Office Romance (2026)

Every year, people seem to act like there’s a new worst movie ever made. Something that was an affront on their senses. Something that never should have been made because of how downright awful it was. Many times, that’s an unfair claim. They saw something they didn’t like and instantly called it the worst because they didn’t like it.

I want to take this post to break down different reasons that people have for exaggerating how bad they think something is. Now, this is coming from a place of my own opinion. Of course it is. And the claims that people make about what might be one of the worst movies they have ever seen are also their opinion. The thing is, there are so many variables to why someone could feel a certain way about something. There are so many experiences that can lead to them thinking a specific thing. Those influences and variables for sure affect what they think. They can lead to things being treated as worse than they truly are.

One of the bigger examples this year of people claiming a movie to be one of the worst was the release of Office Romance. Yes, this is going to be a sort of in defence of Office Romance post. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t anything special. The movie was fine. But it was far from the worst and I want to break down things that I think may have steered people into thinking the movie was worse than what it probably was.

For those who don’t know, Office Romance was a romantic comedy about Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez), the CEO of an airline. She fell in love with her new in-house lawyer, Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein). Their whirlwind romance was against company policy, so they tried to keep it a secret. As time went on, however, that became tough to do.

Office Romance was a movie that got a lot of hate almost as soon as it came out. I think that I can point to two reasons that hate came about. Each reason involved a bias that people had as they headed into it. One was the most basic of reasons. Audiences, particularly the people who want to be taken seriously as a voice within the film-fan sphere, like to treat Netflix as a less-than movie outlet. The second reason was that people had preconceived notions of Brett Goldstein based on their love of his work in Ted Lasso and Shrinking. Those two elements fed into their expectations for Office Romance. The movie had no chance.

Let me start with the Netflix of it all. This might take a while. There are a few things that need to be unpacked when it comes to the streaming giant. They might not all seem related at first, but as I go on with my ranting and rambling, you should come to understand what I’m getting at. I sometimes overexplain myself to the point of there being no possible way for anyone reading to misunderstand what I’m saying. That will likely be what happens here because there are a lot of little bits and pieces of Netflix information that must come together to create the whole picture.

Netflix began as a DVD rental service in 1998. The idea was that people could subscribe and get DVD rentals mailed to them. Did someone want to watch Finding Nemo? Netflix would ship it to them. When they were done watching, they could ship it right back. That was the entire model, a model that companies like Blockbuster and Redbox also used. Redbox did it a little differently, though, with vending machines at grocery stores and post offices and places like that.

By 2007, streaming video had become a mainstay on the internet. YouTube was around, and other video services had been available prior to that. Netflix decided to get into the streaming video game. Not only would they mail DVDs, but people could log into their website and watch movies directly through their streamed videos. They soon went international, spreading their streaming services worldwide.

House of Cards dropped in 2013, marking Netflix’s first foray into original content. Well, their first solo foray. Lilyhammer, a co-production with a Norwegian network had shown up a year earlier. This would pave the way for many more original movies and television shows that would come in the years following. Some of them were nominated for awards. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Mindhunter, and Stranger Things were nominated for Emmy awards, with a few wins tossed in there. Roma, The Power of the Dog, and Emilia Perez were nominated for, and in some cases won, Oscars. They made some well-respected original programming.

All the while, there were people hating on the Netflix model. These award-nominated and award-winning projects were the outliers to these people. It was easy to see why. There seemed to be a different way of producing the projects that weren’t meant to strive for awards. The popcorn products. The stuff that would become known as content, rather than movies or television. Even though Netflix was still producing some respectable things, people were getting bogged down in the stuff they didn’t like.

Early on in Netflix’s foray into original programming, it became apparent that the company was using user data to determine what movies and tv shows they should make. Let’s go back to House of Cards for a moment. Netflix had years of data up to that point of what people were watching. They liked political thrillers, including the British show that House of Cards was adapted from. When they watched David Fincher movies, they usually watched them the whole way through. A popular actor (remember this was before the whole sexual abuse stuff came to light) was Kevin Spacey. Netflix took these three pieces of data they collected and put them together. They made a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey that was produced by David Fincher, who would direct a couple episodes. That data led to a big hit. Netflix struck gold.

They continued their data driven productions by bringing Happy Madison into the fold. You see, Adam Sandler movies were some of the most rewatched content on Netflix. He was one of the biggest box office draws. If they could bring him and his production company into their streaming service, exclusively, they could draw big numbers. They did both. Adam Sandler signed a contract to produce four movies for the company, starting in 2014. He has since extended that contract multiple times.

It’s easy to see why people might dislike Netflix for this kind of production model. It feels like they don’t care about the artistry of movies. There was no real focus on the story. They simply thought of movies and television as interchangeable pieces. Take the pieces from one thing. Put them with the pieces of another thing. Now you have a new thing that feels close enough to the old thing that the same people who liked the old thing will like the new thing. Take a look at their true crime documentaries. They’ve been using the same formula for a long time, to the point that the formula became a trend on TikTok this year.

I don’t entirely stand by this line of thinking when it comes to Netflix. Sure, they’re definitely using our watching habits to determine what gets made and who stars in it. But so do the major Hollywood studios. They just don’t use the same data-driven technology to make those decisions. Studios go by box office when they try to figure out the who, the what, and the why of their movies. Die Hard was popular, so they made Die Hard clones with any budding star. Steven Seagal in Under Siege. Keanu Reeves in Speed. Skyscraper with Anna Nicole Smith. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit it big, Warner Brothers tried to do the same thing with DC properties. They’re still trying, but with a reboot. Universal tried to do the Dark Universe. All studios are built on finding trends and finding popular stars and beating that dead horse until the person beating it has died of old age.

Moving on from the data-driven side of the Netflix argument, it’s time to talk about the look of their movies. Somewhere over the past fifteen or twenty years, lighting in movies has greatly changed. Many people attribute that to Netflix. There’s a certain look that they call the Netflix look. Bright light, soft contrast. That’s it. Everyone’s faces must be bright and there must be light on all sides. That lack of care in the lighting has led to people considering it the Netflix look. And it’s hard to argue with it. But that’s also the way that most movies have gone, recently. Television, too. The lighting used to help tell the story. Now it simply illuminates everything, to the detriment of the visual aesthetic.

I don’t one hundred percent believe that this look was Netflix’s fault. Sure, they kind of perfected it and stood out for the way they used it so constantly in their projects. I want to take you back a few years before Netflix got into original content, though. Let’s go back to 2006, the year that YouTube was made public on the world wide web. You see, from the beginning, there were a few types of videos that would show up on YouTube. There was comedy, whether that be sketch or standup. There were home videos. There were copyright-infringement clips from movies and TV. Then there were the people who wanted to talk into the camera and see if anyone out there was listening to them.

It was these people, the commentary community, that I think ruined lighting for the rest of us. The reaction people, the tutorial people, the review people. People who hadn’t been versed in the way of filmmaking and had simply sat down at their computer with a camera and started talking. Something that became popular in this community was the ring light. They would place it around their camera, and it would provide a uniform lighting across their face.

What does this have to do with Netflix? Ring lights first started getting popular on YouTube in the early 2010s within the beauty subsect of the commentary community. Light everywhere on the face made the makeup easier to see for tutorials and that sort of thing. It soon started to take off within the rest of the community before reaching worldwide popularity during the Covid lockdowns. People on Zoom meetings needed light and ring lights were a good option. This impacted movies and television in two major ways. One, a generation was growing up on seeing things lit that way and it became normalized for them. Two, the studios saw that ring lights were popular and that people were gladly watching things lit by ring lights, then decided to emulate that visual.

So, yeah, Netflix’s data-driven model for making movies struck again. Especially during the Covid era. They saw that people were consuming content that had that style of lighting. It was an acceptable style. They used that style and people kept watching. They kept using that style. It was a feedback loop. When there’s enough saturation of that style of lighting on their streaming platform, and people watch things with that style of lighting because there are so many things lit that way, they’ll make more because they’re being watched. It’s like with clothing. If there’s only a yellow option for a rain jacket, it will be the most popular option because it’s the only option. If there were equal amounts of yellow and black produced, the data would probably show that the black was more popular. The ring lighting emulation remained more popular because there was more of it available on Netflix, not because it was actually the preferred visual style.

Enough rambling about that part, though. I still have one other thing about people hating Netflix that I need to get to. That is the way they market their projects. Netflix has produced so many things over the thirteen years since House of Cards that there’s no way anyone could know or see all of them. The problem is that Netflix only really puts effort into promoting a handful of projects a year. The rest of them get thrown up on the streamer without any effort put into a marketing push. There have been shows that made it to three or four seasons on Netflix that I’d never heard of before that. I know that’s an anecdote, but I think it’s a fair one to put in there. The one that comes to mind is On My Block. I had never heard of that until the third season premiered. Netflix just never promoted it.

This could also bleed into the idea that Netflix cancels their shows too early. There have been numerous good television shows on Netflix that got cancelled after a season or two due to low viewership. In many cases, Netflix hadn’t promoted those shows, so the shows had no chance of getting off the ground. I think back to Everything Sucks!, a coming-of-age story that got a single season, though it received mostly positive reviews. It never really got the marketing push it deserved, since it came out the same month as Altered Carbon, the reboot of Queer Eye, and The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale, all of which I remember getting the promotion at the time. It essentially got buried on Netflix, which is the problem with Netflix making so much content.

Let’s put all of this together now. The Netflix half of the hate that gets thrown onto Office Romance. People didn’t hate Office Romance. They hated what it stood for. They had preconceived notions of Netflix doing some bad things. Netflix was at the forefront of using data to make their movies, which disgusted people in a way. Netflix pushed the idea of lighting looking very muted, uniform, and bland. Netflix would promote movies and television shows that fit within their idea of what people wanted, based on data, and bury their better content under the other millions of movies and shows they released. It wasn’t that people truly hated Office Romance. It’s that it embodied what they hated about Netflix and their rage bubbled to the surface when they watched it.

So that’s the first part of why I think Office Romance got more hate than it deserved. It wasn’t so much the quality of the movie, as it was the Netflix of it all. People are getting tired of what Netflix stands for. They’re getting tired of the poor quality of the popular Netflix projects. Yet, Hallmark could have put out this movie exactly as it was and people would eat it up. That’s why I think it was a Netflix problem.

Okay, not entirely a Netflix problem. I still need to get to the Brett Goldstein portion of this post. Yeah, it feels like I’ve already written an entire post. There’s a little more to go before I can wrap it up. Actually, there’s a lot to go. I have to go over why Brett Goldstein’s inclusion caused people to dislike Office Romance, and then I need to get into Office Romance, itself, just to tie everything together. I hope you’ve got a snack and a drink because we’re about to dive right back in.

To fully understand the popularity of Brett Goldstein, you need to go back a few years. You need to go back to… Covid. Yeah, we’re going back to the era of our lives where lockdowns happened. That time in our lives when we were all depressed. We were all sad that we had to be separated from our friends, family, and found family. Some of us grew apart. Some of us passed away. It was, as every single corporation shilling out their products online or on TV said, unprecedented times.

There wasn’t much to grasp onto when we were in lockdown mode. We couldn’t go out to the places we wanted. Movies and television shut down production. A few things trickled out here and there, but we all had other things on our minds. Of course, some of the streaming services hit it big. Tiger King hit right when “the world shut down.” On March 11^th, 2020, the NBA shut down due to a Covid outbreak. Most leagues and businesses followed suit. Within two weeks, much of North America would shut down, though many US states reopened quickly after that. People were cut off. That caused that depression and sadness.

Fast forward five months. It’s now August 2020. Apple TV+ premiered a new show starring Jason Sudeikis. It was about an American football coach plucked from his home state of Kansas and placed in the coaching position for an English Premier League team. The owner wanted the team to fail and hired him solely because she thought he wouldn’t be able to hack it. However, his positivity and ability to get the team to open up to their emotions brought the success nobody expected.

Ted Lasso hit at the perfect time. When the world was in such a downer place, it was a beacon of positivity. The main character told his team to believe. The show told the world to believe. The main character was about curiosity, not judgement. The show instilled those ideas into their viewers. Ted Lasso was a show about empathy in a time when people had turned a worldwide pandemic into a political fighting point. It did whatever it could to try and bring people back together, no matter how much they begrudgingly tried to stay apart.

A major part of Ted Lasso’s success was the stellar performances. One that stood out for many and became a quick fan favourite was Brett Goldstein’s performance as Roy Kent, the surly, grumpy, veteran captain of Richmond FC, the main team. He was one of the toughest members of the team to turn to Ted’s style of coaching, but he eventually came around. His rough exterior had a softness on the inside, and people latched onto the character.

I don’t need to go too far in depth to help you understand that Brett Goldstein was a major player in getting people out of their Covid funk. Ted Lasso, the show, was a light in the darkness of 2020. People watched it to feel better about life. When they turned it on, they saw Brett Goldstein’s mug staring back at them. Or, I guess, slightly off to the side of them, since actors try not to stare right down the barrel of the camera unless they’re breaking the fourth wall. There was nostalgia in the show and seeing him brought that nostalgia back, as well.

But it wasn’t simply his performance that elevated him. If it were, then I could be writing about a Hannah Waddingham movie the same way I’m going to be writing about Office Romance by the end of this post. There was more to Brett Goldstein’s involvement in Ted Lasso than his performance. There was more that made people love him and put him on a pedestal. The other element was that he wrote for the show. I don’t mean that he improvised his lines and they gave him a writing credit. I’m sure he improvised some of his lines. However, he was an official writer for the show. He was part of the writer’s room. He was hired as one of the writers before he got the role of Roy Kent. He secretly made an audition tape for the character and was perfectly okay just being a writer if he didn’t get it. But he did get it, and the rest is history.

People who look fondly on that first season of the show, nostalgic because of how it helped them through one of the weightiest times in recent history, could easily associate much of that lightening of the mood to him. He was in front of the camera and helped guide the story behind-the-scenes. He was one of the biggest creative influences over how Ted Lasso became what it was. And what it still is, since the fourth season is currently airing. He also got a couple Emmy awards for his performance, so there’s some prestige to the quality of his work, too.

I should note that I’m writing this from my Canadian perspective. I don’t know how big a deal Brett Goldstein was in the UK prior to being a part of Ted Lasso. I looked over his Wikipedia and saw that he wrote some stuff for Catharine Tate, and that he won a British Independent Film Award. I don’t have the same knowledge of that portion of his career. Nor does it really affect what I’m trying to say here. He became an international celebrity through Ted Lasso.

Brett Goldstein followed up his stellar work on Ted Lasso with another show, produced by Bill Lawrence, the television producer who helped create Ted Lasso and bring it to life. Goldstein teamed up with Lawrence and Jason Segel to create Shrinking. This show was about a group of therapists, their friends, their family, and how everyone, including the therapists, could use a support group. It’s my favourite show. I think it’s better than Ted Lasso, and I know other people who think the same. Not the point, though.

The point is that Brett Goldstein was involved in another great show. He now had a history of making great television that he helped write and shape. He also joined Shrinking as an onscreen performer in the second season. I don’t want to get into what his character’s role was, since I think people should check out the show, but there was some heartbreak to it. Shrinking has been an emotional ride, in a very, very good way. Fuck Parkinson’s.

So, yeah, for the North American audiences, these two shows were what people knew Brett Goldstein for most. They knew him for the quality of writing and performances in each of the shows. They knew him for the nostalgic comfort of Ted Lasso and the cathartic emotion of Shrinking. They knew he wrote good scripts or was at least involved in good scripts. That was the type of mindset audiences had when they saw that he was in a new movie for Netflix. That was the mindset they had when they saw that he wrote that new movie for Netflix.

Before I go on and bring all this baggage together, I should recap everything I’ve gone over so far. It’s been 3700 words since I began typing this post. That’s a lot of stuff to say before even getting to how it all built into the negative reaction to Office Romance. I’ve hinted at it. I’ve sometimes blatantly mentioned things. But I think a quick summary will paint the picture I’ve been working on this entire time. My rambling fingers are really working overtime for this post.

To summarize, I think people have unfairly been hating on the Netflix romantic comedy Office Romance, starring Brett Goldstein and Jennifer Lopez. There were two pieces of baggage that people brought into the movie that led to that train of thought. One, people had preconceived notions about the quality of projects put out on the streaming giant. They don’t like the idea of Netflix movies and, thus, were predisposed to disliking another. Two, people held Brett Goldstein to a very high standard due to his work on the shows Ted Lasso and Shrinking. They weren’t ready for something that might not strive for the same emotional connection those shows provided.

As I alluded to when I first described Office Romance, it was your basic, run-of-the-mill, superficial romantic comedy. It was two coworkers falling in love. One just happened to be the CEO of a multi-million-dollar company and the other was her lawyer. There wasn’t much depth to the characters to dig into. The lawyer had a sister in jail who he was looking out for. The CEO couldn’t get out from the shadow of her father, the founder of the company. It was just enough to make an audience feel for the characters, but not too much that would make the audience lose the romantic comedy of it all.

The baggage that people brought in from Office Romance being a Netflix movie made them immediately decide to tear it down. However, if you took the same movie and slapped Hallmark’s name on it as the production company instead of Netflix, people would fall in love with it. It followed many of the same tropes as a Hallmark romance, only with bigger, more recognizable stars. The down-to-earth British lawyer falling in love with the businesswoman? That screams Hallmark holiday movie, if I ever saw one.

When I look at Office Romance as a bigger-budget version of a Hallmark movie, it passes with flying colours. It told a story on par with any of those. It had jokes that landed well enough to get a small rise out of me. The side characters were interesting. The chemistry worked well enough to keep things chugging along. It was a perfectly fine movie that only got the negativity it got because some people will go out of their way to find reasons to hate on Netflix’s output. Some reasons are fair. I won’t deny that. But the hate for Netflix surely pushed people to come into Office Romance wanting to dislike it.

Then you look at the Brett Goldstein of it all. His two biggest successes were television shows where he and the other writers he worked with had hours upon hours to dive into the characters, their backstories, their emotions, their relationships with everyone around them, and bringing their inner thoughts out. There just isn’t time to do that in a movie. Television and movies are so closely linked, but there are some things that one form does better than the other and vice versa. Sure, if Office Romance was a character piece, that would be a different scenario. It wasn’t. It was your typical romantic comedy. You’re not going to spend the hour and a half of the romantic comedy breaking down the romantic histories of each character and what led them into the relationships they’re currently in. You’re not going to be able to explore the airline, how it was built up, how the main character became the CEO, and her relationship with the previous lawyer. You’re not going to have time to show how the lawyer had been taking care of his sister for a long time, how he made the decision to move close to her prison, and how he got the job at the airline.

I mean, I guess you could get into those things. But you can’t explore all of them or even that many of them in the confines of a romantic comedy movie. You only have an hour and a half, maybe two hours, to tell the entire story. That’s why I think it was a little unfair for people to expect the writing to be on the same level as Brett Goldstein’s other work. It wasn’t intended to be that same character study. If you took Ted Lasso and turned it into a movie, you wouldn’t have time to explore Ted’s panic attacks and divorce, Roy’s relationship with Keely and his coming to terms with retirement, Nate’s ambition and the issues with his father that he projected on Ted, Rebecca’s wanting revenge on her ex-husband and coming to love the team she now owned, Jamie’s turn from cocky star to team player, or fleshing out any of the supporting members of the team (Sam’s restaurant, Colin being gay, Isaac learning to be captain). There wouldn’t be time for that. Things would get trimmed.

It was unfair to expect a… Okay, it’s two hours… It was unfair to expect a two-hour romantic comedy to have the same level of depth and nuance as two three-season shows. Yet, I saw people saying they were shocked that Brett Goldstein would write something like Office Romance. I don’t think they were upset because of the writing as much as they were upset that it was different. People wanted the writing equivalent of type casting. That’s not what they got with Office Romance.

Of course, there was also the cunt scene. I saw that pointed to multiple times as something that people thought was bad writing. I don’t necessarily feel the same way. Did it fit within the movie? Maybe not as much as it could have. It kind of felt like a scene that could be taken out of the movie altogether. It wouldn’t change the movie at all. It simply felt like Brett Goldstein had worked on a stand-up bit and placed it into the movie. Because he’s a comedian.

What do I know, though? I’m just one guy sitting behind the screen of a laptop with his own opinion. I can drone on and on about why I think people came into Office Romance with the wrong mindset. Either they were ready to tear the movie down immediately, thanks to their dislike of Netflix, or they had their expectations set too high, thanks to what they decided Brett Goldstein was as a writer/performer.

I think Office Romance fell somewhere in between the expected hate and the expected high. It was perfectly okay. It wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t a travesty. It was something you could throw on in the background while cleaning or cooking and not have to think too much about. We need movies like that. We need some background noise and entertainment, or else life would be boring. Office Romance filled a necessary role in the world. Not enough people appreciate that.

I think I’ve done enough rambling for one day. Multiple days, actually. This is already 5000 words long. Do you think I wrote that in one day? Ha! I’m not that good of a writer, and absolutely not that good at time management. I can ramble, but even I get tired of my own rambling after a while.

I started this post out by saying that people choose one or two movies a year that they dub to be the worst movie ever made. Rarely do I agree with the movie they decided on. The movies tend to be much better than they were letting on. That’s because people have baggage. They come into movies, television, books, relationships, jobs, and any other odd thing in life with their own experiences. They have been influenced by different things. I wanted to take some time to look at some of this baggage and see how it got us to one of this year’s claims of worst movie. I think I did a decent job of that, even if I got rambly in there.

The last bit of rambling I need to do is this notes section:

• Jackie Sandler played one of the airline employees in Office Romance. She’s been in numerous Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, Sandy Wexler, The Ridiculous 6, and Pixels. That’s a total of six movies. How ridiculous is that?
• A new Sunday “Bad” Movies five-timer was Tony Hale. He was in Office Romance, as well as American Ultra, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, and Yoga Hosers.
• Jennifer Lopez starred in Office Romance. She was also in Anaconda, Money Train, and Gigli.
• Will Sasso had a small role in Office Romance, but that wasn’t the only time he was featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies. He was also in Movie 43, Russell Madness, and Southland Tales.
• Coming in at three movies was Norm Lewis. Not only was he in Office Romance, but he was in Winter’s Tale and Sex and the City 2.
• You know who else made a third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Office Romance? Jeffrey Mowery from The Happening and The Last Airbender.
• Edward Jame Olmos returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Office Romance after first appearing in Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
• Jerome Brooks Jr. has now been in two Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Tracers and Office Romance.
• Finally, the great Amy Sedaris has been in Office Romance and Space Buddies.
• Have you seen Office Romance? What were your thoughts? Do you agree that people came in with expectations, both high and low, that made it easier for them to hate the movie? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, or get a hold of me on Bluesky.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, find me in the comments or on Bluesky to let me know.
• There’s not much different from the last post in terms of what’s coming up. This was a big one to write, and I’ve been focusing on it more than tossing another movie in the bad movie queue. I’ve still got Evil Bong 777 and Big Shark coming up. I don’t know about after that. I guess it depends on when I get those posts done and if I can sneak another horror movie in before October ends. I’ll see you next time for Evil Bong 777.

Fred: The Movie (2010), Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred (2011), and Fred 3: Camp Fred (2012)

The early days of YouTube were really a case of you had to be there to understand. YouTube in the present day is a place to watch videos and find the community that you fit into. YouTube back then was a world of stars. People were elevated beyond niche communities into legitimate fame. In some instances, fortune, too.

For some of the stars, YouTube was a stepping stone to bigger, better things. Bo Burnham’s comedy got big on YouTube, which led to specials, an acting career, and even a chance to direct the very good Eighth Grade. Shane Dawson was a part of a reality show that put him in the director’s chair for the very not good Not Cool. Ryan Higa got to star in a movie I’ve never seen that I’ve only heard bad things about and will likely get around to seeing at some point for this very blog.

Then there was Lucas Cruikshank. He was a little different than the others. Sure, other YouTubers from that time did some sketch stuff. That was a big thing in the early era. Lucas took that to a whole new level. His entire YouTube career was in character as Fred Figglehorn. More people probably know him by his character’s name than his actual name. That’s how big that single YouTube character was.

Lucas Cruikshank eventually got the movie treatment as well. His character, Fred, was picked up by Nickelodeon. They made a trilogy of movies following the character and his exploits. Fred made the jump from computer screens and the smartphones of the time onto… Well, it wasn’t the big screen. They were television movies. So onto bigger screens than what Fred had been on but not as big as the screens could have been.

Fred: The Movie was the perfect encapsulation of YouTube at the time. It was about Fred Figglehorn (Lucas Cruikshank) and his journey across his city as he tried to meet up with his crush, Judy (Pixie Lott). She used to be his neighbour, but her family moved to a different neighbourhood. At the same time, Fred had to avoid his bully, Kevin (Jake Weary). That’s about it for the story. Everything else just built on that stuff.

How did it encapsulate what YouTube was at the time? Well, this was 2010. The people who came to stardom on YouTube were still homing in on what the aesthetic of that streaming platform would be. There was a lot of jump cutting going on. There was a lot of talking to the camera. Those are still things that happen on YouTube, but not in the jarring way they happened back then. Fred: The Movie picked up on that style and brought it into the world of movies.

There were many scenes throughout Fred: The Movie that involved Fred running maniacally around his house screaming at the camera in his obnoxiously high voice. It was the same thing the character would do in his YouTube videos, only now it looked professionally made instead of filmed on a Canon MiniDV. It made much of the movie feel like a high-budget YouTube video instead of a movie. The story took a back seat to the vlogging style of Fred Figglehorn.

Anytime Fred: The Movie got away from that YouTube aesthetic, it turned into a series of sketches. Many of those sketches had some sort of taste of that aesthetic. None of it ever really gelled together. There was the scene where Fred dug a hole into the neighbour’s yard, only for it to be the wrong neighbour. There was the scene where he was buried at the beach. There was the scene where he saw a darker Lucas Cruikshank character on the bus. Kind of a yin and yang scenario. These didn’t build the story or push it forward. They were their own self-contained moments within the thin story being told.

The only scene/sketch I really liked in the entirety of Fred: The Movie was near the end when Fred and his best friend Bertha (Jennette McCurdy) put together a fake party video to try and make all their schoolmates jealous. Fred wasn’t invited to Judy’s party, so he was going to make his own. The best party ever. People would call it great. They would call it the greatest. There wouldn’t be another party as great as Fred’s. They would say that Fred threw the best parties, even though they weren’t there. Anyway, the scene where they made the fake party video felt the most like a movie out of anything in Fred: The Movie. Maybe it was just that I’d been worn down so much that having something like that was just refreshing. Maybe it was actually a good scene. I think it was because the scene felt like it did something for the story instead of being a tangent for Fred to be a goofball. It was the one time that what essentially felt like a sketch had been in integral part of the story being told.

Interestingly enough, the sequels would take a slightly different approach to how they portrayed Fred Figglehorn. Let’s get into Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred. This Halloween-themed Fred film saw Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) go up against his new music teacher, Mr. Delvin (Seth Morris). The teacher had replaced Fred’s favourite teacher and started dating his mom (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). At the same time, Fred was connecting with Talia (Ariel Winter), the sister of Kevin (Jake Weary). I should also mention that Fred’s dad was played by John Cena and Bertha was now played by Daniella Monet.

There were still moments in Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred that saw the titular character breaking the fourth wall to speak to the audience in a flurry of jump cuts. That wasn’t all gone. It was still a movie based on a YouTube character who was known for that style of YouTube video. However, it was pulled back a lot from what Fred: The Movie had done. More focus was placed on the story and letting that play out.

With the focus landing on the story rather than the YouTube of it all, it flourished in a way the previous movie couldn’t. It was no longer beholden to staying true to the original format. It was allowed to grow. Not too much, though. Fred still had to be Fred. He still had to, as he called it in his YouTube videos, “spaz out” at the audience occasionally. But the character was able to grow beyond his own little YouTube bubble. He was forced to be a little less self-centered. Breaking him out of that hosting position allowed for the growth.

Much like with Fred: The Movie, Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred had its best moment when an online video became part of the story. In the climax of the movie, Fred livestreamed himself venturing into his teacher’s house, looking for proof of Mr. Delvin being a vampire. People were watching the video. There were hiccups in the video. It was essentially a found footage horror film being live-streamed to everyone Fred knew. It allowed Fred’s vlogging personality to shine without it feeling the exact same as any old Fred YouTube video.

This growth of the franchise from being a modestly budgeted rehash of Fred videos into movies that felt like movies only continued in Fred 3: Camp Fred. This time, Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) was sent to Camp Iwannapeepee, owned by Floyd Spunkmeyer (Tom Arnold). It was the run-down seeming camp, compared to the pristine rival, Camp Superior, where his bully Kevin (Jake Weary) was staying. Fred didn’t like his camp and tried to figure out what was wrong with it, until a rivalry competition showed him how to find the perfection in imperfection. Yeah, it was a ragtag group of camp underdogs. That’s my kind of movie.

The most interesting thing about Fred 3: Camp Fred was how it ended up being a dissection of the two movies that had come before. That’s not the right word, but dissection works for now. The third movie played with what the first two movies were, before becoming its own thing. It even made some meta commentary along the way. It started with the vlog-like style as Fred talked about going to camp, as he got to camp, and as he suspected there were things going wrong at camp. It became what Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred had been, a movie about Fred trying to stop a monster. However, that was all flipped on its head about halfway through (whoa! A halfway turning point, like a real movie) when Fred allowed himself to start connecting with his campmates and enjoy his time at the less luxurious camp.

After that, Fred 3: Camp Fred felt like its own thing. It became a standard summer camp movie, only with Fred Figglehorn attending the camp. The fourth wall breaks were few, if there were any. The suspicion of monsters was gone. The third entry didn’t even include a climactic online video release. It became a narrative movie where Fred Figglehorn just happened to be a character. It became what the film series should have been from the beginning, a proper film series. Oh, and the meta aspects? The one that most stuck in my mind was Fred in a dream, talking in a normal voice, saying he dreamt that he had an annoying high-pitched voice. This was a movie that set expectations, subverted them, and became something special in a trilogy of not-so-great movies.

I would never try to claim that Fred: The Movie, Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred, or Fred 3: Camp Fred were good movies. None of them were good. But there is something to be said for watching a film series grow with each installment. Watching it begin as one thing and change over time to become something else. Usually, that’s for the worse. In the case of the Fred movies, they got stronger with each outing. The writers learned that when adapting a YouTube personality to film, it would be better to come at it from the perspective of film rather than the perspective of YouTube. The movies didn’t need to be YouTube on a bigger budget. They needed to show what could be done with a YouTube character in another medium.

Fred Figglehorn was one of many YouTube personalities who made their way to the bigger screens. Again, these were television movies, so they weren’t the big screen. They were just bigger than the YouTube screens of the time. Other people like Shane Dawson and Bo Burnham and Ryan Higa also made the jump to movies. Most of them didn’t have success. What worked in one medium didn’t necessarily work in the other. But when they allowed themselves to grow, like the Fred movies grew or like Bo Burnham has always grown, they managed to carve out their own little world in film where some special things could happen.

YouTube isn’t like those early days anymore. At that time, the whole of YouTube was one large community. It was the YouTube community. Things have since gotten much more specific. There are the gamers, the film people, the architecture people, the roller coaster people, the comedy people, the music people, the makeup people, the travel people, and many others. Even within those, there are smaller niches. Do you like puzzle video games, RPGs, shooters, multiplayer games, platformers, or speedrunning? Each of those have their own worlds. We won’t ever see the likes of early YouTube again because so many people stay within their own smaller communities. The stars aren’t as plentiful. YouTube has changed.

Now let’s get to the notes, and I’m sure there will be a lot:

• I’m going to start with a link to Not Cool, since I brought that up in the post.
• There were two people who debuted in Sunday “Bad” Movies this week who appeared in all three Fred movies. They were Lucas Cruikshank and Siobhan Fallon Hogan.
• Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred featured Stephanie Courtney, Alicia Favela, and Pixie Lott.
• Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred and Fred 3: Camp Fred featured Peter Hogan, Carlos Knight, and Daniella Monet.
• The first person to be featured in more than just Fred movies was Frank Welker. He did some work on Fred: The Movie. He was also featured in eight other movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Anaconda, Mortal Kombat, Hudson Hawk, GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, Super Mario Bros., Godzilla, Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins, and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster. That’s a lot of movies.
• John Cena has officially joined the five-timers club. He was in all three Fred movies, and previously showed up in The Marine and 12 Rounds.
• Beverly Polcyn made her fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Fred 3: Camp Fred. Her other three appearances were Date Movie, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, and All About Steve.
• Another fourth appearance in Fred 3: Camp Fred came for Tom Arnold. This recognizable face was also in Exit Wounds, The Stupids, and Golf Punks.
• The final fourth appearance was for Jake Weary. He was in all three Fred movies. He was also in Zombeavers.
• John Gatins was in Norbit before reappearing in Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred.
• You may have noticed Chris Wylde in Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred. He also had a role in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
• Fred: The Movie featured a performance by Eddy Martin, who was previously seen in Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.
• Kirsten Berman was in Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star and Fred: The Movie.
• Do you remember Gary Anthony Williams in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows? He showed up in Fred: The Movie, too.
• The final Fred: The Movie actor to be in another movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies was Franklin Ruehl, who appeared in Balls of Fury.
• Onto Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred, we have Ariel Winter. She was also in Nic and Tristan Go Mega Dega.
• The other Fred 2: Night of the Living Dead actor to mention is Ben Wang, who was in Independence Day: Resurgence. This isn’t the Ben Wang who is becoming a popular actor right now. Different Ben Wang.
• Madison Riley popped up in Fred 3: Camp Fred. She also popped up in Bratz.
• Jack and Jill and Fred 3: Camp Fred each featured Luke Broadlick.
• I promise this will be the final time Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star comes up in this post. It featured Adam Herschman, who was in Fred 3: Camp Fred.
• Philip Albuquerque took a wrong turn from Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster and ended up in Fred 3: Camp Fred.
• Finally, Romel De Silva was in Fred 3: Camp Fred and He’s All That.
• Have you seen any of the Fred movies? What did you think of them? Share your thoughts in the comments or find me on Bluesky and let me know there.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, get a hold of me in the comments or Bluesky and let me know. I’m always open to movies I haven’t seen yet.
• Okay, it’s time to give a quick look at what’s coming up in future posts. I have one more post before I get spooky. Office Romance should be coming up next week or the week after. Then we’ll get to October, where I have a pair of horror movie posts planned. One will be the result of continuing my voyage through the Evil Bong franchise with Evil Bong 777. Following that, I finally got to check out Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark. That seems like a solid spooky season lineup to me. I’ll see you soon for more Sunday “Bad” Movies stuff.

Love on a Leash (2011)

Sunday “Bad” Movies started a long time ago. Nearly fifteen years ago. I’ve seen a whole lot of movies as I ventured my way through this blog. Some were better than others. Some were worse than others. But I don’t think I’ve ever been on a stretch of bad like I’ve been on for the past year. My posting rate has gone down the past few years. Not so much year to year, but there was a point when I stopped posting every week. Yet, somehow, in the reduced number of posts, I’ve managed to up my frequency of bottom tier quality movies.

Let me look at the movies since January 2025. Fast and Furriest might not quite make the lowest tier, but it was close. Amityville: Evil Never Dies was bottom tier based on the sound work, alone. 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus was a poorly made fever dream of religion and Covid. War of the Worlds… Well, that’s a well known bottom tier now. Santa’s Got Style might be one of the worst Hallmark type Christmas movies I’ve ever seen. Twisted By Love is the only movie I’ve seen edit two different takes of the same exact scene into a movie AND have one shot that is two takes with the actors breaking character between while talking to the director. That was all within a twenty-nine movie span. Now I’m going to add one more movie to the bottom tier while we bring the total up to thirty.

Love on a Leash was an odd little movie. Lisa (Jana Camp) was a down on her luck woman who loved the colour green. Prince (Stephen Kramer Glickman and Aneese Khamo) was a man trapped in a golden retriever’s body whose only way back to his human form was to find true love. He found Lisa and wooed her in his dog form and, later, his human-by-night form to try and create a lasting bond.

There are going to be heavy spoilers ahead. Pretty much the entire movie’s story. So be warned.

It didn’t take too long for Love on a Leash to cement itself as a terribly made movie. Right off the bat, the movie had bad sound quality. I’ve covered a few bad movies with terrible sound quality. This didn’t reach the same levels as Amityville: Evil Never Dies, but I’d put it down there with Birdemic: Shock and Terror and A Talking Cat!?!. The sound would completely drop out of the movie when nobody was talking or narrating. There wasn’t even a score to cover up the emptiness. It was a lot of nothing and then voiceover that sounded like it was recorded in an alleyway out back of someone’s fast food job, and dialogue that sounded very flat. It just hit me why. There was no room tone to the sound design. It was only vocal sounds, which made everything feel unnatural.

The next notable thing was how Prince was introduced into Love on a Leash. He was walking around alone in some city park during the absolutely silent opening credits. As soon as he started talking, in voiceover, he asked where the women were. When a dad and son were petting him, he told the dad to lay off because he wasn’t a gay dog. If I had been drinking, I would have spit that drink all over the room. That moment caught me so off guard. This was within the first two minutes of the movie. It was a strong start for the bad moments.

I should also note that Prince wore a collar with a tag on it. Collars with tags tend to have names and home address or some such information on them. Prince walked around the city and park solo wearing this collar. Wearing this tag. Nobody questioned it. People let him walk around without a care in the world. Nobody stopped him. Nobody tried to figure out where he came from. Nobody took him to the local animal shelter. They just let it be none of their business and moved on with their days. Sure, any of those scenarios would have made the story non-existent. Would that have been all that bad, though?

The meet cute moment was twofold. First, Prince found Lisa in a park and stared at her. That was about it. Lisa’s friend ran up and pet him, calling Lisa “America’s last virgin.” He was hooked in from that. But it wasn’t love at first sight. He needed to manipulate Lisa to get her to let him into her life. He dirtied himself up and stalked her to the gas station, hoping that the sight of a dirty dog would make her want to give him a bath. The plan worked. I’m not sure how it worked, but it worked. She took him home and cleaned him off.

Lisa took in this random dog. I’m not entirely sure why she took him in. He was still wearing that collar with the tag that would, most likely, have an address and some contact information on it. Either way, the next step was to come up with a name. She settled on Prince, even though the dog kept saying his name was Alvin Flang. It didn’t take him long to drop that name for Prince, though. There was one scene of Prince complaining about the name. When he became human later in the movie, he never once brought up Alvin Flang.

Another thing the dog brought up early in the movie was Lisa’s obsession with the colour green. It was almost like someone had used a One Wish Willow on her that would make her like green more than anything else in the world. Walls? Green. Every piece of clothing she had? Green. Her car? Green. Everything had to be green. Prince called it out early and Lisa somehow understood what he was saying, even though he was a dog at the time who could only bark at her. This was also right around the time she asked what Prince was looking at and, in his best ten-year-old speech, he said “Nothing much” while looking directly at her. Yeah, there were a lot of odd moments in the first twenty minutes of Love on a Leash.

While this coerced adoption was happening, Lisa had a bunch of problems going on at work. She had customers who were rude to her because she dared suggest that something that didn’t fit a customer might not be the right size for that customer. She had a coworker she went on a date with who was revealed to be a gay man looking for someone to marry him as a beard to protect his family’s honour. And then she had an abusive boss who berated her at work, before coming over to her house to try and rape her. She lost her job for not letting him. She was better off without that job anyway.

Let’s get back to the main story, the budding romance between Prince and Lisa. Yes, a romance between a woman and a dog. I brought that up earlier. I should give a little more context that will make you question things even more. When Prince was at the park during the opening credits, he visited the corner of a pond where there was some sort of magic voice. It told him that the only way to become human again was to find true love with a human woman. Well, now he had worked his way into Lisa’s home. He went back to the pond. The voice said he was doing it for selfish reasons, rather than actually loving with Lisa. It was true. But, somewhere along the way, the pond voice granted him the ability to be human when sunlight wasn’t on him. Something like that. The rules had some blurred boundaries later.

Now there was a lady in love with a reverse werewolf, only the wolf side of him was a docile golden retriever. This allowed for one of the funniest romance scenes I’ve ever witnessed. In his human form, where he was kind of a buff-looking Will Forte type, they went to the bedroom. They did a couple kissy-kissy things before the lights went out. They faded back up in the daylight. Lisa woke up and rolled over. BOOM! She was sleeping with a dog. She had sex with a dog. She screamed. I laughed.

Right about now (the funk soul brother) was a chunk of the movie that didn’t really have too much memorable stuff going on. Prince had a job as a dog actor and could somehow make money from it that Lisa didn’t know about. I’m not entirely sure how that worked. No studio head is going to just give money to a dog. Yet, somehow, Prince had a fat stack of cash from his gigs. I doubt he was sneaking out to the studio in the middle of the night to pick up the money, when the offices were probably closed anyway. There was also a dinner that Prince went to so he could meet Lisa’s relatives. And Lisa’s friend stopped being friends with her because she hadn’t been told about Lisa’s new boyfriend. Just a few little bits and pieces that didn’t need a whole lot of focus.

I want to get to the pool scene, though. We have this scene where Lisa went to the house of a potential new boss for a barbecue and pool party sort of thing. Maybe not all that, but they ate food next to a pool. It was the middle of the day. Lisa needed to show her stable relationship to this almost boss for some reason. She convinced Prince to accompany her, even though we all knew it would be a bad idea. By we, I mean the characters and anyone fortunate enough to watch Love on a Leash. It was an overcast day. What could go wrong? They got to the party. They had some food. They had a good time. Lisa stepped away for a moment. In that moment, the clouds went away and Prince turned into a dog. You know, daylight and all that. People fell in the pool, there was a rescue, Lisa was embarrassed. Not a good time.

About two scenes later, Prince realized he was actually in love with Lisa. On his way to confess his true feelings, he was struck by a car and killed. In dog form. With a bunch of the worst looking fake blood matted into his fur. Lisa stayed single forever. Okay, not forever. There was still one more scene where an old Lisa was greeted at her door by a resurrected Prince, in human form, and they were able to rekindle their romance. This time it wasn’t a romance between species. It was a romance between generations.

Love on a Leash ended on a nearly two-minute silent scene of Lisa and Prince kissing after being married. I would say while the credits rolled, but there was a long chunk of this silent scene where there were no credits at all. It was one of the most awkward endings to a movie that was so awkwardly put together.

The story in Love on a Leash was bonkers. The sound quality was atrocious. The acting, especially in the voice-over dog talk portions, was pretty darn bad. There was still something about it that spoke to me. Even with all the bad, it took great strides to become something memorable, something entertaining, something special. Sure, it was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while. Not THE worst. But among the worst. I still had a bunch to talk about just by sharing how ridiculous it was.

That’s the special thing about Sunday “Bad” Movies, really. The overall quality might not be the best. The word bad is in the title of the blog. That should give you an idea of the level of quality we’re talking about here. Bad movies can still manage to entertain as much as the good. Sometimes even more. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the point of my writing about all these movies. Every movie deserves a chance. When you only watch what people think are good movies, you can truly miss out on some special experiences.

Now it’s time for a few notes about Love on a Leash:

• I mentioned a few movies during this post. They were Fast and Furriest, Amityville: Evil Never Dies, 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus, War of the Worlds, Santa’s Got Style, Twisted by Love, A Talking Cat!?!, and Birdemic: Shock and Terror.
• The only actor from Love on a Leash to appear in another movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies was Davis Choh, who was in Zombie Strippers!.
• Have you seen Love on a Leash? What did you think of it? Share your thoughts in the comments or find me on Bluesky.
• You can use Bluesky and the comments to let me know what movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m always open to being told about movies I might not know about already.
• Here’s a quick look at what’s coming up soon for Sunday “Bad” Movies. The next post, which will hopefully be sooner (I had a busy past couple weeks, so this one kept getting pushed back), will be about the three Fred movies. You know, the television film trilogy based on the early YouTube star. After that, the plan is to take a look at Office Romance. Then, based on it being mid-August now, I’ll probably start taking a look at a couple movies for spooky season. I’ll let you know soon, and I hope to see you soon for the next post.

Screamboat (2025) and How the Producers of Terrifier 2 and 3 Used Disney Properties

A year or so ago, I wrote about a movie called Mouseboat Massacre. It led me into the topic of the public domain and how movies were being made based on intellectual properties that had run their course in the world of copyright. A few months before that, I wrote about a movie called Stream, which was from the production company behind the Terrifier sequels. Well, I’ve gotten to the point in my bad movie watching where I’ve checked out the movie that was the perfect intersection of those two.

Yeah, that’s right. The people behind the Terrifier movies and Stream made a movie based on an intellectual property that recently made its way into the public domain. Fuzz on the Lens Productions is the company. I might as well name the company behind the movies. They took Steamboat Willie and turned him into a horror villain, just like Mouseboat Massacre. However, they did it in a different way.

Screamboat was about a bunch of people on the Staten Island Ferry who were hunted down by an evil mouse (David Howard Thornton). That’s about it to the story. Selena (Allison Pittel) was a bartender trying to get to the ferry while avoiding a birthday party she served earlier that night. Pete (Jesse Posey) was a deckhand who helped her. Cindi (Kailey Hyman), Ariana (Savannah Whitten), Bella (Stephanie Bates), Jazzy (Poonam Basu), and Rory (Allie Seibold) were the birthday partiers. They were trapped on the boat together and had to try to team up to escape.

The only similarities between Screamboat and Mouseboat Massacre were that they were horror movies and they used the recently public domain Steamboat Willie animated short as the inspiration for the terrifying things that happened. Other than that, they were two completely different horror movies. One of them was a serious look at drug addiction, withdrawal, and support systems. The other was an ultra-violent horror romp filled with love for the Disney brand.

That love of Disney is what I want to get into with Screamboat. It did everything it could, within the confines of a horror movie based on Steamboat Willie, to pay tribute to Disney as a company. That was a little tough to do, when they were only working with elements of Mickey Mouse. See, the only bit of Mickey that was in the public domain at the time they released the movie was Steamboat Willie. The classic Mickey design hasn’t made it to the public yet. No gloves, no red pants, and a different facial shape. Same with the version of Minne that we know now. Many of the animated Disney feature-length movies so many of us grew up on haven’t made it to the public domain yet. It’s the same reason Winnie-the-Pooh can be used by anyone, but the classic Disney red t-shirt look can’t. Only certain elements have come out of copyright.

Screamboat was put in an interesting place. They could do a straight horror version of Steamboat Willie. That’s what they had the rights to. They would be free to do whatever they wanted with that version of the character as long as they didn’t impose upon any other elements that were still protected under copyright law. Or they could go all in on Disney, as long as they were very careful with their workarounds. That was the route they chose to go.

Take the birthday partying women, for example. They were each based on a Disney princess. Their names and the colour of their birthday dresses were references without being direct copies, to skirt the copyright issues. Cyndi instead of Cinderella. Bella instead of Belle. Jazzy instead of Jasmine. Rory instead of Aurora. Ariana instead of Ariel. The name changes were enough that they were different, but entirely recognizable. Enough to avoid copyright infringement, not enough that audiences wouldn’t catch on. They even wore colours associated with those characters. Pete, the deckhand, was named after a Steamboat Willie character, which was fine because Steamboat Willie was in the public domain.

In a less copyright-bound situation, Screamboat also had their own version of Minnie Mouse. She wasn’t named, but there was a romantic backstory for Steamboat Willie that involved a missing love interest. Selena dressed up as the mate at one point to try and use Willie’s emotions against him. The character of Minnie Mouse had appeared in Steamboat Willie, which meant that her likeness could be used because it was now in the public domain. Her name, however, was still under trademark by Disney. Much like with Mickey, this meant that their names could not be used. Hence why neither of them was named in Screamboat.

It was crafty little workarounds like changing names that helped Screamboat succeed in using the now public domain Steamboat Willie characters. As long as they weren’t naming the Disney-created characters, they could use the characters all they wanted. At least, they could use these older versions. Any versions of Mickey and Minnie that originated after the release of Steamboat Willie, such as Minnie having a bow instead of a clapper girl hat, were still off limits.

There were pieces of dialogue throughout Screamboat that also showed that the filmmakers cared more about Disney than using it as a cheap cashgrab. Not that they weren’t trying to make some money off Steamboat Willie hitting the public domain. At one point, someone said “Let it go” which was a clear reference to Frozen. There were other moments like that, too, which I just can’t remember at the moment I’m writing this.

The final element that I believe showed that the people who made Screamboat liked Disney was the fact that they kept the mouse small. He might not have been as small as your average mouse. He was maybe a foot tall. But he wasn’t a human-sized mouse terrorizing people. He was like a yappy little dog that would usually be all bark and no bite, only he was all bite and no bark. It was nice to see him truer to real size than, say, the Hundred-Acre Wood characters in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Not every horror murderer needs to be the size of an average person. This one wasn’t.

Screamboat wasn’t a movie that was going to blow anyone’s minds with filmmaking quality and expertise. It was a schlocky horror movie based on one of the earliest popular outings of Disney’s most famous character. However, there was enough care put into it to elevate it above many of the other movies within this realm of public domain children’s characters turned into horrific nightmares.

The three elements I listed above showed that the people behind Screamboat cared about what they were making. They cared about the source material almost as much as they cared about the quick buck they were hoping to make off the lapsed copyright. They included references to characters from throughout the history of Disney’s animated catalogue. They pulled pieces of dialogue from those movies and used them in their own ways. And, most importantly, they stayed true to Mickey in terms of his size and his love of Minnie. Sure, there was a lot of violence along the way. But, in the end, it was a violent love letter to the cartoons we all grew up watching and loving.

Movies like Screamboat are only one of the reasons I write these Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Even in a world where the writing might not be great, the acting might be even worse, and the intentions might be some easy money, there can still be heart to the projects. Putting effort into something can go a long way into making it more enjoyable and more notable than it otherwise would be. That’s art, man. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be able to move you in some way.

These notes won’t be moving you in any way, I think:

• I mentioned Stream and Mouseboat Massacre in this post.
• Screamboat featured two actors who were in both Sharknado 2: The Second One and Stream. They were Michael Leavy and Steven Della Salla.
• Allyson Sereboff returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Screamboat, after first appearing in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.
• Brian Quinn made a cameo in Screamboat. He was previously seen in Vulgar.
• Yoga Hosers and Screamboat each featured Tyler Posey.
• Finally, four actors from Stream made their second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Screamboat. They were Gilbrando Acevedo, Allison Pittel, Charles Edwin Powell, and David Howard Thornton.
• Have you seen Screamboat? What did you think of it? Have you seen any of the horror movies based on children’s characters? Let me know your thoughts on this stuff in the comments. Or you could hit me up on Bluesky.
• The comments and Bluesky are also good places to suggest movies for me to watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Let me know what I should be checking out.
• Now it’s time to take a quick look at what’s coming up soon. The next post will be about a movie called Love on a Leash. Then I’ll take a look at the three Fred movies. I’m not sure what will be after those. I have a few movies in mind. I still need to get those two posts written. And some other stuff I’m working on. That’s what you have to look forward to, though. Love on a Leash and the Fred trilogy. See you soon for those posts.