Terror at Blood Fart Lake (2009)

One of the things that changed about Sunday “Bad” Movies since I cut back on how often I write has been the way I find movies. I used to schedule out the posts. I had a whole Word file made with a schedule of what movie would be what week. I planned out the spooky movies for October, the Christmas movies for December, a New Year’s movie, a Valentine’s movie, an Easter movie, and movies that tied into things coming out around those times. It was decent work, but worth it for the way I was writing at the time.

Things are a little freer now. I don’t write these posts quite as often as I used to. I didn’t even hit twenty Sunday “Bad” Movies posts in 2023. That opened up the scheduling. There is no set time for when any given post will go up. Therefore, I don’t need to closely schedule what I’m going to watch. I can’t put four posts between Halloween and December if I don’t know that I’ll get them up in time before I switching to Christmas movies. I kind of just choose movies as I go now.

That’s how I ended up writing this post, about a little movie called Terror at Blood Fart Lake. I didn’t know it existed until I turned it on. You know the nights. You’re scrolling through a streaming service. It could be Netflix, Paramount+, Disney+, or Tubi. For me, it was Amazon Prime, though I know now that the movie is also on Tubi. You’re going from movie to movie to movie, trying to find something that speaks to you. Then one of the pictures or titles pops up. Something clicks. You know that’s the right choice. You throw it on. That’s why I watched Terror at Blood Fart Lake, and now I’m writing about it because it was a perfect fit for this blog.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake was a minimal budget slasher movie. When I say minimal budget, I mean the budget was so low the movie was produced by Low Budget Pictures. That isn’t a joke. That was a production company on the movie. There were six friends who travelled to a lakeside cabin for a fun weekend, only to have that weekend end in death and mayhem. With maybe a fart or two, including a shart and a blood fart. The name was accurate.

Two things tend to stand out when watching a horror movie that doesn’t have a budget. One is the effects work. Minimal budget horror movies sometimes try harder with the effects. The filmmaker might know someone with a practical effects background. They might have that background themselves. The movie then becomes a vehicle to highlight the effects work they do, in the hopes of somehow getting recognized for their talents. The other thing is a reliance, maybe even over-reliance, on jokes. The filmmaker might recognize their own deficiencies in movie making talent. It might be the budget that holds them back. It might be a lack of experience. They infuse the script with extra jokes to try and make the movie a little more fun, since what happens on screen might not be of the highest quality.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake fell into that second camp a little more than it did the first. There were a few effects, to be sure, but none of them were all that amazing to look at. The only one that really stuck with me was a cob of corn being shoved up a guy’s butt and coming out his front like a hard penis. But that was just a cob of corn with red food dye on it or something. It wasn’t anything special. The comedy was where the movie dug in. It was going to rely heavily on the jokes between the characters. Or the comedy of corn penises.

That makes sense. Look at the name. Terror at Blood Fart Lake. If you didn’t go in expecting crude humour, I don’t know how that got past you. The title was exactly that sense of humour. It wasn’t hiding anything. In fact, it was spelling it out for you. A weekend away at the lake, and there was a major blood fart. The movie was the title. The title was the movie.

The humour in Terror at Blood Fart Lake wasn’t all that good, though. It ended up hurting the overall quality of the film. The characters became caricatures, rather than real people. They weren’t even standard slasher archetypes that played well off each other. The character types were odd, making it difficult to fully connect with them. One character was a larger woman who continuously spoke about how wet her vagina was. Another character was a woman who acted like a star system actress of the early talkies era. There was a ridiculous redneck type, and the guy who was awkward with any woman he came across. Oh, and there was the guy who spoke like the most stereotypical Italian from Jersey who wanted nothing more than to say “gabagool.” All the characters had heightened personalities, which felt like it might have been fun on set but didn’t fully come through as fun on screen.

None of this means I disliked Terror at Blood Fart Lake. It definitely had problems in the humour department. Yet there was still some sort of quality that made it watchable. The fun that everyone clearly had making the movie made me care about what was going on. I cared despite the quality of the script. I cared despite the quality of their possible and probable improv on set. I cared because the people making it had a good time making it. Terror at Blood Fart Lake never lost me. And, as soon as I discovered there was a sequel, I knew it would go onto my list of movies to watch. Not for this blog, but because I wanted to see it.

I’m going to get a little more… Honest wouldn’t be the right word because I always try to be honest in my posts… Transparent might be better. The last year or two of weekly posts had me burned out. I was going through the motions, week after week after week. I felt like my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I needed a break. That’s why I stopped posting on a weekly basis. That’s why it can sometimes be a month, maybe two months between posts now. It wasn’t necessarily the quality of the movies. I still adore bad movies and still stand by the fact that you can learn more from mistakes than perfection. Everyone makes mistakes and growth involves using those mistakes to improve the next time. But something had disappeared. That spark.

You might have seen that when I was writing about things like Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, Rapture-Palooza, or Cold Vengeance. Maybe you couldn’t. I don’t know how well I hid my waning interest. All I know is that writing these posts felt more like a chore than fun. It felt like I was doing it to do it, instead of doing it because I enjoyed it. I had to change things to get rid of that feeling.

I started another blog. I wrote about some different things. I wrote about television. I wrote about hockey. I wrote about Bubly sparkling water. And I wrote about me. I wrote about myself in a way that I hadn’t done in forever. It wasn’t even that deep. I shifted things from “what does this mean” to “what does this mean to me.” I gave myself time to write. Not everything had to be immediate. Not everything was confined to one topic. I gave myself some freedom.

That freedom translated over to Sunday “Bad” Movies when I started making these posts again. It might not have been as much of the “how do I feel about this?” as it was back to the normal posts for this blog. However, I had the freedom of watching whatever movie I felt like watching. I started going with the flow. I don’t post every Sunday. Things are calmer. Things are less regimented. It feels fun to write for this blog again.

Terror at Blood Fart Lake is a perfect encapsulation of that. I didn’t have the movie scheduled. I didn’t know about it until mere minutes before watching it. It wasn’t even on my radar. I’ve been working on this post for a while now. I’m going at a pace that feels comfortable with me. It’s freeing.

I don’t really have a proper way to end this post. I got into that last little tangent without a real idea of how to end things. This is going to feel jarring, no matter how things end now. So, let me just say, if you enjoy something, do whatever it takes to keep enjoying it. Unless it’s illegal. Don’t do illegal stuff that could harm yourself or others. That’s not cool.

I have a few quick notes before this post is wrapped up:

• Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, Rapture-Palooza, and Cold Vengeance were all mentioned in this post.
• Nichole LaRoche was in Terror at Blood Fart Lake. She had a bit role in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. She was the only returning performer.
• Have you seen Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Have you heard of Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Would you ever watch a movie called Terror at Blood Fart Lake? Let me know in the comments, or contact me on Bluesky or Threads.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, drop it on Bluesky, Threads, or in the comments.
• The next post shouldn’t take too long to get posted. I haven’t really written it yet, but I know exactly what I’m going to write about the movie. What movie? I checked out something called Pony Express Rider. You’ll have to read the post to find out what it was. See you soon.

Loose Shoes (1978)

Welcome to the latest edition of “I Don’t Know How to Come to Terms with What I Just Watched.” I’m your host, your writer, Jesse, here with a new post all about a new-to-me movie that wasn’t new at all. And, oh boy, was it a wild ride that I did not like in any way whatsoever. Okay, maybe in one way, but I’ll get into that soon enough.

Loose Shoes was a comedy anthology that came out in 1978. It was headed by Ira Miller, a popular comedy performer and writer from the 1970s who frequently worked with the likes of Mel Brooks and John Candy. I’m not entirely sure how someone who seemed so beloved in the comedy circles could make something quite as atrocious as Loose Shoes, but stranger things have happened, I guess. Everyone will put out a stinker at some point.

The concept for Loose Shoes was interesting enough. It was the only thing I can think of that could have been a positive for the movie. Every segment was a parody of popular films and genres at the time. It was a succession of trailers for coming attractions that weren’t actually coming. They were fake. Many of them might have felt, sounded, or looked familiar. However, none of them would ever come to a theater near you. And for good reason. Most of them were offensive in the edgy humour for edgy humour’s sake way that actually took me aback at various times.

I’m maybe a week removed from the movie as I’m writing this. Possibly more. I don’t remember many of the more forgettable segments. The one that Bill Murray was in, for example. All I remember about it was that it was themed like a prison movie. There was the Ma and Pa one, as well. All I remember was that Ma and Pa were in it. Other scenes, though. Others are burned into my mind forever. I can’t unsee them. I can’t unfeel what I felt when they happened.

It started immediately. Loose Shoes began with a scene parodying a biopic of Howard Hughes, a couple decades before Martin Scorsese would make an actual biopic of the man in The Aviator. If you want to know the low hanging fruit that Loose Shoes was going for, you need not look any further than the opening scene. They didn’t use Howard Hughes’s actual name and simply changed it to Howard Huge. The voice over mentioned things about Mr. Huge, including the fact that his favourite pastime was watching planes have sex. That was it. That was the joke. I was taken aback because I never could have expected that to be a punchline. It’s like someone took edgy humour and combined it with random humour to make the worst of both styles.

The low hanging fruit of Loose Shoes didn’t stop there. It kept resurfacing. In what I thought at the time was the worst possible joke to tell in a movie parody, a parody of The Bad News Bears was put into the movie about halfway through. The joke? Pedophilia. The whole scene was a buildup to dropping the name of a new fourth movie in the franchise called The Bad News Bares in Getting Laid. These pre-teen into teenage boys were about to have sex with adult women in the change room showers. I was shocked. I showed someone else this scene to see what they thought. They were also shocked. Like, why would you think this was a good joke? It must have played well to the Jeffrey Epsteins and Donald Trumps of the world.

Much later in the movie, there was a scene set up to be a Cab Calloway musical number of sorts. This was, maybe, the only half-decent piece of satire in all of Loose Shoes. (I’m sorry if I call this Loose Screws at some point. I think that was the movie I meant to watch when I threw on this abomination.) This was the only scene that picked some fruit that hung a little higher in the tree. It was a performance of a song written around a racist remark made by a politician at the time. Making a scene actually about something rather than a crude, random joke gave it a little more weight that, albeit still some terrible comedy, felt like thought and effort was put into it. It wasn’t crude or crass to be crude or crass. It wasn’t the simplest joke possible. They tried something because they were saying something in this one scene.

Then they followed it up with the worst scene of the movie. Maybe second worst. I flip flop back and forth between this and the Bad News Bears scene. That one was pedophilia. This one felt a little antisemite, even with the writer/director being Jewish. It was a parody of the opening of Star Wars. The crawl was written in Hebrew. One of the spaceships was replaced with a menorah. The title of the coming attraction came up. The word “Star” in Star Wars was replaced with the Star of David. The symbol, not the name of the symbol. Then Loose Shoes zoomed out of the screen at the theater, pulled out to the back of the theater, and the movie cut to credits. It ended on a Jewish symbols joke. Why? What was the point? That wasn’t funny at all.

From the entire hour and a half runtime of Loose Shoes, I was able to pull two things that I thought had potential. One was the initial concept. A movie that parodied trailers for other movies was a fun idea for an anthology. Three decades later, Tropic Thunder would do a similar sort of thing to kick the movie off, except actually do it well. The other thing was the Cab Calloway parody scene. The one scene where they seemed to give a shit and didn’t just imply that Howard Hesseman was jerking off in a soldier’s locker for no reason. Other than those two things, I detested this movie.

I don’t know if I’ll ever come to terms with Loose Shoes. I don’t know if I can ever reconcile with some of the things I saw because I forced myself to watch this movie. The scenes I mentioned will stick with me well after I’ve finished this post. I don’t like knowing that. I don’t like that I will forever be thinking about how they thought it would be a good idea to put the Bad News Bears into a sex comedy. Ugh.

I’ve seen a lot of bad movies in my time. I’ve got this entire blog devoted to writing about watching bad movies. It’s about learning from bad movies. Loose Shoes might not be the worst of the worst that I’ve seen. But it’s up there with the likes of Chicks Dig Gay Guys and The $cheme for making some subject matter that they maybe should have just stayed away from. I guess it at least gave me an idea for another topic later on down the road. I could write about the movies I’ve watched for this blog that tried to make the audience appreciate abhorrent material. Perhaps I’ll come up with a better way to describe that. Now I’m just brainstorming with myself.

Thank you for attending this session of “I Don’t Know How to Come to Terms with What I Just Watched.” I’ve been your host and writer, Jesse, and hopefully the next movie I write about will be a little more entertaining.

These notes are probably better than the movie was:

• At the end of this post, I mentioned Chicks Dig Gay Guys and The $cheme.
• I made note that Howard Hesseman was in Loose Shoes. He was also in Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and All About Steve.
• Anson Downes and Murphy Dunne were in both Perfect and Loose Shoes.
• Lewis Arquette returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies with Loose Shoes, after first appearing in Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.
• Sandy Helberg acted in Loose Shoes as well as Mortal Kombat.
• Loose Shoes featured Sandy Helberg from Zombeavers.
• You might have noticed Howard Storm in Loose Shoes. He would go on to be in Valentine’s Day.
• Harry Shearer narrated some of Loose Shoes. He had a role in Godzilla.
• New Year’s Evil and Loose Shoes both had performances from Louisa Moritz.
• Billy Curtis showed up in Loose Shoes after first showing up in The Terror of Tiny Town.
• One of the more recognizable people in Loose Shoes was Avery Schreiber, who was in Galaxina.
• Finally, two actors from the Maniac Cop series were in Loose Shoes. Rod Gist was in Maniac Cop 2 and Joshua Weisel was in Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence.
• Have you seen Loose Shoes? What did you think? Did you like anything about it? Let me know in the comments, or hit me up on Bluesky or Threads.
• You can use the comments, Bluesky, or Threads to let me know what movies I should be checking out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Open my eyes to what I might not know about.
• And that leads me up to the next post. I know the movie I’ll be checking out. It’s a little horror flick called Terror at Blood Fart Lake. I’m not sure what I’m going to write. I’m not even sure when the post will be ready. My week off from work is over, so it might be a slightly longer time than having three posts within a month, with two of them being the same day. I’ll see you when it goes up, though.