It has been nearly eight years since I started Sunday “Bad” Movies. During that time, I’ve seen over five hundred different movies that people consider bad, goofy, or B-movies. Sometimes they don’t even consider the movies at all. There have been a wide variety of genres, as I’ve jumped from horror to science fiction to drama to comedy. I’ve also seen the problematic side of movies, as questionable themes and story elements reared their ugly heads. This is a post about that questionable material.
To give some context, this post was brought about by a recent watch of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. The 2006 comedy saw Dan Whitney playing Larry the Cable Guy as a health inspector, working on a case where a bunch of high-rated restaurants had their food contaminated. He and his new partner, Amy Butlin (Iris Bahr), tried to figure out who was poisoning the restaurants’ patrons on the eve of a city-wide cooking competition, while Larry tried to navigate his love life with new girlfriend Jane (Megyn Price).
On the surface, that might not seem too out of place for a comedy of the time. It was a buddy cop movie, only the cops were health inspectors. Instead of chasing down a hardened criminal trying to kill people or rob a bank, they were after someone who was giving people food poisoning in the city’s best restaurants. It was a tried-and-true formula that found success through many decades of comedy. And, while the movie wasn’t the huge success that I’m sure the people involved wanted it to be, that side of the story worked. The mystery of the crime was a good story to center the comedy around.
The problem was in the comedy itself. Larry the Cable Guy was a household name at this point. The persona was that of a Southerner who, while friendly, was set in his Southerner ways. His catchphrase “Git-R-Done” was huge. He brought this to the movie, playing the character Larry as an extension of the Larry the Cable Guy persona. With that persona came the casual bigotry of the stereotypical south. Larry thought that Amy was a man because she wasn’t feminine enough to be a woman. He was throwing out homophobic language that I’m not going to type here. Everything had to be heterosexual, and it was thrown in the face of anyone unlucky enough to watch the movie.
This got me thinking. What are the most problematic movies that I watched as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies? There have been a few movies with notoriously problematic themes that have been covered. A couple immediately came to mind while watching Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, even if the material they were problematic with wasn’t the same. I want to go over some of the movies and what made them offensive. So here’s a countdown, from five to one, of the most problematic movies in Sunday “Bad” Movies.
5. Tiptoes
I covered this one early in the run of Sunday “Bad” Movies. Basically, the story goes like this. There was a family of people with dwarfism. The mom, dad, and one of the sons were all little people. The other son was a full-grown Matthew McConaughey. He was in love with a woman but was afraid to commit to starting a family. He worried that his children were going to suffer from the same dwarfism that the rest of his family had, since it was in his genes. Meanwhile, his little person twin brother, played by Gary Oldman, was back in his life. The brother and the girlfriend/fiancé began to fall in love.
Tiptoes was a very problematic film, though the intentions were seemingly noble. It tried to raise awareness for the troubles that little people suffer from. There are health problems that come along with dwarfism that the movie took time to highlight. But it went about discussing these issues in the wrong ways. The director was the man behind Freeway, which felt like an exploitative version of Little Red Riding Hood. Perhaps he couldn’t get rid of all the exploitative tricks. He cast Gary Oldman as the main little person character, meaning that Oldman had to spend the majority of the movie on his knees or hidden through couches and stuff. Matthew McConaughey screamed about being a dwarf, himself, at one point, even though he was an average-sized person. This was made all the more baffling when Peter Dinklage was cast in a major supporting role. If they could cast a little person in a major supporting role, why couldn’t they cast one in the starring role?
There’s a reason that Tiptoes has become an infamous bad movie. It’s because, though noble in intentions, it carries enough elements of exploitation filmmaking to feel like it may not have been as noble as the themes are. There was a sincere, good intentions tone that was marred by moments that felt out of a completely different type of movie. It felt like a bunch of mistakes adding up to a wholly fumbled project. And it ended up becoming offensive to people with dwarfism. The movie did not tiptoe around these troubling details.
4. The $cheme
Coming a little later in Sunday “Bad” Movies, The $cheme was troubling from the description. Some friends wanted to make a bit of money. They came up with a couple plans. The one they settled on was to seduce the daughter of a politician, film it, and release the sex tape to the tabloids for a big payday. That’s already disgusting to think of. It’s basically revenge porn, though it’s actually more just exploiting someone for money.
What made the movie more troubling and problematic was the age of the politician’s daughter. It was mentioned early in their planning that the daughter might have been fourteen years old. They were fine with that. They were fine with statutory rape, as long as they could make money off it. It was later revealed that she was seventeen. That was a few years older, but still considered statutory rape in many jurisdictions. She was still under eighteen. That was still illegal in many places. Put the age with the exploitation and you have a very troubling story being told in The $cheme.
3. Not Cool
This is the most recent watch of the movies being featured in this countdown, and still managed to crack the top three. I thought about typing “Shane Dawson” and being done with it because he is a majorly problematic person. He was the driving force behind the movie, as a writer, director, and star. That would be enough to get noted within a list of problematic material. That wasn’t all that there was about Not Cool that made it problematic, though. There was a whole slew of other things that added up to make a whole mess of a movie.
Shane Dawson played two characters in the movie. One was a stalker who became the boyfriend of the main character in a romantic comedy storyline. It was normalizing stalker behaviour, which isn’t great. The other character was Shane Dawson in drag, which, in the context of the film, felt offensive. There were characters using cultural appropriation and making racist remarks. One character threw a stroller with a baby inside. Another character kept overstepping his friend’s boundaries to try and be something more, even though she said no many times. It was a whole series of troubling moments, all put together in a movie.
2. Chicks Dig Gay Guys
I’ve written many times about how bad this movie was. It wasn’t the most well-made movie. It wasn’t funny. It’s not a good story. But I think the most troubling thing about Chicks Dig Gay Guys was that the writer was proud of it. He was proud to share what he said was a true story. He saw nothing wrong with the actions that he performed in his real life, before writing them into this movie. That was the most problematic thing. It was coming from the mind of a truly problematic person who didn’t regret his actions one bit.
The story was simple. Some friends wanted to get laid. They came up with a foolproof plan. Every group of women wanted a gay friend. Those same women wanted to sleep with their gay friends and turn them straight, if only for one night. The friends decided they would pretend to be gay and become the gay friends of the women. They would then convince the women to turn them straight and have a great night of passionate sex. Ew. Yuck. These guys were manipulating women through lies. They were acting stereotypically gay, which was homophobic, to say the least. Yet, the writer and star of the movie was proud of these actions that he performed in the real world and wanted to put them into a movie so other people could use the same tactics. Despicable.
1. Soul Man
How could this one not take the top spot? It’s one of those movies that, whenever someone thinks of problematic material that aged poorly as soon as it was released, gets a mention. Every time. Everyone thinks about this movie and how racist the premise is. People know this movie. They may not have seen it. They may not have even been born when it came out. I wasn’t. But it has lived in infamy for over three decades because the entire premise was one of the most tone-deaf premises to ever be thought up.
Soul Man was about a student who couldn’t get into the Ivy League school he wanted and came up with a plan to get in anyway. He took some pills that made his skin darker. It allowed the white student to pass as a Black student, get a scholarship for Black students, and attend the school of his dreams. There’s something to be said for following one’s dreams, but using blackface to follow those dreams is not the right way to go about it. Making an entire movie about how funny it is for a white man to pretend to be Black is just as bad, if not worse because it gets released to a wide audience. This movie never should have been made
Honorable Mentions
I wanted to take a few moments and just touch quickly upon a few other movies that did some offensive stuff and narrowly missed out on the top five.
Gigli is a notorious movie and could have easily slipped in the top five if it weren’t for the top five. It had Justin Bartha playing someone with a disability in a seemingly unrealistic way. It also had Ben Affleck’s character turning Jennifer Lopez’s gay character straight because of his sexual prowess. Neither of those are good things to be featured in the movie and both make it rather offensive to watch.
The Terror of Tiny Town was a film marketed on the idea that it was the first feature length western with a cast comprised solely of little people. Only, it used a much more offensive word when describing the actors. As for the movie itself, there were a bunch of sight gags about how short they were. It wasn’t quite as troubled a movie as Tiptoes, though, which kept it off the list.
Any sex comedy is going to come with guys doing horrendous things to try and sleep with women. Hardbodies had the guys manipulating women by saying what the women want to hear without meaning it or following throgh. Zapped! had a character use telekinesis to take off women’s clothes. Police Academy had characters watching women in the shower through the window. Sex comedies, by design, have problematic material. Especially those of the 1980s.
There was the fact that All About Steve made out that stalking was okay. The Hottie and the Nottie was just… It’s hard to describe. It made it seem like people should only care about people based on how attractive they are. I guess that wasn’t too hard to describe. A Crush on You involved pretending to be someone else to instigate a relationship. Romantic comedies aren’t above problematic material either.
Over the course of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I’ve seen a whole bunch of movies with troubling aspects. The concepts of the movies, specific scenes in them, or the people working on them have all contributed to problematic things being presented. Stalking, coercing, racism, and blackface have been only a few of the problematic areas in the movies. And as I continue to watch bad movies for future weeks of the blog, there will likely be other things that pop up and make me think “Well, that shouldn’t be something that flies in movies.”
Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector was only one of the problematic movies. It threw homophobia around casually, making a joke of the LGBT+ community. It isn’t something that is acceptable today. It’s not something that should have been acceptable back in 2006, when the movie was released. As with the other movies that were mentioned in this post, the problematic aspects should have been removed entirely. That might have meant that some of these movies would no longer exist. That’s fine. Do we need a Soul Man to understand why that’s a bad premise? Nah. We should just know that. We should do better. We can do better.
Now for a few notes to close things out:
- Movies mentioned in this post include Tiptoes (week 28), The $cheme (week 333), Not Cool (week 439), Chicks Dig Gay Guys (week 145), Soul Man (week 354), Gigli (week 225), The Terror of Tiny Town (week 326), Hardbodies (week 392), Zapped! (week 438), Police Academy (week 400), All About Steve (week 409), The Hottie and the Nottie (week 395), and A Crush on You (week 51).
- David McCharen returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. He was also seen in Monster in the Closet (week 55), Jaws: The Revenge (week 240), and Ghost Dad (week 435).
- Michael Papajohn was in Jonah Hex (week 249), American Ultra (week 261), and Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.
- This week saw the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for David Koechner, who previously appeared in A Haunted House (week 34) and Balls of Fury (week 349).
- The final three-timer of the week was Joe Pantoliano. He has appeared in Baby’s Day Out (week 5), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (week 446), and Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.
- Five actors from Automaton Transfusion (week 236) were in Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. They were Ralph Cahill, Bettye Keefer, Juliet Reeves London, John Archer Lundgren, and Michael Munro.
- Larry the Cable Guy was obviously in Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. He was also in Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160).
- Tony Hale returned from American Ultra (week 261) to appear in Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.
- Bruce Bruce was in The Wash (week 303) and Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.
- Finally, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector featured Tim Goodwin, who also appeared in Cop and ½ (week 340).
- Have you seen Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector? Did you think it was as problematic as I did? What other movies are as problematic as any I mentioned in this post? Share your thoughts and observations in the comments or on my Twitter feed.
- If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, hit me up on Twitter. Let me know what that movie is. Or drop the title in the comments below. I’m always open to suggestions.
- Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
- Now it’s time to think about what I’ll be checking out next week. I’ll be going a little further back in time to revisit a filmmaker whose work I watched once before. John Derek, the guy who directed Tarzan the ApeMan (week 273) also directed a flick called Bolero, and that’s what the subject of next week’s post will be. Well, part of the post, at least. I’ll see you then with some more writing. Have a good week!
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