The $cheme (2003)

Almost every popular actor has an early movie from their career that they don’t want people to see.  It could be that it was some low-budget schlocky thing made to get their foot in the door.  Or to make a quick buck.  It could be something that they were contracted to do that they never wanted.  It could even be something that they regret doing because of the subject matter.  There are buried movies all over the place, and sometimes I stumble upon them.

This week was one of those movies.  I found a Jimmy Fallon movie called The $cheme from early in his acting career.  During the Christmas holidays, I decided that the right gift for my friends would be to go to the local video store (yeah, there’s still one around here) and buy each of them one of the worst movies I could find.  I got someone Tiptoes and someone else Gooby.  But then I found this ratty looking DVD of a Jimmy Fallon movie that I had never heard of.  It was The $cheme.  I bought it, gave it to a friend, and put that whole thing behind me.

Well, I almost put it behind me.  About two months after handing off the DVD, saying “Merry Christmas, here’s your gift,” and moving on, that friend watched it.  That was at the end of February.  I was told all about how bad it was and that, since I watch so many bad movies, I should check it out.  I put it off for a few weeks, then added it to the schedule for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  And here we are.

Before I get into the movie, I want to give a quick background of Jimmy Fallon’s career.  Saturday Night Live is what made him famous.  He was added to the cast in 1998.  He did impressions of people like Adam Sandler and Jerry Seinfeld, and played music.  Three years into his Saturday Night Live run, he became one of the anchors of Weekend Update.  He would keep his chair until he left the show in 2004.  That year, he went on to be in the film Taxi.  That’s the one with Queen Latifah as a taxi driver who helps Jimmy Fallon’s police officer character track down criminals led by Gisele Bundchen.  He followed that up with Fever Pitch in 2005, alongside Drew Barrymore, which is more known for being that movie that filmed the Red Sox winning the World Series than the actual quality of the movie.  A few years later, he would be hosting Late Night, and he would quickly follow that up with The Tonight Show.

Sometime in there, Jimmy Fallon starred in the movie The $cheme.  It was filmed in 1998 and released on DVD in 2003 but there was some stuff online that said 2000.  Either way, it was made during is Saturday Night Live days.  Martin (Nathan Anderson), August (Brian Hooks), and Ray (Jimmy Fallon) were three friends in need of some money.  After robbing a mailman to try and steal the money people were mailing each other, they came up with a plan to make a sex tape with a politician’s daughter.  Ray ended up falling in love with her, and wacky antics ensued.

As soon as The $cheme began, it was easy to see that my friend was right.  It was a terrible movie.  When they said that the writing was bad, they weren’t wrong.  It was atrocious.  When they said it was hard to watch because the visuals were horrid, they were bang on the money.  The visuals were as displeasing to the eyes as anything.  It was an all-around bad movie with those two elements being the standouts.

If we’re going to discuss the writing, we need to go over why the movie was called The $cheme.  The main characters wanted to make some quick cash.  They needed money to live off of, and one character wanted to be rich.  So they were coming up with some quick schemes to get their money.  They were selling their blood all the time.  They tried to rob a mailman because people sent money to each other through the mail (remember that this was 1998 and e-transfers weren’t a thing).  Their big scheme came out of the mail robbery.  They found a letter from a girl to her father.  The father happened to be a politician running for office.  They decided that if they made a sex tape with the daughter, they could sell it for good money.  A tabloid reporter on the brink of being fired for not having stories financed their attempts to get the sex tape made.

Not that the setup was any good, but the moment when Martin, August, and Ray came up with their plan was the moment when the movie became extremely questionable.  When the characters met the reporter, they explained their plan.  Martin thought that the politician’s daughter was fourteen, and he was okay with having Ray try to make a sex tape with her.  That’s not good.  Ray corrected him though and said that she was seventeen.  That’s not much better, Ray.  The whole idea of making a sex tape with an underage girl, while a tabloid reporter is okay with reporting the sex tape… It’s kind of a gross premise.

Add in that the comedy never quite landed and you had some lackluster writing.  The jokes were too obnoxious (because of the characters) or too convoluted to be funny.  Take the joke that happened at the pizzeria.  There’s a certain finesse needed when doing misunderstanding humour.  It’s not the highest brow comedic style but it’s one that needs to be approached carefully.  The misunderstanding was that Ray thought Alison (Andie Falconi), the daughter, was having sex with a pizza shop owner.  In reality, she was teaching him English.  All that Ray had for context was the pizza shop owner saying “Where do you want to do it?  In the back?”  He jumped to conclusions quickly and the joke never stuck.  Maybe if he had stayed and overheard some awkward conversation while they were having English lessons, it could have worked.  That didn’t happen, though.

Moving on from the writing of The $cheme, the visuals should be addressed.  The camerawork in The $cheme was not good.  The mail robbery exemplified everything that was wrong with the camerawork.  The camera was placed wherever they felt like placing it without considering screen direction.  This disoriented what was happening, which worked for the fight that ended the scene, but didn’t work for the setup of the robbery.  It was tough to follow where everyone was during the setup when you couldn’t tell in what direction anyone was moving or looking.  Then there was the angle of the shots.  The shots were all kinds of different angles for no reason, including dutch angles that looked like the camera simply wasn’t levelled, instead of actually adding any interesting style.  The camerawork was terrible.

There were probably multiple reasons that The $cheme got buried.  The first one was that there were no real stars in it when it was made.  Jimmy Fallon wasn’t a huge star at the time.  It was filmed at the beginning of his tenure on Saturday Night Live.  So that meant it got shelved for a few years.  The only reason it got released in 2003 (or 2000) at all was that Jimmy Fallon’s star had risen enough for him to be bankable.  The other main reason for it to be buried was that Jimmy Fallon, himself, probably didn’t want it to be widely seen.  Seeing as he’s one of the more wholesome late night hosts, it seems likely that he wouldn’t want a movie about his adult character having sex with an underage girl for laughs to be out there.   It makes sense.  Or just the overall quality might taint his image.  That could be it too.  Whatever the case, the movie was buried.

The $cheme was not a good movie, and it was buried with reason.  Like many other buried movies, they become an interesting look at the people involved.  That’s especially true when the people involved are big stars later in their careers.  It’s always fun to see the path that a star took in becoming as popular as they ended up.  Their successes, their failures, and everything in between.  There’s a background and the buried movies help to build that.  That’s interesting to me, at least.

These notes are interesting too:

• Early in the post, I mentioned Tiptoes (week 28) and Gooby (week 166).
• Jimmy Fallon made his third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance this week.  He was in Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (week 221) and Jem and the Holograms (week 238) previously.
• Daniel Raymont returned this week after having appeared in View from the Top (week 83).
• The $cheme saw Timothy Bottoms show up, after showing up in Top Dog (week 126).
• Finally, Nathan Anderson from Godzilla (week 282) was in The $cheme.
• Have you seen The $cheme?  Have you even heard of it?  What other buried movies do you know?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
• Twitter and the comments are two places where you can toss me some ideas of what movies I should be checking out for future Sunday "Bad" Movies installments.  I'm always up for suggestions.
• There’s an Instagram account devoted solely to the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Check it out.
• I have a Snapchat that I usually use to share clips from the bad movies I watch.  I definitely used it for this movie.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you want to see clips of bad movies.
• One last thing to wrap this all up is a look at the next movie.  Sometimes I like to revisit franchises that have been featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies before.  I’ve done it with The Marine.  I’ve done it with Evil Bong.  Now I’m going to be checking out the sequel to Hell Comes to Frogtown, conveniently named Frogtown II.  Roddy Piper didn’t return and was replaced by Robert Z’Dar.  I’ll see you next week with my writing about whatever I write about based on the movie.