Do you ever get the urge to watch something of questionable quality? Like, you could watch one of the critically acclaimed movies or one of the popular movies. You could watch something that people know and like. Instead, you want something that isn’t necessarily as well known. It isn’t particularly well received by critics or by the general population. You’re just in the mood for that kind of movie.
I get into those moods. It leads to me scrolling through a bunch of streaming services. I go down as many rabbit holes as I can looking for the most obscure, goofy looking thing possible because I think that will hit the right spot. I avoid the “top movies” categories. I avoid the “recommended” categories. I go to the genre categories and scroll to the side until I see something that doesn’t look good. If that doesn’t feel like the right movie, I click whatever the “more like this” button might be. I go deeper. And deeper. And deeper.
Then I settle on something like the inspiration for this post, Fast and Furriest. Now, why did I settle on this one? I hadn’t watched a kids’ movie for the blog in… a year? Unless you count The Grinch Musical, but I wouldn’t categorize that as a kids’ movie. I also knew it would probably end up in Sunday “Bad” Movies (Spoiler: it did). I didn’t know, however, that I would find it kind of unique.
Fast and Furriest was essentially a kids’ version of The Cannonball Run. Chuck (Robert Notman) and Woodsly (Julia Flood) went to the Fur Ball Run to see their hero, Hunter (David Dixon), race. Through a series of events where Hunter tried to remove any legitimate competition from the race, Chuck and Woodsly were entered in a car of their own. They had to race against their hero and avoid their principal along the way.
Most of Fast and Furriest was a forgettable, albeit watchable, movie. The banter between the characters was decent enough. It was what was needed to make a children’s version of The Cannonball Run. The two main characters having their friend disputes. The girl dog that Woodsly had a crush on. Hunter being a bad guy. The other great racer that Hunter was afraid of. The boy band rabbits. The kangaroos who stopped racing to hang out at a saloon. The two female gerbils that fought over a boy. All that sort of stuff that made the characters stand out and had the whole thing feel like a race with a lot of participants. That all worked enough to make it watchable.
One thing really stood out, though, and became the crux for the post. The look of Fast and Furriest was unlike anything I can remember seeing. There may have been something else like it, but I can’t recall a movie that looked like this. Fast and Furriest was an animated movie, except for when it came to the animals. All the animals were real animals inserted into a CGI world. The cars were animated. The roads were animated. The buildings were animated. The bridge at the end was animated. The animals were real animals, filmed as they sat in front of a camera. Their mouths were animated to move, but that was the only thing animated about the animals.
I considered that a somewhat unique look and it got me thinking about what other movies I’ve covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies had unique qualities to them. I’ve seen 657 movies for the blog. There must be some that stand out more than others for how different they were. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be some of the most unique movies I’ve written about, and I’ll explain why I find them interesting.
Monster Brawl
The thing that made Monster Brawl feel unique was pretty easy. It was in the concept of the movie itself. Monster Brawl was a movie about classic monsters wrestling one another. Professional wrestling, not Olympic wrestling. As such, the movie was built like a television wrestling promotion. It had the commentators. It had the stats. It had the promos and the package segments. It also had the wrestling, which was the most important part.
I’ve never seen a horror movie outside of Monster Brawl utilize professional wrestling in quite the same way. Not too many movies, or even television shows, use the idea of a wrestling show as a framing device. Building the story through the promos and the packages and the matches, rather than have a story with matches in it. Imagine WWE, but less refined, and with monsters.
The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human
There have been thousands of romantic comedies over the years and most of the building blocks have remained the same. Man meets woman. They fall for each other. There’s some conflict that separates them. They overcome it and live happily ever after. Sure, there are the twists where a bet gets made, or the best friend is actually the right person for the main character, but they tend to stick to the basic building blocks and tropes.
The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human took those basic building blocks and did something with them I hadn’t seen before. It framed the entire love story as a nature documentary. The narration was there, as if you were watching Planet Earth. There was technical, scientific speech. Or, at least, there was a comedic use of words to make things sound more scientific. There have been mockumentaries around for years, but few of them do things quite like this.
Spirit Halloween: The Movie
I thought I’d go a little newer with this Halloween movie I watched only a couple years back. Spirit Halloween: The Movie was based on the Spirit Halloween stores that pop up at the end of summer every year. At its most basic, this movie was a kids’ horror movie. But there was so much more to it than that.
Spirit Halloween: The Movie was a feature film advertisement for the holiday-themed store. A group of kids wanted to spend the night inside a Spirit Halloween store. There was a ghost in the building that haunted all the Halloween animatronics the store had to offer. Sure, there have been movies with product placement before. How many movies have been wholly about a store and all that store’s products? Not many. This seemed like a fairly unique thing. Maybe not actually unique, but close to it.
Tammy and the T-Rex
Some movies capitalize on circumstance. If there’s a location available to a filmmaker, that filmmaker might find a way to use that location. That’s a common enough production tale. I went through film school. Beg, borrow, and steal is something we were taught the entire time I was there. Use what’s available.
Tammy and the T-Rex was one of the most extreme cases of that I can think of. Stuart Raffill, the director, was offered the two-week use of an animatronic T-Rex before it was to be shipped off to a park in Texas. He came up with a story in one week and shot it within those two weeks, simply because he had an animatronic T-Rex available to him. The story certainly felt like it was thrown together in a week or so. I couldn’t tell you any other movies that were made because a writer and/or director had access to an animatronic T-Rex for a week.
God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
Almost every modern Christian movie has been about how Christians are persecuted for their beliefs and not able to believe the way they want. That’s not really happening. But there are movies like Last Ounce of Courage where they claim that people can’t celebrate Christmas anymore because nobody likes Christians. It’s kind of annoying to turn on a Christian movie and get the same rhetoric over and over again. Propaganda for the church.
That’s why I was surprised that God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness did something different. Something to make it stand out. Something unique. The first movie was about a college kid not being allowed to believe, and then Christian belief changing people’s lives for the better. The second involved Pastor Dave being arrested for not sharing his sermons with the government, showing that Christian freedoms were being targeted. The fourth movie was about the attack on home schooling and how that attack was against their religious rights to not teach evolution and such parts of science. In all three movies, the Christians were the victims, and they came out on top, proving that Christianity could break through all the haters.
The third film, however, featured a little less of the black-or-white, Christianity-or-bust type of storytelling. Yes, there was some Christian persecution complex in there. God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness was mostly about a college trying to get rid of the church that was on school grounds, after the church was vandalized and destroyed. The vandal, who hated the church at the beginning, did come around to Christianity at the end. There happened to be a twist, though. Something that made the third movie in the God’s Not Dead franchise feel unique among Christian movies. Pastor Dave’s brother was around, telling him that the college might not be wrong. Through the movie, Pastor Dave came to a realization. Sort of. Everyone said that the church should move because other religions didn’t have places of worship on the college grounds. Pastor Dave realized that those other religions still had followers without that college presence. His church could, too. He agreed to place the church off the college grounds and allow his followers to come to him.
This takes just a little more explanation. You see, with Pastor Dave agreeing to leave the campus, he allowed all religions a space to exist. This was a Christian movie that started as a tale of Christian persecution complex and ended as a tale of all religions being able to share a space. I’ve never seen that in a Christian movie and I’m sure it will be a long time before I see that again.
Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical
A perfect storm of situation led to Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical becoming a unique sort of movie/television special. For a few years leading up to it, TV networks had been putting on live stage events. They took plays and musicals and adapted them as a television special that aired around Christmas time. In 2020, however, the pandemic hit. It separated people. It kept them at bigger distances from one another than ever before.
Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical was a result of those two things. It was a live musical stageplay adapted to television that couldn’t actually be performed live. Because of the restrictions put in place to reduce the spread of Covid-19, it wasn’t feasible to perform the story live. There have been movies and specials presented as live when they weren’t really, but this was the only time I can remember a live performance having to be filmed yet still presented as live because it was part of a series of live specials. The sets also looked like stage sets, which was cool.
From Justin to Kelly
Here’s another one that might not seem unique at first, but there was one element that made it unique. Lots of musicals and musical-adjacent movies have been made to feature musicians in major roles. Glitter, Spice World, Crossroads, and the like. From Justin to Kelly might seem like one of those movies. There’s more to it than that. Why it was made is what made it unique.
From Justin to Kelly was the result of American Idol’s first season. As the season wrapped up, Kelly Clarkson defeated Justin Guarini to take the top prize. However, their contracts had one more element to them. The top two contestants were contracted to star in a movie for Fox. That movie ended up being From Justin to Kelly. This was the only movie I can think of that was made to capitalize on the first season of a television talent show by casting the final two contestants in leading roles.
Not Cool
I’m sure this concept isn’t as original as some of the other movies included in this post. I’m pretty sure the idea of how this was made has been done before, in other situations. But I wanted to include it anyway because it’s not something that typically happens in filmmaking.
Not Cool was a movie made for the reality show, The Chair. The idea was that one script would be given to two different directors. Each director would then take that script and make their own version of the same movie. This was the one that Shane Dawson directed, which was filled with Shane Dawson level humour. It wasn’t good, but the production concept was interesting enough that I eventually want to see Holidaysburg, the version of the script directed by Anna Martemucci.
Scream Returns
Fan films are an unsung part of the film industry. They don’t make money because that would cause a whole slew of copyright issues. Instead, they allow fans to put their fantastical ideas for an IP out there for the public to experience. Some are good, some are bad. That’s just like any other movie, really.
Scream Returns was a fan film that came out between the fourth and fifth Scream movies. It wasn’t produced by anyone involved in the franchise and didn’t lead to much of anything. The reason I’ve included it in this post was because it used a Grand Theft Auto V emulator to place Ghostface in San Andreas, leading to a fight between Ghostface and Trevor. I’ve not seen another movie that brings a slasher icon into the world of Grand Theft Auto.
These weren’t the only unique movies or movie elements that were featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ve seen over 650 movies for this blog. There have absolutely been more than a handful that have stood out for various reasons.
Fast and Furriest is the newest of those movies with unique elements, and it surely won’t be the last. It provided a visual that I hadn’t seen before. Stationary live-action animals green-screened into an animated world. It set it apart from other children’s movies that I’ve seen for Sunday “Bad” Movies because none of the other kids’ movies did this. Not to mention that the movie wasn’t all that bad. It was watchable. It was entertaining.
I don’t necessarily choose movies to watch for Sunday “Bad” Movies based on the unique qualities they have. Sure, that has come up once or twice. I choose them based on the movie having a bad reputation. People think its bad, so I check it out and see if they’re right. Or it just looks bad. I’ll find the worst looking thing that might look like the smallest amount of fun and I’ll check that out. However, the uniqueness of some just comes out. I watch the movie and think “Well, that was different.” That’s the magic of bad movies.
The bad movie watching mood strikes me sometimes. I never know when it will hit. When it does, I go searching. I find something. I find something bad. I watch it. I write about it. I make the Sunday “Bad” Movies blog live on.
Now it’s time for some notes:
- Here are the posts for Monster Brawl, The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, Spirit Halloween: The Movie, Tammy and the T-Rex, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical, From Justin to Kelly, Not Cool, and Scream Returns.
- I also mentioned Last Ounce of Courage, Glitter, Spice World, and Crossroads in this post.
- Have you seen Fast and Furriest? What did you think? What are some movie elements that you’ve found unique over the years? Let me know in the comments, on Bluesky, or on Threads.
- If there’s a movie you think I should check out, drop it in the comments. Or suggest it to me on Bluesky or Threads.
- Now it’s time for a look ahead. I’ve got a little something about Trucks coming up. It was the second feature film adaptation of the Stephen King short story. The other was Maximum Overdrive. Hopefully that one will get done faster than this one. I’ve just been having trouble getting time to write recently. Or getting in the mood for it. Either way, see you soon with another post.
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