We are nearing seven years of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. That milestone is only a few months
away. That’s seven full years of
watching and writing about bad movies.
Some of them have been terrible.
They were movies that I would never want to watch again. But there were others that were super
enjoyable. I had a great time checking
them out, and I would share them with other people because of how entertaining
they’ve been.
This post is a belated one that should have been completed a
long time ago. I’ve done five of these
before, for each of the first five years of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I wrote about my ten favourite movies from
each year I’ve been putting out these posts.
Now I’m going to be highlighting ten movies from year six, and discussing
what made them as fun, entertaining, and good as they were.
I came into the sixth year, as usual, with a few Christmas
movies. That’s the way it always
goes. The blog started up at the
beginning of December. Santa’s Slay
was the one that kicked things off, on week 263. The year wrapped up with the one-two punch of
Road to Revenge on week 313 and a rewatch of Wild Wild West on
week 314. There were a few personal
issues in the final few weeks of the year that made those posts come out during
year 7, but for the sake of this post, they’re year 6 movies. There were 59 movies total.
So sit back, relax, and let me tell you about ten movies
that ended up being my favourites of the sixth year of the Sunday “Bad”
Movies. They come from a few different
genres. There are a few different
decades represented. It was an
interesting year.
10. Fred Claus
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room immediately. Yes, Kevin Spacey is in this movie. He’s a horrible person. We’re going to have to move past that for the
sake of discussing this movie, though. Fred
Claus followed Santa’s brother, who wanted nothing to do with the family
business. He was pulled back into it,
though, when he needed some extra cash.
There was also a man overseeing the holiday figures like Santa and the
Easter Bunny, who was at the North Pole trying to shut it down for good.
Fred Claus was a perfect holiday vehicle to highlight
what makes Vince Vaughn entertaining. It
took his film personality and placed it on a family story about Santa. It worked like gangbusters for Vince
Vaughn. The dance scene in the middle
set to Elvis Presley’s Rubber Neckin’ was as Vince Vaughn as you could
get. A great supporting cast with Paul
Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, Kathy Bates, John
Michael Higgins, Ludacris, and Bobb’e J. Thompson helped make it an easily
digestible holiday comedy for the whole family.
9. Airborne
Every generation has their fads. Movies pick up on them all the time,
attempting to cash in on anything popular.
In the early 1990s, inline skates were all the rage. A few movies took that into account and used
inline skating as an important part of their story. Airborne was one of those movies,
utilizing inline skating alongside hockey and surfing to create a fish out of
water story that wasn’t really a fish out of water story as much as a class
struggle.
Most of the movie was a fairly average teen movie that had a
messy story. A surfer kid from
California was forced to live with his aunt and uncle in Cleveland. He didn’t fit in at the school of lower class
Cleveland teens. They hated him. They forced him onto their hockey team as a
replacement player and he scored on his own net, only enraging them
further. His skating skills were good
though. When the lower class kids went
up against their upper class rivals in an inline skating race, they tapped the
kid in to help.
The final race was what really secured Airborne’s spot in my
list of favourites. There was a visceral
feel to it. Every inch of skating felt
real. The music would drop out at key,
tense moments, leaving just the sound of the skates rolling across pavement. The danger of oncoming traffic made things
more dangerous. People fell down, wiped
out, and went through different struggles.
It was an exciting finale that has been matched by only a few of the
movies featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
I’ve been watching the Sharknado movies since they
came out. With each new one being
released, I would rewatch the ones that came before. A few years into the success of that
franchise, SyFy tried to bring another franchise to their network. Lavalantula happened. It crossed over with the Sharknado
films. Then it produced this sequel and
died.
The first Lavalantula film poked fun at the Hollywood
lifestyle. It was kind of funny. Then the sequel doubled down. Set in Florida, the movie spoofed anything
and everything it could in a way that made sense to the story. There were allusions to Scarface, Crocodile
Dundee, Dr. Strangelove, and Jurassic Park. It wasn’t as much a parody of Hollywood as
much as it was a love letter to movies in general. For anyone who loves movies and enjoys the
B-movies that SyFy channel churns out, this was a good time that flew under the
radar. Check this one out.
7. Santa’s Slay
Every year, I like to slide one horror movie into the
Christmas lineup. There are enough
holiday season spook fests that there’s always going to be something to put in
there. Santa’s Slay was the
horror movie for year six’s Christmas lineup and it was a wild ride.
Bill Goldberg starred as Santa. He had lost a bet and been forced to be nice
for a certain number of years. The time
was up, and he was going to kill as many people as possible. Three people in the town of Hell tried to put
a stop to Santa’s slay. Get it? Because he was killing people?
The movie was so balls to the wall with the comedy and the
horror that it was tough to not like it.
Bill Goldberg was clearly having a lot of fun as the maniacal Father
Christmas. The comedy was offensive at
points, but funny all the way through.
It’s one that I’ll probably revisit every couple Christmases because
it’s some good horror comedy.
6. 54
I saw this movie twice as part of the Sunday “Bad”
Movies. There were two versions of the
film released. There was the theatrical
version and the director’s cut, which had some major differences. The thing that the two versions had in common
was that they showed the excess of Studio 54, the people who went there, and
the people who worked there.
The theatrical version was a sanitized for the public
version of the movie. In the 1990s,
studios were still hesitant to have LGBTQ+ characters play a major role in
their film. There was some bisexuality
in the director’s cut of 54 that got removed for the theatrical
cut. It changed the entire relationship
between the core three characters and was most of the reason to watch each
version of the film. The ending was also
drastically changed from one version to another.
54 was not an upbeat movie. It was about the seedy underbelly of the
Studio 54 lifestyle. The theatrical cut
tried to make everything a little happier.
But the movie was still dark at its core. It was a serious drama with some good
acting. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been
included in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. It
was, though, and it made the list of my favourite year six movies.
Will Smith was a huge star in the 1990s. He came from rapping about how parents just
don’t understand and sat on his throne as the prince of Bel-Air. He was a bad boy and helped save the world
from aliens as a soldier and as a man in black.
He closed out the decade playing one of the founding members of a
fictional version of the US Secret Service in Wild Wild West.
This wasn’t as popular as his other big blockbuster
movies. Don’t get me wrong, it still
made over 200 million dollars in 1999.
That’s not bad. But people didn’t
like it. They thought it was a terrible
remake of a television show. Which it
might be. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an
enjoyable watch. The story might be
dumb. The farce might be a little too
over the top to actually work. Yet there
were still some shining moments.
What most people come back to is the mechanical spider that
showed up in the final act. There was a
producer around that time, Jon Peters, who tried to get a giant spider into a
bunch of scripts. He tried to get it
into a film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman that never happened. He tried to get it into Kevin Smith’s Superman
Lives, which also never happened.
Then he finally got it into Wild Wild West. And… Well, it’s a giant mechanical spider
that people fight in. It’s a thing.
The smaller moments in Wild Wild West work a little
better. Particularly, there’s a
recreation of the RCA dog picture with a dead man’s gramophone ear and a
puppy. Moments like that are sprinkled
throughout the movie making it enjoyable, though it is no doubt not a great
movie.
Horror has become one of the main genres of movies in the
Sunday “Bad” Movies. Every October, I
plug in horror films for the schedule.
Then there are the other horror movies that come up throughout the
year. Chopping Mall was one of
the October ones that I tossed in there because I’d seen it before and knew I
enjoyed it. I was stacking the deck in
my favour.
The original name for Chopping Mall was Killbots. That’s because the movie was about robots
killing people that were stuck in a mall after hours. The people had to fight back against the
robots that were out for their lives. It
was action horror with full on 1980s sensibilities. Of course I loved it.
For people into the more cultish horror hits, Chopping
Mall featured Dick Miller and Barbara Crampton. Each of them have built up a career of
memorable horror movies. They dipped
their toes into other genres, too, but people love them for their horror work. Chopping Mall let them each shine in
their own way. One as the snarky guy he
played so well, and the other as the scream queen she was. Best of both worlds.
3. D.C. Cab
Joel Schumacher is a director who is very hit and miss for
me. There’s a lot of his stuff that I
don’t like. His Batman movies
aren’t great, though Batman & Robin has grown on me. St. Elmo’s Fire was a bore. The Number 23 is what it is. I do kind of like Flatliners and Twelve,
though. Phone Booth and The
Lost Boys are pretty great. D.C.
Cab ended up joining the positive side of things, becoming another
Schumacher movie that I enjoyed.
What made it really work was the rag tag nature of the main
characters. I tend to enjoy movies about
rag tag teams. I love when a bunch of
characters who make a messy team come together and end up on top. There are so many sports movies like that
which have become some of my favourites.
D.C. Cab is like those movies, except there’s a taxi company
instead of a sports team.
There’s also a solid cast to really bring the characters to
life. Perhaps they’re not all good
people (hell, two of them are pretty shitty), but they form an entertaining
cast of characters. Adam Baldwin, Gary
Busey, Mr. T, Paul Rodriguez, and Bill Maher are only a few of the people
working for the cab company. The cast
really brings it all together to make it one of the most entertaining Sunday
“Bad” Movies of year six.
It was a Tuesday.
Only, it was a Sunday when I put up a post for the two Street Fighter
movies. They weren’t an actual
continuation of one another, but they were two movies based on the same source
video game franchise. The Legend of
Chun-Li was flat out trash. The only
saving grace was the collection of facial expressions I was able to get from
Chris Klein’s performance. The 1994 Street
Fighter, though… That was some entertaining bad.
There have been a few fighting games adapted to film. Street Fighter is one where the movie
didn’t end up being a fighting tournament.
The people behind it decided that they would try to tell a story through
the characters from the games. M. Bison
was a dictator and a bunch of characters travelled to Shadaloo to stop his evil
ways.
Again, the cast was kind of crazy. Jean-Claude Van Damme took on the role of the
American soldier Guile. Kylie Minogue
was along with him as Cammy. Miguel A.
Nunez Jr. was playing a Jamaican henchman to M. Bison, and M. Bison was Raul
Julia. Ming-Na Wen, Byron Mann, and Wes
Studi were in there, street fighting their hearts out, too.
Street Fighter had that early 1990s sci-fi/action
look and feel to it, though it wasn’t too much science fiction. It was a similar style to Judge Dredd,
Demolition Man, or Super Mario Bros. but in a different setting. It’s one of those styles that isn’t done
anymore, and I miss it. That nostalgia
is definitely a part of placing it this high.
The fun action and cheesy dialogue are the rest of it.
1. Dead Sushi
Was there any other choice?
This was my birthday pick. My
birthday fell on a Sunday in year six of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and I decided
to celebrate with a movie that I knew I would love. It was one that I had seen and loved
before. So I decided to pop it into the
schedule and have some fun for my day of womb escape.
Dead Sushi is an insane movie. A bunch of businessmen went to a Japanese inn
to indulge in what men of power indulge in: sushi and women. A disgruntled former scientist employee
showed up and made the sushi come back to life as zombies. Now it was up to the businesspeople and the
workers at the inn to fight back against the sushi that was trying to take
their lives. There were martial arts,
zombies, and a battleship. Don’t ask
how. It needs to be seen.
And there we have it.
The sixth year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, summed up in one post with my
favourite watches. There were a few
movies that I tossed in there because I knew I loved them and thought they fit
into the Sunday “Bad” Movies feel. There
were also a few surprises. Some movies
came into the schedule that I never knew about or never saw, and they ended up
being dark horses in terms of what my favourites would be. I mean, who expected me to love Airborne
as much as I did?
If six years of writing about bad movies has taught me
anything, it’s that I should expect the unexpected. Nearly every movie that has been watched for
the Sunday “Bad” Movies has had some nugget of magic to it. Whether it’s good cinematography with nothing
else, one insanely good scene, or just pure entertainment, every movie has
something to offer. These movies have
all shown that. All bad movies have
something good to show.
Coming up in about half a year will be another one of these
posts, with another ten movies from another year of the Sunday “Bad”
Movies. What will be my favourites of
year seven? I could probably start
predicting that now, but I have another few months of movies to throw into the
mix. There could be something I don’t
even know about right now that ends up in the top spot. There is always room for a surprise.
And with that, this post is coming to a close. This isn’t the only post for this week. Of course, there is the regular, weekly
post. This week, I covered Breakin’,Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Rappin’. It was an interesting trio of movies. I also want to let you know that I’m planning
on doing at least one bonus post a month.
This one will be the August one.
Next month, I’ll be putting out a bonus post that is basically an update
on the post I wrote for The Room way back in the first year. So keep an eye out for that post during
September. Until then, enjoy the weekly posts.
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