Fred: The Movie (2010), Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred (2011), and Fred 3: Camp Fred (2012)

The early days of YouTube were really a case of you had to be there to understand. YouTube in the present day is a place to watch videos and find the community that you fit into. YouTube back then was a world of stars. People were elevated beyond niche communities into legitimate fame. In some instances, fortune, too.

For some of the stars, YouTube was a stepping stone to bigger, better things. Bo Burnham’s comedy got big on YouTube, which led to specials, an acting career, and even a chance to direct the very good Eighth Grade. Shane Dawson was a part of a reality show that put him in the director’s chair for the very not good Not Cool. Ryan Higa got to star in a movie I’ve never seen that I’ve only heard bad things about and will likely get around to seeing at some point for this very blog.

Then there was Lucas Cruikshank. He was a little different than the others. Sure, other YouTubers from that time did some sketch stuff. That was a big thing in the early era. Lucas took that to a whole new level. His entire YouTube career was in character as Fred Figglehorn. More people probably know him by his character’s name than his actual name. That’s how big that single YouTube character was.

Lucas Cruikshank eventually got the movie treatment as well. His character, Fred, was picked up by Nickelodeon. They made a trilogy of movies following the character and his exploits. Fred made the jump from computer screens and the smartphones of the time onto… Well, it wasn’t the big screen. They were television movies. So onto bigger screens than what Fred had been on but not as big as the screens could have been.

Fred: The Movie was the perfect encapsulation of YouTube at the time. It was about Fred Figglehorn (Lucas Cruikshank) and his journey across his city as he tried to meet up with his crush, Judy (Pixie Lott). She used to be his neighbour, but her family moved to a different neighbourhood. At the same time, Fred had to avoid his bully, Kevin (Jake Weary). That’s about it for the story. Everything else just built on that stuff.

How did it encapsulate what YouTube was at the time? Well, this was 2010. The people who came to stardom on YouTube were still homing in on what the aesthetic of that streaming platform would be. There was a lot of jump cutting going on. There was a lot of talking to the camera. Those are still things that happen on YouTube, but not in the jarring way they happened back then. Fred: The Movie picked up on that style and brought it into the world of movies.

There were many scenes throughout Fred: The Movie that involved Fred running maniacally around his house screaming at the camera in his obnoxiously high voice. It was the same thing the character would do in his YouTube videos, only now it looked professionally made instead of filmed on a Canon MiniDV. It made much of the movie feel like a high-budget YouTube video instead of a movie. The story took a back seat to the vlogging style of Fred Figglehorn.

Anytime Fred: The Movie got away from that YouTube aesthetic, it turned into a series of sketches. Many of those sketches had some sort of taste of that aesthetic. None of it ever really gelled together. There was the scene where Fred dug a hole into the neighbour’s yard, only for it to be the wrong neighbour. There was the scene where he was buried at the beach. There was the scene where he saw a darker Lucas Cruikshank character on the bus. Kind of a yin and yang scenario. These didn’t build the story or push it forward. They were their own self-contained moments within the thin story being told.

The only scene/sketch I really liked in the entirety of Fred: The Movie was near the end when Fred and his best friend Bertha (Jennette McCurdy) put together a fake party video to try and make all their schoolmates jealous. Fred wasn’t invited to Judy’s party, so he was going to make his own. The best party ever. People would call it great. They would call it the greatest. There wouldn’t be another party as great as Fred’s. They would say that Fred threw the best parties, even though they weren’t there. Anyway, the scene where they made the fake party video felt the most like a movie out of anything in Fred: The Movie. Maybe it was just that I’d been worn down so much that having something like that was just refreshing. Maybe it was actually a good scene. I think it was because the scene felt like it did something for the story instead of being a tangent for Fred to be a goofball. It was the one time that what essentially felt like a sketch had been in integral part of the story being told.

Interestingly enough, the sequels would take a slightly different approach to how they portrayed Fred Figglehorn. Let’s get into Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred. This Halloween-themed Fred film saw Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) go up against his new music teacher, Mr. Delvin (Seth Morris). The teacher had replaced Fred’s favourite teacher and started dating his mom (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). At the same time, Fred was connecting with Talia (Ariel Winter), the sister of Kevin (Jake Weary). I should also mention that Fred’s dad was played by John Cena and Bertha was now played by Daniella Monet.

There were still moments in Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred that saw the titular character breaking the fourth wall to speak to the audience in a flurry of jump cuts. That wasn’t all gone. It was still a movie based on a YouTube character who was known for that style of YouTube video. However, it was pulled back a lot from what Fred: The Movie had done. More focus was placed on the story and letting that play out.

With the focus landing on the story rather than the YouTube of it all, it flourished in a way the previous movie couldn’t. It was no longer beholden to staying true to the original format. It was allowed to grow. Not too much, though. Fred still had to be Fred. He still had to, as he called it in his YouTube videos, “spaz out” at the audience occasionally. But the character was able to grow beyond his own little YouTube bubble. He was forced to be a little less self-centered. Breaking him out of that hosting position allowed for the growth.

Much like with Fred: The Movie, Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred had its best moment when an online video became part of the story. In the climax of the movie, Fred livestreamed himself venturing into his teacher’s house, looking for proof of Mr. Delvin being a vampire. People were watching the video. There were hiccups in the video. It was essentially a found footage horror film being live-streamed to everyone Fred knew. It allowed Fred’s vlogging personality to shine without it feeling the exact same as any old Fred YouTube video.

This growth of the franchise from being a modestly budgeted rehash of Fred videos into movies that felt like movies only continued in Fred 3: Camp Fred. This time, Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) was sent to Camp Iwannapeepee, owned by Floyd Spunkmeyer (Tom Arnold). It was the run-down seeming camp, compared to the pristine rival, Camp Superior, where his bully Kevin (Jake Weary) was staying. Fred didn’t like his camp and tried to figure out what was wrong with it, until a rivalry competition showed him how to find the perfection in imperfection. Yeah, it was a ragtag group of camp underdogs. That’s my kind of movie.

The most interesting thing about Fred 3: Camp Fred was how it ended up being a dissection of the two movies that had come before. That’s not the right word, but dissection works for now. The third movie played with what the first two movies were, before becoming its own thing. It even made some meta commentary along the way. It started with the vlog-like style as Fred talked about going to camp, as he got to camp, and as he suspected there were things going wrong at camp. It became what Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred had been, a movie about Fred trying to stop a monster. However, that was all flipped on its head about halfway through (whoa! A halfway turning point, like a real movie) when Fred allowed himself to start connecting with his campmates and enjoy his time at the less luxurious camp.

After that, Fred 3: Camp Fred felt like its own thing. It became a standard summer camp movie, only with Fred Figglehorn attending the camp. The fourth wall breaks were few, if there were any. The suspicion of monsters was gone. The third entry didn’t even include a climactic online video release. It became a narrative movie where Fred Figglehorn just happened to be a character. It became what the film series should have been from the beginning, a proper film series. Oh, and the meta aspects? The one that most stuck in my mind was Fred in a dream, talking in a normal voice, saying he dreamt that he had an annoying high-pitched voice. This was a movie that set expectations, subverted them, and became something special in a trilogy of not-so-great movies.

I would never try to claim that Fred: The Movie, Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred, or Fred 3: Camp Fred were good movies. None of them were good. But there is something to be said for watching a film series grow with each installment. Watching it begin as one thing and change over time to become something else. Usually, that’s for the worse. In the case of the Fred movies, they got stronger with each outing. The writers learned that when adapting a YouTube personality to film, it would be better to come at it from the perspective of film rather than the perspective of YouTube. The movies didn’t need to be YouTube on a bigger budget. They needed to show what could be done with a YouTube character in another medium.

Fred Figglehorn was one of many YouTube personalities who made their way to the bigger screens. Again, these were television movies, so they weren’t the big screen. They were just bigger than the YouTube screens of the time. Other people like Shane Dawson and Bo Burnham and Ryan Higa also made the jump to movies. Most of them didn’t have success. What worked in one medium didn’t necessarily work in the other. But when they allowed themselves to grow, like the Fred movies grew or like Bo Burnham has always grown, they managed to carve out their own little world in film where some special things could happen.

YouTube isn’t like those early days anymore. At that time, the whole of YouTube was one large community. It was the YouTube community. Things have since gotten much more specific. There are the gamers, the film people, the architecture people, the roller coaster people, the comedy people, the music people, the makeup people, the travel people, and many others. Even within those, there are smaller niches. Do you like puzzle video games, RPGs, shooters, multiplayer games, platformers, or speedrunning? Each of those have their own worlds. We won’t ever see the likes of early YouTube again because so many people stay within their own smaller communities. The stars aren’t as plentiful. YouTube has changed.

Now let’s get to the notes, and I’m sure there will be a lot:

• I’m going to start with a link to Not Cool, since I brought that up in the post.
• There were two people who debuted in Sunday “Bad” Movies this week who appeared in all three Fred movies. They were Lucas Cruikshank and Siobhan Fallon Hogan.
• Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred featured Stephanie Courtney, Alicia Favela, and Pixie Lott.
• Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred and Fred 3: Camp Fred featured Peter Hogan, Carlos Knight, and Daniella Monet.
• The first person to be featured in more than just Fred movies was Frank Welker. He did some work on Fred: The Movie. He was also featured in eight other movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Anaconda, Mortal Kombat, Hudson Hawk, GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, Super Mario Bros., Godzilla, Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins, and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster. That’s a lot of movies.
• John Cena has officially joined the five-timers club. He was in all three Fred movies, and previously showed up in The Marine and 12 Rounds.
• Beverly Polcyn made her fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Fred 3: Camp Fred. Her other three appearances were Date Movie, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, and All About Steve.
• Another fourth appearance in Fred 3: Camp Fred came for Tom Arnold. This recognizable face was also in Exit Wounds, The Stupids, and Golf Punks.
• The final fourth appearance was for Jake Weary. He was in all three Fred movies. He was also in Zombeavers.
• John Gatins was in Norbit before reappearing in Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred.
• You may have noticed Chris Wylde in Fred: The Movie and Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred. He also had a role in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
• Fred: The Movie featured a performance by Eddy Martin, who was previously seen in Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.
• Kirsten Berman was in Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star and Fred: The Movie.
• Do you remember Gary Anthony Williams in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows? He showed up in Fred: The Movie, too.
• The final Fred: The Movie actor to be in another movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies was Franklin Ruehl, who appeared in Balls of Fury.
• Onto Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred, we have Ariel Winter. She was also in Nic and Tristan Go Mega Dega.
• The other Fred 2: Night of the Living Dead actor to mention is Ben Wang, who was in Independence Day: Resurgence. This isn’t the Ben Wang who is becoming a popular actor right now. Different Ben Wang.
• Madison Riley popped up in Fred 3: Camp Fred. She also popped up in Bratz.
• Jack and Jill and Fred 3: Camp Fred each featured Luke Broadlick.
• I promise this will be the final time Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star comes up in this post. It featured Adam Herschman, who was in Fred 3: Camp Fred.
• Philip Albuquerque took a wrong turn from Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster and ended up in Fred 3: Camp Fred.
• Finally, Romel De Silva was in Fred 3: Camp Fred and He’s All That.
• Have you seen any of the Fred movies? What did you think of them? Share your thoughts in the comments or find me on Bluesky and let me know there.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, get a hold of me in the comments or Bluesky and let me know. I’m always open to movies I haven’t seen yet.
• Okay, it’s time to give a quick look at what’s coming up in future posts. I have one more post before I get spooky. Office Romance should be coming up next week or the week after. Then we’ll get to October, where I have a pair of horror movie posts planned. One will be the result of continuing my voyage through the Evil Bong franchise with Evil Bong 777. Following that, I finally got to check out Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark. That seems like a solid spooky season lineup to me. I’ll see you soon for more Sunday “Bad” Movies stuff.