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.