Blubberella (2011)

No discussion can be had about bad movies without certain names coming up.  Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, and Lloyd Kaufman are mentioned whenever people talk about bad movies.  Another name that frequently appears is Uwe Boll.  The guy is known for bad movies.  He once promoted a petition to have him stop directing movies, because people hate how bad they are.  That didn’t stop him from pumping them out, though.

This week’s movie, Blubberella is the fourth movie directed by Uwe Boll that I’ve covered, and it is the most Uwe Boll a movie could be.  A half vampire, half human woman named Blubberella (Lindsay Hollister) joined a group of German rebels led by Nathaniel Gregor (Brendan Fletcher) and his gay sidekick Vadge (Willam Belli).  They worked together to take down Nazis, including The Commandant (Michael Paré), The Lieutenant (Steffen Mennekes), and Doctor Mangler (Clint Howard), who were creating an army of vampires.  Hitler (Uwe Boll) also made an appearance.

Being an Uwe Boll movie, you have to expect insanity and bad filmmaking.  However, Blubberella wasn’t any Uwe Boll movie.  It was an original concept.  It wasn’t based on a video game.  Blubberella was an action comedy written by Uwe Boll.  This means that the humour in the movie came from Boll’s comedic sensibilities.  If you know anything about the man (which you should since I wrote a whole post about him), you will know that he seems insane.  The comedy in Blubberella was as insane as he is.

What I’m getting at here is that I’m going to write post where I highlight the crazy things that happened in the movie.  It’s the perfect kind of post for Blubberella.  There was more than enough in the movie to sustain an entire post’s length.  If you had walked in on me watching Blubberella, you would have thought there was something wrong with my face.  I would have been sitting here, staring at the movie, with my jaw on the floor.  When you asked me a question, I would have turned to you and remained silent with my mouth agape.  That’s what this movie did to me.  It made me unable to speak because I was stunned.  Here’s why.

Blubberella’s Introduction

Blubberella was introduced through voiceover while she prepared for her day.  It started with Blubberella waking up and jumping out of bed.  There were a bunch of dildos on the bed when the sheets were thrown off.  That didn’t matter.  That was an unfunny visual gag, but it was immediately surpassed by the freeze frame title card for the character.  The title card set up who she was in six words.  “Half human, half vampire, mostly dough.”  You know, because she’s fat.  That’s what most of the movie was.  Jokes like that.

The Setting

Let’s ignore for a second the bad “Jew-y part of town” joke in the setting title card.  The movie was set in 1940 Germany, during Hitler’s reign.  This was a World War II movie, without any real war or battle scenes.  Although the movie was set in 1940 Germany, there were many modern details.

The opening of the movie had Blubberella searching for love on the internet, using a laptop.  This blending of modern technology and the World War II setting could be an interesting stylistic choice, but Uwe Boll is a bottom of the barrel kind of guy.  He will go for the lowest jokes he can possibly make.  Instead of using the modern technology in a non-modern setting to do something interesting, Boll uses this melding to push offensive jokes on the audience.  He doesn’t care to make something good.  He cares to amuse himself with his own poor taste in humour.

Willam Belli

From Wikipedia: “Willam Belli is an American actor, drag queen, model, reality television personality and recording artist, who is known for his recurring role as transgender woman Cherry Peck in Nip/Tuck and for being a contestant on the fourth season of RuPaul's Drag Race, for which he remains the only contestant ever disqualified from the series, as well as being the only contestant to vomit on the main stage.”

This description of Willam Belli is relevant because it gives his history, which can enlighten his role in Blubberella. (I’m using he as the pronoun because that’s what Wikipedia uses.)  Willam Belli played a gay character named Vadge.  Get it?  Because Vadge is the short form of vagina and Vadge is gay?  The character was so over the top that he bordered on and sometimes crossed into the offensive range.  I’m sure Belli was in on the since he was playing Vadge and because he got a writing credit.  That doesn’t make the character any less offensive.

The main joke regarding Vadge was that he was attracted to his partner in rebellion.  He spent the majority of the movie coming on to Nathaniel and competing with Blubberella (who was always alluding to having sex with people) for his affection.  It wasn’t an actual love type of thing though.  Vadge wasn’t fawning over Nathaniel because of any emotional investment.  He just wanted to bone… hard.  The character had no other traits than wanting to sex up Nathaniel.  That is not a real character.  That is a gay caricature.  It does a disservice to that section of our culture, and the character only perpetuated stereotypes.  Uwe Boll isn’t someone known for subtlety.  Blubberella only helped to prove the lack of subtlety, and Vadge was a large part of the bluntness of Boll’s comedic sensibilities.

Meta Humour

Blubberella didn’t shy away from self-referential and meta jokes.  There were three big, semi-memorable moments that had this kind of comedy.  The lesser moment was when they pointed out how bad the German accents were, particularly Michael Paré’s.  At no point did he sound German.  The Commandant ended up sounding like a bad Marlon Brando in The Godfather impression by the end.  The movie pointed that out though, so it’s okay, right?  Not really.  The accent didn’t bother me because of the style of the movie, but pointing it out didn’t help at all.

That joke got surpassed by the second big meta joke.  There was a scene where Uwe Boll’s voiceover kicked in and he discussed how boring the scene was.  He said that because the scene was so boring, he was going to play music from his movies to make it a little better.  It didn’t help.  The scene was still pretty bad.  At least the voiceover was the slightest bit amusing, especially when Uwe Boll referred to himself in the third person.

The other big meta moment a scene written as a not-so-veiled attack on film critics.  When The Lieutenant first met with Doctor Mangler, the doctor had a vampire on a slab in his laboratory.  He mentioned that before it turned into a vampire, it was either a gypsy or a movie critic.  He also stated that if The Lieutenant had met a movie critic before, he wouldn’t be alive.  This seems to be a shot at the critics who harshly (and rightfully) throw negative reviews on Uwe Boll’s movies.  Boll wanted to toss a quick shot at these critics into his movie as a way to get back at them for the negative reviews.  Since, you know, he didn’t get to beat enough of them up in the boxing ring.

Blackface

There were multiple incidences of blackface in Blubberella.  Both Willam Belli and Brendan Fletcher wear blackface at some point.  It isn’t played as an “Oh, people in the 1940s thought it was okay to dress in blackface.”  It was played straight.  They were in blackface for the sole purpose of being in blackface.  In Willam Belli’s case, he portrayed a spoof of Mo’Nique from the movie Precious.  This kind of racial insensitivity is to be expected out of Uwe Boll.  This is the same movie where he said they were in “a Jew-y part of town” and where they repeatedly said “faggot.”  You can’t expect Uwe Boll to write a movie that isn’t offensive to different races.

There was a lot of absurd, crazy stuff in Blubberella.  The movie was the most Uwe Boll that a movie could ever be.  The only Uwe Boll thing that it didn’t have going for it was that it wasn’t based on a video game.  That doesn’t make it any less Uwe Boll.  It might make it more Uwe Boll, actually.  Instead of being confined to having to tell the bare bones of the video game story, he was given complete freedom with what he was writing.  That freedom created a trainwreck that I couldn’t look away from.

Blubberella was the worst Uwe Boll movie I’ve seen.  It’s only the fourth Uwe Boll movie I’ve seen, but that’s still saying something.  I don’t know what his other movies have in store.  They can’t get much worse, unless they end up have no budget and non-actors.  That’ll never happen though.  With Uwe Boll, you always get people you recognize in some form, and he somehow always has money.  So this may be the worst of his work.  I don’t know.  Only time will tell.

Now for some notes:

• Blubberella was suggested by @1stTimeWatchers.  They have also suggested Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.
• The three other Uwe Boll movies that I’ve watched as part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies are House of the Dead, Blackwoods, and Alone in the Dark.
• Blubberella featured Clint Howard, who was also in House of the Dead and Blackwoods.
• Michael Paré, who played The Commandant, was also in Blackwoods.
• Brendan Fletcher was in Alone in the Dark before he was in Blubberella.
• Have you seen Blubberella?  Have you seen any of the other Uwe Boll movies that I’ve mentioned?  Have you seen any Uwe Boll movies?  If you want to discuss them, there is a comments section below.
• The comments section can also be used to suggest movies that I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If you think there are bad movies out there that I should check out, let me know about them.  Twitter is another place to get a hold of me.
• I am on snapchat with the username jurassicgriffin.  If you want to see snapchat stories of the bad movies that I watch, you can find me there.  Just add me.
• Next week, I will be covering the three Sharknado movies.  Why?  Sharknado 4 comes out at the end of the month and next week is a franchise week for the blog.  I thought it was good timing.  Also, you can’t have a bad movie blog in the current day without bringing up the Sharknado movies.  They’re some of the most popular bad movies.  Come back next week.  It’s sure to be a pretty good post.

The Stupids (1996)

Before I get into the bulk of this post, I want to let you in on my life.  Things are going to get busier for the foreseeable future.  Summer is the busiest time of the year at work, which means that my free time could go down.  It has in the past.  It might not though, so summer isn’t a big deal.  I’ve also made it through three other summers with this blog.  It will survive.  I’m sure of that.

The bigger hurdle is going to be my return to school come September.  I am confident that I will keep up with this blog throughout the fall and into the future.  However, I’m going to have to work hard through the summer to get ahead on posts, and there will be fewer cases of me covering themes that encompass multiple movies.  Those will still appear from time to time, but I will be leaning into discussing the crazy aspects of bad movies more often.  You know the posts.  The ones where I bring up moments that seemed outrageous and discuss them.  You’ll be getting more of those posts.

Of course, sometimes the big themes will still come into play.  If I feel inspired to write something, I’ll write it.  I’m not going to stop myself from doing that because of a little thing like college.  I like this blog.  That’s why I’ve been doing it for nearly 190 weeks.  I enjoy these movies and sharing my thoughts on them or the themes related to them.  I’m not going to stop that.  There just may be a noticeable difference in how I go about doing it.  We’ll see as September nears.  Keep enjoying the blog.  I’m not going anywhere.

Onto this week’s post, I’m going to discuss The Stupids.  Tom Arnold starred as Stanley Stupid, a husband and father of two.  He, his wife Joan (Jessica Lundy), his son Buster (Bug Hall), and his daughter Petunia (Alex McKenna) were all as their name said.  They were stupid.  They were entangled in an imaginary conspiracy story about postal deliveries being returned to a mysterious man named Sender.  In reality, they were unknowingly involved in a weapons deal between criminals and the military.  I guess you could consider the military guys to be criminals too.  They were selling weapons illegally.

The Stupids is not a movie that has been fondly remembered since its 1996 release.  I hadn’t seen it until recently, but watching it, I can understand why someone wouldn’t like it.  In service of making the characters stupid, the movie came across the same way.  There were dumb situations resulting from the characters interacting with the world around them.  They did stupid things and caused stupid situations to unfold.  The movie received four nominations at the Golden Raspberry Awards (Worst director, screenplay, actor, and picture), eventually winning for Tom Arnold’s performance.

I enjoyed watching The Stupids.  Though I understand how people could dislike the stupidity of the characters, it truly worked.  The movie wasn’t dumb in the sense that it was poorly written.  It had the main characters acting stupid and wrote the world into that in a smart way.  The world wasn’t dumb.  It was a normal world reacting to the dumb antics of the Stupid family.  The world was the straight man to the Stupids.

This post is going to be one of those posts I mentioned at the top.  I’m going to cover some jokes that worked well in The Stupids and explain why they were well done.  This is a fine film that has gotten a bad reputation on the concept alone.  The writing, direction, and all that stuff keeps the movie from falling apart.  The writing was well crafted and allowed the movie to have stupid things happen without being dumb itself.  Here are some of my reasons why.

The Sender Conspiracy

The most thought out aspect of The Stupids was the conspiracy that Stanley and his family tried to unravel.  The movie began with Stanley discovering that his garbage had been taken during the night.  He wanted to find out who stole it so he followed the truck.  This led to him reopening his investigation into the Sender conspiracy of his days as a postal worker.

What works about this conspiracy is the fact that it sounds plausible, from a person who doesn’t properly understand the postal system.  Most people know that the phrase “return to sender” means that the letter or package is to be sent back to the person who mailed it.  Stanley didn’t know that because he is one of the Stupids.  He thought that the sender was an actual person.  He thought that all of the mail was being sent to this mysterious person instead of the people that it was addressed to.  In Stanley’s head, the postal service and Sender were stealing hundreds of pieces of mail every day.

This conspiracy theory didn’t end up being real, but it did sound more realistic than many of the conspiracy theories that are bandied about in real life.  It was as believable as Stanley Kubrick using The Shining to tell people that he secretly directed the moon landing footage.  The theory was also the crux of the movie and thus must have enough of a foundation in the characters’ minds to drive their story.  It took effort on the part of the writers to give this dumb theory credibility.

The True Conspiracy

A real conspiracy unfolded in front of the Stupids as they fumbled their way around in an attempt to find Sender.  A few military personnel were selling high tech weapons to the highest bidder.  Starting with Stanley, the family began to unknowingly ruin the plan of the bad guys, causing assassination attempts on the family members.  The real story was that the Stupids stopped the world from being destroyed by these weapons, without realizing that they were stopping the bad guys.

A lot of humour was mined out of this.  The Stupids accidentally defeated the bad guys in various scenarios.  It culminated in a final warehouse battle where the whole family got in on the action.  Stanley ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, causing the bad guys to run into one another.  Petunia took the pin from a grenade to use as a ring, and threw the rest of it away as waste.  She blew up some bad guys by doing that.  Things like this happened throughout the movie.  They weren’t simple bumbles.  They were thought out by the writers in order to generate laughs and move the story forward at the same time.

Also helping with this storyline was Mark Metcalf.  This actor is mostly known for his yelling appearances in Twisted Sister music videos, and his role in National Lampoon’s Animal House as Doug Neidermeyer.  The character was a military hopeful who liked nothing more than to yell and boss people around.  Basically, it’s a militarily inclined college version of his Twisted Sister video character.  He popped up in The Stupids as the main real bad guy, named Colonel Neidermeyer.  That’s right, it was the same name as his Animal House character.  Same director, same actor, same character name.  The Stupids could be some sort of a strange sequel to Animal House.  How about that conspiracy?

Lloyd

During the family’s escapades, Stanley and Petunia ended up in a planetarium.  They believed that they had died and gone to heaven.  The only other person in the room with them was a janitor.  The father and daughter duo immediately thought that the janitor was God, welcoming them to heaven.  At no point did they believe otherwise.  They would forever believe it. The only thing that changed in their beliefs was his name.  The janitor was named Lloyd.  This caused the two Stupids to believe that everyone had been misnaming him in scripture and life.

The clever little God/Lloyd joke became a recurring gag for the remainder of the movie.  Whenever Stanley said “Oh my God,” it came out as “Oh my Lloyd.”  When he said “For the love of God,” he changed it to “For the love of Lloyd.”  The writers took care in sprinkling this joke throughout the movie without making it overstay its welcome.  It was a joke that could be dumb, but actually ended up being fun whenever it came up.

I’m My Own Grandpa

This song from the 1940s made its way into The Stupids.  It wasn’t the most ingenious thing to do.  It didn’t represent how dumb the characters were.  It actually did the opposite.  The fact that Stanley Stupid knew the lyrics to this song is absurd, but showed intelligence in him.  That might go against my defense of the movie being more intelligent than people give it credit for.  Follow me though.  Let me explain why I think this song works.

The entirety of The Stupids was about the family failing upwards.  That is one of the greatest forms of comedy.  Watching someone make all the wrong moves, act dumb, and succeed all the same can create some great laughs.  If you watched the newest season of Silicon Valley, that kind of comedy was a big factor.  The scene in The Stupids where Stanley sang the song I’m My Own Grandpa was one of the many scenes where the characters failed upward.

Here’s how the scene played out.  The Stupid family visited a television studio to find Sender.  A man named Sender was going to interview on one of the talk shows being filmed.  While trying to find the man, Stanley ended up becoming one of four panelists on a talk show about weird families and marriages.  When the host got to him and asked what his weird marital situation is, Stanley thought fast.  His answer was that he is his own grandpa.  Then he broke into song.  The whole studio started singing along.

I’m My Own Grandpa was a perfect fit in The Stupids.  It has the same sense of humour in its presentation.  Both are about ridiculous people in a normal world.  In The Stupids, the family bumbled their way through a real conspiracy while trying to solve a fake one.  In the song, the mother and daughter marryied the father and son, causing a whole weird family tree through the marriages.  The people outside that foursome were normal people.  The listeners to the song (mostly) aren’t in situations like that.  It’s one crazy instance in a non-crazy world.  The two products share that sensibility, which makes the song a perfect choice for The Stupids.

Tom Arnold

This could be my favourite Tom Arnold performance.  I know this isn’t a point about the movie being intelligent.  This does not support my argument that people should give this movie a chance instead of tearing it down.  This is just me being a fan of what Tom Arnold does in this movie.  The role of Stanley Stupid was perfect for him.  He fully became the character.  His childish charm emanated through the role.  He made what could be an unlikeable dummy into a loveable goofball.  There aren’t too many actors who could have perfectly performed this role, but he did it.  Tom Arnold was the right choice for The Stupids and he helped make the movie better.

The Stupids is not as stupid as the name would have you believe.  It is a classic case of wacky vs. straight for the humour dynamic.  The main characters were the wacky and the world they lived in was the straight.  The jokes played off of this dynamic.  They incorporated how dumb the Stupids were compared to the rest of the world.  A lesser movie would not have pulled this feat off.  It’s a wonder that this one did.

Everyone should watch The Stupids.  It isn’t a great film.  As much as I have been praising it, it is not great.  However, it is respectable.  There was effort put into the writing and it tended to work.  There were good casting choices.  It presented a style of comedy that we could use more of in the modern movie world.  People need to watch this movie.  It is not nearly as bad as its reputation might lead you to believe.

These notes might be as bad as you believe:

• The Stupids was suggested by @TheTalkingCan, who also suggested The Room, Stan Helsing, Bio-Dome, and Troll 2.
• I discussed the straight man and wacky man dynamic in the post for Mom and Dad Save the World.
• Nicu Branzea was in both The Stupids and Ice Soldiers.
• The Stupids was the second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for both Tom Arnold and Phillip Jarrett, who were in Exit Wounds.
• Have you seen The Stupids? What did you think of it? Do you think it was a strange sequel spin-off thing to Animal House?  There is a comments section below where you can discuss the movie or the post.
• The comments section is also a good place to suggest movies for me to watch in future weeks of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If you want me to watch a movie let me know.  Another place to get a hold of me is Twitter.
• I have a snapchat account.  It is jurassicgriffin.  I sometimes post stories of the bad movies I watch.  Clips and stuff.  Find me and add me if you want to see them.
• Next week’s movie is Blubberella, another Uwe Boll movie.  This is number 4 for me, I believe.  I never know what I’m going to get with the guy but it will probably be bad.  We’ll see next week now, won’t we?  See you then.