his imagination playing tricks on him.

The crux of the vampirism story involved Peter losing his sanity. He was seeing a psychiatrist, which wasn’t so much a signal of his losing his sanity as it was of his trying to save it. The therapist was meant to help Peter work out his issues. His issues with life, his issues with work, his issues with everything. She tried. She really did. But his sessions got tenser and tenser to the point of scaring the therapist. By the end, I wasn’t entirely sure that the therapist was real. The final session Peter had was a hallucination as he spoke to a wall around the corner from his apartment. It was a fantastical session where he admitted how lonely he was, only to have his therapist set him up with another patient, who just happened to be there at the same time. It was Peter’s desires manifesting themselves through his insane hallucination. Were the rest of his sessions the same?

The prior sessions could have been real. They certainly felt like they were, and they were more accurate to the things that were going on in his normal life. Prior to meeting Rachel, Peter had taken Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) back to his apartment after a night at the club. While they were in the throes of passion, a bat flew in the window and flapped around the apartment. Peter later admitted to his therapist that the bat aroused him. Eventually he got rid of the bat, ditched Jackie in favour of Rachel, and turned into a vampire. But I want to talk about the therapy sessions a bit more.

The bat flying around the apartment gave the first hint at the crazy Nicolas Cage performance that permeated through Vampire’s Kiss. As he tried to get the bat away, he shouted “Shoo! Shoo!” in a way that only Nicolas Cage would. The therapy session about the bat wasn’t quite the height of Nicolas Cage acting, but it set the stage for what would come. A later therapy scene involved Peter recounting his troubles with finding a certain contract. Nobody could find it. I’ll get into the full story about that in a bit. I just want to say that the therapy session led to a weird scene where Peter, filled with outrage, shouted about how it was easy to file things alphabetically. He recited the alphabet while screaming at his therapist, who could only respond with a “Very good, Peter. You know your alphabet.” Not much of a help, but what else could she say at that point?

One of the other revelations in the final, fictional, therapy session was that Peter had killed a woman. It wasn’t a revelation to Peter or the viewer, but it was a revelation to the therapist who wasn’t actually there. This unreal version of the therapist even said it was okay that Peter killed a woman. How did Peter get to that point? As his mental state deteriorated and he became surer that he was a vampire, Peter worried that his teeth weren’t growing in. He went and bought plastic teeth. He went to the club. He used those plastic teeth to chew on a woman’s neck and suck her blood. That killed her. Peter was a murderer.

Now, I have a few questions about that scene and what led up to it. Maybe those questions can simply be answered by “That was the New York of 1988.” I still have those questions. Why did nobody question why Peter ran down the street screaming “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!”? Okay, to be fair, I’d probably just stand there wondering what was happening. I probably wouldn’t do anything about it. So I guess that tracks. When Peter was kicked out of the club, why didn’t anyone try to figure out whose blood was all over him? Seriously, this one is a much bigger question to me. He was covered in blood because he had just bitten someone’s neck open. It wasn’t a Halloween party or a costume party. It was just a normal night at the club. Nobody wondered about the blood. They kicked him out and that was that. Even when they found the woman’s body, they didn’t put together that Peter had been covered in blood and she had lost a lot of blood. I don’t understand that.

I want to take a quick moment to go back to the plastic teeth and Peter’s trip to the club. There’s a moment when Peter first puts in his teeth that is one of the underrated funny moments of the movie. Nicolas Cage put the teeth in his mouth, looked directly at camera, and made a kind of hissing sound. Then he started crawling on the ground. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not sure about the choices that Nicolas Cage makes in most movies, though, so I’m not going to be able to explain it. When he went to the club, however, there was reason for the way he was acting. Some people call it overacting. Some call it homage. I think it could be a little bit of both. Peter entered the club and walked around like he was Nosferatu in the 1920s movie. You could see the glee in Nicolas Cage’s face as he was walking around like that. It was clearly overacting as it didn’t feel realistic at all. At the same time, it was an homage to that earlier film. It was a little bit of both. No need to sit on one side or the other.

It's about time we get into the second storyline that was woven through Vampire’s Kiss, and that was the workplace harassment drama. As I said earlier, Peter was a literary agent of some sort, working in an office. His secretary or assistant was Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso). Peter was always abusing her in one way or another, and things got increasingly bad as the movie went on. It was clearly a metaphor for an abusive relationship, and it was easy to see all the similarities. She never left the situation. She undersold how bad it was to other people. When she did leave, Peter apologized and acted nice, until she returned and he acted worse than ever. It was the same story you hear about abusive relationships all the time. Only, in Vampire’s Kiss, it was a work relationship.

The Alva storyline was where I think the most ridiculous moments of Vampire’s Kiss shined. I don’t mean that to make light of how horrible Peter treated Alva. There’s no excuse for his mistreatment of her, especially the sexual assault near the end of the film. But there were certain things that Nicolas Cage added to his performance during this storyline that were things only Nicolas Cage would think of, then execute upon. There were some raw Nicolas Cage moments within a story about an abusive relationship.

There was one scene that perfectly showed how an abusive relationship could show itself in public. In the middle of the workday, Peter started calling for Alva. She ignored him. He kept calling, getting louder and louder each time. Eventually, he came out of his office into the main area where the rest of the staff were. In the most Nicolas Cage way, he jumped up on someone’s desk, pointed down at Alva (asserting his power position over her), and shouted “There you are!” Alva fled the room, he followed her, going so far as to storm right into the women’s washroom.

The real power of this as an allegory for an abusive relationship came from the interaction that followed. Another woman was in the washroom and asked why Peter was in there. The woman asked if everything was okay, to which Alva replied that it was. This was something that frequently happens with abusive relationships. The victims will, for some amount of time, downplay how bad the relationship is. They will forgive their abuser, usually out of fear that the abuse will get worse. Alva feared what Peter might do to her in the future, so she wouldn’t let anyone interfere.

Things got worse in private. Peter brought Alva into his office to talk about the contract he tasked her with finding. This was when things got threatening beyond what was happening in public. His voice got quieter so that people outside couldn’t hear. His eyes widened as he looked directly into hers. Peter said that there was nobody else he would want to do that job because it was one of the worst jobs he could think of. He would rather have Alva do that job because of how horrible it was. He wanted to torture her with it. It was very much the way that an abuser would emotionally and mentally threaten a victim behind closed doors, talking about all the horrible things they could do to their victim. Peter was laying that threat out there for Alva to see, without it being physical. It was a threat he would follow through on later.

Alva felt so afraid to go to work that she confided in her brother, who convinced her to stay home. Peter, in his full abuser form, found Alva’s house and apologized. He convinced her to return to work, only to then do something much, much worse. He raped her in the office building, somewhere in one of the back rooms. Abusers do this sort of thing all the time. When the victim tries to leave the relationship, they will change their tone completely to try and persuade them to stay. They manipulate in a way that will downplay to the victim how bad they were. Then, when the victim is convinced of the abuser being sorry or turning a new leaf, the abuser will do something even worse because the victim tried to leave them. Peter persuaded Alva to return to work, only to immediately betray her trust in the worst way. The only way she could think of to get away from her abuser was to fight back. Alva took her brother to Peter’s apartment, and her brother killed Peter, driving a piece of wood through his heart. It was like a stake to a real vampire.

So there you have it. That’s Vampire’s Kiss in a nutshell. There were two storylines, intertwined because of one man’s mental deterioration. Peter was losing his mind, which led him to believe he was a vampire. It also worsened his already abusive relationship with coworker Alva. Eventually, both sides of his life would come together to end it with a stake through the heart. Or the abdomen. It definitely looked like the piece of wood was driven into his body below his heart. Either way, he died because of what he did to Alva in the most vampiric way, without being an actual vampire.

I didn’t know what I was going to write when I set out to put together this post. I knew it would be something about Vampire’s Kiss, since that was the topic and I had just watched it. That’s all I knew. I didn’t know how I would get into it. I didn’t have some other topic I wanted to approach. It ended up being a post all about the movie. I guess that’ll work, though the movie might not have.

Now I’ve got a few notes to close things out:

• I mentioned a few movies in this post. They were Birdemic: Shock and Terror (week 100), Halloween: Resurrection (week 413), Sleepaway Camp (week 150), and Killer Klowns from Outer Space (week 361).
• Vampire’s Kiss put Debbie Rochon into the five-timers’ club. Her first four appearances were Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), Battledogs (week 346), and Tromeo & Juliet (week 516).
• Nicolas Cage also joined the five-timers’ club this week. His appearances were in Outcast (week 163), Ghost Rider (week 260), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (week 260), Never on Tuesday (week 387), and Vampire’s Kiss.
• Jessica Lundy was in both Vampire’s Kiss and The Stupids (week 188).
• Fred Claus (week 265) and Vampire’s Kiss each featured John Michael Higgins.
• Branden Marlowe appeared in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (week 310) as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies before reappearing in Vampire’s Kiss.
• The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (week 362) featured David Hyde Pierce, who also had a role in Vampire’s Kiss.
• Material Girls (week 467) and Vampire’s Kiss shared an actor in Maria Conchita Alonso.
• Finally, Jill Gatsby popped up in Vampire’s Kiss. She was also in Maniac Cop (week 480).
• Have you seen Vampire’s Kiss? What did you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
• You can also use the comments section to share any suggestions you have for movies I should check out as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for some more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• Okay, so this post is coming out a little late. Like a month or so late. The post that’s supposed to go up after it is for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. It’ll be up sometime soon. I hope you enjoy that one when it goes up. In the meantime, check out some of the other posts that have come out between when this one was supposed to land and when it did land. See you soon!

Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

It can be a little strange when a comedian makes the jump from stand-up or sketch comedy into a longer form of comedic storytelling. Whether that form is a half hour situational comedy, hour long comedy/drama, or movies, there can be some growing pains that go along with it. They might be used to their stand-up or sketch roots and may not be able to make their new role work. Sometimes they grow and manage to find their place in that longer form of storytelling. Other times, it becomes obvious that there’s something about that comedian that works much better in smaller doses.

Tom Green is a perfect example of a comedian that never quite gelled in a longer form of storytelling. His absurdist style could be funny in smaller doses, whether that was making weird noises or making delicious cheese sandwiches. That could work as an aside in stand-up comedy. It could work as a sketch where that kind of joke was the focus of a three-minute bit. You know, a sort of less is more kind of thing. The comedy wouldn’t overstay its welcome on a smaller scale.

However, his comedic stylings didn’t quite work in a larger project. Freddy Got Fingered was a good example of that. Gord Brody (Tom Green) was an aspiring cartoonist who wanted nothing more than for someone in Hollywood to greenlight his idea. Standing in the way, however, was his father, Jim (Rip Torn). Jim didn’t believe in his son. He thought Gord was a deadbeat slacker who would never succeed. This created a very abusive relationship between father and son and the breakdown of their entire familial unit.

I didn’t dislike Freddy Got Fingered. There was actually a lot that I appreciated about it. The story had a lot of potential. The struggles between a son who wants to live one way and a father’s desire to see the son live a different way is relatable. I’m sure many people have had parental relationships where the parents were very overbearing and trying to steer the child in a direction the child was not meant to go. It’s a story that many movies utilize because so many people go through that experience. That story was good. As was Tom Green’s direction of it and the actors. I wouldn’t say anyone turned in a bad performance. They were all strong in their roles.

The problems came when Tom Green let himself loose to do the types of things that you would expect Tom Green to do. His absurd antics made it into many moments of the movie, sometimes fitting well and other times taking away from what could have been something good, something interesting. When the moments fit well, they fit very well for the comedy. Gord’s girlfriend, Betty (Marisa Coughlan), was paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. One of her sexual kinks was to have Gord cane her senseless legs. The absurdity of that worked for their relationship. It worked when Gord, for whatever reason, pretended to be some bigwig stockbroker to impress Betty. He took a cordless phone from home and used a tape recorder to play a ringtone, so it looked like he had a cell phone. That kind of stuff worked.

Tom Green’s style of humour fell a little flatter when it was a random sort of aside. I’m thinking about things like the opening of the movie. Gord moved out to Hollywood to become a famous cartoonist. While out there, he got a job at a cheese sandwich factory. There was a scene when he was at a conveyor belt of delicious cheese sandwiches and decided that, instead of doing his job, he would jump up on the conveyor belt, hold a salami between his legs, and accost the other workers as though it was his penis. Or there was the scene, right before that, where he drove to Hollywood and randomly stopped to jerk off a horse. Actually jerk off a horse. Tom Green jerked off a horse in Freddy Got Fingered.

What didn’t quite work was that Tom Green was simply being absurd to be absurd. It didn’t have anything to do with the story. There was no reason he needed to poke his coworkers with salami and have everyone no-sell it. There was absolutely no reason he needed to jump a fence and jerk off a horse while yelling “I’m a farmer, daddy! I’m a farmer!” This kind of stuff happened often. It was a bunch of non-sequiturs that added nothing to the story and didn’t enlighten the character(s) in any way.

Then there were the moments that were supposed to be important, emotional moments for the Brody family that got sidetracked by Tom Green doing his wacky Tom Green antics. Picture, if you will, those same horse jerking, salami slinging antics. Now imagine those antics happen during a moment where Gord must confront his dad about the abuse he suffered over his twenty-eight years of life. That would take away from the power of the scene, right? It would make a turning point for the characters feel much less serious.

Two beats in Freddy Got Fingered immediately come to mind when I think about this feeling. The first followed the dinner date scene I mentioned earlier. The stuff with the phone and Gord pretending to have a big stockbroker job was fine. The scene fell apart when Jim realized Gord was at the restaurant and not the computer job that Gord told him he had. Jim completely trashed Gord in front of Betty, then trashed Betty for her disability. It fit with the story of Gord suffering his father’s abuse throughout his life. However, when Gord’s reaction was to jump up on the bar and start shooting water at everyone from the fountain sprayer… That’s where things went a little too far into the typical Tom Green comedy.

This type of behaviour could be easily written off as reactionary bad behaviour meant to elicit people to actually care for Gord. I’m not talking about the audience. I’m talking about the people in Gord’s life. Deep down, Gord wanted nothing more than his father’s approval. His father always wrote him off, though, so Gord acted out. He wanted the attention his brother, the titular Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas), got. He never got it, though. So, in his head, bad behaviour that got him negative attention was better than nothing at all. Plus, he probably had some sort of undiagnosed disability of some sort. I can’t say for sure. I’m not a doctor. But he seemed to have a problem focusing on basic tasks.

I want to go back to Freddy for a moment. The other big emotional moment was where Freddy Got Fingered got its title. Gord, Jim, and Julie Brody (Julie Hagerty) were at a counseling session to try and work out the issues between Gord and Jim. Jim didn’t take it seriously, so Gord dropped a bombshell. A made-up bombshell. He claimed that Jim fingered Freddy. It would have been enough to have everyone’s reactions to the bombshell, and to have Freddy, a mid-20s man, be taken to a home for molested children. But about ten seconds after Gord accused his father, he started screaming. He picked up a bust, threw it out a window, and jumped out behind it. It was a scene about Gord accusing his father of sexually abusing his brother, that ended on wacky “Tom Green jumping out a window” hijinks. It ruined the serious nature of the scene.

This is all to say that Tom Green’s style of comedy didn’t quite work in movie form. There’s a chance that it could have, had it been pulled back a little bit. Instead of inserting wacky Tom Green stuff into every single scene, let the more serious stuff play out without it. Have the wacky hijinks in the crazy scenes. But in scenes like the birth of a child, instead of having Tom Green pretend to be a doctor and swing the newborn baby around by the umbilical cord, maybe have him react to a childbirth. Maybe don’t have him lash out at his father by spraying an entire fancy restaurant with water. Tone that back and focus more on the relationship. The caning sexual kink sidestory can stay, though.

Tom Green seems more like a sketch comedian or a stand-up comedian than a comedy movie star. His style doesn’t fit with the longform storytelling of movies. It’s actually a detriment to captivating storytelling. Every time something happened that was emotionally compelling, his comedy would break it up. And, in most cases, his comedy got stale after the initial shock wore off. It wasn’t long enough to come back around to being funny. Aside from the backwards man bit. That’s not important though.

When a comedian makes the jump from the stage to the screen, whether that stage is stand-up or sketch, there can be an adjustment period of getting their style to work in a new form. In some cases, it can work to a high degree. In other cases, the transition never sits right. The performer will always feel like they don’t quite fit into the roles they play because their style doesn’t mesh. It can make for interesting failures, much like this week’s movie.

Might I interest you in some notes:

• Freddy Got Fingered starred Tom Green, who also directed it. Tom Green was previously seen in Iron Sky: The Coming Race (week 440).
• Shaquille O’Neal played himself in Freddy Got Fingered. He was also in Jack and Jill (week 101), Steel (week 127), and The Wash (week 303).
• Freddy Got Fingered featured the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance of Ron Selmour, who was in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220) and Black Christmas (week 368).
• Lorena Gale also made a third appearance in Freddy Got Fingered, after previously appearing in Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (week 390) and Halloween: Resurrection (week 413).
• Another three-timer was Eric Keenleyside. He was briefly in Freddy Got Fingered. He previously played Santa in both Santa’s Little Helper (week 315) and The Search for Santa Paws (week 420).
• Stephen Tobolowsky popped up in Freddy Got Fingered. Other movies he popped up in were View from the Top (week 83) and Atlas Shrugged: Part III (week 490).
• Finishing off the three-timers is Noel Fisher, who was in Freddy Got Fingered, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (week 310), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (week 310).
• Two actors from Say It Isn’t So (week 481) were in Freddy Got Fingered. They were R. Nelson Brown and Connor Widdows.
• Harland Williams was one of many recognizable faces in Freddy Got Fingered. He returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies after first appearing in Surf School (week 42).
• Stephen E. Miller was in Repeaters (week 62) and Freddy Got Fingered.
• Stan Helsing (week 64) and Freddy Got Fingered each featured Darren Moore.
• Did you know that Drew Barrymore was in Freddy Got Fingered? She was! She was also in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (week 70).
• The Buddies movies got a lot of representation in Freddy Got Fingered. Not only was there Eric Keenleyside, but there was Irene Karas Loeper from Air Buddies (week 270), and Cliff Solomon from Snow Buddies (week 270).
• Scott Heindl returned from Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (week 284) for Freddy Got Fingered.
• Rip Torn was in Zoom (week 457) and Freddy Got Fingered.
• I thought I’d finish off with the titular Freddy. He was played by Eddie Kaye Thomas, who was also in a movie called Taboo (week 422).
• Have you seen Freddy Got Fingered? What did you think? Do you think Tom Green’s comedy translates to movies or not? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
• You can also leave comments to suggest what movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m always open to suggestions.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram if you want more of a Sunday “Bad” Movies fix.
• Now let’s talk about next week. We’re getting really close to the ten year anniversary of Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s one more week before that and I left a pretty big one for that post. I’m going to be checking out a movie where Nic Cage screams about bees. I’ll be seeing The Wicker Man! Come back next week for that post. It should be fun. See you then.

Tromeo and Juliet (1996)

High school was a time when teachers would force their students to read “the classics.” It was always some combination of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Harper Lee. You would get one or two of those dystopian novels like 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, or The Chrysalids. There were the odd books that would fit into the curriculum of the country you lived in because you needed to know that country’s literary history. In my Canadian high school, we got some Margaret Laurence because all the best Canadian authors are named Margaret. That literature was meant to build your knowledge. It was meant to encourage you to read more.

There is one name that I’ve been avoiding until this point, and it’s a name that most of us will recognize. One writer stood above all others in high school literature. This same writer has inspired many artists, either through the words he created or the stories of his that they adapted. That writer was playwright William Shakespeare.

See? I told you that you would likely recognize that name. You probably even remember which of his plays you read in high school. For me it was Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear. If there was one of those that I’m pretty sure everyone had to read, it was Romeo and Juliet. And we probably all had to watch that adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that came out in the 1960s and had a boob in it. Sure, maybe that’s not a big deal now when porn is so easily accessible. But when you grew up before the height of internet video streaming, seeing a boob on the tv in English class was a huge deal.

Building on that point, there have been hundreds of Shakespeare adaptations and reimaginations in film. Almost every filmmaker has been inspired by his work in some way, whether they know it or not. Kenneth Branagh made a career out of Shakespeare adaptations with movies like Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and As You Like It. He loves to dive back into the plays of William Shakespeare and present them to the world through his mostly direct adaptations that have his personal directorial touch.

Other filmmakers like to go in a completely different direction with their adaptations. Instead of making a direct representation of Shakespeare’s work, they modernize it. They place it into a different setting. They take the basic concept of a specific play, and make it work in a wholly different context. For example, 10 Things I Hate About You took the idea of The Taming of the Shrew and set it in a modern-day high school scenario. She’s the Man did the same thing for Twelfth Night. As I’ve said many times before, originality rarely comes from stories anymore. It tends to come from how the story is told.

Nothing can prove that point more than, and here I go back to that high school boob moment once again, Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the history of film, there have been adaptations upon adaptations upon adaptations of what might be the most famous William Shakespeare work. It is a love story that people have found a way to adapt into many different contexts. There have been gangs. There have been zombies. There have even been animated gnomes. People write what they know, and almost everyone knows Romeo and Juliet thanks to high school literature classes.

Tromeo and Juliet was an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in the world of Troma flicks. Tromeo Que (Will Keenan) was the son of Monty Que (Earl McKoy), who was in a long feud with Cappy Capulet (Maximillian Shaun). It was a feud so major that people who associated with the Ques hated people who associated with the Capulets. Things would change, however, when Tromeo fell in love with Juliet Capulet (Jane Jensen), Cappy’s daughter and sexual abuse victim. Yeah, there was some incest going on.

If you know Troma, which I somewhat do, you’ll know that they produce schlocky movies. Their films always have gratuitous violence, nudity, and profanity in different mixtures. Tromeo and Juliet was no different. In adapting Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy into the Troma form, all those things were added. People were beheaded. Tromeo and Juliet got naked and bumped uglies. Murray (Valentine Miele) went on a tirade of profane insults at Tyrone (Patrick Connor) when Tyrone was searching for Tromeo. It was a Troma film through and through, and one of the only times I’ve seen Shakespeare tackled in this sort of way.

I’m not talking about modernized versions of the Romeo and Juliet story, like the Baz Luhrmann version with their longswords (I haven’t actually seen that version, the guns are the only thing I know), or the more recent Die in a Gunfight. I’ve never seen a Romeo and Juliet adaptation go so hard into the exploitation qualities. It went so far as to reveal that Tromeo was the long lost brother of Juliet, and then they were fine with it and went on to live as husband and wife with children of their own. Everyone was okay with the incest. And that was after Cappy molested his daughter and attempted to rape her. It was a whole bunch of exploitation insanity in the way that only Troma could do.

Let’s go back, for a second, to Die in a Gunfight, another adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that modernized the material. Instead of going for the exploitation style of the Troma flick, it went more for a direct-to-video crime movie vibe. The Rathcarts and the Gibbons had a blood feud that began in an 1800s duel. Things would start to change in the modern day when Ben Gibbon and Mary Rathcart fell in love.

Die in a Gunfight didn’t stick completely to the Romeo and Juliet story. It took some of the basic elements and ran on its own. There were the two lovers from feuding families. That’s present in almost any adaptation in some way, since that’s the core of the story. There was the rival suitor vying for Mary’s love, much like Count Paris from Shakespeare’s original play. However, the adaptation made a big shift in structure. The five-act story was tossed aside for a standard three-act structure. The climax of the third act in the play was combined with the death scene of the final act to create something different. The tragedy was also removed.

I should mention that about Tromeo and Juliet, as well. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was not present. Tromeo survived to the end of the movie. Juliet survived to the end of the movie. In place of that tragedy was an action-packed climax where the two star-crossed lovers went toe-to-toe with Cappy Capulet because of his mistreatment of Juliet and, really, everyone in Tromaville. I think the movie was set in Tromaville. It was an all-out brawl to finish the movie instead of two teens suiciding for love. Lloyd Kaufman is just a guy looking for cheap thrills instead of tears, I guess.

Another re-interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet story came in the form of West Side Story. I haven’t seen the Spielberg version of the movie from last year, but I did see the 1961 film adaptation some years ago. There were two gangs in New York, the Jets and the Sharks, that were feuding with each other. There was a romance between someone associated with the Jets and someone associated with the Sharks. It would possibly bridge the gap between the feuding gangs.

West Side Story brought two elements to the table that set it apart from other Romeo and Juliet adaptations. First off, it was a musical. The movie was adapted from a stage musical that was framed by Romeo and Juliet. The songs from that stage musical made the trip to the big screen. Second, there was an underlying story about race relations in New York City. The Jets were composed of white people while the Sharks were composed of Puerto Ricans. The story was somewhat hampered by the use of makeup to have some white people playing Latin roles. It was still a somewhat forward-looking movie, which was something.

Tromeo and Juliet didn’t attempt anything more than schlock and shock. It wasn’t a commentary on anything in the United States. It didn’t tackle race relations like West Side Story. It was pure exploitation instead, touching upon incest and the porn industry as plot points. Tromeo was even originally envisioned as being a crack dealer. There was no nuance to the storytelling. It was simply meant to get a rise out of people, whether that be entertainment or anger. But then the question is, what else would you expect from Troma? They made Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Although that movie was filled with satire of the fast-food industry, it was also filled with nudity, violence, and swearing. Basically, all the things Lloyd Kaufman likes in his movies.

One other Romeo and Juliet re-imagining I want to discuss is a little movie called Warm Bodies. This one removed the warring families or warring gangs aspect and replaced it with the zombie apocalypse. One side of the conflict was humans. The other side was the shambling corpses that we all have come to know and fear. One human and one zombie found a connection that crossed the boundaries of their conflict and turned into love. It also gave the zombies back their humanity, causing the conflict to come to a peaceful resolution.

Warm Bodies was a true modern re-imagining of the Romeo and Juliet story. It took the elements of forbidden romance and feuding families and placed them into a zombie apocalypse. Monsters were popular at that time with zombies, vampires, and werewolves having a major resurgence in the cultural conscience. The other way that it modernized the story was to turn it into a young adult tale. The 2000s and 2010s were filled with young adult stories set in magical worlds, dystopias, and such settings. Warm Bodies fit right in alongside Harry Potter, Twilight, Percy Jackson, and The Hunger Games. Those two things together made the classic romantic tragedy into a modern flick.

Tromeo and Juliet didn’t quite reimagine Romeo and Juliet in that way. That was partially due to how the script was written. The original intention was to tell the story in iambic pentameter. That would make it feel much like any of Shakespeare’s plays, which were written in the same form. The other issue was the schlock of Troma’s films. Lloyd Kaufman was living in the grindhouse, exploitation world of the 60s and 70s, only with updated violence and nudity. Though that was a modern update of Shakespeare, it still felt like the past because of the tone.

There have been various adaptations of Shakespeare plays over the years that have put a modern spin on what people consider to be classic material. Romeo and Juliet happens to be one of the most popular for filmmakers to pull from. They pull from the romance and pull from the tragedy. Or they don’t pull from the tragedy, since audiences tend to prefer happy endings. They keep the forbidden romance part and the feuding sides part of the story. It’s just with a twist. Tromeo and Juliet, Die in a Gunfight, West Side Story, and Warm Bodies all did it. And they all came up with different ways to do it.

If it weren’t for reading those four Shakespeare plays in high school, I might not notice the intricacies in the various adaptations of them. I’ve seen people do Macbeth in a few ways. I’ve seen a modern interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. I even saw a television movie version of King Lear that was a western. Obviously, I’ve seen a bunch of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, too. They aren’t the only Shakespeare adaptations, either. Knowing those four through reading them was only the beginning. I’ve learned about other plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and any of the plays Shakespeare made about kings. I’ve seen adaptations of those, some modernized, some not so much. All of them standing on their own in some way. All beginning with being forced to read four plays in high school.

I’m sure most of us shared that experience. We went high school. A major part of the literature curriculum was to spend a month or so going through a Shakespeare play. Maybe you would have to do a presentation of a scene from one of them. Maybe you had to write a soliloquy in the style of Shakespeare. Or you just read them aloud as a class. Either way, we all know Shakespeare and at least some of his work. We’ve probably seen some of it, too.  That’s just life, you know?

Let’s get a few notes in here:

• Tromeo and Juliet was directed by Lloyd Kaufman. He was the director of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), all the Toxic Avenger movies (week 110), and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (week 259). He also appeared in Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned (week 45), Big Ass Spider! (week 61), Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), The Toxic Avenger Part II (week 110), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), Orgazmo (week 363), and Sharknado: The 4^th Awakens (week 510). That makes him a seven-time director and eight-time performer.
• Tromeo and Juliet featured Joe Fleishaker, marking his sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance after Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), The Toxic Avenger Part II (week 110), The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (week 110), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (week 259).
• Prolific porn actor Ron Jeremy popped up in Tromeo and Juliet. He was in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), 54 (week 266), and Orgazmo (week 363).
• Charlotte Kaufman was in Tromeo and Juliet, after appearing in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), The Toxic Avenger Part II (week 110), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (week 259).
• Debbie Rochon made her fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Tromeo and Juliet. She was also in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), and Battledogs (week 346).
• Lisbeth Kaufman was another returning performer in Tromeo and Juliet. She had previously appeared in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), The Toxic Avenger Part II (week 110), and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (week 259).
• Tromeo and Juliet was the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Purple Pam Shelby, who had already shown up in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84) and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110).
• Tiffany Shepis appeared in Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), Sharknado 2: The Second One (week 190), and Tromeo and Juliet.
• Earl McKoy was in The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (week 110) and Tromeo and Juliet.
• Four actors from Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110) reappeared in Tromeo and Juliet. They were Joseph Anthony, James Gunn, Will Keenan, and Lemmy.
• Finally, Tromeo and Juliet featured Stephen Blackehart, who was in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (week 300).
• Have you seen Tromeo and Juliet? What did you think of it? What other modern-ish updates of Shakespeare do you enjoy? I didn’t mention Strange Brew, but I like that retelling of Hamlet. Anyway, leave your thoughts and comments in the comment section, or get a hold of me on Twitter.
• You can also leave any suggestions for movies I should check out in the comments or on Twitter. I’m open to all suggestions, and like to include them in the schedule.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for some more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• The next post in terms of schedule will be Vampire’s Kiss. You know, the crazy Nicolas Cage movie. Okay, that describes a lot of Nicolas Cage movies. Anyway, that’s up next. But these posts are both going up late, so you’ll probably get another new post before then. I’ll see you for that. Or the Vampire’s Kiss one.