Snow Dogs (2002) and Academy Award Winning Actors in Bad Movies

With awards season well underway, everyone interested in movies is thinking about Oscars.  The Academy Awards aren’t for everyone, but everyone that cares about film thinks about them at one point or another.  It could be the love of the filmmaking craft, and the prestige that comes with celebrating it.  Maybe it could be that the awards don’t truly represent the important films that could last through generations.  The thoughts are there, positive and negative, as the ceremony approaches its annual event.

The big awards that are handed out are Best Picture, Best Director, and the four acting categories.  There are other great categories, too, but in terms of general interest, those are the six that people have the most fervor for.  Best Picture is the culmination of everything, so people get excited for it.  Best Director is who people most associate with steering the ship.  The actors are the faces of the movie.  Every other category falls away, as do the names of the people involved, since the general audiences don’t usually pay attention to the other aspects of filmmaking.

Legacy becomes the discussion once the awards are handed out.  Will the Best Picture winner hold up in the years to come?  Some might while others won’t.  Will the directors ever be able to make a film nearly this good again?  Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t.  The most interesting to look at, however, are the legacies of the actors involved.  There are certain actors who will get nominated time and time again and not really falter from year to year.  Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Jack Nicholson are people who tend to end up in best performance discussions when they release new films.  That’s not what makes the acting awards interesting.  What about the actors who don’t continuously make award worthy movies?

See, the thing is, an actor could make a good movie and get awards buzz for it.  At the same time, they have a movie in post production, and they’re working on another one.  Those movies might not be nearly as good.  They could have done them for a paycheck.  They could have done them simply because they were offered a role and they wanted to work.  Or they could have been confident in the material and things just didn’t work out the way they hoped.  This was all in place before they were nominated for an Academy Award.  That’s what the most interesting thing in awards season is.  An actor could be nominated for, or even win, an Academy Award, only to have one of their worst movies come out that same year or just after.

This topic was semi-inspired by Cuba Gooding Jr.  The man won an Academy Award for Jerry Maguire in 1997.  His career didn’t immediately take the dip that some of the more interesting examples did.  He continued with some strong performances in movies like As Good As It Gets and Pearl Harbor.  The early 2000s weren’t nice to him, though.  He ended up in Rat Race, which has become one of those classics in my house that probably isn’t a classic in too many others.  Then there was the one-two punch of Snow Dogs and Boat Trip in 2002.  It wasn’t a good year for Cuba.  He tried to come back with Radio, but soon ended up in mostly direct-to-video or very limited theatrical run movies that nobody remembered.  He would pop up once in a while in things like American Gangster or Daddy Day Camp, but most of his work was under-the-radar and barely noticed.

The movie that people come back to for his fade into obscurity is Snow Dogs.  The 2002 family comedy from Disney was about a Miami dentist who learned he was adopted and travelled to Alaska to uncover the truth about his parents.  There were some huskies and a border collie along for the adventure as he joined small town culture and became a dogsledder.  It wasn’t the best movie ever, but it was far from the horrible reputation it left behind.  The actors tried to make the best that they could from a poor script, Cuba Gooding Jr. included.  Among the winking dogs and slapstick, child-oriented humour were some decent performances and sweet moments that helped create a story worth investing time in.  It wasn’t the worst thing that Cuba Gooding Jr. was ever a part of.

Other actors ended up with more immediate bad roles when they were coming off an award win.  In 2002, Halle Berry won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Monster’s Ball.  It was one of those career making roles that was going to propel her to great things.  She had been in X-Men and Swordfish, put an award-winning performance into this other movie, and would go on to even bigger parts.  That’s what would normally happen.  In Berry’s case, that promise would be tarnished almost immediately.  Though, it would take a couple years for it to fully set in.

The same year that Halle Berry won Best Actress in a Leading Role, she was in a major action film as the female lead.  That film was Die Another Day.  It was the final James Bond movie to star Pierce Brosnan in the lead role.  The movie paid homage to every James Bond film that came before.  It was dropping during the fortieth year of James Bond on the big screen.  It was also utilizing the effects that were popular at the time, which was a drastic move away from the practical spectacle that people had come to love with the franchise.  There was an invisible car, a laser beam from outer space, and a terrible Madonna song that kicked things off.  It was not the greatest outing from action’s longest running franchise.  Halle Berry played Jinx, an American special agent who was helping Bond take down the bad guys.  The producers wanted to potentially create a spin-off with her character.  That never came to fruition because of how poorly received Die Another Day was.  The franchise would reset itself a few years later with a new actor playing James Bond and no sign of Jinx.

That wasn’t even the worst for Halle Berry.  Two years later, she would play the lead role in a Catwoman movie.  It went down in history as one of the worst comic book movies ever, and one of the worst movies to come out in the blockbuster era.  Selina Kyle was a character from the Batman comics who was a cat burglar.  Catwoman eschewed the Selina Kyle identity.  The writers made their own secret identity for the superhero/supervillain.  Patience Phillips was the new main character, who was killed by a cosmetics company, only to be resurrected by a bunch of cats and have cat powers.  Most of the movie was terrible.  And it was a selling point for studios to not do a female led superhero movies for years to come.  Halle Berry had come off an Academy Award win and did these two movies.  Gosh.

For a third example, Sandra Bullock took the cake for people who got an Academy Award and then had a bad movie right around the corner.  In fact, both happened at about the same time.  The Golden Raspberries tend not to be mentioned in the blog.  They were mentioned in the early days as a jump off point, but that awards ceremony tends to be piling on the same people year in and year out for movies that might not deserve the worst of the year moniker.  However, in the case of Sandra Bullock, it’s impossible to mention her Academy Award without mentioning the Golden Raspberries.

In 2009, Sandra Bullock was in The Blind Side.  It was a movie about a woman taking in a young football player from the wrong side of town.  She gave him everything he needed to succeed in the sport and reach his potential.  Her performance was so acclaimed that it earned her that golden man statue that the business strives to get.  The night before, however, was the exact opposite experience.  The night before the Academy Awards, Sandra Bullock was accepting a Golden Raspberry for her work in All About Steve.  In one weekend, she won both the Best Actress at the Academy Awards and the Worst Actress at the Golden Raspberry Awards.

Three examples with three different timeframes where the Academy Award legacy came with bad movies.  Cuba Gooding Jr. had a career of questionable choices following the potential people saw in him during Jerry Maguire.  Halle Berry immediately followed her Academy Award win with a couple duds that she managed to come back from in recent years.  Sandra Bullock’s win came at the same time as a win for Worst Actress.  Each of these Academy Awards are intertwined with the legacies of the actors who won them.  Each of the bad movies bring back memories of the time that the actor put in an award-winning performance.  What followed and what happened is as interesting as the award itself.

This awards season doesn’t seem to have too many oddballs in the acting department for the Academy Awards.  That might not be the case though.  For many actors, particularly two of the three that were looked at here, the lows came after the high.  Two years out from now, there could be some strange things coming for whoever wins their respective acting awards.  They could keep putting in great performances in great movies, or they could make movies that’ll be covered in future weeks of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Only time will tell.

Now for a few notes before we part ways:

• Snow Dogs was suggested by @koalainchicago, who previously suggested View from the Top (week 83).
• Die Another Day (week 153) and Catwoman (week 174) were mentioned in this post.
• Jim Belushi voiced a character in Snow Dogs.  He was in New Year’s Eve (week 57), Jingle All the Way (week 160), and Snow Buddies (week 270).
• Brian Doyle-Murray showed up in Snow Dogs.  He also showed up in Cabin Boy (week 173)  and Nothing But Trouble (week 267).
• Jay Brazeau made his third appearance in the Sunday "Bad" Movies this week, following appearances in House of the Dead (week 59) and Warriors of Virtue (week 88). 
• Christopher Judge is another three-timer with Snow Dogs.  He was previously in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190) and Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark (week 300).
• Richard Steven Horvitz came back to the Sunday "Bad" Movies today.  He first appeared in Son of the Mask (week 207), then he returned for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (week 226), and now he's in Snow Dogs.
• One last three-timer was Anthony Harrison, who came into Snow Dogs having already been in Blackwoods (week 115) and Snow Buddies (week 270).
• Cuba Gooding Jr. starred in Snow Dogs.  He had a supporting role in Norbit (week 227).
• Sisqo played one of the dental workers in Snow Dogs.  He would go on to play a surfer in Surf School (week 42).
• Artine Tony Browne had his second Sunday "Bad" Movies appearance this week after having a small role in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50).
• Angela Moore showed up in Snow Dogs.  She also had a role in Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160).  Dave 'Squatch' Ward was in both movies with her.
• Snow Dogs saw the return of Gwendolyn Osborne-Smith, who was last featured in Jack and Jill (week 101).
• Britney Ever After (week 258) actress Nicole Oliver reappeared this week in Snow Dogs.
• Hollywood legend Graham Greene was in Snow Dogs, just like he was in Winter's Tale (week 89).
• Another Hollywood legend, James Coburn, had a large role in Snow Dogs.  He also had a large role in Hudson Hawk (week 232).
• David Boyce showed up in bot Exit Wounds (week 93) and Snow Dogs.
• Did you see Frank C. Turner making his second Sunday "Bad" Movies appearance this week?  He was in Alone in the Dark (week 152) and now he's in Snow Dogs.
• Finally, there was M. Emmet Walsh.  He had roles in both Snow Dogs and Wild Wild West (week 296).
• Director Brian Levant also put in a second Sunday "Bad" Movies release this week with Snow Dogs.  He previously directed Jingle All the Way (week 160).
• Have you seen Snow Dogs?  Are there any other actors who won an Academy Award then went on to make some weirdly, bad movies?  What do you think of the examples I used?  Let me know in the comments.
• Twitter and the comments are places where you can suggest movies I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If there’s a movie you think would fit in the blog, drop it in one of those places and I’ll add it to my list.
• There is an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Check it out for updates about the blog and pictures from the movies I cover.  Some other stuff too, but mostly that.
• I have a Snapchat (jurassicgriffin), if you want to add me.  Sometimes I share scenes from bad movies.  Sometimes.
• That does it for this week.  The post is coming to a close.  But one last thing is to let you know about next week.  Back in the first couple weeks, I watched a movie called A Car’s Life (week 2).  Now I’m going to move onto the sequel.  Next week will be the week of Car’s Life 2.  Cruise on back to the blog next Sunday to see what I have in store.  See you then.

Attila (2013)

The Asylum has been producing movies since its formation in 1997.  David Michael Latt founded the company with David Rimawi and Sherri Strain, and began turning out low budget horror movies.  They weren’t huge successes because other studios were doing bigger things with horror at the time.  This would be the start of something special, though.  When The Asylum released their War of the Worlds movie in 2005, they realized that there was a market for mockbusters, movies with similarities to big releases.  People would seek them out to watch either out of confusion, or as a schlocky alternative.

Though the mockbusters have become the biggest piece of The Asylum’s output since 2005, they aren’t the only movies put out by the studio.  They, of course, have their animal attack movies like the Sharknado franchise.  Then there are the sex comedies like The Coed and the Zombie Stoner.  They do still put out some of those low budget horror movies that they began with too.  One such movie was 2013’s Attila.

Attila was a military horror movie.  Vito (Chris Conrad) was a soldier tasked with leading a team to fight the Nomad (Cheick Kongo) and retrieve a mystical staff.  General Thadeus (M. Steven Felty) collected legendary artifacts for the government, and the staff had the ability to resurrect Attila the Hun.  He had an archaeologist helping him out to ensure that every artifact he found was the real thing.  Especially the staff, which would grant immortality to the people who knew how to properly use it.

The first thing that should be noted about the movie is that it was called Attila, though the main bad guy wasn’t actually Attila the Hun.  Most online descriptions tout the film as a sort of military vs. Attila story.  That’s not the case.  The Nomad was Attila’s son, and Attila only came into the story through the “ability to resurrect Attila” portion.  It was some false advertising that fit with The Asylum as a studio, but could be misleading to people who don’t know what The Asylum tends to do with their promotion and marketing.  What little promotion and marketing there typically is for a movie from The Asylum.

As for what Attila ended up being as a completed film, it was entertaining, yet forgettable.  There were things to like while the movie was also filled with the setbacks of low budget filmmaking.  Mind you, it’s The Asylum, so their low budget has more funding than some of the micro-budget films that come through this blog.  There’s enough of a budget that they can get decent equipment to help make their films.  They can secure actors who get semi-regular acting jobs instead of people that the filmmaker knows from their neighbourhood.  This allows for a better overall quality on a technical level.

That’s not to say that things end up being perfect.  Attila had its setbacks.  The most notable setback was from the location in which it was filmed.  The main location was supposed to be the American wilderness where the government had hidden a series of bases.  Trees, hunting trails, dirt roads, and all that stuff should have been abundant.  There were trees, for sure.  There were some dirt roads there, too.  But it all looked like a park of some sort.  The trees and roads all looked deliberately placed.  The location, though the outdoors, felt as though it was manufactured.  People had clearly been involved in the layout of the location, which took away from the fact that the manmade base structure was supposed to be hidden within the wilderness.

To add to the bad aspects, the writing of the man character was atrocious.  He was a highly trained soldier who was respected for his skills but disrespected in every other way by his superiors.  Every mission he went on, his team would be killed.  This would easily cause anyone to experience trauma.  He had a bad case of PTSD, yet his superiors continued to use him.  He would constantly argue with his superiors and defy their orders at first.  They would still force him to go on the mission instead of reprimanding him.  Perhaps it wasn’t him that was poorly written.  Perhaps it was the military system itself.

There was some good writing throughout Attila, though.  Specifically, the interactions between Vito and his team were well done.  They fit together as a cohesive unit who had rapport with one another.  Whenever they lost a team member, it felt like they lost a team member.  It didn’t feel like fodder for the Nomad.  There could have been more work done to make their deaths more impactful.  A better connection could have been built between the characters and the audience.  But, as it was, there was enough work put in to make the comradery feel real between the characters, and that counts for something.

The other thing that deserved praise from Attila was the use of effects.  Usually, movies by The Asylum come with pretty bad special effects.  The explosions are cheesy, the muzzle flashes look fake, and the blood and gore look cheap.  The effects artists for Attila did some good work to mostly blend the effects together with the action.  The Nomad’s face was believably decayed, and though the rest of his body wasn’t decaying, it was the same drained flesh of a colour to match well enough that it wasn’t distracting.  The explosions were of good quality.  The grenade explosion with the Jeep was the highlight of those, being the best-looking explosion of the movie and possibly one of the best The Asylum had done up to that point.  Even the fire during the climactic scene of Attila looked better than most of the effects the studio had produced by 2013.  There was a lot of good to take away from Attila in terms of effects.

The story of Attila may have been what made it forgettable.  There wasn’t much to it outside of fighting with the Nomad through the park looking location.  For people who have seen many movies from The Asylum, however, there were some good things that could be taken away from it.  The character work and the effects showed promise.  There was something to those aspects that made them stand out.

The Asylum might be known for the mockbusters and animal attack movies that they produce more than anything else.  Those are the majority of their output.  Yet, 22 years into their existence as a studio, they’re staying true to their roots.  They still release under the radar horror movies like those that they began with.  They try new things while always remembering where they came from.  That’s how a studio lasts multiple decades.  That’s why The Asylum will go down in history.

These notes will go down in history:

• Sharknado was mentioned in this post.  Here’s the post for the first three Sharknado movies (week 190).  The Coed and the Zombie Stoner (week 102) was also mentioned.
• Anthony C. Ferrante was in Attila.  He directed the first three Sharknado movies (week 190), and had cameos in Sharknado 2: The Second One (week 190) and Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190). 
• Dylan Vox made his third Sunday "Bad" Movies appearance this week.  He was in Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven (week 170) and Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (week 300).
• Bill Voorhees and Steve Hanks were in Attila.  They were also in Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark (week 300).
• Chris Conrad, who played Vito, was in two Sunday “Bad” Movies before this, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (week 140) and Airborne (week 301).
• Leona Mizrahi showed up again this week.  She was last seen in The Coed and the Zombie Stoner (week 102). 
• Finally, let's end off with a four-timer.  Terry F. Smith reappeared in Attila.  He was already in The Human Centipede III (week 180), Sandy Wexler (week 231), and Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark (week 300).
• Have you seen Attila?  What did you think of it?  Let me know in the comments.
• Twitter and the comments are where you can find me if you want to suggest a movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Any movies that you think would fit into future weeks of this blog are welcome.
• There’s an Instagram account for @sunday_bad_movies.  Check it out if you want to keep up to date with the blog through pictures.
• I do share clips of the bad movies I watch on Snapchat.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if that sounds interesting to you.
• Next week, I’ll be going with a suggestion once again.  I only have a few of them right now, and I slipped one in for next week.  I’ll be watching the classic Cuba Gooding Jr. film, Snow Dogs.  If that sounds like something you want to read about, come back next week.  See you then.