Sunday, April 7, 2024

Puppet Master: Axis of Evil (2010), Puppet Master X: Axis Rising (2012), and Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017)


Many movies have clear cut heroes and villains. An action movie tends to have that action star who can survive almost any situation to come out on top over a bad guy with an evil plot. Science fiction movies might have humans of Earth going up against some sort of extra-terrestrial species trying to take over our planet. Horror movies could have ghosts, ghouls, monsters, or animals attacking vulnerable people. Or, in the case of slasher movies, any sort of evil person, creature, or thing.

The Puppet Master franchise is a great example of heroes versus villains. The first movie, which I covered a few years ago, featured a group of psychics staying in a hotel where evil puppets roamed and murdered. It was the psychics against the puppets as they tried to survive the miniature mayhem. That would continue into the second film (which I haven’t covered), which had some parapsychology students venturing into the hotel and experiencing the same sort of marionette murders. The third film in the franchise, a prequel to the first two flicks, flipped the script.


Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge set the stage for later entries in the Puppet Master franchise. It made one major change to the action. The puppets were no longer the villains of the story. They were the heroes. Well, maybe they were anti-heroes. They did heroic things in less-than-heroic ways. There was one way they were able to pull that off, which was to choose a villain worse than what audiences had seen out of the puppets in the first two Puppet Master entries. The villains of the third movie were Nazis.

The next few movies after the prequel would sidestep the Nazis and go with other villains. There were Egyptian gods, an evil puppeteer/mad scientist guy, and even a toy company. However, Nazis wouldn’t stay out of the franchise forever. Following a less-than-successful crossover with the Demonic Toys franchise, Full Moon Features brought the Nazis back into the storyline. There was another prequel, set immediately after the opening scene of the first Puppet Master movie, that featured an America against Germany in Los Angeles conflict. It would be followed by two other movies, which are called the Axis Trilogy of Puppet Master movies. Three movies, one after the other, that all had a continuing storyline about that World War II on home soil conflict.


Puppet Master: Axis of Evil kicked off the trilogy in 2010, bringing David DeCoteau back to the franchise. That was a good thing. He made two of the better movies in the franchise up to that point and turned in another good, for a Puppet Master movie, installment. Danny Coogan (Levi Fiehler) worked with his uncle as a woodworker since he wasn’t fit to join the war effort. His uncle owned the Bodega Bay Inn. Danny, who was friends with hotel guest André Toulon, inherited Toulon’s puppets following Toulon’s death at the hands of Nazis who wanted his formula for reanimation. This inheritance led Danny into a fight against the Nazis that killed Toulon as they planned to destroy a bomb factory that Danny’s girlfriend, Beth (Jenna Gallaher) worked at.

Nazis are villains with a built-in history. Most people recognize Nazis as one of the world’s worst ever villains. They committed massive genocide while destroying large portions of Europe and killing millions of people, attempting to seize power and land. There haven’t been many groups who have had such a negative impact on the world, both in the time where they were at their height, and the years that followed. Nazis still exist, though not in the same form as the headed-by-Hitler, German political party.

With that history in mind, it was easy to get on board with the puppets as heroes in the Puppet Master franchise. That might be why it was so tempting to return to a World War II era setting for Puppet Master: Axis of Evil. The puppets were now (in order of release, not in order of story setting) working with the Americans as heroes to stop the Nazis. The puppets were the good guys. The puppets were patriots, even if they were the creation of a French puppeteer who performed in Germany.


In terms of horror, it might be scarier for the puppets to commit their violent murders on the protagonists that you hoped would survive. However, it’s difficult to make puppets scary. Even at its best of puppets-as-villains storytelling, the Puppet Master movies weren’t all that scary. The shift to make the puppets heroes signalled that Charles Band and his team realized that fact. They knew it would be better to go with satisfying murders, rather than scary ones. Killing Nazis is very satisfying.

Puppet Master: Axis of Evil sure revelled in that satisfaction. It played into American patriotism by having the puppets work with an American to defeat some Nazis on American soil. It played into the satisfaction by setting up some truly threatening villains. The Nazis killed André Toulon and were also behind the death of Danny’s family. It was not only Danny fighting for America in a patriotic way. That was part of it, for sure. But it was also personal. The Nazis attacked the people he knew. The puppets helped him get revenge, all while saving America.


Puppet Master X: Axis Rising didn’t keep the personal aspect to the story. The closest to a personal vendetta was that one of the puppets, Tunneller, had been kidnapped by the Nazis. Danny (Kip Canyon) wanted to get him back. The plan of the Nazis wasn’t even as good or realistic. The Nazis wanted Tunneller’s life force to bring people back from the dead and raise a zombie army. The technology wasn’t ready, though. A kidnapped doctor was working on it, being forced to do the Nazi science work because the Nazis had his daughter. I guess that was personal, but he was also a villain, so that was an odd choice. That’s what you get when Charles Band directs.

This was the Axis Trilogy going full B-movie. Sure, puppets attacking people was always going to be a B-movie story. There’s no way around that. But at least the story in the previous entry, outside of living puppets, had been grounded. It was a battle between a good guy who wanted to be part of the war effort and bad guys who wanted to blow things up on American soil. The sequel was about Nazi zombies. Which one sounds more like the evil plan of a B-movie villain? Yeah, it’s the Nazi zombies.

That didn’t really matter. Sure, the quality of the story took a downgrade with Charles Band taking the directorial helm and choosing to go a little more out there with the Nazi plot. But the villains were still Nazis. They were still the worst of the worst. It was still extremely satisfying to see them get their puppet comeuppance. Or their zombie comeuppance, in one case.

It is more satisfying to see a movie where puppets continuously stalk, attack, and murder Nazis than it would be to see puppets working for the Nazis continuously stalk, attack, and murder the protagonists. It’s more fun to watch bad people get the punishment they deserve, from a movie standpoint. Especially a bad movie standpoint. I’m sure someone out there could make a great film about Nazis bringing puppets to life to murder others, and it would be scary and captivating. Charles Band doesn’t have that in him. I think he knows that. I think that’s why so much of his career has been devoted to making fun, dumb movies rather than movies with real substance. There may be a little bit of substance to take out of them, but they’re mostly just there to have a good time.


That said, Charles Band added a little bit of substance in the third, and final, part of the Axis Trilogy, Puppet Master: Axis Termination. I should quickly note that there was technically a fourth entry, a spin-off that followed the events of Puppet Master: Axis Termination, called Blade: The Iron Cross. However, it only featured one puppet and one human character from Puppet Master: Axis Termination. The main part of this 1940s storyline was the three movies.

Puppet Master: Axis Termination opened with the two main characters of the previous two movies being murdered by a spy while trying to hand the puppets over to the US government. The spy was then murdered, and the government put together a psychic team to help the puppets stop a Nazi puppet master and her psychic sidekick. It was puppets versus puppets and master versus master.

When I say that Puppet Master: Axis Termination had a little more substance than Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, it wasn’t much. With the two conflicts, puppet conflict and human conflict, it touched a little upon the nature versus nurture debate that so often goes on in the world. Were the bad puppets only bad because of their master? Could they be good with a good master? We had already seen that was the case throughout the franchise. André Toulon himself had flipped from good guy to bad guy, and with him, the puppets had also changed allegiances. The first two films in the franchise, which took place some forty years after the Nazi movies, saw the puppets as villains because their masters (Toulon included in Puppet Master II) had been bad people. Every other movie had seen them as heroes because their masters had been heroic. Actions speak louder than words. The franchise had already given the actions. Now it was giving the words for the people who hadn’t been paying attention.


There was a full circle feel to Puppet Master: Axis Termination. The nature versus nurture story thread was brought to the forefront, a story thread that had been unspoken but present through the rest of the franchise. The team of psychics was back for the first time since the original movie. Dr. Ivan Ivanov (George Appleby) was a talented puppet master who could empathize with the puppets. His daughter, Elisa (Tania Fox) saw things in her dreams that could become reality. Georgina Vale (Alynxia America) performed voodoo. The big difference was that this team of psychics knew what they were up against, where the psychics of the original thought they were in an empty hotel.

Another aspect that felt full circle was the Nazi villains. Sure, the main villain of the original Puppet Master wasn’t a Nazi. But the first movie opened with André Toulon being shot in his hotel room. He was shot by Nazis. The opening of Puppet Master: Axis of Evil continued the story of those Nazis through to their deaths. However, those two Nazis weren’t the only part of their American branch. The villains of Puppet Master X: Axis Rising and Puppet Master: Axis Termination were also part of that Nazi sect. It was still the same Nazi crew being defeated by having another plain foiled.

Finally, there was the ending. Yeah, I’m about to spoil the first and eleventh Puppet Master movies. Puppet Master ended with the puppets turning on their master because he treated them poorly. They broke free of his mastery and brutally murdered him in an elevator. Puppet Master: Axis Termination saw the Nazi puppets turn on their master and brutally kill her because they saw how their master didn’t truly care about them. They were treated poorly. It was another villain coming to the same, violent end. Only, not in an elevator this time. The final Axis Trilogy installment brought the franchise full circle before the reboot that came a year later.

This full circle storytelling couldn’t have been done without the transition of the puppets from villains to heroes. Without that transition, there could be no nature versus nurture storyline. The puppets would simply be killing machines, killing anything and everything in their way. Without the transition, the Nazis wouldn’t be the villains of the trilogy, making the trilogy not happen at all. Unless the puppets got in with the Nazis, I guess. The ending could have still happened. It happened in both movies where the puppets were the villains. It wouldn’t have been as satisfying, though.


The entire Puppet Master franchise was interesting for various reasons. Every movie, following the second, seemed to try something new. The prequel setting of the third. The Egyptian gods of the fourth and fifth. The psychological horror of the sixth. The even earlier prequel. The crossover. The clip movie. The reboot. The spin-offs. Each movie felt like its own thing. The quality of those attempts is up for debate. Some of the more interesting (outside of the psychological one, which might be my favourite Puppet Master movie) have been the three prequel-sequels that make up the Axis Trilogy.

When Charles Band and David DeCoteau decided to make the puppets heroes and bring Nazis in as villains for the third Puppet Master movie, they probably didn’t know it was going to lead to a trilogy of Nazi movies in the 2010s. Why would they? They were just trying to extend a franchise beyond where it probably should have stopped. Yet, here we are.

Heroes and villains tend to be clear cut in movies and movie franchises. Here’s a hero. Here’s the villain they’re against. Or protagonist and antagonist, if you want to look at it that way. Not too many franchises, outside of the Fast and Furious franchise, turn the villains into the hero. More likely, they turn a hero into a villain because of love, grief, loss, or power. Puppet Master took that hero and villain dynamic and flipped it by making the villain the hero and finding a worse villain for them to fight against. The franchise went against the typical conventions, growing into something most than humans trying not to die at the hands of puppets. The dynamic was changed.


Here at Sunday “Bad” Movie, I like to give some notes about the cast and crew of what I just watched:

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Sunday, February 11, 2024

LOL (2012)


It has been fifteen years since I was in high school. That’s nearly half my life ago, though it doesn’t feel like it. Sure, I’ve got the basic aches and pains of getting older. I have a full-time job that pays me to be there, rather than school I had to pay for. Things are much different than when I was a teenager. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that teenagers treat every inconvenience, whether major or minor, as the most catastrophic disaster to ever happen. Many adults often do that, as well, but it’s more a stereotypical teenager thing.

One movie that was built around that teenage stereotype was LOL. The 2012 teenage sort-of-romance movie was directed by Lisa Azuelos and was a remake of her 2008 French movie LOL (Laughing Out Loud). Lola (Miley Cyrus) returned to school after summer break to find that her boyfriend Chad (George Finn) cheated on her with Ashley (Ashley Greene). She broke it off with him and began pursuing Kyle (Douglas Booth) after they realized they had feelings for each other. Lola’s mom, Anne (Demi Moore), wasn’t doing any better with her love life. She was sleeping with her ex-husband, Allen (Thomas Jane), while falling for a police officer, James (Jay Hernandez). One other blossoming relationship was between Emily (Ashley Hinshaw), Lola’s best friend, and Wen (Adam Sevani), the guy that any of the teenage girls would be embarrassed to be seen with. It was a lot of romance that might not have been romance and might have just been horniness.


There wasn’t much of a story arc to LOL. It was a movie built around the romantic lives of teenagers without leading to anything. The audience was brought into the teenage drama, watched everyone overreact to everything, and was taken back out without any sort of satisfaction about what unfolded. It felt like watching a teenager’s life unfold, rather than watching a compelling cinematic story.

LOL felt like it was written about teenagers by teenagers. Those stereotypical young whipper-snappers that the older generations, mine included now, complain about. Their hormones ran rampant. Their stances on anything never truly lasted. They rebelled for the simple sake of always putting their own desires over everyone else’s. They hadn’t yet learned to adult. They hadn’t matured beyond their selfish, teenage selves.


All those traits could be seen in Lola. She was an impulsive person, not a girl, not yet a woman. Her young romance with Chad caused her to graffiti the girls’ washroom at school. She immediately scratched over that when she found out Chad cheated on her. It was understandable, but still impulsive. Both sides of the graffiti were impulsive. As was her choice to essentially roofie her grandmother so she could throw a party while her mom was out of the apartment. Or there was the part where she made out with a childhood friend to make Kyle jealous after a misunderstanding. One that I will now get into.

The most apparent impulsive, self-centered part of the character, however, involved a little trip to the school washroom that didn’t involve graffiti. Lola was looking for Kyle and was told he might be in the washroom. She walked in and heard two people having sex. She immediately thought one of the two was Kyle, and she assumed the other was Ashley for three reasons. One, Ashley had been who Chad cheated on her with. Two, there was a bag that looked like Ashley’s. Three, she asked Ashley if she had been in the washroom and Ashley said yes. All signs pointed to Ashley. But it wasn’t Ashley. It was Emily who owned the bag in that stall.

Emily was embarrassed to be caught in the stall because she was having sex with Wen, and didn’t tell Lola. Lola broke up with Kyle, ten seconds after leaving the washroom, even though he didn’t even come from the washroom, because Ashley said she was in there. Kyle’s abusive father stole his phone, which Lola didn’t know. She assumed he was ghosting her. This infuriated her more.

Everyone soon went on a school trip to Paris, which was actually not quite Paris but some farmland outside the city, and Emily fessed up to being the one in the washroom. Lola immediately got mad. Then Emily said she was embarrassed because it was Wen, and the two immediately made up. It was a whiplash of emotions. Lola then hooked up with Kyle as quickly as she could in some not-quite-Paris host’s guest bedroom. That was a lot of teenage impulse and horniness within two scenes.


The rest of the movie was Anne finding Lola’s diary and seeing a condom wrapper in it, getting in a fight with Lola, realizing she liked sex too, and being okay with Lola having sex. It was no less whiplash than the Paris stuff. By the end of the movie, I could only throw my hands up in the air in an exaggerated shrug as the credits rolled. What was the point? Nothing really happened. Nothing of importance.

Before getting into the plot and how insufferable of an impulsive character Lola was, I mentioned that there wasn’t really an arc to the story of LOL. When I say that, I don’t mean the story. There was a point a and a point b and the movie went from a to b. Lola was in love then wasn’t then was and had sex. Anne was in an on-and-off relationship of meaningless sex, then found meaning in a relationship with a police officer (I didn’t really dive into that part of the movie all that much). There wasn’t really a character arc for Lola, the main character and narrator. She didn’t grow as a character. She just did things.


If I had to give a quick, succinct description of LOL, it would be that it was a movie told through the lens of a teenage girl’s diary. I don’t even know where to start on explaining what that means. I’ve never read a teenage girl’s diary. I’ve never seen a teenage girl’s diary in the wild and, if I had, it would be a massive invasion of privacy to read through it. I’m not going to do that. This diary just happened to belong to one of the most selfish, stereotypical teenagers who thought their relationship problems were the most important thing in the world.

LOL wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It was competently filmed, directed, and edited. The only real faults were the characters and the overall writing. There should be some growth to a main character, something they learn, something that changes them. That wasn’t apparent while watching the movie. Other movies that have tackled the idea of teenage girls wanting to be sexually active have done so in a way where it (not necessarily the act, but the pursuit of it or the aftermath) had consequences. There weren’t any consequences in this one. The relationship drama was presented as super important, but had no real substance. I guess that’s like the real teenage stereotype.

I don’t know what the life of a teenager is like in 2024. Again, it’s been fifteen years since I was in high school. That’s the entire lifetime of some of the kids going through that right now. I do think that teenagers probably still act kind of like the ones in this movie, though maybe not in the same sort of Chicago big-city way if they’re not in Chicago. I’m not one hundred percent sure, though. What I do know is that it doesn’t make for a very entertaining movie.


It’s time to finish this post off with some notes:

  • LOL was the third Sunday “Bad” Movie to feature Fisher Stevens. He was previously in Movie 43 and Super Mario Bros.
  • The other three-timer this week was Thomas Jane, who has previously been in Money Plane and Breach.
  • Four actors from Alex Cross were in LOL. They were Elias Bahri, Ron Causey, Pennie-Marie Hawkins, and Eric Tuchelske.
  • Marlo Thomas was in both LOL and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.
  • Loretta Higgins returned from Crossover to appear in LOL.
  • LOL was the second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Jay Hernandez. He was also in Torque.
  • Gina Gershon had a small role in LOL after having a major role in Showgirls.
  • You might have noticed that Demi Moore made a second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance this week, after already being in Nothing But Trouble.
  • Sex and the City 2 featured Miley Cyrus, the star of LOL.
  • Nora Dunn made a second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in LOL. She was previously seen in Southland Tales.
  • Finally, Ashley Greene appeared in both LOL and Yoga Hosers.
  • Have you seen LOL? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments, or find me on BlueSky or Threads.
  • If you have an idea for something I should watch for Sunday “Bad” Movies, hit me up in the comments or on social media. I’m always open to suggestions.
  • Alright. Up next will be a franchise post, since it will be official post 540. I’m going to take a quick look at three movies in the Puppet Master franchise that form a sort of trilogy. Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, Puppet Master: Axis Rising, and Puppet Master: Axis Termination. I may touch on a few of the others, since I’ve seen them all in the past year or so. But the post will be for those three, specifically. I’ll see you when I get that one up and out.
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Monday, December 25, 2023

A Karate Christmas Miracle (2019)


From the 1960s through the 1980s, true crime was a big thing. That was a result of heightened awareness to serial killers. That was the era when television had established itself in households. The first inklings of criminal profiling and 24-hour news coverage snuck into culture. These three things combined put serial killers on people’s minds more often than they had been when people were a little more cut off from the world and knowledge. At least, that’s how I’ve been taught. This was all before I was born. Movies and television shows have certainly made it feel this way.

Things seemed to shift in the mid-1980s. It may have been due to the war on drugs and the AIDS crisis. Numerous serial killers preyed on addicts, sex workers, and gay people, many of whom were targets of these two parts of the 1980s. Since these three groups of people were villainized, the vast majority of middle Americans didn’t care as much when they were the victims of serial killings. Murderers who targeted those communities could fly below the radar, relatively speaking, while serial killers who targeted straight white people or children would garner attention. There weren’t a lot of serial killers targeting those more attention-getting communities. With the fading of serial killer attention came the fading of true crime from the popular media. For the most part.

True crime bubbled beneath the surface for a few decades. It was always there. Jeffrey Dahmer was captured in 1991, the O.J. Simpson trial happened in 1994. Unsolved Mysteries, Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and Forensic Files aired. Police procedurals became CBS’s thing. Se7en and Zodiac were around, too. None of this stuff had the same cachet as when the news seemingly always covered new murders and serial killers in those earlier decades.

That all changed when Serial came out. The first episode hit podcasting services in October 2014, and would change the podcast world. People who didn’t listen to podcasts before were listening to podcasts at that point. They wanted to know anything they could about Adnan Syed and his trial. In the wake of the podcast’s popularity, a bunch of other true crime podcasts started popping up. Documentaries, both feature and series, became popular thanks to true crime subject matter. Some of the shows and movies that had been released in that under-the-surface time rose to prominence. True crime was back, and it was as strong as it had been so many years before.


Now, you’re probably wondering why I just wrote nearly 500 words about true crime to start a post about a movie called A Karate Christmas Miracle. That would be a good question and I’m kind of wondering that myself. I do have an answer, though. It was a movie that played out kind of like a true crime podcast. A fictional true crime podcast. It was based around a shooting at a theater, inspired by what happened in Aurora, Colorado.

Abby Genesis (Mila Milosevic) lost her husband, Bob (Ken Del Vecchio), in a theater shooting on Christmas Eve. He didn’t die. He simply disappeared after the shooting and his family hadn’t heard from him since. A year later, Abby found her son, Jesse (Mario Del Vecchio), trying to do a series of tasks over the twelve days of Christmas to bring Bob back. It didn’t make any sense to her. She needed some closure to get her son some closure. Abby enlisted the help of a criminal law professor and psychic, Elizabeth (Julie McCullough), to find any clues about what happened to her husband.


As you can see, A Karate Christmas Miracle was about an investigation of a man’s disappearance following a theater shooting. That may not be true crime in the most straight-forward sense, since it was fictional. And it didn’t relay the facts about the shooting all that much. The details were vague. They didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Mind you, the movie didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so that was par for the course. There was that investigative angle, however. It was an angle shared by true crime podcasts like Serial and shows like Making a Murderer. It was looking for some deeper truth that may not have been uncovered in the immediate aftermath of the crime.

The investigators were Abby and Elizabeth. There wasn’t much to Abby’s character. Elizabeth, on the other hand, got a whole bunch to do. She was the more heightened personality of the two. Elizabeth was introduced during a lecture where she questioned her students on what Santa would be charged with if he smashed a bottle over a guy’s head while defending Rudolph in a bar fight. It was a lecture that highlighted Elizabeth’s personality, before throwing her head-on into the story with Abby. Jesse interrupted the lecture and Elizabeth immediately knew his name, piquing Abby’s interest. She had seen Elizabeth long before for a psychic reading, and Elizabeth still remembered details. Maybe she would know what happened to Bob.

Elizabeth’s part of the investigation was her psychic visions. She had vague hallucinations of what happened before, during, and after the shooting. She saw James Whitmore (Eric Roberts) on the theater screen, spewing off some sort of manifesto. Sam (Martin Kove), the owner of the theater, also appeared on the screen. He talked directly to his daughter, Aurora (Lacy Marie Meyer), the only known survivor of the shooting. She saw a clown with a gun walking around. She saw Bob watching over Aurora while she lay in a hospital bed. None of it answered anything. It left more questions. Kind of like a psychic reading, I guess.


All the while, Jesse was off in his own world trying to finish his list of tasks before Christmas came. He named a bunch of presidents and capitals of states. Boring stuff like that. Capping off the tasks was the most exciting thing. He had to earn his black belt. The little dude had to go through so many belts to get there, and he pulled it off in less than twelve days. That was a crazy amount of work.

That didn’t have much to do with the “true crime” storytelling of it all. That side of the story was contained in the visions that Elizabeth had, and the places she and Abby checked out after the visions. Mostly the front yard of a church Elizabeth saw Bob at in a vision. They never went to the theater or found Aurora. Nah nah. The closest anyone came to that was Jesse having a dream where he talked to Sam and was told to be quiet until he got his black belt. The investigation wasn’t poorly done.

The last thing that should be talked about with A Karate Christmas Miracle in regards to the true crime investigation story is the ending. Spoilers ahead. The ending made no sense. Jesse earned his black belt. As soon as it was presented to him, in his own house, Bob walked in the back door. Bob put the belt on Jesse, everyone hugged, and the movie ended. How did Bob get there? No idea. Where was he for a full year? No idea. Who was the shooter in the theater? Possibly James Whitmore, but I have no idea. What was his relation to Aurora? No idea. Why did he abandon his family? No idea. After all the sleuthing and bonding by Abby and Elizabeth, there were no answers. Bob was just back and that was that. What?


I started this whole thing by comparing A Karate Christmas Miracle to a true crime podcast, show, or movie. In terms of what was happening, that felt like a right comparison. There was a tragic event that people investigated in the aftermath. The problem was that there were no conclusions. Not that all true crime stories tie up all the loose ends. None of the loose ends were tied up, though. Everything was left hanging. The shooting, Bob’s whereabouts, why Jesse had his dreams, and why his list of tasks worked to bring Bob back. Everything was resolved with Bob’s return, but none of the answers that anyone was looking for were given. That was where my comparison fell apart. Well, that and the part where it wasn’t a true story. It was clearly referencing one, however.

Going into A Karate Christmas Miracle, I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe it would be better to say I expected something a little more uplifting than what it was. I expected a kid doing karate for some silly Christmas reason. I wasn’t expecting a theater shooting and people who needed psychiatric help in the aftermath. It was much darker than the name made me think. It was nothing like what I expected.

A Karate Christmas Miracle was a movie made in the wake of true crime popularity rising and the number of mass shootings increasing. It brought elements from each of those into a family Christmas movie. It tried to find some success by relating to things people were invested in, whether for good or bad, and didn’t do a particularly good job of it. The movie could easily be one of the forgotten pieces of true crime media produced in the post-Serial boom.

That’s a boom that has kept on going. True crime is still as popular as ever. Things like Serial and Making a Murderer have fallen by the wayside. Other projects have come and gone, as well. Yet there’s always something new in that genre to whet people’s appetites. It doesn’t seem like it’ll be going away any time soon, and I’m interested to see what other ways people will find to blend it into projects you might not see coming.


Here are a few quick notes to tie everything together:

  • You may have seen me mention Eric Roberts was in A Karate Christmas Miracle. That’s his seventh appearance in Sunday “Bad” Movies. His other appearances were in A Talking Cat!?!, Chicks Dig Gay Guys, The Human Centipede III, DOA: Dead or Alive, Miss Castaway and the Island Girls, and Amityville Death House.
  • Martin Kove also returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in A Karate Christmas Miracle. He previously popped up in 2 Lava 2 Lantula and I’m in Love with a Church Girl.
  • The final returning actor was Julie McCullough, who was in Sharknado before A Karate Christmas Miracle.
  • Have you seen A Karate Christmas Miracle? What did you think? Let me know in the comments, on Threads, or on BlueSky. Because I’m in those spots now.
  • If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. I’m up for suggestions. Comment or find me on one of those social medias.
  • I don’t know what’s next for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I was going to go with Where is Winky's Horse, but that's a Christmas movie, so I'll save it for next year. Something will pop up. I'm sure. I'll see you soon with another post.
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Monday, November 20, 2023

Ringmaster (1998)


Think back to when you were younger. You were sick and from school. All the usual stuff that you would watch on TV was not on. The morning television geared towards children getting ready for school, that was over. But after school programming hadn’t started yet because school was still in. You flipped through the channels for anything to watch. You got The Price is Right. That was always on. Bob Barker told people to spay and neuter their pets, while the contestants spun a giant wheel, hoping to get 100. You flicked the channel again and got soap operas. All My Children, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital… all this boring drama that you didn’t really want to see. Flipped the channel again. News. Talking heads telling your parents what new thing was going to terrorize their children. One more flick. Now this was what you want to see.

One of three shows was now on your television. You got Maury Povich. He was telling people whether or not the child was, in fact, theirs. You got Montel basically doing the same thing. And what’s this? You had Jerry Springer standing in front of a line of chairs, while people sat in the chairs and yelled back-and-forth. One of them got up. They threw haymakers at the rest of them. Steve Wilkos came out wearing his security shirt. He pulled them off each other. He kind of tossed one away without actually letting go and tossing them. Chairs were flying. Profanities were being shouted and bleeped out. You were having a great time on your day off.


The Jerry Springer Show was a staple of daytime television for twenty-seven years. Every day there would be different people sharing their problems. They aired out their problems by fighting over their problems. Most of these people would be considered lower class. That was the perception that the show gave off. And, sometimes, that was a completely accurate perception. It was what most people would call tabloid entertainment, without the celebrities.

The popularity of the Jerry Springer show wasn’t just based on children home sick from school. Obviously, it was geared towards adults with the material that was featured. It wasn’t made for kids. But you can’t deny the attraction that kids would have to a show of this nature. They were probably not allowed to watch it, but when they were home sick from school, flipping through the channels, they could sneak a good two, three, five, maybe ten minutes before their parents from noticed what was on the TV. However, it was the adult audience that helped drive the show’s popularity. They drove it so much that Jerry Springer became a household name even to the people that didn’t watch The Jerry Springer Show. His popularity was undeniable.

Some of this popularity probably came from the political career Jerry Springer had before his show. He was a city council member and, at one time, mayor of Cincinnati. The time he spent with politics made him a known figure. He transitioned that into news. Eventually, he started The Jerry Springer Show, which began as a topical news interview and commentary show. The ratings were kind of low on that version and it wasn’t until he got into more tabloid-style topics that the ratings begin to skyrocket. Eventually the popularity of the show would lead to a spinoff, The Steve Wilkos Show, featuring the aforementioned security guard as the host.


I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about what happened during what may have been the height of Jerry Springer’s popularity. If something becomes popular, Hollywood studios will want to get their hands on it. They’ll want a piece of that pie. I bet you can see where this is going, not only from what I’m writing, but from the fact that this is a blog about movies. Movies that don’t have a great reputation. Movies that are kind of unknown because they don’t necessarily have all the good qualities that people associate with good movies. Hollywood decided to take Jerry Springer and his show and create a movie based on them, but not associated with them.

Ringmaster came out in 1998. Jerry Springer played a TV host named Jerry Farrelly. He wasn’t the main character of the movie, but his show, Jerry, was the story. Connie (Molly Hagan) and Angel (Jaime Pressly) were a mother and daughter living in a trailer park with Connie’s husband, Rusty (Michael Dudikoff). It didn’t take long for Connie to discover that Angel and Rusty were sleeping with each other. As revenge, Connie slept with the Angel’s fiancé, Willie (Ashley Holbrook), called the bookers for the show, and got a spot on an episode being shot in Los Angeles. Also appearing on that same episode was Starletta (Wendy Raquel Robinson), who caught her boyfriend, Demond (Michael Jai White), sleeping with her friends. All this would be jammed together in a weird family drama, comedy, sex romp sort of thing. And that’s the story.


It wasn’t necessarily the popularity of Jerry Springer, himself, that inspired this movie to be made. It was the popularity of The Jerry Springer Show, translated to Jerry in the movie. The movie was about the people on the show, and what their lives were like outside of the show. On The Jerry Springer Show, you only had a little snippet. You got one side versus the other and a fight. Probably. That was the stereotypical thing that happened. The audience didn’t really know what was happening in their lives beyond that. They only knew what the guests were saying. And they didn’t really care what the guests were saying because it was more about the action that was about to explode.

Ringmaster gave that background. It took what you knew was going to happen on the show and built it that way. It presented why the people were fighting. It showed everything that happened before the confrontation, during the conversation, and after the confrontation. I saw why Connie wanted to share her families, dirty laundry on national television. Why was she so angry with her daughter? You got to see the daughter interacting with the husband prior to their appearance on the show. I mean, the husband didn’t even show up on Jerry. He knew it would make him look bad and left before the taping. See, if you watched The Jerry Springer Show, you would only hear about him leaving. You wouldn’t see why, you wouldn’t see how, and you wouldn’t see what led to it. But in Ringmaster you got to see all of that.

Do you know why the movie was built like this? It was to tell the story of the people. Or that was what the movie wanted you to think. The Jerry Springer Show, or Jerry, only gave a glimpse into the lives of these people. As an audience, you probably looked down on them because you only got this tabloid story about one person cheating on another person and then punching said person, or other person, in front of a live audience. These people had more going on in their lives. The grievances they aired out on screen, as if they were in the midst of a Festivus celebration, were real issues. They were issues that people went through every day. As Jerry Fowler said, paraphrased from the climax of Ringmaster, audiences love when rich people talk about the issues portrayed on his show, but look down upon the poor people when they share the same exact problems. Why do people look down upon the poor but look up to the rich when they’re dealing with the same stuff? That seemed to be the message of the movie. The execution was just not that great.

I commend them for trying to show more of the lives of people that would appear on The Jerry Springer Show. The intention behind that was pretty good. They showed that the people on screen were more than what you might see in their segment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Showing that people are people, just like you or me or anybody that might be watching them is an important thing to get across to audiences. Maybe next time they won’t make the people they highlighted into the type of tabloid character everyone assumed they were.


The Jerry Springer Show was an important part of television for twenty-seven years. It showed the problems that normal every day people went through, only to a sensational tabloid-exploitation degree. Everything had to be explosive. It had to be dramatic. That was what audiences wanted. Jerry Springer started with a calm discussion show about serious issues, but it wasn’t until the fights and the yelling started that people begin to pay attention. That was what made his show so big.

The most interesting thing was that he was always sympathetic towards those people. He would let things play out, but at the same time he wasn’t pushing their buttons. He was trying to get to the deeper meaning behind what they said. Even if what they said was pretty surface level. You might think that some of the stuff on The Jerry Springer Show was staged. It may well have been. But you can’t deny the importance that that had on shining the spotlight on part of America that most people would rather ignore. He was doing good through exploitation.

This idea continued beyond the popularity of his show. The Steve Wilkos Show came out of it, becoming its own thing while also being the same thing. If it weren’t for Jerry Springer, Maury probably wouldn’t be as popular. Montel definitely wouldn’t have been as popular, and we probably wouldn’t have had Dr. Phil. All this came back to Jerry Springer wanting to make a news talk show where he tackled real issues. If it wasn’t for that desire, the television landscape wouldn’t be what it is now. Particularly, the daytime television landscape.


Jerry Springer passed away earlier this year. I was supposed to write this post a couple months before that. Not that I planned to have it out before he died. I didn’t know he was going to die. Nobody really knew that. But this movie was originally scheduled for February. He was still alive when I first watched it for that initial post. And then I changed what I was doing. This post kept getting pushed back and back. I wrote about him when he passed in April. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t tackled this post until now. And some of the stuff in this post might be some of the same stuff I wrote way back in April on my other blog. There’s a reason for that though. I respected Jerry Springer, and what he was trying to do, even if I may not have respected the show he made.

His show started in 1991. I was born in 1990. As far as I can remember, his show was just kind of always there. It was always on. It was one of those shows where, if I was home sick, like I said at the beginning of the post, I would be flipping through the channels, and there it was. It was a slice of the world that I didn’t normally see. And that’s kind of important. Seeing stuff that isn’t necessarily in your immediate surroundings makes you a broader person. It makes you a better person. That’s what Jerry Springer did. Through his movie, Ringmaster, you understood what he was trying to do. You understood that his show was trying to do that same thing. Even if it was going about it in a cartoonish way. When you see that as a kid, you don’t know that. But you know what? It gets instilled in you. Bit by bit you learn from it. You might not learn the right things at first, but years later you really understand. Understanding… That’s what Jerry springer taught so many people.


As I do with every post, I’ve made a list of notes for y’all from this movie:

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