Sunday "Bad" Movies - Year Three Top 10 Favourite Movies

The second year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies came to an end with my yearly rewatch of one of the movies that had been covered during the past year of posts.  The audience chose wisely and had me watch Winter’s Tale for a second time.  Once that post was done, it was time to look forward.  It was time to dig into another year of bad movies as I continued to write a weekly blog post about them.  That’s where this shall begin.  This is my look back at my ten favourite movies of the third year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.

I kicked off the third year, as I normally kick off any year, with a few Christmas movies.  Week 106, the first week of year three, brought Elves to the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I would watch a total of 61 movies during the third year, wrapping it all up with a watch of An American Hippie in Israel before going into a rewatch of Mac and Me for the third anniversary.  There were only two bonus posts that year, thanks to a lack of effort on my part when my life became fuller.  But the weekly posts still came.  I still saw bad movies and still wrote about them.  Now I’m going to write about them again as I get into my top ten favourite bad movies I covered that year.

10. Tracers

The bottom spot on this top ten was a toss-up between two or three movies.  Tracers felt like the right one to put in the bottom spot because I want more people to see it than my mother when I saw her watching it once, and me when I saw it for the blog.  It deserves to be seen because it’s actually a decently made action movie.

Taylor Lautner isn’t someone known for his acting talent.  He’s the only one of the main three Twilight actors who hasn’t gone on to have too many respected performances post-Twilight.  Tracers showed that, if given the right material, Lautner can do quite a good job.  It fit his skill set perfectly.  There was a little bit of action for a guy who can physically do action work.  There was parkour because Lautner can do that sort of stuff.  And it wasn’t asking for huge drama or anything.

Tracers stuck to lower-key action than Lautner had previously been involved in, letting him show off his real stunt work.  The guy is talented in that area, and that’s where he should focus his acting.  He should be in more movies that use practical stunts.  It’s fun to see him having a good time being physical in a movie.  He had fun in Tracers.  It was easy to tell.  That fun translated to an entertaining movie.  It won’t be blowing the doors off of cinemas at any point in its life, but it’s a good home video watch if you’re looking for a fun little action flick.

9. Money Train

The dynamic duo of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes took the stage in this crime movie set around New Year’s Day.  Those two actors have great chemistry together.  White Men Can’t Jump was one of those movies that I used to watch every time that I saw it was on television.  Somehow, their later collaboration had slipped past me.

Harrelson and Snipes played foster brothers who were employed as transit cops.  When Harrelson’s character ended up in gambling debt, he decided to try and rob the money train, a subway train that carried all of the revenue money from one location to another.  His brother worked to stop him from doing it, while they both fell in love with a transit worker played by Jennifer Lopez.

Like Tracers, there’s not too much that’s bad about Money Train.  It’s not the greatest crime action movie, but it’s also not the bad kind of stuff that I tend to watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It wasn’t messy in the way that other movies I cover are, whether a charming messy or groan inducing messy.  It was just your standard action movie made better by the chemistry of the lead actors.  I enjoy Snipes and Harrelson working together, so it worked for me.

8. Dead Before Dawn 3D

One note that should be made about the inclusion of Dead Before Dawn 3D is that the movie was filmed around where I’m living.  It was actually about three cities over, but the cities aren’t too big around here, so it was like it was filmed in my back yard.  I do not believe that it factored into the movie being in the top ten of year three.  Feel free to take this one with a grain of salt, though, since it was filmed around here.  It may have subconsciously influenced by decision.

Horror comedy is a genre that hits for me much more than it misses.  It is probably due to both those genres being my two favourite genres.  I like horror and I like comedy, so a movie that brings them together is bound to get me to watch it.  Dead Before Dawn added in zombies, Christopher Lloyd, and one of the most used token black guys in the genre, Brandon Jay McLaren.  All around, it was a movie made for me to like it.

I can understand how most people wouldn’t like Dead Before Dawn.  The comedy might not land for them.  Comedy is subjective though, and dumb jokes usually work for me.  As long as they’re jokes.  Dead Before Dawn had dumb jokes and a nonsensical script.  That just made me enjoy it more.  There’s something to sitting down and wondering what the hell is going on.  You’ll see that in some of the picks higher up on this list.  If you go into every movie expecting brilliance in the writing, you’re going to be disappointed in 99% of what you see.  Go in with an open mind.  Try to enjoy the little things.  Dead Before Dawn is enjoyable.

7. Batman & Robin

Here is where we get into the meat of the top ten.  These are the movies so unbelievably ridiculous that you can’t help but love them.  Or parts of them, at least.  Batman & Robin is one of those movies where I may not love the thing as a whole, yet I love many parts of what happened on screen.  It’s a dumb as rocks movie.  That’s what makes parts of it great while other parts fall completely flat.  Let’s get into that.

So the thing that bothers me with Batman & Robin is the look of the movie.  Some of it comes from the costumes that feature nipples.  That’s weird.  I can look past that part, though.  What really gets to me is the architecture of Gotham City.  The Tim Burton Batman movies that came before had a gothic feel.  The city was dark, and felt old but grand, if that makes sense.  The Schumacher movies were grotesque and filled with neon.  The buildings looked like giant people, for whatever reason.  It was like Las Vegas on steroids.  That never, ever worked.

Then you get into the actual meat of Batman & Robin.  It ended up being a 1990s version of the 1960s Batman camp.  It may not have been entirely intentional (the Batcard scene seems more like terrible product placement than intentional campy humour), but when you go into the movie with the mindset of it being campy, you can have an insanely good time.  Arnold Schwarzenegger was at his one-liner best.  George Clooney was finding his film stardom with a solid Bruce Wayne performance.  There was an ice skating fight in a museum, and a crazy number of villains doing villainous stuff.  It was cheesy, which made it work.  If only the city was designed differently, it could have been much better.

6. Top Dog

Chuck Norris has made one appearance in the Sunday “Bad” Movies and it was in this movie where he was paired up with a dog.  They were a couple of police officers tasked with taking down some Nazis who wanted to blow up a festival for equality.  Chuck Norris played a lone wolf type of police officer who didn’t like that he was partnered with a dog that just had its old partner killed in action.

Top Dog was completely and entirely tone deaf.  It didn’t know whether it wanted to be a hard R action movie where Chuck Norris kicks Nazi butt, or a kids’ movie about a police officer bumbling around with a dog.  Almost everything with the dog went for childlike humour.  Reno (the dog) slid back and forth in the back seat of the car during a chase.  Jake (Chuck Norris) and Reno acted like a bickering married couple when they were paired together.  The police chief treated Jake like a dog, saying “Good dog” to Reno and immediately following it with “Good Jake” for Jake.  But then the action had Nazis killing people and blowing things up.  It was two completely different tones brought together without any blending.  Nothing fit together.

The haphazard way that things were thrown together in Top Dog didn’t matter too much.  It made the movie feel like a mess, but the two parts were still decent.  There was a decent R-rated action movie in there with the plot to blow up the festival, and there was an interesting kid-friendly buddy cop movie going on.  They simply didn’t fit together and it would be tough to say that a young child should be watching Top Dog because of the Nazi stuff.  Both parts worked, though, so there was still something fun to watch in there somewhere.

5. Mortal Kombat

Paul W.S. Anderson is one of the patron saints of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It seems like the vast majority of the stuff he is involved in is stuff made for the posts I write.  There have been five movies featuring his touch that I’ve watched for this blog.  Three Death Race movies made early entries, the first Mortal Kombat was one he directed (he wasn’t involved in the sequel), and he produced DOA: Dead or Alive.  Oddly enough, they all featured Robin Shou in some sort of role.

The prototype for a successful fighting tournament type of movie is probably Enter the Dragon.  It built out the characters, put them in a tournament, and had people fighting to the death.  In the end, the tournament didn’t matter so much as the characters, and you wanted more than one person to make it out alive.  It was about what happened around the tournament.  That’s what built the stakes and kept it from being a repetitive series of battles.  Mortal Kombat attempted to replicate this, but it had to stay true to the video game roots.  It had to pay tribute to the Mortal Kombat games, which were primarily just fighting games.  You picked a fighter and fought.  There was the slightest amount of story.  The fighting was all that mattered, though.

Mortal Kombat, as a movie, played it mostly the same.  It tried to tell a story like that of the games while still trying to have the character work of Enter the Dragon.  Not all of it was successful.  Of all the movies based on fighting video games like this, however, it’s one of the better examples.  It manages to make the good guys sympathetic while making the bad guys really bad.  In the end, the tournament was the story, but the actual bracket didn’t matter so much.  It broke from the formula of a tournament in an attempt to finish it with the characters intact.  It somewhat worked.  The movie was still a little messy.

What brought everything up, though, was the fighting.  The story was fairly weak through Mortal Kombat, and only got weaker in the sequel, but the fighting was still good.  Part of this was that Paul W.S. Anderson can do over-the-top action like almost nobody else.  Part of it was that the actors could do the fighting action needed for the scenes.  The mixture of that as well as sets and choreography boosted this one into action-filled fun.

4. The Toxic Avenger

Troma found its first hit in The Toxic Avenger, a movie about a health club janitor who was thrown into toxic waste and turned into an ugly superhero with a mop.  He went on a mission to rid Tromaville of all the terrible people residing in the city.  He also fell in love through the movie.  It went on to have three sequels (with a fourth reportedly in the works) and an animated series spin-off.

The Toxic Avenger was one of those movies that perfectly captured what the Sunday “Bad” Movies are about.  Though it was not the most well-made movie (Troma was never big on production quality, I don’t think), it had fun.  It went overboard in how bad the bad people were.  The people who pushed the hero into the waste were the same people later seen running people over in their car as a game.  There was a robbery in a Mexican restaurant where the thieves attempted to rape a blind woman (who Toxie fell in love with).  He came in and, in an ultraviolent way, dispatched of them.  All of the crime fighting ended up being ultraviolent, really.  That’s the Troma way.

This was Lloyd Kaufman at his best.  He was able to bring his sensibilities to the screen and create a memorable, classic B-movie out of it.  None of his other stuff has lived up to The Toxic Avenger, and it’s no wonder that Toxie has become the poster boy for the entire studio.  I don’t dislike the other Troma produced movies I’ve seen, but The Toxic Avenger is easily the top of the pile.

3. Leprechaun in the Hood

The Leprechaun franchise is nowhere near one of the best in horror.  It’s a mess.  The first wasn’t good.  The second and third were okay.  The fourth was terrible, and the reboot was worse.  The high point was the fifth entry, Leprechaun in the Hood.  That was the one that made it all the way to the top three of the third year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.

Ice T was one of the featured actors in Leprechaun in the Hood.  His character had imprisoned the leprechaun with a curse twenty years in the past in order to gain his riches.  An up-and-coming hip hop group accidentally set the leprechaun free, leading to yet another killing spree where a goofy leprechaun went after people to get his gold back.  Warwick Davis was always great as the leprechaun, regardless of the overall quality of the movies.

Leprechaun in the Hood was greatly influenced by the hip hop that was a major part of the story.  There were breaks in the action where the hip hop group would perform.  The leprechaun even rapped during the end credits.  There were drugs, shootings, and anything else that could be considered stereotypically hip hop.  Seeing the leprechaun interact with characters from this world instead of greedy, scared white people brought a new flavour to the franchise that rejuvenated it too late for it to become something great. 

There was a sequel to the fifth installment called Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood.  It didn’t capture the same magic and the series stalled out at that point.  Leprechaun in the Hood, however, was the one entry in the Leprechaun franchise that could completely stand up next to the greats in horror.  It might not be as good as them, but it deserved to be in the discussion.  It realized that the franchise should veer more into comedy.  That’s what Leprechaun should have been, a comedy with horror.  Leprechaun in the Hood hit that note perfectly.

2. WolfCop

The title alone makes WolfCop seem perfect for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  He’s a wolf.  He’s a cop.  It’s perfect.

Cineplex Odeon, a Canadian theater chain, helped fund WolfCop.  Lou Garou (loup garou is French for werewolf) was a police officer cursed with being a werewolf.  The werewolf wasn’t such a bad thing, though.  He still thought and acted like a human.  Thus, he was able to continue performing his police duties while in werewolf form.

There’s a certain attitude to WolfCop that I’ve only seen come out of Canadian movies like Hobo with a Shotgun and the Goon franchise.  Something about it just hits all of the right notes for me.  Maybe it’s the fact that they were ballsy enough to begin his transformation into a werewolf with his dick.  Maybe it was the fact that Jonathan Cherry made an appearance.  Maybe it was the use of Moonlight Desires by Gowan.  Or it could have been all of that together.  There’s a lot to like about WolfCop and that’s why it’s near the top of the list here.  I can’t wait to see the sequel when it comes out next month.

1. Elves

Now we come to the ultimate in bad movies.  This is the movie from year three that took the cake in what a bad movie could be.  It had bad acting, a weird ass script, one recognizable actor, and Nazis.  It was a Christmas horror movie that was so insane that it’s hard to believe anyone could have written it.  This is Elves.

The story involved a teenage girl.  After she and her friends went out to the woods and jokingly played around with her grandfather’s book, an elf came to life and tried to impregnate her to create the master race.  A security guard at the store she worked at helped her fight off the elf.  That sounds tamer than the movie actually was.  The elf killed anyone who got in the way of his lust for the girl.

There were so many crazy things about Elves.  I mentioned the Nazis and the master race.  Well, let’s just say that the elf was a Nazi experiment and that some remainders from the Nazis were trying to help it get to the girl.  There were also a whole bunch of references to incest throughout the movie, including the girl’s brother telling her that she has nice breasts.  He wanted to let everyone at school know that he saw her naked, as well.  On another note, her mother hated her and her cat, and would stop at nothing to punish them for things they didn’t do.

I’m not going into spoilers about the twists and turns in Elves though, since this is a movie that should be seen.  The last thing I want to mention about it is that the one recognizable face that I wrote about earlier was Dan Haggerty, the man who played Grizzly Adams.  He became the hero of the movie.  If you haven’t yet seen Elves and you’re reading this post, you need to get on that.  Make sure it is a part of your Christmas viewing.  It is worth seeing.

Now we’ve wrapped up another year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies with my top ten favourites of the year.  Some of these are classics that I’ll surely be revisiting because of how fun they are.  WolfCop is a movie I’ve convinced other people to watch.  Elves is a movie I’ve watched every December since first seeing it.  There were also a few bad movies that weren’t first time watches when I saw them for the blog, but were still good enough to make the top ten.

Year three was probably the weakest of the five years I’ve been doing the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It was the year when I was trying to get my life on track.  After working a minimum wage job for a few years, I wanted to do something that would make me happier.  I began thinking about school and decided I was going to apply to a broadcasting program that I’m currently working my way through.  The third year was the funk that I was getting through, and it came through in the movies I picked.  There weren’t as many home run bad movies.  The funk would snap with the next year.

The top ten of year four is going to be coming at you soon.  With three years down and less than a week until the anniversary, I’m going to be coming fast and hard with the other two posts.  They might not be today.  They might not be tomorrow.  But they’ll be up before the anniversary.  You can count on that.  Year four was a better year than year three, and the top ten will show that.  Come back soon to see why.

Sunday "Bad" Movies - Year Two Top 10 Favourite Movies

The second year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies began with a bunch of Christmassy fun, as any year does.  That just happens when the anniversaries fall at the beginning of December.  It also kicked off with a post about The Disaster Artist, a book by Greg Sestero involving his friendship with Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room.  Look for my thoughts on the movie adaptation of the book whenever I get to see the movie.  The year closed out with a post about the sequel to the movie that had closed out the first year.  It was nostalgia for the first year that capped off the second.

I’m now about to go into my sixth year of Sunday “Bad” Movie writing, and decided that I would take the time leading up to the fifth anniversary to write about my ten favourite movies that I watched in each year.  This is the second post and I will be covering the second year of movies.  Week 53, the first anniversary, was a rewatch of The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, so I’m starting my top 10 eligibility at week 54, Jack Frost.  The year will end at week 104, Evil Bong 2: King Bong.  There were 64 movies that I covered, so there were a lot that didn’t make it to the top ten.  What did?

10. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Troma has been a constant source of my bad movie watching for a long time.  Outside of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, I’ve seen things like Honkey Holocaust, Hectic Knife, and Sick Sock Monsters from Outer Space, all of which the company distributed.  Poultrygeist was one of the many movies that they produced in house, and not the only Troma produced movie I’ve seen.  It was also one of the strangest experiences I’ve had.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead was a horror comedy musical.  The story was about a man named Arby trying to win back the heart of a woman named Wendy.  He worked at American Chicken Bunker (a KFC spoof), where the chicken was coming back to life and attacking people in a zombie-like way.  Throughout, the characters broke into songs such as Slow Fast Food Love, Revenge is a Dish Best Served Fried, and Generous General.

The Lloyd Kaufman tendencies hurt Poultrygeist a bit, making it too grotesque at points.  He went even farther than I’m used to from the other five movies I’ve seen him direct.  But what brought it back into the top 10 was the music.  The singers weren’t great, but the songs were catchy.  They were fun to listen to.  Slow Fast Food Love ended up becoming one of my favourite musical songs of all time, and that’s with a reference to tossing salad in the main chorus.  Even with this being as bad and off-putting as it is, I still have a place for it in my heart.

9. Gymkata

One rule that I have when choosing movies to put into the Sunday “Bad” Movies is to automatically schedule any movies that get multiple suggestions.  If more than one person suggests a movie, I’m going to watch it.  Gymkata was the first movie to get suggested twice, once by @Mimekiller and once by @Movie_Doc.  There’s a reason that both of them wanted to suggest this one.  It’s bonkers.

What was there that made Gymkata special?  For one, the name came from the combination of gymnastics and martial arts.  The reason that gymnastics were an essential part of the film was that the lead actor was an Olympic gymnast named Kurt Thomas.  His character, John Cabot, was also an Olympic gymnast.  He was tasked with participating in a competition in Parmistan where the winner gets a wish.  The Special Intelligence Agency wanted him to win and wish for a US satellite monitoring station to be built in the country.  It was an insane story that had insane action.

The action made the movie worth watching and brought it to the level of this top ten.  Between the crazy fighting during Cabot’s training and the competition itself, Gymkata never lacked action.  The most memorable part was the final obstacle of the game, a village filled with hostiles.  Everyone in the village tried to kill Cabot and he had to get through with his life.  At one point, he found a pommel horse on the street and used it to kick the various villagers that approached him.  Why was there a pommel horse just on the village streets?  Who cares!  It’s Gymkata!  One final little note, the movie was name dropped in The LEGO Batman Movie.

8. The Coed and the Zombie Stoner

The Asylum has always been a big part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  The studio was one of the biggest influences in my writing about bad movies.  I had seen things like Battle of Los Angeles and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies before starting the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Early on, I included 2-Headed Shark Attack.  But it’s The Coed and the Zombie Stoner that has made one of my top ten lists.

Most of the Asylum movies that I had seen up to this point were either mockbusters (movies that ripped off whatever was popular at the time, Battle of Los Angeles ripping off Battle: LA), or animal attack movies.  The Coed and the Zombie Stoner was the first of The Asylum’s raunchy teen comedies that I saw.  It had a different method of entertainment delivery than the other Asylum movies, but it still felt like Asylum.  And that’s with it not following the normal Asylum structure.  It wasn’t based on anything else.  It didn’t have a fading Hollywood star in a major role.  There wasn’t so much in terms of action effects that could be used poorly.  It was a different kind of Asylum movie that still felt like Asylum without looking like it.

The Coed and the Zombie Stoner was fun.  It was nothing more than that.  Plain old fun.  A college student becomes a zombie.  A sorority girl falls in love with him.  There’s a zombie outbreak.  There’s a naked marathon.  The evil sorority leader gets what’s coming to her.  It’s not a smart movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is fun.  That’s all that matters, and it makes sure that the fun counts.

7. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

The name alone seemed like something that needed to be covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It took a religious figure and pitted him against monsters.  What more do you need for a classic bad movie?  There was much more than those two things that helped make Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter one of the most memorable movies to ever grace the blog.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter was suggested by @lyzetteg24, who I believe now goes by the Twitter handle @filmslikedreamz.  I could be wrong though, and promoting a random person’s Twitter account.  As soon as the movie was suggested, I knew it would end up in the schedule.  Boy, did I get something great when I watched it.  Jesus was protecting the lesbians of Ottawa, Canada from vampires with the help of El Santo, a Mexican wrestler.  He sang, he staked, and he got a haircut to fit in with the modern day setting.

This was one of those movies that made an impression on me as soon as I saw it.  When I’m asked about why I write the Sunday “Bad” Movies posts, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is one of the movies that comes to mind.  It took a ridiculous concept and had fun with it.  If a movie doesn’t have the high quality equipment or professional crew of the mainstream movies that people watch all the time, it better be fun.  The people making it better put out something entertaining that you could watch with a bunch of friends to have a good time.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter fit that description.  It wasn’t the highest quality movie, but it was a ton of fun.

6. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

Friday the 13^th had gone through a lot as a franchise.  This was the ninth entry, and the first that broke from the standard slasher formula.  Instead of having Jason Voorhees, his mother Pamela, or Roy Burns simply following teenagers and killing them, Jason Goes to Hell upended the franchise with some supernatural body-hopping hijinks.

I get where people might find this movie just plain bad.  It’s a Friday the 13^th film.  It should be a slasher.  Instead, the movie goes deep into the lore of the Voorhees family in a way that none of the others had.  Sure, there was always the connection between mother and son.  She sought revenge for his death, and he loved her after hers.  The ninth installment of the franchise brought in an unknown half-sister of Jason, as well as her daughter and grand-daughter.  Jason could only truly be killed by a relative, and since he was now body-hopping, the only way to get his own body back was to possess one of the relatives.  If that’s not crazy enough, there was a bounty hunter named Creighton Duke trying to bring everything together for a final showdown to kill Jason forever.

There were two reasons I enjoyed Jason Goes to Hell, a movie suggested by @ThatStevenC.  One was Creighton Duke.  That character felt like something that was missing in the Friday the 13^th movies outside of the Tommy Jarvis trilogy.  He was a character whose purpose was to stop Jason.  What can help elevate a slasher beyond slashing is an anti-slasher, a hero to the villain.  I mean this as more than a final girl type.  Take Dr. Loomis in Halloween.  He was always there trying to stop Michael throughout the series.  Creighton Duke was that for one movie.  The other thing was how the standard formula of the Friday the 13^th franchise was broken.  Every movie had its entertaining moments, with the kills trying to get more and more off-the-rails, but that story can get boring.  Sometimes, something new should be attempted.  It might not land.  The attempt is still nice.

5. Aces: Iron Eagle III

Three of the four Iron Eagle movies didn’t do too much for me.  Even though the original had a great soundtrack, I have a tough time remembering anything about it.  The second one, I remember two groups coming together, but I don’t remember the context.  The fourth was like a “next generation” sort of thing.  It’s the third movie that stuck with me, and for good reason.  It was different than the rest.  It had a different feel, one that fit me better.

Most of the change in Aces: Iron Eagle III could be attributed to director John Glen.  He had come out of working on five James Bond films into working on the third Iron Eagle movie, and that influence truly showed.  It was apparent that the director had been a part of the later Roger Moore Bond films, since this one felt like the campy, goofy late Moore-era style mixed with a story like the Dalton-era.

Louis Gossett Jr. returned as Chappy an ace pilot, as the title suggested.  He was now working at an airshow, putting on fake plane fights.  After an old friend’s plane was shot down, Chappy put together a team of seasoned pilots to defeat a drug lord in Peru.  They used airshow plane tricks to take down the enemy pilots.  There was comedy as much as there was action, giving it a lighter tone than the others, while still telling a serious story.  It was the charm and cheese that made it entertaining, as well as a cast that included Paul Freeman (who would go on to be Ivan Ooze a few years later), Fred Dalton Thompson, Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini, Sonny Chiba, and an early role for Phill Lewis. It’s just plain entertaining.

4. Big Ass Spider!

You’ll notice as I go through the five years of the Sunday “Bad” Movies that there are sometimes movies that I expect nothing out of, but I get a pleasant surprise of something super fun.  I got that in the first year with Hansel and Gretel Get Baked, and I got it in the second year with Big Ass Spider!  The name of each of those movies seemed like something that would be dumb and fun.  They weren’t nearly as dumb as I expected, and were instead mostly just fun horror movies.

Big Ass Spider! was a self-aware monster movie about an exterminator in Los Angeles who had to face off against a spider that grew larger every minute.  The exterminator teamed up with a security guard from a hospital, and together they went on an adventure to stop the spider from destroying the city and possibly the world.

The most important thing about Big Ass Spider! was the cast, who were clearly having a delight while making the movie.  Greg Grunberg took on the leading role exceptionally well.  His partner in crime, Lombardo Boyar, was a great sidekick.  Ray Wise and Lin Shaye helped to round out the cast.  There was even a small appearance by Lloyd Kaufman who never doesn’t have fun playing a role in a movie.  Having all of these actors together propelled the movie above the standard direct-to-video monster movie fare.  It was like Snakes on a Plane on a lower budget.

Yet nothing in it compared to the title drop.  Yes, that’s right.  The name of the movie was spoken in the movie, which made the title all that much better.  One guy on the news after the spider began its rampage said “Hide your kids.  Hide your wife.  There’s a big ass spider on the loose.”  And that’s how the movie got its title.  You can’t get much better than that.  Oh, and there’s also a solid use of Where Is My Mind? to kick off the whole movie.  That song is always great.

3. Winter’s Tale

As someone who loves bad movies, how could I not fall in love with this one?  It was baffling in so many ways.  Every decision was absurd.  It ended up being a surreal experience.  I couldn’t believe what was unfolding before my eyes.  Was there ever something unfolding.

This is one of the few movies that I’ve watched twice for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It was originally chosen based on what I had heard.  Nobody suggested the movie before I watched it.  I had simply heard tales about how weird it was, so I decided to watch it.  It only became more infamous as time went on and when I asked which movie I should rewatch for the second anniversary, it got the most votes.  So I rewatched Winter’s Tale a second time.  Twice for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Only three other movies (soon to be four) can say they got that treatment.

What makes Winter’s Tale such a crazy movie that it ended up near the top of my list of favourites?  It’s a romance that takes place over two different time periods.  The romance has to do with people giving other people miracles.  There’s a magical horse, a demon miracle hunter, and a strange as all hell Will Smith role.  There’s even some amnesia thrown in there for good measure.  If there was anything that you thought could make a romance movie more ridiculously magical, short of one of the characters having been dead the entire time, this movie probably had it.

Winter’s Tale was like one of those accidents where you know it’s bad but you just can’t look away.  Everything was dumb.  Every new revelation made it dumber.  Yet, it’s one of the most watchable movies to have ever been a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If people wanted me to watch it and write something about it again, I probably would just for kicks.  Not as a main movie.  It had its time.  A bonus post though?  Sure.  I’d consider it.

2. The Christmas Consultant

You probably didn’t see this one coming.  It was a Lifetime Christmas movie from 2012 that not too many people know about.  I know about it.  I saw it for the Sunday “Bad” Movies and it quickly moved into that territory of Christmas movies that I watch every year because they bring me the Christmas joy that I want.  I would never outwardly admit that, though.  I’m open about loving the movie.  Not so much about the Christmas joy part.

This had been up for inclusion in the Sunday “Bad” Movies early on.  It was in one of the polls that I held in the early weeks before realizing that structuring the Sunday “Bad” Movies that way wouldn’t be sustainable.  It may have even been the first week.  I think I polled three Hasselhoff movies to kick things off.  It didn’t win and it wouldn’t be until the second year that I tossed it into the mix. I live Tweeted it with friend of the blog, @jaimeburchardt an instantly fell in love.  With it, not Jaime.  I was already in bro love with Jaime.

The part of The Christmas Consultant that brings me to it year after year is the performance of David Hasselhoff.  He’s not an actor that I usually think turns in great performances.  Most people might not even consider his role of Owen, the man brought into the family to help them throw a Christmas party, a great role.  The Hoff turned in some good work, though.  He brought the energy necessary for the role, and when things got sad, he was able to bring a believable sadness to the table as well.  It was as good a performance as you could want for the titular Christmas Consultant.

There were a lot of things that Owen did to bring holiday cheer that would have fallen flat without the energy of David Hasselhoff.  There was an intense caroling scene that upped the ante by adding backpack speakers and a microphone.  Owen helped to get rid of the local bully by pummeling him with fruitcakes.  He brought the extended family together to get the decorations set up on the front lawn.  Owen even taught the kids to play Christmas songs on different instruments to perform for their parents.  Oh, and he set up a green screen sleigh ride for the parents.  He was the ultimate bringer of Christmas cheer, and brings the joy into my house every holiday season.

1. Samurai Cop

How could this not be in the top spot?  Samurai Cop is the kind of movie that I love discovering while going through the many bad movies I watch every year.  It was so poorly made.  However, that didn’t keep it from being highly entertaining.  The entertaining aspects outweighed how poorly made it was, to the point that it heightened them to being even more entertaining.  The bad dialogue, wigs, and acting worked together to create something special.

There was a police officer who was well versed in the ways of the samurai.  He was partnered up with another police officer who was well versed in being an undercover cop.  The partner even called himself an undercover cop when he was climbing under a wall.  They were going up against a drug ring in Los Angeles, who also had a member well versed in the ways of the samurai.  It had action, sex, comedy, and all kinds of bad wigs on the main character.

In the fifth year of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, I scheduled the sequel, Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance.  I rewatched the first movie in preparation for that, and had as much fun with it as I had the first time I saw it.  It was like seeing it again for the first time.  There’s not much of depth that I can really say about it.  All I can say is that I loved Samurai Cop.  If you’re a fan of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, it is one of those must see movies.  You need to watch it.  It is one of those movies that can truly show that a movie can be “so bad it’s good.”

That brings year two of the Sunday “Bad” Movies to a close.  Ten movies from the second year of this blog series.  At some point during that year, it became its own blog.  I decided that since the series was going on for long enough and (still to this day) having a post come out every Sunday, it was worth giving its own space.  And it has been worth it.

There will soon be posts for my ten favourite movies from the third year, the fourth year, and the fifth year.  This is my way of looking back on the five years in which I’ve been watching bad movies and writing about them.  It is all leading to the five year anniversary, which will be celebrated on December 3^rd.  That’s a big deal for me.  Five years.  Wow.  See you soon with year three.