Found Footage Films and How Area 407 (2012) Does Not Do Found Footage Well

Found footage films are something that seems to come up frequently in the discussion of bad filmmaking.  It’s not because they are all terrible films.  That’s not it at all.  There are many good films made in this style.  The problem is that it is so easy to stumble when using the found footage concept.  There’s a wide array of bad found footage films that can be easily found by searching whatever brick and mortar stores remain, looking at Redbox, or digging through Netflix.  You could even own some of them in your personal collection.  I don’t know.  I can’t see through my computer and browse your collection.  The only thing I know for sure is that there has been a nearly endless supply of found footage films in the past decade or so.

One of the lesser found footage movies is 2012’s Area 407.  This horror movie doesn’t have a lot of scares, and instead is filled to the brim with annoying characters who are basically just names.  There’s the annoying main female character Trish (Abigail Schrader), her older sister Jessie (Samantha Lester), a cameraman named Jimmy (James Lyons), air marshal Laura (Melanie Lyons), flight attendant Lois (Samantha Sloyan), and asshole Charlie (Brendan Patrick Connor).  Who they are doesn’t really matter because everyone acts as annoying as everyone else.  Except for Charlie, who is an asshole.  They spend the entire movie yelling each other’s names, screaming, and dying.  There is no depth to anyone in the movie.

The reason I am highlighting Area 407, aside from the fact that it is the Sunday “Bad” Movie this week, is because it can help me to clarify the ways that a found footage movie can fail.  It is one of the worst movies made in the found footage style that I have come across.  It falls into many of the trappings of bad found footage films, which I will go over through this post.  Why don’t we get to these things that can hamper the creation of a good movie?

The first thing that should be known about found footage movies are that they are cheap and quick to make.  That is the reason that so many of them exist.  The cheapness helped to make the Paranormal Activity series into a money-making machine.  They make back their budget in the first few days and go on to exceed it by vast amounts.  Studios like large profits and will make other found footage films in the hopes of capturing the same magic.  Independent filmmakers also like the found footage style because of how quick and cheap it is.  They don’t have the wealth that studios have and cannot spend nearly as much money making movies.  Found footage can help them to not show their budgetary limitations as much as making a standard film would.

Yet, as positive as these reasons may seem, there are also negatives to the fact that the movies are cheap, quick, and easy to make.  Many times, that comes in the form of the writing.  When a low budget filmmaker wants to make a movie, they want to make a movie.  As I’ve written before, many times it is a group of friends who think it would be fun to hang out and make a cheap movie.  They’ll rush it, not caring about the quality of what they make.  They only care that they can get it done.  They like how easy and quick using the found footage concept can make the filming process.  When with a bunch of friends, you want to hang out.  You’ll do stupid things on camera and think that it should be added to the movie.  The whole writing process flies out the window so that the people making the movie can amuse themselves.  The improvised amusement makes it into the movie solely based on the fact that it might as well.  This isn't always the case, for sure, but many times, I’m sure that what you watch on screen in low budget movies includes random stuff that was shot just for the fun of it.  That’s a little bit off topic though.  That’s about low budget films in general.  When it comes to found footage movies, it’s usually just a lack of quality writing that exists.

When looking at Area 407, the lack of writing is apparent in many ways.  The characters don’t have depth outside of job and name.  The plot goes almost nowhere.  The majority of the movie involves characters yelling at each other or yelling each other’s names.  Between the brief moments of action, the characters repeatedly end up in cabins.  There’s a lot of repetition throughout the film with no characters that a viewer can attach themselves to and care about.  If we remove the idea that the people involved in making Area 407 were friends, why is the quality of the writing so poor in the case of this film?  Disregarding what I wrote above, another theory for the bad script could be realism.

Found footage movies are based upon the concept that what the viewers are witnessing actually happened.  Everything seen in the film is supposed to be realistic.  It is purported to have happened.  The writers have to try and make everything that happens seem like something that would actually happen.  Sometimes that can work to the detriment of the movie, such as Area 407.  After a plane crash, everyone would be yelling and on edge.  They would wait for someone to come save them.  That’s what the movie did, until throwing a monster into the mix.  It made everything in between the crash and the monster irritating.  But it was at least semi-real to what would happen in the situation.  The dialogue in found footage also suffers from the realism.  People talk like you would hear in the situation, which is never as entertaining as typical movie dialogue.  One of the things that can really pull the audience into a movie is the prose that is used within the dialogue.  Found footage movies can lean towards reducing dialogue to the minimum amount of words to get a point across.  Names, directions, and yelling out feelings are some of the minimums.  They don’t add anything to those components to make them interesting.  They leave them at the bare minimum and the product is uninteresting because of it.

What is written above is a lot of rambling.  I understand that.  There is still one more part of found footage filmmaking that needs to be covered.  This part is the ending.  The thing about found footage films is that the footage needs to be found.  There needs to be a way for someone to stumble upon the camera or the tapes and be able to edit it all together in a way that could make a movie.  As you probably know, most found footage films are done in a first person point-of-view.  This means that someone is holding a camera and filming the action.  Viewers of the movie are watching the footage captured through that camera.  I say most because there are exceptions.  Area 407 is not one of the exceptions.  The first person point-of-view is used to bring the audience into the action with the characters.  It is supposed to make the viewer feel like they are one of the people involved in the situation, rather than someone witnessing the footage.  It leaves a question about how the footage was found though.  In the majority of first person found footage horror films, the characters all die by the end.  How, then, does anyone get the footage out of the dangerous location?  In Area 407, how does anyone find both cameras without being attacked by the monster?  I’ve never seen an answer to a question of this kind when it pertains to the horror films of this style.  Movies are supposed to be about the ride and not the destination, but the destination always leaves that question behind.  It’s a frequent destination that should be accounted for but never is.

These aren’t all of the reasons that found footage films can end up being some of the weaker films released.  There are definitely more that could be covered.  That will come at another time.  This post is long enough as it is.  It has gone over a few of the bigger components of found footage that, if done well, could make for a great movie, but if done poorly, could make for disaster.  Between the accessibility for aspiring filmmakers, the realism that tends to come along with the style, and the fact that the footage needs to be found, there are many different ways in which these movies could fall apart.  Area 407 certainly fell apart.  There are good found footage movies out there.  There definitely are.  But it’s easy to fumble the style.  It’s really damn easy.

There are a few notes to make before I finish up here:

• One of the actors in Area 407 was Jude Gerard Prest who directed Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.
• Another found footage film I’ve covered is The Devil Inside.
• I’ve watched two parodies of found footage films for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They were 30 Nightsof Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and A Haunted House.
• Area 407 was suggested by @Deggsy.
• If you have any movies you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can suggest them in the comments, or you could tell me on Twitter.

Stan Helsing (2009) and a Little Bit on Movie Expectations

Sometimes, all I ever hear about a movie is how bad it is.  That is, if I ever hear about the movie at all.  I hear how much people dislike the movie, how it fails at everything it attempts, how unfunny any of the jokes are, how the scares do anything but scare, how the drama is weightless, the acting poor, etc.  I basically hear about anything bad about the bad movies.  I’ll hear about how I should never see the movie.  I should never think about seeing the movie.  I should see something good instead.  But you know me.  I’ll watch a bad movie any day of the week, and many times I’ll enjoy it.

One of the movies that I’ve received this kind of description about is Stan Helsing.  That’s right, Stan Helsing.  I’m not writing about Van Helsing.  I’m writing about Stan Helsing.  It’s the 2009 Bo Zenga directed comedy about Stan (Steve Howey), a descendent of the famous Van Helsing.  One night, on the way to a party, he stops for a movie delivery and gets trapped in a town full of slasher movie villain knockoffs.  Along for the adventure with Stan are Nadine (Diora Baird), Teddy (Kenan Thompson), and Mia (Desi Lydic).

I try to go into every movie with an open mind, but Stan Helsing was a tough one to do that with.  All I had heard about the movie was negativity.  Usually that doesn’t affect me in any way whatsoever.  If I hear overly bad things about a movie, I still go in hoping to like a movie.  That doesn’t matter.  When I looked up the movie, my hopes started to go down.  It seemed to be a parody/spoof film focused upon the slasher films that were popular throughout the 80s and early 90s.  That made me a little bit worried because most of the movies in that subgenre have turned out badly in the past fifteen years or so.  I’ve only liked a handful of the numerous spoofs released since the first Scary Movie.  They don’t make me feel too confident in what I’m about to watch.

Watching Stan Helsing, I came to the realization that it’s not quite the parody that I thought it was going to be.  Yes, there are many references to pop culture, and it has the same sense of humour as many of the other spoofs that have been made in the past fifteen years.  I will say that much.  But when it came to the story, it didn’t feel like a beat-by-beat rip-off of another movie with comedy added in.  It seemed to be its own thing, making a comedic sendup to the horror villains of decades past.  I appreciated that much.

That didn’t help make the first half of Stan Helsing good, however.  The humour that the majority of recent spoofs and parodies share isn’t a kid of humour that makes me laugh.  They play upon the idea of what is popular in the moment.  The jokes come from recognition rather than actually being funny.  That’s a major problem when trying to create a comedy that will age well and be remembered in future generations.  It’s hard to make a memorable comedy when all of the jokes are based on the pop culture fads of when the movie is made.  The first half of Stan Helsing seems to be trying to play upon the same sort of ground that other spoofs and parodies play on.  It’s all the setup for the horror icons and the movies that they are from, though they couldn’t get the licensing and had to change the names to joke names.  It feels like they are forcing in all of the pop culture references in an attempt to get people to laugh out of recognition.  This half of the movie is exactly what I feared that the movie would be.  It’s an unfunny reference regurgitation machine.

Then I got to about halfway through the movie.  The number of references being thrown into the movie dropped exponentially.  It became more about the story and less about pop culture.  It was about four friends stuck in a scary situation.  It was about the four of them trying to get out of a little town safely.  It became a movie and not a series of unrelated half-jokes.  The movie tightened up in a way I wasn’t expecting and I ended up enjoying the back half.  I laughed, I didn’t cry, and I had an all-around good time.

The thing that most worked in the second half of the movie was the performances.  Whereas the first half got bogged down in the setting up of all of the references, the rest of the movie was able to let the actors shine in their roles.  From Steve Howey as the reluctant hero that had to go from being the slacker to showing his inner heroism, to Desi Lydic playing an airhead who has gotten herself into too many sexual dangers, each actor brought exactly the right ingredients to their role.

In the end, I’m not sure that I can agree or disagree about whether Stan Helsing is as bad as people say it is, or if it isn’t.  It has parts that are surely as dour as the impression that people tried to give me.  There were also parts of the movie that I truly liked and would say make the movie not the atrocity that people claimed.  I would watch it again.  I’ll say that much.  That has to mean something.

Movies are all up to the opinion of the person watching them.  The opinions of other people shouldn’t influence what you think of a movie.  The problem is that they do.  In a world where everyone can easily put their thoughts and feelings about anything out on the internet, or in text messages, or anywhere, it’s hard to avoid going into a movie without any impressions on what it will be like.  Try as hard as you can, it’s nearly impossible to prevent that influence.  Watching a movie can change these impressions.  That’s what I found in this case.

There are some notes to make before I’m done:

• Ben Cotton plays one of the monsters in Stan Helsing.  He was also in The Marine 3: Homefront, which we covered in the 30^th post of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• John DeSantis plays a monster in Stan Helsing.  He was in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.
• Other parody/spoof films I’ve covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies include 30 Nights of… I don’t want to type it all and A Haunted House.
• Stan Helsing was suggested by @TheTalkingCan.
• If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, leave a comment.  I like comments.  Or you could tell me on Twitter.  I do look there too.

Movies Based on Toys and Where Bratz (2007) Fits in

Modern cinema is a land of merchandising.  It’s a land of making money off of established brands.  It’s a land of using anything that is known in any way whatsoever to make more money.  Hollywood is greedy and will cash in on whatever you might be nostalgic for.  There are a slew of remakes and sequels that get released into theaters each year.  Then there are movies like Battleship and Clue, which are based on games.  Or movies like Transformers and Masters of the Universe that are based on toys.  This week, I delve into this kind of movie making as I take on Bratz.

Bratz is a 2007 movie based on the MGA Entertainment line of dolls.  That’s right.  It’s a movie based on some dolls.  It is about four girls: Sasha (Logan Browning), Jade (Janel Parrish), Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos), and Chloe (Skyler Shaye).  The girls have just entered into high school and must overcome the clique system, headed by the evil daughter of the principal, Meredith Baxter Dimly (Chelsea Kane).  Their rebellion leads to many things, including a food fight, an episode of My Super Sweet 16, and a talent show.

If that storyline sounds like they just threw a bunch of stuff together and called it a movie, that’s because it’s basically what they did.  Movies based on toys and board games typically don’t have a great storyline to them because the toys and board games don’t usually come with good storylines.  There is a very basic template upon which the writers can make the story, but at the same time, they have to stay true to the source.  It makes the story feel disjointed because you need to try and keep the ideals of the toy/game you are making a movie about.  In the case of a movie like Battleship, it needs to be about destroying enemy ships without being able to see and properly target them.  In the case of Transformers, it has to be about alien robots fighting.  In the case of Bratz, it needs to be about teenage BFFs and friendship.  Most of all, you need to try and make the movies fun, but you can’t get too deep or else you will lose the fanbase that the toys have.

Why would you lose a fanbase of a bunch of toys by writing depth into the characters?  As a child, you probably played with toys all the time.  You made up your own stories and had different backstories for the characters, built upon those given by the toy company.  Maybe there were some cartoons that helped you along the way.  But when you were playing with the toys, it was all you.  You put yourself into all of the action going on.  When the movie was made, your nostalgia for the days when you played with your Transformers, Bratz, or He-Man toys came back in heaps and you remembered the stories as you had played them.  You might expect the movie to give the characters the same personalities that you had built upon them.  However, the scriptwriter cannot read your mind.  Instead, he simplifies the characters back to their basic cookie cutter personalities so that you can continue to put your personality upon them.  If they had not done that, you would have felt cheated.  You would like the movie less because it didn’t hit that nostalgic feeling inside you.  Eliminating the character depth allows you to feel like they are still the characters that you built them up to be.  It has a better chance of keeping you on as a fan instead of alienating you based on your memories of growing up.

Upon this very flimsy, unemotional character writing, the story of a movie based upon toys tends to fall apart.  Since there is no depth to the characters, you tend to feel very little about what happens to them.  The spectacle might be interesting to look at, but very rarely is there an investment in what is going on.  This is why a movie like Transformers feels so empty.  It’s nice to look at, but the characters are so poorly defined that you can’t feel anything for them, and thus don’t care about their struggles.  It’s all in the name of letting people’s nostalgia take over.  For the people without the nostalgia for the source, the movie feels like a hollow shell of nothingness.  Or even worse, it feels like something very dumb and not worth the time spent watching it.

Since this week’s movie is Bratz, I feel like I should go through how the adaptation of this line of toys into a live action film was a failure.  I don’t intend to complain about how much I disliked the movie.  What I want to do is highlight what makes the movie unsuccessful, and how that relates to the rest of the movies based on toys and board games.

Let’s begin with the nostalgic aspect of the movie.  I cannot imagine there was too much nostalgia for a movie based on the Bratz line of dolls.  The movie was released only six years after the release of the line of toys.  The toys were marketed toward young girls.  So, say a nine year old was playing with the doll when it first came out.  She would have been fifteen when the movie came out, and she wouldn’t have cared about the dolls all that much anymore.  At least, from what I know, she would have outgrown them and become interested in the football players at her school.  Okay, that’s a little bit of a generalization of teenage girls, whom I don’t completely understand.  Oh well.  I don’t believe a fifteen year old would be interested in the dolls anymore.  You lose the nostalgia factor.  Yet the filmmakers still made the characters as blank as other toy movies which must deal with nostalgia.

Each of the four main characters barely have any personality to them.  The black girl wants to be a cheerleader.  The white girl is a soccer player.  The Asian girl is smart and likes fashion.  The girl of Spanish decent is shy but can sing.  And minus a couple of things to deal with parents, that’s all of the character depth you get.  Wait, I forgot one thing.  They are friends.  That’s important because it’s the entire crux of the plot.

Like I said at the beginning of the post, Bratz is about the four friends overcoming the clique based school setup to show that true friendship can overcome anything.  That idea is a nice idea, and a good lesson to teach to children.  I would give respect to the movie for that idea, if only it wasn’t executed so damn poorly.  There are two different moments in the movie where the friendships fall apart.  One instance is an extended scene where, after being apart for an extended period of time and leaving Yasmine with no friends, all four end up with spaghetti on their faces.  They incite a food fight throughout the schoolyard and end up in detention, where they make up for how poorly they’ve treated each other.  The other instance in which they stop being friends is when Yasmine decides she isn’t going to participate in a talent show because she wants to protect the reputation of her friends.  They don’t trust her and declare the friendship over.  If friendship can truly conquer all, you would think that they wouldn’t have stopped being friends at two different times during the movie.  The idea might have good intentions, but due to the lack of depth in the characters and the writing, the way they go about showing the moral is detrimental to the final product.  The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  This movie is Hell.

I would like to blame the poor quality of Bratz upon the fact that it is based on a line of toys.  I can only do that to a certain extent.  The director, writer, actors, and producers are just as much to blame as the source material.  They couldn’t make the movie come together in a satisfying way.  With enough talent, you should be able to overcome any obstacle.  They were not able to overcome how bad Bratz is.

All in all, movies do come down to the talent behind them.  Whether they are original stories, adaptations of books, or movies based on toys, it is up to the people making the movie to craft something good.  For whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to happen with movies based on toys or board games.  Why is that?  Is it the nostalgia that I was talking about?  Is it about staying true to the ideals of the source?  Something must be preventing a great movie based on a toy or a game from happening.  I hope that we eventually find out what that obstacle is, and how we can overcome it.

No Sunday “Bad” Movie post is complete without some notes:

• The Golden Raspberry Awards ate Bratz up.  The movie was nominated for Worst Actress (all four leads), Worst Supporting Actor (Jon Voight), Worst Screen Couple, Worst Remake or Rip-Off, and Worst Picture.
• Bratz features Jon Voight and Skyler Shaye, who were both in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.
• If you have any suggestions for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can leave them in the comments or contact me on Twitter.

Repeaters (2011)

Let me give you a little bit of insight into how I make the schedule for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I do have a schedule set up for much longer than the four weeks that I let all of you readers in on.  The movies that I choose are picked out months in advance.  I pull the titles out of a list that I have built over the past year and change.  There are many ways that the movies get put on that list.  I can find out the movie exists, or already know it exists, and think it would fit in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  There are the suggestions that people have given me during the time I’ve been writing these blog posts.  Some movies are also found on some DVD movie sets that I bought for cheap at different stores.  That’s the list that I use for the majority of the schedule.  But there are a few exceptions on the schedule that I throw into it based on the fact that they ended up on Netflix, they were released on video close to the post date, or they are a movie related to the day.  The movie this week ended up in the schedule because of that last criteria.

As you can see, today is Groundhog Day.  There is a rather popular movie with the same name as this day, set on this day.  That’s not a bad movie.  Nope.  Not at all.  When I found out that this Sunday was Groundhog Day, I wanted to find a movie that would be good for today specifically.  Since I couldn’t use the Bill Murray classic, I had to find another movie.  I don’t know any other movies about this day.  Therefore, I went with a movie that used the same sort of plot device.  I settled on a movie I had seen once before called Repeaters.

Released in 2011, Repeaters is a Canadian movie directed by Carl Bessai.  It’s about a group of young adults in a rehabilitation center, trapped on the same day for an endless amount of time.  Kyle (Dustin Milligan), Sonia (Amanda Crew), and Michael (Richard de Klerk) use the additional time to abuse certain laws and overcome some of the relationship issues in their lives.

The first thing that you notice when you turn on Repeaters is the look of the movie.  It looks as modernly Canadian as it possibly can.  I would compare the look of Repeaters to an early season episode of Supernatural, the WB/CW television show.  The movie looks dark which does sort of match the tone of the story being told.  But it still makes for something a little more ugly and gritty to look at, which isn’t necessarily a pleasant thing.  If there was one thing that I would give a negative review to in the movie it would be the look.  It only goes to ruin the impact of the story being told.

There’s an intriguing idea in the story of the film.  Three different people with their own personal problems have different reactions to the fact that they are reliving the same day over and over again.  It is an interesting psychological study.  It shows the audience how people will respond differently based on their past experiences and what those experiences have done to them.  It expands upon that idea by giving the audience insight into the regrets, and possibly lack thereof, of exploiting a time loop.  Not that too many people have ever experienced a time loop.  But really, it’s about taking control of your destiny, your fate, and making yourself into what you moralistically want to be.  It’s a theme that everybody can relate to in one way or another, even if the story might be nowhere near anything that you have gone through in the past.

This sense of differing levels of regret over the actions in the time loop is displayed well by the cast of Repeaters.  Dustin Milligan expertly portrays a young adult who has lived in a drunken and stoned stupor, overcoming his addictions to possibly stop other people from suffering the same fate.  Amanda Crew establishes a character with a dark past in her family relationships and makes the audience feel bad for her, and feel good when she overcomes these issues.  Richard de Klerk delves into insanity in a way that I don’t tend to see in lower budgeted direct-to-video films.  His performance brings hints of fear into the movie, making it more than a simple tale of overcoming the past to make a better future.  He’s the wrench thrown into the gears, and he makes the struggle that much more fulfilling.  A lot of it comes down to his performance.

I do believe that Repeaters is worth a watch.  It won’t be a great drama that will be remembered in the generations that come after this.  It is an interesting little thriller that might resonate with you in one way or another.  It’s better that we remember the decent quality filmmaking of it now, rather than have it forgotten forever.  It deserves an audience.  I hope that I just got one for it.

Here are a few notes that I would like to make before you head off to do whatever it is you do in your life:

• Michael Adamthwaite and Teach Grant made appearances in Repeaters.  They also showed up in The Marine 3: Homefront.
• In the post, I did say that this movie was direct-to-video.  After looking at the release date, I see that it did have a limited Canadian theatrical release.
• If you have any suggestions for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, leave a comment.  Come on.  You know you want to.  Or you could message me on Twitter because that’s cool too.

Representative Movies: The First 50 Posts

On my Sunday “Bad” Movies Twitter account a few months ago, I listed the ten movies out of the first fifty posts that I considered the most representative of the Sunday “Bad” Movies as a whole.  I don’t know why I never made a post to make note of this list.  I decided that I should so I am about to go through the ten movies out of the first fifty posts that I think completely embody the feel of the blog series.  Note that these are single movies from the fifty posts.  I don’t consider an entire series of movies to be one slot in this list of ten.  Each movie in the series would be one slot.

Starcrash

This was the first movie I covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and it seems like it was the best movie to begin the blog series.  It spawned the initial post about whether or not movies could be so bad that they are good.  It had David Hasselhoff, the patron saint of cheese.  It’s a rip-off of Star Wars with a scantily clad woman.  It has the great Christopher Plummer in a role that doesn’t deserve his talent.  Everything about the movie makes it the perfect choice for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and makes it a worthy representation of what this blog series is.

Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2

These choices don’t represent my favourite movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies and Superbabies is actually one of my least favourite movies I’ve watched for the series.  In fact, this choice represents the pinnacle of poor filmmaking.  The acting throughout the movie is unbearable, even from decent actors such as Scott Baio, Vanessa Angel, and Jon Voight.  The story is convoluted and boring.  The action is insane to look at.  It isn’t a good sequel (which is entirely different from being a good film).  The small amount of depth that was present in Baby Geniuses is removed in the sequel, taking away any of the resonance that the film could have.  Instead it’s a hollow shell of a movie that will only leave nightmares in the mind of the viewer.  This movie is representative of all of the bad movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, and thus earns a spot in this list of ten movies.

Miami Connection

Well, this one had to be included in the list of ten movies.  Why?  It shows how fun a movie can be when it might not have the best writing, the biggest budget, or an experienced director.  Miami Connection still kicks ass in a way you wouldn’t expect it to.  The low budget shows.  The dialogue is okay, at best.  It’s a first time director.  Still, there are the catchy songs in it that make it worth it.  Then there are the action scenes which are astonishing and enjoyable.  This movie isn’t about objective quality, but rather the feeling that you are left with after watching it.  That feeling is as much a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movie aura as the objective quality.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

The potential of a movie is something I’ve written about various times throughout the Sunday “Bad” Movie posts.  I’ve written about how a movie could have an intriguing concept that could be great if it is executed properly.  I’ve written about movies where I thing the story is good but everything surrounding it is not so good.  Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is one of these movies.  The story is a solid story that, with a couple of tweaks, could be a great story.  The real problem with the movie, and what makes it a bad movie, is everything else.  The performances are weird.  The effects look bad because of when it was made.  The sets are funny looking.  But the story has the potential to be something great.  Potential.  That’s why this movie made the list.

Hansel and Gretel Get Baked

Quite often, I choose movies based on the names.  This was one of them, and it was surprisingly a really good movie.  I included Hansel and Gretel Get Baked because the Sunday “Bad” Movies can really go against my expectations and give me a movie that is a whole lot better than I thought I was going to get.  It’s mostly the name on this one, but there was a subversion of my expectations nonetheless.  I have nothing else to add about this movie.  I would only be talking in circles if I kept writing about this one.

Tiptoes

This is a movie with a message.  A lot of bad movies spawn out of the writers and directors having a message to give to other people.  There are movies like Birdemic that are about the dangers of global warming.  Tiptoes is about the hardships of having dwarfism.  I included it in this list of ten movies that represent the Sunday “Bad” Movies because the idea of crafting a movie around a specific theme can easily lead to a poorly made movie.  Tiptoes personifies that idea by being a poorly crafted movie built around a theme.

The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure

There are a few reasons that I included The Oogieloves on my list of ten movies from the first fifty posts that truly represent the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  One: It’s one of the worst box office earning movies ever.  Two: There are respectable actors doing really stupid things.  Three: It fits both the children’s movie genre and the musical genre.  Four: The movie is batshit insane.  And finally, it has been covered twice for Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Sure, one was post 53, but still, it’s a first fifty posts movie that was covered a second time.  That’s how much it is a Sunday “Bad” Movie.

Robot Jox

There’s not much to say about why this one is in here.  It has good effects work, and it is a hell of a lot of fun to watch.  It’s the feeling of this movie that gets it onto this list above many of the other movies that I could have included.  I couldn’t bring myself to take this one off the list because of the feel of it.

Attack of the Super Monsters

If you were looking for something completely unique in this list, Attack of the Super Monsters is that.  It’s a compilation of four episodes of the Japanese show Dinosaur War Izenborg.  It is a combination of animation, miniatures, and Godzilla style monster fights.  I’ve never seen a movie quite like it before in my twenty-three years of watching movies.  It’s definitely something special, and shows how out there that the movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies can get.

Rise of the Zombies

This movie is practically the hub or cornerstone of the first fifty films in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  There was a point where I was only writing reviews for the blog posts, and that felt wrong.  Rise of the Zombies was where I decided I would write different kind of posts.  There could be reviews, thematic posts, posts about my history with the movies, or posts about bad movies in general.  There were three actors in Rise of the Zombies who had appeared in previous movies in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It was a movie from The Asylum, a studio that has been featured a few times throughout the many posts I’ve written.  There’s so much about this movie that helped to make the Sunday “Bad” Movies what it is.

Those are the ten movies from the first fifty posts that I think truly represent the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They each have different things that have helped to make them a part of the list.  If you wanted to get a true feeling of what the Sunday “Bad” Movies are without watching all of the movies I’ve watched, those ten should give you a relatively good idea.  I will do this again come the 100^th post with ten movies from the 51^st to 100^th posts that I think symbolize what the Sunday “Bad” Movies are.  Until then, you will have a lot more movies being added to the Sunday “Bad” Movies back catalogue.  Watch them if you want.  Or don’t.  I’ll be watching them anyway.

Big Ass Spider! (2013)

Every once in a while, I leave a slot open in the Sunday “Bad” Movie schedule for a newer movie to slide in.  I’ll wait until I get closer to the date that I’ve designated for the new movie and then check what comes out around then on DVD and blu-ray.  I take a look and see if anything coming out a few weeks before that time seems like it would fit into the whole Sunday “Bad” Movie feel.  That’s how I came upon this week’s movie, Big Ass Spider!  Yes, the exclamation mark is a part of the title.

Big Ass Spider! was a 2013 limited release horror movie.  It went into theaters for a short amount of time near the end of October.  Director Mike Mendez and writer Gregory Gieras brought to screen a movie about a government mutated spider that terrorizes Los Angeles, and the ragtag group that is trying to put a stop to the arachnid threat.  The group consists of a military Major (Ray Wise), his Lieutenant (Clare Kramer), an exterminator (Greg Grunberg), and his new hospital security sidekick (Lombardo Boyar).

I don’t know why I would bury the lead on this one.  I loved this movie.  Too many of the “bad” movies that have come out recently spend too much time focusing on the bad aspects that they forget to have a sense of humor and have fun with the material.  The most notable that comes to mind is Sharknado.  I have spent a lot of time talking about how I hate the Sharknado culture.  I’m not here to get into my hate for that movie based on a personal principle that I have for “bad” movies.  I’m just going to use it as a point of reference for Big Ass Spider!

Sharknado is a movie that also came out in 2013.  It was from The Asylum and was about a group of people trying to outrun, and eventually trying to stop, a tornado that was filled with sharks.  The ridiculous storyline was played fairly straight which made for an alright watch.  The one aspect that kept it from being a movie I would recommend to other people was effort and care.  Sharknado felt like a movie that was made in a few days.  It seemed like they had a mentality of getting in and out as quick as possible.  Half of the actors in the movie, most notably Tara Reid, felt like they were there just to get paid, and had no investment in what was happening.  That’s a major problem.  When the actors don’t care about what they’re doing in the movie, it makes the characters feel non-existent.  When the crew doesn’t make the effort to have the background look like there is a storm occurring in a movie that is about a storm, the whole thing rings false.  That’s enough about Sharknado.  Let’s get into Big Ass Spider! and what it does to make its own ridiculous idea more enjoyable.

The first thing about Big Ass Spider! that elevates it over many of the other movies that attempt the same thing is that it has a sense of humor about itself.  The main character is a goofball exterminator who can “be a spider to catch the spider.”  I’m not sure if that’s the exact line, but it’s close enough to what he said that I will quote it.  He attempts to catch spiders by making spider sounds.  He gets himself stuck in webs and burns himself trying to get out.  He’s serious about extermination, but he’s so overly into spiders that it becomes a joke.  His sidekick is an accented stereotype who is the perfect character to bounce jokes off of.  Their back and forth makes for an entertaining comedic relationship.  Both Grunberg and Boyar give performances that show that they care about the material that they are working on.  Of course, these two characters aren’t the only source of comedy in the movie.  Many of the murders committed by the spider are humorous, as well as the news footage where one character exclaims that he saw a “big ass spider.”  The movie is first and foremost a comedy, which really helps in elevating the material above what other filmmakers have attempted.

Big Ass Spider! has a ridiculous concept, but it isn’t so ridiculous as to cross the border into an insane idea.  The concept is simply that the military were engineering vegetables to grow larger and they accidentally engineered a spider to do so.  It’s crazy, but not something that seems entirely impossible.  It keeps the movie rooted in some sort of extremely heightened reality.  It’s easier to invest in what is going on if it is even the slightest bit realistic.  This movie leaves that very tiny window of reality open that allows the story to play out in a way that fits with the real world setting.

There is a lot to love about Big Ass Spider!  The movie knows exactly what it is and plays right into it.  Everyone involved seemed to give enough of a damn to put some effort on the screen.  It looks good, it is fun to watch, and it provides enough laughs to give your gut a workout.  I’m glad that I chose this movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movies because it’s exactly the kind of movie I love to discover.  It would have been a great B-Movie if theaters still had the A-Movie/B-Movie system.  I could imagine it playing after Godzilla when that hits theaters.  How great would that be?  That would be great.  This is a movie that I would recommend to anyone interested in the movies that I cover in these blog posts.  Go out and find it right now.

There are a few notes that I am going to make at the end here, like I usually do:

• Lin Shaye was in Big Ass Spider!  If you’ve been watching some of the movies I’ve covered, you might have noticed her in Surf School.
• If you know anything about bad movies, you know Lloyd Kaufman.  He showed up in Big Ass Spider!  He also showed up in Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned.  Don’t forget he is in charge of Troma, so he also produced both Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and Monster in the Closet.
• I do have another post going up this week about the ten movies in the first fifty posts that I feel best represent the Sunday "Bad" Movies.  It's something I discussed on Twitter a couple weeks before the fiftieth posts, and I wrote it all down last week, better than on Twitter.
• If you have any movies you would like to suggest for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, feel free to leave a comment.  I’ve never gotten suggestions in the comments, but it would be nice to.  I’ll also take them on Twitter.  Or I’ll take a follow on that account.  I’d like to talk to people there and give that more use than just pimping the blog posts.

Paranormal Entity Quadruple Feature (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012)

As I’m writing this, the newest Paranormal Activity movie came out yesterday.  It marks the fifth film in the series, and the first that moves away from that central family (for the most part).  I like the Paranormal Activity movies but felt that the Sunday “Bad” Movie posts could use something to celebrate the fifth in the series.  What would that something be?  I went to one of my favourite sources of bad movies to find out.

The Paranormal Entity series, as Wikipedia classifies the movies, are four Asylum produced movies.  The first is a direct rip-off of Paranormal Activity.  The other three are found footage movies about different groups of people experiencing different paranormal beings in different locations.  The movies are completely unrelated outside of the fact that they are produced by The Asylum, they are found footage, and Wikipedia classifies them as a series.

Before I get into the individual movies, let me talk about the series in general.  Like many people say about the Star Trek movies, the evens are better than the odds.  At least, I find the second and fourth Paranormal Entity movies to be the better ones.  There are no characters or actors that overlap between the movies.  They all stand on their own as separate works.  Lastly, there was a movie released in November 2013 called The Bell Witch Haunting, which might be in the series.  I do not have any confirmation as of yet that it is the fifth installment in the Paranormal Entity series, but from the trailer, it seems like it could easily fit in there.

Now it’s time for me to get into the individual movies.

Paranormal Entity

This 2009 Shane van Dyke written and directed film tells the story of a mother and her two children, a brother and sister, as they deal with some sort of paranormal force in their house.  It’s basically Paranormal Activity, but by The Asylum.  The practical effects aren’t interesting and the scares are practically non-existent.  I’m a defender of Shane van Dyke’s work with The Asylum.  I love Titanic II, I enjoy Transmorphers: Fall of Man, and I find Battledogs to be a lot of fun.  Paranormal Entity is not any of that.  It feels lifeless and is among my least favourite Asylum produced movies.  It’s sad because I always have hope for Shane van Dyke’s output.

8213: Gacy House

In 2010, The Asylum came out with another found footage film.  This time, it centered on a group of paranormal investigators going to the site of John Wayne Gacy’s house.  Something doesn’t want them there, though, and they suspect that the spirit of Gacy still resides on the premises.  If that sounds like a more thought out plot than the first movie (which, to be honest, it probably doesn’t), there is more thought to it.  The characters seem more realized than in the previous film.  You know them as more than just the mother, the brother, and the sister.  They seem like actual people.  When things start happening to them, you care.  That’s where the real success of the movie is.  It has characters that you actually invest in.  You want them to survive.  It doesn’t really show too much of what happens to people, but what it does show is interesting to watch.  This is a vast improvement over Paranormal Entity.

Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes

I have to give a little bit of a backstory on this one.  This story has been told numerous times in film.  The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based on the same real life story as this movie.  Basically, a girl in Germany named Anneliese Michel was thought to be possessed by a demon.  When she died, her parents and some priests were charged with negligence.  That’s basically what plays out in the movie, except there is also a camera crew recording what is going on.  The practical effects in this movie are solid enough to be effective.  I liked that part of the movie but that’s about all that I could find to like.  The performances are bad and the characters are even worse.  It’s as though director Jude Gerard Prest (I’m assuming he wrote it, but there is no writing credit) read a synopsis of the real events and didn’t think to add any more to the characters.  They are all plot devices rather than captivating people, and you don’t care what happens to any of them.  It’s a shame seeing as how The Exorcism of Emily Rose was able to cover the same story to a much better effect by creating characters that you enjoy watching as a viewer.  This movie isn’t simply bad, it’s depressing to think of what could have been.  So little effort was put into it that I can’t help feeling cheated out of an hour and a half of greatness.

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck

This is my favourite movie of the bunch.  Like the second movie in the series, 100 Ghost Street is about a group of paranormal investigators.  This time, the investigators are going to a hospital where Richard Speck raped and murdered nurses.  At least, I think that’s what they said.  Yes, that’s what he did.  They lock themselves inside and investigate.  What really works about this movie is both the effects and the characters.  These characters are the most well-defined of any of the movies.  They each had their own personalities, and you could relate to them, even though you’ve never experience what they are going through.  The effects were a mixture of practical and computer generated, but it worked for the movie.  Sure, it takes you out of the realism a little bit, but it helps to highlight the violence without going over-the-top with it.  I appreciated that a lot while watching.  All in all, this movie is a major step up for the series and one that I would recommend to people looking for a decent found footage horror flick.

These four movies are not a series in the sense that the story comes together like the Paranormal Activity series they were originally based upon.  Instead, the Paranormal Entity series is a thematic anthology series.  Every movie is a found footage movie about people fighting against the supernatural.  Like any anthology, the different films are of varying qualities.  There is some good that came out of the Paranormal Entity series, however.  I will always be grateful for that.

There are some notes I would like to make before I am done:

• Another anthology kind of series I covered was The Marine.
• I discussed my history with The Asylum in my post for Snakes on a Train.
• 8213: Gacy House was suggested by @SincereBC.
• If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can comment below or message me on Twitter. 

Video Game Movies and House of the Dead (2003)

One of the biggest news-makers of 2013 was video games.  There were big games released such as The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto V, and Call of Duty: Ghosts.  There were new consoles released: Xbox One and PlayStation 4.  We were getting over the 2012 movie releases of Resident Evil: Afterlife and Silent Hill: Revelations, and we saw a trailer for a Need for Speed movie.  Video games are everywhere.

Hollywood likes to use a lot of sources when it comes to inspiration for movies.  Video games are one of these sources, but the results are rarely good.  When we look back at the various adaptations of video games to the theaters, we get movies like Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia, and this week’s movie House of the Dead.  That’s not to say that there aren’t some fun movies in the bunch, but they have never done too well critically.  Is it a result of a lack of effort put into the movies?  Is it due to the talent of the people behind the camera?  Could there simply be no way to properly get a video game adapted to the big screen?  I don’t know the answer to these questions, and I won’t tell you that I do.  But I can write about how House of the Dead can both show the good and the bad of video game adaptations.

For those of you who aren’t in the know, House of the Dead is a 2003 adaptation of the 1996 videogame by Sega.  It was directed by Uwe Boll, one of the most hated directors in the entire world.  He is so hated, in fact, that there was once a petition to stop him from ever directing again.  The movie stars Jonathan Cherry, a guy you might recognize as being in movies for a couple of years then disappearing off the face of the planet.  House of the Dead is about a bunch of people going to an island, finding zombies, and hiding out in a house.  Or trying to hide out in the house.  That might be a better way to describe the movie.

The good things about the movie are what I am going to start with.  It all basically comes down to how fun the movie is.  The point of most video games are to have fun.  In many cases, the story behind the game is very secondary to how much fun a person can have playing it.  That is why online gaming has become so much more popular than playing through the story modes of games.  Let’s look at the Call of Duty games as an example.  How many people do you know that have played through the story mode on the games?  Now compare that to the number of people that you know have played it online.  As the Call of Duty games have continued onward, the story has become less and less relevant, while the online has become more relevant.  The games are about fun rather than a meaty story.  Most of the film adaptations of video games focus on the fun instead of the story as well.

House of the Dead can exemplify this focus upon the fun.  The story of the movie is very basic.  A group of 20-somethings are put on an island and get attacked by zombies.  Add some guns, boobs, and explosions, and you get an action movie.  Add some ridiculousness, an extended gunfight of every character attempting to get into the house while the camera spins around them, a final climactic swordfight, a rave, and Clint Howard, you get a lot of fun.  The movie is upping the fun in an attempt to cover the lack of story, and though the overall quality might be bad, the movie is still a fun movie.  It’s enjoyable from beginning to end.

Before I get into what House of the Dead doesn’t do well as an adaptation, let me say that I’ve never played the game.  I will be talking about the negative aspects of the adaptation in generalizations.  I’m not going to get into the parts that were directly adapted from game to screen because I don’t know them.  With that out of the way, I shall begin.

One of the biggest issues with adapting video games to film comes from the story.  I’ve already discussed how the point of video games comes down to fun, but movies are supposed to give some sort of story to go along with the fun.  It is hard to adapt a video game into a good story when the source material does not have a solid story.  From the little that I know of the House of the Dead video game, it is about two people going to a mansion to stop an evil scientist that created zombies.  None of that is in the movie.  Instead, the movie is about young adults at a rave being attacked by zombies.  The story in the movie is even more simplistic than that of the video game which is a major flaw in the adaptation.  The game might not have had the most thought provoking, character growing plot to it, but it seems to have had more than the movie.

The other issue I would like to bring up is the fact that the House of the Dead game was a first-person shooter.  The thing about games of this type are that they put the player into the shoes of the protagonist.  As a player, you are more immersed in the game since all of the action is from your point of view.  Anything that happens is from your line of sight.  You can’t rotate around the character and see from all angles at once.  You can’t zoom in or zoom out from the character for a wider view.  You have one point of view, which is the same as the character’s point of view.  You are essentially the main character in the game.  This is extremely difficult to translate into film.  Yes, found footage films are a big sort of subgenre of movies in the present day, but that’s slightly different.  How often do you see people brandishing weapons in found footage films and acting as if the camera is their eyesight and not a camera that they are holding?  That is very rare.  I’m not sure if I have ever seen that myself in a found footage movie.  It’s very difficult to make work.  The first person style is one that I’ve only seen in a video game sense once on film.  Doom had one scene in which all of the action was seen from the main character’s point of view and the screen was set up to resemble that of the game.  There is no real consensus on whether it worked or not.  I think it did, but it has not been done since, from my knowledge.  It’s a difficult concept to pull off.

The reason I bring up the difficulty of that is the immersion factor.  I said that the first person point of view of video game shooters can really help to immerse the player into the world of the game.  Movies tend not to do that.  House of the Dead is no different.  The first person point of view is replaced with the less immersive third person point of view.  For people who had played the game, there will be a sense of disconnect when watching the movie because they are no longer a part of the action.  Instead, the viewers of House of the Dead are witnessing what is going on.  It isn’t as satisfying or fulfilling.  And that’s where the problem lies.

When you look at all of the video game adaptations that have hit theaters over the years, you can see that many of the problems come in the form of story, or the fact that the video game was first person, and the movie cannot translate that.  There are certain aspects, like the first person point of view, that don’t translate well to movies.  There is more of a focus on atmosphere and fun in video games that leaves the story behind.  Will these problems ever be overcome?  Will there ever be a critically successful movie based on a video game?  I cannot answer these questions outside of saying that only time will tell.

There are a few notes that I’m going to leave you with:

• Michael Eklund was in House of the Dead.  You might remember him from The Marine 3: Homefront, if you watched that movie.
• If you watched Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, you might have recognized David Palffy in House of the Dead.
• House of the Dead was suggested by @jaimeburchardt.
• Do you have a movie that you’d like to suggest for the Sunday “Bad” Movies?  Leave a comment, or tell me on Twitter.