Padding the Runtime and The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) (2011)

There is a strange obsession that many filmmakers have with making their movies ninety minutes long.  If not ninety minutes long, they make it as close to that length as they possibly can.  It is frequently noticeable in bad movies as the writing is not strong enough to sustain the feature length, yet the director was so adamant that he or she forced the movie to that length.  This trend is one of the most irritatingly annoying trends in film and one that I want to take a look at this week.

The trend of scenes and shots meant to extend a movie is not something new.  It has been happening for many years.  Low-budget movies are the biggest culprits of this type of behaviour, but big budget movies have also been known to participate in this practice.  I haven’t seen the movie I’m about to mention, which is Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  I have heard about how much time the film spends showing the USS Enterprise travelling through space.  I’m sure the movie had a much larger budget than many of the movies that I will be discussing within this post.  That doesn’t change the fact that the one thing that I have heard about the first theatrical continuation of the franchise is how much of the movie is these filler exteriors.  Though, as I said, the biggest culprits of needless extensions in movies are within the lower budget areas.  That’s why I’m writing about it.

Before I get right into the post, I want to say that this week’s post is going to resemble last week’s post a lot.  Once again, I will be going through the history of the Sunday “Bad” Movies to select films to use as examples of the trend I’ll be writing about.  I’ll be looking at the movies that I remember watching for this blog that have notable scenes or shots that were used to extend the runtime of the movie that they were featured in without adding any substance whatsoever.  These are moments in the movies where you would stare at the screen and wonder when something was going to happen.  They feel like filler, and many times they actually are.  This is what the post will be.

I’m going to begin with a movie that I have seen at least six times.  I even wrote about having seen it that many times.  That would be the one that I watched for week 25, The Room.  If you don’t know what The Room is, I’m going to judge you harshly.  Mostly, I’m going to wonder how you could be reading a blog about bad movies and have never heard of The Room.  It, and the man behind it (Tommy Wiseau), are well known in the world of bad movies.  For those of you that have seen it, you’ll remember an exterior shot that stood out for how long it lasts.  You’ll also remember that it comes back throughout the film.  The shot is one of the Golden Gate Bridge.  The Room is set in San Francisco and Tommy Wiseau was not afraid to remind the audience of this fact many times.  It’s as though he thought the audience would forget about it.  The reason I chose to include it in this discussion is because of how much time is spent looking at the bridge in The Room.  This establishing shot has become a joke among the fans of the movie.  It slowly pans across the entire bridge.  Let me repeat the key word in that sentence: slowly.  If you ever see the movie in the theater with a bunch of people who know it, they shout “Go! Go! Go!” the entire ten seconds or so of the shot whenever it appears.  It is as much a part of the experience as football or the utensil art in Johnny’s apartment.  And it bulks the movie up in terms of runtime.

Another movie that padded time establishing something was a movie that appeared in the Sunday “Bad” Movies two weeks prior to The Room.  That movie was the great Miami Connection.  Now, this is slightly different as the scene I’m about to discuss wasn’t establishing a location, as so many of the other examples will.  Instead, it is a scene all about taekwondo.  If you watched Miami Connection at any point in your life, you probably know what scene I am talking about.  Basically, what happens is that the main characters spend a good five minutes of the movie practicing their favourite martial art.  It is not a montage or anything of that sort.  It is just five minutes straight of taekwondo practice at a glacial speed.  A few seconds of it are spent setting up something that happens in the climax, but most of it is spent with boring practice that is meant to make taekwondo look cool.  It tried to establish the martial art form as cool.  It forgot to make the scene worth the time spent watching it.

Back to exteriors and that kind of stuff, let’s fast forward to the 100^th week when I watched Birdemic: Shock and Terror.  It’s a movie that starts with an uneventful drive.  A long, uneventful drive.  Other highlights of the movie include repeated still shots of the sky with fake birds cawing, final credits over birds slowly flying away from the beach, a dancing scene that takes the time of an entire song and doesn’t have interesting dancing, and a few shots of birds dive bombing different locations and exploding.  The most extended moment of Birdemic isn’t any of these shots, though.  It is instead a scene in which a bunch of office workers are informed that the company has just been sold for a lot of money and they are now millionaires.  Director James Nguyen then cuts to each pair of employees, one after another, for five or ten seconds.  The employees clap.  It feels like it goes on forever.  Clapping followed by clapping, followed by even more clapping.  A never ending parade of people slamming their hands together.  There is no reason for all of this excess to be in the movie.  One shot of the entire room clapping about the news would have sufficed.  The only imaginable reasons for this scene to have been done this way were to extend the running time, or the filmmaker did not know what he was doing.  Either of those reasons seems reasonable in the case of Birdemic.

One of the more egregious movies that I’ve watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies was a movie titled Science Crazed.  It rivaled Birdemic in terms of showing scenes of travel that did not need to be shown.  Where it surpassed Birdemic was that all of the scenes of travelling followed a shuffling serial killer.  A good fifteen minutes of the movie (at least that much) involved the killer shuffling through hallways on the way to his next scene of gruesome murder.  However, Science Crazed was much more than travel when it came to bumping up the runtime.  One of the murders involved two women working out in the gym.  Prior to the carnage that would ensue, we are witness to ten minutes of shuffling interspersed with boring exercise.  It added nothing to the movie outside of length.  Had the travel and workout been a mere two minutes, nothing in the story would have changed.  Come to think of it, the tension probably would have worked better because it wouldn’t have been worn thin.  The whole movie was made in this way, but that scene stands out the most as the worst offender of extension for extension’s sake.

Finally, we come to this week’s bad movie.  This is the movie that inspired me to write this post.  The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) was a long and boring movie that felt longer and exponentially more boring because of the establishing and extended shots in it.  These shots mostly focused on the interstellar travel that the characters were experiencing.  Yes, there was a time machine in the movie.  Yet most of the movie was spent with the two protagonists voyaging through space.  They went into the future, found a spaceship, and began a journey through the galaxy.  This journey was shown with shots of the poorly computer animated ship drifting through celestial landscapes (usually without land).  It would be four or five in a row before the movie went back to its boring dialogue.  The only other extended bit that really stood out (because there wasn’t much runtime left after the travel shots) was a scene with a belly dancer that felt like it would never end.  It was a five minute scene of terrible belly dancing while the two main characters drank in front of a green screen background.  You could easily tell that there was not enough script in The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) to constitute the feature length, but director Steven A. Sandt decided to make it that long anyway.  The extended shots and endless exterior traveling shots were how the director made it as long as it was.

I could go on and on about other movies that I have covered that made the same choice to use extensions and exteriors to build their runtime.  I’m not going to do that though.  This post has gone on long enough and you don’t need me to make it any longer.  It would just be me falling into the same trap as so many of the filmmakers who have been featured in this blog.  Having a feature length movie can be a nice thing.  Hell, I enjoy sitting down and being entertained for an hour and a half.  The problem is that sometimes the script does not have enough material to sustain that runtime.  This means that either a rewrite must be done to make it longer in a qualitative way or filler shots get added to make it longer in a quantitative way.  Many movies that I have seen resort to the quantitative method because it is quicker, cheaper, and easier.  It comes to the detriment of the film.  Had more time been put into some of the movies I mentioned above, they may have been better.  A rewrite could have made for a feature length film without the long, boring filler shots.  But the films are what they are.  So what are you going to do?

Here’s what you do.  You read these notes:

• The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) was suggested for the Sunday "Bad" Movies by @refocusedmedia.
• The Sunday “Bad” Movies I mentioned in this post were The Room, Miami Connection, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Science Crazed, and The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale).
• Another movie that came to mind that I didn’t write about was A Talking Cat!?!
• What are some movies that you think use exteriors, travelling shots, and that kind of stuff to pad their runtime?  Have you seen any of the movies I have mentioned?  Do you think The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) is as much a waste of time as I do?  There is a comments section below if you want to discuss anything.
• The comments section could also be used for suggestions on what I should watch for this blog.  I’m currently working on the schedule for weeks 126-150.  If you don’t want to suggest here, you can email me at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com or contact me on Twitter.
• Next week, the movie is the delightful The Hero of Color City.  Let me just say that it was better than I expected and the post is going to be an actual review.  So be ready for that.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) and the Corruption of the Justice System in Bad Movies

As a society, we are persuaded to believe that the police are always right and the people they go up against are wrong.  That is what we are told.  This is not always the case, but it is the story presented to us from a young age.  We play games like cops and robbers, where the police have to chase down the robbers because the police are the good guys and the robbers are the bad guys.  We are raised while being taught not to break the law because if we do, the police will come after us.  If we don’t do anything illegal, we should be fine.  The reality does not always line up with this description of law enforcement.  I’m not going to be writing about real life incidents like Ferguson or whatever the hell is happening in New York City.  Instead, I’ll just do what I do and use movies to discuss some serious topics.

What I really want to get into this week is corruption of law enforcement as shown through movies.  Movies are a great way to dilute any of the idealized thoughts about the justice system that may be rolling around in that head of yours.  As much as many movies make the police out to be heroes, there are numerous movies that show the injustice and corruption within this system.  Whether the movies show police officers breaking the law or wardens and guards of prisons overstepping their authority to basically turn a prison into a dictatorship, movies are able to open the eyes of the viewer to the idea that not all of the law keepers are actually keeping the law.

If you look back through the history of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you’ll see that corrupt law enforcement has almost always been there.  Freelancers was the first movie I watched for the blog that took a good look at the police force and how easily they could be corrupted.  It dealt with some rookie police officers who got into the drug business after busting an operation.  It showed how easily money could corrupt anything, including the people whose job it is to prevent the corruption.  This is definitely true to some instances in real life as police officers have been found guilty of crimes that they are expected to stop.  But the reason this movie shows this side of the police force isn’t because they want to make some sort of statement.  Well, that could be a little bit of it.  Some movies do make statements.  However, I think that the primary focus of this movie was to be entertainment.  In the current day and age, viewers like to watch anti-heroes or just plain bad people.  Freelancers wanted to capitalize on this desire while also showing the dark side of the police.  They tried to show that these people are not the best people, as we had been raised to believe.  It didn’t quite achieve either of these objectives because it ended up being a very forgettable movie instead.

Freelancers was only the first movie in the Sunday “Bad” Movies that touched upon corrupt police.  Movies such as Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and The Marine 2 would end up using police corruption as a twist.  More recently on the blog, Exit Wounds took some of its story from this darker side of the police by pitting the good officers against the bad.  Steven Seagal’s character gets sent to a corrupt precinct in Detroit and makes it his job to clean it up.  As a movie, it is basically having its cake and eating it too.  And as bad as the movie might be, the cake is a very important thing to include.  Exit Wounds shows that there is police corruption while also highlighting that there are good cops as well.  This is a distinction that many movies don’t make (aside from a twist of one officer being bad).  Yet this one did, and it was a noble move to make.  It provides hope within a sad reality.

But corrupt police aren’t the only problem I have encountered with the justice system throughout the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Prisons have not had a much better light put upon them.  The wardens have been bad people, the guards have been bad people, and the prisoners have been bad people.  In many cases, the guards and wardens have been working with the prisoners to do something heinous.  They work together to take down someone who has gone against them, or they will strike a deal to make money.  The corrupt ways of the prison system have been on full display through the movies I have watched.

The Death Race franchise manages to highlight many of these corrupt tendencies within prisons.  Whether the first, second, or third movie in the franchise, the concept remains the same.  The prisons of the future are trying to profit off of the deaths of their prisoners.  Let’s start with Death Race 2, the one that takes place first.  The prison stages fights to the death between their prisoners and televises them for people to watch in the safety of their homes.  This soon escalates into races in which the racers are prisoners who try to kill the other prisoners and cross the finish line first.  Now let’s go back to the first Death Race, which takes place last out of the three movies.  After the previous Frankenstein dies (or escapes, as we see in Death Race: Inferno), the warden “hires” one of the prisoners to murder the main character’s wife and frame him for murder.  This is because the main character is a former race car driver.  Having him put on the Frankenstein mask and race will help keep the ratings high for the televised races.  It is capitalist prison corruption at its finest.  The movies help to show how influential money can be to the prison system, though it is done in an overly exaggerated way.  Even though prisons are supposed to be a way to get the bad people off the streets, there can be innocent people incarcerated when money is involved.

A movie that takes a different approach to the bad things involving higher-ups in prison is 1991’s Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.  This movie follows the character of Ricky Ho as he goes to prison for murder and must deal with corruption on every level.  There are inmates trying to kill him.  The deputy warden wants him taken care of, if you know what I mean.  The warden is growing opium on the prison grounds.  And they’ll beat, torture, maim, and kill whoever goes against their wishes.  The idea of corruption based on the profit of growing opium was set up early in the movie, though not explicitly.  Text on the screen mentions the privatized nature of prisons in the near future, and compares them to franchised businesses.  They didn’t say where the money really came from, but they set up that there was money to be made.  Money is a big problem in the prison system and much of the reason for the corruption in the institutions as shown through movies.  That and the basic cruelty of people.

The justice system is frequently shown to have corruption in movies.  Usually the bad movies that I watch for this blog focus upon the greed and capitalism aspects of it.  In Freelancers and Exit Wounds, it was police getting into the drug trade.  In Riki-Oh, it was the warden and his underlings involved in the drug trade.  In Death Race and movies like it (Gamer), it is the prison capitalizing upon the demise of the prisoners.  Not all movies focus on this stuff, however.  There are movies out there, usually better, that focus on other aspects of bad policing.  Movies such as Fruitvale Station show that money isn’t always the problem with the justice system.  It could just as easily be the mental stability of a police officer.  It could be racism.  It could be prejudice against a certain demographic.  Or it could simply be police brutality, which we all know exists.  There are many movies that depict this kind of stuff happening because it is real stuff.  If we’re not careful, our society could end up being similar to the over-the-top gory Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, or the high octane insanity of Death Race.  We already live in a world where Freelancers and Exit Wounds could happen, and probably are happening somewhere.  Isn’t that enough?

And now for some notes:

• Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki is the first three time suggested movie.  It was suggested by @robtrench, @1sttimewatchers, and @TheTrueBrendanF.
• Let’s link to the posts of the three other movies I focused on in this post.  They were Freelancers, Exit Wounds, and Death Race.
• I also mentioned the Deuce Bigalow and The Marine franchises in there.
• Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is a foreign movie.  Other foreign movies (not North American) I’ve covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies are Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata is Coming and Infra-Man.
• Have you seen Riki-Oh?  Do you actually want to discuss the movie in all of its crazy, gory, actiony glory?  Are there other movies like it that you want to take about?  Did you like the movie?  You can use the comments below to discuss anything related to the movie or this post.
• You can also use the comments section to give me suggestions about what to watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movie installments.  If you don’t want to use the comments section, why not message me on Twitter or drop me an email at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com?  Those work too.
• Next week’s movie will be The Time Machine (I Found at a Yardsale) and let me tell you that it was a tough movie to get through.  The post is going to be… I don’t know.  It’s not written yet.  Anyway, see you next week.