Not Cool (2014)

When YouTube began in 2005 and expanded in 2006, it was nothing more than a way for people to share videos of things they liked. Early videos like Don’t Tase Me Bro and Charlie Bit My Finger became popular as people started repeatedly watching them. It wouldn’t take long for people to start making original content. Comedy sketches showed up. Commentary videos. Covers of popular songs and original songs. People made webseries. There were many ways that people could use YouTube to build their portfolio and rise to fame.

A bunch of people came out of that wave of creators. The earliest YouTubers were born. They built a community that would grow into many YouTubers of many different likes and interests. Big names were built, and many would go on to more fame in different places. Bo Burnham made a comedy career out of his work on early YouTube and transitioned that into acting and directing in Hollywood. Logan and Jake Paul transitioned from Vine to YouTube and have since transitioned from YouTube into… Boxing careers, of all things. And then, of course, there was Justin Bieber who was discovered through his YouTube videos. All of these people used YouTube as a stepping-stone to other careers within the entertainment world. Film, sports, and music.

Another famous YouTuber who transitioned, however briefly, into another facet of the entertainment business was Shane Dawson. He came up through the YouTube ranks in 2008 with comedy sketches. Later in his YouTube career, he would produce documentaries about other YouTube celebrities like Jake Paul and Jeffree Star. However, he has rightfully come under scrutiny for videos from his past featuring blackface, as well as jokes about pedophilia and beastiality. The guy had some major issues. His YouTube channels were demonetized in 2020.

In 2014, he broadened his entertainment portfolio by directing Not Cool. Tori (Cherami Leigh) was home from college for Thanksgiving weekend. She hated the town she grew up in because of the harassment she suffered through high school. While driving around, she ran into the recently dumped Scott (Shane Dawson) and they began a romance that would change both their lives. Meanwhile, Tori’s friend Joel (Drew Monson) pined after Scott’s sister Janie (Michelle Veintimilla), who wanted nothing more than to be friends.

Now, quickly, let me say this. I did not pay to see Not Cool. I definitely watched it and I’ll be describing it in some detail coming up, but I’m not going to support Shane Dawson. I’m not going to give him any opportunity of making money off me watching his shitty movie. That’s not going to happen. I found a free copy of the movie that I could watch for the sake of this post. There is no way I could justify spending money on his movie, money that would go to him, money that would fund his shitty behaviour. And now on with the rest of this post.

Not Cool very much felt like Shane Dawson’s comedic stylings packaged in the form of a feature film. It was an hour and a half of bad jokes, tasteless and offensive humour, and Dawson playing sketch-level characters. Everything was wrapped up in a cliché romantic comedy, complete with scenes that have been in every stereotypical romantic comedy since the beginning of scripted films. For those people who liked Shane Dawson in 2014, it was surely a movie they loved. Looking at it now, as someone who was never into Shane Dawson, it’s tough to see anything good in the movie.

The first thing of note about Not Cool was Shane Dawson’s character. Or, should I say, characters. Shane Dawson played Scott, the main romantic interest. He was the guy that the main character, Tori, fell in love with over the course of the movie. The problem was that Scott was written as a guy with stalkerish tendencies. Tori even called him out on it, on multiple occasions. When his ex-girlfriend, Heather (Jorie Kosel), broke up with him, Scott began cyber-stalking her. When he hooked up with Tori, he then forced himself into her life. He came to her house uninvited. He joined her family’s festivities without her consent. He stalked her online, too. Not a great romantic interest, really.

Shane Dawson didn’t stop there. He had another character who showed up throughout Not Cool. Janie had a group of friends that she always hung out with. Shane Dawson played one of the girls in Janie’s entourage. It was an over-the-top crossdressing performance that was seemingly only in the movie to satisfy Shane’s own comedic wants. Maybe she was a play on a character he had in some of his YouTube sketches. I don’t know because I never really watched any Shane Dawson stuff. The only point of that character existing was for an awkward half make-out between her and Joel near the end of the movie.

Now let’s dig into Joel. That character was possibly even worse than Scott in terms of being a viable romantic interest. This was mostly a result of his not taking “no” for an answer. He wouldn’t leave Janie alone. Tori told Joel that Janie wasn’t interested. Janie told Joel that she wasn’t interested. Joel didn’t listen. He told Janie that he wanted to study. Instead of studying, he set up the perfect date for her by creeping her Facebook. She caught on and called him out, saying that she already told him she wasn’t interested. That also didn’t stop him. He tried again, before she shot him down one more time and set him up with some of her friends, including that Shane Dawson character, so that Joel could lose his virginity.

If the guys sound bad in Not Cool, it’s because they were bad. But there were also female characters just as bad. Heather was played to be a lunatic. A sex-crazed lunatic. She was introduced into the movie by throwing a stroller into a door and tossing some random person on the ground, all so that she could go make out with Scott. She broke up with him during a blowjob. Then she raped Scott during the climax of the movie, in the scene that tore Scott and Tori apart before bringing them back together. She wasn’t the most over-the-top character in the movie (that fell on the homeless man who ate his own shit), but she was certainly among the worst. Though, to be fair, she did give me the one laugh I had in the movie when she screamed “Give me your dick!” through a gloryhole.

One other terrible character was Marisa (Lisa Schwartz), Tori’s blind sister. Schwartz, another problematic YouTuber, was Shane Dawson’s girlfriend at the time that Not Cool was made. She wasn’t blind. That didn’t stop her from playing a blind character and playing the blindness up for jokes. It was ableism at some of its worst, an able person making fun of a disabled group of people for the sake of comedy. That type of humour wasn’t out of the ordinary for Lisa Schwartz. She joined Dawson in an early video where he made sexual jokes pertaining to his 12-year-old cousin. Both of them have issues with their sense of humour being much more offensive than funny, which clearly came through in her performance of Marisa.

Most of the tasteless humour in Not Cool came through the offensive characters. Scott being a stalker, Joel being a harasser, Shane’s other character being insufferable, Heather being a rapist, and Marisa being a case of ableism. They were all played for jokes. Characters were called out for it throughout the movie. Tori called Scott a stalker. Janie said Joel needed to just leave her alone. Scott said that Heather raped him. Scott even called Heather a racist, which was a strange thing to hear from a Shane Dawson character, since Shane Dawson has used blackface in the past. The entire sense of humour in the movie was much more off-putting than funny.

The other thing I want to note is how cliché the entire romantic comedy story of the movie was. Many of the tropes were present in Not Cool. There was the typical romantic comedy story structure, which was forgivable, since most romantic comedies have that structure. Two people meet up and fall in love. They separate near the end because of some big issue that gets between them. But they get back together because they love each other, regardless of what that big issue was. The problem with Not Cool was that throughout that structure, there were beats and elements that didn’t help set the movie apart. They simply made it feel like an amalgamation of everything else.

First off was the setting. Too many romantic comedies set themselves within a specific event or timeframe. Think about all the high school romantic comedies leading up to prom. Or consider all the romantic comedies that involve New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, or Christmas. Or even weddings. Not Cool was set within Thanksgiving weekend. It was a way to bring everyone back together and get their families involved. Having it set during an important holiday weekend felt like a standard romantic comedy trope, even if it wasn’t intentional.

Secondly, there was the airport. How many romantic comedies feature one of the characters chasing the other character to an airport or a train station or a bus station? How many have scenes where the characters meet up at one of those places and embrace each other? If not that, how many have the characters coming into town in one of those places and meeting up with their family? Not Cool had that. It had the characters show up at the airport, meet up with their loved ones, and begin their journey. It was bookended with the characters returning to college through that airport at the end. That was cliché number two.

Side note. The airport was a terrible set. Based on the trivia on IMDb, they shot the airport scenes at an elementary school. It truly looked that way. The entire airport scene was a front door, a small set of stairs, a round bench, and another door. It looked like the foyer of a school. It was the cheapest looking airport scene that I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Another trope used in Not Cool was a scene where the romantic interests visited an empty football field. This trope might not always be an empty football field. In Happy Gilmore, it was an empty hockey rink. It was also an empty hockey rink that Eddie and Joey visited in season 6 of Dawson’s Creek. In Van Wilder, the two characters played some one-on-one hockey alone in the rink. The use of an empty sports venue to highlight the characters’ focus on one another without anyone interfering is used a bunch throughout romantic comedies, and Not Cool was no different.

The final major trope was when Scott won Tori back by showing that he could change, in the most superficial way possible. In every romantic comedy where the two leads break up leading into the final minutes of the film, one of them must do something to truly show how much they care about the other person. They must embarrass themselves, do some big public gesture, or drastically change something. Not Cool saw Scott cutting his hair in the final portion of the movie, showing that he was ready to change. He was ready to try something new with Tori. His past was the past and his future was with her. Cutting his Shane Dawson emo hair was Scott letting go of his past and what made him the prom king in high school. He was moving on.

There were also some parties and a bunch of dancing scattered throughout Not Cool. Scott and Tori bonded over a round of a dancing video game that Tori hated. That dancing would come back at the end, once the two characters got back together. There was a party to kick off the movie, a party about halfway through, a party where Joel made out with the crossdressing Shane Dawson, and a party where Scott got raped. It was a party-filled movie. It was a teen movie. It was a teen romantic comedy.

Writing this post, I discovered that Not Cool, while a Shane Dawson movie, was based on a script that wasn’t his idea. It was a script called How Soon is Now. That script was the basis of a television show called The Chair, in which two first time filmmakers were given the opportunity to make their own versions of it. One of them ended up being Not Cool, a movie that completely overhauled the script to change the subgenre from coming-of-age to a sex-rom-com filled with Shane Dawson humour. The other was Hollidaysburg, a movie I’ve never heard of or seen. So, yeah, I might watch that soon to compare.

Not Cool was a misfire, mostly due to the creative talent behind it. Shane Dawson infused the script with the humour that made him famous, the humour that also got him into big trouble in recent years. The standard romantic comedy story that he presented to audiences was filtered through bad characters who were played as sympathetic in how depraved they were. The audience was supposed to care about the stalker romantic interest and the friend who kept overstepping the boundaries that someone had set. Rape and blindness were played for jokes.

Shane Dawson was one of many YouTube celebrities to dip their toes into other waters. He made the jump, however briefly, from YouTube to feature films and Not Cool was the result. Many others have made similar leaps, going from YouTube to some other form of entertainment. They’ve become actors, stand-up comedians, musicians, and writers. Issa Rae went from YouTube to a successful film and television career, both in the writing and performing side of things. Lilly Singh became a talk show host on NBC.

While anyone could move from their entertainment career jobs into YouTube and find some form of success, it’s tougher for YouTubers to find success outside of the online world. People like Shane Dawson, who had one feature film and a couple shorts, are much more common than the big successes. It proves that there are different skill sets to every form of video presentation. What works in one form may not work in another. A person who becomes a huge success on YouTube may not find huge success outside that platform. It happens.

YouTube came into the world in 2005 and changed the way that internet videos existed. It provided an easy way to share videos with people around the world. It brought a bunch of fresh faces into the public eye to find fame and fortune, as well as to share their creative talents. Some YouTubers, as they came to be known, lasted. They found a way to remain relevant. Others faded into obscurity. That’s the way the world goes. The good, the bad, and everything in between. It comes, it goes, and it makes an impression while it’s around.

Something else that will make an impression is this list of notes:

• Three actors appeared in both Not Cool and Abduction (week 433). They were George Lourimore, Terri Middleton, and Phil Nardozzi.
• Finally, Kurt Angle had a small appearance in Not Cool as a security guard. He was also in Sharknado 2: The Second One (week 190).
• Have you seen Not Cool? Have you seen Hollidaysburg? Do you mind telling me how similar or different they are? Do you hate Shane Dawson? Give me all your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments.
• You can use Twitter and the comments to let me know what movies I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m always open to suggestions of movies I might not know. Put them on my radar. Hit me up.
• Head on over to Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• And now we get to look forward to next week, a franchise week. That’s right. Next week, I’ll be checking out multiple movies in one franchise. That franchise is Iron Sky. There are two movies. I’ll see them both, write about them, and come on back here. Are you ready for that? See you in a week for another post.

Zapped! (1982)

When I think of movies in the 1980s, there are a few things that come to mind. The first is the horror of that era. Much of what is in horror movies now was influenced by what came out in the 1980s. Then there was the rise of the blockbuster film and big, excessive action movies. Filmmakers took the groundwork that had been laid by Jaws and Star Wars and ran with it. The last thing that really stuck out about the 1980s was the sex comedy.

Much like the horror and blockbuster films of the 1980s, the success that sex comedies had in the 1980s could be attributed to the films of the late 1970s paving the way. National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978 and Meatballs in 1979 really set the stage for what would happen in the 1980s. They found success within their demographic and people wanted to capitalize on it. They also wanted the success. Most importantly, they wanted the money.

The imitators came quickly. Two years after National Lampoon released their sex comedy, Mad Magazine had one to release. They put out Up the Academy, a sex comedy set at a military school. It didn’t fare nearly as well, which might be a reason why National Lampoon slapped their name on a bunch of movies while Mad Magazine didn’t. Gorp was another 1980 sex comedy, this time imitating the summer camp setting of Meatballs. There’s not much to say about that one, really. It didn’t leave much of a cultural impact one way or the other.

The most influential of the sex comedies would come out in 1981 and get a wide release in 1982. Porky’s was another school-set sex comedy, in the vein of Animal House, but it influenced so many more movies. The entire subgenre exploded following its release. Movies like Screwballs, Revenge of the Nerds, and Jocks would come in its wake. But that was just scratching the surface. There was an abundance of sex comedies set in schools.

Filmmakers had to add things to their sex comedies to make them stand out from the abundance of movies in the same wheelhouse. Some of them specialized the schools to make the setting a little bit different. Police Academy placed the sex comedy into a school for cops. Hamburger: The Motion Picture placed the subgenre into a fast-food management school. Stewardess School and Ski School were set exactly where you would expect them to be set. If the filmmakers wanted to set their sex comedy in a school, they needed a reason that their movie was different from all the others.

Some filmmakers took a different route, such as in the movie Zapped!, released in 1982. Barney Springboro (Scott Baio) was a high school student working on a formula that would quickly grow vegetation, while also studying the effects of alcohol on mice. His friend Peyton (Willie Aames) wanted to use the formula to grow pot for profit. When the alcohol and the formula were accidentally combined, the fumes from the new concoction gave Barney telekinetic abilities.

Zapped!, for the most part, was the stereotypical teen sex comedy. It was set at a high school and involved characters hooking up for various amounts of time. It also involved teenage boys doing horrible things to other people simply to appease their own hormones. If it weren’t for the twist, that Barney ended up getting telekinetic powers, it could have been any of the teen sex comedies released throughout the 1980s.

First, there was Barney and what was going on with him. He was holed up in the science lab at his high school, working on what would be his major project to get him recognized. He was hiding some cannabis plants in one of the cabinets. There was a school reporter, Bernadette (Felice Schachter), who wanted to write an article about Barney’s formula. They hit it off. They started a relationship. They had sex. But when Barney went along with one of Peyton’s schemes, Bernadette broke it off. Barney had to win her back in the end.

Second, there was Peyton. He was the sex-crazed friend, using any means to get laid. He slept with the secretary, Miss Updike (Hilary Beane), under the guise of a photo shoot. He constantly harassed Jane (Heather Thomas), a girl at their school who was dating a college guy. When Peyton eventually had sex with Jane, he snuck a picture of their intercourse to use as revenge against her boyfriend. Peyton was the scummy character of Zapped!, though it was a sex comedy, so all the men were kind of scummy. He was just the worst.

Third, there were the teachers. Principal Coolidge (Robert Mandan) was always in cahoots with Miss Burnhart (Sue Ane Langdon) to figure out what secrets Barney had in the science lab. Over the course of the movie, Coolidge and Burnhart got the hots for each other before getting together and continuously hooking up, in a restaurant, at the prom, or any location they could find. There was also Coach Jones (Scatman Crothers), who oversaw the school’s baseball team. He got high off Barney’s supply at one point, going on a crazy dream sequence. During the climax of the movie, he was all horned out for the high school girls while his unnamed wife (LaWanda Page) threatened him. The sex comedy was as much influenced by the adults as the teens.

For the most part, that played like the average sex comedy of the early 1980s. The big difference in Zapped! was the tleekinesis. It changed things up enough that the movie could stand on its own as something special. It could be lumped in with the other high school sex comedies, but it would be identified as “that one with the telekinesis.” Or however the kids said it in the early 1980s.

There were two main ways that the telekinesis was used throughout the movie. One way was Barney taking revenge on anyone who wronged him. His mother wanted to control his life. Barney used his telekinesis to freak her out. He defended himself against the bullies who wanted to beat him up. He also destroyed the college fraternity’s rigged roulette wheel. The other way telekinesis was used was to further the sexual side of Zapped!

The sexual stuff came early in the telekinetic powers. Barney and Peyton were outside with Jane. Peyton tried to ask her out and she pushed away his advances. Barney began staring at her chest and her shirt popped open. There would be a couple other simple sexual uses of telekinesis throughout the movie, but it wouldn’t go crazy until the climax. In what was a huge reference to Carrie, Barney threw the high school prom into disarray with his telekinesis. He opened the doors and rushed wind in. He ripped the clothes off everyone, leading to a bunch of naked women running around. The twist in Zapped! was that the main character could remove people’s clothes with his mind.

Zapped! was only one of many sex comedies trying to find its own foothold in an oversaturated market. It took the very standard high school teen sex comedy and tossed in some supernatural shenanigans. It made itself stand out by adding something that the other teen sex comedies didn’t have, and it allowed for the sex to come out in a slightly different way. It led the way for other sex comedies to try their own unique twists to give a simple subgenre something fresh to titillate with.

The over-abundance of sex comedies led to filmmakers adding whatever twist they could to try and make their movies even a little bit unique. The settings changed. Some of them were schools. Some of them were camps. Some of them were beaches. The main characters changed a little bit. Some were jocks. Some were nerds. Some had telekinesis. But they all shared their core concepts. There were characters who wanted to have sex and they would do almost anything to get it. That was the 1980s sex comedy.

Sex comedies reached their peak in the 1980s and then their popularity eased off. It never completely dissipated, though. Since the 1980s, sex comedies have still been released and found some form of success. American Pie hit big in 1999, starting a franchise that had its most recent, ninth, entry just last year. National Lampoon had Van Wilder in 2002. Sex Drive came out in 2008. The one-two punch of No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits came out in 2011. There are still sex comedies coming out.

The major difference is that there’s not the same sex comedy saturation that there was in the 1980s. There aren’t dozens of sex comedies set in schools hitting the theatrical or direct-to-video markets. Things have quieted down, and when they aren’t quiet, they have evolved into something a little more. Rather than the school-set sex comedies of the 1980s, the characters have grown up. Many of the modern sex comedies involve adults going about their sex lives. People still want sex outside their years of puberty. The hormones slow down, but they don’t stop.

As people have, generally, become a little more respectful of other people, so have movies reflected that cultural shift. The sex comedies of the 1980s could not be remade in the same way now. The misogyny and rape in many of the movies is unacceptable in most modern movies. Characters would not be allowed to get away with half the stuff they did in the movies from four decades ago. In the heyday of the sex comedy, these antics were acceptable. Perhaps that’s what caused the subgenre to grow into something more mature. And that’s a good thing, in my books.

Now it’s time for some notes:

• Some movies that were mentioned in this post were Screwballs (week 292), Police Academy (week 400), Up the Academy (week 136), and Hamburger: The Motion Picture (week 197).
• Scott Baio starred in Zapped! He was also in a little movie called Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50).
• Bryan O’Byrne returned from The Million Dollar Duck (week 119) to make an appearance in Zapped!
• Daniel Dayan was in both Zapped! and Perfect (week 195).
• Zapped! featured actress Hilary Beane, who was also in Xanadu (week 216).
• Irwin Keyes showed up in Zapped! after previously showing up in Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong (week 271).
• Corinne Bohrer made appearances in Police Academy 4:Citizens on Patrol (week 400) and Zapped!
• Mews Small was in Zapped! She was also in Puppet Master (week 412).
• Finally, Demetre Phillips made appearances in both Zapped! and Stone Cold (week 423).
• Have you seen Zapped!? What did you think of it? What do you think of the sex comedy subgenre as a whole? Drop your thoughts in the comments or hit me up on Twitter.
• If there are any suggestions you have for movies I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. You can find me on Twitter. Or you could leave the suggestions in the comments.
• Hop onto Instagram and check out Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s always something going on there.
• The final thing to do in this post is look forward at what’s coming up. Next week, I’ll be tackling a movie made by a formerly popular YouTuber. Yeah. This is one of those YouTubers that people smartened up and realized was actually a terrible person. The name is Shane Dawson. I’ll be writing about his feature directorial debut, Not Cool. Come back next week to see what I had to say about that one. See you then.