Big Shark (2023) and a Story in Five Acts

This is a story in five acts. Shakespearean, you might say. Except I’m no Shakespeare when it comes to writing. I’m me and that will have to do. That will have to be enough. That’s what you’re getting. Buckle in, this is going to be a long ride.

Act I: The Room

Let’s start in 2003. Ontario high schools abolished that grade 13, the Ontario Academic Credit. They took it away the year I was going into high school, so I only had to stick around for four years. I didn’t. I did a fifth. A victory lap. My own grade 13 after I already graduated. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I still don’t, really. Do I want to work on movies? Sure. Do I want to write stuff like this? Sure. Do I like my retail jobs that I keep moving up in? Most of the time, yeah. Do I have a plan for my life? Not at all.

Move forward to 2008 or 2009. It was either right before or right after the Christmas holidays. We had to apply to post-secondary schools. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went with what people thought I should do. I applied to a handful of schools for engineering. “There’s big money in engineering,” my dad would say. “You could be an engineer,” my mom would say. I would essentially flunk out of engineering school three years later. Well, I got the option to flunk out or drop out, and I chose to drop out because it was on my own terms. Same thing, though. Engineering wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it showed.

Those three years of my life were an experience I’ll always cherish, though. I made some good friends during that time of my life. I’m still in contact with these friends. We studied together. We lived together. We still find a few times a year to all get together and hang out, playing board games and catching up on what we’ve missed in each others’ lives. It wasn’t always that way. When I dropped out, I kind of disappeared. I came back into the group when my best friend of the group got married and I’ve been a part of it again since.

One of the things that came out of that group, and something that partially inspired this blog, was a love of bad movies. I kind of always loved movies, good and bad, but it was a tradition within our group to check out bad movies. It still is, sometimes. In recent years, I’ve seen Champagne and Bullets, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and Cats with some of the guys who lived a little closer. During the school years, the best friend who got married would, maybe once a month, grab an ice cream cake and pick a couple bad movies to watch on a Friday night, after a week of stress-filled engineering school shenanigans. Things like Titanic 2 and Sharktopus. This was the same friend who offered to buy my end of the year East Side Mario’s meal if I double featured the first two Human Centipede movies with him. Yeah, this era of my life was very much a fostering time for my love of bad movies.

There was one other friend in that group who was into bad movies, as well. He messaged me one night to tell me about one of the movies he found on the school’s underground file-sharing program. Yeah, a bunch of broke university students at a school known for engineering and software had a full-on pirating file-sharing program at that time. Most schools probably have something like that, actually, because students don’t normally have money to pay for luxuries like entertainment on a regular basis. This friend pointed me in the direction of a specific file on the program. The Room.

I downloaded the movie, headed home for the holidays, and watched it on my own. Maybe that wasn’t the best choice for a first-time watch of The Room. It’s not all that exciting of a movie. It’s kind of boring on a first watch, really. Unless you’re checking it out with other people. Then you can all point out the crazy stuff going on. The spoons. The overacting. The dialogue. The greenscreen for the roof. The lack of a mag in Chris R’s gun. Johnny humping the red dress during his breakdown. Mike’s face during the blowjob and chocolate scene. Replacing Peter halfway through. All the stuff that made it so fun to watch on subsequent viewings. You don’t really get that the first time round.

Once I got back to school, I talked to him about the movie. Our entire group of friends became interested in the mystery that was and is Tommy Wiseau. There was a song about The Room on YouTube about the room that we all knew the lyrics of. Tommy Wiseau had starred in a short film called The House That Drips Blood on Alex that we all watched. The Room and Tommy Wiseau were as much a part of our friend group as any of us were.

There were two theaters downtown in our university’s town that were owned by the same people. One of them was kind of a second-run theater of popular movies. I saw District 9 there. The other one was more of the arthouse kind of theater. One time, they played The Room. We all went to see it. One guy brought a football. I brought spoons. Every time a picture of a spoon appeared on screen, people would throw spoons. I kept hitting the same person in the back of the head. I felt bad, but it was a great time seeing The Room with a group of people in the theater.

I’ve seen The Room a few times since. I think I’m up to maybe eight times checking it out. Some viewings are better than others. I’ve seen it in theaters twice, now. Both of those were fun times. I might watch it again soon, since all the Tommy Wiseau stuff made its way to Tubi. Who knows what the future will bring with my relationship with The Room. The fourteen-year-old about to start high school, hopeful for his future, had no idea the movie even existed. It took that three-year stop in engineering school to meet the movie and fall in love.

Act II: The Disaster Artist

The year is 2013. I’ve been out of school for a year, now. I dropped out of engineering school when my grades weren’t enough to land me a paying co-op job and they wanted to push me back beyond the limit of my program. Things might have worked out if I had been willing to take an unpaid internship, but I had like fifteen dollars in my bank account when I finished my last semester. I needed the money. Plus, I wasn’t really into engineering.

I was now working in the Niagara Falls tourist industry. You know all those tourist trap attractions that take too much of your money while giving too little entertainment? Yeah, I was in one of those. I was the guy taking the money. It ain’t much, but it also wasn’t really honest work. Sometimes we had to lie and cheat to get people in the door. Probably the same kind of stuff Tommy Wiseau had to do to get his six million dollars for The Room. See, I can tie it back in.

I had been writing Sunday “Bad” Movies for nearly a year. One of the posts had been about The Room. It was never going to be a long time before I wrote about one of my favourite bad movies. The perfect opportunity had risen to write about it again for the blog. A book was coming out. Greg Sestero co-wrote a memoir about the time in his life when he met Tommy Wiseau and made The Room. It was called The Disaster Artist.

This was a book I couldn’t pass up on. I pre-ordered that sucker so fast that it was like I was breaking Usain Bolt’s records. Obviously, I wasn’t. I worked in a museum where his record was displayed. With a spelling error. I wasn’t THAT fast. I was quick on that pre-order, though. And since it was the off-season at work, I had a lot of free time to read books. That one was a very quick read. Once I finished the book, I wrote about it as a bonus post for Sunday “Bad” Movies. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to read the book because I was interested. But it wasn’t a bad side-effect.

There was a lot of insight to be had from reading The Disaster Artist. It wasn’t only about the making of the infamous bad movie. It was about the relationship between Greg and Tommy. How they came to know each other. Why they were the way they were. What their roles were. How The Room turned out the way it did. Who Tommy was, while keeping the mystery alive. My love of The Room was still going strong, in the new era of my life.

Act III: The Disaster Artist, Part II

Fast forward to 2017. I decided to go back to school in 2016, at the age of 26. I was now in my second year. I had the friends I made in this school, all of whom were years younger than me. That happens when you restart your education in your mid-20s. You end up in a local college film school with a bunch of people who are mostly fresh out of high school. This was the year when I was 27 and all my college friends were between 19 and 23.

This being a film course with a bunch of film students, I wasn’t the only person familiar with The Room. It had made its rounds by this point. It was nearly a decade since I had first seen it. I had seen it multiple times since then. I had written about it for Sunday “Bad” Movies back in 2013. The other 2013 event around The Room was the release of The Disaster Artist. In 2017, a film adaptation of the book was coming out.

Let me give you a little context about why I was excited about that movie before bringing it back around to being in film school. Yes, I loved The Room. Yes, I had read the book. Those two things were already enough, but I was also excited about who was involved in the movie. Put the James Franco of it all behind us right now. This was still a year or two before the #MeToo movement that would bring his predatorial nature to the forefront. The rest of the cast was filled with people I knew from the comedy scene around that time. Particularly, the comedy podcast scene.

Back when I was in university for engineering, I had started listening to Comedy Bang! Bang! and a few of the podcasts that were associated with it. The podcasts that had crossover because so many people within the comedy scene at that time were friends. When you get beyond James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, and Alison Brie, the rest of the cast list is filled with crazy comedy people. The entire hosting team of How Did This Get Made? (Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas) were in there. Ari Graynor and Andrew Santino, both from the forgotten show I’m Dying Up Here, played some of the memorable actors from The Room. Megan Mullally, Nathan Fielder, Hannibal Burress, Bob Odenkirk, Judd Apatow, Ike Barinholtz, Keegan-Michael Key, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Randall Park, Casey Wilson, and Lizzy Kaplan were all in there, too. That was a cast I was going to like, based on what I had been listening to and watching for years. Yeah, I was excited.

Some of my friends were excited, too. I don’t think they had all seen The Room, but they at least knew about The Room. They knew about Tommy Wiseau. I think we were all planning on seeing the film adaptation of the book about the making of a different movie. But there was one more interesting wrinkle that led to a bunch of us seeing it together.

There was an arthouse theater the next city over from where we went to school. That theater was going above and beyond with the release of The Disaster Artist. They were doing a double feature. First, they would play The Room, and then they would play The Disaster Artist. It didn’t take much to convince my friends that we should do the double feature. We piled into either just my car or my car and another car and headed down to the theater to see both movies.

I don’t have too much to say about the actual double feature. Were there spoons? Of course there were spoons. There’s not going to be a screening of The Room without people bringing spoons to toss during those moments. Was there a football? I think one of my friends brought a foam football. You know, one of those smaller ones that’s not going to hurt someone when it beans them in the head. And then The Disaster Artist was a fun enough movie that I only ever really felt the need to watch a single time. It has been nine years since that double feature and that was still the only time I saw The Disaster Artist.

Act IV: Best F(r)iends

We have arrived at 2018 now. Not even a full year after that double feature, there was another double feature on the horizon. Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero teamed up for a two-part epic. Best F(r)iends had them on the screen together again. They were capitalizing on the newfound popularity of The Room, a popularity that rose with the release of Greg Sestero’s book and rose even more when James Franco adapted it into a film.

It was Christmas season in 2018. In fact, looking up the date, it was only a few days before Christmas in 2018. I had no job at that point. I left my tourism job at the end of the summer in 2018. Part of the reason was to focus on school. The other part was the amount of burnout I felt working in the tourism industry. Every year felt like I was expected to do more with less help and no increases in pay. So I was done. That’s all to say that it was the first Christmas in forever where I didn’t have to worry about work.

There was a screening for the two Best F(r)iends movies scheduled in Toronto. Greg Sestero would be in attendance and would do a Q&A between the parts. A bunch of us who had gone to see The Room and The Disaster Artist agreed to meet in Toronto to attend the screening. We would hang out for a bit first, and then walk our butts over to the theater for the movies and to meet one of the guys behind The Room.

Most of us met at the Go station in Burlington. One of us met up with the rest when we got to Union Station in Toronto. We had a few hours to burn before heading to the theater. We went and got some ramen at a location I don’t remember much about. We also hit up Kensington Market, where we stopped for drinks at a place called Film Café. What I remember most about this stop along our walk to Best F(r)iends was that while we sat there with our drinks, some middle-aged ladies were having a discussion at the next table. I overheard one say “You haven’t watched Love, Actually? It’s not Christmas if you haven’t watched Love, Actually!” It was one of those movie claims that stuck with me as much as when a coworker once told me they “only watch good movies, like Tokyo Drift.”

Once we wrapped up at Film Café, we were off to The Royal Cinema for the double feature and the Q&A with Greg Sestero. It wasn’t too long a walk for a bunch of people in their early-to-mid 20s. We got there and Greg Sestero was in the lobby. He was meeting the people who came into the theater and signing autographs. I brought my copy of The Disaster Artist with me and walked over for an autograph. Greg looked at the book, looked at me, mentioned it was a first edition, and signed it. We talked quick and then I headed into the main seating area with my friends.

I’ve done double features in the theater before. I’ve taken short films to film festivals, where I then sat through a bunch of movies in a row. I once saw Monster Trucks back-to-back with La La Land in the theater, on the same screen. Heck, this wasn’t even the first Tommy Wiseau double feature I had witnessed. I already wrote about that earlier in this post. This one was different. This one was the pinnacle of everything that makes me who I am. It was a Tommy Wiseau double feature with the second most important person in the world of Tommy Wiseau present.

I remember enjoying Best F(r)iends Volumes 1 & 2. They weren’t on the same bad movie level as The Room. There was no way that the duology was going to become as beloved as that original Tommy Wiseau breakthrough had been. But they were weird and brought together two people who had helped shape my bad movie loving brain. This was a formative experience for me. I planned on getting around to them at some point for this blog, and never had a chance. Until now. But I had other fish to fry, first.

Act V: Big Shark

Now we’re in the present day. October 2026 (first day of November as I post this). But I need to take us back to 2019 for a moment. It was two months after I took that trip with my friends to Toronto to meet Greg Sestero and watch the two Best F(r)iends movies. Tommy Wiseau went on a trip with Greg Sestero to New Orleans and roped him into making a trailer for a movie called Big Shark. He had come up with the idea in 2005, shortly after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. This wasn’t a trailer for a real movie. It was simply something that Tommy Wiseau came up with to have a little filmmaking fun.

My group of friends was fully invested in the Tommy Wiseau lore at this point. After getting them to the double feature of The Room and The Disaster Artist, then the double feature of the Best F(r)iends movies, we were all excited for any new Tommy Wiseau. Big Shark was that new thing. And, wouldn’t you know, Tommy wanted to use that fake trailer as a pitch to get a new movie made. We all wanted to see that movie.

Alas, we got hit with the Covid-19 pandemic. The movie couldn’t be filmed. Following the lockdowns and production shutdowns, Greg Sestero pulled out of being involved. He said it was scheduling conflicts. I’m not entirely sure that’s true. When restrictions eased up, Tommy Wiseau got the movie made. He released it in 2023. It was mostly a roadshow movie. He would take it around the country and show it off while in attendance. He would sell his merch. Forever the hustler, that Tommy Wiseau. He also continued editing the film during the roadshow, meaning that the version we get to see now is not the original version that showed during the premiere in Portland, Oregon.

Now we arrive back in 2026. It has been three years since that roadshow happened. Big Shark has been nearly impossible to see outside of select screenings. A movie I anticipated for seven years, and I hadn’t had a chance to watch it. Then the announcement came. At the end of August, Tommy Wiseau posted on his social media that The Room, Best F(r)iends, and Big Shark would hit Tubi on the fourth of September. I know Tubi. A bunch of the recent movies I’ve watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies have been streaming on Tubi. This would be perfect!

I waited impatiently for the day to come. I watched Big Shark. I knew immediately that I would be writing about it as part of my October lineup (only two movies this year, sorry). Of course, it took me over a month to get the post ready and posted. I’ve been writing some longer posts, recently. I’ve been working almost full time. I’ve had other things going on. Sometimes it takes some time to get things written. That’s not the point, here. Let me get back to Big Shark.

Big Shark followed three firefighter friends who tried to stop a big shark from attacking New Orleans. Patrick (Tommy Wiseau) and his girlfriend Sophia (Ashton Leigh) were out fishing on the Mississippi River when he saw a shark in the water. She didn’t believe him. He tried to convince Tim (Isaiah LaBorde) and Georgie (Mak Valeriano) of the danger. They slowly came around to his side. The big shark was using controlled floods to swim the streets of the Big Easy and eat unsuspecting people. The three firefighters had to get rid of the shark.

This was exactly the movie I had been hoping for. Well, maybe not the exact movie. Greg Sestero wasn’t in it. It didn’t feel complete without Greg Sestero. But it did have all the other makings of a classic Tommy Wiseau movie. Even without being quite as memorable as The Room, it had many moments that made it worth the wait.

I should start at the beginning. Patrick, Tim, and Georgie saved some people from a burning building and then were given medals for being such good firefighters. The medals were given out in a theater, as people finished watching a news segment about them saving those people. I think. It was a strange opening, especially when it ended on them getting the medals in a movie theater. I don’t think the city hands out awards like that in locations like that. That was only a precursor to how strange the movie would get.

The next scene to point out is the fishing scene that I put in the summary of Big Shark. Patrick and Sophia fished on the Mississippi River in a place that looked much more like a pond than a river. Patrick claimed that he saw a shark. At no point during the scene was there a shark in the water. The audience was left in the same position as Sophia, questioning if Patrick saw the big shark. Because there was no big shark to be seen. Then they got out of the water and Patrick started singing. That’s a little bit of a theme with Big Shark.

Before we get to more singing, I should mention that Tim got his fair share of odd scenes. They mostly revolved around his spending time in restaurants and bars. The first scene was when his boxer friend relayed a story about what happened during his recent bout. A big shark came in and ate his opponent. The image, which I think was the first time we saw the shark, was something to behold, and only scratched the surface of all the shark stuff to come. It was the shark head coming straight down from above, chomping a boxer, and lifting right back out of the frame. Wild stuff. Tim’s second weird scene was when a strange man at the bar gave him a map of where the shark wanted to be in the water so that the firefighting trio could track it down. It was kind of like a strange alternate universe moment where the bar suddenly became empty. After the quick exchange, the strange man disappeared and the bar was bustling again. Did it actually happen? The map would say yes, but everything else would say no.

Next, I want to take you to a scene outside of the house or apartment that Patrick shared with Sophia. She was upset that he spent so much time focused on the big shark and not enough time focused on him. There was a lot of screaming and yelling between Sophia on the balcony and Patrick standing next to Tim on the sidewalk. Clothes were thrown. The locks were threatened to be changed. Patrick yelled in a way that was very reminiscent of the famous quote from The Room, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa.” It was a scene that meant nothing to the movie. It didn’t factor into anything before or anything that followed. It was this singular force that only existed to exist.

I’ll follow that up with another scene that felt like it was ripped straight out of The Room. The three firefighting heroes of Big Shark headed down to the beach to hunt the shark in the water. Georgie stayed on shore as a lookout. Sadly, the shark didn’t stay in the water and ate Georgie right up. Cue the extended scene of Patrick breaking down in emotion the same way Johnny did at the end of The Room. Minus the humping of the dress, the tearing down of the bedroom, and the suicide. Vocally, though, there was a lot in common. The wailing. The emotion. The heartbreak. It was Tommy Wiseau showing off his chops. Chops that weren’t all that talented at believably conveying the emotion he wanted in the scene. I’ll hear his cries for Georgie as long as I live.

Another scene I won’t soon forget took place on the waterfront in New Orleans. I’m not talking in the water. I mean it took place next to the Mississippi River, on a promenade. Patrick and Tim were watching the water as a bunch of people looked out on the Mississippi. They said they had to hurry up and stop the shark. The shark jumped out of the water, much to their shock, and they ran down the promenade on their way to save the city. None of the other people on the promenade reacted to the shark. They reacted to Patrick and Tim, though. They looked at the men running, but nobody seemed affected by a big shark jumping out of the Mississippi. I’m pretty sure they just shot on location and used the real people as extras without telling them what was going on.

Finally, there was the ending of Big Shark. The two surviving friends blew up the shark. They got back in their little motorboat, lit only by a blue light in the bottom of the boat. Then they started singing. The way the two men sang reminded me of that Saturday Night Live bit on Weekend Update where Kristin Wiig and Fred Armisen would sing a song. One of them would make up the words and the other would try to sing along. It felt like Tommy Wiseau and Isaiah LaBorde did the same thing. They weren’t in tune with each other, on beat with each other, or even singing the same words as each other half the time. This scene was immediately followed by the credits over the cast walking as part of a New Orleans parade. Movie over.

There was a lot to take from Big Shark. It didn’t have the high highs of The Room or the shock value of being introduced to Tommy Wiseau. This was a movie that was made for Tommy Wiseau to make another movie. From an audience perspective, this was a movie that built on the solid bad movie foundation of The Room. It improved in some ways, mostly being shot in real locations rather than a green-screened rooftop in a parking lot. But there were still a whole bunch of weird moments that could only come from the mind of Tommy Wiseau. It was a perfect follow up for fans who had been waiting two decades for a new movie to drop.

And that’s where this five-act story comes to a close. I’m sitting here writing about my history with Tommy Wiseau, from first watching The Room, up to the Tubi release of Big Shark. My life has changed a lot over the nearly twenty years of this relationship. I dropped out of one school, worked a job for seven years, went to another school and graduated, went to another job for six years, started a new job a year ago, started a blog fifteen years ago, saw The Room in theaters twice, The Disaster Artist once, and Best F(r)iends once. I met Greg Sestero and he signed my copy of The Disaster Artist, the book he wrote. That’s a lot of stuff that happened since I first watched The Room by myself back in 2010.

That’s the thing with art. It could be movies, sculptures, books, paintings, or podcasts. You never know which ones will connect with you. Which ones will be more important to your life. The Room ended up being one of those for me. One bad movie that was suggested to me by a friend. The movie didn’t shape my life, but it has existed alongside my life, allowing some interesting insight into where I was at any given point in time. And maybe that’s why it holds a special place in my heart. It’s not just how The Room entertains me. It’s that it has kept giving for years since I first saw it. Not many movies can get a full five act history from me.

Let’s finish with a few notes:

• Tommy Wiseau directed Big Shark. He also directed and starred in The Room, and he played a part in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance.
• Greg Sestero was in the trailer for Big Shark. He was also in The Room, and he wrote The Disaster Artist.
• Finally, Wayne Douglas Morgan was in both Big Shark and Bending the Rules.
• Have you seen Big Shark? What did you think? Have there been any movies or artists that have given insight to your life? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, or you can find me on Bluesky.
• You can also use Bluesky and the comments to suggest movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m open to any suggestions.
• Now we’re at the part where we take a look at what’s coming up in the next post. There were lots of movies I debated checking out next. You know, Tubi’s such a treasure trove of bad movies. But I wanted to step away from Tubi for a moment because I’ve been watching so many movies off Tubi lately. Seven of the last ten posts I wrote were about movies I watched on Tubi. I’m going to dive onto YouTube for a movie from the 1980s called Body Rock. My plan after that will be to check out Hard to Kill, before getting into some Christmas stuff. Hopefully those posts will be shorter than this and the previous one. See you soon for Body Rock.

Evil Bong 777 (2018) and the Evolution of the Evil Bong Franchise

I was a year into writing the Sunday “Bad” Movies posts when I looked at my collection and settled on a movie that would change my life forever. It was in one of those bargain bin sort of compilation DVDs where they take ten mostly unknown movies and toss them into a cheap set. Well, nine mostly unknown movies if it’s a horror set. The tenth is always Night of the Living Dead. I’d been eyeing this movie up since I first got my hands on the set. The name sounded so ridiculous that I had to check it out. Evil Bong. And so it began.

Watching that first Evil Bong movie was the start of a new era for me. It opened me up to a realm of movies I hadn’t known about to that point. It was directed by Charles Band, the founder of Full Moon Features. I started dipping into that studio’s movies. The Gingerdead Man franchise. The Puppet Master franchise. Robot Wars. Then I went back further in Charles Band’s career, because Full Moon wasn’t his first production company. In the early 1980s, he had Empire Pictures. What did I then watch from that company? Well, Robot Jox, but I saw that before I knew Charles Band. But I plan on covering a few more of the movies from the earlier company.

I’m not here to write about Charles Band, though. I just thought it might be worth the time to give you context about how deep I’ve gone into the Charles Band-iverse. The pinnacle of which has been the Evil Bong franchise. It has acted as a sort of Sacred Timeline to Full Moon Features. Many of the franchises and characters that have existed within the company have made their way into the series. That was true from the very beginning. The Bong World within the first Evil Bong featured cameos by Ivan Burroughs (from the Decadent Evil series), Jack Deth (from the Trancers series), The Gingerdead Man (from the Gingerdead Man movies), and Ooga Booga (from Doll Graveyard). It was like the Bong World was the thread in which every Full Moon Features franchise was tied.

Now I’m seven (technically eight because of the crossover) movies deep into the Evil Bong series. Evil Bong 777 saw Rabbit (Sonny Carl Davis), Faux Batty Boop (Robin Sydney), Misty (Jessica Morris), and Ebee (Michelle Mais) flee to Las Vegas after escaping Sexy Hell. They wanted to stay away from Lucy Furr (Mindy Robinson), who wanted revenge for the events of Evil Bong 666.

The story of Evil Bong 777 was a far cry from where the franchise began. What I want to explore is that evolution of the series. I want to let you, whatever readers I still have in a day and age where attention spans are minimal, know the journey of the franchise and not just the destination. I also want to help myself understand how we got here. Mostly, I want to help myself understand how things went from stoner comedies to… Whatever the hell you would classify Evil Bong 777 as.

Let’s go back a few years. For me, the year was 2013. For the Evil Bong franchise, it was 2006. Those were the years when I first watched Evil Bong and when Evil Bong was first released, respectively. That first movie would be the one that changed Charles Band’s Full Moon Features forever. It was the one that connected so many of his franchises. It would continue connecting them as more movies came out. It was stoner comedy horror where the stoners took hits from a bong and their spirits transported into the bong to be killed by the bong. There just happened to be cameos galore from other Full Moon Features characters who had their spirits trapped in the bong world.

There wasn’t anything all that crazy about the first movie. The premise was made clear early on. There was a real world and a bong world. The stoners were a group of friends and roommates who were saved by the nerd who just moved in and the previous owner of the bong. There were girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and delivery men and grandpas, but the core of the story was that Ebee, the evil bong, was trying to kill the stoners.

The two sequels that followed didn’t stray too far from that premise. Evil Bong 2: King Bong saw the stoners head to the jungle, where they came upon a bong that was eviller than Ebee. It was trying to do the same sort of killing method, only it took whole people into the Bong World instead of just their spirits. There was the added wrinkle of the stoners having side effects to what happened in the first movie, including increased appetites for sleep, sex, and food. Rabbit, the delivery guy who had a bit role in the first movie, tagged along to the jungle with them. In the bong world, the villainous Poontang Tribe tried to roll him into a joint and smoke him.

The first sequel to Evil Bong slowly began the transition of the franchise from its stoner comedy/horror roots to going full… Well, you’ll understand the further I go. Things get way more sexual than the sexual place the movies started. In the first movie, the Bong World was a strip club where the strippers killed the spirits of the victims. Yeah, that’s some sex movie making right off the bat. Evil Bong 2: King Bong, however, made the half-naked to naked henchwomen much more eye candy than a threat. Sure, they tried to roll Rabbit up. I already mentioned that. But they also spent more time standing around, looking pretty. Or naked.

Evil Bong 3D: The Wrath of Bong brought in a bong from outer space to threaten the stoners. It was more of the same. The same stoners, the same idea of being transported to a bong world. All that sort of stuff. The biggest difference was that the new Space Bong had an alien fungus that grew alien weed on anyone it came into physical contact with. There were naked women in this one too, found inside the Bong World.

The point we’re at now in the Evil Bong franchise is where I would put the delineation between a stoner comedy with some sex comedy moments and start the real transition into sex comedies that just happened to feature stoner jokes. As you can see from my brief descriptions, the original trilogy of Evil Bong flicks was about a group of stoner friends who fought off a trio of evil bongs. They ended up in places that had naked women, but the stories were focused primarily on weed. They were addicted to smoking and toking. The weed caused them to, in the case of the second film, have physical and mental ailments and, in the case of the third film, be covered in parasitic alien buds. The weed was always what the stories came back to, even with the strip club of the Bong World or the half-naked armies of henchwomen.

The original trilogy of Evil Bong movies included crossovers to other Full Moon Features franchises. However, the next movie was a full-on crossover that would change the trajectory of the series. Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong officially merged two of the Full Moon Features franchises. Larnell, Rabbit, and Velicity returned from the Evil Bong movies. Sarah Leigh, the main character from The Gingerdead Man, was also around. They had to work together to stop Gingerdead Man, who was out for revenge because Sarah Leigh survived his original rampage.

Most of this movie was spent recapping what happened in the previous movies of each series. It was a clip show of sorts, with only bits and pieces of a new story thrown in. I don’t remember how much nudity there was in the movie, but I can tell you that Larnell owned Dick’s Head Shop, which should have told me where things were going with these movies. Oh, and The Gingerdead Man was here to stay. He would be featured in almost all the Evil Bong movies going forward. Not that he hadn’t already been in the first Evil Bong. But he would be a main character now.

Here we are, at the new era of Evil Bong movies. Evil Bong 420 was the first post-crossover movie, and it set the tone for the descent into madness that would be the remainder of the franchise. Rabbit was now the main character. Yes, the delivery guy from the first movie was elevated to main character status. Three of the four stoners from the original trilogy were completely out of the franchise. Rabbit opened a bowling alley. Not just any bowling alley. Rabbit opened a topless bowling alley. The setting of the entire movie was an excuse to show topless women. The focus of the movie had shifted from weed (which was still present, mind you) to boobs. And penises. The Bong World of Evil Bong 420 was a CGI creation and featured phallic looking scenery.

The biggest indicator of the shift to sex comedy within Evil Bong 420, however, was a sex scene set within the bowling alley. I don’t remember any of the Evil Bong movies before this fourth one having a full sex scene within them. This one featured one of the bowling alley employees getting freaky with The Gingerdead Man. As the evil little pastry reached climax, icing shot up to coat the lucky lady’s face. It was clearly a comedic sex scene, but the fact that it was in the movie showed that the focus had moved from weed to sex. Charles Band’s perverted side was coming out more than it had in the past.

I should also mention that more and more porn stars showed up in the Evil Bong movies as they went on. The first movie did have at least one porn star featured as a stripper within the Bong World. The second movie featured a few as the Poontang Tribe, and the third… I don’t know if the third featured any. Evil Bong 420, though… They were getting parts that weren’t just the naked henchwomen for a villain. Two porn stars showed up as themselves at the bowling alley, and a couple more played the henchwomen. This was also the movie that introduced Mindy Robinson into the series, an actress not afraid to show off her butt and boobs in whatever movies she’s in. She’s not a great person, mind you, but she did show off a lot of skin back in the 2010s. Before the MAGA, being at the storming of the capital, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist stuff became her whole personality.

Evil Bong: High 5! was the Evil Bong movie I remembered the least about. I definitely watched it. Looking up the story, I remember that storyline. Do I remember anything specific that happened in it? Not at all. Most of the characters from the previous movie appeared again, including Mindy Robinson, who took off her top. There were porn stars as henchwomen again. Same old same old. There’s not much to take away from that one. Legitimately, I cannot remember a thing about it.

Things got weirder and more sexual in Evil Bong 666. Mindy Robinson was kind of the main character of this one as Lucy Furr, the new owner of a dispensary. She managed to get Ebee and use her as a way to do something with Sexy Hell. Yeah, Hell couldn’t just be Hell. In the world of the later Evil Bong movies, it had to be Sexy Hell, where the devil surrounded himself with naked women. Now this, this movie right here, the one I’m currently writing about, was where the movies became a full-fledged sex comedy that just happened to be set in the world of weed. Okay, Evil Bong 420 was kind of that too, but this one was egregious.

I don’t remember a sex scene in Evil Bong 666, but I do remember the crazy amount of nudity. The demons in Sexy Hell were always topless. Mindy Robinson was flaunting. The only things that really kept it within the realm of stoner comedy were Lucy Furr owning a dispensary, and the creation of The Gingerweed Man. Larnell wasn’t even there, and he was the only one of the stoner friends from the original trilogy that had lasted beyond those three movies. This was a fully changed franchise.

That change would continue with Evil Bong 777, which was the least stoner movie of the entire franchise. There wasn’t much of a story to latch onto in Evil Bong 777. They went to Vegas, they stopped at a show, they went to a hotel, and they hid out at a museum. There was barely a conflict. They were running the whole time. The entire confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys was about ten seconds and didn’t put anyone in harm’s way. It felt like the entire movie was made because they liked the idea of 777 being Las Vegas, rather than to tell a compelling story. Not that story has been much of a thought post-crossover.

The only real references to weed that were left in Evil Bong 777 were things that didn’t help shape the story at all. The Gingerweed Man was there. He was on the run with the characters. His absence wouldn’t have really changed anything. They could have swapped him out for The Gingerdead Man and the story would have stayed the exact same. It wasn’t like they smoked him or he smoked anything. He was just kind of there. The same with Ebee. The other reference was that the characters called a rideshare service to pick them up. Instead of being called Lyft, it was called Splyft, and the driver provided customers with weed. That was it.

Most of the screentime for Evil Bong 777 was devoted to being a sex comedy, showing how far the movies had swung into that new genre. One of the first things the characters did upon arriving to Las Vegas, after the obligatory drive down the strip, was go to a performance. That performance involved a porn star having a full-on sex show with a life-sized puppet Elvis, nicknamed Hellvis. This was an extended scene of the porn star grinding up against Hellvis before being penetrated with his big, studded dildo penis until she reached climax. The comedy came from the puppet. The sex came from the… well, the sex. It was like a comedic softcore scene in the middle of a movie from a franchise that started out as a stoner horror comedy.

Then there was the whole middle portion of the movie where the characters were hooking up, or at least trying to. Faux Batty Boop and The Gingerweed Man shared a hotel room and were doing all the things to lead up to foreplay and sex. When Faux Batty Boop went into the washroom, The Gingerweed Man called up a call girl. They proceeded to get caught in the act when Faux Batty Boop returned. Then there was Rabbit, who met a woman down in the hotel bar. He invited her back to his room and things started to get hot and heavy. Then, in the most insensitive scene of this movie that came out in the year of our lord, 2018, Rabbit fled his own hotel room upon learning that she was a transwoman who had a penis.

Finally, there were still the scenes of Sexy Hell, where the devil had his topless women sidekicks. Lucy Furr was there trying to find a way to escape and get to the crew in Las Vegas for revenge. Those things were par for the course, at this point. They didn’t up the ante into sex comedy in the same ways as the other parts of Evil Bong 777 that I mentioned.

This has been a thirteen-year journey to get me to this point. I watched Evil Bong all the way back in 2013, the early days of Sunday “Bad” Movies. The name piqued my interest. A movie about an evil bong sounded like the right kind of movie for the blog. I was correct in that thought. It led me into some interesting places. It gave me a whole series of sometimes interesting movies to write about. It opened me up to all the movies in the Full Moon catalogue, really. I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, writing about Evil Bong 777, after thirteen years of this blog, without having taken a chance to watch that first Evil Bong movie so long ago.

Over those thirteen years, I ventured through a series of movies that slowly but surely shifted from beginning as a stoner comedy with horror and sex elements to a sex comedy with horror and stoner elements. I went on a side quest through The Gingerdead Man and its sequels. I learned, while writing this post, that I should probably go through the Killjoy movies. Not just because Faux Batty Boop was inspired by those movies, but because characters from the Evil Bong movies appeared in one of the Killjoy movies. It has been a wild ride that isn’t quite done yet.

I know this wasn’t necessarily the best post I’ve written. That’s fine. Writing this one was much more for myself than anyone reading this. I needed to come to terms with how and when this franchise transitioned into being so obsessed with sex and nudity. I needed to type it out to sort of accept that this sort of stuff had always been there. It simply became more prominent as the franchise went on. This was me exorcising my demons after watching a movie and wondering where it even came from. Now I know. And knowing is half the battle.

What you’re going to know now are these notes:

• Here are links to the posts for Evil Bong, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High 5!, Evil Bong 666, The Gingerdead Man, The Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust, and The Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver.
• Here are all the movies directed by Charles Band that have been covered in Sunday “Bad” Movies so far. Evil Bong, The Gingerdead Man, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High 5!, Evil Bong 666, Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, and Puppet Master: Axis Termination. Of course, Evil Bong 777 now as well.
• Robin Sydney has now been in eleven movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Evil Bong, The Gingerdead Man, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High 5!, Evil Bong 666, Puppet Master: Axis Termination, and Evil Bong 777.
• Mindy Robinson popped up in Evil Bong 777. She could also be seen in movies like The Coed and the Zombie Stoner, Chicks Dig Gay Guys, Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High 5!, Evil Bong 666, and Sharknado: The 4^th Awakens.
• Sonny Carl Davis and Michelle Mais have each been in all the Evil Bong movies. No need to link them this time. All the movies have been linked thrice already, at least.
• Now we jump down to the Five-Timer’s Club, where the newest member is Robert Ramos. He’s been featured in Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High 5!, Evil Bong 666, and Evil Bong 777.
• Tonya Kay made her fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Evil Bong 777, following roles in Evil Bong 666, The Amityville Terror, and Puppet Master: Axis Termination.
• Peter Donald Badalamenti II showed up in Evil Bong 777, after appearing in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, and Evil Bong 666.
• Two series regulars for the Evil Bong franchise were Circus-Szalweski (Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, Evil Bong 420, and Evil Bong: High 5!) and Caleb Hurst (Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High 5!, and Evil Bong 666). They both appeared in Evil Bong 777.
• Jessica Morris and Diana Prince each made their third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearances in Evil Bong 777. They were each also in Evil Bong 666 and Puppet Master: Axis Termination.
• Alan Maxson was in Evil Bong: High 5!, Evil Bong 666, and Evil Bong 777.
• Tanya Tate returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Evil Bong 777 after first showing up in Evil Bong 420.
• Noelle Ann Mabry made her Sunday “Bad” Movies return in Evil Bong 777. She had previously been a part of Evil Bong: High 5!.
• Three actors from Evil Bong 666 popped up in Evil Bong 777, as well. They were Brooks Davis, Nathan Martin, and Marc Pearce.
• Robert Frashure and John Taylor now have two Sunday “Bad” Movies appearances under their belts. They were in Evil Bong 777 and Puppet Master: Axis Termination.
• Finally, we have Eli James. He was in Foodfight! And Evil Bong 777.
• Have you seen Evil Bong 777? Have you seen any of the Evil Bong movies? What did you think of them? You should be able to find them on Tubi. Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Bluesky.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, let me know what it is. You can get a hold of me on Bluesky, or drop a comment.
• As for a look forward, I’m basically where I was last time I had a post to go up. The next post will be about Big Shark. That should be next week. Beyond that, I’m wide open. It’ll be whatever I’m so inclined to check out and write about. Before I get to the post two posts from now, I should get the next post done, though. I’ll see you soon for Big Shark.

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.