Bandit Goes Country (1994), Bandit Bandit (1994), Beauty and the Bandit (1994), Bandit's Silver Angel (1994), and People Who Claim Something Can Ruin Their Childhood

The internet has given a voice to people who never really had one in their offline life. People who felt like outcasts because they weren’t normal. They cared about movies, books, television, video games, or comics. Interests that only a couple decades ago would have been seen as nerdy and would have led to people being made fun of. Now they had a voice and could find people from around the world who shared those interests.

However, with good always comes bad. When you give a voice to a whole group of people who didn’t have that same voice before, someone will use it for bad. There has been a lot of negativity within these communities. Misogyny, racism, all kinds of crazy, inexcusable stuff. I’m not the right person to get into those serious issues, though. I can condemn them, but I can’t speak to them. There’s something more lightly negative that I want to examine.

The same communities that were bullied before the internet and the rise of technology are the same people that complain about every single detail they don’t like in the media they claim to love. Some of those complaints might overlap with the other major issues. Casting someone who they believe was the wrong gender or race. That sort of stuff. However, it usually comes down to a single, catch-all statement. “They ruined my childhood.”

This statement annoys me beyond any reasonable level. It always comes after a remake or adaptation or sequel to something from the past. Sometimes as soon as the new project is announced. These vocal detractors treat a new piece of media as though it can take away from the quality of something they enjoyed years earlier. They treat it like the creatives behind the new project personally attacked them. It gives insecurity.

A new version of something you love doesn’t change the thing you loved. That thing you loved still exists. You can still go back and enjoy that thing you always enjoyed. A new version doesn’t automatically pop the old one out of existence. Especially with almost everything being so readily available on either physical media or streaming services. There will always be a way to watch that version that got people so invested in the first place.

One of the movies I grew up with was Smokey and the Bandit. It was one of those movies my parents saw when they were teenagers, and it made an impression on them. When VHS and DVD were big, they picked up copies of it. Not the second one, though. The first one was the good one. That’s what I had always been told.  The second one, the one with the elephant, was nowhere near as good. It was stupid, in fact. That first one, though? A perfect movie.

Notice how they never brought me up to think that the second movie ruined the first? That’s because it didn’t. The second movie was worse than the first. Much worse. It had too much focus on the comedy and not enough focus on the driving stunts. That didn’t take away from what the first movie accomplished. In fact, it only helped solidify why Smokey and the Bandit worked as well as it did. There was also a third movie that barely had Burt Reynolds in it, which could be seen as even worse. I think it brought the action back enough to make it more enjoyable than the second, however. I know I’m in the minority.

What I really want to talk about, though, is the reboot television movie series that came out in 1994. That’s the Smokey and the Bandit outing that inspired this post. Bandit was a four-movie television reboot of the Smokey and the Bandit franchise that brought Hal Needham back as the director. Had these television movies been made in an age of widespread internet, forums probably would have been filled with people saying that their childhoods of Smokey and the Bandit fandom had been ruined because it was so different. I think it kind of worked. Maybe shouldn’t have been based on Smokey and the Bandit, but it was, and we just have to deal with it.

Now, there were some major differences between Bandit and Smokey and the Bandit. One was the casting. They obviously didn’t get Burt Reynolds back for the television movies. They had to cast someone else in the role. They went younger with Brian Bloom taking the mantle. This was a reboot, not a remake. They went with a fifteen year more modern setting and a younger Bandit. They covered some of the stuff he got up to before the famous beer run, if that beer run even happened to this version of the character.

The first adventure, Bandit Goes Country, saw Bandit return to his hometown while accompanying a couple musicians, Mel (Mel Tillis) and Teach (Charles Nelson Reilly), to a concert. He got involved in a love triangle with his high school sweetheart, Beth (Elizabeth Berkley), and muscle-bound wrestler, Big Sky (Tyler Mane). Bandit also got roped into some music bootlegging with his cousin, Johnny Bruce (Christopher Atkins). Along for the ride was Bandit’s trusty best friend. No, it wasn’t Snowman. The only character that ported over to the reboot was Bandit. This new best friend was Lynn (Brian Krause).

There were reasons I didn’t think Bandit Goes Country was a good reboot of the Smokey and the Bandit franchise. I mentioned the Burt Reynolds of it already. Very few actors could capture his specific brand of humour, charm, and charisma. Brain Bloom wasn’t one of those actors. I could see that from the start of the television movie. Then there was the lack of a proper police villain. Buford T. Justice was nowhere to be seen. There was a police officer in there, but he was a one-off villain-of-the-week kind of officer. Finally, there was the car. For whatever reason, I can never take car chases seriously when the car is from the 1990s. The Dodge Stealth they used in the television movies, replacing the Pontiac Trans Am, looked too much like a Pontiac Sunfire or Chevy Cavalier. It looked so odd in police chases.

Yet there were some good elements to Bandit Goes Country, as well. The characters and actors all seemed to have good chemistry with each other. The small-town shenanigans were fun, particularly when they played jokes on the police officers. There were memorable characters who probably deserved to pop up in more of the episodes, but didn’t because it was an episodic television movie. And it had that southern feel that this franchise was rooted in from the beginning.

All I had to do was shift my perspective a little bit to enjoy Bandit Goes Country. Was it a good Smokey and the Bandit outing? Maybe not. However, it would have been a fun enough little television movie if it had been anything else. If they had simply made it its own thing instead of making it a reboot of Smokey and the Bandit, it would have stood perfectly well on its own two feet. That’s where I came to enjoy this four-film television series, as its own thing.

Next up was Bandit Bandit, the most Smokey and the Bandit feeling television movie of the bunch. Bandit was arrested on the way to deliver a futuristic car to the governor. A fake Bandit (Gerard Christopher) had broken laws to get him in jail and take the car for himself. After Lynn broke Bandit out, he had to get the car back, while escaping the pursuit of Sheriff Enright (John Schneider).

If any episode was going to showcase how this series of movies was based on the Smokey and the Bandit franchise, it was Bandit Bandit. It had everything. Bandit was delivering a car. There was a sheriff chasing him to arrest him. His sidekick was by his side. Sure, Bandit for some reason had a helicopter at his disposal, but it was mostly the kind of story that made Smokey and the Bandit such a classic. It was outrunning a police officer while delivering a car. With a couple new twists, of course.

Sure, the biggest flaws in Bandit being a reboot of Smokey and the Bandit were there. The Dodge Stealth still didn’t look like a formidable car for chases. That’s a me problem. I don’t think 90s cars look all that great in action scenes. And Brian Bloom still didn’t quite have that Burt Reynolds charm that brought everything together in the original. However, the strengths were starting to show. For a television movie, this had the heart of what made Smokey and the Bandit special. It captured that feeling, even if the quality wasn’t there. And Brian Bloom was starting to make his own out of the character, much in the same way that different actors have their own spin on James Bond.

I still stand by the idea that it didn’t ruin the original. If anything, the original was ruining what I thought of the television movies. They were starting to click, though. Everything was falling in place to be a fun little movie series on a television budget. All I had to do was shift my mindset from this being a new Smokey and the Bandit to this being a bunch of television movies inspired by the car movie classic. It wasn’t Smokey and the Bandit. It was Bandit. If I imagined the character being a different character, everything got better.

That was only solidified in Beauty and the Bandit, the third television movie in the series. Bandit had his car stolen by a mysterious woman, Crystal (Kathy Ireland). As he tried to get his car back, Bandit learned more about her. He learned about her ties to a mob boss, Lucky Bergstrom (Tony Curtis). He learned that she was being chased by a bounty hunter, Slade (Joe Cortese). There were also some FBI agents involved. It was a race against time and other people to get his car back and protect the woman who stole it.

Beauty and the Bandit solidified that Bandit could live on in the spirit of Smokey and the Bandit. It had a whole lot of driving. Crystal drove Bandit’s car. Bandit drove Bandit’s car. Bandit drove a buss filled with nudists. Yeah, that was a thing. There was the chase. Lucky sent his goons after Crystal. Slade was after Crystal. Bandit was after Crystal. The FBI was after Crystal. The local police were after everyone. There was the banter between enemies that became a sort of friendship while still being enemies, with Bandit and Slade. Yeah, it was a television movie and wasn’t nearly as good as the theatrical outings, but it at least captured the spirit.

This was the third of the four television movies. If I were one of those overreacting internet people, I could have easily claimed that they had ruined Smokey and the Bandit for me. Except they hadn’t. As I had learned while watching them, it was simply a different take on the material. If you go in with that mindset, you’ll even enjoy these new versions. A new take on a character, a world, a story cannot take away from previous takes on any of them. It’s just another take on the material. It’s not the only take on the material. That’s where the false claim of ruining the original comes into play.

And then there was the fourth television movie, Bandit’s Silver Angel. Bandit was contacted by his uncle, Cyrus (Donald O’Connor), about helping with a traveling carnival. He turned his uncle down, only to inherit the carnival upon Cyrus’s passing. Angel Austin (Traci Lords) was the person in charge of the carnival. Bandit helped her fend of debt collectors and put down a rebellion within the staff.

This was about as far from Smokey and the Bandit as Bandit could get and yet it still worked. Most of the television movie involved running the carnival and tricking people. There were a few car chases sprinkled throughout. There was one with Uncle Cyrus at the beginning, one to get rid of the debt collectors, and one to outrun the police who tried to tax the carnival to death. But they didn’t feel like the traditional chases this franchise featured in the past.

For the most part, Bandit’s Silver Angel felt more like an episode of a television show than the previous two movies. It felt much smaller scale. Sure, there were still appearances from notable actors, but it didn’t have the same scope or special feel that the other television movies had. The setpieces felt smaller scale. There were minimal chases. It was more about outrunning than losing the people behind. The big setpiece was a truck barely crossing a lake on a raft ferry, which was cool, but didn’t feel as full of spectacle as a plane landing on a truck or a truck being chased down by a helicopter.

None of the Bandit television movies were anywhere near as good as Smokey and the Bandit. They were never going to be. The difference between a Hollywood big screen budget and a 1990s television movie budget is huge. I could imagine people now, hearing that their favourite 1980s property was being made into a television movie on USA network, complaining about how this decision was a blight on their childhood favourite. It happened when Ghostbusters was remade in 2016. It happened when the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog came out and people didn’t like the teeth. It happens whenever a Marvel production comes out, and the costumes aren’t one hundred percent accurate to the comics. It wouldn’t have been any different here.

The thing about a new version of a beloved property is that it’s just that. It’s a new version. A new generation of fans can find an entry point that better fits their sensibilities. Maybe it will lead them to seek out the older version. Maybe it won’t. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t affect the quality of the old version. It doesn’t erase the old version from existence. Well, not in this day and age. It may have in the 20s or 30s when they reused old film stock like maniacs. Today, though? Everything has been ported to hard drives, put on home video, or bounces between streaming services. A television movie reboot of Smokey and the Bandit won’t stop the original trilogy from being available. In fact, it comes in the same DVD package as the theatrical trilogy.

All this is to say that claiming a remake, reboot, sequel, or re-adaptation of a beloved property is ruining the past is a false claim. The new version can’t change the quality of the original. It can’t take your love of the original away. It may, in fact, be a new version of that story you can grow to appreciate and maybe even love.

With the ever-increasing digital landscape, there can be multiple versions of everything that allow different people to enjoy it. If you think something is ruining your childhood, you have that love of something from the past. A newer generation or audience might not have that love, and a new version could be just what they wanted. Why is it up to this vocal minority to decide what people should or shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy?

The internet has brought about a lot of good things. It allowed people from around the world to connect in ways they never had before. If you felt alone in your day-to-day life, there was a chance you would find your tribe on the internet. It became a good place to archive text, video, imagery, and audio so that it was less likely to be lost over time. It took a library and allowed it to fit into the palm of your hand.

The downside of the internet was that some of the tribes that people found were bad tribes. Rampant racism and hate. Bullying. That sort of stuff. The imagery and archived stuff could also be bad. And the voice that was given to that lonely person who was able to connect with others? Sometimes that voice came out in the most self-entitled way imaginable. The internet was good for some things, but terrible for others. We should all try a little harder to get rid of the bad stuff.

What I won’t be getting rid of are these notes:

• The four Bandit television movies were directed by Hal Needham, who directed Rad.
• Brian Bloom, Brian Krause, and Dawn Sears were each in all four Bandit television movies.
• Bandit Goes Country featured Elizabeth Berkley, who you might know from Showgirls or Control Factor.
• The other three-timer in Bandit Goes Country was Christopher Atkins, who appeared in Shakma and The Pirate Movie.
• Marty Terry appeared in both Bandit Goes Country and Elf-Man.
• Robert D. Raiford was in Super Mario Bros. and Bandit Goes Country.
• One of the more recognizable people in Bandit Goes Country was Tyler Mane. He was also in The Scorpion King.
• Finishing off Bandit Goes Country was Charles Nelson Reilly, a recognizable voice you might remember from A Troll in Central Park.
• Now onto Bandit Bandit, which featured the third appearance of Mark Jeffrey Miller after Super Mario Bros. and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip.
• Two other actors from Super Mario Bros. were in Bandit Bandit. They were Michael Harding and Andrea Powell.
• Buckley Norris was in Bandit Bandit and Mac and Me.
• Bandit Bandit featured Barnaby Carpenter, and actor from Jem and the Holograms.
• James Martin Jr. returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies for Bandit Bandit after first showing up in Jaws: The Revenge.
• Closing out Bandit Bandit was Ami Dolenz, who had already been in She’s Out of Control.
• Another third appearance this week came from Tony Curtis. He previously voiced a character in Roxanne’s Best Christmas Ever and appeared in Sextette before popping up in Beauty and the Bandit.
• The other third appearance in Beauty and the Bandit was Henry Cho, who also appeared in Material Girls and Say It Isn’t So.
• Beauty and the Bandit had three more actors from Super Mario Bros. They were Lucy Alpaugh, Wallace Merck, and Patt Noday.
• One of the stars of Beauty and the Bandit was Kathy Ireland, who appeared in Mom and Dad Save the World.
• Brining Beauty and the Bandit to a close was Mark Joy, who was in Martial Law.
• And now we get to Bandit’s Silver Angel, which featured Marc Macaulay, who popped up in both From Justin to Kelly and Cop and a Half.
• Finally, Traci Lords was in Bandit’s Silver Angel and Ice.
• Have you seen any of the Bandit TV movies? What did you think? What do you think about people feeling entitled to something ruining their childhood? Let me know in the comments, or you can find me on Threads or Bluesky.
• Threads, Bluesky, and the comments are all good places to let me know what movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.
• Okay, this post took longer than I thought it would to come out. With that, we’re already in December, which means my next movie will be a Christmas movie. What one? Santa’s Got Style, of course. I got a box set of a bunch of those Hallmark-like Christmas movies and picked one with an interesting name and gave it a watch. I’ll get that post out soon. See you then.

Slashlorette Party (2020) and Some Fixations

Once in a while, I’ll watch a movie and get really hung up on a single detail. It’s not to the point where it will ruin the movie. There just happens to be one little tidbit that sticks out and makes me think much longer than I should about it. I wouldn’t call it a nitpick. I’m not complaining about a small detail as if they got some continuity wrong. It’s more an observation than anything. But I can’t stop thinking about that thing. It sticks in my brain in a way that it shouldn’t.

What I want to do is go over a few movies within Sunday “Bad” Movies that had these types of things. Something within the story that has me sitting here, wondering why they wrote it like that. This could end up being one of the shortest posts in a while, or it could end up being my opus. I don’t know. I haven’t planned it. All I know is that I’m going to start with the movie I just watched, the movie that inspired this whole idea.

Slashlorette Party was a slasher film set at a combination bachelor/bachelorette party. Brie (Molly Souza) was having second thoughts about marrying Dolph (Andrew Brown). He was emotionally abusive, and she had nightmares where he turned physical. She only went through with the party because it had already been planned with all their friends at a rented cottage. Things turned bad, however, when the friends were attacked by masked men.

The combination bachelor/bachelorette party wasn’t so out of the ordinary. That’s something that happens. People would rather have their final party before marriage together than separate. You want to be with the person. Why would you want that extra time away to get things out of your system? It’s not necessary. So you throw the party together with your friends. A sort of pre-reception, pre-wedding party where you get to have fun without the formality.

It was one of the events that happened at the combined party that threw me for a loop. One of the stereotypical events of a bachelor or bachelorette party is to have a stripper come in to perform for the lucky lady or gentleman. Slashlorette Party had a stripper scene, but things got a little odd. The bachelor and bachelorette were placed in chairs across from one another. They had to watch the other one get a lap dance. They weren’t entirely comfortable with it. I don’t know why either of them agreed to it. Dolph got angry when the stripper rubbed up against Brie. Why would you include this at your party if you weren’t okay with it? It baffled me. I’m still sitting here wondering why they would choose to do that. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that I’m not nitpicking. Maybe I’m nitpicking. But I’m not nitpicking the quality of Slashlorette Party like people tend to attack the quality of a movie when they nitpick. I’m more nitpicking the motivations of Brie and Dolph when they agreed to be cucks to each other’s lap dances. If you aren’t comfortable with it, you shouldn’t agree to it. It was an odd thing for either character to want to experience on the eve of their wedding.

Slashlorette Party wasn’t nearly the only movie with a moment like this that I cocked my head and wondered why it was there. Or one that was so random I couldn’t stop laughing. Things that I fixated on because something about them wouldn’t stop scratching the darkest crevices of my brain. There have been plenty, partially because I’ve seen plenty of movies, and partially because I definitely have something undiagnosed going on. I’ll get around to that at some point, but not now. Now is for those little pieces of movies.

Let me take you to the Birdemic franchise. None of them were particularly good movies. The third was atrocious because of a lack of effort, but I’m not looking at that movie. I want to take a look at Birdemic 2: The Resurrection. However, to get context for this moment, I need to quickly glance back at Birdemic: Shock and Terror.

The first Birdemic movie came out and was almost instantly deemed a modern bad movie classic, in the same vein as Troll 2 and The Room. There was a lot of heart and effort put into the movie, yet it all failed miserably. Maybe not all. Birdemic did have that Damien Carter banger partway through. The vast majority of it didn’t have any level of quality, though. It was a love story turned road trip survival story, where the romantic couple became surrogate parents for two children they found in a van. They caught fish at the beach to eat, met a nature guy who told them all about global warming and other bad ecological things. You know, basic family stuff.

Jump ahead to Birdemic 2: The Resurrection and only one of the children remained. This was where we got the moment. This was where my mind started racing because I was so in shock with what just happened. The remaining kid made a remark about how his sister would have loved to see a museum, had she not died from food poisoning from the fish they ate in the first movie. What was that comment? Why was it in there? It made the hero of the movie, or rather the secondary hero in the sequel, look like a bad guy. He not only couldn’t save his friends in the first film, but he caused the death of the child he took in. What a weird choice.

Also, now that I think about it… Why did they still have one of the two children anyway? I understand that the parents died during the bird attack of the first movie. That made sense for taking the kids in. But in the aftermath, after everything settled down, wouldn’t the kids have gone with extended family? Wouldn’t they have gone into foster care? I have so many questions stemming from this one moment. Birdemic 2: The Resurrection turned one line into such a crazy thread spiral in my mind.

I could make an entire post like this just for Nicolas Cage movies, but I won’t do that yet. This isn’t the time for a whole bunch of Nicolas Cage. I’ll, instead, give you a little taste through one choice in Ghost Rider. No, not the sequel. The first Ghost Rider movie that Nicolas Cage was in. The one where he was basically Evel Knievel. Yeah, that one. There’s one detail in that one that I’ve been stuck on ever since I first saw the movie.

So you’ve got Johnny Blaze, a stunt performer who just jumped over… I can’t remember if it was the semi-trucks or the helicopters. Either way, he was in his room talking to his friend. He had a martini class. However, the glass was filled with jellybeans instead of a martini. What I can only assume happened was that the screenwriter wanted to have Johnny Blaze as an alcoholic because of how rough his job and his superpower were. The studio didn’t want the movie to be that hard, though, so they asked the director to pull it back. Rather than rewriting the scene, they substituted alcohol for candy. And there we go.

I don’t know if that’s true at all. It’s an assumption, twenty years after the making of the movie. I had nothing to do with it. Whatever the case, it left this strange image of Nicolas Cage sitting around with a martini glass full of jellybeans. This moment became one of those quintessential Nicolas Cage moments, even if it wasn’t dependent on his strange choices as an actor. It was the strange choices of the movie that brought it about.

One final movie I want to bring up is Scream Returns. It was a French fan film for the Scream franchise made before the newer sequels started coming out. There was some real weird stuff in there, none more notable than the scene I’m about to get into. Yes, a full scene, not just a moment. The scene was so crazy that I’ve been thinking about it ever since. You know when you see something and you’re just blown away by it? Yeah, that’s what this was.

There was a moment in Scream Returns where the action went from live action to animated. Specifically, it was animated by a video game engine. It was Grand Theft Auto V, okay? Trevor popped up and fought with Ghostface. It was a whole big fight scene in Michael’s house in Grand Theft Auto V between Trevor and Ghostface. I could not believe my eyes. It wasn’t ten million fireflies, but it sure was something.

This scene didn’t really get me thinking. It wasn’t one of those moments where I questioned why it happened. All I could think about was what I saw unfolding. I never expected to watch a movie and see a GTA V character going up against a slasher villain. It wasn’t on my horror bingo card. But I saw it and it was glorious. It was all I could have hoped for and more. Why did it happen, though? I don’t know, but it was great.

There are moments all throughout film history that will make you wonder why they were done the way they were done. Or they’ll make me wonder. Because I’m like that. I get hung up on small moments. I get hung up on moments that might pass other people by. They stick with me in a way that makes me think about them far longer than I should. These moments become a part of who I am. Yeah, it’s a me thing.

What I like about Sunday “Bad” Movies is that they teach me to embrace things about movies and things about myself. Would I have written this post if I hadn’t seen Slashlorette Party? Probably not. Would I have seen Slashlorette Party had it not been for this blog? Probably not. But I did and I did, so there’s that. I love this blog.

It’s about time we got some notes in here:

• I mentioned a few other movies in this post. Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle, Ghost Rider, Troll 2, The Room, and Scream Returns.
• The only actor from Slashlorette Party to be in another movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies was Drew Marvick, who was in Another WolfCop.
• Have you seen Slashlorette Party? What did you think? Are there any other movies you can think of that had moments that you fixated on? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, of you can find me on Bluesky or Threads.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, drop that suggestion on Bluesky or Threads, or you could drop it in the comments.
• Now I’m going to do a quick little look ahead. I only have one post on the docket right now. It’s a nice little franchise post, so I’ll be looking at four movies. More specifically, I’ll be looking at the four Bandit television movies from the early 1990s. You know, the reboot of Smokey and the Bandit? Yeah. I’m not sure what I’ll write, but I’m going to write about them. See you soon for that one.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024) and Rambling About Stunt Casting

There’s nothing like a little stunt casting to get a movie going. You bring that special someone in for a day of filming and it boosts the recognition of the movie by an exponential amount. A quick cameo that audiences will talk about. An appearance by a popular non-actor in an acting role. Even better, a movie built around a non-actor. The possibilities are endless. As long as that one person shows up in the movie, the movie will be unstoppable.

Sunday “Bad” Movies has featured a bunch of movies that used the non-actor stunt casting to help find an audience. Gymkata took an Olympic gymnast in Kurt Thomas and built an action movie around merging his gymnastics with fighting. Cool as Ice took the persona that Vanilla Ice presented himself as and tried to play it off as the cool hero type. I recently saw Showdown, which placed Tae Bo master Billy Blanks in the Mr. Miyagi role of a Karate Kid-like. And let’s not forget Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever. That was a whole Hallmark Christmas movie made to star a popular cat from the internet.

The horror genre might be the one most associated with stunt casting because of the lengths they’ll go to for stunt casting to be a thing. Horror might be the only genre to retroactively stunt cast actors. Let me explain how. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation came out in 1995. It starred Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey, who weren’t big stars when it was made. Nobody paid attention to it when it first came out. Those actors rose to popularity soon after, and it was re-released in 1997 to capitalize on their fame. As if they were stunt cast for their statuses. That might not be the best example. Here’s another one. Cutting Class was a 1989 direct-to-video horror flick featuring Brad Pitt. I can’t tell you much more about it, but it has only been sold using Brad Pitt’s giant face for the past 25 years in those multi-pack DVDs.

Stunt casting in horror has been a thing since at least the Abbott and Costello Meets movies. It has remained a major device to help push horror and amuse the filmmakers. 1978’s Halloween had stunt casting. Jamie Lee Curtis was cast in the lead role in part because she was the daughter of Janet Leigh, the star of Psycho. Janet Leigh would later show up in Halloween H20, a little bit of stunt casting because of her horror history and to be on screen with her daughter. The Scream franchise has done lots of stunt casting. The first film was promoted as a Drew Barrymore movie, only for her to die in the opening scene. The Stab movies shown in-universe featured many notable names as part of their casts. Jay and Silent Bob even showed up in Scream 3. There’s lots of this kind of stuff in horror.

Low budget horror is where stunt casting really shines, though. The entire cast might be a bunch of relatively unknown actors, except for one recognizable face in a small role. That one recognizable face will be who the filmmakers use to sell the movie to audiences. They will want to know what that person was like in the movie, even if their role was only a scene or two. What did they do with their screentime? Curiosity always wins out.

Take #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead, for example. On their way to a music festival, Sarah (Jade Pettyjohn) and her friends suffered a blown tire. They were forced to rent an Airbnb. The only problem? Someone knew the Airbnb they booked and started killing them, themed to the seven deadly sins, as revenge for the suicide of Collette (Jojo Siwa) a year earlier. They had to put aside their quarrels to work together if any of them wanted to make it out alive.

When I say low budget horror, I don’t mean micro. Micro-budget horror doesn’t typically have the means to stunt cast someone. I’m talking the $500k to $2 million range, something that #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead certainly fell into. It was part of a 10-film deal at $15 million. If I’m to understand that correctly, that would be about $1.5 million per movie. This is the exact low-budget horror realm I mean. It’s enough to pay for a notable name to make a small appearance, while paying the rest of the lesser-known cast and crew to do the more intensive work. The budget can’t be micro because that wouldn’t cover the person’s fee. But when it gets into low budget territory, that’s when a producer can stunt cast someone to be the face that a movie can be sold on.

There are a couple ways that low-budget horror flicks utilize stunt casting to promote themselves. They essentially come down to the same things. One is to use someone in promotional material prior to release. Trailers, posters, that sort of stuff. Drum up the hype by letting people know this person shows up. The other way is to use their image in thumbnails on streaming services. That’s what brought my attention to #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead. I was scrolling through Tubi and they smacked me in the face with Jojo Siwa in the thumbnail. I wondered what a Jojo Siwa horror movie would be like. They got me.

The thing about stunt casting is that it doesn’t typically have that recognizable face in a big role. Unless that performer has passed the peak of their fame, such as in The Asylum movies, or the performer is in one of their earliest roles, a la Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Most times, it would be too expensive to stunt cast for major roles. Smaller roles mean less money. It’s like paying for a shoutout on Cameo. That allows lower budget movies to get that recognizable face. Jojo Siwa was only in a couple scenes of #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead. The montage of her character, a flashback, and her death scene. The story being told took place a year after all that stuff. But her small appearance was enough to promote the movie with her name and image.

Stunt casting doesn’t mean that a movie is bad. The filmmakers aren’t trying to trick audiences. Not in a quality way, at least. There’s the trick of promoting a movie off someone who isn’t the star. But the overall quality of the movie might still be good. Scream was promoted with the star power of Drew Barrymore. Her character died twenty minutes in. That didn’t take away from the rest of the movie, which was also good. The stunt casting of Drew Barrymore got people to see the movie. The quality kept them interested.

Let’s go back to #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead one more time. It might have been a lower budget movie, but that didn’t mean it was a lower quality movie. It was fine. The performances were mostly decent, minus maybe the lazy guy, but I think that was the writing. The idea behind the movie was interesting enough, being a cross between I Know What You Did Last Summer and Se7en. The kills were fun enough. The digital mask of the villain was maybe the most interesting thing. It wasn’t a terrible movie. Could it have been better? Sure. Was it fitting of being in Sunday “Bad” Movies? Yes. The size of Jojo Siwa’s role wasn’t going to make or break the movie, though.

The most important part of stunt casting is getting eyes on a movie. It’s a tool to get an audience. The quality is a result of the hard work of everyone else. They should go hand in hand. Stunt cast to get the eyes. Good quality to keep the eyes. That’s not always the case. Take The Asylum, for example. They’ve made an endless number of bad movies, stunt casting people like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, Reginald VelJohnson, Linda Hamilton, Jamie Kennedy, and Jaleel White. Hell, the Sharknado movies were nothing but cameo after cameo to get people to watch them. Stunt casting happens all the time.

The idea behind stunt casting is that it will bring eyes to a project from people who may not have checked it out otherwise. This, in turn, could get more people to invest in said movie. Dangle that carrot to get that money. That will never change. The business is built on money. Most societies are built on money. We live in a capitalistic society. Movies cater to that. But a little bit of stunt casting doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time. What else would you be looking for in a movie, if not a good time?

Let’s end this off with a few notes:

• I mentioned a few movies in this post that were part of Sunday “Bad” Movies. Gymkata, Cool as Ice, Showdown, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Oh, and the Sharknado franchise, which has been looked at twice.
• There were no actors in #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead from other Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Have you seen #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead? What did you think? What do you think of stunt casting? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, or find me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Bluesky, Threads, and the comments are good places to suggest movies for me to watch for future posts. Hit me up. Let me know what I should be seeing.
• Now we’ve got a look forward. This month got away from me with a new job and some short film work, so my two planned horror posts were pushed back. This one will be out this week. Hopefully the Slashlorette Party post comes out next week. Then I’ve got a post planned for the Smokey and the Bandit made-for-TV movies that came out in the early 90s. That’ll be fun. I’ll see you soon for another post.

The OctoGames (2022)

We live in a world where the equipment to make a passable movie is easily available. It’s not hard to get enough money for a decent camera, a couple lights, and a microphone or two. I’ve been able to make short films with that much before. Anyone can get their hands on equipment if they want to bring one of their ideas to the screen for others to see.

The problem comes when these same creators try to come up with their ideas. Some people aren’t as creative as others. Look back through the Sunday “Bad” Movies history and you’ll see numerous movies that were mockbusters, rip-offs, and retellings of the same story. Metal Man was a riff on Iron Man. Chop Kick Panda was a mockbuster of Kung Fu Panda. Showdown was a retelling of the story made famous by The Karate Kid.

I’m always of the stance that originality comes from how a story is told, rather than the story itself. I’ve mentioned that in almost every recent post. There are times, however, when so many movies go in on one subject at the same time and don’t do enough new with it that I get kind of annoyed. The slashers based on public domain characters are getting a little out of hand. As are the Squid Game riffs, one of which I’m going to be going over.

Here's the issue. I wouldn’t have such a problem with the Squid Game riffs if they were taking the story concept and running with it. A bunch of people are put in a situation where if they lose, they die. One person survives and wins. That concept has been around in different forms for years. Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, Death Tube, and The Long Walk all used that basic story concept in different ways. The OctoGames, the Squid Game riff this post is about, stuck way too close to Squid Game. Instead of being a riff on the material, it felt like a cheap recreation.

JaxPro (Brad Belemjian) was a popular YouTuber and streamer looking to retire from the business. His last big series was going to be a competition. Eight up-and-coming influencers would compete in a series of children’s games where the losers would be eliminated in deadly fashion. Once the contestants found out they would be killed if they lost, some of them wanted out. The other greedy ones wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.

Nearly every story beat in The OctoGames felt like it was pulled straight from Squid Game. On the surface, there were the childhood games and people getting killed. That was the very basic premise of both Squid Game and The OctoGames. There was also the name. One involved squid, a sea creature with ten tentacles. The other went with octo, as in octopus, a sea creature with eight tentacles. The very basic stuff was practically the same, with enough changes that it wouldn’t be considered plagiarism.

The characters were also very much the same between Squid Game and The OctoGames. The main character in each was someone who got into the competition for their own benefit, immediately saw people get killed, and tried to band everyone together to stop the games. There was the super selfish person who would do whatever it took to be the last one standing, even if it involved straight up murdering people. There was the woman who flirted with every possible person to try and gain an advantage, and the older guy who played both sides so he could join whoever had more power. These were character types that, sure, weren’t all that original to Squid Game, but were surely lifted directly from the popular Netflix show for this lower budgeted knock-off.

Other than the clear similarities, the lower budgetedness of The OctoGames really showed through how they tried to recapture some of the Squid Game elements on a much lower scale. One of the big sets in Squid Game was the bedroom where the players were housed between games. Three walls were lined with towers of bunk beds that people would have to climb up to. The OctoGames had eight sleeping bags in a garage. Every set within Squid Game was expertly designed with some sort of theme to it. Some sort of large scope to it. The OctoGames had a hide-and-seek game that really only took place in two small rooms of a house. One of the games in The OctoGames was an obstacle course, which could go any number of imaginative ways, even on a lower budget. They opted for a party inflatable, which was laughable. Every game felt like the least amount of effort was put into it.

As much as I’ve spent this post going through everything that made The OctoGames feel like the cheap knock-off it was, there was one thing it added to the story that made it at least the slightest bit interesting. The whole competition was put on by JaxPro, a popular streamer who wanted to upload videos of it to his YouTube channel before retiring from the platform. Everyone who was chosen to compete in his games was an aspiring influencer who joined for the chance of JaxPro promoting them. The OctoGames was a commentary on the great lengths that influencers will go to for fame and fortune. It was interesting enough commentary for a movie that didn’t try on any other level.

That said, the commentary was still derivative of other, more popular and recognized movies. Scre4m had commented on streaming and fame a decade earlier. The way the killer recorded their murders. The motive behind the deaths. It all came back to fame and fortune. Spree, which came out two years before The OctoGames, followed a budding YouTuber who went on a killing spree after snapping from his lack of success. Each of these movies were about the horrible things people would do to become famous. Each of these movies covered that theme before The OctoGames. So, even the one thing that made The OctoGames feel different than the show it was riffing on wasn’t anything that hadn’t been used in other movies before.

The commentary on influencers wasn’t enough to really set The OctoGames apart from Squid Game. It was essentially just a way to pull the characters into the situation. Once they were in, it played out very much the same way as the show it pulled from. Children’s game after children’s game. Death after death. The characters wanting to be influencers fell to the wayside, even for the ones who wanted to keep playing. It became about the prize money, instead. The same prize money that Squid Game held as a carrot in front of the rabbits playing. It was a different motivation to get them invested, with the same end result.

I’ve defended many movies and their originality as being the way the stories were told rather than the story itself. The problem with The OctoGames was that it was so reliant on Squid Game as a story source that it never fully lived on its own. It didn’t do enough to take an unoriginal premise and spin it in an original way. Squid Game managed to take what The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and The Long Walk had done and give a unique telling of that concept. The OctoGames didn’t.

The availability of filmmaking equipment has led to some interesting projects. There were some kids in the 1980s who remade Indiana Jones shot for shot. There was a remake of Toy Story in live action, where someone used a bunch of actual toys. These were at least interesting in that they were passion projects. They felt like people doing something because of their love of the source. They got a pass on not bringing anything new to the table.

When someone gets access to filmmaking equipment and uses it to rip-off something at a lower cost for a quick buck without that love… That’s where I have a problem. That’s where I think The OctoGames fell, and that’s why I’m so down on it. Was it watchable? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it came from the right place. It didn’t feel original, and there was no love in the reproduction. That made it a bad movie.

I’m going to toss some notes in here and head out:

• I mentioned a few movies I’ve covered in this post. They were Metal Man, Chop Kick Panda, Showdown, and Death Tube.
• There was nobody in The OctoGames who was previously featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Have you seen The OctoGames? What did you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, on Bluesky, or on Threads.
• You can use Threads, Bluesky, or the comments to let me know about movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.
• Let’s take a look at what’s coming up in future posts. The next post will be about a little movie called #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead. I couldn’t help myself. When I saw it had Jojo Siwa, I knew it would be perfect. Then I’ve got Slashlorette Party. Yeah, we’re right into horror now. Anyway, I’ll see you soon for #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead.

War of the Worlds (2025)

Summer 2025 was a big one for movies. The rebooted DC Universe hit the big screens for the first time with Superman. The Tom Cruise era of Mission: Impossible movies seemingly came to a close. College-aged dudes went crazy for The Minecraft Movie, while new life was breathed into the Final Destination franchise. Yet there’s one movie that is arguably getting more attention than all of them.

This might be a little bit of recency bias, since the movie came out on July 31^st and we’re midway through August as I’m writing this sentence. War of the Worlds dropped on Prime Video to no fanfare. I don’t remember any marketing, whatsoever. Word of mouth, however, worked better than marketing ever could have. People started talking about it immediately. It was heralded as one of the worst movies ever made. Everyone who subsequently watched it said they hadn’t expected it to be as bad as the quick reputation was, and then it was worse. As one of the resident bad movie people on the internet, and one who tends to be more forgiving than most, I thought I should give it a fair shake.

War of the Worlds was a modern screen-life adaptation of the H.G. Wells science fiction story from the 1890s. Will Radford (Ice Cube) was the best computer analyst that Homeland Security had. While locked in their headquarters tracking down a high-priority, high-threat hacker, Will watched on as the world was invaded by alien tripods. Will used his surveillance methods and his connections on the outside to save his family and the world.

I’m not going to lie and say that War of the Worlds was a good movie. One, I wouldn’t lie about something like that, and two, it was bad. Do I think it was as bad as people have said? No. They’ve overblown how bad it is for sure. People haven’t seen enough bad movies if they think that War of the Worlds is one of the worst.

There were a couple good things in War of the Worlds. I could see the potential. I’m going to save the good for closer to the end. People are probably here for the negativity, and I’ll give them some of that first. Just know that my negativity doesn’t come from a place of hate or wanting to pile it on like everyone else has been doing. It comes from a place of seeing that potential that it never fully lived up to.

Let’s kick things off with the worst part of War of the Worlds. This is the one thing that was never going to work, solely because of the execution. About 75% of the movie was a compilation of stock footage repurposed for the action of an alien invasion. It felt like a series of clips, five to ten seconds in length, strung together to make it look like news footage that Will watched while the invasion unfolded outside his walls. The movie was shot during the height of Covid and was confined to a computer screen. They had to figure out the action somehow. This wasn’t the way. The few clips of other characters running around conveyed the situation much better than the stock footage of a soldier speaking to the press with his face blurred out. 

Think of it like this. How many movies since, let’s say, the late 1990s have used home videos or phone footage, or even found footage style, to show action? I recall Signs, where one of the most chilling moments was home video footage of a birthday party where the alien walked out from behind a hedge that was shown in a news broadcast. There’s a way to make something like that work, then have the main character react to it. Obvious stock footage being repurposed was not the way to go about it.

That brings me to the real issue. War of the Worlds was a Covid restrictions movie. Think back five years. Around here, lockdowns were on and off. Most places had theaters closed. A lot of non-essential jobs were either put on hold or work from home. People were starved for content. When movies and TV started production again, there were heavy restrictions. Limited cast and crew. The dreaded term “social distancing.” That sort of stuff. War of the Worlds started production during all that, in 2020. That’s part of the reason why they went the screen-life route. That’s why the actors were rarely together, if they ever shared the screen at all. That’s why there weren’t any big action scenes, and stock footage was used. Could they have done some other stuff during the five years the movie sat on the shelf? Sure. But it’s working for their algorithm as is.

Now we're onto point number two. The acting. War of the Worlds was a confusing movie when it came to the performances. Everybody did both terrible and the best they could do. The Covid protocols meant that they likely weren’t acting opposite anyone. It certainly felt that way. Nobody seemed to be in a real conversation. Nothing was natural. At the same time, they were all spewing off exposition in a way that wasn’t boring. So it was a somewhat entertaining unnatural mess.

I want to specifically point out three moments that just kind of stuck with me. First, Will’s disappointed dad faces made me laugh. If Ice Cube did one good thing with his performance, it was his facial expression work. Second, Will’s daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), was injured partway through the invasion. Iman Benson easily gave the best performance in the movie as her character struggled with blood loss. Finally, her boyfriend, Mark (Devon Bostick), was the least invested of any actor. At least, it felt that way. This was especially apparent in a scene where he facetimed Will while driving. That brings me to the third thing that people talked about while describing how bad War of the Worlds was.

Remember what I said about the release of War of the Worlds? It popped up on Prime Video on July 31^st of 2025. It was mostly made in 2020. What do these two aspects of the movie have in common? When people were being quarantined during the height of the pandemic, they weren’t out shopping. They were in shopping. They shopped online. The biggest online retailer was Amazon. Is Amazon. It never stopped being Amazon. Prime Video is Amazon’s streaming service. The third thing that got people talking about War of the Worlds was how Amazon inserted themselves into their own movie.

When I said Mark spent some time driving around, it was because he drove an Amazon delivery van. That would probably be fine for most people. Oh, look, Amazon put themselves in the movie as product placement. Things got a little more involved than that. Mark patched Faith up with a tape gun from the van. That might have pushed a few people over the edge. It was a ludicrous way to make the Amazon driver a little more heroic because of his work. However, that was nothing compared to what the climax would bring.

Spoilers coming up. There’s no way to hammer home how propaganda-like the self-serving product placement was in the climax without spoiling the climax of War of the Worlds. Alright, now that you’ve been warned… The alien tripods came to Earth to mine data. Will needed to corrupt the data with a virus, but he didn’t have a USB stick to insert into the servers in his building. Mark ran through how to order a USB stick on Amazon. For some reason, he had a USB stick to sell to Will on the spot. He also had an Amazon drone for express shipping. I don’t know why a van driver had stock and a drone. I’m not done yet, either. At one point, the drone was knocked down and was like a turtle stuck on its shell. The good guys hacked into some onlooker’s phone to ask him to flip the drone back over. He would only agree with a bribe. They gave him a $1000 Amazon e-gift card. Then they were back on their way to save the day. Basically, the world would have been doomed without Amazon’s delivery services. I completely understand how people were turned off by that. My brain was powered off by that point, so it didn’t really affect me.

I will say that the drone sequence was my favourite part of War of the Worlds. Remove Amazon from the equation. Think of it solely as a scene where someone outside the danger zone had to get something to someone within it. This was the only time in the movie where there was kinetic action shot specifically for the movie. It wasn’t stock footage. It wasn’t a stationary webcam or a closeup of someone’s face through their phone. There was a drone flying to and through an office building while Will ran from floor to floor past security cameras. For this one scene, product placement aside, it felt like a real movie.

It looks like I went with a mixture of negative and positive, rather than the negative then positive that I thought I’d be doing. I turned some of the negativity into positivity. It’s like being stuck in a blender, then saving lives. In the end, War of the Worlds was still a bad movie. Some good facial expressions, a good performance, and one good action scene didn’t make up for the fact that it was an hour and a half of stock footage and Amazon advertising. The positives kept it from being true bottom of the barrel stuff, though. I’ve seen much worse, no redeeming qualities movies.

July 31^st, 2025 was a day that changed the movie landscape for at least the rest of the year. It saw the release of War of the Worlds, one of the most talked about movies. People said it was one of the worst movies of all time. They had legitimate reasons to believe that. I don’t necessarily agree with that stance, though I agree it was very bad. The thing is, it will be one of the cinematic talking points of 2025 going forward. It will be in the conversation of important cultural cinema touchstones of 2025, alongside movies like KPop Demon Hunters, F1, Weapons, and Sinners. War of the Worlds will stand the test of time for how it doesn’t stand the test of time. That’s something.

Something else is this notes section:

• War of the Worlds starred Ice Cube, who was also been Torque and Anaconda.
• Another three-time Sunday “Bad” Movies performer was Jim Meskimen, who was in Jingle All the Way, Battlefield Earth, and War of the Worlds.
• Eva Longoria returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in War of the Worlds. She was previously seen in Foodfight!
• War of the Worlds brought back Devon Bostick, who was previously seen in Dead Before Dawn 3D.
• Finally, Harvey B. Jackson was in both 2 Lava 2 Lantuala and War of the Worlds.
• Have you seen War of the Worlds? What were your thoughts? Let me know in the comments, on Bluesky, or on Threads.
• If there’s a movie you would like to see me cover for Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can use the comments, Bluesky, or Threads to let me know what movie it is.
• And now we get into the spooky season movies. War of the Worlds was already fringe horror, but let’s kick things into full gear. I’ve got a few movies lined up already. I’m already writing one of the posts. The next post will be for The OctoGames. Following that, we’ve got a little movie called #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead. Then I’ll be taking a look at Slashlorette Party. I have a few more movies I want to get to, but that will depend on how much time I have. You never know what might come up. I’ll see you soon for The OctoGames.