Killer Sofa (2019) and Inanimate Object Horror Movies in Sunday "Bad" Movies

A writer will use anything as inspiration when coming up with a story. We’re told from a young age that it’s better to write about what we know. That’s somewhat true. But I think that’s just convenience. It’s easier to write about what you know, not necessarily better. You can be inspired by other things, too. Things you haven’t experienced yourself.

Me? I’ve started tales about the Canadian Baseball League which existed for a single year in the early 2000s, a pet rock that slowly convinced a man to kill his partner, a person who lived in a storage unit, and a slasher set in a logging town. Have I experienced any of that? Not at all. I’ve watched baseball and I had a rock collection, but that’s as close as I got to any of that. It’s tougher to write a story about things you don’t necessarily know. That doesn’t make the stories any less fulfilling or good.

When you get into horror, a genre that I’ve dabbled in because I’m a huge fan of it, writers will find inspiration in almost anything. Horror can be almost anything. There can be fear and terror anywhere you look. Spooky old houses are obvious. There could be ghosts or monsters or murderous squatters hiding in the shadows, causing the boards to creak and the hinges to squeak. An isolated cabin in the woods can prey upon the anxiety people have of feeling isolated. If something happens in that cabin, there won’t be people around to help. People, in general, can be horrific. Serial killers, torturers, doctors who want to sew people together ass to mouth. If you can think something up, chances are that another person can think up something equally horrible or even worse.

What fascinates me more than those rather basic ideas, at least at this moment, is another rather basic idea that horror writers always come back to. What if an everyday object could somehow take on a mind of its own and use that sentience to maim, murder, and torment? There have been plenty of movies where dolls have been able to kill or influence people to kill. Child’s Play had the mind of a murderer transfer into a doll that then continued to murder. Annabelle was a conduit for a demon to do its evil bidding. The Boy was about a woman taking care of a doll like a babysitter with a child, but strange things involving the doll kept happening. It was sort of a haunted house doll movie. Dolls are like an extension of humans, though. They just happen to be inanimate objects. They look relatively close to humans, in most cases. Maybe not full anatomy, depending on the doll, but they have the limbs and head and stuff.

Some writers have gone even further into the inanimate object world. Look at the writing of Stephen King. He has been called one of the masters of horror. He wrote Christine, a novel where a teenager became obsessed with his possessed car. The same car that became obsessed with him and tried to murder anyone who got between them. Stephen King also wrote The Mangler, a short story about a possessed ironing and folding machine at an industrial laundry facility. Trucks was a Stephen King short story where a group of people were trapped in a truck stop that was being circled by possessed transport trucks. Then there was The Monkey, a short story about a wind-up monkey that caused the death of someone whenever its cymbals clanged together. He really likes his possessed objects. They creep him out in the right way that he keeps going back.

This is closer to the type of horror that’s really picking at my brain lately. There have been so many horror movies that made random objects the source of horror. It’s like they’re never ending. I’ve covered a bunch of them for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Ever since the beginning, really. They’ve covered a wide breadth of objects. Discussing them would probably get this out of my system, and that’s just what I’ll do. We’re going to go one by one through the possessed object horror movies I’ve covered, from Evil Bong, one year into the blog series, until this post’s movie, Killer Sofa.

Evil Bong

I didn’t intentionally choose Evil Bong to be the first movie I watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies where an inanimate object caused the horror. There were a bunch of movies within this subgenre of horror that were on my radar. I happened to own this one as part of one of those Walmart multi-packs. Only, I think I got it at Zellers when they were going out of business the first time. Not this more recent, everything is Anko, time where they were only in The Bay. I’m talking about when Target came into Canada and completely floundered for a year or so before abandoning ship. Those original standalone Zellers stores. That’s where I got the multipack. It was probably 2012 or 2013.

The name Evil Bong stuck out to me in the set. I threw it into my schedule, gave it a watch, and wrote about it. I have more appreciation for what it did now than when I first saw it. I didn’t have the knowledge of Charles Band movies to fully grasp the crossovers that were happening. I thought it was a simple, weird movie where a bunch of stoners were taken by an evil bong into a stripclub dimension where they would be killed.

That was the inanimate object horror. It was basically a slasher movie where the stoner friends succumbed to taking a toke from Eebee, the evil bong, and were subsequently killed in her bong world. This would be the case for pretty much every Evil Bong movie going forward, though other bongs were introduced along the way. Things always ended up with people being sucked into a bong world and fighting their way out, lest they be killed.

Evil Bong was an interesting enough way to be introduced to inanimate object horror in Sunday “Bad” Movies. It took something that you wouldn’t inherently find horrifying, unless you were super conservative and anti-marijuana, and turned it into a killer. Not a killer in the way that Reefer Madness might have you believe. The bong killed people through that bong world. That was the horror. Not very good horror, but horror all the same.

Jack Frost

Very soon after Evil Bong, I went into Jack Frost. This was a movie that I had known about since around the time it first came out, when I would frequent movie stores like Blockbuster and Rogers Video. I knew there was the Jack Frost I had seen, with Michael Keaton being brought back to life as a snowman and teaching his son to throw snowballs and shoot a hockey puck. Then there was this one, the horror movie.

Well, Jack Frost took the Child’s Play approach. A serial killer was killed. His spirit was transferred into a nearby snow man. Now he would be able to kill and, in one scene rape with his carrot nose, all the people he wanted without being suspected. Until he was, obviously. He had to be stopped at some point. He wasn’t completely stopped, though. A year later, a sequel came out that relocated him to Hawaii for a Christmas vacation.

This may have been the point when I truly became fascinated with the inanimate object horror movies. It was two weeks after Evil Bong and it not only built on that, but it played into that serial killer thing which would resurface a few months later. It wasn’t only part of the subgenre of inanimate object horror. It was part of the subgenre that came from that subgenre. In my mind, which likes to categorize stuff like that, it was a great time.

Jack Frost didn’t do this kind of the story the best. It at least had fun with it. The thing with diving into inanimate object horror, I’ve learned, is that you need to do it with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek. You are very rarely going to find a snowman to actually be scary. You may, however, find the stuff the snowman does to be horrifying, if done right. Dark humour at its finest. Okay, not finest. Jack Frost was some dark humour, though.

The Gingerdead Man

A few months later, I was back into the Charles Band movies with the first film in The Gingerdead Man franchise. This series of movies would last three instalments and a crossover with Evil Bong before being completely folded into the Evil Bong franchise. It’s a shame because I thought there was a lot more going on in these movies than the Evil Bong movies.

The Gingerdead Man took the same approach as Jack Frost. A serial killer was captured and executed, only for his spirit to find new life in a gingerbread man at a bakery. This new body helped him continue his murderous ways, eventually going after the victim who got away. Yes, another serial killer in an inanimate object that sort of looks human enough story.

I didn’t particularly like the first movie in The Gingerdead Man franchise. It played things a little too straight, even with Gary Busey as the killer. The second and third movies brought more of a comedic edge, particularly in how they satirized independent horror studios in The Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust and how they spoofed Carrie and roller discos in The Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver.

Again, you’re not likely to find too many inanimate objects to be innately scary. Would you really believe people were going to get killed by a cookie they could simply take a bite out of with no problem? That’s not likely. But when the comedy gets brought into it so that the killer can go over-the-top with their rampage, audiences will more likely overlook the fallacies of the concept.

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

It took about a year to get to another movie in this horror subgenre. A complete 180 from what I had seen previously with Sunday “Bad” Movies, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was like if an inanimate object horror movie were made by an arthouse director. It was one of the few inanimate object horror movies to not default to a slasher style. It felt like it presented the murders committed by the bed in a different way. A more artistic way. A more surreal way.

The bed didn’t stalk its victims the way some of these other objects did, particularly the ones that had more of a human or animal shape. The bed was stationary. It did its killing when people approached it. Many approached for sex, while a few just wanted to catch some zs. It would wait for the people to be on it, then swallow them into the mattress. It would grip them with the sheets. In one case, it would dissolve a man’s arms right down to the bone. It was a different kind of inanimate object predator, more in line with The Mangler than Chucky.

To further accentuate the arthouse feel of it, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was based on a nightmare the writer/director had. That made sense with the dreamlike feel of the movie. The story was broken into four parts, titled based on meals of the day. The parts would flow together in almost nonsensical ways that made some sense in a dream state. Why is someone sleeping on a random bed in an abandoned, decrepit house? Couldn’t tell you, but it made sense in the dreamlike world of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.

I’ve ended up watching some odd inanimate object horror movies in the decade plus that I’ve been writing these posts. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was one of the movies that stood out the most. Not because it was good. I didn’t really like it. But it was different. It was unique. I had never seen another movie like it. I don’t think I have since. That’s something special.

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle

My memory of I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is a little foggy. By a little, I mean I remember nothing about the movie. I know I watched it. That’s all the only thing I remember. That happens sometimes with a blog that has been going for over a decade. Some movies have faded from my memory. I’m going to have to go off what I wrote about the movie when I watched it nine and a half years ago.

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle was fell into a second category of inanimate object horror movies. It was a blood possession movie. An occultist was killed with a crossbow, which happened to also puncture a motorcycle. This allowed a vampiric spirit into the motorcycle, which began killing people almost as soon as it was purchased by a new owner.

Based on the synopsis I’m currently looking at, the bike did some crazy things, bringing I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle into the dark comedy/horror realm. It tried to have sex with a woman. It stabbed people with spikes. It got scared by garlic and crucifixes. There didn’t seem to be much blood sucking, but there sure were some other vampire traits.

This would probably be an easier movie to write about right now if I had rewatched it more recently than a decade ago. Maybe before I edit this, I’ll rewatch it and add a new final piece to this movie. All I can say is that I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle fit into the inanimate object horror because that vampire spirit was in the motorcycle.

Killer Condom

Two weeks after seeing I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, I checked out an inanimate object horror movie that has quickly become a favourite. I didn’t have high expectations about Killer Condom, but I almost immediately fell in love with it. Don’t let the name fool you. There was a whole lot going on with this one that made it a fun little flick.

Killer Condom was a German neo-noir set in New York City where a gay detective tried to solve the mystery of a bunch of murders and maiming in a seedy sex hotel. He would quickly realize that the condoms in the building were coming to life and biting off more than they could chew. I mean penises. The condoms were biting off penises.

The condoms in Killer Condom weren’t an inanimate object possessed by a spirit or a demon. They were little monsters. They were lab created little monsters, but they were little monsters. More like animals than anything else. They weren’t intelligent beings. They were simply out there to eat the men who were in their way, as a way to stop sex. They weren’t protection. They were permanent prevention. When it comes to inanimate object horror, the point is to make horror out of an inanimate object, such as a condom. In the world of the movie, that object doesn’t need to be inanimate. Only in our reality.

The neo-noir detective story of Killer Condom almost required the inanimate object coming to life to not be a serial killer. In almost all the serial killers or bad spirits possessing inanimate object movies, the audience was shown the item getting possessed near the beginning of the story. That couldn’t happen in Killer Condom if the filmmakers wanted to tell a detective story about solving a mystery. The way the condoms came to life had to be kept under wraps until the climax, which meant they couldn’t be as much a character as other objects had been in other movies. The animalistic nature of them was the way to go. And it worked. It allowed the rest of the characters to be stronger. It allowed the story to be something other than a basic horror movie where an item killed and people tried to escape it. Killer Condom did something different and was successful at doing that different something.

Dead Sushi

In 2018, my birthday fell on a Sunday. I wanted to feature one of my favourite bad movies for my birthday post. Dead Sushi took the opposite approach of Killer Condom. It still had the inanimate objects as monsters sort of thing going on, but it showed the audience almost immediately what was happening. That was because there was no mystery involved with the story. It was a zombie story and that was it.

The sushi wasn’t the spirit of evil in an inanimate object. There wasn’t some serial killer continuing their spree through a piece of sushi. No no. A disgruntled former employee used a serum on sushi to bring it back from the dead. They were zombies that attacked the current pharmaceutical employees staying at an inn. Revenge really was a dish best served cold, in this case.

Dead Sushi, much like the best in the inanimate object horror subgenre, didn’t take things too seriously. It went off the rails in the things the sushi would do to people. I mean, the finale involved a bunch of the sushi coming together to form a warship that could fly around and shoot the survivors. There were nipples being sucked by the sushi. A fish man chased people down. A naked woman sushi table went very, very wrong. All kinds of wacky, Japanese hijinks.

That doesn’t mean Dead Sushi was all wacky hijinks. There was an emotional core to the movie. The main character needed her confidence so she could make the perfect sushi. One of the pieces of sushi was outcast from the rest for being a different kind of sushi. There was an old, disgraced mentor who overcame the event that cast him out of the sushi world. All these came together because someone decided to bring sushi to life. What an odd little movie that I love oh so much.

Puppet Master

This is where we dive back into the slasher side of inanimate object horror movies. It’s now the height of lockdowns during the pandemic and I decided to give my box set of Puppet Master movies a watch. The franchise has been around since 1989. The film that kicked off the franchise involved a group of psychics going to a hotel owned by their late acquaintance, only to be picked off one-by-one when a bunch of puppets snuck into their rooms and attacked them. It was fairly basic stuff, but the franchise became a much bigger thing.

There have been fifteen movies in the franchise. The original, five sequels, five prequels. That’s eleven in the main series. Two spin-offs about different puppets. That’s thirteen. One crossover, and one reboot. There’s your fifteen. Almost forty years, and fifteen movies. After the first two movies, the franchise went in every which way and direction, becoming more than a simple slasher. For Sunday “Bad” Movies, I covered the first movie, a clear slasher. Then I went and covered a few of the later movies, dubbed The Axis Trilogy, which weren’t slashers at all, really.

The Axis Trilogy were a trio of prequels to the first film that involved the puppets teaming up with some rebels in 1930s/1940s California to fight off a Nazi underworld that formed. Yeah, the movies turned into low budget war movies. This wasn’t the first time, either. The third movie in the franchise, which I haven’t covered yet, showed the story of the main human character and the puppets leaving Nazi Germany and coming to the USA.

What began as a simple movie about people’s spirits being placed in puppets so they could be controlled killing machines ended up becoming an anti-Nazi war epic on a small scale budget. It wasn’t a trajectory I could have expected, but it was a pleasant one. The movies might not necessarily be good, but at least they tried something different than most of the inanimate object horror movies. They went a different direction and that was commendable.

Blades

As I approached week 500 of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I tossed on a movie I had heard about on a podcast. It was an inanimate object horror movie where the inanimate object was essentially an animal attacking people. It was a spoof of Jaws where the shark was replaced by a lawnmower and the beach setting was changed to a country club. There were other slight changes, but this was essentially Jaws on land.

Blades was a pure animal attack movie, following the same story beats as Jaws. There was a big golf tournament coming to the country club. The new golf pro noticed that a lawnmower was attacking people and wanted the tournament postponed while they found and stopped the mower. The owner wouldn’t listen and people were mowed down. The golf pro teamed up with the groundskeeper to hunt the lawnmower. There were other, more specific story beats that lined up, too, but you get it.

This was another case of comedy creeping into horror to make things land a little better. No audience was going to take a killer lawnmower seriously. When the story was wrapped up in a Jaws parody, however, it became much more palatable. The believability of the world was strengthened by things being a little on the comedic side. The comedy was the rug that brought the room together.

Blades quickly became not only one of my favourite inanimate object horror movies, but one of my favourite Sunday “Bad” Movies features. Even though the story was unoriginal, it worked with the mantra of “originality doesn’t come from the story, it comes from how the story is told.” There was magic in that lawnmower just as much as there was magic in this comedic spin on Jaws. This might be the pinnacle of inanimate object horror.

Amityville

Week 500, I dove into a bunch of Amityville movies. I covered a few more after I stopped doing these posts weekly, for official post 560. I’m not going to go movie by movie through the Amityville franchise and talk about how each one featured inanimate object horror. Not all of them featured it. But there was a point, once the franchise stopped being theatrical, that the inanimate objects really began creeping into the stories. Let’s do a quick summary of all that.

After three theatrical Amityville movies, producers kept the series going without the house. They needed to justify how the newer movies were connected to Amityville, though, so they used haunted objects to create the horror. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes featured a haunted lamp. Amityville: It’s About Time had a haunted clock that could manipulate time and do Final Destination style Rube-Goldberg deaths. Amityville: A New Generation had a haunted mirror, while Amityville Dollhouse had a dollhouse.

When all the random Amityville movies started popping up after the Platinum Dunes remake in 2005, a bunch of those writers/directors continued the trend of haunted objects. There was haunted lumber, a haunted musical monkey toy, and, in a movie I haven’t yet watched, a haunted vibrator. If there’s an object that could harbour an evil spirit of some sort, you can be sure that some independent director has made a movie about it.

I’ll say as much as Amityville: It’s About Time did the inanimate object horror the best, followed by Amityville: A New Generation and Amityville Dollhouse. The way they used those objects added some interesting layers. The time dilation of the clock. The way the mirror was able to project loved ones to kill the victims. The little bit that characters ended up miniaturized in the dollhouse. They used the objects well. The rest of them, not so much. They were mostly just conduits to the evil spirits from the original Amityville house.

The Mangler

Here we find ourselves upon a movie based on a Stephen King short story. One of the ones I mentioned at the start of this post. This one tapped into his past. When he was a struggling writer who hadn’t yet published his first novel, Stephen King was a teacher in the school year and worked at an industrial laundry in the summer. The story, having been written in 1972, may have been written during his time as a laundry worker.

The idea was fairly simple. After some blood fell into an industrial laundry machine, it became possessed and started killing people from its newfound bloodlust. A detective who was called in after the first death in the machine later began investigating why the machine acted the way it did. A detective story with a known supernatural villain in a laundry machine. They just needed the evidence to shut the laundromat down.

The Mangler was a simple story. Possessed laundry machine killed people. That was probably why there was the whole detective story thrown in around it. The story had a hook to pull readers in. The movie went even further, giving occult backstory showing that these weren’t the first killings with the machine. It also turned the machine into a monster by the end, with it chasing the main characters around. The Mangler got wild.

It’s been a while since I checked this one out. It was that mid-to-late 90s wild imagery that makes me think Jon Peters was involved, even though he wasn’t. It was like he wanted this movie to have the giant spider that he would finally get into Wild Wild West. Those were some interesting times for movies. At its core, though, it was the same idea that had been explored in I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle. There was a machine. It was possessed after blood fell onto it. Inanimate object became animate and began killing.

Yoga Hosers

I had been meaning to get to a Kevin Smith movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies for a long time, and finally got around to Yoga Hosers in 2022. It was one of the more interesting inanimate object horror movies I’ve seen. This was made during Kevin Smith’s non-stop weed smoking era of his career where he started a film trilogy of nutty horror movies that only ever made it to two entries. The first was Tusk, where a man was turned into a walrus. Then there was Yoga Hosers.

Taking place in Winnipeg, the movie put two teenage girls up against a bunch of Bratzis (Nazi bratwursts) created by the Nazis that lived in the area. That means I’m stretching the idea of inanimate objects again, in the same way that I stretched it with Killer Condom. The Bratzis were definitely a living creature that just happened to be made in the form of an inanimate object. For the sake of this post, though, I’m counting it.

The visuals of seeing Kevin Smith as a Nazi sausage were maybe the most horrific thing in the movie. That image is one that will never leave your brain after you see it. Frightening stuff. The whole movie was like a fever dream of stuff Kevin Smith thought was funny while high, much like Tusk came from his rambling on a podcast. The Bratzis stuck, though. That’s the one thing from Yoga Hosers that really stuck.

However, I’ve seen movies do much better with inanimate object horror. They either made the inanimate object into a formidable horror, or they found a way to be satirical. Yoga Hosers didn’t really do either of those, instead becoming a goofball Nazi movie that never really worked and wasn’t truly scary. The image was scarier than the movie, and that’s really the most I can say about it.

Bearry

About a year and a half into Sunday “Bad” Movies no longer being a weekly blog, we returned to an inanimate object movie that didn’t involve a monster made to look like an inanimate object. It was a human-sized teddy bear that came to life and grew jealous of its owner’s new relationship. Thus, the bear went on a killing spree. Things got very violent bearry fast. See what I did there?

Bearry was one of the inanimate object horror movies that didn’t take itself so seriously. I mean, who would be able to take a jealous teddy bear killer seriously? A jealous teddy bear that was jealous of all the guys making moves on the woman who used to cuddle with it after a bad divorce. The almost obsessive stalker teddy bear. Yeah, the visual is hard to be frightened of. They knew that some comedy had to be infused into the story.

It didn’t do too bad of a job, either. Sure, the low budget might have kept it from reaching the heights it could have gotten to. But the people involved had fun with it. That made up for most of the quality issues. Especially when they got to do things like reference both Psycho and Scarface in a scene where the teddy bear mowed down a guy with a chainsaw while he was showering. What a movie.

This is another one of those inanimate object horror movies that I want to rewatch. It was a fun enough movie that I think back on it fondly. The number of times when I was shocked by what they did has kept it in my mind since seeing it nearly two years ago. That’s the case with a lot of these movies. Dumb fun sticks with me, as it did when I saw Bearry.

Trucks/Maximum Overdrive

I’m going to lump these two movies together because they told the same story. No, I mean the same story. I mean they were both based on a Stephen King short story about a group of people trapped in a truck stop while a bunch of possessed trucks circled around to kill anyone who tried to leave. One was Stephen King’s only directed movie, made while he was clearly coked out of his mind. The other was a television movie that was a little more subdued.

The case of these two movies was a case where one was better made, while the other was a more memorable, entertaining movie. Trucks tried to be scary. It tried to be grounded. It tried to take things more seriously. It didn’t necessarily work the way the filmmakers wanted it to. Instead of being a solid horror flick, we got goofy scenes played straight. Scenes like a lady running on the top of a hill only to be knocked off a cliff by a truck while everyone looked on. Scenes like a Tonka truck that came to life, broke out of a building, and tripped a postman before repeatedly driving into his face. Scenes that were a little too silly to be taken in the serious way the movie wanted.

Maximum Overdrive, on the other hand, was as coked up rock and roll as could be. There was the AC/DC soundtrack backing everything. There was an ATM that called the user, played by Stephen King, an asshole. One character got electrocuted by an arcade cabinet. Someone was hit in the dick with a can of soda, fired at MLB pitcher speed from a vending machine. Almost every single choice in this movie was insane. And when I say it felt coked up, there was evidence to back that up. This was made during the period of Stephen King’s heaviest cocaine use, and he has said as much about making the movie.

Aside from the tones of the two different adaptations of Stephen King’s short story, the thing that most made Maximum Overdrive the more successful and entertaining movie had to do with the trucks, themselves. They were inanimate objects brought to life in both movies. However, the biggest and baddest of the trucks in Maximum Overdrive was given a face. It had a big Green Goblin (yes, the Spider-Man villain) face slapped across the front grill. That gave the truck a little more personality. It made the truck stand out. It gave a definite villain for the characters. A one truck above the rest to root against. And that was important to a situation that wasn’t all that believable to begin with.

Maximum Overdrive ended up being the better adaptation of the short story, if only because of the tone. The cocaine of it all made things memorable. The face on the lead truck made it stand out. It gave a more direct focus for the distaste of the villain. But at their cores, these two movies were about the same thing as any of the other movies I’ve written about here. An inanimate object, in this case a bunch of trucks and/or machines, was wreaking havoc on people. That same idea we keep coming back to where something we control becomes uncontrollable.

Killer Sofa

That brings us to the movie that inspired this post. Killer Sofa wasn’t about a sofa killing people. Oh no. Big difference. It was about a recliner killing people. See? It’s a completely different piece of furniture. Only one person can comfortably sit on this one. If it’s comfortable. You’re probably getting killed while sitting on it, so maybe not so much.

Killer Sofa went like this. Francesca (Piimio Mei) was given a used recliner after the death of her ex-boyfriend. She began having dreams about the chair, which turned sexual at times. At the same time, all her ex-boyfriends or the men who wronged her were coming to untimely deaths. The police investigated a serial killer, while Francesca’s friend Jack (Jim Baltaxe) thought there might have been a dybbuk to blame.

That synopsis might sound more complicated than it really was. The movie was, at its core, about a chair killing people and nobody willing to accept that. Everyone tried to find other sources of the disturbing deaths. It was always the chair, though. We, the audience, knew that. We knew it from the beginning. The movie never tried to hide it. The characters didn’t realize until it was too late, however. The death and destruction were already happening when they figured things out.

Killer Sofa was another one of those low budget horror movies that didn’t take things seriously. How could they? There was a recliner killing people. People fantasized about having sex with the recliner. The filmmakers made sure that the back cushion had a face in it, as well. Not a real face. Obviously. But the way the buttons and stitching were positioned on the chair, it looked like there was a face peering at people. So much so that the chair moved to the apartment window at one point to watch people out on the street below. Can you really take a killer chair seriously when it has a face and watches people? Probably not.

There was a twist near the end of Killer Sofa that added a new layer to inanimate object horror. I’m not going to get into it. I don’t want to spoil things. But it did something that none of the other inanimate object horror I’ve written about here did. It was something new. Something refreshing. Not necessarily good. It made the movie stand out, though. That’s all you can ask from a sub-subgenre like this.

Inanimate object horror is an interesting subgenre within horror. There can be so many different ways an inanimate object can be used as the vessel of horrifying events. It could be a monster that simply looked like an inanimate object. It could be an inanimate object come to life for slasher purposes. It could simply be possessed with an evil spirit and doing the same things as would happen in a ghost or demon story. In one case, the inanimate object was essentially a shark in the water, only it was out of water and not a shark.

I think the reason horror storytellers keep returning to the inanimate object horror is because there can be some fear in the most seemingly innocuous places. Sure, most of these movies veered into the comedy realm. So did movies like Rubber and Slaxx, which I haven’t watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies. But there’s some fear in there. Deep down, beneath the chuckles and the guffaws, they’re hoping to get the audience to look around their room and maybe fear something they had never thought to fear. That cup? It could somehow make you drown. The box of tissue? That could shoot a tissue straight down your throat, causing you to suffocate. The Pop Vinyl figure of George Clooney in Tomorrowland that you got for $3 at the dollar store because nobody wanted it? Imagine that thing started speaking in demonic tongues. There’s horror to be had in everything in one way or another.

There won’t be a time when I’m not fascinated by stories about inanimate objects causing horrific situations. The ideas that storytellers come up with always pick at some small section of my brain. It’s an itch that needs to be scratched. Lawnmowers, bongs, lamps, condoms… What other wacky objects could be the source of scares? Every new one interests me, even if the end result is a bad movie.

One of the biggest sayings in writing is that you should write about what you know. Inanimate object horror is people writing about what they know. Maybe not so much the horror side of things. But when it comes to the object, they surely know about the object. Stephen King wrote about an industrial laundry machine because he worked at an industrial laundry. I write about movies because I watch movies. Inspiration can come from anywhere. What’s more magical than that?

Now, after that really long post, let’s get to the notes:

• I wrote about a bunch of movies in this post. It’s time to list them. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, The Gingerdead Man, Gingerdead Man 2: Passion ofthe Crust, Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High Five, Evil Bong 666, Jack Frost, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, Killer Condom, Dead Sushi, Puppet Master, Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, Puppet Master: Axis Termination, Blades, Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, Amityville: It’s About Time, Amityville: A New Generation, Amityville Dollhouse, Amityville Toybox, Amityville Exorcism, Amityville: Evil Never Dies, The Mangler, Yoga Hosers, Bearry, Trucks, and Maximum Overdrive.
• Nobody from Killer Sofa was featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies before. That’s the thing with New Zealand movies. I haven’t seen a whole lot of them.
• I mentioned Reefer Madness and Wild Wild West in this post.
• Have you seen Killer Sofa? What did you think? What inanimate object horror movies do you like? Let me know in the comments or get a hold of me on Bluesky.
• Bluesky and the comments are also places where you can send me recommendations about what to watch. I’m sure I’ll get around to them sooner or later.
• Now for a look at the next post. It’s already written, aside from the notes. I hammered it out pretty quickly. It’s much shorter than this one. I wrote about Breaker! Breaker!, one of those late 70s trucker movies. If you want to see my thoughts, come back when that post goes up. Probably next week. See you then.

Twisted By Love (2024)

Bluesky can be a wonderful place. It’s a social media app where you can be social. Obviously. It hasn’t yet turned into the cesspool that so many social media apps have. It may still get there. It likely will. But, right now, it’s a way for me to connect, usually unsuccessfully, with other people. When I do connect with them, I end up in a situation much like the one I’m currently in.

See, I mostly follow people who like movies. That comes some name drops that I may not have been familiar with until they were mentioned by these people. It’s a way to discover movies, or to get recommendations. Not specifically for Sunday “Bad” Movies, but in general. Someone could share thoughts about how much they liked an under-the-radar 90s action movie or an 80s horror movie that got overshadowed by the big slashers of that era.

One thing I’ve noticed people discussing more, likely because of the oversaturation of streaming services and the rising costs to subscribe to them, is Tubi. You see, Tubi is currently a free ad-fueled streaming service. You go on there, you decide to check out something from their wide array of movies or television, and you click play. There are a handful of ad breaks throughout, but you get to watch the movie on your terms without paying anything. Everything costs more now and wages never rose enough to make up that difference in inflation. Capitalist societies are fun. Having a free option will give people a spot to watch things if they can’t afford the subscriptions.

However, the free option comes with a cost. You have to sit through the ads. Or, much like during the network television era of my childhood, you could always just get up and use the washroom or grab a snack instead of watching another insurance commercial. The other downside, for most people, would be the catalogue. For every decent thing that you might want to watch, Tubi has like five or six bottom-of-the-barrel movies or television shows. I’ve watched numerous Amityville movies there. I checked out The Octogames there. For this post, it was Twisted By Love. However, I’m still not at the point of talking about the movie.

That’s the downside of having a free option like Tubi. There’s some good stuff on the service, for sure, but you sometimes need to dig deep to find it among the slew of cheap stuff they could get to fill out their options.

Bringing it back to Bluesky, the people who use Tubi tend to be open about it. They know what they’re getting into, and they’ve grown an appreciation for the more questionable movies that pop up there. That’s where I find the discussion to be interesting. They mention things that I never heard of, pointing out exactly what might make it work or make it not work. They’ll share all the crazy new things they find on the streamer. Oh, did you know the Alf television finale made its way to the service? No, I didn’t. Thanks to the people I follow, I do now.

A little while ago, one of the people I follow started talking about Twisted By Love. I’m not entirely sure what provoked them to watch it, but they did. And they reported back that there was a scene where you heard the director talking to the actors about their performances and the scene. Not some sort of meta comedy or anything. Just a shot from between takes that was left in the movie. That got a few people curious, including myself. Most of them went solely to that one scene. Me? I had to watch the whole movie. That couldn’t be the only ludicrous thing in there. And it wasn’t.

Twisted By Love followed married couple Alex (Shawn Francis) and Lily (Dalisha Taylor) as they took a trip to a cabin with their friend Shaena (Kevonshay Pinky Donaldson). Over the course of their first day on the trip, secrets were revealed about a past between Alex and Shaena, and relationship bonds were tested as jealousy and betrayal ran high.

Things started rocky in Twisted By Love. It started with a scene from near the end of the movie, but quickly went back to the beginning, as the trio arrived at the cabin. Only, the cabin wasn’t a cabin. It was a random house in the middle of suburbia. Just a plain, old, residential house. Why did they decide to call it a cabin trip? I couldn’t tell you. It clearly wasn’t a cabin in the traditional sense. It wasn’t isolated in any way, whatsoever. It was your average house, and that’s it.

That wasn’t even the only odd thing about that scene. The thing that really tipped me off to how troubled the filmmaking of Twisted By Love would be was the sound design. Alex parked their vehicle in the driveway. He got out and there was a continuous shot as he closed his door, walked around the car, and opened the door for his wife. A little unnecessary for a shot, but whatever. The kicker was that during his entire walk, where nobody was talking to each other, you could her rustling from inside the car. During the sound design, nobody thought to get rid of the sound of the microphone rubbing against one of the actors’ skin or clothes in the car. Not a great look to start off the movie.

Fast forward about fifteen minutes. There have been sex scenes already. There was one about six minutes into the movie. Well, maybe not a sex scene. There was a foreplay scene six minutes in. At fifteen minutes in, there was a dialogue scene that led into the first real sex scene. I mean naked body sex scene this time with bits flopping around, though everything was angled just right so you couldn’t actually see the flopping. Aside from Dalisha Taylor’s buttcheeks. That’s not the point. The point is the lead-in dialogue. The dialogue scene ended with a “joke” about Lily agreeing that if Alex bought dinner, he would get to pin her any way he wanted. It was a joke so good that when it was over, the movie cut to a completely different take of the same line. Two takes of the same dialogue put into the movie one after the other. It was as though they only had the master shot for the scene, liked the start of one take and the end of the other, and instead of cutting from the beginning of one to the end of the other, they left the overlapping dialogue. That’s not the way to edit a movie, let alone shoot it.

The main bit worth highlighting was the scene that got me interested in Twisted By Love. Half an hour into the movie, all three characters were at the park having a nice little lunch. They wrapped up and headed back to the car. Dialogue scene. When they walked off screen, you could hear the director end the scene and ask them to reset for another take. All three actors then broke character and started talking about the scene and joking around. Eventually, the director called action, the actors got back into character, and they ran through the scene again. It was one of the most baffling things I’ve ever seen in a movie.

One final moment I want to bring up is a spoiler for the end of Twisted By Love. If you care about watching this movie at all, maybe don’t read this paragraph. The climax of everything came when Lily ran out of the cabin to a nearby playground to get away from the relationship drama caused by having Shaena around. Of course, Alex and Shaena went to the playground to check in on Lily. A little tussle happened and Shaena fell onto the bottom of a slide in the safest looking roll over the side I’ve ever seen. But it caused her brain damage, which then led to the tension of covering up the potential death or going to the police and being harshly punished for it because they were black. That debate was good enough. The fall onto the slide, however, was just one more poorly done moment in the movie that made me question if it was real. Was I being trolled?

The rest of Twisted By Love was an underwhelming relationship thriller. It went to some dark places by the end, with characters going to great lengths to resolve the love triangle that was festering like a bad wound. But it wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t good. It was poorly built and left the thrilling part of the thriller out. Outside of how poorly made it was, there wasn’t much to take away from this bottom of the barrel, streaming on Tubi movie.

The only reason I knew about Twisted By Love was word of mouth. That word of mouth was actually word of fingertips came courtesy of the fingers of the people on Bluesky who I follow. Had they not mentioned the movie, I never would have known about it. It wasn’t in my algorithm. It wasn’t something I was likely to stumble across as I went from streaming service to streaming service. I can only find so many things on my own. But I found this, all because some people live and die by using Tubi.

Why is that? It’s a free option for streaming movies, when every other streaming option seems to be charging more and more. How expensive will Netflix get? Or Disney+? Or Paramount+? You never know. They just keep hiking the prices up, even for ad-supported tiers. Who doesn’t do that? Tubi. Tubi lets people watch everything for free, just with some ads scattered throughout. That’s the way it should be. Charge for premium tiers without ads. Don’t charge for tiers where the ads pay off the subscription tiers. I’m not the only person feeling that way, hence the people who have found Tubi and love Tubi.

Those people also talk. They’re the same people who would pay to see a relatively unknown movie on the big screen and tell you all about how you should be checking that one out. They’re the kind of people you should trust because they’re the kind of people who have an open mind. They can find the diamonds hidden in the rough. They can find the gems of movies you might not know about. They will also find the terrible stuff that’s just so bad that you wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it yourself. These are my kind of people and this is the reason I love social media, even if so much of it is a hellscape.

Now for a few notes to close things out:

• Twisted By Love had no connections to any other movies I’ve watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies, so I’m just going to drop links to some random posts that I feel like dropping links to. The Lair of the White Worm, Stone Cold, The Legend of Sorrow Creek, and Breach. I mentioned The Octogames in this post, as well.
• Have you checked out Twisted By Love?  Have you seen any movies make mistakes as big as this one did? Let me know whatever you’re thinking by posting in the comments, or contacting me on Bluesky or Threads.
• You can suggest movies for me to watch in the comments, on Bluesky, or on Threads. I’m open to discovering movies I might not already know about.
• Looking ahead to the next post, I’m going to be checking out a movie called Killer Sofa. In fact, I’ve already watched it. If you want to see my thoughts about it and, maybe, a few other movies, that post will come out sometime soon. It might be next week or the week after. Keep an eye out and I’ll see you then.

Trump vs the Illuminati (2020)

Three and a half years ago, I watched Bigfoot vs Megalodon. It was a suggestion from someone who I was a mutual follower with on Twitter, who I’m still a mutual follower with on Bluesky. I knew nothing about it, tossed it on, and was immediately lulled into a sense of boredom. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t even entertaining in any way whatsoever. Well, aside from one specific moment. There was a point where the main character said “I’m a clone, not a cuck…” and I lost it. It was the single shining light in one of the dullest movies I’d seen in a long time.

I have a way of tormenting myself through Sunday “Bad” Movies, though. I’ve always been of the mind that no movie is not worth seeing. There’s always something to take away from even the most boring movies. There’s always something to take away from the most poorly made movies. Bigfoot vs Megalodon had that one perfect moment that I could take from it, as well as a big lesson in what not to do when writing or animating a movie. As much as I disliked the movie, it gave me enough hope to check out another of BC Fourteen’s animated movies.

A year later, now two and a third years ago, I checked out Van Helsing. It was his newest movie at that point and served as a prequel to what I had seen. It followed how the Van Helsing  clone I saw in Bigfoot vs Megalodon came to be such a famed space hero. The story of Van Helsing was a big improvement over Bigfoot vs Megalodon, having a coherent plot and a theme. That theme had to do with the general attitude of humanity being the reason that humans would die out. Self-destruction sort of thing. It felt like some depth was given to the universe BC Fourteen was building out.

That improvement convinced me, in the current day, to check out the movie that started the entire universe. Trump vs the Illuminati followed a Chinese clone of Donald Trump (Timothy Banfield) as he discovered his role in a prophecy about the saving of the human species. The world had been destroyed. Humanity was trying to survive in outer space. The alien Illuminati tried to control everything. And the Chinese clone was the only person who could stop them.

Trump vs the Illuminati was a little messier than Van Helsing. It wasn’t for the lack of a story. Having the Donald Trump clone be the prophet who would save humanity was a story, for sure. The issue was how the movie handled Donald Trump. It felt like BC Fourteen wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. He used Donald Trump as a character to poke fun at his mannerisms and attitude, even going so far as to have the clone disavow his roots. However, it also placed this Donald Trump clone as the savior of humanity, which went against the idea of satirizing the guy. It felt like they didn’t know whether they wanted to go against or for Donald Trump, and they decided that playing both sides would be the right course of action. It only muddied the political angle the movie clearly took by using him as the main character.

From looking up the couple documentaries that BC Fourteen made before diving into this animated universe, that stance made sense. He made two political documentaries, one about Trump’s first presidency and one about the campaign trail to get there. From what I can find about Trumpocalypse Now!, it was a collection of archive footage that made the early days of the first Donald Trump presidency into some sort of heroic time in American politics. His other political documentary, Uncivil War: Battle for America was seen as too pro-Trump and anti-Clinton. So it seems as though making Donald Trump the hero wasn’t something new to BC Fourteen when he made Trump vs the Illuminati. It looks like his career at that point was all about putting Trump in a heroic position.

So, yeah, the Trump of it all wasn’t the greatest, since Trump vs the Illuminati clearly came from a guy who appreciated Trump getting into office. Maybe hindsight is 20/20 and BC Fourteen doesn’t feel that way now that we’re a year into Trump’s second, and much more disastrous than the horrendous first time, term. But for the time when this was made, he put Trump in a heroic light, even if that Trump clone said he didn’t like what the real Trump did. That didn’t save the movie from being about Trump as the hero.

The humour surrounding the Trump character was weird throughout Trump vs the Illuminati. Most of the humour came from the vocal impression Timothy Banfield did, which was pretty good. I’ll give the movie that much. They could have had any old hack doing a Trump impression, but managed to get someone who, though they didn’t nail the impression, came close enough to make it believable.

It was the random moments that really made things weird, though. The fact that Satan was an alien in a wheelchair, a part of the Illuminati. That was strange. Or the part where the Chinese Trump clone had a one-man dance-off to show the Illuminati aliens… I don’t know what. He danced, though. There was a dance scene in the middle of Trump vs the Illuminati that I can’t explain. He just started dancing in front of a line of aliens. What an odd thing to happen in the middle of a movie about Trump saving humanity.

Trump vs the Illuminati wasn’t a great movie. It wasn’t even a good movie. But it was a fine middle ground between the previous two BC Fourteen movies I checked out. It had the crazy moments I hoped for, and a storyline I could follow. It didn’t do either element particularly well, but at least it had those elements. That’s all I could ask for, really.

I didn’t know who BC Fourteen was five years ago. I was five hundred posts into Sunday “Bad” Movies before I saw one of his movies. I had been writing these posts for nearly a decade before I even heard his name. Yet, I’m now hooked. I keep watching his movies because, though they aren’t good, there’s always some sort of insanity baked into them. His odd little moments get me to return for another.

Bigfoot vs Megalodon pulled me in with one single line of dialogue. It was the only saving grace of a disastrous movie, but it got me to come back for more. That more was Van Helsing, which told a better story, but didn’t quite have that single memorable moment. Now, upon watching Trump vs the Illuminati, I got another crazy moment. I got a Donald Trump clone dancing like a maniac. I got a wheelchair-bound Satan alien. I got a reason to come back for even more.

I don’t know that these notes will bring people back, but whatever, they’re here:

• BC Fourteen directed two other Sunday “Bad” Movies features. They were Bigfoot vs Megalodon and Van Helsing.
• Wes Bruff and Edson Camacho did voice work in Bigfoot vs Megalodon, Van Helsing, and Trump vs the Illuminati.
• Bigfoot vs Megalodon and Trump vs the Illuminati shared six other cast members. They were Simon Daigle, Carl Folds, Robert Forth, Marco Guzmán, Carrie Isaac, and Carlos Welos.
• Have you seen Trump vs the Illuminati? Have you seen any of BC Fourteen’s movies? Share your thoughts in the comments, or get a hold of me on Bluesky or Threads.
• You can contact me on Bluesky, Threads, or in the comments if you have a movie that might be a good fit for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Suggest away.
• Now for what’s coming up in the next post or two. We’re approaching Valentine’s Day. I’ve got some relationship movies ready to be written about. The one I’m for sure going to be writing about next is Twisted by Love. The other one I have in mind, I haven’t decided whether I want to write about it. But Twisted by Love will be written about. I’ll see you soon for that post.

A Wrestling Christmas Miracle (2020)

One of the more fascinating aspects of the Christmas season is how low the standard for movies gets. People will watch almost anything as long as it is Christmas themed. Those Hallmark movies? Would anyone consider them all that good? Probably not, for most of them. But those same people would watch them endlessly to get into that festive feeling. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

That’s how people came to know A Karate Christmas Miracle. I checked that out a couple years ago for this very blog. A kid’s dad went missing and they went to great lengths to pull off a miracle and get the dad back. It was a bonkers movie with fever-dream type sequences. There were main characters who did some odd things but, most importantly, weren’t cartoonish. The poster would have you believe it was a kid’s movie, but it played more adult.

When I was writing the post for A Karate Christmas Miracle, I came across something that I took note of immediately. The same people made another movie. I knew I’d get to it at some point. This is that point.

A Wrestling Christmas Miracle came out a year after A Karate Christmas Miracle. It wasn’t a sequel. It had many of the same performers. They all played different characters, though some were in similar roles. Kace Gabriel (Mario Del Vecchio) was a child wrestling star, from a family of wrestlers that included his dad, Ajax Gabriel (Ken Del Vecchio). Kace put his wrestling career on hold when his friend fell into a coma. He wanted to make the best, most funniest movie ever. That would surely wake his friend up. However, the movie was stolen by Chuck (Buddy Fitzpatrick) and Kitty Kat (Julie McCullough).

When I first watched A Karate Christmas Miracle, I was flabbergasted by how strange it was. It was a missing persons story where a mom sought out answers to her husband’s disappearance to try and alleviate the pain she and her son felt. Her husband had disappeared after a theater mass shooting. As poorly made as it was, with the weird movie screen hallucinations and the almost slapstick comedy with the college professor, it had some emotional substance. The driving force was how to deal with loss during the holidays.

A Wrestling Christmas Miracle wasn’t interested in being grounded in an emotional reality. Instead, it went all in on the slapstick comedy. It was clearly directed at children, while A Karate Christmas Miracle had been geared more towards adults. It leaned right into the slapstick comedy. Everything was about jokes. The clips from the movie within the movie were all the broadest, worst jokes. The thieves were as goofy as they could be. Everything about A Wrestling Christmas Miracle was grounded in the movie being directed at kids.

Speaking of the movie within the movie, I didn’t understand how that cast was in A Wrestling Christmas Miracle. I understood how the characters in the movie could have gotten them to be in their movie. They were famous wrestlers. Kace was a child prodigy at wrestling. But for the people behind A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, it was shocking that they got Gilbert Gottfried, Todd Bridges, Jimmie Walker, Michael Winslow, and Martin Kove to all be in this movie. This was not the kind of movie to have that many recognizable, albeit well past their peak popularity, actors. Yet it did.

And those cameos were probably as crazy as A Wrestling Christmas Miracle got. Aside from the ending. The way that they brought the kid out of his coma was one of the most insane life-saving techniques I’ve ever witnessed on screen. I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, and few have gone to this level of unrealism. And to immediately follow it up with someone saying “It’s a Christmas miracle!” before slamming the title card on screen and hitting the credits… That was as ludicrous as it could have been.

It was really the theft storyline that took me right out of A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, though. Had the movie simply been strange cameos that I didn’t understand, or moments like that final scene, I would have appreciated it a little more. However, the two thieves were played so goofy that I couldn’t help but think of every direct-to-video children’s movie I’ve seen where thieves have been the villains. For a movie that was set up as a kid trying to bring his friend out of a coma, having comedic relief villains seemed too much.

Here are a few examples. The villains were introduced as two actors, one who took the craft too seriously, and the other who couldn’t remember her lines. Yet they were a couple. It was like having Harry and Marv if they were a married couple who stole a hard drive containing the movie a child made. Their introductory scene involved the bad actor repeating her line wrong, over and over again. “Wow, my whites do look whiter.” Kind of a strange line to repeat. Then there was the climactic ransom handoff where the good actor pretended that a can of tennis balls, that everyone could see were tennis balls, was a can of explosive projectiles. He wanted to swap the movie for the money when he spelled “bear.” Then there was a whole debate over whether it should be “bear” or “bare”. It was an odd comedic moment to have when there was a ransom exchange happening.

All these elements of A Wrestling Christmas Miracle were more comedic than A Karate Christmas Miracle. Sure, the earlier movie had some comedic moments, but it was grounded in the emotional side of the story. It would have been better if A Wrestling Christmas Miracle had followed in that direction. It was introduced as a story about making a movie to help get a friend out of a coma. That was a much more serious topic than the tone of the movie would have you believe, and that’s where this one steered so wrong.

I started this post by saying that people have a lower standard for Christmas movies. Movies that they might not find good or entertaining any other time of year become the movies they’ll watch endlessly once December hits. But I don’t know who would want to watch A Wrestling Christmas Miracle besides me. Between the serious story subject, the cameos from 80s stars, and the slapstick comedy I’ve seen in many kid’s movies, I don’t know what the demographic of the movie truly was.

There have been plenty of bad movies, or movies of more questionable quality, made for holiday season consumption. People give them a pass because those movies are more about the feel of that time of year and less about pure entertainment. A kiss under the mistletoe led to Hallmark holding the holiday hostage for love. Too many people have seen their past, present, and future to become a better person. Too many dads have put up too many lights and let their house be seen from too high in the night sky. But audiences will flock to these movies to feel that holiday cheer. That’s the way it goes.

Now this post will go to the notes:

• Here’s a link to the post for A Karate Christmas Miracle.
• Michael Winslow moved up the ranks of recurring Sunday “Bad” Movies actors with his appearance in A Wrestling Christmas Miracle. He was also in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, Lavalantula, 2 Lava 2 Lantula, Police Academy, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Police Academy 3: Back in Training, and Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.
• Gilbert Gottfried became a six-time Sunday “Bad” Movies actor, appearing in Thumbelina, Never on Tuesday, Sharknado: The 4^th Awakens, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, and A Wrestling Christmas Miracle.
• Martin Kove was in A Wrestling Christmas Miracle after appearing in A Karate Christmas Miracle. He was also in 2 Lava 2 Lantula, and I’m in Love with a Church Girl.
• Julie McCullough appeared in Sharknado, A Karate Christmas Miracle, and A Wrestling Christmas Miracle.
• Six actors appeared in A Karate Christmas Miracle and A Wrestling Christmas Miracle. They were Michael Borao, Ken Del Vecchio, Mario Del Vecchio, Candy Fox, Buddy Fitzpatrick, and Joe Wooley.
• Finally, Todd Bridges was in She’s Out of Control before appearing in A Wrestling Christmas Miracle.
• Have you seen A Wrestling Christmas Miracle? What did you think of it? Is it a Christmas classic? Let me know in the comments, or you can find me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Bluesky, Threads, and the comments are three places you can suggest movies for me to watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.
• Now it’s time to look ahead to what’s coming up for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I only have one movie on deck right now, and it’s a return to a director I’ve seen before. BC Fourteen made Bigfoot vs. Megalodon and Van Helsing. I thought I’d go back to what seems to be the beginning of these animated movies for him. I checked out Trump vs. the Illuminati. It was something. You’ll find my thoughts soon enough. See you then.

Santa's Got Style (2022)

There’s a certain language to movies that you will see time and time again, the more movies you watch. The most basic language is that of the visuals. The colour palette that makes up a movie. The flow of a character from one shot to another that makes their movement make sense. Low angles and high angles that make a character feel more powerful or weaker. All sorts of visual cues that you might not even think about when watching something.

When you dig a little deeper, you get into transatlantic accents and costume design and the music. Oh, the music that truly sets a tone for a scene. Scores can be super important at making the audience feel the way they feel. Even licensed music can hit the audience in just the right way. Every little bit of the movie is a piece of language that helps tell the story.

I should get into the written story, though, since that’s the bit of movie language I want to talk about. Well, part of a written story. It’s difficult to come up with a story that is truly original. So many stories have already been told. Everything will feel like something that came before. How many movies have been made with some unstoppable killer hunting a bunch of teenagers and killing them before one girl figures out a way to stop that killer? That’s a whole subgenre of horror movies right there.

You can break things down beyond the overall story into scenes, characters, plot points, and tropes. Certain elements that you see over and over in many movies. Part of the language of filmmaking has been using these elements time and time again. Audiences are familiar with them. A story must be told. Using familiar elements should, in theory, help an audience connect with that story. Unless that element has been used too often or too frequently. Or it hasn’t been used in an interesting or new way.

This has all been a long setup to get into the movie at hand, Santa’s Got Style. There were two things about the movie that felt very familiar. One was the story. Madison (Kathryn Davis) needed to hire a Santa Claus for her department store. She wanted one that would appeal to adults, so she went to her friend Ethan (Franco Lo Presti) to hire a model from his firm for the job. Ethan couldn’t find a model, so he did it himself without telling Madison. He thought she’d be upset that he gave himself the job. Madison fell in love with Santa while Ethan fell in love with Madison and the whole double identity thing came to a head.

Okay, so you can see the familiar story in there. Right? One of the main characters pretended to be another person and didn’t tell the other main character. Eventually, they wouldn’t be able to keep up the charade, and the other main character would find out about the double identity situation. Some sort of tension would come from that, but it would all be resolved in the end. Everyone would live happily ever after. This wasn’t a new concept to Santa’s Got Style.

Another example that immediately came to mind was Mrs. Doubtfire. The whole movie was about a divorced man pretending to be an old woman so he could work as a nanny for his separated family. It has been a few years since I saw it. Probably since I was a child. I don’t remember the specific details. But it played out much the same way. He wore prosthetics to pretend he was someone else. Eventually, they found out who he was. Tension rose, and everyone lived happy ever after once the tension was resolved.

For whatever reason, this storyline has become one that writers have clung onto. There’s something about this double identity concept that intrigues them. Glen Powell has written two projects, and each of them has used this same concept. Hit Man was about a teacher who moonlit as a police entrapment tool. He pretended to be a hit man so people would hire him and get arrested for hiring him. He fell for a woman who wanted to hire him and kept his hit man persona to keep his relationship with her. Chad Powers was a television show from earlier this year that he wrote about a controversial football player using prosthetics to pretend to be a college player and find a fresh start. The whole show was about him struggling to not get found out. Glen Powell seems to really like this double identity concept.

Santa’s Got Style wasn’t even the only Christmas movie to utilize the double identity storyline. I recently watched My Secret Santa, which had a mom pretend to be a man so she could take a job at a local ski resort as Santa Claus. This job would allow her daughter to get snowboard lessons at the resort’s ski hills for half the cost of tuition. At the same time, the mom fell in love with the owner’s son. She was eventually found out and yadda, yadda, yadda, everyone lived happily ever after.

As you can see, this storyline has been rolling around Hollywood for years. It has continued to be used because people continue to be receptive to it. Audiences like this story. The different ways that it has been told have been original enough to keep it interesting. The stylish Santa doing advertising for a department store. The father trying to be a part of the family he was separated from. The football player trying to move past the drama and get back to what he loved, football. There have been a bunch of different stories told through the same storyline that have connected to many different people.

That wasn’t the only part of Santa’s Got Style that felt familiar, though. There was a specific scene near the end of the movie that has been a part of many of these stories, as well as stories that haven’t been about double identities. Well, I guess it is specific to double identity movies, but it was sort of an inversion of a scene that has been in many a romantic comedy or situational comedy stories. Or any other story, for that matter.

There were two big moments that had the same trope involved. Most sitcoms and romcoms use the trope of one person on two dates at the same time in the same place, or close to the same place. Santa’s Got Style inverted that and had Ethan being himself and Santa at the same place at the same time, trying to have nobody notice. The first scene was a party in Ethan’s apartment where Santa was invited. By the way, people knew he wasn’t really Santa. He was Rafe, Ethan’s cousin. Or so Ethan said. Anyway, Rafe and Ethan were both supposed to be at the party, so Ethan had to go upstairs and change into costume to allow Rafe to be there. The other scene, the one where he was found out by the department store’s security officer, was a fashion show that Ethan was supposed to be helping run while Rafe was supposed to walk the catwalk. Each scene was a balancing act for Ethan to try not to get found out.

Now we will go back to My Secret Santa, where the same thing happened. Not the same exact thing, but the idea was the same. There was a party held by the owner of the ski resort that both the main character and her Santa were invited to. She had to keep excusing herself to the washroom to switch into or out of costume. That was, until someone ran into the party and said her daughter had been injured on the ski hill. She dropped her entire second identity at that moment because her daughter came first.

Mrs. Doubtfire managed to merge the two opposing tropes into one double trope. The main character was invited to his ex-wife’s birthday party as Mrs. Doubtfire. At the same time, he was invited to a meeting at the same restaurant, as himself, with the CEO of a television station about a new children’s show. He had to switch in and out of costume while also participating in both dinner reservations. Double identity movies always tend to have the in and out of costume scene, an inversion of the two dates at once trope.

As you can see, this trope has been used time and time again in stories where a character had a second identity. What better way to ratchet up the tension than to have the character need to be both personas at the same time? The character will get anxious. The audience will get anxious. It will make the movie more suspenseful and, hopefully, more entertaining.

This is how the cinematic language works. When a person speaks, there are certain words that fit with each other in ways that other words don’t. They’re just more satisfying when spoken together than when other words are in their place. That’s the same with certain scenes in certain movies. A story arc about someone with a double identity always feels better when they’re at risk of being exposed. That conflict drives things forward or brings things to a conclusion.

Santa’s Got Style wasn’t the best movie. It wasn’t the most entertaining movie. But, when it came to the script, it used a familiar story and the tropes within to tell what could have been a compelling tale in better hands. It was really only the set design that didn’t quite work. The movie had no reason to look as cheap as it did. One bad chapter does not make a bad book.

There are many bits and pieces to the cinematic language. The story structure and the tropes that come with it are only one part of the whole. They give the backbone for the movie, but all the decoration still needs to be put around them. The performances, the set design, the shots, the colour palette, the sound editing… There are many parts that work together to make the language more beautiful than it has any right to be.

That’s the beauty of film as an entertainment medium. The basic language of cinema is only the starting point. Like many languages, there are ways you can add flourishes. You can spruce things up to make them look, feel, and sound better. The stories and the tropes are only the starting point. It’s what happens with them that makes the movie magic.

Now for a few quick notes to close this post out:

• The only returning actor in Santa’s Got Style was Lanette Ware, who had a role in The Christmas Consultant.
• Have you seen Santa’s Got Style? What are your thoughts on the double identity story? Let me know in the comments or find me on Threads or Bluesky.
• Threads, Bluesky, and the comments are great places to suggest movies for me to watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.
• Okay, a quick look forward. I got this post done a lot quicker than I expected, thanks to a snow day. I’ve already got another Christmas post lined up. I watched A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, a movie from the same people behind A Karate Christmas Miracle. I had to check out the other one. You know? Anyway, yeah, that’ll hopefully drop next week. See you then.