In the spirit of the season, today I am going to take a look at the infamous 1966 holiday movie, The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t.
The plot of The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t is summarized on IMDb as follows:
Santa has to get a job as Santa to earn money to pay his overdue rent bill.
The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t was co-written and directed by the Italian actor Rossano Brazzi, who appeared in movies like The Italian Job, Final Justice, and South Pacific. However, his directing credits were very limited, and is best remembered for his works as an actor.
The movie was based on a book of the same name written by Paul Tripp, a children’s author and musician best known for the song “Tubby the Tuba”. Not only did he adapt The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t to the screen himself, but he also portrays the lead role in the film.
The music for The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t was provided by Bruno Nicolai, who composed music for for well over 100 features over his career, including Caligula, X312: Flight To Hell, and Django Shoots First. However, his more distinguished credits are as a conductor: he performed music for such films as Django, For A Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, The Battle of Algiers, The Cat O’ Nine Tails, and Waterloo.
In 2017, The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t was featured in the eleventh season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where it was mocked by the show’s hosts.
In an episode of The Simpsons, specifically season 12’s “Skinner’s Sense of Snow”, a parody of The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t is briefly shown on a television, titled The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t, But Then Was.
Even though the actors spoke their lines in English, there was no recording done on set, and everyone was dubbed over by other actors to avoid Italian accents. The only exception was the director, Rossano Brazzi, who recorded his character’s dialogue himself.
The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t currently holds an unenviable 4.2/10 IMDb user rating, which likely has its featuring on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in large part to thank for that.
Not unlike the similarly silly Christmas-themed bad movie classics Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and Santa Claus (1959), The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t is mostly ridiculous in how over-the-top its plot is. However, it is also just a goofy, utterly harmless little movie, that is endearing in how simple it is. Its internal logic is wholesome and childlike on a level that few stories can really touch: it sounds and feels like it might have even been written by a child.
The odd combination of the whimsy of Santa Claus with the harsh reality of financial inequality and greed is a weird mixture at the core of the movie to be sure, but it always feels grounded on the side of naivete. That said, the very premise of saddling Santa with real-world problems feels almost a tad like heresy: Santa is inherently supernatural and separate from the real world, and suggesting otherwise always turns a bit weird in movies in my opinion.
Probably due to the extensive use of dubbing, The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t just looks and feels like a poorly translated foreign film. The mannerisms certainly add a lot to that as well, but there is an undeniable charm to watching a badly dubbed old movie. As someone who is a big fan of English-dubbed Godzilla movies, I have an admitted soft spot for bad dubbing in movies, so it was kind of a plus in my book.
Overall, I think there are definitely better bad Christmas movies to watch out there. However, if this one happens to pop up on you, it is totally worth sitting through. It might not merit seeking out, but it is hardly painful.
Howdy loyal followers! As you are well aware, we are just about to put another year behind us. With 2017 coming to an end, I wanted to, once again, shine a spotlight on the publicly perceived worst films of the year.
I want to re-emphasize that this is a list I generated based on public perception, and not objective quality. I chose to measure this by compiling 11 currently published year-end “Worst of 2017” lists (from sources like The AV Club and The Chicago Tribune), then I tallied up how often each film appeared. It is a pretty simple and data-driven way to make this sort of list, and gives a rough idea of how widely despised individual films were.
As with last year, there was no consensus between the various “Worst of 2017” lists. Between the 11 ranking lists I initially pulled movies from, I wound up with roughly 70 different films with at least one tally, which included some obviously contentious, contrarian picks like Phantom Thread and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. For the sake of brevity, I’m only listing out movies here that appeared on more than 2 lists, but if you want to see the final version of my spreadsheet with all of the tallies and sources used, you can find it here.
Once again, there was no consensus pick for the worst picture of 2017. Last year, the most consistently reviled movie (Independence Day: Resurgence) was on 10/14 rankings, which crunches out to just under 72%. The fact that the closest thing to an agreed “worst movie of the year” failed to land a vote on 28% of lists certainly says something about either a variety of tastes, or a competitive field of bad movies. This year was no different: the highest vote-getter only barely squeaked by a tight pack of contenders, and received votes on only 7/11 lists (63.6%).
Without further ado, here are the publicly perceived worst movies of 2017:
Transformers: The Last Knight
Book of Henry / 50 Shades Darker / The Emoji Movie
The Mummy / Baywatch
The Great Wall / King Arthur / Chips / The Snowman / Geostorm
The Dark Tower / Flatliners / Rings / Suburbicon
Are there any movies that you expected to see that didn’t make the cut? Let me know in the comments!
Today, I’m taking a look at a bizarre alternate history film about identical twins who are, in turn, identical to Elvis Presley: 2014’s The Identical.
The plot of The Identical is summarized on IMDb as follows:
Twin brothers are unknowingly separated at birth; one of them becomes an iconic rock ‘n’ roll star, while the other struggles to balance his love for music and pleasing his father.
The screenplay for The Identical was written by Howard Klausner, whose other writing credits include Hoovey, Space Cowboys, Grace Card, and The Last Ride.
The Identical was directed by a man named Dustin Marcellino, who has no other directorial credits listed on IMDb. His only documented experience is shooting and editing a short film in 2011, called The Last Train.
The cast of the film includes the likes of Seth Green (Austin Powers, Idle Hands, The Italian Job, Rat Race), Ray Liotta (Goodfellas, Smokin Aces, Revolver, The Iceman), Ashley Judd (Heat, Bug, Frida), Joe Pantoliano (Memento, The Matrix, Daredevil, Pluto Nash), and Erin Cottrell (Love’s Abiding Joy). The lead of The Identical, Blake Rayne, is a well known Elvis Presley impersonator. He was cast in the dual lead role after one of his performances was seen by the film’s casting director, despite his lack of acting experience.
The cinematographer on The Identical was Karl Walter Lindenlaub, whose shooting credits include Independence Day, Stargate, Nine Lives, Universal Soldier, and Moon 44.
The editor for the film was Rick Shaine, who also cut Pitch Black, The Incredible Hulk, Theodore Rex, Loverboy, and the horror classic A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Four people are credited with composing music for The Identical, including Klaus Badelt (Ultraviolet, Equilibrium, Catwoman, Constantine, 16 Blocks, Rescue Dawn, Poseidon), Christopher Carmichael (The Howling: Reborn), and producers Yochanan and Jerry Marcellino, the latter of whom composed Michael Jackson’s hit single “Music & Me”.
After the film’s critical and financial failure, the production’s twitter account launched a campaign for fans to flood Rotten Tomatoes with positive reviews, claiming that the popular review aggregator has an anti-Christian bias. Even with that directed campaign, however, the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes for The Identical sits at an unenviable 62%.
The Identical only played in theaters for three weeks before getting pulled for low grosses. In that time, it took in only $2.8 million of its $16 million budget, making it a significant loss for a small production.
As far as positives go, I have to say that some of the music featured in the film is kind of catchy, even if the lyrics aren’t exactly deep. That said, this was definitely a music movie first, and everything else second. Unfortunately, that definitely shows once you delve beyond the soundtrack.
It would be easy to poke at first time actor Blake Rayne as a key issue with this movie. After all, he had no acting experience previously, so he’s an easy target. However, I thought he was actually pretty decent here. Given that his character is basically Elvis, it shouldn’t be too shocking that a professional Elvis impersonator could pull the role off well. Likewise, most of the cast is pretty decent: Liotta in particular deserves props for a performance that far exceeds the needs for this film.
The area where The Identical really suffers is in the screenplay writing. Not only is there a ton of unnecessary narration that drifts in and out of the film, but the very structure of story is bizarre: notably, it flashes back and forward numerous times, making it unclear when certain events are happening, and glosses over years at a time.
On top of that, there are some serious historical issues with the screenplay. For instance, it dodges the Civil Rights Movement and racism in any way that it can. Even more glaringly, the film doesn’t address that Elvis is an established figure within the film’s acknowledged historical canon. Basically, in the film’s version of history, both Elvis and an identical Elvis look-alike are celebrities at the same time, doing the same kind of music. On top of that, the Elvis look-alike’s identical twin winds up with an enviable music career, which is inexplicably never compared to Elvis’s. Despite establishing Elvis’s existence as a popular figure, at no point does anyone in the film note similarities between Elvis and his fictional identical(s), which is beyond mind-boggling. I assume this is the result of the screenplay originally having Elvis as a character (instead of Drexel), and being changed at some point to avoid issues. However, to leave in references to Elvis is a glaring flaw in the story’s world and internal logic, that both the screenwriter and director should have caught and omitted.
It may be a minor gripe, but one of the most egregious issues with The Identical is the costuming. There are countless bad wigs scattered throughout the film, in an attempt to convey ages of characters and time periods, but they all ultimately distract the eye because of how unconvincing they are. Costuming, ideally, should blend into the background, and only catch the audience’s eye if it is meant to establish something about a character or the setting. In this movie, wigs and outlandish outfits constantly stand out without cause or need, which takes away from the audience’s immersion and investment in the story.
Similar to the costuming, another pair of unusual issues with The Identical are the casting and makeup. Given the story spans over multiple decades, there were going to be some inevitable difficulties with portraying characters over time. Some productions elect to re-cast characters in order to convey different points in time, like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. This can create a slight disconnect, but audiences are usually a bit forgiving if the actors look plausibly related. The other popular way to show that characters have aged is the use of makeup, such as in Citizen Kane, which allows the same actor to portray an older version of their character. While some movies have been innovative in terms of prosthetic use or digital enhancements to achieve similar aging and de-aging effects, these two methods remain the most effective and cheapest ways to deal with having the same characters portrayed across long spans of time in a story.
In the case of The Identical, however, the production chose to do nothing at all. Seth Green and Blake Rayne, outside of changing goofy wigs occasionally, look the same when their characters are in high school and when they are grown adults. Particularly in the early sections of the film, this decision makes their scenes straight comical. In one sequence, the two clearly adult men are in a bar, and are supposed to be playing minors. Then, the “teens” are scolded by their also-adult parents. “Surreal” might not be the right descriptor, but it is pretty close.
If I didn’t know from the marketing that The Identical was a Christian movie, I’m not sure if I would have figured it out otherwise, and that is pretty noteworthy to itself these days. While religion does play somewhat prominently in the story, it is hardly the focal point. That is not even to mention that the version of Christianity lauded is not nearly as conservative as one might expect, particularly when comparing the film to its contemporary Christian features like God’s Not Dead or The War Room. Theoretically, this is what a Christian movie should be: a story that involves Christianity, insofar as it impacts the characters. The crux of the story isn’t that Christianity is rad: there is a (mostly) coherent narrative with tangible characters, who are often guided by their religion. It may seem like a minor distinction, but when a movie’s transparent purpose is to preach and convert, it automatically gets the tone of hokey propaganda, and it undercuts any character motivations or story investment that the audience might develop.
I don’t think there’s much to recommend with The Identical, but I did find it to be a bit thought-provoking. If you are curious, Ray Liotta and the music may justify your time, but there isn’t much entertainment to be had beyond that. I do think that, with some work on the screenplay and a little more attention to detail on screen, there might have been the makings of an interesting alternate history film here. Hell, if Bubba Ho-Tep can work, I’m not writing off any outlandish Elvis movie ideas.
Today, I’m going to look at one of the most notorious pre-MCU Marvel comics adaptations: Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, starring David Hasselhoff.
The plot of Nick Fury is summarized on IMDb as follows:
Marvel’s hard-boiled hero is brought to TV. He is brought back to fight the menace of Hydra after exiling himself in the Yukon since the end of the Cold War. The children of the former Hydra head, Baron Von Stucker, have taken charge of the terrorist organization. Under the lead of his vicious daughter, Viper, Hydra has seized a deadly virus and threatens the destruction of America. The covert agency SHIELD brings Fury out of retirement to fight the terrorists.
The character of Nick Fury was created by the legendary Marvel comics duo of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He first appeared in May 1963’s Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #1, a World War II war series. However, his modern incarnation as a SHIELD secret agent and spy began with Fantastic Four #21 in December of 1963.
Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD was written by David S. Goyer, who is now a proven blockbuster screenwriter with credits like Man of Steel, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, Dark City, and the Blade trilogy. Earlier in his career, however, he penned low budget flicks like The Substitute, Demonic Toys, Kickboxer 2, and The Puppet Masters.
Nick Fury was directed by Rod Hardy, who did a lot of television work over his career, including stints on The X-Files, JAG, Burn Notice, Supernatural, The Mentalist, and Leverage.
The central cast of the film is made up of television legend David Hasselhoff (Baywatch, Baywatch Nights, Knight Rider, Starcrash), Lisa Rinna (Days Of Our Lives), Sandra Hess (Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Beastmaster 3), Neil Roberts (Charmed, The Second Civil War), and Ron Canada (Pinocchio’s Revenge, National Treasure, Cinderella Man).
The editor for Nick Fury was Drake Silliman, who also cut Tremors 3, The Christmas Shoes, The Sisters, and did extensive editing work on television shows like Law & Order and Beauty & The Beast.
The musical score for the film was provided by Gary Lionelli (OJ: Made In America, Luck, Dexter’s Laboratory, The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest) and Kevin Kiner (Star Wars: Rebels, Hell On Wheels, Jane The Virgin, Making A Murderer, Leprechaun, Carnosaur 3, Tremors 3). However, Lionelli’s work is interestingly not credited.
A number of the prominent characters in Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD have since appeared in the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe: Arnim Zola has been played by Toby Jones (Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Baron Strucker has been played by Thomas Kretschmann (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: The Winter Soldier), and Nick Fury himself has been played by Samuel L. Jackson (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Agents of SHIELD, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, Iron Man 2, Iron Man).
Nick Fury currently holds an unenviable IMDb user rating of 3.7/10, along with a 16% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and stands as one of the least-seen and most-reviled Marvel comics adaptations.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why Nick Fury is so reviled. Particularly thanks to David Hasselhoff and Sandra Hess, who are having an absolute blast hamming up their respective roles, I found this film to be a cheesy but entertaining throwback to classic spy-centric action movies, kind of like Escape From New York and the Roger Moore James Bond years in a blender. The low budget might not have done it any favors, but the action is still palatable, if a bit hokey in its execution.
One of the odd strengths of Nick Fury is the consistently silly dialogue, which I think transcends the border into effective self-parody. I thought that this was a screenplay that was written with an awareness of its dated material, and used it to its advantage. Hess’s accented one-liners and Hasselhoff’s excessive “tough-guy” showboating all make a lot more sense if you look at the film through the lens of light parody and pastiche, rather than as an earnestly-constructed action flick. Likewise, the overly sentimental and unnecessary romantic subplot (acted out by a soap opera alum, no less) is hard to take seriously, specifically because it isn’t supposed to be.
Nick Fury is without a doubt cheesy and cheap, but I also think that it is exactly what it should have been: a story aware of how misplaced in time it is, that revels in its genre cliches. From what I can tell, a whole lot more people dislike this movie than have actually seen it, which is a damn shame. It isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but it is a fun send up of the sillier Cold War era spy thrillers. By today’s Marvel standards, it would be a massive disappointment, but at the time, this was probably one of their better outings (next to 1989’s The Punisher, of course, which is magnificent).
If you can get into a cheesy action flick, I think there is something to enjoy with Nick Fury (provided you take it all with a grain or two of salt). For bad movie aficionados, this is one that is worth digging up in my opinion, and is in dire need of popular re-appraisal.
Today, I’m going to take a look at 2008’s divisive, live action film adaptation of Speed Racer.
The plot of Speed Racer is summarized on IMDb as follows:
A young driver, Speed Racer, aspires to be champion of the racing world with the help of his family and his high-tech Mach 5 automobile.
Speed Racer was written and directed by the duo of Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who are best known for The Matrix trilogy, Jupiter Ascending, Cloud Atlas, and the television series Sense8.
The central cast of Speed Racer includes Emile Hirsch (Into The Wild, Milk, Killer Joe), Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise, Igby Goes Down, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bull Durham), John Goodman (10 Cloverfield Lane, The Big Lebowski, Blues Brothers 2000, Barton Fink, Matinee, King Ralph, The Flintstones), Christina Ricci (Monster, Black Snake Moan, Casper, The Addams Family), Matthew Fox (Bone Tomahawk, Lost, Alex Cross), and Rain (I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK).
The cinematographer for the film was David Tattersall, whose other credits include Tooth Fairy, Next, The Green Mile, Soldier, Con Air, The Matador, Die Another Day, and Theodore Rex, among others.
Speed Racer employed the work of two primary editors: Zach Staenberg (Bunraku, Ender’s Game, Lord of War, Police Academy, The Matrix) and Roger Barton (The Grey, The A-Team, Bad Boys II, Ghost Ship, Pearl Harbor).
The musical score for Speed Racer was composed by Michael Giacchino, who also provided music for Doctor Strange, Rogue One, Jurassic World, Super 8, Ratatouille, Up, and John Carter.
The designer for the production was Owen Paterson, who has done work on such visually distinct films as The Matrix, Gods of Egypt, The Green Hornet, Red Planet, and V For Vendetta.
Keanu Reeves, whose career was resurrected by the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, turned down the role of Racer X in Speed Racer. Other alternative casting rumors about the production include that Kate Mara was at one point considered for Trixie, and the lead role of Speed could well have gone to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zac Efron, or Shia LaBeouf.
There were multiple attempts to make a film adaptation of Speed Racer over the years prior to the Wachowskis’, dating back to the early 1990s. Various planned incarnations were set to feature Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp, and Vince Vaughn over that time period, with Alfonso Cuaron, Hype Williams, and Julien Temple all being attached to direct the film at one point or another.
PETA, the contentious animal rights organization, claimed that the production of Speed Racer engaged in animal cruelty. This was confirmed by the American Humane Association Animal Safety Representative who worked on the set: specifically, there was an incident where the animal trainer hit a chimpanzee in retaliation for biting an actor.
Speed Racer has the unenviable claim of receiving a Golden Raspberry nomination, which are given out to the worst films and performances of a given year. In this case, it was nominated in the category of Worst Prequel, Remake, Ripoff, or Sequel, but lost out to Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The reception to Speed Racer was fairly mixed: it currently holds Rotten Tomatoes scores of 39% from critics and 60% from audiences, along with an IMDb user rating of 6.0/10. Financially, however, it did not far well at all: on a production budget of $120 million, it took in an international lifetime box office gross of just $93.9 million.
On April 1, 2017, Jon Humbert of The Hollywood Reporter published a defense of Speed Racer, which included the following:
An editing and compositing master class, each shot of Speed Racer lingers for mere flashes, with overlaid background and foreground action. It’s clear the directors are playing up the manga and animated style — and translating that to film as best as possible…Admittedly, outlandish costumes and absurd colors clash with “so expensive it’s bad CGI” — creating a visual mess at times…which isn’t entirely a bad thing. It’s just its own thing.
In general, I agree with Humbert’s assessment of Speed Racer. I think that the Wachowskis did one of the better jobs of translating the style of manga and anime to the screen in a live action format. While the CGI isn’t perfect by any means, and some sequences suffer from visual overload, the movie is all uniform enough that even the rougher sequences hold together adequately. Also, when compared to something like Transformers, the visuals actually compare pretty well: in general, it is clear to the audience what is happening at any given moment, unlike in the other franchise.
The reason that I decided to take a look back at Speed Racer to begin with was because of a video essay by Patrick H. Willems, a YouTuber who generally makes some insightful and interesting stuff. In his essay, he compares and contrasts the styles and color palettes of Speed Racer with traditional superhero movies like Civil War and The Dark Knight, and talks at length about the modern trend of realism in non-realistic movies. He makes a number of good points: namely, that Speed Racer‘s colors and vibrancy don’t detract from its emotional core. Basically, it doesn’t have to be realistic to be identifiable. Speed Racer is unique and interesting as a result of shirking the accepted norms of realism, which is why it still stands out from the pack of blockbusters visually and stylistically nearly a decade later.
Something that definitely stood out more on a re-watch were the smooth and creative transitions that are used throughout the film. A lot of the techniques that are used in Speed Racer are lauded when employed by someone like Edgar Wright. In fact, I think a direct line can be traced between Speed Racer and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. While that doesn’t make up for some of Speed Racer‘s drawbacks, such as its terrible comic relief, shallow characterizations, and less-than-thrilling story, I think the visual craft of the film makes it worth a second look and reassessment on its own.
In regards to those stated drawbacks, they are a bit tricky in their own right. It can be argued that the comic relief is accurate to the source material: the same goes for the weak characters and plot. I suppose it is a matter of perspective: if something is bad in the source material, should it be changed for an adaptation, or kept in tact for the sake of accuracy? Personally, I could have done with a whole lot less of the kid and monkey shenanigans, but the plot and characters make sense to me to keep as they are.
When it comes down to it, Speed Racer is (and should be) all about the races: to the movie’s credit, that is exactly what the Wachowskis executed. The track set pieces are absolutely electric, and the races are gripping, which is what the movie should have always been about. All of the issues that I hear pointed out about it, outside of the complaints about the occasional moments of visual clutter, are about the fringes of the film. As annoying as the kid and monkey are, they are never front and center. Likewise, the plot is far secondary to the spectacle.
Speed Racer is not a great movie. It may not even be a good movie. However, it is a creative and interesting movie, that may be the best example we have of what the Wachowskis’ innovative concepts in high gear look like when things generally go right. At the very least, I think it is worth another look, particularly in our current era of drab blockbusters. I think that, similar to Batman & Robin, Speed Racer probably came along at the wrong time: it may have been a successfully executed vision, but it isn’t a vision that people wanted.
Reviews/Trivia of B-Movies, Bad Movies, and Cult Movies.
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The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t currently holds an unenviable 4.2/10 IMDb user rating, which likely has its featuring on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in large part to thank for that.
Misan[trope]y 