Creepy Canadian Kids Shows: Freaky Stories & More (Part 1)

 

Creepy Canadian Kids Shows (Part 1 of 2)

 

My love of horror started not just from watching movies like King Kong and Jaws, or from reading books like Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, but also from watching a number of TV shows as a young, impressionable child. Obviously one of the biggest shows to feature ghosts and ghouls and monsters aplenty was Scooby-Doo. There were so many different Scooby-Doo shows that several generations grew up with a different current one or re-runs of old ones. For me it was re-runs of the original Scooby-Doo: Where Are You! (1969-70) and What’s New, Scooby Doo? (2002-05). Scooby-Doo has always been more about the goofy, repetitious gags and the formulaic reveal that there are no real monsters or supernatural entities, and while I enjoyed the shows as a kid, they were rarely what I would call creepy.

Another cartoon that played up horror concepts purely for laughs was Grim & Evil (2001-04), which later turned into The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (2003-07). Don’t fear the reaper, indeed, for he’s the best friend of an idiotic, happy-go-lucky boy, and a cynical, unemotional girl. Grim has a Jamaican accent, his scythe is magical, and together the three of them go on outlandish adventures. Both shows originally aired on Cartoon Network, and I had to stay up past my bedtime to catch re-runs late at night on Teletoon. If you wanted an even funnier and more visually disturbing Cartoon Network show with monsters, you had to watch Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999-2002), which I also enjoyed, but I think I appreciated it even more as an adult.

A less well-known show that aired for a short time on Saturday mornings was Phantom Investigators (2002), which mixed together stop motion with puppetry and a little live action in a truly unique and entertaining way. The plot was a bit like a modern update on Scooby-Doo, only the supernatural is real, and the teens don’t have a pet dog, but three of them do have special abilities: telekinesis, telepathy, and shapeshifting. Unfortunately, Phantom Investigators only aired for one season and it’s difficult to find online these days. From what I remember, it had some ghosts and creatures that were actually pretty creepy, and I distinctly recollect noticing the strings on one of the monster puppets, but it still creeped me out even though I could tell it how the effect was achieved.

As great as those cartoons were (and there were even more than that), I’m going to maintain a focus on creepy kids’ shows that were specifically Canadian-produced. I didn’t know they were Canadian at the time—I was a kid, I didn’t care who made any of them, I just wanted to be entertained—but now with the aid of the internet I’ve come to realize how influential Canadian shows were in filling out mainstream channels like Teletoon and YTV with programming that was not all just jokes and light-hearted adventures. As a kid growing up in British Columbia in the early 2000s, there were a few shows I watched from the ages of six to ten that were targeted at kids like me who had an interest in the paranormal, the macabre, and the monstrous, but obviously they supplied a fun kind of fright and were not too intensely scary—for the most part.

One non-horror show that came a little later, closer to my teen years, was a cartoon aptly called 6Teen (2004-10). It was kind of like a Canadian, aged-down, animated version of Friends (also a show I grew up loving) about six teenagers who hang out at a giant mall and work various jobs. The last episode of the first season aired on October 27^th, 2005, and was an hour-long Halloween special called “Dude of the Living Dead” which I realized much later was primarily a spoof of the 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. The part that stuck with me the most was when the girl working at the taco stand (having turned into a zombie) serves unsuspecting main characters Wyatt and Jonesy tacos, and her severed thumb is in one of the tacos, and one of them almost eats the thumb! It seemed a bit disappointing even back then that the whole episode ends up just being a dream in the mind of the chilliest of the six teens, Jude (who is also obsessed with B-movies).

I used to watch re-runs of a show called Freaky Stories (1997-99), shown on YTV at night in the early-to-mid-2000s on weekends, but it originally aired around the time another famous anthology kids’ horror show was revived: Are You Afraid of the Dark? I may have seen some of the revival episodes or re-runs of that much longer running and more popular show, but I honestly don’t have any distinct memories of watching it, whereas Freaky Stories I distinctly remember watching, and being both disturbed and confused by it. I wasn’t told not to watch it, but I always felt like I was getting away with something when I was able to stay up late and tune in. There was a reason it didn’t air with the rest of the YTV shows during the daytime. If I caught it just as it was starting, the groovy-yet-eerie theme music got me in the mood to be freaked out—and it played during the end credits, too, which helped lodge it in my memory.

The premise for this anthology series is a blue cockroach named Larry de Bug and his friend Maurice the Maggot live in a 1950s-style diner and bridge the gaps between four individual short stories. Larry and Maurice’s segments are live-action. Larry is designed in the spirit of a Jim Henson-style puppet that looks like it would fit right in on the sitcom Dinosaurs, but Maurice has a seriously revolting design aesthetic—he’s eyeless, has a gooey, toothless mouth, and his pale, segmented body glistens with nasty slime! They’re purely comedic hosts, but I always found Maurice off-putting, and I never really understood the diner as a framing device for the show. It doesn’t have any impact on the stories, but is original and memorable. In fact, I found the Larry and Maurice skits more memorable than the freaky stories themselves.

Usually the stories weren’t that freaky, but they were almost always weird. One good thing about this show was if you tuned in midway through an episode, you didn’t feel like you missed too much, because the stories were very short, given it filled a half-hour timeslot. Every story always begins with, “This is a true story. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine.” It’s repeated at the end of every story, too, sometimes with follow-up about how the main character ended up later. The concepts for most of the stories were derived from urban legends and the kinds of creepy tales you would tell at a sleepover or campout. Each segment has a different, singular narrator who tells the whole story in past tense and usually does the voices for the different characters—yet another way this show was unique. The fast pace combined with the constantly evolving animation styles (some better than others) always kept me watching, even if the stories weren’t always that great. I think I might have enjoyed Freaky Stories more had I seen it a few years later. Some of the concepts went over my head, which is probably why I never remembered any specific episodes.

I revisited the first season of Freaky Stories this past summer (streamed on Tubi) and discovered just how messed up some of the stories I had forgotten about really were! In the first episode there’s a story about a dinner party that gets sabotaged by a kid who thinks his cat died because he ate some of the poisoned salmon served to the guests, and everyone throws up. Then, at the end, we find out it was actually the neighbour who ran over the cat and killed it and put it on their doorstep! This is not the only time something terrible happens to an animal in the show. As a kid I didn’t realize the stories in season one’s episodes had common themes, which makes sense to give them some thematic ties, but I think I never realized that because I rarely watched an episode from beginning to end—and because I was a clueless kid.

In Part Two I’ll be revisiting two more programs from my childhood that left even bigger impressions than Freaky Stories, so tune in next time as I continue to explore Creepy Canadian Kids’ Shows!

 

THANKSKILLING 3 DISSECTION

 

ThanksKilling 3: The Worst Movie Ever Made?

 

Part One: The Horror Begins

Let’s go back in time for a little flashback intro. The year is 2014. I am midway through university, my cousin is in high school, and we get together over the Thanksgiving long weekend to do something we always do: hang out and watch movies together. I’ve brought an indie-horror-comedy called ThanksKilling, which neither of us know much about aside from what the ridiculous DVD cover tells us, but it looks so bad that it might just be great. After 66 minutes of intense laughter and head scratching and our jaws constantly being left agape from the sheer absurdity of what is occurring on screen, we move on to watch other movies, but ThanksKilling doesn’t leave our minds, nor do we stop talking about it for the entire weekend.

Skip ahead to 2023. Ten years later, much has changed, but my cousin and I are still talking about ThanksKilling on Thanksgiving. We didn’t know it at the time, but watching that movie initiated an unintended tradition of the two of us watching a food-related horror-comedy every Thanksgiving for an entire decade. In October 2015 we were laughing and joking about ThanksKilling again and wondering if there could be an even more ridiculous movie like it out there. Thanks to Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness we found one that was in a whole other league from ThanksKilling—certainly a league of its own, in terms of unabashedly revolting filmmaking. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead left us mentally and emotionally scarred, and the next year I showed up to our Thanksgiving movie night with a DVD that was in the “Viewers who bought [ThanksKilling] also bought…” category on Amazon: The Gingerdead Man, which looked more in-line with ThanksKilling in terms of its premise and content compared to Poultrygeist. Instead of being a so-bad-it’s-good movie, it was so bad that it was just painful and pitiful.

Even though Gingerdead Man ended up sucking, we carried on the tradition the next year with Microwave Massacre, then after that it was The Stuff. In 2019 we watched one I had seen years before and realized fit pretty well into this food-related-horror subgenre we had delved into, even though it was also a cannibal film: Motel Hell. In the first year of the pandemic we were in the same social bubble so were able to watch another cannibalistic cinema catastrophe, Blood Diner, which neither of us had seen before. With my selection of films within the subgenre steadily dwindling, I dug up a classic for year eight, which is also considered a classic in the so-bad-it’s-good category: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. In 2022 we went international with Dead Sushi, and just like that, the tenth anniversary of our Thanksgiving food-related-horror-comedy movie night was upon us.

I decided we should go back to where it all began, and so we watched ThanksKilling 3, the fabled sequel to the movie that started the tradition.

It started as a fun movie night. It ended with us nearly in tears. Not from laughter. From pain.

Before I get this thing up on the chopping block and take the carving knife to it, I have to admit, I knew the risks going in. ThanksKilling was a fun movie. Ridiculous, yes, and really cheaply made, and amateurish in several ways, but genuinely funny and entertaining. Most of the reviews for it will tell you this, and I hope I made it clear in my own review that it won’t be for everyone, but for the right kind of viewer I think it’s worth checking out. The third film did not have such kind reviews when I first looked into it. There were multiple warnings about it being a “puppet film” that was unlike the first one and it wasn’t so bad that it was funny, it was just bad. So, for years I avoided buying it, but with such few options for films left, I wondered…could it really be that bad? My cousin and I have seen a lot of bad movies together. Earlier in 2023 we had watched Shark Exorcist, which had reached a new low in terms of horrible cinematic experiences. Surely Shark Exorcist is as bad as it could get. How could ThanksKilling 3 be worse?

Such an innocent question. Two such innocent cousins putting on a seemingly harmless DVD and hitting play, not realizing the agonizing torture they were about to endure for what would feel like an eternity of damnation.

The runtime was a bit longer than the original. ThanksKilling isn’t technically feature length, but ThanksKilling 3 was an hour and thirty-nine minutes. It felt like ten years to get through it. I don’t know how many times we checked to see how much longer was left.

I can’t even just come out and say ThanksKilling 3 is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life, if not the new definitive low for worst film of all-time. This needs to be a full blown dissection, but I promise you, it won’t be worse than watching the actual film. It can’t be. If you were to stick your head in an unflushed toilet with a snorkel in your mouth and hold your head in the bowl for the same amount of time it would take to watch ThanksKilling 3 it would be a more pleasant experience. Guaranteed.  

 

Part Two: The Status of “Sequel”

The first question ThanksKilling 3 presents is with that title. What happened to ThanksKilling 2? The very idea of a sequel was turned into both a marketing tool and a means of constructing an elaborate plot. If you look up ThanksKilling 2, you will find no results, because the movie does not exist. ThanksKilling 3 IS ThanksKilling 2. The DVD boasts “The First Movie to Skip Its Own Sequel” and at first the idea seems to be in line with the comedic nature of the original. From what I gather, ThanksKilling was a successful independent feature, and even though it didn’t get a major theatrical release, I’m willing to bet it made more than its budget back from DVD sales and digital downloads. So the premise of the follow-up leverages the first film’s success, and it sounds like a fun idea. In the world of ThanksKilling 3, the original film is well known and the fictional sequel ThanksKilling 2 has just come out at the start of the film. Turkie, the star of the original, is depicted as sort of a real creature/real actor/celebrity, but there’s a problem with ThanksKilling 2: it’s so bad, anyone who watches it dies!

ThanksKilling 3 is what you would call “metacinematic” which means it is bringing awareness to the fact that it is a movie. More than that, it is heavily emphasizing the sequel aspect, and while it does sound like a clever idea with potential, it seems this very approach is what doomed the entire project from the start. How appropriately ironic, then, that the fake sequel in this actual sequel is so bad that it’s been removed from existence and the last remaining copy is what Turkie is after, when the actual sequel itself is also so bad it should be removed from existence. The plot is not just about the quest for ThanksKilling 2, it is about so much more than that—and it should not have gotten so needlessly complicated. We don’t even get any glimpses of footage from ThanksKilling 2, because I think the writer forgot his own plot by the end due to all the shit he tried to cram into a project that seemed to want to be something other than a ThanksKilling sequel. Who is the writer behind this travesty, you ask? Is he the one to blame?

 

Part Three: The Man Behind It All

Jordan Downey is probably not such a bad guy in real life. He’s an indie filmmaker from Ohio who made the original ThanksKilling as part of a college project, and he made it with only a $3500 budget. As ridiculous and stupid as that movie was, it was clearly something of a passion project made by someone with a fondness for those kinds of films. Apparently his favourite movie of all-time is the original Critters, which checks out, and he made ThanksKilling with films like that in mind. He also made it with his friends and even family members helping out. He co-wrote the screenplay with collaborators Kevin Stewart and Brad Schulz, two guys whose senses of humour clearly aligned with Downey’s own, and Downey himself voiced Turkie, who is the best character in the film. ThanksKilling is pretty entertaining, for what it is.

Downey made ThanksKilling 3 under very different circumstances from the original. With that one, he had a great idea for a silly premise never done before. As with any sequel, there was the pressure to deliver more of what made the first one entertaining but also not just make the same movie over again. He once again collaborated with Kevin Stewart on the script, but Mike Will Downey is also credited as a screenwriter, and I have to presume he is Jordan’s relative—a brother, most likely. Instead of just voicing Turkie, Jordan Downey voiced several characters, but one of the big problems is that Downey’s not exactly a talented voice actor. I could voice several characters in a movie, too—in fact, I’ve literally done this, when I made my own puppet movie with my friend when we were in grade nine—and guess what? All the characters kind of sound the same. Even though Downey tries to change his voice, it’s obviously him each time, and it gets incredibly annoying incredibly fast not just because of the dialogue, but because he’s saying too many lines. I was surprised to discover he actually voiced fewer characters than I thought at first (only three) but that’s actually just a criticism of the other voice actors, because a few of them sound very similarly annoying.  

I don’t know if I can entirely blame Downey for how bad ThanksKilling 3 turned out, in the same way that I don’t know if I can solely congratulate him on the success of the first ThanksKilling. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, but there’s something about ThanksKilling 3 that comes off as decidedly less collaborative compared to the first. It’s like a twisted vanity project for Downey, almost like a Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen production. One of the biggest contributors to the reason Downey botched this sequel, though, was how much money he had at his disposal for the production.

 

Part Four: The Bigger the Budget, the Harder they Fail

The first ThanksKilling was made for $3500 and it shows. The locations are unremarkable, the acting is bad, the Turkie puppet is cheap-looking, and the music, sound, and cinematography are all pretty low quality. None of that stopped the movie from being entertaining, though, because it was shot just well enough to capture the humour in the script and bring to life the director’s bizarre ideas. For the sequel, Downey managed to raise way more money through a Kickstarter campaign. He amassed $112,248 to produce ThanksKilling 3, which was the largest sum of money ever raised for a film through a crowdfunding platform at the time it was made. Unlike before, this time he could make the movie pretty much any way he wanted to.

He blew it.

After I watched the 2015 film Tsunambee I thought that was one of the biggest wastes of a film budget ever. That movie was made for $780,000 and looks like it was made for less than half that. ThanksKilling 3 doesn’t look far off from what the budget was—it looks about right for the money he had, but this movie is now the new standard for wasting a modest budget because the money was spent in some of the worst possible ways to make a truly terrible sequel. They could have made so many different choices with that money and made something infinitely better than what they ended up making.

As I’ve mentioned before, this movie has a lot of puppetry in it. The original ThanksKilling had the Turkie puppet and that was it, and it wasn’t as if he was supposed to be a puppet. He was a killer turkey and the rest of the cast were people trying to survive the massacre. This time, there are more puppet characters than real people, but they are supposed to be puppets (I think?) so they are often shot on sets built to accommodate the puppeteers. Obviously the majority of the budget went toward set design/construction, puppet design/fabrication, and some digital effects, but it was all for nothing. We’ve seen it again and again: a great filmmaker loses their touch when there are no limits put on them. We saw it with George Lucas, with Steven Spielberg, and it happened with Jordan Downey—except not quite, let me back up. Downey is entire realms away from the two master directors I just mentioned. He probably shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys, but the principle is still the same: he had far fewer limits when it came to making ThanksKilling 3, and the surplus of budget ended up being a detriment to what he could create.

ThanksKilling was shot in only 11 days. It took less than two weeks to get all the footage they needed, but ThanksKilling 3 took over 50 days to shoot. I can’t imagine spending so much more time, money, thought, and effort into making a sequel like this and having it be such a waste of all those things, but ThanksKilling 3 was doomed from the start, it seems, because of the director’s intentions.

 

Part Five: The Wrong Kind of Movie

Why a puppet movie? Why not anything other than that kind of movie? And it’s not even fully committed to being a puppet movie! It’s like 75 % a puppet movie and 25 % regular terrible live-action movie. It’s not a puppet movie in the spirit of The Muppets or anything like that, it’s more like Meet the Feebles or Team America: World Police—at least, that’s what it wishes it could be, but it can’t come close, for all the reasons I’ve already covered up to this point and more.

ThanksKilling comes off as a film that knows exactly what it is and why it exists. It’s the low budget execution of a simple idea made to entertain. ThanksKilling 3 is a hodgepodge of too many ideas thrown into a film that has no distinct identity. It isn’t an effective comedy because it isn’t funny. It isn’t a horror movie because it isn’t scary or even revolting or gory. It isn’t an entertaining sci-fi flick because the special effects are a stretch even with the higher budget and crazily inconsistent and the concepts are stale. And yet, it tries to dabble in all these genres, plus others, and can’t do any of them justice.

Saddest of all is it can’t even get it right in being so-bad-it’s-good. It’s an earnest effort even with tongue firmly in cheek, but it’s not like the original: a movie that found a way to be self-aware yet still ended up being so terrible in its execution that it was funny. It’s like Sharknado in its effort to be bad and therefore great, but turned out even worse because it is such a stew of bad. Here’s just one ingredient in this unpalatable stew: making Turkie the default main character. ThanksKilling used a basic horror formula—group of dumb teens is stalked by a killer, only the killer is Turkie. This time, it starts with Turkie as the sort-of-protagonist, I guess? But then he kills his wife and becomes the villain, and the protagonist role is filled by this new puppet character who has lost her mind? There’s also a real human character and a worm puppet involved, somehow. This is just one example of what’s wrong with this movie. So many things are wrong that each wrong thing weighs on your brain like a brick, slowly crushing your mind and your ability to comprehend it until it collapses in on itself from the stupidity.

 

Part Six: Is There Anything Good to Say?

I think the analogy I used while we were watching was something along these lines: this movie is the equivalent of a three-year-old kid screaming and yanking on your pant leg trying desperately to get your attention and part of you just wants to kick the kid away but you can’t because you want to see if it can possibly get any louder and more annoying before it finally passes out.

I’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel here to get even a smear of something positive. I mean, it didn’t look worse than the first one, at least in terms of cinematography. The puppet effects are still cheap and lame, but the greater abundance of bad effects increases how bad it is overall. The one element that I can say is definitively good is the music, and that’s only because it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The techno tracks were composed by Zain Effendi, and I’m sure he just made some cool music and let Jordan Downey use it and that was about it. It isn’t as if the music sounds particularly suited to what is happening on screen at any given moment, and it seems Downey knew on some level the music was really the only truly good thing the movie had going for it based on the marketing. There are some other minor details that could have been entertaining in isolation, like when Turkie fights another ancient turkey in the style of a 16-bit video game cutscene, but any potentially good ideas are shrouded by the glaring errors that plague every minute of every scene.

I’ll include something positive at the end: the links to my reviews of all the better food-related horror movies I've reviewed in the past, including the original ThanksKilling, which explains how someone could fall victim to this catastrophic sequel.

 

Part Seven: I’m Done

I had dreamed of making a long video essay-style review of the original ThanksKilling many moons ago when I still made videos semi-regularly, but my video production days have steadily faded into my past as I’ve become more focused on writing and my career. I did eventually write a review for ThanksKilling, and it ended up being pretty short, because I realized I could sum up all the important stuff to say about it in relatively few words and still be satisfied with telling the world about this ridiculous movie, even if it wasn’t how I originally envisioned doing it.

This review is the ThanksKilling review epic I didn’t know I needed to make, but I never could have predicted ThanksKilling 3 would actually give me more to write/rant/rave about than the original. It has been therapeutic for me to make this, because I needed to ensure the experience of having endured the entire movie wasn’t for nothing. We could’ve turned it off…and we probably should have. But, since we didn’t, I had to get it all out. I’m not sorry this review turned into a full-blown dissection, because if you made it this far, then you’ve experienced ThanksKilling 3 in a more entertaining way than properly watching it, and you’ve saved yourself from watching what might be one of the worst movies of all-time, so it’s a win-win, as far as I’m concerned.

 

Related

ThanksKilling (2009) Review: http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/thankskilling-2009-review.html

Poultrygeist (2006) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/10/poultrygeist-night-of-chicken-dead-2006.html

Gingerdead Man (2005) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-gingerdead-man-2005-review_30.html

Microwave Massacre (1983) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/microwave-massacre-1983-review.html

Motel Hell (1980) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/motel-hell-1980-review.html

The Stuff (1985) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-stuff-1985-review.html

Blood Diner (1987) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2023/10/blood-diner-1987-review.html

Dead Sushi (2012) Review:

http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2023/10/dead-sushi-2012-review.html