Live Action Adaptations of Disney Animated Stories and Grimm's Snow White (2012)

Childhood is filled with imagination and wonder.  Stories from childhood stick with you throughout your life.  Many have been immortalized as Disney animated movies.  Robin Hood was presented with animals in the 1970s.  Before that, there were animated versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Pinocchio.  The story that started the Disney animated wonder was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  It was a heartwarming tale of a beautiful woman who befriended a bunch of little people, defeated an evil witch, and married the prince of her dreams.  Aw shucks.  Why can’t we all have lives like that?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937 and began the reign of Disney as the ultimate animation studio.  Though there have been decades of lesser releases from the studio, it withstood the test of time and remains at the top of the animation competition.  Disney, along with their on again off again relationship partner Pixar, have provided entertainment to children of many generations.  Children are still watching movies from every Disney era, showing how timeless the stories are.

The early Disney films have been etched in the minds of children for many generations.  People of all ages have a history with the movies.  This history has fueled a recent uptick in live action movies based on the same stories.  Studios (not just Disney) have worked on live action versions of these classic stories to cash in on the nostalgia that people have for these properties.  We all grew up with these stories.  Everyone knows that.  The studios want to use these childhood memories to get people into theatres for a non-animated version starring people you might recognize.

To discuss these live action versions of the classic stories, I have to go back to the 1990s.  Sure, there may have been instances from before the 90s where there were live action adaptations.  There was an excellent Robin Hood movie from the 1930s.  But that was long before the Disney version came out, and it didn’t have the bipedal animals of the animated version.  It was the 1990s where remaking the Disney stories (which didn’t originate at Disney, mind you) as live action movies became a big thing.  So why don’t we take a step back to 1991, the year after I was born.  It is the year I’m going to start with, when a pseudo-sequel to Peter Pan was released.

1991 saw the release of Hook.  It was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Robin Williams as Peter Pan.  It showed an older version of Peter who had left Neverland and grown up.  He returned to the land he never aged in to save his children and defeat Captain Hook once again.  Spielberg wrote a script in the 1980s for Disney and was planning on making it a direct sequel to their animated movie.  It would later move to TriStar and Sony, where Spielberg would finally make it.

It was the sixth highest domestic grossing movie of the year.  Based on the nostalgia that people had for the Disney animated movie, as well as the people involved in making Hook, it earned $50 million in profits.  It wasn’t as critically praised as the studio may have hoped, and it might not have made as much money as they wanted, but it got people into the theatre.  It is a movie that many people still like to this day.  And it opened paved the way for other movies that would come after it.

Later in the 1990s, there were three live action adaptations of The Jungle Book released to the public.  The first came from Walt Disney Studios in 1994, featuring a star studded cast.  Jason Scott Lee took on the lead role of Mowgli.  He was supported by Lena Headey (Game of Thrones is back tonight!), Cary Elwes, Sam Neill, and John Cleese.  This version took the voices away from the animals, grounding it in a more realistic world.  It would soon be followed by a TriStar produced film in 1997 and another Disney version in 1998.  Three live action movies in a five year period that adapted a single story told in a classic Disney animated movie.  Three times, they tried to hit the nostalgia bone of potential audiences by remaking the movie.  None of these three iterations have managed to hold any footing in modern culture.  They are all but forgotten by people, unless the people are searching for movies of this type, like I was.

Around that same time, there was a Dalmatians franchise.  101 Dalmatians was released in 1996, thirty-five years after the Disney animated classic.  There are some memorable things to come out of the franchise.  Particularly, Glenn Close gave a great performance as Cruella De Vil.  That’s how I remember it.  She is the one thing that stood out other than the fact that there were a lot of puppies.  On a slight sidenote, the franchise boosted the desire for families to get Dalmatian puppies.  However, Dalmatians are difficult to keep with a family and many of them ended up in human societies, eventually being put down.  The critical acclaim for 101 Dalmatians was about how Close’s performance was faithful to the original version.  They felt the familiarity, which is what Disney was hoping for when making the live action adaptation.  The movie even spawned a sequel, 102 Dalmatians, but let’s not talk about that one.

There weren’t too many other live action versions of Disney tales again until 2010.  It was in that year that things started to turn and these kinds of movies were brought into the light once again.  2010 was the year in which Alice in Wonderland was released.  With Johnny Depp as the face of the movie, it was bound to get some traction.  And boy did it.  It made over a billion dollars worldwide, having $220 million of that come in during its first weekend.  That’s a major success.  It even spawned a sequel that will be coming out in just over a month’s time.

Now, that is the most important movie of any that I’m going to be discussing that doesn’t have to do with the movie of the week.  Alice in Wonderland was the turning point for Disney when it came to making live action adaptations of stories they had already told in animated form.  The success of the movie gave them the idea to try the same thing with other tales.  Hell, other studios jumped at the idea.  Everyone wanted to tap into that trend.  It worked once, so why wouldn’t it work again?  They even tried it on television.

Once Upon a Time debuted in 2011 and has been filling ABC with fairy tale wonder ever since.  Set in the town of Storybrooke, the show brings fairy tales and Disney animated characters to life in a shared universe.  Snow White, Cinderella… Even the princesses from Frozen have shown up at one time or another.  It’s a primetime fairy tale that has captured the imaginations of television viewers and helped them see new versions of the stories they grew up on.  It was so successful for the television network that it spawned a spin-off called Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.  Notice how Alice in Wonderland has been a major part of this resurgence of live action adaptations twice now?  The spin-off wasn’t nearly as successful as the initial series and was cancelled after one season.

Speaking of Disney princesses, there have been updated versions of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella over the past few years.  (I’ll get to Snow White in a moment.)  Disney went all out on releasing Cinderella in 2015.  It looked and felt like a Cinderella movie.  It was a simple retelling of the same story without any sort of real updating.  When put into the pool of recent classic Disney stories coming to live action, it is the most faithful to what came before it.  Disney would put a twist on one of their classic stories when they released Maleficent a year prior to that.  The 2014 film was told from the point of view of the villainous witch in the animated movie, much like Wicked is The Wizard of Oz from the witch’s point of view.  The Asylum jumped into the fray to release their version of Sleeping Beauty at the same time.  It’s a movie I see at Walmart all the time.  Nobody seems to want it.  But it’s out there.  It exists.

The other Disney princess to get her own solo movie from The Asylum was Snow White.  In 2012, three Snow White movies were released to the public.  Two were theatrical and one was straight to video.  Snow White and the Huntsman was a grittier (I know some of you hate that word) action take on the material, having the titular characters team up to fight a war against the evil witch.  It was successful enough to spawn a pre-sequel that came out a few days ago.  Two months before Universal released Snow White and the Huntsman, another Snow White movie was released in the form of Mirror Mirror.  It’s a lighter, more family oriented version of the story.  The contrast of these two movies made it worth having both, though the Snow White story was a little overdone that year with three movies and all.

This week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie is the third of the Snow White movies released in 2012.  Grimm’s Snow White came out earlier than both movies, being released in February, as opposed to March or May.  It took a similar approach to Snow White and the Huntsman, adding action to the story and making it a tad more adult than most people are used to.  However, it did it in the way that The Asylum does things.  Dinosaurs and monster dogs were added.  The dwarves were changed into elves.  That kind of stuff.

You could say that this was just The Asylum producing another mockbuster in an attempt to make money off of two similar movies that were getting wide releases.  That assessment would be true.  But there’s also the added layer that The Asylum was becoming a part of a larger trend in filmmaking at the time.  Movies were trending towards live action remakes of Disney animated classics.  They still are with a new version of The Jungle Book and a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman having just been released.  The Asylum was participating in this.  They were creating their own live action updates of classic Disney cartoons.  Between Sleeping Beauty, Grimm’s Snow White, and The Avengers Grimm (their version of The Avengers, done with similar classic Disney characters), they were following the trend.

For nearly thirty years, we have watched the trend of remaking animated classics in live action form rise and fall.  Some of the movies that came out of this trend have been good.  Others, not so much.  The Asylum at least tried to be interesting with their entries.  They changed things up enough to stand out from the Disney classics and managed to find their own place in the movie landscape, albeit a small place.  Grimm’s Snow White is an example of how they attempted to try something a little bit different.  It was fairly successful, yet fairly forgotten.  It’s just another blip in the long line of these kinds of movies.

This trend will eventually die out.  Everything does.  Moving pictures died out.  Talkies died out.  Movies presented in colour died out.  Right?  Right?  Seriously though, trends ebb and flow.  Some die out completely.  In a few years, we’ll get another period of dormancy for movies based on Disney classics.  There might be the odd one coming out but they won’t be as prevalent and overwhelming as they sometimes seem.  For now, they are a part of the yearly deluge of releases.  With the critical acclaim that The Jungle Book has been receiving, that can’t be all bad.

Something else that can’t be all bad is this notes section:

• I mentioned Cary Elwes was in the 1994 version of The Jungle Book.  He was also in Hansel and Gretel Get Baked, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, and New Year’s Eve.
• Johnny Depp’s name came up in the discussion of Alice in Wonderland.  He was in Jack and Jill.
• This past week, a new Evil Bong movie was released.  Here are my posts for Evil Bong and Evil Bong 2: King Bong.
• Have you seen Grimm’s Snow White?  Have you seen any of the movies based on classic Disney stories?  What do you think about this trend in movies?  You can talk all about this stuff in the comments.
• If you want to suggest a movie for me to watch in a future Sunday “Bad” Movies week, you can let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• I’m also on snapchat.  You can find me with the username jurassicgriffin.  If you want to see my stories, they tend to be clips from movies that I watch.
• Next week’s movie is going to be The Single Moms Club.  I wanted to watch this movie for Mother’s Day, but since that week is a franchise week, I’m covering it a week early.  Come back next week to see what I write about it.

Fatal Deviation (1998)

For every big budget movie that is released, there are many more low budget movies being made.  It is easier for someone to pick up a camera and shoot something on a shoestring budget than it is to get funding and release something into theatres around the world.  This makes it easy for smaller studios to make the knock-offs of blockbuster movies that we call mockbusters.  But there are hundreds of thousands of other, non-mockbuster low budget movies floating around.  This week, I cover one of them.

Fatal Deviation is a low budget movie from Ireland, directed by Shay Casserley and Simon Linscheid.  The action movie followed Jimmy Bennett (James P. Bennett, who helped co-write the movie) as he returned to his hometown and was targeted by the mob boss who killed his father.  He fought in an underground fighting tournament in a monastery, he used martial arts on every mob member he met, and he saved the girl that he loved.

It was difficult to come up for an idea for this post, so instead of keeping it contained to one, I’m going to relate it to a few ideas that I thought about but didn’t really want to delve into.  Some might be topics that I’ll get to at a later date.  Others will be ideas that I regurgitate with different movies every once in a while.  And some ideas will be bad brainstorming done while trying to come up with a good idea.  This is basically going to be a structured freeform that goes from one small idea to the next without me getting too deep.

A Quick Review

Hailing from Ireland, Fatal Deviation was a low budget foray into the action genre.  It blended a mob story with martial arts and bad acting to make for an experience that was quite unlike any other.

James P. Bennett had the charisma of a piece of bread, without the texture of the grain.  He played an action hero with no relatable characteristics.  There was nothing about his performance to latch onto.  His one saving grace was his martial arts skill.  He definitely knew how to perform the moves.  Though the choreography wasn’t the best, he was able to pull off the stunts.  If only he had as much skill with acting.

The story wasn’t the greatest either.  Jimmy came back to town, got invited into the mob, declined, dated the girl one of the mob members liked, then fought the mob.  There was no deeper story.  It was as surface level as that.

If there’s only one bad Irish martial arts mob story that you watch, make it Fatal Deviation.  It has a fighting tournament in a monastery.  With a few drinks among friends, it could be a whole lot of fun.

Irish Movies

Movies have been coming out of Ireland ever since they became an entertainment standard.  The first Irish movie, A Lad from Old Ireland, was released in 1910.  It was directed by and starring Sidney Olcott and would begin a long relationship between Ireland and film that would span more than a century.  By that, I mean that there are still Irish movies being released.

There aren’t a lot of Irish movies that I’ve seen, especially when it comes to the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Only two movies that I have covered come to mind when I’m thinking about Irish films.  Fatal Deviation is one.  The other was the horror flick, Shrooms.  There was nothing particularly Irish about that movie.  It wasn’t about Irish people (the main actors were American), it didn’t go into Irish lore… The only thing about Shrooms that was Irish was the setting.

Fatal Deviation is a different story.  All of the actors were Irish.  They spoke with accents so thick that I could barely understand them.  The location was Ireland.  The story still could have been set anywhere.  You don’t need it to be an Irish story for the movie to be Irish.  The second Irish movie that I watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies felt more Irish than the first, which I nearly forgot was Irish.

Low-Budget Films

This is a topic that I’ve probably gone over before.  Low-budget films are movies that tend not to have the financial backing of the big Hollywood studios.  People have different definitions of low budget.  Some simply go with a budget that doesn’t get as big as the blockbusters that are released into most cinemas.  I want to go even lower than that.

Fatal Deviation is much closer to a no budget film.  It looked like a bunch of friends got together and decided to make a movie.  Less than 9,000 Irish pounds financed the movie.  Movies with budgets this small tend to be movies that are made by people who want to make a movie no matter what their situation.  They might not be able to buy the best cameras or hire the best cast and crew, but they have the desire to make something.  They want to create.  That can certainly go a long way in some cases.

In the case of Fatal Deviation, many of the cast and crew were working on multiple aspects of the film.  Director Shay Casserley also served as the cinematographer, filming the stuff that he wanted to be in the movie.  Star James P. Barrett was one of the cowriters.  The other writer, Simon Linscheid helped Shay Casserley with the directing.  Those are the three off the top of my head that I knew were pulling double duty.  With how low the budget was, I’m sure there were more.

Many low budget movies are the same way.  There will be actors doing crew duty, and crew members working as extras.  There typically isn’t enough money to hire a lot of people, so it requires people to hold multiple positions.  Personally, I’ve worked on a couple short films in school.  I was a co-writer, a co-director, I shot a couple of the sequences, and I was an extra multiple times.  It is necessary to step in where needed for the betterment of the final product.

Damsels in Distress

Action movies have a tendency to cast males as the heroic characters.  For every female led action movie, there are ten action movies starring men.  In these movies, the men are fighting for many things.  They’re saving the world.  They’re saving hostages.  Or they’re saving a woman that gets given to them as property by the film’s end.  Women end up being a trophy in action movies.

You probably already know this, but let me explain in my stupid, male brain way.  In most action movies that get released, the action hero’s wife, girlfriend, daughter, or mother is put in danger.  Batman v. Superman was just released and put both Lois Lane and Martha Kent into dangerous situations requiring the aid of the superheroes.  The women are simple motivation for the superheroes, moving them forward into the big fights.

In Fatal Deviation, the whole conflict was motivated by the female that Jimmy falls for.  He started dating the girl, which sparked jealousy in a mob member.  All of the trouble in the movie was a result of this jealousy.  It pushed the mob member into trying to get rid of Jimmy, and it pushed Jimmy to fighting back to save her.  At the end of the movie, Jimmy got her.  She had no other point in the movie but to be the end item for the hero and the villain.

Martial Arts Movies

A subsection of the action genre is the martial arts film.  They involve hand to hand combat that looks realer and more painful than effects heavy action.  Most of them come from countries in Asia.  China, Japan, Indonesia, and Korea have each produced martial arts movies with various fighting styles.  Actors and directors have managed to come to North America and make movies in the Hollywood system.

Movies that aren’t necessarily martial arts movies sometimes incorporate martial arts in them.  The Expendables 2 is not a martial arts movie, but it does have a martial arts fight between Jason Statham and Scott Adkins.  Hollywood has also taken martial arts and blended it with standard gun action to make “gunkata.”  This style has been used in movies such as Equilibrium.

Fatal Deviation was filled with martial arts but wasn’t afraid to add in other action.  James P. Bennett showed off his martial arts skills throughout the movie with kicks and punches, while also taking moments to shoot guns.  As opposed to most American action movies which take standard gunplay and add martial arts, the Ireland produced movie took martial arts and added guns.

Like I said, none of the ideas were all that great.  I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed perfect for Fatal Deviation.  I came up with the ideas that I briefly touched upon.  Most of them (Irish, martial arts, damsels), I didn’t feel like I had enough expertise to expand upon the initial concept.  With the low budget films, I was afraid that I was retreading a subject I’d already covered.  And I didn’t want to do a straight up review.  So I threw them all together.

Fatal Deviation was one of the more difficult movies that I’ve had to write about.  Maybe it’s because it didn’t have a whole lot going for it.  Half of its runtime could have been cut and the movie would have been the exact same.  It wasn’t a good movie.  It had few redeemable qualities.  Some people might even call it unwatchable.  I wouldn’t go that far.  I would watch it again with friends.  We could have a good time.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t terrible.

This isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I didn’t hate Fatal Deviation.  I remember things that happened in it.  It has that much going for it.  It’s absolutely a must see for people interested in bad movies.  You probably won’t like it, but you need to see it.  That’s the best I can say for it.

Here are some notes to finish off this lackluster post:

• Fatal Deviation was suggested by @brideofcrapula.
• I mentioned Shrooms in this post.
• The only actor in Fatal Deviation that was in another Sunday “Bad” Movie was James P. Bennett, who was in Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
• I mentioned Jason Statham, who was in Death Race.
• I also mentioned Scott Adkins, who was in The Legend of Hercules.
• Have you seen Fatal Deviation?  What did you think of it?  There’s a comments section below if you want to discuss the movie or this post.
• You can also use the comments section to suggest movies for me to watch in future Sunday “Bad” Movie installments.  Or you can let me know on Twitter.
• You can find me on snapchat with the username jurassicgriffin.  I mostly use the story feature on there to share clips of movies I’m watching.  Every once in a while there’s something else.
• Next week’s movie is Grimm’s Snow White, since The Huntsman: Winter’s War is going to be coming out.  I’ve seen it before and I’m excited to be watching it again.  It’s one of my favourites from The Asylum.  I’ll see you next week with a post that is hopefully better than this one.