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.
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