A Karate Christmas Miracle (2019)

From the 1960s through the 1980s, true crime was a big thing. That was a result of heightened awareness to serial killers. That was the era when television had established itself in households. The first inklings of criminal profiling and 24-hour news coverage snuck into culture. These three things combined put serial killers on people’s minds more often than they had been when people were a little more cut off from the world and knowledge. At least, that’s how I’ve been taught. This was all before I was born. Movies and television shows have certainly made it feel this way.

Things seemed to shift in the mid-1980s. It may have been due to the war on drugs and the AIDS crisis. Numerous serial killers preyed on addicts, sex workers, and gay people, many of whom were targets of these two parts of the 1980s. Since these three groups of people were villainized, the vast majority of middle Americans didn’t care as much when they were the victims of serial killings. Murderers who targeted those communities could fly below the radar, relatively speaking, while serial killers who targeted straight white people or children would garner attention. There weren’t a lot of serial killers targeting those more attention-getting communities. With the fading of serial killer attention came the fading of true crime from the popular media. For the most part.

True crime bubbled beneath the surface for a few decades. It was always there. Jeffrey Dahmer was captured in 1991, the O.J. Simpson trial happened in 1994. Unsolved Mysteries, Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and Forensic Files aired. Police procedurals became CBS’s thing. Se7en and Zodiac were around, too. None of this stuff had the same cachet as when the news seemingly always covered new murders and serial killers in those earlier decades.

That all changed when Serial came out. The first episode hit podcasting services in October 2014, and would change the podcast world. People who didn’t listen to podcasts before were listening to podcasts at that point. They wanted to know anything they could about Adnan Syed and his trial. In the wake of the podcast’s popularity, a bunch of other true crime podcasts started popping up. Documentaries, both feature and series, became popular thanks to true crime subject matter. Some of the shows and movies that had been released in that under-the-surface time rose to prominence. True crime was back, and it was as strong as it had been so many years before.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I just wrote nearly 500 words about true crime to start a post about a movie called A Karate Christmas Miracle. That would be a good question and I’m kind of wondering that myself. I do have an answer, though. It was a movie that played out kind of like a true crime podcast. A fictional true crime podcast. It was based around a shooting at a theater, inspired by what happened in Aurora, Colorado.

Abby Genesis (Mila Milosevic) lost her husband, Bob (Ken Del Vecchio), in a theater shooting on Christmas Eve. He didn’t die. He simply disappeared after the shooting and his family hadn’t heard from him since. A year later, Abby found her son, Jesse (Mario Del Vecchio), trying to do a series of tasks over the twelve days of Christmas to bring Bob back. It didn’t make any sense to her. She needed some closure to get her son some closure. Abby enlisted the help of a criminal law professor and psychic, Elizabeth (Julie McCullough), to find any clues about what happened to her husband.

As you can see, A Karate Christmas Miracle was about an investigation of a man’s disappearance following a theater shooting. That may not be true crime in the most straight-forward sense, since it was fictional. And it didn’t relay the facts about the shooting all that much. The details were vague. They didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Mind you, the movie didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so that was par for the course. There was that investigative angle, however. It was an angle shared by true crime podcasts like Serial and shows like Making a Murderer. It was looking for some deeper truth that may not have been uncovered in the immediate aftermath of the crime.

The investigators were Abby and Elizabeth. There wasn’t much to Abby’s character. Elizabeth, on the other hand, got a whole bunch to do. She was the more heightened personality of the two. Elizabeth was introduced during a lecture where she questioned her students on what Santa would be charged with if he smashed a bottle over a guy’s head while defending Rudolph in a bar fight. It was a lecture that highlighted Elizabeth’s personality, before throwing her head-on into the story with Abby. Jesse interrupted the lecture and Elizabeth immediately knew his name, piquing Abby’s interest. She had seen Elizabeth long before for a psychic reading, and Elizabeth still remembered details. Maybe she would know what happened to Bob.

Elizabeth’s part of the investigation was her psychic visions. She had vague hallucinations of what happened before, during, and after the shooting. She saw James Whitmore (Eric Roberts) on the theater screen, spewing off some sort of manifesto. Sam (Martin Kove), the owner of the theater, also appeared on the screen. He talked directly to his daughter, Aurora (Lacy Marie Meyer), the only known survivor of the shooting. She saw a clown with a gun walking around. She saw Bob watching over Aurora while she lay in a hospital bed. None of it answered anything. It left more questions. Kind of like a psychic reading, I guess.

All the while, Jesse was off in his own world trying to finish his list of tasks before Christmas came. He named a bunch of presidents and capitals of states. Boring stuff like that. Capping off the tasks was the most exciting thing. He had to earn his black belt. The little dude had to go through so many belts to get there, and he pulled it off in less than twelve days. That was a crazy amount of work.

That didn’t have much to do with the “true crime” storytelling of it all. That side of the story was contained in the visions that Elizabeth had, and the places she and Abby checked out after the visions. Mostly the front yard of a church Elizabeth saw Bob at in a vision. They never went to the theater or found Aurora. Nah nah. The closest anyone came to that was Jesse having a dream where he talked to Sam and was told to be quiet until he got his black belt. The investigation wasn’t poorly done.

The last thing that should be talked about with A Karate Christmas Miracle in regards to the true crime investigation story is the ending. Spoilers ahead. The ending made no sense. Jesse earned his black belt. As soon as it was presented to him, in his own house, Bob walked in the back door. Bob put the belt on Jesse, everyone hugged, and the movie ended. How did Bob get there? No idea. Where was he for a full year? No idea. Who was the shooter in the theater? Possibly James Whitmore, but I have no idea. What was his relation to Aurora? No idea. Why did he abandon his family? No idea. After all the sleuthing and bonding by Abby and Elizabeth, there were no answers. Bob was just back and that was that. What?

I started this whole thing by comparing A Karate Christmas Miracle to a true crime podcast, show, or movie. In terms of what was happening, that felt like a right comparison. There was a tragic event that people investigated in the aftermath. The problem was that there were no conclusions. Not that all true crime stories tie up all the loose ends. None of the loose ends were tied up, though. Everything was left hanging. The shooting, Bob’s whereabouts, why Jesse had his dreams, and why his list of tasks worked to bring Bob back. Everything was resolved with Bob’s return, but none of the answers that anyone was looking for were given. That was where my comparison fell apart. Well, that and the part where it wasn’t a true story. It was clearly referencing one, however.

Going into A Karate Christmas Miracle, I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe it would be better to say I expected something a little more uplifting than what it was. I expected a kid doing karate for some silly Christmas reason. I wasn’t expecting a theater shooting and people who needed psychiatric help in the aftermath. It was much darker than the name made me think. It was nothing like what I expected.

A Karate Christmas Miracle was a movie made in the wake of true crime popularity rising and the number of mass shootings increasing. It brought elements from each of those into a family Christmas movie. It tried to find some success by relating to things people were invested in, whether for good or bad, and didn’t do a particularly good job of it. The movie could easily be one of the forgotten pieces of true crime media produced in the post-Serial boom.

That’s a boom that has kept on going. True crime is still as popular as ever. Things like Serial and Making a Murderer have fallen by the wayside. Other projects have come and gone, as well. Yet there’s always something new in that genre to whet people’s appetites. It doesn’t seem like it’ll be going away any time soon, and I’m interested to see what other ways people will find to blend it into projects you might not see coming.

Here are a few quick notes to tie everything together:

• You may have seen me mention Eric Roberts was in A Karate Christmas Miracle. That’s his seventh appearance in Sunday “Bad” Movies. His other appearances were in A Talking Cat!?!, Chicks Dig Gay Guys, The Human Centipede III, DOA: Dead or Alive, Miss Castaway and the Island Girls, and Amityville Death House.
• Martin Kove also returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in A Karate Christmas Miracle. He previously popped up in 2 Lava 2 Lantula and I’m in Love with a Church Girl.
• The final returning actor was Julie McCullough, who was in Sharknado before A Karate Christmas Miracle.
• Have you seen A Karate Christmas Miracle? What did you think? Let me know in the comments, on Threads, or on BlueSky. Because I’m in those spots now.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. I’m up for suggestions. Comment or find me on one of those social medias.
• I don’t know what’s next for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I was going to go with Where is Winky's Horse, but that's a Christmas movie, so I'll save it for next year. Something will pop up. I'm sure. I'll see you soon with another post.

Ringmaster (1998)

Think back to when you were younger. You were sick and from school. All the usual stuff that you would watch on TV was not on. The morning television geared towards children getting ready for school, that was over. But after school programming hadn’t started yet because school was still in. You flipped through the channels for anything to watch. You got The Price is Right. That was always on. Bob Barker told people to spay and neuter their pets, while the contestants spun a giant wheel, hoping to get 100. You flicked the channel again and got soap operas. All My Children, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital… all this boring drama that you didn’t really want to see. Flipped the channel again. News. Talking heads telling your parents what new thing was going to terrorize their children. One more flick. Now this was what you want to see.

One of three shows was now on your television. You got Maury Povich. He was telling people whether or not the child was, in fact, theirs. You got Montel basically doing the same thing. And what’s this? You had Jerry Springer standing in front of a line of chairs, while people sat in the chairs and yelled back-and-forth. One of them got up. They threw haymakers at the rest of them. Steve Wilkos came out wearing his security shirt. He pulled them off each other. He kind of tossed one away without actually letting go and tossing them. Chairs were flying. Profanities were being shouted and bleeped out. You were having a great time on your day off.

The Jerry Springer Show was a staple of daytime television for twenty-seven years. Every day there would be different people sharing their problems. They aired out their problems by fighting over their problems. Most of these people would be considered lower class. That was the perception that the show gave off. And, sometimes, that was a completely accurate perception. It was what most people would call tabloid entertainment, without the celebrities.

The popularity of the Jerry Springer show wasn’t just based on children home sick from school. Obviously, it was geared towards adults with the material that was featured. It wasn’t made for kids. But you can’t deny the attraction that kids would have to a show of this nature. They were probably not allowed to watch it, but when they were home sick from school, flipping through the channels, they could sneak a good two, three, five, maybe ten minutes before their parents from noticed what was on the TV. However, it was the adult audience that helped drive the show’s popularity. They drove it so much that Jerry Springer became a household name even to the people that didn’t watch The Jerry Springer Show. His popularity was undeniable.

Some of this popularity probably came from the political career Jerry Springer had before his show. He was a city council member and, at one time, mayor of Cincinnati. The time he spent with politics made him a known figure. He transitioned that into news. Eventually, he started The Jerry Springer Show, which began as a topical news interview and commentary show. The ratings were kind of low on that version and it wasn’t until he got into more tabloid-style topics that the ratings begin to skyrocket. Eventually the popularity of the show would lead to a spinoff, The Steve Wilkos Show, featuring the aforementioned security guard as the host.

I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about what happened during what may have been the height of Jerry Springer’s popularity. If something becomes popular, Hollywood studios will want to get their hands on it. They’ll want a piece of that pie. I bet you can see where this is going, not only from what I’m writing, but from the fact that this is a blog about movies. Movies that don’t have a great reputation. Movies that are kind of unknown because they don’t necessarily have all the good qualities that people associate with good movies. Hollywood decided to take Jerry Springer and his show and create a movie based on them, but not associated with them.

Ringmaster came out in 1998. Jerry Springer played a TV host named Jerry Farrelly. He wasn’t the main character of the movie, but his show, Jerry, was the story. Connie (Molly Hagan) and Angel (Jaime Pressly) were a mother and daughter living in a trailer park with Connie’s husband, Rusty (Michael Dudikoff). It didn’t take long for Connie to discover that Angel and Rusty were sleeping with each other. As revenge, Connie slept with the Angel’s fiancé, Willie (Ashley Holbrook), called the bookers for the show, and got a spot on an episode being shot in Los Angeles. Also appearing on that same episode was Starletta (Wendy Raquel Robinson), who caught her boyfriend, Demond (Michael Jai White), sleeping with her friends. All this would be jammed together in a weird family drama, comedy, sex romp sort of thing. And that’s the story.

It wasn’t necessarily the popularity of Jerry Springer, himself, that inspired this movie to be made. It was the popularity of The Jerry Springer Show, translated to Jerry in the movie. The movie was about the people on the show, and what their lives were like outside of the show. On The Jerry Springer Show, you only had a little snippet. You got one side versus the other and a fight. Probably. That was the stereotypical thing that happened. The audience didn’t really know what was happening in their lives beyond that. They only knew what the guests were saying. And they didn’t really care what the guests were saying because it was more about the action that was about to explode.

Ringmaster gave that background. It took what you knew was going to happen on the show and built it that way. It presented why the people were fighting. It showed everything that happened before the confrontation, during the conversation, and after the confrontation. I saw why Connie wanted to share her families, dirty laundry on national television. Why was she so angry with her daughter? You got to see the daughter interacting with the husband prior to their appearance on the show. I mean, the husband didn’t even show up on Jerry. He knew it would make him look bad and left before the taping. See, if you watched The Jerry Springer Show, you would only hear about him leaving. You wouldn’t see why, you wouldn’t see how, and you wouldn’t see what led to it. But in Ringmaster you got to see all of that.

Do you know why the movie was built like this? It was to tell the story of the people. Or that was what the movie wanted you to think. The Jerry Springer Show, or Jerry, only gave a glimpse into the lives of these people. As an audience, you probably looked down on them because you only got this tabloid story about one person cheating on another person and then punching said person, or other person, in front of a live audience. These people had more going on in their lives. The grievances they aired out on screen, as if they were in the midst of a Festivus celebration, were real issues. They were issues that people went through every day. As Jerry Fowler said, paraphrased from the climax of Ringmaster, audiences love when rich people talk about the issues portrayed on his show, but look down upon the poor people when they share the same exact problems. Why do people look down upon the poor but look up to the rich when they’re dealing with the same stuff? That seemed to be the message of the movie. The execution was just not that great.

I commend them for trying to show more of the lives of people that would appear on The Jerry Springer Show. The intention behind that was pretty good. They showed that the people on screen were more than what you might see in their segment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Showing that people are people, just like you or me or anybody that might be watching them is an important thing to get across to audiences. Maybe next time they won’t make the people they highlighted into the type of tabloid character everyone assumed they were.

The Jerry Springer Show was an important part of television for twenty-seven years. It showed the problems that normal every day people went through, only to a sensational tabloid-exploitation degree. Everything had to be explosive. It had to be dramatic. That was what audiences wanted. Jerry Springer started with a calm discussion show about serious issues, but it wasn’t until the fights and the yelling started that people begin to pay attention. That was what made his show so big.

The most interesting thing was that he was always sympathetic towards those people. He would let things play out, but at the same time he wasn’t pushing their buttons. He was trying to get to the deeper meaning behind what they said. Even if what they said was pretty surface level. You might think that some of the stuff on The Jerry Springer Show was staged. It may well have been. But you can’t deny the importance that that had on shining the spotlight on part of America that most people would rather ignore. He was doing good through exploitation.

This idea continued beyond the popularity of his show. The Steve Wilkos Show came out of it, becoming its own thing while also being the same thing. If it weren’t for Jerry Springer, Maury probably wouldn’t be as popular. Montel definitely wouldn’t have been as popular, and we probably wouldn’t have had Dr. Phil. All this came back to Jerry Springer wanting to make a news talk show where he tackled real issues. If it wasn’t for that desire, the television landscape wouldn’t be what it is now. Particularly, the daytime television landscape.

Jerry Springer passed away earlier this year. I was supposed to write this post a couple months before that. Not that I planned to have it out before he died. I didn’t know he was going to die. Nobody really knew that. But this movie was originally scheduled for February. He was still alive when I first watched it for that initial post. And then I changed what I was doing. This post kept getting pushed back and back. I wrote about him when he passed in April. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t tackled this post until now. And some of the stuff in this post might be some of the same stuff I wrote way back in April on my other blog. There’s a reason for that though. I respected Jerry Springer, and what he was trying to do, even if I may not have respected the show he made.

His show started in 1991. I was born in 1990. As far as I can remember, his show was just kind of always there. It was always on. It was one of those shows where, if I was home sick, like I said at the beginning of the post, I would be flipping through the channels, and there it was. It was a slice of the world that I didn’t normally see. And that’s kind of important. Seeing stuff that isn’t necessarily in your immediate surroundings makes you a broader person. It makes you a better person. That’s what Jerry Springer did. Through his movie, Ringmaster, you understood what he was trying to do. You understood that his show was trying to do that same thing. Even if it was going about it in a cartoonish way. When you see that as a kid, you don’t know that. But you know what? It gets instilled in you. Bit by bit you learn from it. You might not learn the right things at first, but years later you really understand. Understanding… That’s what Jerry springer taught so many people.

As I do with every post, I’ve made a list of notes for y’all from this movie:

• Jaime Pressly was one of two actors who made their seventh Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Ringmaster. She was previously in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, Torque, Cruel World, DOA: Dead or Alive, A Haunted House 2, and The Karate Dog.
• The other seventh appearance came from Chris Coppola. He was in Far Cry, Russell Madness, Santa Buddies, The Search for Santa Paws, Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups, Bloodrayne 2:Deliverance, and now Ringmaster.
• Stepping into his fifth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance with Ringmaster was Robert Harvey. You may have seen him before in Jack and Jill, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, Sandy Wexler, and Amityville: A New Generation.
• Another new member of the Sunday “Bad” Movies five-timers’ club was Michael Jai White. He previously popped up in Exit Wounds, The Toxic Avenger Part II, The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, and Skin Trade.
• M.C. Gainey has been in three Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Soul Man, All About Steve, and Ringmaster.
• Dawn Maxey returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Ringmaster after first appearing way back in Baby’s Day Out.
• Paul Renaday was in Ringmaster and The Million Dollar Duck.
• Mickey Jones was a recognizable face in Ringmaster. He was also in Drop Zone.
• Ringmaster wasn’t Jerry Springer’s first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance. He had already shown up in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!
• Diane Michelle was in both Ringmaster and Roller Blade.
• Tangie Ambrose made her second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Ringmaster, having first appeared in Surviving Christmas.
• Ringmaster and Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment each featured Paul McMichael.
• Finally, the great Retta was in Ringmaster, as well as Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip.
• Have you seen Ringmaster? What did you think of it? What are your thoughts on Jerry Springer? Let me know what you’re thinking in the comments. Or you can find me on Threads. I’m over there, doing stuff.
• If there are any movies you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can also drop those in the comments or on Threads. I’ll take almost any movie suggestions into consideration.
• Okay, so the next post might not be until December. It’ll probably be something a little Christmas-ish. It’s getting to be that time of year. There’s also another anniversary coming up. That means I’ll have some sort of special post for you. I’m in the middle of planning it out before writing it. It should be a fun one. I’ll see you whenever I get the next post up, whatever movie it may be.

Spirit Halloween: The Movie (2022)

The inspiration behind movies can come from many places. People say that you should write what you know. Many writers pull from earlier in their lives. It could be a childhood fear that inspires a horror movie, or a friendship that inspires a children’s adventure movie. Rule of threes says I should pull out one more. It could be the divorce of parents that inspires a family drama. Not every inspiration will be pulled from a writer’s life, though. They might find inspiration in other movies and stories. They could find inspiration in the news. Many times, inspiration could come from some much stranger places.

Consider the movie that inspired this post. Spirit Halloween: The Movie came out in 2022. Jake (Donovan Colan) was gearing up for another year of trick-or-treating with his friends, Bo (Jaiden J. Smith) and Carson (Dylan Frankel). Carson said they were too old for trick-or-treating because they would be in high school the next year. This led Jake to change his plans. The three of them would hide in the local Spirit Halloween at closing time and stay the night. It all seemed like simple fun and games until they discovered the spirit of Alex Windsor (Christopher Lloyd), an evil landowner from decades before, haunting the store. Would they make it out alive?

It's a spooky children’s flick. Of course they made it out alive.

The strange thing with Spirit Halloween: The Movie was that it was inspired by a store. I don’t mean that it was inspired by working in a store, the way that Clerks or Empire Records were. I mean that the entire reason the movie was made was to promote the store. Kind of like how Career Opportunities was a movie about being stuck in a Target overnight. Swap out the Target for a Spirit Halloween. De-age the characters a little bit. Swap out thieves for a ghost. He basic idea of being in a specific store overnight is still there.

The only reason for a movie to be inspired by a store in this way would be for the movie to serve as an advertisement. That’s essentially what Spirit Halloween: The Movie was. The montage of the children playing around in the store was an excuse to show off a bunch of the costume stuff they had, whether it was actual costumes or accessories. The ghost being around and possessing various items throughout the store was an excuse to show off all the decorations and animatronics that Spirit Halloween had. This movie was one massive promotion for people to visit Spirit Halloween and buy things. However, it still had an 80s kids’ horror adventure feel to what was going on in, and under, the store.

Spirit Halloween: The Movie might have been inspired from the seasonal store, but it still had to be more than montages and interactions with Spirit Halloween items. There was an underground cave system beneath the store that led to a small shack next to a pond. That added an adventure side of things. There was Kate (Marissa Reyes), Carson’s sister, who broke into the store to find her brother who said he was staying at Jake’s house, but clearly wasn’t. And there was Sue (Rachael Leigh Cook), Jake’s mom who was worried about what her son was up to and didn’t really do anything beyond banging on the doors of the store for a bit. I’m not sure why she was in the movie.

Nothing about Spirit Halloween: The Movie was groundbreaking or memorable. It was a movie that simply happened. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t bad. It just was. What it did do, however, was give me a jumping off point to find some movies that were inspired by things that wouldn’t normally inspire a story. Or television shows. Really, any sort of visual media that was inspired by something you wouldn’t typically get inspired by. I may have written about this before. I don’t remember. I’m writing about it now.

Perhaps the most notable example is Shit My Dad Says. This was a one season television show starring William Shatner that was based on a Twitter feed. I’ve never known about anything else that was based directly on someone’s social media account. Based on YouTube? Sure. But a television show based on someone’s, at the time, 140-character messages about things their dad said? That sounds like a crazy idea now. It was a crazy idea then, too. It didn’t work.

Next up is a movie that most people say shouldn’t have been made, but I found to be kind of decent. The Emoji Movie was a children’s animated flick about emojis living inside a kid’s phone. Specifically, it was about a meh emoji trying to prove that it was more than just one emotion. There was an adventure through different smartphone apps and a decent story about being more than what people label you as. It’s a shame that certain voice actors are in it, though. But a movie inspired by emojis? That’s a strange inspiration if I’ve ever heard one.

I guess you could lump in a bunch of Pixar movies for this one. The monster in the closet becoming Monster’s Inc. A person’s emotions becoming Inside Out. The four elements becoming Elemental. Pixar doesn’t always take random things and pull a, usually, good movie out of them. However, they can look at the idea of a person’s emotions and think “What if we personified the emotions and they had to work together to make the person whole?” The studio is good at doing that. They have done stuff like that multiple times.

It would only make sense to follow up Pixar with Disney. There have been a few times that the multimedia juggernaut based movies on the rides of their amusement parks. Pirates of the Caribbean was the most successful, spawning a five-movie franchise. It’s based on a dark ride where you sit in a boat and float past a bunch of pirates doing pirate things. Then there was The Haunted Mansion. Two movies have been made based on the spooky dark ride, plus a Muppets special. The Country Bears was another attraction that was made into a movie. Finally, there was Tomorrowland, which was named for the land within the Disney parks, and was based on Walt Disney’s vision for the future. The Disney company just keeps making movies based on their rides as a sort of synergy between film and park. It’s the opposite of how they make rides based on their movies.

I should also mention From Justin to Kelly which was inspired by the first season of American Idol. The winner and runner-up of that singing competition show, Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini, were contracted to make a movie after the season was complete. The entire idea behind the movie was to use the newfound success of the singers to produce new music in movie form. It was a spring break musical that had almost nothing in the way of story, outside of a romance between the two aspiring pop stars. Who were not actors. Not a great reason to make a movie.

The last inspiration I want to mention is one that inspires a lot of movies, which makes sense because so many people have worked there or visited there. It’s the way that it inspired these movies that makes it a weird inspiration. That is McDonalds.

I’ve covered two movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies that were inspired by one of the biggest companies in the world. The most obvious one, from a story standpoint, was Hamburger: The Motion Picture. It was a sex comedy, not too unlike Police Academy, where a guy enrolled in Hamburger University to one day run a franchise of a successful fast food chain. The idea of a Hamburger University was based on the McDonalds Hamburger University, where management and franchise owners are trained, or were trained at the time. So, maybe it is a little stranger that it’s not based on the restaurant and more based on the training facility of the restaurant.

The other movie inspired by McDonald’s might not seem so obvious upon first glance. Mac and Me might look like your average E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial knock-off, where an alien was lost on Earth and befriended a few children, while the government tried to find and capture it. But there’s the name. The alien was Mac. M. A. C. Like if you were to go to McDonalds and order a Big MAC. Okay? And then about halfway through the movie, Mac goes to a birthday party dressed as a bear. Where was the birthday party? McDonalds. Who was there? Ronald McDonald. There was a ten-minute dance sequence at the McDonalds. Mac and Me was a poorly done excuse for a McDonalds advertisement.

Sometimes, inspiration can come from the strangest places. There are the obvious ways to be inspired to write a story. Personal experience, something on the news, a certain notable person. Other times, though, it can come from somewhere you never expected. One very old picture, a meh emoji on your phone, a ride you went on once when you were a kid. The important part is that a writer gets inspired. That doesn’t always happen and it’s important to act on the inspiration when it does. However good or bad the end result is.

Let’s toss a few notes in here to close things out:

• Christopher Lloyd returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Spirit Halloween: The Movie. He was previously in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, Baby Geniuses, Foodfight!, Dead Before Dawn 3D, and Santa Buddies.
• I mentioned a few movies that I’ve covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies in the past. They were The Emoji Movie, Mac and Me, Hamburger: The Motion Picture, From Justin to Kelly, and Police Academy.
• Have you seen Spirit Halloween: The Movie? What did you think of it? Have you been to a Spirit Halloween? Have you ever wanted to stay the night there? Let me know in the comments or on Threads.
• If there’s something you think I should check out for a Sunday “Bad” Movies post, let me know. I’m always open to more movies to watch, even if it might take me some time to write the posts.
• I promise the next post will be for Ringmaster. I’ve been meaning to write about that one since… February? It’s been way too long and I want to get a post in before December. It seems like the right time for that Jerry Springer movie. I’ll see you when I get that one up.

Scream Returns (2018)

Let’s go back to the 1970s or 1980s. I’m going to be talking out of my ass for this little bit because it was a time before I was born. Personal video cameras became a more popular thing sometime during those two decades. The transition from film to video made it a whole lot easier for a regular consumer to get their hands on a camera they could use to film whatever they wanted. People became more familiar with these home movie makers. They made home videos. Families doing family things. Stuff like that. They also started making scripted movies.

That’s where no-budget cinema came from. People had access to cameras at a rate that hadn’t been seen before and were able to let their creativity out. People like Todd Sheets rose in prominence through the underground movie scene because they had access to equipment they hadn’t previously had access to. Then came the independent scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s where people like Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Steven Soderberg found their footing in the industry. Having access to a device to capture video allowed more people to start their cinematic careers than ever before.

Everything took another step forward with phone technology. As phones got better, the cameras on phones got better. As the cameras on phones got better, more people were able to make creative video output. Places like Vine, TikTok, and YouTube helped creative minds reach wider audiences. Anyone was able to make movie. Or videos. Or content. Whatever they wanted to make, within legal parameters, they were able to make.

All this quick rambling was to set up for this point. Some people, namely the creative types I name-checked already, brought their own ideas to the forefront. They came up with stories. They, in many cases, had original characters they created, going through original stories they wrote. There were some cases where that wasn’t entirely true. Kevin Smith made Cop Out and Richard Linklater remade The Bad News Bears, which didn’t feature their own characters. For the most part, however, these people had their own ideas.

Another subset of creative mind came out of the rise of easily accessible cameras. These people were a little more fanboyish in their creativity. They didn’t simply reference other movies. They used those other movies as the basis of their own movies. They used their access to cameras and other such equipment to make fan films.

There are three main ways fan films could be made. The simplest is for someone to basically remake a movie they like. Off the top of my head, I think I’ve only seen one of these kinds of fan films. On YouTube, you can find something called Live Action Toy Story, where someone remade Toy Story with real toys instead of animation. I also know of a Raiders of the Lost Ark fan film from the 1980s, but I haven’t seen that one.

The second kind of fan film is to reboot the intellectual property in some way, without having the rights owner’s input. The most notable, at least from my knowledge, would be the works of Adi Shankar. He made Dirty Laundry, which brought Tom Jane back as The Punisher, and he made a dark reboot of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers called Power/Rangers. I’ve seen both and they’re each good quality short films. But they are just fan films of what people may have wanted at the time, even though big studios were doing other stuff with those properties.

Finally, there are the fan films that use an intellectual property as a jumping off point for doing their own thing while capitalizing on the other, more popular, property. My example, and the movie I started writing all this to discuss, is Scream Returns. This French film from 2018 followed a bunch of people who were stalked by Ghostface. And, as you may already know, Ghostface was never the same person in the Scream movies. None of the characters from the Scream franchise were in this film. Only the mask made an appearance and, for the most part, it wasn’t even the same mask.

Scream Returns began by basically recreating the opening of the first Scream movie. Instead of “What’s your favourite scary movie?” they went with “What’s your favourite scary video game?” You see, as much as this was a Scream fan film, it was also a video game fan film. One of the production logos that came up at the beginning of the movie featured a PlayStation controller. Someone called a woman who was home alone, quizzing her on horror movies, before chasing her around the house and killing her. That someone wore a Ghostface mask. Only, this Ghostface mask was silver instead of white.

Hard cut to the next scene where the movie went into a Grand Theft Auto V mod. That’s right. There was a whole ten-minute chunk of the movie rendered in Grand Theft Auto V where Trevor got into a fistfight with Ghostface. If you thought the opening scene was all about video games, you hadn’t seen anything yet. The fact that the scene was in the movie at all was crazy. The fact that the characters in that scene, and that scene only, spoke English with heavy French accents took everything another step over the top. This was going to be a bonkers fan film and it probably wouldn’t let up.

Only it did. In the third part of Scream Returns, the audience was taken back to the live action world. I’m not going to get too much into this or the final section because they were basically more of the same from the first segment. There were video games involved. A killer in a Ghostface mask harassed some people. There may have been some teleporting and time shifting and insanity involved in the fourth and final portion. But, all in all, it was just a bunch of French people using the Scream IP to make a movie.

Yet, the fan film suffered in a way that most fan films don’t. Usually, a fan film will ooze with someone’s love of a property. The way that some of them are shot-for-shot remakes done on shoestring budgets with kids (Raiders of the Lost Ark) or toys (Toy Story) shows the investment that people put into making these movies. The Adi Shankar fan films showed an appreciation for a property and an understanding of what the fans of those properties wanted to see. The problem with Scream Returns was that it had none of that love.

Scream Returns took some of the iconography of Scream and put it into this new movie. The Ghostface mask was there, though silver instead of white. The “What’s your favourite scary movie?” line was in there, with video game substituted in. The issue was that it took away one of the biggest strengths of the Scream movies. The meta humour was gone. The characters were no longer self-aware. They no longer followed the horror rules. There was no ability to understand what they were going through because they didn’t bring up any of the rules that built the genre over the century it has existed. This was the element that helped set the Scream franchise apart from the other horror of the mid-to-late 90s, and it was completely absent from the fan film. That felt like a major misstep.

As its own thing, Scream Returns was fine. Replace the Ghostface mask with any other non-IP slasher mask and it would surely not rub me quite as wrong as it did. There would still be the whole Grand Theft Auto V scene that came out of nowhere. And it wasn’t tense or frightening at all. But it was a serviceable little amateur slasher flick. I just wish that, for a movie that claimed to be a fan film, it had represented the franchise it was based on a little better.

A final note about Scream Returns… Even the poster was influenced by the Scream movies. Look at it. That poster wouldn’t be too out of place among at least the first four Scream movies. The fifth and sixth were made after Scream Returns, so the filmmakers didn’t have those for reference.

Fan films come in many shapes and sizes, though there are really two things that they have or should have in common. The first would be an appreciation for the property they are based on. The people making the movie wanted to share their love of what came before, and they presented their love on screen. The other would be an appreciation for the fans. The filmmakers might want to share something that all fans of that property would love. They should be about the love. By fans and for fans.

That all ties back into the introduction of home cameras. Once people were able to access affordable cameras, they were able to declare their love for specific movies and movies in general. Thanks to the internet a little while later, they were able to share their love of the movies by showing the world the movies they made with those cameras. Now that everyone has a camera on their phone or even better cameras outside their phones, and because streaming is so easily done, fan films are all over the place. And it’s very easy to watch them.

Now it’s time for a few notes:

• I’m pretty sure there are no actors from Scream Returns in any other Sunday “Bad” Movies. Let me double check. Yeah, there are none.
• I might as well list off a few slashers that I’ve checked out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Here are links to Backwoods Bloodbath, Science Crazed, Sleepaway Camp, Slaughter High, New Year’s Evil, Taboo, Santa Claws, and Valentine.
• Have you seen Scream Returns? What did you think? What are your thoughts on fan films? Let me know in the comments, or find me on Threads because that’s where I am.
• If there’s a movie you want me to watch for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know in the comments. I’m open to suggestions and I will get to them.
• I know I was supposed to cover Ringmaster. Yeah yeah. I still need to rewatch it. I haven’t seen it since February. I got a little sidetracked by Spooky Season. It’ll be coming up at some point in the near-ish future. I do have another Spooky Season post to put up, though. One that I’ve been working on for a couple weeks because I couldn’t pass up the chance to watch the movie. It seemed like perfect Sunday “Bad” Movies material. I’ll have something up about Spirit Halloween: The Movie. I’ll see you again when that one goes up.