The second year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies came to an end
with my yearly rewatch of one of the movies that had been covered during the
past year of posts. The audience chose
wisely and had me watch Winter’s Tale
for a second time. Once that post was
done, it was time to look forward. It
was time to dig into another year of bad movies as I continued to write a
weekly blog post about them. That’s
where this shall begin. This is my look
back at my ten favourite movies of the third year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
I kicked off the third year, as I normally kick off any
year, with a few Christmas movies. Week
106, the first week of year three, brought Elves
to the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I would
watch a total of 61 movies during the third year, wrapping it all up with a
watch of An American Hippie in Israel
before going into a rewatch of Mac and Me
for the third anniversary. There were
only two bonus posts that year, thanks to a lack of effort on my part when my
life became fuller. But the weekly posts
still came. I still saw bad movies and
still wrote about them. Now I’m going to
write about them again as I get into my top ten favourite bad movies I covered
that year.
10. Tracers
The bottom spot on this top ten was a toss-up between two or
three movies. Tracers felt like the
right one to put in the bottom spot because I want more people to see it than my
mother when I saw her watching it once, and me when I saw it for the blog. It deserves to be seen because it’s actually
a decently made action movie.
Taylor Lautner isn’t someone known for his acting
talent. He’s the only one of the main
three Twilight actors who hasn’t gone
on to have too many respected performances post-Twilight. Tracers showed that, if given the right
material, Lautner can do quite a good job.
It fit his skill set perfectly.
There was a little bit of action for a guy who can physically do action work. There was parkour because Lautner can do that
sort of stuff. And it wasn’t asking for
huge drama or anything.
Tracers stuck to
lower-key action than Lautner had previously been involved in, letting him show
off his real stunt work. The guy is
talented in that area, and that’s where he should focus his acting. He should be in more movies that use
practical stunts. It’s fun to see him
having a good time being physical in a movie.
He had fun in Tracers. It was easy to tell. That fun translated to an entertaining
movie. It won’t be blowing the doors off
of cinemas at any point in its life, but it’s a good home video watch if you’re
looking for a fun little action flick.
The dynamic duo of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes took
the stage in this crime movie set around New Year’s Day. Those two actors have great chemistry
together. White Men Can’t Jump was one of those movies that I used to watch
every time that I saw it was on television.
Somehow, their later collaboration had slipped past me.
Harrelson and Snipes played foster brothers who were
employed as transit cops. When
Harrelson’s character ended up in gambling debt, he decided to try and rob the
money train, a subway train that carried all of the revenue money from one
location to another. His brother worked
to stop him from doing it, while they both fell in love with a transit worker
played by Jennifer Lopez.
Like Tracers,
there’s not too much that’s bad about Money
Train. It’s not the greatest crime
action movie, but it’s also not the bad kind of stuff that I tend to watch for
the Sunday “Bad” Movies. It wasn’t messy
in the way that other movies I cover are, whether a charming messy or groan
inducing messy. It was just your
standard action movie made better by the chemistry of the lead actors. I enjoy Snipes and Harrelson working
together, so it worked for me.
One note that should be made about the inclusion of Dead Before Dawn 3D is that the movie
was filmed around where I’m living. It
was actually about three cities over, but the cities aren’t too big around
here, so it was like it was filmed in my back yard. I do not believe that it factored into the
movie being in the top ten of year three.
Feel free to take this one with a grain of salt, though, since it was
filmed around here. It may have subconsciously
influenced by decision.
Horror comedy is a genre that hits for me much more than it
misses. It is probably due to both those
genres being my two favourite genres. I
like horror and I like comedy, so a movie that brings them together is bound to
get me to watch it. Dead Before Dawn added in zombies, Christopher Lloyd, and one of
the most used token black guys in the genre, Brandon Jay McLaren. All around, it was a movie made for me to
like it.
I can understand how most people wouldn’t like Dead Before Dawn. The comedy might not land for them. Comedy is subjective though, and dumb jokes
usually work for me. As long as they’re
jokes. Dead Before Dawn had dumb jokes and a nonsensical script. That just made me enjoy it more. There’s something to sitting down and
wondering what the hell is going on.
You’ll see that in some of the picks higher up on this list. If you go into every movie expecting
brilliance in the writing, you’re going to be disappointed in 99% of what you
see. Go in with an open mind. Try to enjoy the little things. Dead
Before Dawn is enjoyable.
Here is where we get into the meat of the top ten. These are the movies so unbelievably
ridiculous that you can’t help but love them.
Or parts of them, at least. Batman & Robin is one of those
movies where I may not love the thing as a whole, yet I love many parts of what
happened on screen. It’s a dumb as rocks
movie. That’s what makes parts of it great
while other parts fall completely flat.
Let’s get into that.
So the thing that bothers me with Batman & Robin is the look of the movie. Some of it comes from the costumes that
feature nipples. That’s weird. I can look past that part, though. What really gets to me is the architecture of
Gotham City. The Tim Burton Batman
movies that came before had a gothic feel.
The city was dark, and felt old but grand, if that makes sense. The Schumacher movies were grotesque and
filled with neon. The buildings looked
like giant people, for whatever reason.
It was like Las Vegas on steroids.
That never, ever worked.
Then you get into the actual meat of Batman & Robin. It ended
up being a 1990s version of the 1960s Batman
camp. It may not have been entirely
intentional (the Batcard scene seems more like terrible product placement than
intentional campy humour), but when you go into the movie with the mindset of
it being campy, you can have an insanely good time. Arnold Schwarzenegger was at his one-liner
best. George Clooney was finding his
film stardom with a solid Bruce Wayne performance. There was an ice skating fight in a museum,
and a crazy number of villains doing villainous stuff. It was cheesy, which made it work. If only the city was designed differently, it
could have been much better.
6. Top Dog
Chuck Norris has made one appearance in the Sunday “Bad”
Movies and it was in this movie where he was paired up with a dog. They were a couple of police officers tasked
with taking down some Nazis who wanted to blow up a festival for equality. Chuck Norris played a lone wolf type of
police officer who didn’t like that he was partnered with a dog that just had
its old partner killed in action.
Top Dog was
completely and entirely tone deaf. It
didn’t know whether it wanted to be a hard R action movie where Chuck Norris
kicks Nazi butt, or a kids’ movie about a police officer bumbling around with a
dog. Almost everything with the dog went
for childlike humour. Reno (the dog)
slid back and forth in the back seat of the car during a chase. Jake (Chuck Norris) and Reno acted like a bickering
married couple when they were paired together.
The police chief treated Jake like a dog, saying “Good dog” to Reno and
immediately following it with “Good Jake” for Jake. But then the action had Nazis killing people
and blowing things up. It was two
completely different tones brought together without any blending. Nothing fit together.
The haphazard way that things were thrown together in Top Dog didn’t matter too much. It made the movie feel like a mess, but the
two parts were still decent. There was a
decent R-rated action movie in there with the plot to blow up the festival, and
there was an interesting kid-friendly buddy cop movie going on. They simply didn’t fit together and it would
be tough to say that a young child should be watching Top Dog because of the Nazi stuff.
Both parts worked, though, so there was still something fun to watch in
there somewhere.
Paul W.S. Anderson is one of the patron saints of the Sunday
“Bad” Movies. It seems like the vast
majority of the stuff he is involved in is stuff made for the posts I
write. There have been five movies
featuring his touch that I’ve watched for this blog. Three Death
Race movies made early entries, the first Mortal Kombat was one he directed (he wasn’t involved in the
sequel), and he produced DOA: Dead or
Alive. Oddly enough, they all
featured Robin Shou in some sort of role.
The prototype for a successful fighting tournament type of
movie is probably Enter the Dragon. It built out the characters, put them in a
tournament, and had people fighting to the death. In the end, the tournament didn’t matter so
much as the characters, and you wanted more than one person to make it out
alive. It was about what happened around
the tournament. That’s what built the
stakes and kept it from being a repetitive series of battles. Mortal
Kombat attempted to replicate this, but it had to stay true to the video
game roots. It had to pay tribute to the
Mortal Kombat games, which were
primarily just fighting games. You
picked a fighter and fought. There was
the slightest amount of story. The
fighting was all that mattered, though.
Mortal Kombat, as
a movie, played it mostly the same. It
tried to tell a story like that of the games while still trying to have the
character work of Enter the Dragon. Not all of it was successful. Of all the movies based on fighting video
games like this, however, it’s one of the better examples. It manages to make the good guys sympathetic
while making the bad guys really bad. In
the end, the tournament was the story, but the actual bracket didn’t matter so
much. It broke from the formula of a
tournament in an attempt to finish it with the characters intact. It somewhat worked. The movie was still a little messy.
What brought everything up, though, was the fighting. The story was fairly weak through Mortal Kombat, and only got weaker in
the sequel, but the fighting was still good.
Part of this was that Paul W.S. Anderson can do over-the-top action like
almost nobody else. Part of it was that
the actors could do the fighting action needed for the scenes. The mixture of that as well as sets and
choreography boosted this one into action-filled fun.
Troma found its first hit in The Toxic Avenger, a movie about a health club janitor who was
thrown into toxic waste and turned into an ugly superhero with a mop. He went on a mission to rid Tromaville of all
the terrible people residing in the city.
He also fell in love through the movie.
It went on to have three sequels (with a fourth reportedly in the works)
and an animated series spin-off.
The Toxic Avenger
was one of those movies that perfectly captured what the Sunday “Bad” Movies
are about. Though it was not the most
well-made movie (Troma was never big on production quality, I don’t think), it
had fun. It went overboard in how bad
the bad people were. The people who pushed
the hero into the waste were the same people later seen running people over in
their car as a game. There was a robbery
in a Mexican restaurant where the thieves attempted to rape a blind woman (who
Toxie fell in love with). He came in
and, in an ultraviolent way, dispatched of them. All of the crime fighting ended up being
ultraviolent, really. That’s the Troma
way.
This was Lloyd Kaufman at his best. He was able to bring his sensibilities to the
screen and create a memorable, classic B-movie out of it. None of his other stuff has lived up to The Toxic Avenger, and it’s no wonder
that Toxie has become the poster boy for the entire studio. I don’t dislike the other Troma produced
movies I’ve seen, but The Toxic Avenger
is easily the top of the pile.
The Leprechaun
franchise is nowhere near one of the best in horror. It’s a mess.
The first wasn’t good. The second
and third were okay. The fourth was
terrible, and the reboot was worse. The
high point was the fifth entry, Leprechaun
in the Hood. That was the one that
made it all the way to the top three of the third year of the Sunday “Bad”
Movies.
Ice T was one of the featured actors in Leprechaun in the Hood. His
character had imprisoned the leprechaun with a curse twenty years in the past
in order to gain his riches. An
up-and-coming hip hop group accidentally set the leprechaun free, leading to
yet another killing spree where a goofy leprechaun went after people to get his
gold back. Warwick Davis was always
great as the leprechaun, regardless of the overall quality of the movies.
Leprechaun in the Hood
was greatly influenced by the hip hop that was a major part of the story. There were breaks in the action where the hip
hop group would perform. The leprechaun
even rapped during the end credits.
There were drugs, shootings, and anything else that could be considered
stereotypically hip hop. Seeing the
leprechaun interact with characters from this world instead of greedy, scared
white people brought a new flavour to the franchise that rejuvenated it too
late for it to become something great.
There was a sequel to the fifth installment called Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood. It didn’t capture the same magic and the
series stalled out at that point. Leprechaun in the Hood, however, was the
one entry in the Leprechaun franchise
that could completely stand up next to the greats in horror. It might not be as good as them, but it
deserved to be in the discussion. It
realized that the franchise should veer more into comedy. That’s what Leprechaun should have been, a
comedy with horror. Leprechaun in the Hood hit that note perfectly.
2. WolfCop
The title alone makes WolfCop
seem perfect for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
He’s a wolf. He’s a cop. It’s perfect.
Cineplex Odeon, a Canadian theater chain, helped fund WolfCop.
Lou Garou (loup garou is French for werewolf) was a police officer
cursed with being a werewolf. The
werewolf wasn’t such a bad thing, though.
He still thought and acted like a human.
Thus, he was able to continue performing his police duties while in
werewolf form.
There’s a certain attitude to WolfCop that I’ve only seen come out of Canadian movies like Hobo with a Shotgun and the Goon franchise. Something about it just hits all of the right
notes for me. Maybe it’s the fact that
they were ballsy enough to begin his transformation into a werewolf with his
dick. Maybe it was the fact that
Jonathan Cherry made an appearance.
Maybe it was the use of Moonlight Desires by Gowan. Or it could have been all of that
together. There’s a lot to like about WolfCop and that’s why it’s near the top
of the list here. I can’t wait to see
the sequel when it comes out next month.
1. Elves
Now we come to the ultimate in bad movies. This is the movie from year three that took
the cake in what a bad movie could be.
It had bad acting, a weird ass script, one recognizable actor, and
Nazis. It was a Christmas horror movie
that was so insane that it’s hard to believe anyone could have written it. This is Elves.
The story involved a teenage girl. After she and her friends went out to the
woods and jokingly played around with her grandfather’s book, an elf came to
life and tried to impregnate her to create the master race. A security guard at the store she worked at
helped her fight off the elf. That
sounds tamer than the movie actually was.
The elf killed anyone who got in the way of his lust for the girl.
There were so many crazy things about Elves. I mentioned the Nazis
and the master race. Well, let’s just
say that the elf was a Nazi experiment and that some remainders from the Nazis
were trying to help it get to the girl.
There were also a whole bunch of references to incest throughout the
movie, including the girl’s brother telling her that she has nice breasts. He wanted to let everyone at school know that
he saw her naked, as well. On another note,
her mother hated her and her cat, and would stop at nothing to punish them for
things they didn’t do.
I’m not going into spoilers about the twists and turns in Elves though, since this is a movie that
should be seen. The last thing I want to
mention about it is that the one recognizable face that I wrote about earlier
was Dan Haggerty, the man who played Grizzly Adams. He became the hero of the movie. If you haven’t yet seen Elves and you’re reading this post, you need to get on that. Make sure it is a part of your Christmas
viewing. It is worth seeing.
Now we’ve wrapped up another year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies
with my top ten favourites of the year.
Some of these are classics that I’ll surely be revisiting because of how
fun they are. WolfCop is a movie I’ve convinced other people to watch. Elves
is a movie I’ve watched every December since first seeing it. There were also a few bad movies that weren’t
first time watches when I saw them for the blog, but were still good enough to
make the top ten.
Year three was probably the weakest of the five years I’ve
been doing the Sunday “Bad” Movies. It
was the year when I was trying to get my life on track. After working a minimum wage job for a few
years, I wanted to do something that would make me happier. I began thinking about school and decided I
was going to apply to a broadcasting program that I’m currently working my way
through. The third year was the funk
that I was getting through, and it came through in the movies I picked. There weren’t as many home run bad
movies. The funk would snap with the
next year.
The top ten of year four is going to be coming at you
soon. With three years down and less
than a week until the anniversary, I’m going to be coming fast and hard with
the other two posts. They might not be
today. They might not be tomorrow. But they’ll be up before the anniversary. You can count on that. Year four was a better year than year three,
and the top ten will show that. Come
back soon to see why.