Actor-Directors and Freaked (1993)

Actors are one of the biggest aspects of making a movie.  Sure, you don’t need actors for all movies.  You could make a silent animated movie and not need any actors for it.  Or a nature documentary where you’re showing nature without any narration of any sort.  But when it comes to most films, actors are necessary to bring characters to life.  They portray the characters and the characters then become associated with that actor.  Aside from acting, the actors do a lot more behind the scenes.  They could manage to get friends into the movie, and thus become part of the casting process.  They might produce something they are in, or even something they aren’t in.  Sometimes they even turn to directing and writing.

Like anything in the movie business, actors becoming directors are sometimes successful and sometimes failures.  There are good actors who can transition into good directors, and good actors who transition into the directors of bad movies.  The same can be said for bad actors.  Some bad actors manage to become good directors and others not so much.  The quality depends on the actor’s ability to pick up the directing skills throughout their career.  Sure, there are actors who begin their career as a director, and they act in their own movies.  But I’m talking about the actors who begin as actors and make a career as an actor before moving behind the camera.  People such as Clint Eastwood and Rob Reiner began as actors on television and soon moved into movies and directing to great acclaim.  I want to look at some actors who didn’t fare as well when it came to directing.

The movies that I am going to write about are movies that tend to be looked upon as bad and are directed by people who made careers out of being actors before they were directors.  I am not going to be looking at the lesser works of good directors, unless the lesser work is terrible.  So, Clint Eastwood is safe from me.  I’m not going to be writing about Invictus, or Jersey Boys, or J. Edgar.  Instead I want to focus on the movies that are just plain bad.  These are the movies directed by actors that don’t match up to most of the cinematic landscape.  And I’ll start with this week’s movie.

Freaked

Most of you probably know about Alex Winter for his work in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.  He played the character of Bill S. Preston.  Yes, the Bill in the title of the two movies.  Ted was Keanu Reeves, but that’s beside the point.  I want to talk about Alex Winter for a bit.  After making the two Bill and Ted movies as well as the MTV sketch series The Idiot Box, he teamed up with some of his Idiot Box buddies to direct the movie Freaked.  It was met with mixed reviews.  Alex Winter has gone on to direct a few more things including the documentary he is currently promoting called Deep Web.

Freaked is about former child actor Ricky Coogin (Alex Winter) who agrees to go to South America to promote a chemical called Zygrot 24.  While there, Elijah C. Skuggs takes Ricky hostage and turns him into a mutant.  Ricky and other mutants from the days and years past make an attempt to escape and reverse their mutations while the bad guy prevents this at any cost.  It is a twisted comedy filled with random jokes that made me chuckle, but would be highly off-putting to other viewers.  I understand the lackluster reviews and the distaste that many people have with the movie.  It isn’t well made.  It’s just wacky enough for me to be entertained.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

Seth MacFarlane got a lot of praise for his directorial debut film, Ted.  His follow up came a couple years later, set in the Wild West.  A Million Ways to Die in the West told the story of a man (MacFarlane) who lives in the Wild West and is trying to survive in a world where death could always be, and frequently is, right around the corner.  Many people die in the movie.  The quality of the movie pretty much soiled all the goodwill that he had gained with his previous movie.

Does Seth MacFarlane only act in his own work?  Yeah, he really does.  But what he is known most for is Family Guy, a show he created in which he performs the voices for many of the characters.  It was the fact that he voiced many of the characters that he became a popular figure in entertainment.  It led to his hosting the Academy Awards, hosting Saturday Night Live, and directing some movies.  With Ted 2 coming out soon, can he turn around his film career from the disaster it has seemingly become?  Only the release of the movie will tell us for sure.

Jack and Jill

Did you know that Dennis Dugan had an acting career before becoming an Adam Sandler go-to director?  He’d been acting throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and continued acting after that.  He might not have been a big star like Seth MacFarlane, and he might not have had a character to fall back on like Alex Winter, but he was showing up in different television shows and movies.  He also directs movies, including many Happy Madison productions like Happy Gilmore, Grown Ups, The Benchwarmers, and Jack and Jill.

I’ve written about Jack and Jill a bunch already.  It got its own post in this blog.  Adam Sandler stars as Jack and his twin sister Jill.  Al Pacino is in love with Jill and Jack uses her to land Pacino for a Dunkin Donuts commercial.  Jill is one of the most irritating characters ever put to film and tarnishes what could have been a great movie due to Pacino’s excellent performance.  I’m not kidding.  Pacino is great in the role as himself.  One of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen in a terrible movie.  No doubt that Dugan had some influence on how terrible the movie is.

White Chicks

The Wayans family became famous in the early 90s because of the show In Living Color.  It was a sketch show made for black people who weren’t catered to by shows like Saturday Night Live.  It featured most of the Wayans family in the cast as well as a few other notable actors like Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, Jim Carrey, and Tommy Davidson.  It was created by Keenen Ivory Wayans, the second oldest sibling.  He was in a few movies, including The Glimmer Man in 1996, and was a featured performer on In Living Color before breaking through as a director with Scary Movie.

White Chicks happened a couple of movies after Scary Movie for Keenan Ivory Wayans.  It starred Shawn and Marlon Wayans as two police officers who had to pretend to be Caucasian heiresses for an undercover mission.  In order to do this, they put on whiteface.  That was basically the entire concept of the movie.  It was really, truly bad, and I find it almost unwatchable.  The only saving grave is Terry Crews who puts in a fantastic performance as a man who falls in love with one of the police officers (as a woman).

Harlem Nights

Eddie Murphy only ever directed one movie, and this is that movie.  It has mostly negative reviews and there is a reason why.  The movie could have been so much better than it was.  The three stars were Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Redd Foxx, three of the biggest black comedians of all time.  Putting the three of them together would surely make for great comedy, but the movie wasn’t a laugh riot like people were expecting.  It involved gangsters, corruption, and speakeasies, and was set in the 1930s.

I liken this movie to Eddie Murphy’s song Party All the Time.  I enjoy it when it’s on, and there are definitely some good aspects to it, but I can clearly see where people would have problems with it.  There are noticeably bad things in there.  As well, you expect it to be so much better because it is 1980s Eddie Murphy, which tended to be reliable.  The disappointment with the product, along with the flaws led to Harlem Nights being seen as a bad movie.

Many actors go on to have illustrious directing careers thanks to all of the experience they have gained being directed.  George Clooney has made a few critically acclaimed movies since he began directing.  Drew Barrymore made Whip It and people enjoyed that movie.  Elizabeth Banks was the director of the recently released Pitch Perfect 2, and that has done well with audiences.  Though I wrote about five of the bad movies from actor-directors in this post, there are just as many, if not more, good movies out there.  It all depends on the movie.

The one thing that I think helps actor-directors with their movies is that they are able to lean on friends to help them make good work.  Friendship can work wonders.  George Clooney is able to get many people he has previously worked with to act in his movies.  It helps the actors to make the transition, which could be a reason why it is usually fairly easy for them to transition to directing.

It’s about time that I wrap this thing up.  Freaked was a movie directed by an actor that didn’t fare as well as many of the others.  Whether it be the lack of experience, the inability to transfer skills to another aspect of filmmaking, or a plain old lack of quality in the movie, it is one that hasn’t been looked upon fondly.  Not all actors can successfully direct.  Though, sometimes they prove us wrong with subsequent efforts.  It takes time to learn, and sometimes that can turn something bad into something good.

There are notes that I have to give you guys before we finish up here:

• Freaked was suggested for the Sunday “Bad” Movies by @BettisM.
• Morgan Fairchild had a small role in Freaked.  She was previously featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in a movie called Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2.
• One of the actors in Freaked was Deep Roy, who was also in Flash Gordon.
• Lee Arenberg was in Freaked.  He was also in a movie called Warriors of Virtue.
• Then there was John Hawkes.  He was in Freaked, but could also be seen in Steel.
• I mentioned Jack and Jill in this post.
• Have you seen Freaked?  Did you like Freaked?  What other actor-directors do you know?  What movies do you like that are directed by actors?  You can answer any of these questions or just talk about this post in the comments below.
• If you want me to watch a specific movie in a future week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, leave the suggestion in the comments.  Or you can tell me on Twitter or in my email, sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week’s movie is Drop Zone.  I remember going to Canada’s Wonderland before Paramount pulled out, and one of the rides was called Drop Zone.  I haven’t seen the movie, though.  So I’ll tell you what I thought next week.

How the Transmorphers (2007, 2009) Movies Fit in the Asylum Archetype

For this week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie post, I watched the two Transmorphers movies.  These are two movies produced by The Asylum in 2007 and 2009 that took their core premises from the blockbuster Michael Bay Transformers series.  The first in the franchise came out around the same time as the first in Michael Bay’s franchise, and the second was released around the time of the sequel.  Like most of Asylum’s releases, the Transmorhpers movies are meant to cash in on the success of the movies they are ripping off, confusing people in movie rental stores (the few that are left) and online streaming services, when they accidentally pick these movies up instead of the mainstream ones.

The Asylum tends to take liberties with the stories they tell.  They might be ripping off something more famous or popular, but the stories tend to be their own and fit their own mold.  The movies follow a certain set of criteria for the most part.  In my post for Rise of the Zombies, I outlined five of the main concepts that seem to appear in the movies produced by The Asylum.  I’ll review them now very quickly before I get right into this post.

The first of the concepts is the fact that the movie is based on an established property.  Whether that means a franchise, a single movie, or even a television show, the Asylum movie should be a knock-off.  In many cases, the title is a rip-off of the title of the known property.  Other times, it is only the core concept of the movie. This concept is essential in getting people to watch the movie.  If you can confuse them into thinking it is something else, they will watch it.

Concept 2 is that the movies produced by The Asylum have at least one recognizable actor in them.  This is more common in the more recent Asylum movies than the ones that came near the beginning of the company’s reign of direct-to-video rip-offs.  The actors themselves might not be huge stars.  They could be someone who was supporting in a bunch of stuff.  They could be a person who had one big role that they are known for.  As long as people could see the actor and think “Hey, I know that person” it is enough for The Asylum.

Bad effects is the third concept because no Asylum produced movie is complete without the subpar effects that give the action that the mainstream movie would typically have.  The effects are usually very poor quality.  In many cases, they are outright laughable.  Because of the low budget of the movies, the effects can’t really get the funding to be of a higher quality.  That’s The Asylum for you.

Onto concept four which is that one of the main female characters must be a doctor, scientist, or stripper.  Must is such a strong word.  Most of the time this is the case with The Asylum movies, though.  Why these three professions?  I’m not exactly sure on that one.  The strippers aren’t as often as the other two, and may in fact not be a part of the equation.  It is mostly in here from when I watched 200MPH, a movie that has yet to be featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Doctor and scientist are two sure-fire jobs for women in most Asylum films.

The fifth and final concept is basically an offshoot of the first one.  In the rip-off movies, the plot usually seems to get more outrageous than the movie it is based on.  This one really needs an example to be explained properly.  I will use Snakes on a Train for this one.  Snakes on a Plane involved people trapped on a plane with snakes that were put in the storage hold by a criminal.  Snakes on a Train takes a different approach.  The snakes come from inside people, and when they attack other people, those other people release snakes.  Then a snake grows and eats the train.  That is a lot more insane than Snakes on a Plane.

The reason that I wanted to restate each of these concepts for movies produced by The Asylum is that I wanted to take the remainder of this post and write about how the two Transmorphers movies fit into the five concepts.  The more that they fit, the more stereotypically Asylum the movies are.  I will go through each concept with each of the two movies to determine whether or not that concept is a part of the movie.  So, without any further rambling on this part of the subject, let’s get into the first of the two Transmorphers movies.

Transmorphers

Before I go over the different concepts and how they relate to this specific movie, let me explain the story of this movie.  In the future, the human race has been driven underground by the robots that now rule the Earth.  The atmosphere is bad, and it is dangerous on the surface.  A group of soldiers goes on a mission to end the mechanical threat and bring the world back to the healthy state it was at before their arrival.

Transmorphers is clearly a take on the first Transformers movie; however, the story is drastically different.  The title alone makes the movie fit the first of the Asylum criteria.  Transformers is a very close title to Transmorphers.  And, at their core, both movies are about humans having to deal with dangerous, shape-shifting robots coming to Earth.  But Transmorphers takes place in a future world that has been overrun by robots, so that’s different.  There is still enough present to fit the first concept.  That means that we’re at 1/5.

There’s nobody in Transmorphers that could have been used for name recognition at the time.  Most of them had done small parts in many movies and television shows previous to being in the movie, but nobody had any real star power at the time when it was released.  We are still at 1/5 for the concepts that this movie hits.

Bad effects is a concept that is readily apparent throughout Transmorphers.  With all of the different robots that have to transform into giant death machines, effects are required throughout the movie.  None of these effects look all that good.  In fact, many of them look downright terrible.  They look like computer graphics from the show ReBoot, but placed in a live action setting.  The movie definitely fits this part of the Asylum criteria, so we have now gotten to 2/5.

Fourth up is female doctor or scientist.  I do believe this one is not present in the movie.  The doctor/scientist in Transmorphers is a man.  However, he does have an assistant who is female.  Maybe that’s stretching the definition of female a little bit.  His assistant is an android made to be female.  I would consider this about halfway there, so I’m going to give the movie half a mark.  2.5/5.

Finally, we come to how outrageous the movie is compared to the first Transformers movie.  Does Transmorphers top that movie in terms of insanity?  That’s difficult to say.  In Transformers, there are two factions of robots fighting against each other, with Earth being their battleground and the humans ending up in the middle of the war.  Transmorphers simplified this by making it humans versus robots, without any robot versus robot stuff.  Then again, we do find out there are androids within the humans, so I guess there are robots versus robots in a small sense.  In Transformers, the robots transformed into vehicles.  In Transmorphers, they transformed into any mechanical device.  Plus, the atmosphere was destroyed in the rip-off.  I guess I have to give it to Transmorphers.

That leaves Transmorphers with a 3.5/5.  That’s pretty Asylum of the movie.  There are some movies that are more stereotypically Asylum, yet there are many more movies that aren’t as Asylum as Transmorphers.  Let’s see how the sequel (actually a prequel) stacks up with the criteria.

Transmorphers: Fall of Man

Because this movie is a prequel, the story takes place prior to Transmorphers.  It follows a group of people in a small town who are dealing with the initial coming of alien robots to Earth.  They must band together to try and stop the otherworldly threat from destroying the planet they live on.  And it all leads to the world being engulfed by a toxic atmosphere, and humans being driven underground (the setting for the first movie).

Obviously, the movie fits with the first concept of the Asylum blueprint, as it is ripping-off Transformers again.  Though, the title is even better than the first with Fall of Man playing off of Revenge of the Fallen.  Get it?  They both have fall in them.   As for the story, it fits with Transformers in that it involved alien robots coming to Earth and causing destruction.  That gives Transmorphers: Fall of Man a 1/5 so far.

The second concept that needs to be covered is the inclusion of an actor who is known for his or her work in another movie or television show.  Unlike the first Transmorphers movie, the second one actually has this.  It features an actor named Bruce Boxleitner.  He is known for his work in Babylon 5, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and Tron (he played the character Tron).  This is enough star-power to allow The Asylum to use his name for selling the movie.  That’s a second point, moving Transmorphers: Fall of Man up to 2/5.

Honestly, the effects in Transmorphers: Fall of Man are decent.  For the most part, that is.  The robots actually look okay.  But, there’s still a lot of weakness in laser blasts and explosions.  So that means that criteria number three is covered.  There are bad effects in the movie, and that’s what The Asylum tends to do.  The movie is now at 3/5.

The fourth thing I need to look for is a female doctor or scientist, and that’s easy enough to find.  One of the main characters, and the first to know the problem that is unfolding, is a female scientist.  So, yeah, that’s in the movie, and that brings the score up to 4/5.

But Transmorphers: Fall of Man is not a perfect Asylum movie.  Sadly, it doesn’t quite fit the final criteria of what makes an Asylum movie an Asylum movie.  It does not out-crazy Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  It might actually be the better movie too.  The characters are more defined, the humour isn’t as offensive, it has a story you can follow easily, and it is more restrained.  If it weren’t for the big budget, Transformers could be the Asylum version of itself.  Transmorphers: Fall of Man tops out at a 4/5 on the Asylum scale.

As you can see, some movies fit the Asylum archetype better than others.  The differences in what they have or lack don’t make them any less Asylum, though.  Some of the movies don’t feature anyone famous.  Others, like The Coed and the Zombie Stoner, aren’t even rip-offs.  But they all feel like they come from The Asylum because The Asylum is more than a studio.  It is a brand.  At this point in time, the brand is just as important to the success of these movies as the actor, the source material, or the quality.  People see the name Asylum and they think of Sharknado or the countless other movies by the studio that have been featured on SyFy.  People are now watching the movies based on the studio as much as anything else.

The Asylum began as a studio putting out cheap knock-offs.  It still does that, as can be seen by the ever increasing number of Asylum produced knock-offs that I’ve seen for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  But the studio is growing out beyond that.  As such, the criteria will likely grow as I see more of their movies.  They even have a television show called Z Nation that airs on SyFy.  They’ve basically become this generation’s Troma.  What will come of the studio in the future?  Only time will tell.

There are a few notes for you guys and then we’ll be done for this week:

• Jason S. Gray was in Transmorphers.  He had previously been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Snakes on a Train.
• Shane van Dyke was the star of Transmorphers: Fall of Man.  He was also the star of Paranormal Entity.
• I mentioned The Coed and the Zombie Stoner and Rise of the Zombies in this week’s post.
• Other movies by The Asylum that I have covered are Two-Headed Shark Attack, Nazis at the Center of the Earth, and Bermuda Tentacles.
• Have you seen either of the Transmorphers movies?  Have you seen any movies from The Asylum?  What movie do you think is the most Asylum of all Asylum movies?  There’s a comments section below where you can discuss all of this and more.
• If there’s a movie that you think I should discuss for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can tell me in the comments, on Twitter, or in an email at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.
• Next week’s movie is a little movie called Freaked.  It comes from Alex Winter, of Bill and Ted fame.  I’ve not seen it before, so this is going to be interesting.  See you next week.