Air Buddies (2006), Snow Buddies (2008), and Space Buddies (2009)

Air Bud came out in 1997 and became a big part of my formative years.  I had just turned seven when it was released.  I was a fairly active child, running around, playing whatever sport I could, though I wasn’t necessarily good at any of them.  This movie about a boy befriending a basketball playing dog spoke to me.  It wasn’t because I was the boy.  I wasn’t.  It was the mixture of dogs, which I loved, and sport, which I enjoyed.  Those two elements were brought together in a movie, which I didn’t know was my true passion at the time, and it quickly became something I admired.

The franchise would continue through 2003 as Buddy the dog went through five different sports.  He started by playing basketball, then he tried his paw at football.  He continued through soccer, baseball, and volleyball.  I watched three of the five movies as a kid, yet somehow regarded the entire franchise as some sort of sacred ground.  I don’t agree with that assessment now, having watched the entire five movie franchise in preparation for this post, but I still think there’s something to them that made me, as a child, admire them.

When I was fifteen, I heard about a new Air Bud movie coming out called Air Buddies.  It would integrate Buddy’s puppies into the story.  The only catch was that now the dogs talked.  That set me off.  For some reason, I thought the entire series was some classic thing that hinged upon the animals not talking.  That was a constant in the franchise up to that point.  As I would soon learn, though, Air Buddies was the start of a new series, not the continuation of an old one.  The old continuity was there, to an extent, but the Buddies movies were a spin-off series.  I was quick to write them off because they were not what I thought the future of the Air Bud franchise should be.

After over ten years of shunning the Buddies movies, I finally decided to give them a chance.  Before I get into that, though, I should let you know which ones I watched and what they were about.  The Air Buddies movies began with Air Buddies in 2006.  In 2008, a sequel was released called Snow Buddies.  The year after that, Space Buddies was released.  Those were the three Buddies movies I watched.  The first three of nine movies.  Yes, there were nine movies produced in the Air Buddies spin-off series, with two of them actually being a spin-off of Santa Buddies, a 2009 release that I didn’t get to.

Air Buddies followed a new litter of five puppies.  Each of them had something in their name pointing to the word “bud.”  Rosebud was the only female puppy.  Mudbud was a puppy who liked being dirty.  Buddha was a calm, zen puppy.  Budderball was the strong, overweight puppy.  Then there was B-Dawg (the B standing for “Bud”), the cool puppy.  There was a boy who wanted Buddy for his new pet and the puppies had to save Buddy and Molly from their dognapping.

Snow Buddies followed that up by having the puppies accidentally shipped to Alaska aboard an ice cream delivery.  They met a husky puppy named Shasta who was trying to help his boy become a dogsledder.  The puppies came together to make a great sledding team that would compete in the local dogsledding competition.

In Space Buddies, the puppies went to space.  They had to overcome sabotage to get their space shuttle back to Earth.  Along the way, they met a Russian cosmonaut dog and helped him return to Earth to meet up with the boy who owned him.

The three movies were a change from what the Air Bud movies had been.  Air Bud from the first through Spikes Back was about a dog playing sports to help a kid find his or her place in their world.  At the same time, there were people trying to take the dogs away from them.  Whether it was the clown played by Michael Jeter in the first or the bumbling jewel thieves in Spikes Back, people kept trying to take Buddy away from the Framms.  The Buddies movies weren’t about that stuff.  They were about the sibling puppies coming together to find their way home.  Sure, Snow Buddies still had the child finding their way through sport storyline, but the movies became about reuniting at home.  They were about family being together, even though they might be apart.  It was a different overall theme.

This was a theme that I appreciated.  The Air Buddies movies weren’t trying to tell the same story as the Air Bud movies, but with talking animals.  They were setting themselves apart by focusing on different ideals.  They were about the importance of family.  That’s where their strengths lay and that’s why I felt bad for having written them off for so many years.

The idea that we write off movies because we think they will be terrible is something that I’ve been advocating for not doing.  I still end up falling into that trap sometimes, as I did with the Buddies films.  However, one of the main inspirations for the Sunday “Bad” Movies blog is to find something good in everything.  These posts are all about using the movies that people write off to discuss themes that encompass all movies.  And if I find something I enjoy while checking out the bad movies for the blog, so be it.

Sometimes, even with the Sunday “Bad” Movies, I need to remind myself not to write off movies.  Air Buddies wasn’t the first instance of my going into a movie thinking that it shouldn’t have been made and coming out thinking it was pretty good.  That happened with The Marine 2.  It happened with God’s Not Dead 2.  Those two, specifically, were instances where I watched the first movie in a franchise and thought it was a mess that didn’t know where the story should have been.  Then I saw the sequels.  Both The Marine 2 and God’s Not Dead 2 took what was good about their predecessors and got rid of most of the unnecessary elements that brought them down.  They were steps in the right direction, turning disappointing franchise starters into interesting franchises.

That elimination of the irritating, weaker aspects was apparent in Snow Buddies as well.  As I’ve already said in this post, many of the movies in the Air Bud franchise involved people trying to steal Buddy, the sports dog.  Even Air Buddies had that storyline.  Snow Buddies got rid of it.  Nobody tried to steal anything.  Instead, the bad guy was the rival in the dogsledding competition.  It streamlined the story and let the focus be on family and working together.  The whole movie benefitted from that, making it one of the better entries in the whole Air Bud franchise.

Certain filmmakers also get reputations where people begin to write off their work.  From experience, I wrote off Friedberg/Seltzer after a series of terrible spoof films where the jokes were based solely on recognition and not on anything actually funny.  But then they showed they could try with their original movie Best Night Ever, and tried with their spoof Superfast!.  The same could be said for Uwe Boll.  Though I enjoyed House of the Dead, the movies I had seen from him hadn’t given me any reason to think he could make a good movie.  I wrote him off.  Then I saw the potential he had with a big budget in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  The guy made an entertaining action/adventure movie.  It was still kind of messy, but showed that he could put together a half decent film if given the resources.

The most notable written off filmmaker, though, and one that was written off by almost everybody was M. Night Shyamalan.  He came to prominence with the one-two punch of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.  By the time The Happening came out, people were wary.  Then he released The Last Airbender and everyone was completely against him.  It would take until the release of Split in 2017 for people to come back on board.  Now he’s respected all over again and people are anticipating Glass.  People had written his work off.  They were pleasantly surprised when they enjoyed Split.

Writing off a movie, a franchise, or a person’s work can lead to you missing something you might enjoy.  People who write off remakes are missing some of the best movies out there.  The Thing, The Fly, Ocean’s Eleven, A Fistful of Dollars, The Magnificent Seven… Even The Wizard of Oz and The Maltese Falcon.  All of those movies are great remakes.  No matter what you write off for whatever reasons, there could be something great in there.

And yes, there are reasons to write things off that I would be like “Yeah, makes sense.”  I’m not going to say that people shouldn’t write off James Toback’s work after finding out what he did.  That’s a respectable reason to not want to watch something.  All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t write off movies for reasons like I’ve written them off.  It was petty of me to not want to watch Air Buddies because it was different from Air Bud.  I’d be more bored if it was exactly the same as Air Bud but with puppies instead of Buddy.  At least they tried something new.  That something worked, too.

Watching through the first three Buddies movies gave me a respect for movies I had been ignoring because of petty reasons.  They’re not great movies by any stretch of the imagination, and they shouldn’t be ignored because of that.  They have earned their place in the world of cinema.  It might not be a big place.  It might not be an important place.  It’s a place all the same.  I was too quick to write them off, that I forgot that they have their place.

These notes have a place, and it is right here:

• I mentioned a few movies I’ve seen in this post.  They were The Happening (week 185), House of the Dead (week 59), In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220), The Marine (week 30), God’s Not Dead (week 230), and Superfast! (week 229).
• Air Buddies, Snow Buddies, and Space Buddies were all directed by Robert Vince.
• With his appearances in Snow Buddies and Space Buddies, Mike Dopud has now been in six Sunday “Bad” Movies.  The other four that he was in were Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (week 33), Skin Trade (week 146), Alone in the Dark (week 152), and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220).
• Michael Clarke Duncan returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with a voice performance in Air Buddies.  He was previously featured in A Crush on You (week 51), D.E.B.S. (week 111), and Delgo (week 148).
• Did you notice Wallace Shawn’s voice in Air Buddies?  He was also in Furry Vengeance (week 162) and Mom and Dad Save the World (week 186).
• John Tench also made his third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Air Buddies.  He had already been included in Repeaters (week 62) and In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220).  Yay for movies filmed in Canada.
• One surprise in Snow Buddies was a voice performance by Whoopi Goldberg, who was in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50) and Theodore Rex (week 223).
• Lochlyn Munro showed up in Space Buddies with the awesome character name of Slats Bentley.  He’s a third-timer here, having been in Hansel and Gretel Get Baked (week 38) as well as In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220).
• Tom Everett Scott was in Air Buddies and Snow Buddies, but that wasn’t his first time in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  He was in Parental Guidance (week 27) way back in the first year.
• Michael Teigen played Deputy Dan in Snow Buddies and Space Buddies.  He had shown up once before in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in, you guessed it, In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220).
• Three actors appeared in Air Buddies, Snow Buddies, and Space Buddies.  They were Josh Flitter, Skyler Gisondo, and Gig Morton.
• Abigail Breslin voiced Rosebud in Air Buddies.  She was already in the Sunday “Bad” Movies when I covered New Year’s Eve (week 57).
• Jake D. Smith was also in Air Buddies.  He was in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50).
• Snow Buddies was the second appearance of Charles C. Stevenson Jr., who had shown up in Jack Frost (week 54).
• Anthony Harrison of the film Blackwoods (week 115) was in Snow Buddies.
• Malcolm Scott became a Sunday “Bad” Movies two-timer with Snow Buddies.  He was in Alone in the Dark (week 152).
• Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160) featured Nicholas Harrison, who returned this week for Snow Buddies.
• Jimmy Bennett was in Snow Buddies for a little bit.  He was also in Movie 43 (week 243).
• Dylan Minnette made one of his first acting appearances in Snow Buddies as Noah Framm.  He would go on to be in Fred Claus (week 265).
• Ali Hillis returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies with Space Buddies, after being in Beverly Hills Chihuahua (week 70).
• Eleven actors showed up in Air Buddies and Snow Buddies without being in any other Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They were Kelly Chapek, Jarvis Dashkewytch, Tyler Foden, Richard Karn, Dominic Scott Kay, Stuart Malinowski, Christian Pikes, Paul Rae, Molly Shannon, Cynthia Stevenson, and Cainan Wiebe.
• Ellen Kennedy was in both Air Buddies and Space Buddies.
• Finally, there were three actors that came into the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Snow Buddies and stayed on for Space Buddies.  They were Henry Hodges, Taku Kawai, and Liliana Mumy.
• Have you seen any of the Buddies movies?  Have you ever written a movie off only to visit it later and realize you liked it?  Share your thoughts in the comments or let me know on Twitter.
• Twitter and the comments are both good places to suggest movies to me.  I’m always trying to build up my list of possible movies to watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Let me know any you find.
• Snapchat is a place where you can find me if you want to see clips of bad movies, or other random things.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you feel like it.
• Now that I’m done with the Buddies, for now, I’m going to be returning to another franchise that has been in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’ll be checking out Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, the third in the series that included Evil Bong (week 52) and Evil Bong 2: King Bong (week 104).  Come back next time so see what I have to say about this one.

Vulgar (2002) and Movies Where the Directors Also Act

The most important role in any movie isn’t the star that is in it.  A star might be the selling point.  They are the face of the movie that the producers use to get butts in theater seats or eyes on television screens.  But the actor is usually just a tool for telling the story.  They are used to play the character.  The most important part of a movie is actually the director, who makes sure that everything comes together.  They make sure that everyone else brings the scene to life.  They take what was on paper and translate it into something that can be recorded for later viewing.

There are times, however, when directors feel that keeping a movie afloat might not be enough for them.  They want an even bigger part in making the movie, and take on another role.  It might be editor, writer, or some other technical role.  Many times they go in front of the screen.  Some directors choose to direct their own performances.  They give themselves roles in the movie so that they can be both behind the camera and in front of it.

The Sunday “Bad” Movies has featured many movies where the director was one of the performers in their work.  Not all of the instances were as big as the others.  Sometimes there were multiple directors on the movie, and other times the acting role was a simple cameo.  For the sake of what will be covered, those examples will be left out.  The only movies that will be covered will include the director having a significant role in the film.  Let’s begin with this week’s movie.

Vulgar

Kevin Smith’s film universe, also known as the View Askewniverse, grew when his friend Bryan Johnson directed Vulgar.  IMDb says that it came out in 2000, but looking at the release dates, it was really released in 2002.  It was Johnson’s first and, to date, only directorial effort.  Will Carlson (Brian O’Halloran) was a clown who worked children’s birthday parties.  He wasn’t making as much money as he had hoped and tried to think of a new way to boost his income.  He came up with the idea of being a joke stripper for bachelor parties, coming in before the stripper as a cross-dressing clown.  This got him into hot water when his first customers gang raped him.  The rest of the movie was about Will dealing with what had happened to him.

The story of Vulgar was promising, dealing with what a victim goes through after experiencing a violent act.  The way that Will dealt with things felt realistic, though having not experienced anything like that, I wouldn’t know for sure.  He was angry at the world and didn’t care about himself anymore.  He was trying to come to terms with the fact that there are people in the world doing terrible things like this.  That was all good.  The execution of getting that from the page to the screen was where Vulgar fell apart.  The performances were underwhelming in most cases.  The cinematography, though decently enough framed, didn’t give off any look to make the movie appear to be more than shot on video.  I don’t know if it was shot on video, but it had that feel.  The direction seemed unable to nail down a specific tone to the movie, trying to be darkly comedic and horrific, but not blending the two.

The direction and acting came together with Bryan Johnson.  Not only was he directing a movie for the first time, but he gave himself a decent sized role as Will’s friend Syd Gilbert.  Syd was the voice of reason.  He told Will that the bachelor party idea was bad.  He was there for Will after the rape.  He tried to keep Will from going off the rails.  Johnson himself was a passable actor.  He wasn’t terrible in the movie.  The problem was that it was his first directed project and it may have been too much for him to do a good job in either role.  He didn’t have the experience to both direct and star, which brought everything down a notch.

The Room

How could this one not come up?  Everyone knows the story of how The Room got made by now.  Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau were two actor friends who moved to Los Angeles together.  Greg found some small success while nobody would hire Tommy.  He decided to make his own future by writing a script.  That script ended up being The Room.

Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) was a man in love with his fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle).  She began cheating on Johnny with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero).  Johnny found out and decided to confront his fiancée and best friend.  In the end, he was torn up and went into a fit of rage, not dissimilar to one that was featured in Vulgar.

There’s a reason that nobody wanted to hire Tommy Wiseau.  He directed a terrible movie and gave a terrible performance in it.  There were no redeeming qualities to any of the work that he put in.  This one might not have been a case where it was too much work for him to be both the director and, in this case, the lead actor.  Wiseau couldn’t do either of them.  The movie that came out of it was a disaster, hence the book and movie about the making of it being called The Disaster Artist.  It was easy to see that he wanted to make something great.  His heart was on the screen.  He opened himself up to audiences.  But he’s not good.  He’s just not good.

The Single Moms Club

Tyler Perry is a fairly well known director.  His work finds an audience that most mainstream movies don’t target.  He’s got a solid following for his Atlanta based work, which has led to some great success.  Most notably, his Madea series of films, which see him star as the Madea character, have lasted longer than the time it takes many studios to reboot their franchises.  The Spider-Man franchise has been rebooted twice since the first Madea movie was released.  That’s how well his movies do.

The Single Moms Club wasn’t a part of the Madea franchise.  Tyler Perry still gave himself a role within the movie, though.  He played the prospective romantic interest of one of the mothers.  Out of all of the movies being covered, this one might be the best performance.  He doesn’t take away from the movie, nor does he add anything.  He’s there, as any actor would be in that role.  The experience that Tyler Perry has after doing so many films has given him enough skill to know what he has to do in his own movie.  He has not become an exceptional director, but he knows how to perform.  He has become a better performer than director at this point.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Lloyd Kaufman has shown up in a lot of Troma movies.  In many cases, he was a talking head introducing a movie that they picked up.  In the case of Poultrygeist, he was one of the characters in the movie.  He was an important character, helping to shape the story of Arby (Jason Yachanin).

Arby was in love with Wendy (Kate Graham).  She broke up with him, so he got a job at American Chicken Bunker.  Everything was going okay, aside from the protest against slaughtering animals that was happening outside, until the chicken being served came back to life and began attacking the patrons.  Everyone’s lives were in danger from the zombified chicken.  There were songs, scares, and sexual acts.  It was a Troma movie.

Lloyd Kaufman has never been a good actor.  He has shown up in a lot of stuff (including Guardians of the Galaxy), but none of it has been for his talent.  The reason he has been cast in so many movies is because he’s Lloyd Kaufman.  He’s a patron of low budget, typically horror movies.  He helped the careers of many filmmakers and they repay the favour by letting him have a small role in the other stuff they work on.  The one redeeming quality of any of his performances is that Lloyd Kaufman is always having fun.  He was having fun in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, which made it easier to overlook his poor acting.  It’s like most bad movies.  If it isn’t going to be well done, at least make it fun.

Dead Before Dawn 3D

April Mullen directed the first stereoscopic 3D movie that was a completely Canadian production.  That movie was a horror movie about a group of friends who fought off zombie demons while succumbing one by one to the virus.  It was called Dead Before Dawn 3D, and she also played one of the college aged friends trying to survive the outbreak.

The problem that most people have with the movie falls upon its script.  The problems aren’t about the direction or the acting, which are both fairly solid.  April Mullen learned how to be both the overseer of a movie and one of the performers through her career up to the release of the movie and it showed.  It might not be the greatest movie to ever be put to screen, but it’s a fun enough horror comedy that was weakened by the writing.

Fateful Findings and Double Down

Closing out the list of actor/directors is this double feature from the mind of Neil Breen.  The guy isn’t really good at any of the aspects that go into making a movie, but has somehow managed to carve out a career for himself.  He’s like Tommy Wiseau, though much less entertaining.  Instead of putting his heart into the script, he tries to come up with deep thoughts and ideas that get lost somewhere along the way.

Breen directed both Fateful Findings and Double Down.  They’re two vastly different movies.  Fateful Findings was about an author using his hacking skills to reveal the secrets of the government and the world’s corporations.  Double Down was about a hacker going up against the government.  Okay, maybe they’re more similar than I remember.  In each movie, the character ended up believing he had supernatural powers.

Neil Breen cannot act.  Neil Breen cannot direct.  Neil Breen cannot write.  This is apparent in both of the movies.  He runs, screams, and gives unintelligible voiceover.  The worst part of it all is that no emotion comes through the screen.  There were attempts to make things sad or suspenseful, but they fell flat in both the direction and the performance.  Neil Breen might be the most unsuited to any of the things that he wanted to do.

There have been many movies featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies that had directors wanting to perform in their own work.  About half of the time, that seems to work out fine.  The other half, it falls completely flat and the movies are worse for it.  Perhaps the directors can’t handle the two jobs.  Sometimes they’re just terrible actors and it takes people out of the movies.  Other times, they’re bad at both jobs and shouldn’t be doing either.  Whatever the case, it happens.  Movies have directors taking on acting roles.

Vulgar was a movie that at least felt promising.  The execution might not have been great, but there was the potential within Bryan Johnson’s work to improve and make something better.  That never happened.  It has been fifteen years, and he has not directed another movie since.  It would have been nice to see him blossom into a solid director, churning out movies like Vulgar, but better.  More experienced.  That would have been something.

The directors that seem to be best at directing their own performances tend to be directors that come from an acting background.  Ben Affleck and Clint Eastwood are two that come to mind.  Knowing how to perform can help when performing in something that they direct.  But they need to be able to do both jobs.  The acting is important when trying to sell the movie.  The directing is more important because it keeps everything together.  If they can’t do both, they have nothing.

I’m not ending this post on nothing.  I’m ending it on these notes:

• Vulgar was suggested by @FranchiseFred, who also suggested Officer Downe.
• A few movies were mentioned in this post.  They were The Room, The Single Moms Club, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, Dead Before Dawn 3D, Fateful Findings, and Double Down.
• Ethan Suplee had an important role in Vulgar.  He was previously in Rise of the Zombies, which was covered for the sixteenth week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• The lead actor in Vulgar was Brian O’Halloran, who had a small part in The Happening, the movie that was covered in week 185.
• Finally, Scott Mosier had a bit role in Vulgar.  He had a small role in the week 209 movie, Free Birds.
• Have you seen Vulgar?  What do you think of acting and directing in the same movie?  Let me know in the comments.
• You can find me on Twitter if you want to talk bad movies or suggest something for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  The comments are a good place to do that as well.
• Sometimes when I’m watching bad movies, I share clips through my snapchat (jurassicgriffin).  Add me if you’re interested.
• Next week is a big week for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It’s one of those franchise weeks.  I will be checking out the first three spin-off movies to the Air Bud series.  That’s right.  Air Buddies, Snow Buddies, and Space Buddies will be coming up next week for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Come back then to see what I have to say about that trio.