Thumb Wars – The Phantom Cuticle & Bat Thumb
I watched these ripped from the original DVDs you gave me and not in their 4K remastered versions that are now available on YouTube, but I’ll sat this – I think they were bullshitting on YouTube. They look exactly as bad as they do from DVD.
The LA Times released a story about Steve Odekirk shortly after the release of his Martin Lawrence-Tim Robbin’s “comedy” Nothing to Lose, a movie that likely haunts Robbins more than Howard the Duck and earned a 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. This was right before he was doing a Tv special, on some unknown corner of the Fox Network seems likely, that was called “steve.odekerk.com.” In the LA Times piece there’s this quote: “But man, put me on a stage with 15 new minutes, and I don’t know if it’s great or if it sucks–that is the thrill that I love.”
Guess what, Steve. 9 times out of 10, I bet it will suck. And make that 10 out of 10 if it involves your fucking thumb.
His biggest claim to fame might be, honestly, what is listed under the “Did You Know” section of his IMDB profile: “Is good friends with Jim Carrey.”
That said, this doesn’t explain it all away. Oderkirk has, until around 2010 or so, had a lot of success writing and sometimes directing some pretty terrible things that have made a lot of money.
His fucking credit list… ugh. I liked the Ace Ventura movies, but almost anything else this guy has been connected to is terrible. The Nutty Professor movies with Eddie Murphy. The Bruce/Evan Almighty movies. Patch Adams. He wrote fucking Patch Adams in which Robin Williams tries to save dying kids with laughter. But the way, the film holds a 21% fresh rating but was somehow nominated for a Best Picture Golden Globe. To me, this is where Robin Williams lost his groove almost completely. With the exception of Insomnia, almost everything he did after 1997’s Patch Adams was either with his terribly miscast in a lead role or relegated to a minor one, as he was in the Night at the Museum movies. Previous to Patch Adams? The Fisher King, Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting, Awakenings, Good Morning Vietnam, Jumanji, Dead Poet’s Society,l. After: Bicentennial Man, RV, One Hour Photo, Okd Dogs, Man of the Year and World’s Greatest Dad. Clunkers, the whole lot of ’em.
Send Mike to Wikipedia to look at Odekirk’s photo. He looks like a thumb-character version of Seth McFarland, for whatever that’s worth.
You ever read a Wikipedia article or IMDB bio and think, oh I bet this was written by the person himself? That’s both for Odekirk. 100% he has somehow polished the turds of his career into gold.
How many Thumb! movie are collected in the 6-DVD set called “All Thumbs?” I have no idea. It’s nearly three hours, so one would assume six, but I think there are many more that are shorter than these two, including one called Freddy Got Thumbed that was mentioned in an Amazon Review and was the only laugh Odekirk managed to get out of me since the Ace Ventura movies. I don’t even know if it’s real, but whatever.
After a series of TV failures including two series he based on his Jimmy Neutron movie and some terrible-looking CG mess he made called “Barnyard,” he’s sunk so low that he’s got a Thumbs! TikTok channel called SHBoom with, I shit you not, only 22 followers, with content consisting solely of Thump Vs. Thumala debate snippets. JFC.
Interestingly, both steveoderkirk.com and Omation.com (his animation studio’s web domain) have gone tits-up. All he has now is thumbs.com.
THUMB WARS
(there is zero tie to the Phantom Menace other than that this was released the same year. The story follows A New Hope.
- Steve Odekirk – in silhouette as if in the witness protection program.
- Thumby – what the fuck?! I’m seeing the Padme and Anakin meme here. You’re doing this as a goddamn goof? Right? :: Anakin Smirk::: RIGHT?!?!
- I just watched a thumb get shot in the dick
- Black Helmut Man? This is feeling too much like Spaceballs, but with thumbs.
- Vader’s helmut is a fucking thimble.
- Look Groundrunner – JFC
- At least they’re making fun of Luke whining.
- There’s a lot of misogynist shit in this already. You cry like a girl.
- Droids are called Digits.
- Obi Wan is Oobie Woop Be Doopie
- They look under the Leia hologram’s skirt.
- Oobie tries to tongue kiss Like to make things official??
- Do not underestimate the power of the thumb.
- Why do we speak in British accents. WHY DO YOU SPEAK IN ENGLISH AT ALL?! This is not funny. None of this is funny nor is it clever.
- Hand Doit. – names all Harrison Ford’s movie because… I don’t know why. He is paid in Gil giggles.
- Crunchy is Chewy. Of course he is.
- Gobbadebutt – Jabba the Hutt
- The Milennium Falcon is called… Han’s Hand. I hate this. It is of course shaped like a hand.
- The Death Star is a thumb. FFS.
- Instead of blowing up Leila’s planet, Daldar, they spin it?
- They dual with lightsabers that come out of their nails on the back of their heads.
- I’ll admit, Crunchy is actually funny looking.
- Yoda is literally a puppet and introduces himself as such.
- Yoda also tries to touch tongues with Luke.
- They’re trying to make fun of the Deathstar weakness, which back in 1999 maybe was cutting edge, but post Rogue One just seems super dated.
- Leia is bunhead.
- Let’s just do almost identical scenes to this at the end of Star Wars because clearly that is funny.
- Join me on the nail side of the thumb… FFS.
- Luke I am your mother: whips out pink dress.
- The fact that any money was spent on this horseshit shows us why Capitalism will kill us all.
- Jesus, Steve Odekirk did like ten voices.
- CG effects were way better than they had any right being.
BAT THUMB
- Odekirk cannot introduce the segment due to a wee-lo accident. So it is instead handled by a can of beets. That was sort of funny, but a whee-lo? It’s a toy from the 1950’s. WHY???
- Kudos to the dude who does the music and approximates the scores of the original movies.
- Gotham is, of course, GAAATHUMB. Fuck.
- So, like, the thumbs of the Star Wats movie looked real. But in this movie they often look like plastic thumbs. What the shit?
- The thumbs have hands. Goddamn it. Did they have hands in the other one?
- Wuce Bane = Bruce Wayne, Viki Nail = Viki Vale – These are JOKES???
- Oddly, the Bruce Wayne in this one sounds and acts more like Christian Bale
- Every joke is a train wreck except it would be super easy to look away.
- Chief: Are there any women there. Great, I will be right over. Then Wuce makes the same fucking joke.
- Alfred = Fred. Nothing is funny here. Ever.
- The throwbacks to the Batman tv show are… dumb? I guess I like the spinning transitions but I don’t understand the point of any of this.
- Cores through the entire Earth and found a Chinaman to help him. I don’t think that is the preferred nomenclature.
- Why is No Face, the bag guy, British?
- Robin is dressed like a bird and helps while riding his sister’s bike? He is called Blue Jay.
- Sort of funny how they reenacted the climb up the wall with a rope from the original show.
- No face talks like Bane but this was 2001, so how? Also, No Face is a thumb without the stupid visual effect that puts a face on him.
- No Thumb has this ludicrous Rube Goldberg machine than will remove Batthumb and Blue Jay’s faces, and it’s more James Bond than anything in Batman.
- “You’re like a sissy,” Batthumb to Blue Jay
- This doesn’t appear to be anything someone who watched Burton’s Batman would have written.
- God, you would think this would be better than the Thumb Wars but fuck; it is soooo much worse.
Bottom Five Gimmicks:
Gimmicks. Is there a dirtier word in cinema? I don’t think so. A gimmick is like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat—except instead of a rabbit, it’s a half-baked idea, and instead of a hat, it’s a multi-million-dollar studio budget. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are good gimmicks—clever ideas that add something to the story or experience. But the ones we’re talking about today? They’re the bad kind. The desperate, ill-conceived, creatively bankrupt kind that either distract you from how little substance the movie has or bury an otherwise decent film under the weight of its own ridiculous conceit.
So here’s how I approached this list: the gimmick had to be central to the film. It’s not a marketing stunt like something William Castle would put out – like shocking audience members through their seats with “The Tingler” or giving them spirit glasses for “13 Ghosts”; the gimmicks here had to be the movie. These are the films that leaned so heavily on their one bad idea I’m surprised they weren’t elected to Trump’s cabinet. And I’m not saying a gimmick can’t sometimes be entertaining—I personally LOVE that “Clue” had three endings—but for the movies on this list? The gimmick was either poorly executed, completely unnecessary, or just plain stupid.
5. Diary of the Dead (2007)
Dir. George A. Romero
Gimmick: “Found footage” meets zombies.
Imagine being George A. Romero, the guy who basically invented the modern zombie movie, and thinking, “You know what’s been missing from my zombie oeuvre? Shaky cam and people yelling, ‘Are you still filming this?!’” Enter Diary of the Dead, where Romero takes his Dead franchise and crams it into the “found footage” genre, the same one already overrun by low-budget horror hacks in the wake of The Blair Witch Project.
The concept isn’t inherently bad: document a zombie apocalypse in real-time, with all the rawness and immediacy of handheld footage. But in execution? Oof. Every camera angle feels suspiciously cinematic for a movie that’s supposed to look amateur. Add to that a cast of characters so grating that you start rooting for the zombies. And then there’s the constant commentary about the media, which is about as subtle as a zombie gnawing on a leg.
Romero’s earlier works (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) are brilliant social commentaries wrapped in gore. This one? It’s like he thought shouting “MEDIA BAD” for 90 minutes would carry the same weight. Spoiler: It doesn’t.
4. Mad Max: Fury Road Chrome Edition (2016)
Dir. George Miller
Gimmick: It’s the same movie, but black-and-white.
Look, I’m not going to sit here and say Fury Road isn’t a masterpiece. It’s a high-octane ballet of fire and metal, a two-hour car chase that somehow works as art. But then George Miller decided we needed the exact same movie… in black and white. And suddenly, we’re supposed to believe this is a whole new experience because “color is a distraction.”
I’m sorry, what? Color was a key part of Fury Road! The vivid oranges of the desert, the stark blue of the night scenes, the chrome spray paint on the War Boys’ faces—it all added to the insanity. Stripping the movie of color doesn’t make it “more artistic”; it makes it feel like someone hit the “desaturate” button in Photoshop and called it a day.
Sure, some die-hard cinephiles will argue this version highlights the film’s composition and lighting, but let’s be real: this was a gimmick to squeeze a few more bucks out of fans who already own the Blu-ray. And the worst part? It worked.
3. The Expendables (2010)
Dir. Sylvester Stallone
Gimmick: Assemble all the aging action stars into one big, dumb action movie.
The gimmick here is simple: What if we took every action hero from the ’80s and ’90s, put them in one movie, and made things explode for two hours? And honestly? For the first Expendables, it kind of works. There’s a dumb, giddy charm to seeing Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and a bunch of other testosterone-fueled legends chewing scenery and spitting out bad one-liners.
But the problem is that once you’ve seen one Expendables movie, you’ve seen them all. The formula is basically: Stallone grumbles something unintelligible, Jason Statham throws a knife, Jet Li fights three dudes at once, and then a building explodes. Rinse, repeat. By the time we get to the sequels, the whole thing starts to feel like a retirement home field trip where everyone forgot their meds.
The first movie at least had a spark of creativity. The rest of the series? It’s just a collection of “Remember this guy?” moments strung together with duct tape and CGI explosions.
2. Cool World (1992)
Dir. Ralph Bakshi
Gimmick: Animation meets live action… for adults.
Take the premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—animation and live action combined in a fantastical world—and make it “sexy.” That’s Cool World. Except it’s not sexy. It’s not even coherent. It’s just a weird fever dream where Brad Pitt looks perpetually confused, Kim Basinger voices an animated femme fatale with the depth of a cardboard cutout, and Gabriel Byrne looks like he’s regretting every career choice that led him here.
The movie’s big gimmick is its attempt to make a gritty, adult-oriented hybrid of live action and animation. But instead of edgy, it’s just awkward. The live-action characters interact with the animated ones as if they’re on completely different planets, and the animation itself feels like it’s constantly trying to escape the screen.
Bakshi is a legend in the world of animation, but this feels like the work of someone who had a cool idea and absolutely no plan for how to execute it. The result is a disjointed mess that’s neither fun nor thought-provoking. If Cool World proves anything, it’s that not every “dark” version of a successful formula (Roger Rabbit) is a good idea.
1. The Emoji Movie (2017)
Dir. Tony Leondis
Gimmick: “Let’s make a movie about emojis!”
What if we took the tiny icons you use in text messages and turned them into an entire animated feature? That’s the kind of pitch that’s not just a bad idea—it’s a cynical idea. And yet, somehow, The Emoji Movie exists, with its core gimmick being, essentially, “people love emojis, so they’ll definitely love a movie about emojis.”
The film’s director, Tony Leondis, was no stranger to animation. He’d previously directed Igor (2008), a quirky story about a hunchbacked lab assistant with aspirations of greatness, and Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch (2005), a solid direct-to-video Disney sequel. But where those projects had at least some creative charm, The Emoji Movie feels like the result of a brainstorming session where “brand synergy” was the only goal.
The story centers on Gene, a “meh” emoji who feels too many emotions (yes, really), and his quest to, I don’t know, find self-acceptance or something? Along the way, the movie stuffs in as many brand tie-ins as possible, with whole scenes dedicated to promoting apps like Candy Crush, Just Dance, and Dropbox. It’s less a film and more a corporate PowerPoint presentation dressed up as a kid’s movie.
The gimmick of anthropomorphizing digital icons might have worked if the film had anything interesting to say. But instead, it’s a soulless cash grab that treats its audience—kids, no less—like walking dollar signs. Critics tore it apart, audiences rolled their eyes, and even the cast (hello, Sir Patrick Stewart as the Poop Emoji) seemed embarrassed to be involved.
If you want the ultimate example of a bad cinema gimmick, this is it: a movie that exists purely because some executive thought, “What if we made emojis talk?”
Mike’s Next Movie: Beverly Hills Cop 3
Mike, in 1994, 7 years after the second installment in this franchise and 10 since the first, famed-turned-infamous comedy director John Landis saddled into the driver’s seat for the second sequel about a Detroit cop who, for reasons too convoluted to get into now, keeps ending up in California to solve crimes. Landis had already lost the thread on his career, which strangely continued on despite what’s described as gross negligence on the set of his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie during which actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed in a stunt gone wrong. Instead of going to jail, he directed Oscar starring Sylvester Stallone. I’m unsure what is worse. But you’re not going to watch Oscar, because unlike you, I’m not THAT cruel. Instead, you’re viewing the third movie in the Beverly Hills Cop series, a movie so bad that it sunk the franchise for 30 years before Eddie Murphy returned to the character he made famous in the eponymously titled Axel F for Netflix. After Beverly Hills Cop 3, a lot of people’s lives changed perhaps for the worse, not the least of which was Murphy’s as he went on to star in many a family film stinker including The Nutty Professor, Dr. Doolittle and holy shit, The Adventures of Pluto Nash.