Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever (2014) and Turning Internet Stars Into Movie Stars

The internet is a powerful tool. It began as a way of linking two computers in different places so they could share information. At some point, it went public. This public access allowed people to connect through their computers in different parts of the world. Email became a thing. Message boards and instant messaging became a thing. Information providers, search engines, social media, streaming… All sorts of things could happen through the internet. People could share things they knew, questions they had, and things they found funny.

Social media and streaming are what I really want to discuss. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I thought the Nicolas Cage persona elevation was thanks to The Wicker Man coming out at exactly the right time when Facebook and YouTube were taking off. It allowed people to find those crazy Nicolas Cage acting moments, repeatedly watch those moments out of context, and make the connection to other moments from his career that were also crazy. This specific movie at this specific time helped people see something in Nicolas Cage and hold him up as this sort of wacky personality. It was all because of streaming and social media.

He wasn’t the only person to benefit from these two sections of the internet. Both social media and streaming produced personalities that could be considered celebrities. There were celebrities of pictures and celebrities of motion pictures. People, pets, and characters found their own popularity through these channels. Television and movie studios did what they normally do. They did what they thought could earn them the most money. They took some of these newfound internet stars and tried to bring them into the movie and television world.

The most obvious place to find stars was through the streaming platforms. It started with YouTube, but later video platforms like Vine and TikTok would also create stars. Studios and networks thought the transition from one video platform to movies or television would be easy. They found people who blew up on the platforms and tried to use their popularity to make a quick buck. Those performers were brought on to star in a vehicle, using much of what made them famous to provide the story or tone of the project. Sometimes it worked. Usually it didn’t.

One movie I discovered while writing this post was Ryan and Sean’s Not So Excellent Adventure, a movie starring Ryan Higa and Sean Fujiyoshi. They were two of the most famous YouTube stars of the platform’s early years. Ryan Higa had the number one most subscribed YouTube channel for 677 days in from 2009 until 2011, so that shows just how big he was. A producer approached the two guys to star in a movie about them trying to create a television show from their YouTube work. I don’t have anything else to say about it, as I haven’t seen it.

That movie could kind of be seen as the starting point for YouTube celebrities making the jump into film and television. Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart, and Mamrie Heart eventually jumped from YouTube to the movie Camp Takota. Bo Burnham started out on YouTube in 2006, which propelled him to comedy fame, appearances in movies, and even a directing gig with Eighth Grade. Lucas Cruikshank created the character Fred Figglehorn, which became so popular that he got three movies made with that character. That’s only scratching the surface.

One other major YouTube to movie jump I need to quickly mention is one that I previously covered in Sunday “Bad” Movies. Shane Dawson is a YouTuber that people have a strange relationship with. Some people love him. Most don’t. He has done and said some pretty bad things, yet he still has 19 million subscribers. In 2014, there was a television show called The Chair. It took two directors, gave them the same script, and chronicled how their visions differed as they put a movie together. One of the directors was Shane Dawson, and what came out of his direction was a little movie called Not Cool. It has gone down as one of the most tasteless, unfunny comedies ever. It was basically an extended version of his sketch comedy. Producer Zachary Quinto took his name off the movie, calling it “a vapid waste of time.” That’s not a great endorsement.

Anyway, we can now see that a bunch of YouTube personalities made the jump. Vine didn’t lead to as many starring roles in movies and television shows as YouTube. In fact, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. There were some people who became hugely recognizable and used their Vine fame to transition into acting roles or other ventures, however. People like Logan Paul, Jake Paul, Lele Pons, and Andrew Bachelor all rose to prominence thanks to the six second video platform. They’re people whose faces you might still see around, even if you want to punch them.

TikTok seems to be more of the same. People like Bella Poarch have found fame through the short videos, but there’s not much more to that. Okay, maybe there’s Addison Rae who became popular on TikTok before starring in He’s All That, the remake of She’s All That from last year. I think that’s the most prominent example. I don’t know if TikTok is really the right platform for finding stars, since so much of the content is copying exactly what other people do and saying it’s just part of jumping on the trend. Meh.

Moving away from the video platforms, we get into the more social side of social media. It’s time to get into the outlets that aren’t quite as much about just throwing content out there and are instead about sharing thoughts and images. There’s more interaction with the people who follow these, as they say, influencers. Outlets like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have been platforms that helped people raise awareness for their own personal brand. Some of the users became bigger than others, and that’s where the studios and networks came into play.

The strangest part of studios and networks tapping social media was when they started adapting Twitter feeds into television shows. Specifically, CBS created a television show based on the Twitter feed Shit My Dad Says. It turned into a single season sitcom starring William Shatner and Jonathan Sadowski. People don’t remember it fondly, but they do remember it as a strange footnote in television history. Social media moving to bigger outlets wouldn’t stop there.

Grumpy Cat was a celebrity cat that people knew from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and pretty much any social media outlet there was. She rose to fame in 2012 thanks to a permanent grumpy look she had. Feline dwarfism caused the expression. With over 1.5 million followers in Twitter and 2.5 million followers on Instagram, it was only a matter of time before that fame was monetized. Merchandizing, public appearances, paid sponsorships, and eventually a movie.

Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever was released on Lifetime in 2014. Crystal (Megan Charpentier) was a lonely girl with no friends. She befriended a cat at the pet store in the mall. The cat, Grumpy Cat (Aubrey Plaza), could never find an owner because of how grumpy it looked. Together, the unlikely pair would fend off a robbery attempt. Two bumbling rock musicians tried to steal a valuable dog that was meant to help the pet store stay in business. Could they save the pet store, or would it truly be the worst Christmas ever?

The idea behind Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever was to capitalize on the viral popularity of Grumpy Cat. She was one of the most popular cats on the internet. The only other cat that might have come close to that popularity at the time was Lil Bub. There was money to be had by putting Grumpy Cat in a movie. It wasn’t theatrical, so there wasn’t that big box office number to go by. It was a television movie, though, so there was a bunch of advertising money to be made. The more that people wanted to watch the movie, the more that Lifetime could make from the ads playing during commercial breaks. For Grumpy Cat, the movie would hopefully catch the attention of people who might want to buy some merchandise. It was a win-win for both.

Sadly, for Lifetime and the owners of Grumpy Cat, the movie didn’t become quite the cultural phenomena that they wanted. It came, it trended for about an hour, then it faded into obscurity. People barely even know it existed now. It wasn’t a successful jump from social media to movie stardom. It was a falter that was never really recovered from. Grumpy Cat would see her popularity continue until her death in 2019, but she wouldn’t star in another movie. There would be no sequel, no spin-off, to this Christmas tale.

Social media and the internet haven’t necessarily been the best places to find content. When a studio or filmmaker finds some internet content and decides to bring that exact idea to the big screen, it rarely works. Having Ryan Higa play himself in a movie didn’t do the big numbers that had been hoped. Same with Grumpy Cat or Shane Dawson. I lumped him in here because Not Cool was essentially just a longer version of his sketch comedy. These cases felt like when Saturday Night Live made a bunch of movies in the 1990s. Maybe the magic of those sketches came from the short form storytelling. Maybe the magic of these internet personalities was the way people saw them on the internet. The narrative, long-form storytelling wasn’t it.

This isn’t to say that people haven’t jumped from internet fame to a budding movie or television career. I already mentioned that Bo Burnham and the Paul Brothers found success in other avenues than their YouTube and Vine origins. Justin Bieber was found and given a music career because of YouTube singing videos he made. Jimmy Tatro went from YouTube to a series of supporting roles in comedy flicks, as well as a starring role in the first season of American Vandal. And then there was Rachel Zegler who essentially went from singing on YouTube to starring in the remake of West Side Story and winning awards for her performance. Success from these avenues can happen.

The success comes when the investment is in the creator and their growth, though. It doesn’t come from taking their idea and simply giving it more time and money. Pictures of a cat that always looks grumpy doesn’t translate to a major motion picture when the idea hinges on the punchline of a cat looking grumpy. A Twitter feed about a dad saying insensitive things can’t sustain a 22-episode half-hour sitcom season. Fred… Well, Fred got three movies. I’ll see them eventually and give my thoughts then. Right now, I don’t think that character could necessarily sustain three feature length movies. But that’s an assumption.

Studios and filmmakers are always trying to find new ideas, while sticking with something familiar. If there’s a new social media outlet of some sort, or a new breeding ground for content, they’ll find a way to capitalize on that. They’ll want to use it to line their own pockets with money. That’s how the film business works. New ideas are great, but they need to come with a built-in audience. Viral internet personalities have that audience. If only that audience would translate to box office receipts. Or good content. More often.

Now let’s get some notes in here:

• I mentioned a couple movies in this post that I’ve covered previously. They were The Wicker Man (week 522) and Not Cool (week 439).
• The director of Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever was Tim Hill. He also directed Alvin and the Chipmunks (week 470).
• Reese Alexander made an appearance in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever. It was his sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance after The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30), In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220), Cop and a Half: New Recruit (week 340), Far Cry (week 364), and The Search for Santa Paws (week 420).
• Another sixth appearance in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever came from Jay Brazeau. He had previously shown up in House of the Dead (week 59), Warriors of Virtue (week 88), Snow Dogs (week 322), Far Cry (week 364), and Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups (week 420).
• Stephen Stanton was in Playing for Keeps (week 21), Foodfight! (week 143), and Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever.
• Russell Peters played Santa in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever. It wasn’t his first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance. He was also in New Year’s Eve (week 57) and Fifty Shades of Black (week 219).
• Tasya Teles returned from Skin Trade (week 146) for Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever.
• Rebecca Georgelin was in both Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever and Russell Madness (week 382).
• Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever featured Veronica Alicino from Alvin and the Chipmunks (week 470).
• Finally, Keith Dallas was in Say It Isn’t So (week 481) before popping up in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever.
• Have you seen Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever? What did you think? What are some other internet celebrities who made bad movies that I missed? Let me know in the comments.
• You can share any suggestions for movies I should be watching in the comments. I’m open to all suggestions.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for some more bad movie fun.
• This post went up a little bit late. As such, the look forward is to a movie I already released a post for. The post after this one was supposed to be for A Christmas Story 2. That came out over a week ago, though. Check it out anyway. Okay? I’ll see you again for another post soon.

Santa Claws (1996)

Hello everyone! To those who celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry one and all that stuff. To those who celebrate Hanukkah, I hope you’ve had a happy past few nights. Kwanzaa? Festivus? Any other seasonal holiday? May they be some of the most joyous days of your year. With all that said, it’s time for a special Christmas Day post for another not-so-great movie. Consider it a gift from me to you as part of your holiday celebrations.

Since it’s Christmas, I stuck with the Christmas theme for this week’s movie. I usually go about choosing my Christmas lineup in a way where I get one very Christmas themed Christmas movie, one Hallmark or Lifetime movie, and one horror movie. This is the horror movie for this year’s lineup. It’s another in a long line of movies where a person dresses as Santa Claus (they may or may not be the real Santa) and goes on some sort of murder spree. Horror filmmakers love seeing the jolliest gift-giver giving a much bloodier gift around the holidays.

Santa Claws was a horror movie from 1996 that was about someone dressing as Santa Claus and committing murder. Raven Quinn (Debbie Rochon) was a famous horror icon with two kids and an estranged husband. Trying to keep her professional life going while juggling a hectic personal life, she befriended her neighbour, Wayne (Grant Kramer). Little did Raven know, Wayne was obsessed with her and was going to continue a murderous rage on her acquaintances, the same way he had murdered his mother and uncle when he was a child.

There was an important theme tackled by Santa Claws. Raven Quinn was famous. Wayne was an obsessive fan. The movie was about how dangerous it could be to have obsessive fans. It went into the violence and life-threatening situations that could result from an obsessive fan forcing their way into a celebrity’s life. This was some four years before Eminem would bring that idea into the mainstream with the release of his song, Stan. Since then, the name Stan has taken on a new meaning, coming to mean any obsessive fan of something. However, it kind of lost the negative connotation. People are glad to say they stan something that they deeply like, when the true meaning of stanning something would be to love it so much that you become a threatening presence.

The idea that Wayne would become so obsessed with Raven that he would violently attack anyone who came between them was a predecessor to that song shining a light on the same concept. Neither of them were original ideas. They pulled from real life situations. There were things like the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt that shared similarities to Santa Claws. John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan because he wanted to gain the attention of Jodie Foster, a 19-year-old celebrity he was obsessed with. There’s basis in reality for the themes that Santa Claws plays with.

Santa Claws did have some problems, though. It wasn’t a perfect movie. The obsessive fan theme was intermixed with numerous scenes of women stripping for magazine photoshoots. I would dare say it was split down the middle with the horror and the titillation. The two didn’t even coexist. There would be a horror scene. There would be a nude scene. The horror never invaded the nudity, and the nudity never invaded the horror. There may have been some cross-cutting, but they never directly interacted. It made the nudity feel like it was for the sake of nudity and not for the sake of telling the story.

The other major problem with Santa Claws came from the expectations that the description brought. It was a movie described as an obsessive fan killing people while dressed as Santa Claus. He was only dressed as the jolly gift giver for one, maybe two murders. The rest of the movie saw him in a ski mask, calling himself “The Black Claw.” This was because the ski mask was black, and he killed people with a gardening claw. If you, like me, when into the movie expecting to see Santa Claus killing people, then you, like me, would be disappointed by the lack of Santa slaying people. That was disappointing, to say the least.

Santa Claws was not a great movie. It was pretty darn bad. There was a solid theme in there with the obsessive fan stuff. The way it got violent could hit home for some people, especially when related to real life instances of this sort of thing happening. Maybe not to the dressing up as Santa, calling himself “The Black Claw” extent. But people have done some evil, murderous things for the sake of celebrity attention before. The excessive scenes of nudity took away from that message, though. Every time there seemed to be something interesting to say about obsessive fans, the movie would cut away to some woman taking off her clothes. I get that it was Raven’s job to pose for those pictures, but we probably didn’t need four different scenes devoted to different models doing the same thing when it didn’t add to the story. The message was lost in the nudity.

That’s another Christmas post down. I think it might have been the first post to fall on Christmas day, but I could be wrong. Either way, it was the yearly Christmas horror movie to be covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Every year, I try to do one of those. What’s the holiday season without some chills? The weather outside is frightful, and so is whatever screen you’re watching your Christmas movies on, if you’re doing things right. I certainly am.

With that out of the way, I want to wish everyone a happy new year. I won’t see you again until 2023, since New Year’s Day is when the next post should be going up. For anyone who lives in or around my area, I hope you’re doing well with all the snow we had dumped on us this past week. It’s been a crazy one. Here’s to a white holiday season, and here’s to a new year of bad movies coming at us all. Thanks for reading!

There are a few notes I must toss in here before I go:

• The only returning actor in Santa Claws was Debbie Rochon. She has been in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), Battledogs (week 346), Tromeo and Juliet (week 516), and Vampire’s Kiss (week 517).
• Have you seen Santa Claws? Have you heard of Santa Claws? What did you think about it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
• If there are any movies you think I should cover for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. You can drop a suggestion in the comments section.
• Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram. Check it out for some other Sunday “Bad” Movies material.
• What’s in store for next week? I know you’re asking, and I’m asking too. I scheduled it a while back and can’t remember right now. Let’s check the schedule. I’m going to be watching a movie from 2014 called A Long Way Down. I can’t remember what it is right now, but I’ll be sure to find out and let you know for next week. See you then.

A Christmas Story 2 (2012)

People love sequels. For audiences, it’s a chance to revisit characters that they fell in love with. For studios, it’s a chance to make money off the audiences who want to revisit those characters. It’s a win-win situation. Unless, of course, you’re of the mind that every movie should be an original movie, movies should remain stand-alone, and you should never continue intellectual property because all that happens nowadays is that intellectual property is driven into the ground. If you’re not one of those people, you probably like sequels.

Early in my bad writing blogging, I hit upon the idea of sequelitis, a condition where filmmakers are too beholden to what came before that they can’t let a story blossom into something of its own. To suffer from sequelitis is typically to tell the same story over again, with very minor changes. A filmmaker may not want to fix what wasn’t broken, so they put on the same show thinking it will find the same success. That doesn’t usually work because audiences are smarter than that. They want some change. The other major form of sequelitis can be that a different story is told, but so many references and callbacks are placed into it that it forces the new story to feel very much like what came before, even if it isn’t.

The second form of sequelitis is where I would place the 2014 direct-to-video sequel A Christmas Story 2. Ralphie Parker (Braeden Lemasters) was a fifteen-year-old who wanted nothing more than a car for Christmas. Okay, he wanted a car and the love of Drucilla Gootrad (Tiera Skovbye). While checking out a car he liked, Ralphie accidentally ruined its roof. He needed money to pay back the angry car salesman, so he and his two friends got jobs at the local department store over the holidays. Wacky holiday antics ensued, both at work and at home with Mrs. Parker (Stacey Travis) and The Old Man (Daniel Stern).

Everyone knows A Christmas Story. It’s one of those staples of the holidays. It plays on TBS for a full twenty-four hours every year. Ralphie wanted a Red Ryder BB Gun, but everyone said he would just shoot his eye out. His father got a leg lamp. That one kid got his tongue stuck to the frozen pole in the schoolyard. If you know Christmas movies, you probably know all these things. You probably saw all these things. And, like so many people who watched the movie over the years, you probably experienced these sorts of things. That’s why it endured through so many generations of movie watchers.

A Christmas Story 2 didn’t have nearly the same lasting power. That was where the sequelitis of it really set in. There was a new story because of the difference in age for Ralphie. He was a nine-year-old in the first movie. Now he was fifteen. Even if the stories were narrated as memories of the same adult character, they came from different perspectives because of his ages at the time of the experiences. The first movie was very much about Ralphie being forced into family things, while the sequel saw him with more freedom in his teenage years.

The sequelitis came from the references placed throughout A Christmas Story 2. Every scene seemed to have some sort of callback to the first film. It wouldn’t have been a bad thing if there were a couple nods here and there. It would have been a continuation of the story with the world built through the history of the characters. That’s fine and dandy. But there were some references that felt forced for the sake of bringing up the memory of that same sort of moment in the prior movie. That’s the stuff that felt like the filmmakers were trying to recapture the magic without putting in the effort to do something new.

One of the main stories that The Old Man had throughout A Christmas Story 2 was a simple rehash of a story he had in A Christmas Story. He was battling it out with the malfunctioning furnace in the basement. Eventually, he would replace it with an Oil-o-matic furnace and things would work out. For the time being. His other storyline, one that felt a little fresher, was that he wasn’t willing to pay for a turkey that had risen in price. Instead, The Old Man decided to go ice fishing to catch Christmas dinner. It was a new spin on his struggles with Christmas dinner.

Some references in A Christmas Story 2 felt more forced than others. There was a scene while Ralphie and his friends were working. Flick (David W. Thompson) kissed a pneumatic tube, only to get his lips and tongue stuck in the suction. This was clearly a play on the same character licking the frozen pole in A Christmas Story and getting his tongue stuck. The problem was that the pneumatic tube scenario felt unrealistic. Nobody in their right mind would do that. Especially without a triple dog dare egging them on. That dare wasn’t present, so Flick just made a very poor decision.

The other forced reference was the costume scene. Anyone who saw A Christmas Story will remember the scene where Ralphie was forced to wear a bunny onesie because his aunt sent it special for him. That same idea made a comeback on Christmas morning in A Christmas Story 2. Ralphie opened a gift from his aunt to find a sailor suit. He was embarrassed because he was fifteen and she was still sending him this stuff. The twist was that the suit wasn’t for him. It was for Randy (Valin Shinyei), his younger brother. The effect was the same. A child awkwardly wore a costume on Christmas morning.

A couple other references felt like refreshing takes on what had been parts of A Christmas Story. The leg lamp made a reappearance. That might feel like something forced into the story simply to pull at the nostalgic memories of the audience. I guess it kind of was. At the same time, however, the return of the leg lamp helped tie a nice little bow on the relationship of Ralphie and The Old Man. Ralphie got the lamp from a pawn shop as a Christmas present for his father. The Old Man’s eyes lit up when he found out what he got. It was the same love that he showed to Ralphie whenever he got Ralphie what he wanted for Christmas.

The other reference was another Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant. It wasn’t the Parker family, this time. The Old Man was too busy trying to save a few dollars by catching fish. He didn’t have time or money to take everybody to the Chinese restaurant again. It was Ralphie who went to the restaurant. Throughout the course of A Christmas Story 2, Ralphie worked hard to make enough money to repair the roof of the car he had damaged. When he finally got the money, he realized it was more important to help the down-on-their-luck homeless people in his town. He used the money to buy them a hot meal at the Chinese restaurant and a tire for their broken-down car. Ralphie was becoming a more giving person, rather than a person who simply wanted everything given to him.

That said, A Christmas Story 2 did feel like it suffered from sequelitis. It was too beholden to A Christmas Story. There were too many call backs, too many references. Only a couple of them felt natural to the story being told, while the others seemed like they were shoehorned in because the people behind the sequel wanted to be like “Hey, remember this?” There’s a fine line that must be ridden between remembering the past and taking a step into the next chapter. A Christmas Story 2 was reluctant to take that step, and it showed.

A Christmas Story 2 told a story that was different from what came before. It shared similarities, sure, but it was different because of Ralphie’s age. He was no longer a nine-year-old being forced to participate in holiday traditions. He was a fifteen-year-old with some freedom, allowed to go off on his own into the world. There was still one thing he desired more than anything for Christmas. That part was the same. But the way that he went about his desire was wholly different because of the freedom that came with being older.

What set it back was the incessant need to use A Christmas Story as a reference point. Somehow, with the six-year difference in setting, the events lined up in a way that felt like the Christmas of the first movie was bleeding into that of the sequel. The pneumatic tube, the leg lamp, the Chinese restaurant, and the Christmas costume were all factors in that feeling. It was like it couldn’t allow the story to be its own thing. That is the idea of sequelitis: a sequel that can’t separate itself quite enough from what came before. A sequel that can’t even really put its own spin on these things. For the most part, at least.

Sequelitis frequently comes from a fear of straying too far from what came before. A studio or a filmmaker found success with one thing. They fear that if they change that thing too much, the audience will turn on them. They fear that if they don’t recognize how much people loved the first movie, people will dislike the sequel. This can sink a sequel. When a franchise holds the earlier outings too dearly, it tends to stunt its own growth. It can’t move forward when it’s only looking back. The sequelitis strikes again.

Even though people enjoy watching sequels to movies they love, revisiting the characters and locations, they also want to see some growth. It’s not enough to see the characters and places again. There needs to be some forward momentum to justify the revisit. If there isn’t, audiences will feel like they might as well just pop on the original and forget about what came after. When that forward momentum is there, however, sequels can become major successes. Both financially and critically. People like familiarity. They just want a little change in that familiarity. And that’s where a strong sequel can prevail.

It's time for a few notes:

• Brian Levant directed a few movies that were featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies. Not only did he direct A Christmas Story 2, he also directed Jingle All the Way (week 160), Snow Dogs (week 322), Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (week 390), and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster (week 390).
• Garry Chalk returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in A Christmas Story 2. He could previously be seen in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50), Warriors of Virtue (week 88), The Karate Dog (week 281), Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (week 284), and Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (week 390).
• C. Ernst Harth also made a sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in A Christmas Story 2. His other appearances were in Space Buddies (week 270), Dudley Do-Right (week 336), Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (week 390), The Search for Santa Paws (week 420), and Say It Isn’t So (week 481).
• Paul Lazenby was in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30), In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220), The Unauthorized Saved By the Bell Story (week 337), and A Christmas Story 2.
• Tony Alcantar is back in Sunday “Bad” Movies, thanks to A Christmas Story 2. His other appearances came in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30) and Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (week 33).
• A Christmas Story 2 featured Jessica Harmon, who was also in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30) and Black Christmas (week 368).
• Another three-timer was Shawn Macdonald, who has now appeared in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50), Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (week 390), and A Christmas Story 2.
• Gerard Plunkett is someone I’ve begun to recognize when he shows up in movies. Perhaps that’s because he’s been in Dudley Do-Right (week 336), Futuresport (week 491), and A Christmas Story 2.
• Two other actors from The Unauthorized Saved By the Bell Story (week 337) were in A Christmas Story 2. They were France Perras and Tiera Skovbye.
• Viv Leacock returned from Snow Buddies (week 270) for A Christmas Story 2.
• A Christmas Story 2 was Alex Zahara’s second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance, following Ice Twisters (week 329).
• You may have noticed Michael Ogbeiwi in A Christmas Story 2. He was also in Russell Madness (week 382).
• Finally, Stacey Travis played the mom in A Christmas Story 2. She was also part of Only the Strong (week 386).
• Have you seen A Christmas Story 2? What did you think? Was it as good as the first, or did it miss the mark? Share your thoughts in the comments.
• Let me know what movies you think I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m open to suggestions. They help me put together a schedule of what to watch.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram. Keep the fun going.
• Now it’s time for a look ahead. Next week, Sunday will be falling on Christmas day! That means a Christmas post, assuming I get things up and ready on time. It also means one more Christmas movie. I thought I’d go with one that I’m sure not many people know. It’s from the mid-90s and it’s called Santa Claws. That’s what I’ll be writing about, and I’ll see you in a week for that. I might get some other posts out by then too. We’ll see.

Ten Year Anniversary! and a Quick Second Look at Clownado (2017)

Ten years. I have been writing these posts for ten years. A decade of my life, I’ve been writing about bad movies. It has mostly been a weekly thing. There have been some hiccups along the way. Some of those hiccups are still present. But I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still watching bad movies. And some of you are still reading the nonsense I write. Thanks for still being here. Thanks for taking this bad movie ride.

I would like to think my writing has improved over the years. It certainly feels like it has. Somewhere along the way, I found my voice. I found a writing style that became my groove. Is it the best writing style? No. Not at all. I wouldn’t call myself a great writer by any means. I’m open to growth, though. I’m open to learning more about writing and improving at it in a way that both you and I will appreciate. Perhaps you’ll stick with me as the ride continues.

When I first started writing about bad movies, I didn’t have a plan. I just thought that I could bring a different point of view into writing about these movies. So many people talk or write about bad movies from a perspective of trashing them. They watch bad movies with the intention of doing so ironically. They want to be a new Mystery Science Theater 3000, but they lack the humour. Their writing or criticism, if you could call it that, becomes too much of an attack and not enough of an appreciation. I wanted to do something different.

I sometimes resort to writing reviews, or more review focused posts, if I’m short on time and can’t come up with a better idea. Usually, however, I try to use a bad movie as a jumping-off point for some other topic. Just last week, I used The Wicker Man as a jumping off point to discuss the popularity of Nicolas Cage and how it may or may not be connected to the rise of streaming and social media. I stand by the idea that bad movies can teach people about movies as much as, if not more than, the ones that people hold dear as greats. Learning from your mistakes and all that jazz.

I’ve done that for ten years. My knowledge of movies had vastly expanded over the past decade as I watched bad movie after bad movie after bad movie. To be completely fair, not all the movies were bad. Some good movies snuck in there, too. I’ve made mistakes in scheduling. I’ve also scheduled movies that I didn’t think were bad, but had bad reputations. In any case, I’ve learned a lot through watching 620 movies for this blog over 522 weeks. (Plus, there were all the movies I watched outside of this blog, but that’s not the point here.)

Even the rewatches, like this week’s movie, have taught me things. What did Clownado teach me on a second watch? Well, I need to recap what happened in the movie, first. Savanna (Rachel Lagen) was forced into working for Big Ronnie (John O’Hara) at his circus. She tried to escape, but was caught and tortured for her misdeed. She cast a spell on Big Ronnie and his clowns as revenge, turning them into a Clownado. This tornado of clowns began terrorizing anyone that they came across, including Hunter Fidelis (Bobby Westrick) and his band of misfits.

The first time I wrote about Clownado, I basically just reviewed it. I tossed in a little bit about how it was clearly inspired by the Sharknado movies. That was the first lesson I found within watching it. Anything could be an inspiration for something later on. A b-movie like Sharknado, made for the sole purpose of The Asylum thinking “Wouldn’t this be funny?”, could inspire movies like Lavalantula and Clownado to come out in subsequent years. That’s what I took away from it, and it’s what I tied into the review.

This time, checking it out as a rewatch for the tenth anniversary of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I got something else out of Clownado. It was something that resonated with me because I went to film school. It resonated with me because I threw together a short film in the summer of 2021. Clownado was that, on a bigger scale. Not too big, obviously. It was still a low budget movie thrown together with crowd funding dollars. But it spoke to something about low budget movies.

If you find yourself wanting to make a movie, you only really need three things. You need equipment, you need an idea, and you need support. As long as you have those three things, you can throw something half watchable together. That has been Todd Sheets’s modus operandi from the very beginning. He would grab a camera, originally a video camera, a few friends, and film wherever they had access to. That’s sometimes what you need to do when you’re making independent, micro-budget movies. You use what you can and make something, anything, that you can think of.

Clownado is inspirational in that way. It reminds you that with a few good, supportive people, you can make things happen. If you have an idea, you can bring it to life. If you have a camera, you can figure out ways to visually tell the story. You don’t need anything more than that. It would be nice to have all the bells and whistles. But you don’t need them. You just need to invest yourself in what you have and the people around you, and you can make some magical things happen. You can make a killer clown movie happen.

This is a similar lesson to what a budding filmmaker could learn by watching Clerks. There was one major difference between Clerks and Clownado, besides the story content. Watching Clerks, you can tell it was more about the writing than anything. Kevin Smith was invested in the writing, not necessarily the people. That caused problems with him and Jeff Anderson at later times, but that’s another story for another day. Smith even acknowledged his short-sightedness through his writing in Clerks III. He took a more serious filmmaking approach, which managed to pay off for him in a mainstream career. It also led to him building up a stable of actors that he enjoyed working with, who would continuously appear throughout his filmography.

Todd Sheets took a different approach with Clownado. Clearly, everyone was having fun making the movie. It showed through their performances in a way that the fun didn’t show in Clerks. The old-timey mobster accents that Rachel Lagen and John O’Hara used were accents they relished using. The country costuming of Hunter Fidelis and Elvis costuming of Dion Livingston (Antwoine Steele) only helped to bring fun to their performances. Everyone knew they weren’t the best actors. Todd Sheets knew it too. But if he could build an atmosphere where people enjoyed themselves and present it in a way where the audience could feel that same enjoyment, a shaky premise could blossom into something special. For the most part, it did.

This resonated with me because I’ve worked on micro-budget short films. We made a few of them through my three years in film school, having to stay within the small budget the school provided us. We had to find people willing to let us use their locations with minimal financial compensation. That was fun when we needed a hospital setting for one of them. It was a bunch of students making ends meet as best they could to throw something half decent together. It worked and got us into a couple film festivals.

Once school was done, I kept in contact with a bunch of the people I worked with. I entered a short film contest about a year after graduation and brought together a team to turn the script into a reality. The actors were people who I worked with during film school who wanted to keep working. The camera guy had been a camera guy on some projects I had produced. The sound guy was a friend I knew before film school who had joined the program the same time as me. Everyone came together for the project because they enjoyed working on films. It was the same sort of “people just want to make something and have fun doing it” mentality that Todd Sheets had with Clownado, and a reminder that I could always count on people if we had fun making movies.

As you can see, I’ve found lessons to take from watching Clownado. That’s what I like to use Sunday “Bad” Movies for the most. The movies might be bad, but they can enlighten people about film, both on screen and behind it. In this case, I learned that the cast and crew having fun can go a long way in making something entertaining. Whether it’s from my own experience or just being able to see it in other people’s work, movies are usually better if the people making them enjoy making them. There are, of course, exceptions. But when you can see that fun and enjoyment on screen, it brings you in that much more.

Sunday “Bad” Movies has been an extension of me for the ten years I’ve been writing it. It’s my thoughts. They are thoughts that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate in a good way were I talking to someone face to face. I’m a better writer than I am a talker. Not that I’m a great writer. If you’ve been with me through these ten years, or even if you stepped in sometime between the start and now, you’ve probably seen me grow, though. I like to think that what I write now is much better than what I wrote at the beginning. Experience and all that.

I’ve written about other movies through the filter of the movies I’ve watched, shining a light on tropes, trends, and subgenres of subgenres. I’ve discussed my difficulties, at times, writing things for this blog. There have been times I’ve been disappointed in my own writing. I knew I could do better and I just didn’t. I’m looking at you, early post for Robot Jox. I really didn’t do enough on that one. I could have put more effort into it or come up with a better idea. Oh well. I’m nearly ten years past that one now.

It took some time to truly figure out what I was doing with Sunday “Bad” Movies. There were growing pains. Even now, I’ve been struggling with things behind the scenes. I’ve got a post from October and a post from November I still have yet to upload. My life has completely changed since this began. I’m a different person. This blog is a different beast. Yet I’m still here. I’m still writing. Ten years later, and I’m still passionate about bad movies. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to change any time soon. I’m fine with that. I like what I like and you can’t take that away from me.

If you’ve been here for the entire ten year run, thanks! I’ve thought, at various times, that I wouldn’t make it this far. I would stop writing about bad movies at some point and never look back. That’s not what happened. I don’t have quite as much free time now, which may be why the posts haven’t been coming out on time. I might end up changing the schedule at some point. I’ve been mulling that over in for a while. That’s not going to happen yet. What will happen is another post will come out next week. Another week, another movie. Hopefully you join me for another ten years.

I’m going to quickly toss some notes in here:

• I wrote about Clownado (week 497) in a previous post.
• I mentioned a few movies in this post. They were The Wicker Man (week 522), Sharknado (week 190), Lavalantula (week 290), and Robot Jox (week 6).
• Clownado was directed by Todd Sheets, who also directed Nightmare Asylum (week 134) and Prehistoric Bimbos in Armageddon City (week 464).
• Linnea Quigley popped up in Clownado. She also made appearances in Graduation Day (week 462) and Jack-O (week 466).
• Thanks for sticking around for ten years!
• If there are movies you think I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts, let me know about them. Tell me in the comments.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• Next week, we head into the holiday season. With that comes holiday movies, and I’ve got a few interesting ones lined up this year. I’ll be starting with a family movie that’s sure to perk up your ears. Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever will be the subject of the next post. That’s right, Grumpy Cat was in a Christmas movie. If you want to know what that’s like, come back next week for an all new post. See you then.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Some actors have personas that are larger than life. Nicolas Cage is one such actor. He came from the Coppola family, one that you might recognize for all the movies they directed. However, he wanted to distance himself from his given last name. He decided that the perfect way to do so would be to change that last name before pursuing his acting career. The name he chose was the same last name as one of his favourite comic book characters, Luke Cage. His stage name was Nicolas Cage and it’s what he used to start his career. The strange thing was that his career began with family projects. Three of his earlier movies were Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and Peggy Sue Got Married, all of which were directed by his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola.

It wasn’t the early work that lifted Nicolas Cage to the larger-than-life status that he currently has. Many of the traits that he brings to his performances were present throughout those early movies and the others he was in, though. The early movies weren’t outliers. But it wasn’t until more recently that people began to hold him in a higher esteem. He was well known by the time he had his turn of the century action movie run. That’s how he became an action star. People knew Nicolas Cage. They enjoyed Nicolas Cage. It would take a few more years for that stereotypical Nicolas Cage persona to solidify.

I have a theory about when this persona really took hold for audiences, and this theory is tied into the release of The Wicker Man. Before I get into that, though, I should explain what The Wicker Man was. Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) was a police officer who witnessed the violent deaths of a mother and child after a car accident. In the aftermath, he received a letter from Willow (Kate Beahan), his ex-fiancée. She informed him that they had a child and the child had disappeared on an island off Washington state. Edward travelled to the island to find his missing child and discovered a cult-like population. The more he dug into the island and how the people lived, the darker things got.

Within Nicolas Cage’s filmography, The Wicker Man might not seem like the most outlandish movie. For the most part, it was a straight-forward mystery that devolved into horror. It came after there had already been a movie where he played multiple characters. It came before his career turned to direct-to-video. It was a middle-of-the-road Nicolas Cage movie, at least at that time, that was only notable for the final fifteen or so minutes when things went off the rails. Yet it became the turning point for Nicolas Cage, or how people would see him.

You see, there was something else that happened in 2006 that helps to build my theory. This other thing elevated Nicolas Cage beyond what he was already known as and pushed him into a new echelon of the public consciousness. Or, really, two other things. They kind of go hand in hand, though. The internet was growing in popularity. It had already surged through the AOL messenger days of the late 1990s and through the dot com bubble of the early 2000s. Yet, it still had a lot of growth to go. Much of that came with the public releases of both Facebook and YouTube.

Facebook might have been created in 2004, but that wasn’t when the public was able to use it. For nearly two years, it was a social network for American colleges. You’ve probably seen The Social Network. You understand the basic idea. In 2006, however, it was opened to anyone over the age of 13, no matter where they were. YouTube launched in 2004, and by 2006 was big enough to be purchased by Google. So you have the rise of the biggest social networking site and one of the biggest video streaming sites around the same time as the release of The Wicker Man. How does this relate to Nicolas Cage?

Well, with the rise of social media and streaming video came the rise of viral videos and memes. Sure, those things existed before. People who went to Newgrounds could see things like Numa Numa Guy or Star Wars Kid and get a chuckle. YouTube became such a household name, though, because people could put almost anything up there. Did you want to see someone’s day at the zoo? Did you need a quick tutorial on how to use an iPod? Did you want to watch a music video? YouTube could help. YouTube was also filled with movie and television clips that people enjoyed.

The Wicker Man hit at the time when YouTube was about to be bought out by Google. Some clips were bound to be uploaded on the site as people discovered the movie. More clips would be uploaded as people discovered the “Not the bees!” part in the Unrated home video cut of the movie. There were some wacky, you-need-to-see-this moments in the movie, and YouTube users wanted to put them on the site for quick reference. Go on YouTube now and search “Nic Cage Bees” and you’re bound to find multiple videos of that particular clip from The Wicker Man.

Putting a clip on YouTube wasn’t enough to have it go viral, though. That wasn’t a guarantee. I could put a video up on YouTube right now and, thanks to the algorithm hiding me, I’d get a couple views but that’s it. Part of what you need to do is share the video. What better way to do that is there than to blast it on social media. It’s the quickest and easiest way to get something to the people you know. We all have a group chat. We’ve all shared videos in a group chat. Some of them have probably been the same videos, even. The rise of Facebook allowed this.

It was this connectivity that bridged borders which propelled the clips from The Wicker Man into popularity. “Why is it burned?” became a thing. The bees became a thing. Nicolas Cage dressed as a bear became a thing. People who hadn’t seen the movie saw these clips, out of context, and concluded that the movie was ridiculous. They concluded that Nicolas Cage’s performance was ridiculous. It gave some people the idea to go back and look at previous Nicolas Cage movies to see if there was a pattern. There was. He always made strange choices in his performances, and they always made his movies a little more ridiculous than they needed to be. Movies like Vampire’s Kiss, Deadfall, and Never on Tuesday had more eyes on them because people sought out other wacky Nicolas Cage bits. It was all because The Wicker Man dropped at the perfect crossroads of streaming and social media.

Now, this is just a theory. It might be wrong. It most likely is. There are absolutely other factors that led to this idea that Nicolas Cage has become known for his crazy acting choices. Even in the height of his theatrical popularity, through the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was doing some odd things. People who saw Face/Off and Gone in 60 Seconds probably recognized a few of them. However, it had never been so easy to access the movies he was in. Blockbuster was as strong as ever. Redbox and Netflix were on the horizon. And YouTube would only grow. The access to Nicolas Cage output was only going to get easier.

That’s not the end of Nicolas Cage’s growth into a larger-than-life figure. It was only a turning point. It was a moment in time that opened people’s eyes to the fact that he was a special kind of actor. He had a unique quality to him. That unique quality would cross over to his real-life persona. He married Lisa Marie Presley in 2002 and divorced her later that year. He named his son Kal-El. He bought and sold multiple castles and the most haunted house in America. Nicolas Cage also ended up in debt that would cause him to take on whatever direct-to-video roles he could for most of the 2010s.

In more recent years, he paid off his debt and focused on making the types of movies he truly wants to. These newer roles have gained him critical acclaim once again, even allowing him to participate in an acting roundtable last year. That roundtable really brought out his larger-than-life personality as he told the story of filming a western and having his actor horse, Rain Man, try to kill him during most shots. It was a crazy moment in that roundtable that will live on in infamy the same way as screaming “How did it burn?” has been seared in people’s minds. And the reason we know so much about Nicolas Cage and his crazy performances is because The Wicker Man came out at exactly the right time.

I don’t have much more to say other than it’s nice to see people have turned around on Nicolas Cage. There was a time there, from around when The Wicker Man came out until, maybe, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, where people wrote him off. They appreciated his commitment but didn’t necessarily like his movies. He’s always been entertaining to watch, though. Even in the worst of movies, his choices and his presence would provide something good. I hope that continues for a long time.

Now let’s toss some notes in here:

• The Wicker Man marked the sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Nicolas Cage. His other appearances were Outcast (week 163), Ghost Rider (week 260), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (week 260), Never on Tuesday (week 387), and Vampire’s Kiss (week 517).
• Next up, we’ve got Matthew Walker. He has been in Blackwoods (week 115), Alone in the Dark (week 152), Futuresport (week 491), and The Wicker Man.
• Kendall Cross returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in The Wicker Man, after popping up in Space Buddies (week 270) and The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story (week 337).
• Joyce and Jacqueline Robbins were in both The Wicker Man and Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160).
• Two actors from In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (week 220) were in The Wicker Man. They were Leelee Sobieski and Tania Saulnier.
• Diane Delano was in Surf School (week 42) and The Wicker Man.
• You might have noticed Frances Conroy in The Wicker Man. She was also in Catwoman (week 174).
• Aaron Eckhart had a small role in The Wicker Man. He was the star of I, Frankenstein (week 217).
• Do you recognize the name Anna Van Hooft? She was in The Marine 5: Battleground (week 237) and The Wicker Man.
• Monique Ganderton made a second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Wicker Man after previously showing up in American Ultra (week 261).
• In the theatrical version of The Wicker Man, James Franco was in the final scene. James Franco was also one of the stars of King Cobra (week 331).
• Michael Wiseman was in both The Wicker Man and Atlas Shrugged: Part III (week 490).
• Finally, The Wicker Man featured Simon Longmore, who was in Freddy Got Fingered (week 521).
• Have you seen The Wicker Man? What did you think? How do you feel about Nicolas Cage? Let me know in the comments.
• You can also leave a comment if you want to suggest a movie for me to watch for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies installment. I like suggestions.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram to keep up with the Sunday “Bad” Movies mayhem.
• Next week is a big week. It’s the tenth anniversary. I don’t have anything all that special planned for it. I wish I did, but I’ve been kind of short on time and, as I’m writing this, focus. I don’t know what it is. Anyway, I’ve got a rewatch of Clownado planned. So you’ll get that. I’ll see you then!

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

I am unsure what I’ll be writing for this post. I’ve tried to start it a few times now, and every time I do, it feels like the wrong way to start. This is my last-ditch effort, a Hail Mary, to try and kickstart things so that I can actually write something. Anything. It’s not that I don’t have things to say about the movie. I do. I just haven’t been able to break into it in a way that felt good. Everything has fallen flat, so far, and I thought I’d just write about that and maybe get somewhere.

As we approach the ten-year mark of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I decided to toss some major movies into the mix. October was horror movies or, at the very least, horror adjacent movies. The same as it is every year. I’d already covered things like Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Halloween: Resurrection, Sleepaway Camp, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I had to find more horror movies on those levels of notoriety to watch this month. That’s what brought me to this week’s movie, Vampire’s Kiss.

Here's a rundown of what Vampire’s Kiss was about. Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) was a literary agent in New York. He lived a good life. He had his own apartment that made it look like he was well off. He and his colleagues would go to the club on what seemed like an almost nightly basis. He was a little quirky, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, after a chance meeting with a woman at the club, Peter would start his path on the downward spiral of becoming a vampire.

If you don’t know what Vampire’s Kiss is, you probably do. You just don’t know that you know. It has been the source of many an internet meme. I’ll get into some of that stuff as well as many of the other ludicrous moments that it had. There were a lot. There was Nicolas Cage influence all over it, and not just because he was in it. He clearly helped shape a lot of what the movie would be, beyond his simple eccentricities.

There were two storylines in Vampire’s Kiss. The main one, and where the movie got its title, was that Peter thought he was turning into a vampire. This was due to a one night stand with Rachel (Jennifer Beals), a woman he met at the nightclub. One night turned into two nights turned into an obsession on Peter’s part. She had fangs, bit him on the neck, and he started feeling different. He was sensitive to light. He had a thirst for blood. He ate a cockroach and started sleeping in a makeshift coffin he built out of his couch. The thing is, the vampirism wasn’t real. It was all in Peter’s head. He may not have even taken Rachel home at all. For sure she didn’t bite him with vampire fangs. He had no bite mark in the morning, until he cut his neck shaving. She wasn’t there in the morning when he was talking to her. It was all his imagination playing tricks on him.

The crux of the vampirism story involved Peter losing his sanity. He was seeing a psychiatrist, which wasn’t so much a signal of his losing his sanity as it was of his trying to save it. The therapist was meant to help Peter work out his issues. His issues with life, his issues with work, his issues with everything. She tried. She really did. But his sessions got tenser and tenser to the point of scaring the therapist. By the end, I wasn’t entirely sure that the therapist was real. The final session Peter had was a hallucination as he spoke to a wall around the corner from his apartment. It was a fantastical session where he admitted how lonely he was, only to have his therapist set him up with another patient, who just happened to be there at the same time. It was Peter’s desires manifesting themselves through his insane hallucination. Were the rest of his sessions the same?

The prior sessions could have been real. They certainly felt like they were, and they were more accurate to the things that were going on in his normal life. Prior to meeting Rachel, Peter had taken Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) back to his apartment after a night at the club. While they were in the throes of passion, a bat flew in the window and flapped around the apartment. Peter later admitted to his therapist that the bat aroused him. Eventually he got rid of the bat, ditched Jackie in favour of Rachel, and turned into a vampire. But I want to talk about the therapy sessions a bit more.

The bat flying around the apartment gave the first hint at the crazy Nicolas Cage performance that permeated through Vampire’s Kiss. As he tried to get the bat away, he shouted “Shoo! Shoo!” in a way that only Nicolas Cage would. The therapy session about the bat wasn’t quite the height of Nicolas Cage acting, but it set the stage for what would come. A later therapy scene involved Peter recounting his troubles with finding a certain contract. Nobody could find it. I’ll get into the full story about that in a bit. I just want to say that the therapy session led to a weird scene where Peter, filled with outrage, shouted about how it was easy to file things alphabetically. He recited the alphabet while screaming at his therapist, who could only respond with a “Very good, Peter. You know your alphabet.” Not much of a help, but what else could she say at that point?

One of the other revelations in the final, fictional, therapy session was that Peter had killed a woman. It wasn’t a revelation to Peter or the viewer, but it was a revelation to the therapist who wasn’t actually there. This unreal version of the therapist even said it was okay that Peter killed a woman. How did Peter get to that point? As his mental state deteriorated and he became surer that he was a vampire, Peter worried that his teeth weren’t growing in. He went and bought plastic teeth. He went to the club. He used those plastic teeth to chew on a woman’s neck and suck her blood. That killed her. Peter was a murderer.

Now, I have a few questions about that scene and what led up to it. Maybe those questions can simply be answered by “That was the New York of 1988.” I still have those questions. Why did nobody question why Peter ran down the street screaming “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!”? Okay, to be fair, I’d probably just stand there wondering what was happening. I probably wouldn’t do anything about it. So I guess that tracks. When Peter was kicked out of the club, why didn’t anyone try to figure out whose blood was all over him? Seriously, this one is a much bigger question to me. He was covered in blood because he had just bitten someone’s neck open. It wasn’t a Halloween party or a costume party. It was just a normal night at the club. Nobody wondered about the blood. They kicked him out and that was that. Even when they found the woman’s body, they didn’t put together that Peter had been covered in blood and she had lost a lot of blood. I don’t understand that.

I want to take a quick moment to go back to the plastic teeth and Peter’s trip to the club. There’s a moment when Peter first puts in his teeth that is one of the underrated funny moments of the movie. Nicolas Cage put the teeth in his mouth, looked directly at camera, and made a kind of hissing sound. Then he started crawling on the ground. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not sure about the choices that Nicolas Cage makes in most movies, though, so I’m not going to be able to explain it. When he went to the club, however, there was reason for the way he was acting. Some people call it overacting. Some call it homage. I think it could be a little bit of both. Peter entered the club and walked around like he was Nosferatu in the 1920s movie. You could see the glee in Nicolas Cage’s face as he was walking around like that. It was clearly overacting as it didn’t feel realistic at all. At the same time, it was an homage to that earlier film. It was a little bit of both. No need to sit on one side or the other.

It's about time we get into the second storyline that was woven through Vampire’s Kiss, and that was the workplace harassment drama. As I said earlier, Peter was a literary agent of some sort, working in an office. His secretary or assistant was Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso). Peter was always abusing her in one way or another, and things got increasingly bad as the movie went on. It was clearly a metaphor for an abusive relationship, and it was easy to see all the similarities. She never left the situation. She undersold how bad it was to other people. When she did leave, Peter apologized and acted nice, until she returned and he acted worse than ever. It was the same story you hear about abusive relationships all the time. Only, in Vampire’s Kiss, it was a work relationship.

The Alva storyline was where I think the most ridiculous moments of Vampire’s Kiss shined. I don’t mean that to make light of how horrible Peter treated Alva. There’s no excuse for his mistreatment of her, especially the sexual assault near the end of the film. But there were certain things that Nicolas Cage added to his performance during this storyline that were things only Nicolas Cage would think of, then execute upon. There were some raw Nicolas Cage moments within a story about an abusive relationship.

There was one scene that perfectly showed how an abusive relationship could show itself in public. In the middle of the workday, Peter started calling for Alva. She ignored him. He kept calling, getting louder and louder each time. Eventually, he came out of his office into the main area where the rest of the staff were. In the most Nicolas Cage way, he jumped up on someone’s desk, pointed down at Alva (asserting his power position over her), and shouted “There you are!” Alva fled the room, he followed her, going so far as to storm right into the women’s washroom.

The real power of this as an allegory for an abusive relationship came from the interaction that followed. Another woman was in the washroom and asked why Peter was in there. The woman asked if everything was okay, to which Alva replied that it was. This was something that frequently happens with abusive relationships. The victims will, for some amount of time, downplay how bad the relationship is. They will forgive their abuser, usually out of fear that the abuse will get worse. Alva feared what Peter might do to her in the future, so she wouldn’t let anyone interfere.

Things got worse in private. Peter brought Alva into his office to talk about the contract he tasked her with finding. This was when things got threatening beyond what was happening in public. His voice got quieter so that people outside couldn’t hear. His eyes widened as he looked directly into hers. Peter said that there was nobody else he would want to do that job because it was one of the worst jobs he could think of. He would rather have Alva do that job because of how horrible it was. He wanted to torture her with it. It was very much the way that an abuser would emotionally and mentally threaten a victim behind closed doors, talking about all the horrible things they could do to their victim. Peter was laying that threat out there for Alva to see, without it being physical. It was a threat he would follow through on later.

Alva felt so afraid to go to work that she confided in her brother, who convinced her to stay home. Peter, in his full abuser form, found Alva’s house and apologized. He convinced her to return to work, only to then do something much, much worse. He raped her in the office building, somewhere in one of the back rooms. Abusers do this sort of thing all the time. When the victim tries to leave the relationship, they will change their tone completely to try and persuade them to stay. They manipulate in a way that will downplay to the victim how bad they were. Then, when the victim is convinced of the abuser being sorry or turning a new leaf, the abuser will do something even worse because the victim tried to leave them. Peter persuaded Alva to return to work, only to immediately betray her trust in the worst way. The only way she could think of to get away from her abuser was to fight back. Alva took her brother to Peter’s apartment, and her brother killed Peter, driving a piece of wood through his heart. It was like a stake to a real vampire.

So there you have it. That’s Vampire’s Kiss in a nutshell. There were two storylines, intertwined because of one man’s mental deterioration. Peter was losing his mind, which led him to believe he was a vampire. It also worsened his already abusive relationship with coworker Alva. Eventually, both sides of his life would come together to end it with a stake through the heart. Or the abdomen. It definitely looked like the piece of wood was driven into his body below his heart. Either way, he died because of what he did to Alva in the most vampiric way, without being an actual vampire.

I didn’t know what I was going to write when I set out to put together this post. I knew it would be something about Vampire’s Kiss, since that was the topic and I had just watched it. That’s all I knew. I didn’t know how I would get into it. I didn’t have some other topic I wanted to approach. It ended up being a post all about the movie. I guess that’ll work, though the movie might not have.

Now I’ve got a few notes to close things out:

• I mentioned a few movies in this post. They were Birdemic: Shock and Terror (week 100), Halloween: Resurrection (week 413), Sleepaway Camp (week 150), and Killer Klowns from Outer Space (week 361).
• Vampire’s Kiss put Debbie Rochon into the five-timers’ club. Her first four appearances were Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (week 84), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110), Battledogs (week 346), and Tromeo & Juliet (week 516).
• Nicolas Cage also joined the five-timers’ club this week. His appearances were in Outcast (week 163), Ghost Rider (week 260), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (week 260), Never on Tuesday (week 387), and Vampire’s Kiss.
• Jessica Lundy was in both Vampire’s Kiss and The Stupids (week 188).
• Fred Claus (week 265) and Vampire’s Kiss each featured John Michael Higgins.
• Branden Marlowe appeared in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (week 310) as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies before reappearing in Vampire’s Kiss.
• The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (week 362) featured David Hyde Pierce, who also had a role in Vampire’s Kiss.
• Material Girls (week 467) and Vampire’s Kiss shared an actor in Maria Conchita Alonso.
• Finally, Jill Gatsby popped up in Vampire’s Kiss. She was also in Maniac Cop (week 480).
• Have you seen Vampire’s Kiss? What did you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
• You can also use the comments section to share any suggestions you have for movies I should check out as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for some more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• Okay, so this post is coming out a little late. Like a month or so late. The post that’s supposed to go up after it is for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. It’ll be up sometime soon. I hope you enjoy that one when it goes up. In the meantime, check out some of the other posts that have come out between when this one was supposed to land and when it did land. See you soon!