Welcome to Stale Popcorn, the weekly newsletter where I write about movies, specifically bad ones. If you know me, you know I’m a big fan of the Feature Length Film in all its forms, but for as much as I love good movies, I find bad movies to be far more fascinating.
Since I am frequently asked for bad movie recommendations, I have decided to start a weekly newsletter where I discuss bad movies. There are other media formats that take this approach, mainly the How Did This Get Made? podcast which I’m sure I will share a few entries with as I go along, but I’m trying something a little different. Sure, you’re going to get a brief synopsis and a review, but I’m going to try and explain just why this bad movie, out of all the bad movies out there (and boy howdy are there a ton) is worth watching. Or not, as will be the case with plenty of these entries.
There are a bunch of reasons why you’d call a movie a “bad” movie. In my opinion, bad movies exist on a spectrum. There are bad big budget movies. There are bad low-to-no budget movies. There are bad box office bombs. There are bad universal successes. There are bad thrillers, bad horror movies, bad dramas, bad historical flicks, but what I’m mostly going to focus on is bad comedies, which are some of the more fascinating films to analyze. Comedy is subjective of course, but have you ever watched a comedy and wondered to yourself just who exactly was the intended audience for this? That’s one of the things I aim to narrow down about each one I write about. Some are easy, some are baffling.
So how do you qualify a bad movie? For the purposes of this newsletter, I will mostly be focusing on movies that have lower than a 35% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. I disagree with Rotten Tomatoes quite often, which is why I think it makes a good barometer for qualification. Usually the things I have to disagree about are absurd (“How does this have a 12%? The outfits alone should put it at a 70%”), but here’s the thing: I have my reasons. That’s the important part.
The reason I tend to focus on movies under 35% is because that’s my bad movie sweet spot. If the scores are under that, its pretty assured that the movie is bad. I tend to notice that movies that hover around 40% to 60% aren’t bad per se, just mediocre, and I don’t have much interest in mediocre movies. There will always be exceptions, of course. There are movies that I’ll be writing about which are rated way higher than they deserve to be. There are also going to be plenty of examples of movies that don’t have a Rotten Tomatoes score because I don’t discriminate against no-budget bad movies that got zero press but ended up on Tubi somehow. If it stands out to me, I’m going to write about it. Rotten Tomatoes just helps provide a little aggregated context so we can look at what the general critical consensus is for whatever I’m writing about.
Not all bad movies are worth being written about either. I don’t enjoy every bad movie I see. As a matter of fact, there are plenty of movies I turn off after five or ten minutes because I just can’t get into them, or something about them is bothering me so much that that’s about as far as I can take it (I will be revisiting a couple of these for this series just based on the sheer unbelievability of them, so you’re welcome in advance for my personal sacrifice). There is a certain factor I look for in a bad movie: it has to be watchable. “Watchable” will of course be subjective based on personal taste, but I tend to consider a movie watchable if you can still get through it even if it sucks. You can acknowledge that something is bad and that it is still enjoyable. You’re reading the words of a man who eats a lot of 7-Eleven taquitos. I know that there’s no redeeming factor to those, but I enjoy every second. In that sense, the bad movies I’m going for here are like gas station taquitos. You still get something out of them, even if it isn’t something useful or necessary. They still serve a purpose.
All of this is to say welcome and thank you for reading. I quite often get asked about my favorite bad movie. I always have a short list of answers for the What and Why, but if we need to boil it all down, if I’m forced to choose just one singular bad movie to define bad movies, I honestly don’t even have to think twice. College (2008) directed by Deb Hagan and starring Drake Bell is the ultimate bad movie.
So I watch a lot of bad movies. I spent most of my life trying to absorb “good” and “classic” movies, but always had a real soft spot for garbage. During early quarantine, my best friend/roommate Tyler and I started delving into the depths of the unredeemable. We share a love of some of the bad movie classics I’ll be getting to in later issues, and we had burnt through most of those mid-90’s trash gems pretty quickly. Soon we just started playing stuff that sounded awful in the description. I can’t remember what led us to push play on College the first time, but I have now seen this movie probably twelve human times (including two background-watches as refreshment for this issue). Now when we watch a movie that we’ve never seen before, whether bad or good, we’ll always compare it to College (“I can’t believe this has a 64% and College only has a 5%!”), even sometimes going so far as to recalculate the RT score for a movie in how many College’s (five-point increments) it scored. College is my go-to bad movie. However, this comes with a caveat. I almost never recommend College to people. As a matter of fact, when I’m asked my favorite bad movies for recommendations, I always cite this movie and nine times out of ten I follow up with “but don’t watch it” to whoever is asking. It occupies a unique place where I consider it the absolute ultimate of its kind but would for sure never tell you to go experience it. I guess just kinda trust me that it exists and that it is what I say it is?
College is not the worst movie ever. It really isn’t, I have seen plenty worse. It is absolutely terrible though. There are many factors contributing to this but taken all together it is almost overwhelming how bad, yet still watchable, it is. So let me quit edging you all and get to the bones of this movie.
Let’s take a trip back to August 2008. Rihanna’s “Disturbia” had me dancing like a robot with a motherboard someone spilled water on. We lost the late great Bernie Mac. John Mayer and Jenifer Aniston just broke up. Huge stoner and friend of Lil Wayne Michael Phelps had just set a world record at the Olympics. And while swaths of moviegoers were laughing through their $8 boxes of Sno Caps at Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express, a much smaller population of moviegoers were probably not laughing so much while they sat through College.
College was released August 29, 2008 and is the sole feature length film directed by Deb Hagan whose only other film credits are two shorts, one apparently about boy scouts having to pee and the other about Corbin Bleu. It stars a pre-Mexican popstar exodus, pre-Campana, pre-grooming and abuse allegations Drake Bell as Kevin, a high school senior who just got dumped by his girlfriend for being no fun. This contrast between his lack of fun and what she is missing out on is played out right in the opening scene where Kevin is developing photos (he is a photographer for the school paper) while watching a video text message (in 2008? My old Verizon enV2 and I would like to have a word) from his loudmouth obnoxious friend Carter (Andrew Lewis Caldwell, trust me you won’t know him from anything except maybe his two appearances on How I Met Your Mother as one of Ted’s students) who moons the camera at what appears to be a wild party. What follows is a pastiche of Superbad ripoff, gross-out jokes, homophobic setups, ableism played for humor, a wildly Hollywoodized version of what college/frat life is like, and just like an absolute ton of shit, both human and pig.
Kevin gets dumped by his girlfriend right before she was supposed to go on a college visitation with him and his friend Morris (American Idol contestant Kevin Covais), the stereotypical nerd who carries fifteen text books despite having a messenger bag slung across his shoulder. Morris has an entrance exam this weekend that will qualify him for a scholarship and it’s the most important thing to him, as his parents are both alumni of “Fieldmont University” and poor Morris doesn’t know anything in life except trying to make his father happy. Of course, since he’s the dorky side character you already know Morris is going to be put on the back burner by the main character’s plight, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Kevin is bummed after getting dumped by Gina and now he doesn’t want to go to the college visitation weekend. Carter doesn’t blame him. But that all changes when their faux-hawk-sporting friend Fletcher mentions that he went to Fieldmont to visit the previous weekend, spinning a yarn that plays like a diet high school parody of Victor’s recollection of what he did in Europe in The Rules of Attraction. Upon hearing how fucked up Fletcher got (and how he got laid “three times”) Carter wants in and insists this is what Kevin needs to get his mind off of Gina, if not prove that he knows how to have fun too.
When they arrive on campus, Carter wastes absolutely no time sexually harassing girls by yelling out of the car window. When they attempt to find the dorm they are supposed to stay in, it is occupied with a guy with a large boner who they interrupted in the middle of watching some kind of animal porn according to the noises coming from the room. He tells them he needs some time to finish and leaves them hanging. That’s when Carter has a GENIUS idea that sets the ACTION of this movie in motion.
See Carter has a cousin who’s legacy at the rowdiest frat on campus. He thinks since his cousin is who he is, the boys should have no trouble assimilating with that crowd for the weekend. Unfortunately, that classic frat trope “who do you know here?” only gets them so far when he learns his cousin’s nickname among the frat brothers was “Queef”. The good news? This frat is so rowdy that they aren’t allowed to have pledges this semester after a hazing incident gone horribly awry the previous year (a student was injured and made paraplegic, but is still in the frat, just now the butt of many, many, many ableist jokes, and sometimes not even jokes as the guys seem to throw garbage at this kid through the whole movie). Why is this good news? Well it’s really only good for the frat brothers, but our “heroes” are drafted as honorary pledges for the weekend by the conniving frat alpha male Teague (Nick Zano), sidekick Cooper (Zach Cregger), and my favorite character in the movie, Bearcat (played by stand-up comedy legend Gary Owen, who was 31 at the time this was filmed), the permanent fixture who refuses to graduate so that he doesn’t have to leave college and the world they’ve created where they are top dog. I missed this tidbit about Bearcat the first time I watched this movie and was just mindblown that a 31 year old Gary Owen was playing a college student. Endless chuckles ensued. The thing is, it’s still funny even after you learn that he’s a super senior because its Gary Owen as a frat guy. Anyway, I digress. Mr. Owen I am a huge fan.
From this point on, the boys immerse themselves in the world of college partying and find out that it is not all it’s cracked up to be, mostly because they are hazing victims and not actual frat guys. The setups for jokes here are about as low in the barrel as you can scrape, even by 2008’s standards. There’s all the homophobic humor, like the main three getting sent to a gay party and it being played as a huge joke and the boys having to take bodyshots off of a willing Bearcat against their own wishes. There’s the ableist humor, including the complete bullying of the paraplegic frat guy that I mentioned previously, and also just Verne Troyer’s inexplicable presence which is played up for laughs. There’s the gross-out humor, which essentially just equates to constant visual shit jokes. I shouldn’t really have to go into great detail because you can fill in the blanks for yourself if you’ve ever seen even one movie aimed at grossing out teenagers. Sadly, they don’t hold back. There is so much shit in this movie.
The boys eventually meet three pretty sorority girls (of course) and the one who likes Kevin, Kendall, has slept with Teague in the past and he won’t let her forget it, nor will he just allow Kevin to step in and charm her with his lies about being a college student. Oh yea, did I forget to mention that part? The boys lie to the sorority girls and tell them they’re in the frat. Nothing like some deception in the name of tricking women into sex, right? Hilarious! Anyway I digress, our scummy protagonists all seem to make some leeway with their prospective partners. Morris hits it off but ends up getting too fucked up and passing out in a bathroom with a bunch of profanity written on his face with Sharpie, which sadly he doesn’t notice as he bounds to his entrance interview late with the word “pussy” on his forehead. Poor Morris. He’s one of the only redeeming characters in this whole movie, and truly the only one who experiences any growth as a person. He’s under so much pressure to make his father happy and when he blows his entrance interview, his world is crashing. Carter seemingly hits it off with one of the girls, too, but they are interrupted from being intimate by getting caught in someone else’s room and having to hide under the bed while a poorly pantomimed sapphic sex scene happens above them, and once those ladies fall asleep, Bearcat comes in the room and starts using their vibrator. All witnessed by Carter and his date from that hiding under the bed angle. When they eventually pass out, she leaves before he wakes up and he’s also distraught at not getting laid.
Kevin and Kendall are hitting it off, too, but Teague is feeling threatened by Kevin and decides to up the ante a bit. He makes the boys perform grueling tasks lest he reveal to their love interests that they are actually still high schoolers. The boys have to clean a ton of shitty toilets as Teague dangles this truth bomb over their heads. If you don’t mind me diverging for a second, I would like to diagnose this happening which I see quite often in media and for which I have coined the term “Richard Belding Syndrome”.
What is Richard Belding Syndrome, or RBS? RBS is where you have a character, usually the antagonist, who has knowledge that can defeat the protagonist, but instead of using that knowledge to put the protagonist to shame once and for all, they come up with elaborate ways for this to be a lesson for the protagonist as the antagonist wields their power. I have named this syndrome after a particularly awful episode of Saved by the Bell: The New Class (yes, the seven season spinoff that I like better than the original, which some will say is where my devotion to bad media was born) where upon finding out that character Ryan schemed to set off the fire alarm to get out of taking an exam he wasn’t ready for, Mr. Belding the principal, decides not to expel or suspend Ryan. So what does he do? He dresses up as a woman (?) and pretends to be a stringent substitute teacher (?) to put the pressure on Ryan for not being prepared. Once the reveal happens, everybody learns something and we’re off happily ever after. This is what I call Richard Belding Syndrome; where the antagonist would rather set up some goofy ruse to embarrass the protagonist and catch them in their lie than just like you know, doing the real life thing and ending their shit. I know this phenomenon isn’t limited to Mr. Belding, but he performs the most egregious version of this, so that’s who I named it after.
Anyway, Teague holds the knowledge that the boys are high schoolers until the big reveal where Kevin is humiliated and Kendall is hurt for being lied to, because that makes Kevin just as bad as Teague. More antics ensue and the boys end up in a pig pen covered in mud and more shit, getting shot at by a shotgun-packing farmer who thinks they’re “pig fuckers” and wants them gone.
Here is where the real movie magic happens to me. These three high schoolers, on the verge of killing each other as pressures boil over, decide they need each other and need to focus on their common enemy, the frat. They then wash their muddy, shitty clothes in the river and plot their revenge on the frat. Now another syndrome is at play, what I call Kevin McCallister in New York Syndrome. If you’ve seen the Home Alone movies, you know the protagonist Kevin rigs his house as a trap for the would-be burglars. In the second film, however, Kevin uses an address book to locate his uncle’s house which is under renovation. He then, at the age of ten mind you, breaks in and rigs this house, which he has never been in, even more dangerously for the burglars. This ability to enter a strange residence and booby-trap it to your advantage is what I call Kevin McCallister in New York Syndrome, and that’s exactly what the boys do. They add superglue to the toilet seat so Bearcat gets stuck. They somehow defy logic and hook a bunch of kegs up to the sprinkler system so it rains beer (? great prank geniuses) when set off, and fill Teague’s room with mud, shit and pigs, which doesn’t wake him up at all. Of course their prank goes off just fine. The house gets racked, Bearcat has to be lifted off the toilet by paramedics, Teague gets humiliated and arrested, and Cooper wakes up taped to a statue in a position where it looks like he’s fellating it. When Teague tries to tell the cops it was all Kevin’s fault, the boys chime in with an effortless “we’re just some high schoolers, we don’t even go here” and the cops don’t even question why high schoolers are outside a frat house on Sunday morning while it is in a state of chaos, nope they just arrest Teague because this is a movie and Drake Bell needs to win I guess. He reconciles with Kendall and Carter finally gets laid. His love interest was also a high schooler visiting for the weekend, spending time with the sorority. Ahh that works…wait. So she was doing the same thing Kendall was mad about the boys doing? But in Kendall’s care? Huh. Anyway, Kendall stated previously she didn’t mind Kevin being in high school she just hates liars, so fucking high schoolers is cool as long as you’re honest? I guess? Anyway, so the weekend is over, the boys all learned…something, and back at high school Gina is eager to reconcile with Kevin. Too bad Kevin has moved on because he totally learned something about himself this weekend you guys. Then they plot to do the same thing at another college the next weekend and the movie ends.
So that’s it. That’s a brief rundown of the ultimate bad movie. Sure I glossed over a bunch of things, but that’s fine. Do you really need all those details? So what do I think of College ultimately? I think Kevin was the worst character of them all. At least Carter wears his obnoxiousness on his sleeve. Kevin whines and complains the whole movie while his two best friends make sacrifices so he can further himself. Morris makes the ultimate sacrifice by ruining his interview, redeeming himself with the dean, then ruining his shot again later when he pukes on the dean’s car. Honestly? That’s the movie I’m more interested in. Poor Morris has everything go wrong and he just takes it and keeps it truckin’ because he’s the nerd archetype. He’s a bootleg McLovin without any of Fogle’s charisma or false sense of confidence. I would totally watch a movie where Morris is the protagonist. I think his issues are far more relatable than Kevin’s. So what Kevin lost his attractive girlfriend? He has his photography hobby, he finds a new college girl in no time, he’s a good looking dude who seems to have a relaxed family life. Contrast that with Morris who’s under so much pressure to live up to his parents’ idealized version of him that the poor kid might explode if the wind changes direction too quickly. Morris’ story falls in line with Shakespearian tragedies, yet he is limited to the butt of nerd jokes. It’s a shame honestly.
So now we have to ask the important question; who was this movie made for? If I had to guess, I’d say they were hoping to pull a Superbad and make the kind of raunchy teen sex comedy that anyone can enjoy. However, they really failed by making…you know, a really bad movie. There is no way people who don’t have an affinity for garbage would actually enjoy this. I know, I’ve spoken to people who have seen this movie and they couldn’t believe I watched it more than once. So who was the ultimate audience for this? If I had to make a guess, I would say literally just high school seniors, specifically cishet senior boys. There is no way any actual college students would want to watch this movie, and it is absolutely a movie made to please that juvenile boy sense of humor. So if I had to harbor a guess, I’d say they intended to make Superbad and American Pie but ended up with, like, something National Lampoon wouldn’t even release as a straight-to-DVD feature, and that’s saying something. So maybe not intended audience, but really the only ones who could truly get enjoyment out of this (aside from me) would probably be your average high school dude.
So that’s College. Like I said up top, I would absolutely not recommend it to anyone. Do you really need to see it after reading the synopsis? Maybe you do. Maybe you need to see for yourself just how bad it is. Maybe you love god-awful raunch comedy. Maybe you need a schadenfreude viewing of something Drake Campana is in. Maybe you’re a big Gary Owen fan but missed this. Either way, if you do need to watch this abomination, it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime this month, but it jumps around from streaming service to streaming service. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.