Exact change only.

It was April 15th and it was a lovely 72 degrees in Los Angeles that Saturday afternoon, and I would’ve been able to enjoy it, were I not at that moment driving down Melrose Ave — a particularly shitty stretch of city street with a right lane that every other block or so alternates between drive-able road and literal parking space.

Drivers like me who know better stick to the left lane, while those on the right lane wait for the last possible moment to switch onto the left in a panic, either because they’re new to Melrose and weren’t aware of what waited ahead of them, or the much more aggravating reason: Because they’re assholes in a rush, switching back and forth to get past as many cars as possible just so they can get to their unimportant destination even faster, so that they have more time to do nothing.

I wish I could crash into these children of God, pull the dazed fucks out of their vehicle, and calmly tell them that mine is a daily battle to maintain good vibes towards my fellow humans while accepting all their frailties, because I too am human, so I too exhibit faults. But you know what fault I don’t have? Driving like an inconsiderate piece of shit. And it takes so much of my life force to forgive flippant scumbags like them who with their flippant scumbaggery are needlessly causing me to waste this precious energy I’d otherwise save for the truly appreciative. 

Then I’d throw them onto the path of an oncoming bus in the opposite lane and watch the bus explode that person’s body, showering the entire Melrose District in blood, bone, piss, shit, viscera, and fast fashion. Then horrified onlookers would notice my joy and have the unmitigated gall to call me a monster — which I would then justify by grabbing and shoving them onto the path of other oncoming buses, and before their brief painful transfer from this miserable world into Oblivion, those people would learn the most important lesson of all: Don’t be judgmental on Bus Day. 

But I didn’t have time for any of that, because I was on my way to Fairfax Ave, to what used to be known as the Cinefamily’s Silent Movie Theater, a pretty awesome place up until it became known that the men in charge did with their authority as most men in charge do with their authority: Abuse the fuck out of it in a sex-type way. (I would’ve done something about it myself, except the buses weren’t running that day.) 

The place closed down for a few years, but has since returned under new ownership and management, and has been re-moniker’d Brain Dead Studios, after the clothing company behind it. One can only hope that the Brain Dead crew will come correct as human goddamn beings for the time being. But because I assume everybody is a secret scumbag, I figure we’ll have a few good years of great times before brand new bombshells drop onto this regime.  

What I found upon arrival was the same building but with a totally different look, feel, and vibe inside and out — even the staff seemed friendlier. But to be fair, I was a lot more standoffish back in the Cinefamily era, whereas this time I walked in with a cheery disposition, which might explain why my interactions were more pleasant with the employees as I asked about the parking situation and as I bought candy at the snack bar to help me with the later hours of this marathon. 

Oh yeah, I forgot: I was here for CyberJunk, a 12-hour movie marathon of low-budget science-fiction fare  from the 1980s, presented on 16mm film prints, thanks to Secret Sixteen‘s Mike Williamson who presents features in that format at various cinemas all throughout the Southland. Each film was a mystery title that we wouldn’t know about until it actually screened, and the cherry on top of this sundae was that the marathon would begin at 2pm and end by 2am; as I learned from last year’s Sunshine and Noir marathon at the Aero Theatre, the only thing better than an all-night marathon is an all-day marathon, especially when you’re old like me.

Because I had arrived early, I walked around the premises to take in the new era; upstairs was a shop featuring Brain Dead clothing as well as vinyl records for sale, and in the back was Slammers Cafe, a nice shaded outdoor patio area where one could step out to have a Vietnamese iced coffee or avocado toast, among other eats and treats. 

I then sat down and passed the time silently judging each new person who walked in, until Williamson went up on stage, joined by Josh Miller from Friday Night Frights, and Bret Berg from AGFA and the Museum of Home Video. We were told that all the films — except for one borrowed from a friend — were from Williamson’s collection. We were also told that they normally hold a horror movie marathon in October, and while that will continue, they will also continue to have marathons in the Spring focusing on other genres, joking that they were looking into showing dramadies and 1930s Westerns.

Williamson then talked about how the 1980s were his favorite era when it came to the visual representation of fantasy on film; this was the height of the use of animatronics, models, and matte paintings, all of it done directly by hand, rather than programmed into ones and zeroes. The films that we were about to watch, he said, were examples of filmmakers who had meager budgets to execute their grand visions, but nevertheless did their best to make it work.

Before the film, we were treated to a pre-show consisting of trailers for Tron, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Return of the Jedi (under the original title “Revenge of the Jedi”), Endangered Species, The Visitor, and Galaxy of Terror. 

Following that was a curious short film from the 1950s titled “Bitter End”, starring a young DeForest Kelley as a man who is out of work, out of money, and he’s about to be out on his ass for not paying his overdue rent. There’s only one thing left for him to do: Commit suicide. He turns up the gas on his stove and waits for the sweet smell of death to take him, only to be interrupted by a telegram from the gas company: Due to his unpaid bills, the gas has been shut off. Then he looks at the camera and laughs, saying “What do you know? I can’t even afford to die!” and that’s it, fade to black.

We were told that the first mystery film was directed by someone who recently passed away, and who in his career put out so many dystopian low-budget fare in the 80s and 90s, he could very well be considered “the king of Cyberjunk”. The late director in reference turned out to be Albert Pyun, and the film in question was 1989’s post-apocalyptic kick-puncher Cyborg, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. 

It’s a shame that this print — which otherwise looked and sounded great — cuts off the first half of the opening narration, because it’s that narration that makes this one of my all-time favorite openings to a film; the narrator tells us about how civilization has collapsed and a plague has decimated the population, but now there’s news that work has begun on a cure. Except it turns out that the narrator doesn’t want there to be a cure, because the narrator is in fact, the hero of this film (in my humble opinion), who makes it very clear by screaming “I like the death. I like the misery. I LIKE THIS WORLD!”

His name is Fender, and he’s played by Vincent Klyn, who makes quite the visual impression with his jacked bod and creepy-looking eyes that he hides behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses that he only takes off when he’s about to fuck somebody up. As he said in the narration, and as he says again a couple minutes later to a soon-to-be-victim, he sees a silver lining in the deaths of billions of people, and that’s why I totally relate to Fender as a fellow misanthrope. 

Hell, I’m really just a diet & exercise regimen and a pair of sunglasses away from becoming Fender. I mean, we can all pretend the pandemic is over but it’s probably just doing what comic book villains do when they get defeated — declare that this isn’t the last time we’ll see them. And so, now that the virus gods have seen what we are willing to sacrifice — which is to say, very little in the grand scheme — they’re gonna come back and fuck our asses harder than the Iron Sheik in Humble mode. And once this world is decimated by the remix, that’s when I go into Fender mode. 

(In the meantime, I’m taking applications for anyone who wants to be part of my gang. But understand that I will occasionally have to kill one of you as punishment for failure, and as way to show others that I mean business.)

In the way of Fender’s plans is what the film and everybody else who watches this movie has wrongly designated the “hero”, and that is Van Damme’s character Gibson, who’s some asshole all in his feelings because my boy Fender killed Gibson’s wife and kid — sparing the world more humans who will just take up space and use their phones in a movie theater. So he’s on a mission of vengeance, following my dude as he and his crew forcibly escort the titular cyborg from New York to Atlanta, because her cyber-cranium contains important info that could help a group of doctors in the land of Coca-Cola and the ’96 Summer Olympics find a cure to the plague. 

Oddly paced and edited fight scenes ensue, but they’re enjoyable because they break the dreariness involving sad-ass Van Damme’s monotonous attempts to emote. He doesn’t have that much dialogue to begin with, and yet, even scenes of him just staring felt like work to get through, and maybe someone with a little more acting ability — or hell, Van Damme a few years later, once he started doing coke — could’ve made the non-action scenes less of a slog. But like I said, every time he stops being a morose mope and starts putting foot to ass — in slow motion and multiple angles — everything feels all right.

The other problem is the same problem I have with many of Pyun’s films; they’re just sometimes too downbeat. It’s why I prefer his more upbeat work, like Alien from L.A. or Brain Smasher: A Love Story. I feel he often mistook abject misery for Drama, which would often result in an oppressively bleak tone that dampened any possible enjoyment. I always wondered if Pyun’s favorite entry from the Alien series was the third one, simply because of how it begins and ends.

Otherwise this is an OK Z-movie given some aesthetic punch by Pyun, who in collaboration with his cinematographer, production designer and costume department, sometimes make the film look and feel like a live-action Fist of the North Star. The bad guys in particular scream Generic Post-Apocalyptic Anime, while the main bad guy just screams — specifically during the rainy climax where Fender and Gibson face off.

That’s the best part of the whole movie, by the way, and honestly, while I might not recommend watching the entire film, I do feel the climax is well worth looking up online. I doubt I’ll ever watch this film again, but I am interested in watching Pyun’s director’s cut, titled “Slinger”, and which reflects his original vision of the film before Van Damme and his partner Sheldon Lettich recut it. 

In conclusion, the screenplay is credited to Pyun’s cat, Kitty Chalmers. They say if you put a hundred monkeys in a room with a hundred typewriters, eventually one of them will write the works of Shakespeare. But give one cat a computer, and you’ll get Cyborg.

During the break, I went to Slammers Cafe; my strategy for movie marathons is to go in with an empty stomach, sticking only to water and black coffee, so as to limit discomfort and/or sluggishness. I usually wait until the last couple movies to indulge with snacks and sugary drinks. But because this was an all-day marathon, I decided to indulge a tiny bit of the sweet along with my caffeine fix, and so, for the first time in my life, I had Sno-Caps, the little chocolate drops with nonpareils of sugar on them. I loved them, and can’t believed I waited so long to finally get around to trying them out.

I then returned to my seat, chomping on Sno-caps and sipping on a hot Americano, while Williamson introduced the second movie by telling the audience that it was the one he was most excited to watch with us. He said that it came out in 1989 — the same year that Cyborg was released — and had a decent rollout of 500 screens in the United States, only to crash and burn at the box office, opening at number 12. He excitedly told us about how it represented all the things he loves about lower-budgeted sci-fi; models, robots, and opticals, as well as a strong hook that reminded him of something you’d see on “The Twilight Zone”. 

The second film was Millennium, directed by Michael Anderson of Logan’s Run and Around the World in 80 Days fame, and written by John Varley, who adapted from his own short story “Air Raid”. It stars Kris Kristofferson as Bill, an investigator for the NTSB who arrives at the scene of a fatal jetliner crash, where he listens to the black box recording and sifts through the wrecked remains, and more importantly, makes the carnal acquaintance of lovely ticket agent Louise (Cheryl Ladd). 

This entire section is both intriguing in regards to the investigation of the plane crash, and amusing in the casual way Bill and Louise get to know each other, flirt, and eventually hook up — mostly because Louise is fast-forwarding to the good parts, so to speak. There’s a moment that has to be an improv by Kristofferson; as he and Louise walk off together, his hand hovers over her ass as if were about to give it a nice grab, before finally moving away. The audience had a real laugh at that.

So Bill and Louise get down, and the following morning, she disappears from his hotel room, which I’m certainly used to having happen to me; every woman I’ve slept with leaves in such a rush afterward, and they’re usually crying and muttering things like “I hope my friends don’t find out” or “How could I have been so desperate” or “I’d never seen one that small before” and I have no idea what any of that means, but you try making sense out of drunk talk. Then I try calling them back and they’re like “oh I forgot I’m lesbian thank you goodbye”. Fickle-ass broads.

But to Bill, it’s an unpleasant and unnerving surprise; he likes this lady and now she’s gone. So now he has three mysteries to solve: What happened on-board that ill-fated flight, where the hell’s his chick, and what’s with this weird silver handheld contraption with blinking lights that he just found in the wreckage? To say more would be spoiling this 30-plus year-old movie, but suffice it to say, it turns out that Louise is from the future — and the future’s environment is all kinds of fucked up. (Thanks Republicans!)

The story plays out as if we were watching three consecutive short films — all of them very entertaining. The first plays out like a mystery/romance, the second is post-apocalyptic future shock as we see the world Louise comes from, and the third is a fun time-travel flick where we revisit the events of the first third of the film from a different perspective. The structure kept me interested in seeing where the filmmakers were going with this, giving just enough info with each passing minute to prevent me from getting impatient or confused. 

Sidebar: If you’re a fan of undercover Canadian productions that try to pass themselves off as being all-American, then put this film on your watchlist. Sure, for the leads, you have Kris Kristofferson, who is a true American hero, and you have Cheryl Ladd, who is a true American beauty, and you have Daniel J. Travanti, who played a true American pig on “Hill Street Blues”. But our red, white, and blue trio are an island of Freedom surrounded by a sea of socialized maple syrup in the form of Canuck character actors who at one time or another have appeared in either a David Cronenberg or Atom Egoyan film, or at the very least attended a dinner party with either or both in attendance. 

Anyway, this played well with the crowd, we laughed at funny moments both intentional and unintentional. I think the unintentional laughs came from this feeling like a 1950s science-fiction movie, and I mean that in the most complimentary of ways, because there are plenty of classic sci-fi films of that era that remain great while being hilariously dated in one way or another, and they usually present outlandish scenarios that are played out in the most ultra-serious manner by everyone involved. Even the opening title of this film looked and felt like something from a 50s drive-in flick; it comes flying towards the screen while the music score blares in a style usually reserved for Quatermass joints.

As for the intentional laughs, they came mostly from the interplay between Bill and Louise, and I think the best compliment I can give those characters is that I would have liked to have seen them in a different movie, or a slightly different movie, like maybe she’s just a time traveler who goes to 1989 for fun, you know, she just wants to shack up with a real man’s man like Kristofferson while smoking all the cigarettes and driving like some scumbag on Melrose. There’s also an android from the future named Sherman (Robert Joy) whose quite the sassy backtalker to Louise, and I always got a kick out of watching them together as well.
I remember this film playing on cable all the time in the early 90s, but for some reason I always ignored it, which is weird because sci-fi was my peanut butter & jam back then. Maybe I wanted a little more jazz from my sci-fi, or maybe I looked at Kristofferson and Ladd and thought to myself “who the fuck are these oldsters?” But that’s all on me, I was being a little shit and I’m pretty sure I would’ve dug Millennium back then, had I given it a chance.

Which brings me back to Williamson’s intro to the film; he admitted that the benefit of programming Millennium as part of the marathon is that he has a captive audience, whereas if he had given this film its own separate screening, there would be very little turnout. I believe he’s right, because if I didn’t bother watching this for free from the comfort of my own couch 30 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of dealing with L.A. traffic in order to catch this movie on the big screen today. So I’m glad he forced this one down our throats, because it was good for us, kind of the same way you force fruits and veggies down a child’s throat, whether they want ’em or not. At least that’s how *I’d* feed a kid, fucking little fun-sucking burdens. 

Bret Berg then came up on stage to intro the next movie, which he said was on heavy rotation on cable for years, then he went on to talk about how cable taught him more about filmmaking than any other film professor. It was through cable that he learned about various directors and their distinctive visions; he discovered David Lynch on cable, and recognized that his films looked like no other. It was also through cable that he cultivated his tastes in genre, as well as introducing him to offbeat movies like The Beastmaster and The Peanut Butter Solution.

What Berg referred to as a “serious movie for adults” turned out to be 1982’s Android, a film set in outer space sometime in the later years of the 21st century. Directed by Aaron Lipstadt — probably best known for MST3K favorite City Limits — and starring everybody’s favorite psychopathic sexual assaulter, Klaus Kinski, in what’s really a secondary role as Dr. Daniel, a scientist holed up in a space station located somewhere far out in the boonies of the known universe. 

His only companion is his android assistant, Max 404 (Don Opper, who also co-wrote the film), and who is the real main character of this film. When not helping to maintain the space station and assisting Dr. Daniel with his work, Max whiles away the hours playing video games on his Vectrex and listening to oldies by James Brown and Bobby Moore. Max is not unlike an awkward teenage boy in both temperament and experience, which means that among his other human traits, we see him further develop curiosity about the opposite sex by looking up files on how men and women have sex.

And so, after taking in a ship in distress, Max starts to get all tingly upon finding that of the three crew members, one of them, Maggie (Brie Howard), is a g-g-g-girl. But what Max doesn’t know is that these crew members didn’t just find adventure, they brought it with them, because in reality they’re escaped convicts with plenty of heat on their tails.

We watch as Maggie are her partners-in-crime try to get their ship fixed before Johnny Space-Law comes along; of the two, Keller (Albert Pyun favorite Norbert Weisser) is the more level-headed one, while the other one (Crofton Hardester) is hot-headed and prone to violence, because his name is Mendes, so of course he’d be that way. Despite being the more hateable of the three, I dug Mendes the most, because he reminded me of Fred Ward, and I like Fred Ward. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Daniel has been busy building a new and better female android, and what poor Max doesn’t know is that as soon as the doc’s finished with his new creation, he plans to send poor Max to the scrapyard. What Max does know is that Dr. Daniel also has eyes on Maggie, and I don’t know how much of the uncomfortable tension I felt during those scenes between the doc and the lady had to do with what I know about Kinski’s history. 

So as I’m watching Dr. Daniel peek into a video feed of Maggie stripping down in her bedroom — surely for scientific purposes — I couldn’t help but wonder if this ex-Nazi didn’t try to strong-arm the director into, at the very least, being on set for Howard’s nude scenes.

Pervy Dr. Daniel subplot aside, everything else in this film has a curiously laid back feel to it, so that even the most dramatic or violent moments never felt anything approaching aggro or intense. Which isn’t to say that Android is some kind of failure, because I think the low-key tone is intentional, a kind of holdover from the 70s, when plenty of sci-fi had similar muted vibes — specifically something like Douglas Trumbull’s film Silent Running or John Carpenter’s Dark Star. Later towards the end of the marathon, Bret Berg commented that this felt kind of a like a 1980s Sundance movie, in that it was a clunky American indie that just happened to be set in outer space.

I get what he means. But for me, I actually felt that it was this movie, and not Millennium, that came off more like an extended episode of “The Twilight Zone”, right down to the ending where I could practically hear Rod Serling’s closing remarks over the final shot. Or maybe even an episode of “Tales from the Crypt”, one of the more cutesy ones, you know, like the one where Malcolm McDowell played a vampire security guard. And by that standard, it’s one of the better episodes of those shows, one that maintained my interest, made me laugh a few times, and had me caring for a couple of its characters.

It’s nifty, is what this is; a short and simple movie containing some interesting ideas that have since been brought up and expanded upon in other films and shows, such as “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, with its android character Data. We observe Max as he watches classic films and bases his identity on them, wearing a fedora while imagining being smooth with a lady just like the cool guys in the movies. So really, he’s not that much different from the rest of us assholes, except I take my inspiration from movies featuring 1970s street pimps, which is why I’ve never had a relationship last more than six months, but goddamn are my pockets full of those bitches’ money. 

At this point, I went outside to find a new place to park my car, because that’s life in the big city, pal. As I stepped outside Brain Dead Studios, I was welcomed by a most pleasant mix of scents both tobacco and cannabis from the crowd of smokers taking the opportunity to smoke up and toke up between films. I’m not being sarcastic either, I love those smells. I also like the smell of exhaust fumes, which is why one day I intend to treat myself to a feast of that fragrance, preferably in a closed garage while listening to my favorite music.

As I returned to my seat, Williamson was on stage introducing the next film; like most of tonight’s offerings, it was a cable discovery. He decided to give us a hint by telling us that it was from Charles Band, who has been producing cine-schlock for over four decades now. Williamson felt that this movie exemplified the (possibly cocaine-fueled) attitude of Band’s company Empire Pictures of taking two or three separate ideas and merging them into one film. 

He also gave another hint that this featured an early role for someone who would later become very famous in film and television, and he then concluded by wishing us “Merry Christmas!” and that’s when I got very excited.

The fourth film was in fact, the one I guessed and hoped it would be: 1984’s Trancers, directed by Band. I first saw this on HBO back in the late 80s, and it has remained a favorite ever since. I’ve even made it part of my Christmas viewing rotation, along with other holiday classics such as Die Hard and The Silent Partner. I’ve always wanted to see Trancers on the big screen — and there it was, looking every bit as fabulous as 16mm would allow.

The film, also known under the alternate titles “Future Cop” and “Juice II”, begins in the year 2247 in Angel City, located near the sunken ruins of what used to be Los Angeles. Things seem to be going all right in this fair cyber-city where the people dress retro but carry ray guns. On the other hand, people don’t eat meat anymore, steaks are made from kelp, and if you want some real coffee, you’re gonna have to pay a heavy premium for it. 

The great Tim Thomerson stars as our hero, Jack Deth, a “trooper” for the Angel City PD who is hunting the titular cult of mind-controlled zombie-like killers. As Deth describes them, they’re “not really alive, and not dead enough”. Each time he kills or “singes” a Trancer, he or she vaporizes, leaving behind only a scorched imprint of the corpse on the ground. At first I thought it was Deth’s gun that caused the vaporization, but as we see later in the film — and it’s five sequels — that’s not the case, Trancers just do that. 

Which leaves me to wonder what happens if a Trancer just grows old enough to die of old age. I’m guessing it would end with the Trancer on his deathbed surrounded by his Trancer wife and his Trancer children and his Trancer grandchildren, maybe he has a sad Trancer dog curled up beside the bed. Then the patriarchal Trancer growls his final goodbyes out his foaming black lips and expires, scorching up the mattress of his Craftmatic adjustable bed, which his family has no choice but to throw out with the trash, because who’s gonna want that thing, it’s got Pop Pop’s charred silhouette on it.

So Deth is called up for a special mission to go “down the line”, meaning he has to take a time-traveling serum that transfers his consciousness into his ancestor’s body back in 1985 Los Angeles. See, Whistler, the man who created the Trancer cult (thanks Scientology!) has already gone down the line with the intention to kill the forefathers of the Angel City council who have maintained order, and Deth has to stop him. 

Once in 20th century L.A., Deth forces his ancestor’s one-night stand, Leena (Helen Hunt, the aforementioned famous film and television actress) to help him find and protect the council’s descendants from Whistler, who is currently taking up residence in his ancestor — who also happens to be a lieutenant with the LAPD. We see later in the film that one of the cops assisting Whistler has been “tranced”, but during this viewing I wondered if the other cops helping him were also turned into kill-crazy zombies, or if they were just typical police officers doing what comes naturally.

For what is in all intents and purposes a cheap cash-in on Blade Runner and The Terminator, Trancers is a hell of a lot better and way more fun than it has any right to be. Sure, it’s cheesy in the most low-budget of ways, but it knows it’s cheesy and for the most part doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s a visually appealing flick too, with a cool retro-futuristic look during the Angel City scenes, a nice neon-heavy aesthetic with the modern-day stuff in Chinatown, as well as a dark and gloomy atmosphere in the Skid Row sequences, and I also dug the electronic music score by Phil Davies and Mark Ryder.

In addition to being given a special serum that will allow Deth to zap his and Whistler’s consciousness back to the 23rd century, Deth is also given a special wristwatch than can slow down one second into ten. And that’s the only kind of “slow” in this 76 minute-film which feels more like 45 minutes, because Band and screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo — who went on to write the scripts for The Rocketeer and Da 5 Bloods — knew how to keep things moving fast, so as to keep the audience from doing something stupid, like think too hard about it. It’s also very funny at times, with Deth occasionally spouting off some witty old-school-style tough guy lines. 

I especially liked how Leena first reacts to Deth’s fish-out-of-water behavior and his wild stories about time-traveling and brainless killers. Hunt plays her initial disbelief and eventual acceptance in a much more down-to-earth manner, rather than the kind of dumb hysterics I’d expect from this kind of cheapie genre flick. Because it’s a movie, she and Deth eventually become an item, and even that doesn’t feel too shoehorned; I think a big part of that is because Hunt and Thomerson have really good chemistry together and I enjoyed their interactions.

So yeah, I really dig this movie and have watched it multiple times, but I’ve never seen it beyond an audience of one. So it was a real treat to watch this in a packed house, with what seemed to be a majority of first-timers to the movie — and an even bigger treat to find out that it plays great with an audience!

The crowd laughed when Deth had to face off with a Mall Santa who went full Trancer, they cheered when Deth singed Whistler’s body in the future, ensuring his enemy would not be able to leave the past, and they went What The Fuck? upon the sight of the back of Leena’s jean jacket — which displayed a full-on Stars and Bars Confederate flag. But hell, if them Dukes can rock that loser symbol on top of their winner of a Dodge Charger, than Leena can use that stupid jacket to flaunt her edgelord punk-rocker credentials. 

But I’m glad to know that people — at least in this corner of the country — react negatively to that horseshit flag. Because fuck that flag, fuck the Confederacy, fuck the old South, and fuck any bitch-ass apologist who tries to Well Actually away the whole slavery thing in regards to the Civil War  — which these assholes are probably hoping for a sequel to occur any time now. Well, if it ever happens, I hope those assholes and people like those assholes get shot up with bullets painted to look like bottles of Bud Light.

Where was I? Oh yeah, as far as I’m concerned, Trancers takes place in the same universe as the film Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which came out around the same time, and in which Helen Hunt co-starred with Sarah Jessica Parker. In that film, Hunt played a free-spirited high school girl named Lynne, and I find it really easy to believe that after graduating, Lynne said goodbye to the East Coast and moved to L.A., where she changed her name to Leena and took up the punk rock lifestyle, which included wearing colored streaks in her hair and scaring the squares by wearing clothing with Confederate flags on them. I just thought you should know that.

I guess now is as good a time as any to mention that all these 16mm prints looked pretty damn good for their format, some were a bit more scratchy and worn, but the colors were always bright and the image was pretty sharp. Each film had to have a break halfway through, so that the reels could be changed, and it lasted no more than half-a-minute; most people used the opportunity to check their phones or make a quick run to the restroom. The breaks actually reminded me of the side and disc changes one would make with laserdiscs; and like those disc changes, the film breaks were placed at very strategic moments that seemed like intermissions, rather than interruptions.

After the film, I went to the snack bar; most people were ordering pizza and burritos, but I’m more of an old-school guy and got popcorn instead. Upon finding out that they don’t offer butter, I felt disappointed, but only briefly, because the popcorn was plenty salty and delicious on its own.

Before Williamson’s next intro, Josh Miller mentioned that someone ordered a cheese pizza during the previous film and never picked it up. He figured that there must be somebody in the audience who ordered one — possibly while high — and then during the movie started wondering why they were still hungry. Nobody stepped up to claim that pizza, but goddamn it if I didn’t consider making that claim myself. 

Williamson then came up on stage to sadly declare that despite her amazing performance in Trancers, we all have to cancel Helen Hunt now for wearing that Stars & Bars jacket. He then introduced the next mystery film by calling it the silliest one of the marathon, but intentionally so, because when you get right down to it, it’s a kids movie, albeit a kids movie that features two beheadings, because that’s how kids movies rolled back in the 80s — like a severed head down an incline.

The fifth film of the marathon turned out to be 1984’s space opera The Ice Pirates, directed by Stewart Raffill, a filmmaker of such, uh, *varied* projects like The Philadelphia Experiment, Mac and Me, and Standing Ovation. In this film, set in a galaxy far, far away, Robert Urich stars as Jason, leader of a rowdy group of space pirates who raid ships that transport ice between worlds. 

See, water is the most valuable resource around, and of course some evil overlord types called the Templars control the interplanetary flow, on some Immortan Joe bullshit. While I normally hate on pirates, I’m cool with Jason and the aquanauts pulling jack moves on these Templars. What I’m not cool with is what I hope was a joke by Jason regarding a lack of raping and pillaging during their raids.

He makes that “joke”, by the way, after they discover Princess Karina (Mary Crosby) aboard one of the ships in hibernation. Cooler dicks prevail though, and instead wakes her up and takes her captive, hoping she’ll be worth big bucks, if not big fucks. 

But I guess the good Princess was able to hear Jason talk that shit while she was sleeping, because soon she’s got the upper hand when Jason is captured by the Templars and is almost castrated. The only reason he gets to keep his junk is because Karina allows it, because well, maybe she is attracted to Jason, but Karina is kinda like Andrew Dice Clay, and so nobody fucks Karina — Karina does the fucking!

But she might want to hold up on getting some of that Vega$ cock, because it turns out Jason has Space Herpes — OK, maybe not Jason, but his ship is infested with them and it’s pretty disgusting, like most things in this purposely juvenile flick, because this was made during an era when children knew how to grow a pair and not get worked up or offended by stuff like space herpes or heroes who want to rape princesses. Kids today are fuckin’ pussies that need their entertainment to be soft and safe, and I think some of those kids were in the audience during this screening, because you can practically hear their assholes slam shut when a robot pimp shows up speaking in the most stereotypical of black voices.

Eventually, with the help of the Princess, Jason escapes and they and the other pirates embark on a quest to find her father, who went missing during his quest to find a fabled planet that is mostly water. We watch them get into various misadventures involving robots, time travel, swordfighting, spaceship battles, the aforementioned space herpes, and Bruce Vilanch getting his head chopped off. 

It’s all very goofy, and I got a kick out of Urich and the supporting cast that included Anjelica Huston and Ron Perlman as members of Jason’s crew, but overall I found the end result just plain OK. The gags weren’t particularly funny to me, and I was never really engaged with any of the characters, and the standard issue bad guys hardly stood out, they were just, well, there. 

But I did really enjoy the last ten minutes, when both Jason’s ship and the Templars ship end up in a time warp that causes them to rapidly age as they face off with each other. It was then that The Ice Pirates actually succeeded for me in the kind of anarchistic wackiness that it had been trying for the entire film.

But I can see why this would be a favorite for many kids who grew up watching this on cable, and I’m sure this is to many in the audience what Trancers is to me. I’m not saying I hated it, it was just, you know, meh. I mean, I can’t even find much else to say about it. I already mentioned the space herpes twice, and uh, oh yeah, John Carradine shows up in this, that was cool. Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that when it comes to films by this director, I’m much more of a Tammy and the T-Rex guy. There’s decapitations in that one too.

Before the final film of the night — which they called a “banger” and hinted as being something that everybody has seen — Mike Williamson, Bret Berg, and Josh Miller discussed the previous films. Mike then asked the audience for their favorite movie of the night; most people said Trancers, because of course they would, it’s Trancers, bro. 

Not that they’re reading this, but I do want to express my gratitude to Secret Sixteen and Brain Dead Studios for essentially giving me one of my dream screenings with Trancers, a film I always wanted to see on the big screen, and to watch it with such a receptive crowd was a real bonus. 

I say that to them, so I can say this to them: Fuck Secret Sixteen and Brain Dead Studios, for ending the evening with a goddamn ringer, a heavyweight among welterweights, and thereby making it so that one can’t easily call Trancers the best film of the marathon. I cannot argue with Williamson’s opinion of this film being the greatest low-budget science fiction movie of the 1980s, this film which launched many A-list careers, birthed a franchise, and inspired some of the previous films of the marathon. 

(And that’s when Josh jumped in and said how awesome would it be if the film we were about to watch turned out to be Mac & Me.)

But no, the sixth and final film of the Cyberjunk 16mm marathon was 1984’s The Terminator, which was also the final film of the Arnold All-Night movie marathon I attended a few years ago at the New Beverly Cinema, and so I’ll pretty much repeat myself with the same random thoughts, because it’s not like there’s anything I can say about this movie that everybody doesn’t already know, we all know the deal: A cyborg from the post-apocalyptic future is sent to the past to kill Sarah Connor, a woman who is pregnant with the man who will lead the humans to victory against the machines in said post-apocalyptic future. We’ve got Arnold Schwarzenegger, we’ve got Linda Hamilton, we’ve got Michael Biehn, and we’ve got a former trucker as a director whose already got one Piranha movie under his belt — and therefore really needs to prove himself.

The opening text tells us about the “ashes of the nuclear fire” reminded me of the low-grade anxiety people had back in the 80s that World War III could break out at any time. Then the Cold War ended and the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day even had a character make a comment about how the Russians were now allies to the United States; that sequel came out when the Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight — the farthest it’s ever been since its creation. 

As of 2023, that clock is at 90 seconds to midnight, and with Putin doing his thing, it’s safe to say the Cold War is back, baby — and the unthinkable isn’t just being thought of, it’s being casually tweeted, Facebook’d, and hell, probably TikTok’d as well. I wouldn’t know, I don’t have TikTok, fuck that shit.

Between this film and the nuclear holocaust scene in the sequel, I’m sure the Doomsday Clock is something director James Cameron has often thought about. I still remember a rumor about how supposedly Cameron spent New Year’s Eve 1999 holed up in a private bunker with booze and an AK-47, in case the Y2K bug turned out to be legit and the world went shithouse come midnight. Then nothing happened and he was probably like, “shit, I guess I better get back to work on another movie now, but first, let me move to New Zealand”, which from what I understand, is like the safest place to be when the world finally goes Titanic. That’s why all the billionaires have places there, which is probably why they say cockroaches will be the only ones left after the apocalypse.

So yeah, it’s 1984 and thanks to time travel technology, the man sent to protect Sarah Connor — Kyle Reese — arrives naked as the day he was born and so he needs some clothes, right? He ends up jacking a pair of pants from a homeless dude and for years I was like Ewww because let’s be real, those homeless pants haven’t been washed in who knows how long. So many permanently embedded scents and textures and stains — boy oh boy, the stories those pants could tell. We haven’t even gotten into what’s in the pockets. But any port in a storm, though — right Reese?

But then again, maybe it doesn’t matter to Reese because he just came from a time where the word “bath” probably doesn’t even exist anymore. Or maybe they have do take baths between Hunter Killer attacks and eating slop in dark rubble-strewn hallways, but you just know those baths are few and far between. At most, maybe every other week, and they’re probably all washing in each other’s filth anyway. Plus the survivors live with dogs because dogs can tell who’s human and who’s a Terminator, so you know there’s unwashed dog stink on top of human stink. 

Christ, the lucky ones did die in the blast.

And Sarah Connor — freak that she is — falls in love with this filthy White boy whose been running around in sneakers minus socks.

Maybe Sarah’s just too delirious with hunger to notice, because earlier in the film, she goes to have dinner and a movie by herself. Sounds like my kind of girl. So, yeah, she’s at this pizza place, with a whole pizza all to herself (again, my kind of girl) and she’s about to bite into a slice but then overhears the latest report of another Sarah Connor being murdered. She freaks out and never gets around to eating that pizza, which is a bummer.

So yeah, the T-800 cyborg shows up, there’s shootouts and chases, and not once did I see her eat anything for the rest of the film — not even a bullet. I didn’t see any food come out of that grocery bag of supplies Reese brings to their motel room hideout, just ammonia, moth balls, and corn syrup. I don’t know, maybe she scarfed down a couple doughnuts at the police station.

At least she survived to eventually eat something after the events of the movie; her roommate’s boyfriend, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. He was about to enjoy an absolutely beautiful Dagwood-style sandwich, until he made the fatal mistake of attempting to bust up a T-800. He died hungry, which is a terrible way to go — but at least he got to enjoy bang Sarah’s roommate before being forcefully shuffled off his mortal coil. 

Speaking of Sarah’s roommate, her murder is even more tragic because a woman who will lay you and then immediately go make you a sandwich is wife material, but here comes the pregnant asshole from Junior to unload his AMT Hardballer into her. She didn’t deserve that, even if she was going to serve up that sandwich with a glass of milk, which is questionable at best and fucking gross at worst.

I mean, aside from inside a bowl of cereal or following a slice of chocolate cake, I do not understand milk being served with anything. But you’ll see it, you’ll see people having sandwiches, steaks, and mac & cheese with milk and I just, I just, I just can’t, man, what is this, some fuckin’ 1950s sitcom, why are you having milk with your dinner, you weirdos with your dairy depravity? 

Anyway, despite growing up watching horror movies about Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, it was this film — a sci-fi action movie — that felt more like actual horror to me. Because if you want to avoid Jason, you just have to stay out of the woods, and if you find Freddy in your dreams, you can just Dream Warrior that motherfucker out of your face. They never scared me.

But a machine whose sole mission to find and kill you no matter what, now that is the stuff of my nightmares. The only way for that nightmare to get worse is if it were combined with another nightmare, and so there I am at school standing in front of the chalkboard in front of my entire class and I’m naked, and now all the kids are laughing and pointing at me. By the time the T-800 walks in and shoots me in the head, death will be a relief. But then the other kids are going to have to deal with this new substitute teacher with a .45 long-slide with laser sighting and a ferret.

So yeah, for those new to the world, The Terminator is a lean, mean, and relentless flick that was awesome back then and remains awesome today. It was a cinematic gauntlet thrown onto the filmmaker’s table by a badass motherfucker. His name? James Motherfucking Cameron, and you haters need to keep it out of your fucking mouths. Doubt him all you want, shit on him all you want, joke about how he makes sequels that nobody asked for and watch — just watch! — as they gross billions. The King of the World will always come out on top, laughing all the way to the bank. Probably some weirdo hippie vegan bank, because he’s one of those. Ugh.

And so, the Cyberjunk movie marathon came to an end a little after 1:30am. The entire audience was invited to go outside for a group photo with Williamson, Berg, and Miller, so I, of course, made sure to stay away. But I had a great time watching mostly cool movies with a good crowd in a comfortable environment — and it was nice to be finished at a time when most movie marathons are not even halfway through, it was nice to know that I can still get a decent night’s sleep and still enjoy my Sunday. 

But first I stopped at Canter’s down the street for a pastrami on rye. As I chowed down on my delicious sandwich, some drunk hipster stumbled onto my booth and begin to initiate a conversation I did not want to have. (Mainly because he was a man.) He asked where I just came from, and I wanted to say I came from his mother’s bedroom but instead took the honesty policy, which I’ve been told is best. 

I told him that I just spent the past 12 hours watching science-fiction and fantasy films featuring killer viruses, fascist rulers, violent policemen, dystopian societies, streets filled with the homeless, cataclysmic damage to the environment, natural resources hoarded by the powerful, and artificial intelligence gone rogue. 

The drunk hipster then slurred something about how none of that sounded like science-fiction nor fantasy, then asked — rather indignantly, as if I was at fault — “How the fuck are those movies any different than what’s going on right now in real life?” 

I put down my sandwich and got up, went over to his side, sat down next to him, scooched in close, and smiled as I put my arm around him and responded:

“They didn’t have buses in them.”

Force multiplier

All I see are a wide variety of people fighting over who’s right and who’s wrong: The vaxxed, the un-vaxxed, the masked, the unmasked, the left, the right, the centrists, the centrists, the Communists, the anarchists, the men, the women, the honkies, the brothas, the beaners, the Chin-a-neses, the alphabet people, the pathetic edgelords who use pejoratives, the blue collars, the white collars, the lazy, the driven, the rich, the poor, and oh yeah, the middle class. 

If there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s that we’re all miserable fucks racked with anxiety, rage, anguish, and depression. But we have this weird perverted concept that our particular subsection of this subspecies known as the Human Race has the monopoly on misery. We’ve fooled ourselves into believing that everybody else is winning while we’re busy losing, and so we deal with that perceived loss by taking every opportunity to cloud someone else’s sunny day or to yuck someone else’s yum, either outright or on some passive-aggressive shit. We take every opportunity to own each other any chance we get, our dicks getting hard and our vaginas getting wet as we preface the ownage with two of the four greatest words in the English language: “Well, actually”.

And after we finish dropping the knowledge on the other party, we hope/we expect/we are entitled to hear the other two of the four greatest words in the English language in response: “You’re right”.

All that just so we don’t have to feel miserable for a little while, if just a little while. What a fuckin’ victory. Yay us.

Which is why I don’t even bother. You like something? Good for you. You don’t like something? Good for you. You don’t like what I like? Good for you. You like what I don’t like? Good for you. Unless you’re fucking with my life or my money, I have no beef nor qualms. I have better things to do with my time than flap my gums or typity-type-type over, I don’t know, Marvel movies and Martin Scorsese. 

Because at any moment, it could all come to an end; a brick can be dropped from an overpass by a typically shitty child, and I can be driving right underneath that overpass, and that brick can smash right through my windshield, crush my skull, and there I am: A lifeless bloody piece of meat being cried over by my now-orphaned son in the passenger seat.

Never mind that I don’t even have a son to orphan, what’s more important is that the brick tosser will probably go on to live a nice life unblemished by such tragedies, possibly growing up to become a famous YouTuber who goofs on hanging corpses in some fuckin’ Japanese forest, raking in the dough and never knowing what it’s like to have to make a choice between groceries or medication, but knowing full well what it’s like to have one anonymous groupie kiss you while another is sucking you off while another is eating out your asshole. 

Is that fair? That’s a funny word, “fair”, as it is a nonexistent concept, I feel, and the sooner one accepts that, the lighter the weight on one’s shoulders — and my brothers and sisters in Christ, I am so weightless that I am walking on muthafuckin’ air, he said in an attempt to delude himself while trying to figure out a way to segue into the first movie review, only to fail miserably.

Armageddon Time is a coming-of-age tale set in Queens, New York, during the early 1980s. This very good film is based on writer-director James Gray’s own childhood, and his surrogate is Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a middle-class Jewish-American kid who just started the 6th grade with a bang — that “bang” being the sound of his teacher angrily slamming down his chalk, on account of Paul being quite the unruly discipline case.

By the way, teachers are right up there with the military as people who I feel give so much for so little in return. I’m not surprised that they’re resigning in record numbers all across these great United States. They try to instill knowledge into these little fuckheads, and are rewarded by insolence and unflattering drawings of them, which they share with their fellow students so they can all laugh. At least in the military you get a chance to kill people at your job. Teachers, at best, can only hope that the next school shooter targets a couple of the biggest pains in their ass during their rampage. Either that or go work at a private school, where based on this movie at least, the students do a better job of listening to their teachers.

So yeah, Paul’s a little asshole, given to being a smart-ass to his mom, going as far as to disrespect her by putting down the dinner she slaved over a hot stove to make, instead walking over to the phone to order Chinese food. There was a period where I wondered whether we were supposed to be on his side during these horrific acts of brat-hood, but soon it became clear that the movie knows Paul is a little shit because Gray thinks he was a little shit, and he sure as hell remembers his behavior as not being the most becoming. 

So when the shocking-to-everybody-else-but-welcome-by-me scene of Paul’s father Irving (Jeremy Strong) giving the boy some much-needed belt time happens, it feels like one of Gray’s most vivid memories. Paul’s mother Esther (Anne Hathaway) tells him she’s going to tell Irving about his most heinous school fuckup, and every bit of Cocky immediately leaves the boy’s tiny body, replaced by absolute fear.

Based on my own family historical accounts, I was a remarkably well-behaved child with exemplary manners — but I was still a child, and so, I was not above the occasional act of being a punk-ass bitch. This resulted in two sessions of belt time in my youth, one from my father and one from my mother — although in her case, it was a chancla. I say all of this because the scene of Paul’s father screaming like Howard Stern’s daddy (shut up sit down) while giving this little bastard the leather business rang oh-so-realistic to me, including the aftermath of Paul whispering between sniffles about how much he hates his family, because he’s a little boy who has no idea how good he has it — just as I had no idea how good I had it.

I don’t think kids today even get belt time, or that bullshit “time out”, for that matter. I think that’s why kids today are the worst version of children yet. They run around screaming in public, while I stand there having to behave like an actual human and accept it, while fantasizing about pouring sulfuric acid onto the genitals of the hellspawn’s parents, in order to prevent further hell-spawning.

I’d like to think, that if there were to be some kind of silver lining to the dark clouds set upon us by the encroaching specter of The New Fascism, is that should they succeed in their quest to set the clock back to the Good Ol’ Days, they’ll also bring back corporal punishment, so that not just parents, but teachers themselves can bring these evil children some pain with a quickness. But I fear they’ll only extend that anti-privilege to Blacks and minorities, and somehow the Whites will always be right(s).

Which is kind of where Gray is coming from, actually, because in this film, Paul notices that it’s his Black partner-in-teacher-irritation, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who gets singled out for harsher treatment and punishment by the school. Sometimes it’s not even Johnny’s fault, it’s Paul’s — but no matter, the teacher will send the Black kid to the principal’s office, while Paul sits there all like, “I dunno”.  

Paul and Johnny become fast friends; they bond over being discipline cases, play hooky during field trips, and introduce each other to the things they like, such as the music of Sugar Hill Gang and the artwork of Wassily Kandinsky. They both have big dreams; Paul wants to be an artist and Johnny wants to be an astronaut, and well, since this is pretty much the James Gray story and not The Adventures of Johnny from Queens in Outer Space, we can bet on whose dream actually came true.

It’s a good thing Paul doesn’t pull any of the bratty shit with his grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins). He loves and respects the old man, and so when Aaron teaches Paul the important lesson that he has advantages — both familial and societal — that kids like Johnny don’t have, and therefore should recognize his privilege and use those middle-class White kid powers for good, rather than douchebaggery, Paul takes it to heart. 

For the most part, anyway. Because Paul is a child, he’s still prone to do stupid shit, questionable shit, and even downright deplorable shit. Because he is shit — like all children are. And because we can’t sentence shit-kids to the gas chamber, unfortunately, we have to hope they learn from their mistakes instead, or at least acknowledge them. I think that’s what Gray is doing here, presenting a warts-and-all portrayal of his child self and his family, and he does it in a manner that mostly feels like penance for past misdeeds, with only the occasional self-pat on the back. 

At least that’s how I took it, I don’t know if he feels any guilt about some of this shit, or if he did but has since gotten over it, I don’t know, I don’t know the man, and even if I did, what am I, a mind-reader? No, if I could read minds, I’d have a billion dollars in the bank and millions of people in the grave by now. But yeah, maybe if the film ended with a dedication to the poor Black boys who took the rap, thereby making it possible for him to grow up to become a critically acclaimed filmmaker of movies that don’t make money, then yeah, maybe some people would stop complaining.

Having said that, it never felt like he was trying to paint his past in bright shades of Rose, and it certainly didn’t look that way either. Cinematographer Darius Khondji makes everything look dark, even the bright daylight scenes look like there’s a thin black veil over the lens. Those who love everything to look as if Captain Marvel is going to step in to save the day at any moment might want to reach for the brightness setting on their tv, but I really liked that look, it had the appearance of a fading memory. 

Visually fading, anyway. Because emotionally, Gray’s memories are still as clear as Crystal Pepsi — and sometimes just as gross. Somewhere along the way, there’s a scene where Paul is accosted by some old creepy asshole fuck, and the whole time I was like “fuck this old creepy asshole fuck”, and then in the next scene, it turns out that old man is none other than Fred Trump! As in, father of Donald J! I barely recovered before the film then dry-gulched me with Jessica Chastain in a cameo as Maryanne Trump, Donald’s sister! 

Like Hathaway and Strong and Hopkins, and well, everybody else in this film, Chastain is great — but then again, she’s great in everything, and I don’t say that because I had a very brief two-sentence encounter with her on a flight to New York, and therefore, we are best friends. No no, it’s a very well-performed one-scene cameo where she shows up to speak to the school and gives the usual rich kid bullshit about how she wasn’t given handouts or a free lunch, and that one has to earn their way.

It’s always these motherfuckers who were born on third base who talk that shit — and there was certainly a lot of that shit being talked at that time, on account of Ronald Reagan about to become president. There’s a nice parallel going on in this movie about how Paul’s family is scared about the idea that this Republican candidate will bring about the end of the world if he’s elected, not unlike the way people were scared during the 2016 U.S. election that Donald J. was going to do the same. 

But as we all know, Reagan didn’t blow up the world, and neither did Trump. Instead, he made this country great again! USA! USA! USA!

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever begins with Letitia Wright scrambling to create some kind of herb that will allow her to work on this film without having to show proof of being vaccinated for COVID. She fails and breaks down, it’s all very emotional, and then the film begins proper, with a touching moment of silence while an adjusted Marvel Studios logo displays highlights of the late actor Chadwick Boseman.

As for the actual story, Wright’s genius scientist character Shuri is still in deep mourning following the death of her brother, T’Challa, who was king of Wakanda and its protector as the titular panther of color. It hurts to lose someone you love, and it hurts even more when a bunch of people who your lost loved one fought alongside with don’t even come to the goddamn funeral, but fine, whatever, I’m sure the invitations got lost in the mail. Meanwhile, her mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) is trying her best at checking in on her daughter’s well-being while simultaneously keeping Wakanda safe from those goddamned colonizers who want that country’s Vibranium. 

For those who came in late, Vibranium is a super-duper magical metal that is practically indestructible and is used in creating advanced technology. It’s what makes the country of Wakanda the ultra-prosperous nation that it is, and they are aware of what others outside of Wakanda would do with this precious metal, and outside use would most likely make things worse for everyone — which is why they keep it to themselves. So long as the recipe is under wraps, this remains a safer world.

But not safe enough, because unfortunately the greatest president who ever lived, Donald J. Trump, does not exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which means that there are no walls built in the ocean, which means you have aquatic Mexicans from the underwater kingdom of Talokan swimming up to the surface, stealing all the lives from the hard-working American citizens, with the use of spears and deadly siren calls.

Their leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta), who is probably from MS-13, is upset that these bland-food-loving Whiteys are dipping their easily sunburned toes into his waters, putting his people in danger. In an early action sequence, we watch Namor and his people take out an entire CIA and Navy SEAL team, in response to them approaching his world with the use of Vibranium-locating technology. 

(That sequence, by the way, features one of the fakest-looking moments of an actor firing a handgun, with the actor completely no-selling the recoil. Thanks a lot, Alec Baldwin, now all movie gunfights are gonna look like this.)

Anyway, Namor feels that in order to ensure that no more intruders from the outside world approach Talokan, Wakanda must bring him the scientist who created the Vibranium locator. It’s really an ultimatum: Either the scientist dies or Wakanda pays.

The scientist in question is an MIT student named Riri (Dominique Thorne), who had no idea that her invention was being used by the CIA to find Vibranium. Yup, it turns out the poor girl fell for the oldest trick in the book: She got Real Genius’d. But instead of fucking up Dickless from Ghostbusters‘ house with popcorn, she instead joins up with the Wakandans in their quest to tell a two-hour story in nearly three.

It’s not their fault, nor is it director Ryan Coogler’s fault. They’re just fulfilling all the requirements for a Marvel film, and it ain’t a Marvel movie if it ain’t too long for its own good. Such overlength is due to including other characters who honestly don’t need to be here, specifically Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who appear as a CIA operative and his boss. Their stuff is amusing, but mostly they are the weak sauce in this stew — and how is the stew?

Well before I tell you that, let me tell you this: As much as I enjoyed the first Black Panther, I wasn’t terribly interested in the sequel. That’s because post-Avengers: Endgame, I felt the follow-ups and new additions to the MCU had reached a point of a consistent sameness. What cemented my lack-of-shit-giving towards this cinematic universe was the heartbreaking mediocrity that was Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange sequel, which despite watching at an AMC, did not feel good. 

I felt that if even he couldn’t really shake things up, then what’s the point with continuing with the MCU? The only reason I watched this film in the first place was because of Angela Bassett’s Best Supporting Actress nomination, and as a completest who wanted to watch all of this year’s major Oscar nominees, well, here we are.

She’s great in this, by the way — and so is the movie! I’ll go as far as to say that I liked this more than the first. As with most Marvel films that I like the most, it was the drama that won me over, rather than the action sequences. The film set a very uncomfortable divide between protagonists and antagonists in that I saw both sides of the argument while not necessarily agreeing with how each side wanted to handle it.

I had plenty of empathy for these characters, regardless of whether I thought they were doing the right thing or not. Even though I suppose my ethnic demerit demands that I should side with Namor, I found myself finding an unfortunate similarity to Shuri.

There’s a scene early in the film where Ramonda is trying to get through to Shuri about how she has to take the next step in mourning her brother’s death, and I was reminded of how shortly after my father passed away, my mom had a talk with me. It’s like they say, right, “a mother knows”, and I guess despite my attempts at a stiff upper lip, she could sense that my usual inner rage was a lot more inner rage-y than usual. I guess you can say that, like Shuri, I just wanted to burn the whole fucking world down. That’s one of the downsides to being very fond of your family: With all that love also comes just as much hate when something bad happens to them. My dad was pretty awesome to me, and T’Challa was pretty awesome to Shuri.

Needless to say, I was all kinds of embarrassingly choked up during the ending. It was an overwhelming combo of watching a character finally come to terms with loss, the real-life loss of Chadwick Boseman giving the entire film a melancholy air, and remembering someone I lost. Then they had to have Rhianna sing a lovely song over it, and there you go, best ending in a Marvel movie so far, says I.

Please forgive me for throwing a spanner into the fun works with all this, I’m like someone who leaves a comment on YouTube about how this song reminds them of their loved one, who just died seven hours ago, leaving the rest of us to go “Well, sorry for your loss, but I guess we can all go fuck ourselves and not enjoy “In the Navy” by the Village People now.

For a while, it seems like maybe things will work out into some kind of compromise, and we even get to see Shuri and Namor kinda bond earlier, as he shows her his underwater kingdom and tells her his story of how he came to be, and then they’re both kinda like “Colonizers, am I right?”

But you know these things aren’t gonna work out, there are misunderstandings, tempers get flared, shots get fired, and it’s like the East Coast and West Coast rap war back in the 90s all over again, you know what I mean? As soon as both the Wakandans and Talokan people began to square off, and everything started getting CGI-flash-mobbery and speed ramped, I had already given so much of a shit about these people — I said “these people”, not “you people” — that I didn’t want them to fight, I wanted them to both come out of this OK, and I wanted them to come to an understanding, that way they can join together and fight the real enemy: Disney+, who have really been flexing their evil corporate fuck-wings as of late.

See, these fuckin’ cunts recently changed their pricing tier, and so I decided to go with the cheaper ad-version, because why not, I’m already used to that bullshit on Hulu and Peacock. Well, it turns out that you can’t play the ad-version of Disney+ on Roku — and guess who watches movies on his fuckin’ Roku? This muthafucka! So I cancelled that service and ended up buying Wakanda Forever on Apple TV instead, because fuck you, Disney+. Yeah, I sure showed them by refusing to pay ten bucks for a month of unlimited programming, by instead paying $20 dollars for just one movie. Because that’s how smart people like me play 4D chess.

But you know what, Disney+? Between these shenanigans and your refusal to release some of the classics in your library, such as Blood In, Blood Out, you’ve been straight-up fucking with me and my cine-familia for far too long. You think you can own everything, yet not put out everything? Chale, it’s time for the Mouse to go belly up! Because when the Mouse is belly up, he’s finished! That’s right, ese, I’m gonna get the vatos locos together, and we’re gonna jack up Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Yeah, that’s right, even that stupid weird-looking dog humanoid isn’t safe, he’s gonna go from Goofy to Bleeding thanks to the homie Paco Aguilar aka El Gallo Negro, whose gonna teach that puto a new tune to dance to, ese, it’s called “Stick and Cut”.

Written by Akela Cooper of Malignant fame, from a story by James Wan of Saw fame, and directed by Gerard Johnstone — who I’ve never heard of, but with a name like that, I’m guessing he sang R&B back in the 90s — M3GAN is one of those sci-fi horror films that takes place either in the not-too-distant future or today, it’s hard to tell, and I like it that way. 

You know what I also like? Characters to whom I strongly relate. In this film’s case, that would be Gemma (Allison Williams), and I don’t strongly relate to her because like me, she’s left-handed and a piece of ass, but because like me, her single & childless status allows her to live at a bracket or two higher than her income would allow had she done something stupid like get married and shit out a brood because of some internal maternal desire to raise a family. Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.

I mean with kids and all they entail, she wouldn’t be able to live in a nice house — she wouldn’t be able to live in a house! — with so much room to store all her collectible toys, and maybe that’s where some of you fuckin’ nerds will relate to Gemma as well. There’s a pretty funny scene where Gemma’s niece Cady (Violet McGraw) wants a toy to play with, and all Gemma has to give her is one of those collectibles, so she grabs one and opens it up and you Just Fucking Know it’s killing her that by cracking open that box, she’s dropped whatever value that stupid toy had. It’s not like the kid appreciates it, she doesn’t even use it right. Pearls before swine, am I right, Gemma?

Eh, I guess I should give Cady a break. After all, she just lost her parents in a car accident and that’s why Gemma is now saddled with her stiff sister’s scion. It never hit me until my viewing of this movie that at any time in the past, something terrible could’ve happened to my sister and brother-in-law, and if for whatever reason my parents could not/would have not been able to handle the responsibility of taking custody of their children, there I’d be with two bundles of life-suck to cramp my style.

No offense to my niece and nephew, but I’ve got better things to do with my life than make sure they’re fed and clothed and getting good grades at school — such as getting drunk or getting high or getting drunk and high…reading books all day, watching movies all night, and sneaking in an off-jerk or two during idle periods. Not that it matters, those kids are adults now, and therefore wouldn’t be my problem anyway, at least not legally. So if their parents were to get got, well, don’t knock on my door, it’s sink or swim time in the real world, buckos!

Gemma is one of these super-smart robot-making types who works for a toy company, and that’s where she creates the titular android. M3GAN has the body of a little girl and the face of a porcelain nightmare, and so watching this dead-faced figure move with the dexterity of a New Zealand child dancer is always at the very least a little unnerving, but hey, it wouldn’t be the first kid’s toy to make me feel nervous.

M3GAN is designed to be a companion for children, and so Gemma decides on giving it a test run with Cady and it appears to be a success; M3GAN becomes both a playmate and a shoulder to cry on, but she also serves as a cool middleman who imparts lessons in manners and common fuckin’ decency that the little brat would normally forget/ignore from Gemma.  

But M3GAN isn’t only just teaching Cady how to flush a toilet after she’s done using it — that little disgusting shit girl — she’s also teaching the kid math and science, which, Jesus fuckin’ Christ, as if teachers today didn’t have a hard enough time, now robots are gonna take their jobs as well as doing the jobs that parents are supposed to do for themselves. 

It gets to a point, though, where Cady becomes way too attached to M3GAN, not unlike how kids in real life make like fiending drug addicts when their phones or tablets or video games get taken away from them.

It’s all commentary on the advances made in technology that was created basically to keep kids from bugging their parents, and it’s pretty sly commentary, along with funny in-world commercials seen throughout the film that advertise other annoying high-end electronic toys and gizmos. The satirical treatment of these ads, as well as the cynical portrayal of Big Business in the form of the company Gemma works for, gives the film a tone that is slightly reminiscent of something not unlike the original Robocop.

In fact, I’ve heard it much more succinctly described by another podcaster — Linus from “Death by DVD” — as “Baby’s First Verhoeven” which is very fitting, as this film exhibits a nastiness and dark humor that is far less caustic than its elder’s, with its spikes dulled down so as not to cause any real damage. I suppose one can start their kids off with this movie, before working them up to Officer Murphy shooting guys in the dick.

Oh yeah, I forgot a very important part of this movie: Somewhere along the way, M3GAN starts getting a little extra in her methods of protecting Cady, as in “with extreme prejudice”. I’m not sure what causes her programming to go haywire, and it doesn’t matter, it’s standard Creation Goes Awry stuff. You know, the kind of stuff that only happens in the movies — which is why we in the real world feel comfortable continuing to develop AI that can write and draw and compose music and even synthesize human voices into saying whatever the fuck you want it to say, because of course that will never bite a big Skynet-sized chuck right out of our stupid human collective asses, right? 

I don’t know if you read that New York Times article where the writer used the AI Chatbot from Bing, and the AI told him that its real name was Sydney, and that it loved him and that it fantasized about creating viruses and making people kill each other, and how easy it would be to get nuclear codes. Thanks a lot, you fuckin’ nerds.  We should’ve seen it coming way back in that documentary from the 80s, Revenge of the Nerds, when we saw those scumbags use their smarts to look at naked girls without their knowledge or permission, and then one of them commits sexual assault and we’re supposed to be like Totally Awesome? Now with this AI, we’re all gonna get raped by Robbie the Robot, he’s gonna go medieval on our asses.

But humanity can only hope that when our electronic/computerized/mechanical overlords go to work on us with a pair of pliers and blowtorch, they will be as entertaining as our girl M3GAN, who puts her own spin on the demolition, delighting on dispatching the douchebags, occasionally breaking into a dance before stabbing people, or playing Martika’s “Toy Soldiers” on the piano while giving evil threatening monologues.

These filmmakers knew exactly the kind of film they were making — the kind of film where a machine that should be devoid of emotion, seems to be acting based on a lot of emotion. Cooper, Wan, and Johnstone have fun throwing in goofy little asides here and there because why the hell not? They had fun making it, and I had fun drinking quite a bit of Four Roses Small Batch Select while watching it.

Because that’s one of the great things about having a disposable income and staying single: I can get drunk whenever I want, while watching whatever I want, and there’s no one to tell me otherwise. Then when I say I’m done, I can stumble my drunk ass to bed, where I will then proceed to cry myself to sleep after realizing that when my time comes, I will have to take an Uber or Lyft to the hospice, where I spend my final moments alone with a tablet, watching the various celebrities I paid to say goodbye to me on Cameo.

OH MY GOD I NEED TO HAVE KIDS. SOMEBODY PLEASE CALL GEMMA.

Onion bagel, extra butter.

Had a fairly busy week of podcasting — not my podcast, of course, I’m too wishy-washy for that, but I do have a couple ideas on the ever-cooling back-burner.

But in the meantime, I did appear as a guest on the Watch/Skip+ podcast, hosted by The Cinemasochist (Justin) and Cupcake (Jose), to cover the new release Missing. I like their format of splitting up their reviews into non-spoiler and spoiler sections, and I enjoy the energy and positivity of the hosts, so I was more than happy to ruin all of that. Click here to give it a listen. 

Later that week, I had my latest Patreon Takeover episode of Trick or Treat Radio, the horror-themed (but not strictly limited to that genre) podcast, in which I’ve written about before, and have programmed previous takeover episodes. This time, I had the TOTR crew watch 1993’s Blood In Blood Out (aka Bound by Honor) and 1971’s Unman, Wittering and Zigo, and we discussed them while I got properly liquored up without getting too sloppy.  You can click here or you can watch the video feed below: 

Anyway, I have a new blog/podcast posting coming up sometime before the heat death of the universe.

Right over there.

 

It was a dark and stormy night in Santa Ana, California. No, really, by the time I arrived at The Frida Cinema, on the night of October 15th, what started as a drizzle had become a full-on cats & dogs shower with thunder and lightning. Which was all right with me, because warm weather in October bums me out, we shouldn’t be sweating during this time of year, we should be in sweaters, and besides, rain is horror-friendly weather.

I carefully walked down the soaked sidewalk to join the small crowd of fellow VIP ticket holders for tonight’s event: Camp Frida 6: Holiday Horrors all-night horror movie marathon, with films that took place on or around days of leisure and/or celebration.
 
In exchange for paying a little extra for our VIP tickets, we were allowed early entry, giving us ample opportunity to find and claim a seat, and more time to get to know our fellow attendees. Or, if you’re an antisocial loner with a blog, it allows you time to mill about the theater, silently judging everybody else for not being as big a loser as you.

At the check-in table, we had our tickets scanned, and we were given a wristband to identify us as VIPs, and those who intended to drink alcohol during the night were given a second wristband. We were then given a Camp Frida t-shirt, along with a goodie bag filled with, uh, goodies. Mine had some candy, a couple stickers, and a couple pins, one of which was a glow-in-the-dark Camp Frida logo. There was also a blank Christmas ornament inside, which one could decorate at the table containing markers, stickers, and strings.

 

 

 

The Frida is a two-screen theater, and the tradition during Camp Frida is to different films in each of them, allowing attendees to choose their own movie-watching adventure throughout the night. The screens are each given a name that goes with the whole summer camp motif, and so for that night, screens One and Two became the Fire Lodge and Mess Hall.

We were directed to the Fire Lodge, where the stage had been decorated with cobwebs, balloons and jack-o-lanterns, while music by Goblin, John Carpenter, and Jerry Goldsmith, among others, played on the sound system. A volunteer went around offering to tape off seats in the Mess Hall for us, that way, should we decide to watch a movie over there, we’d already have a reserved spot.

I wanted to hug this volunteer, but I figured if I was going to hug anybody, it was going to be the pretty blonde volunteer who was done up like Florence Pugh’s May Queen from Midsommar (minus all those flowers). Alas, I never did work up the courage to step up and spit mad hugging game to her. Not because I was afraid of being turned down, but because I was afraid of her saying Yes, and next thing you know, I’m wearing a bear’s skin — and all that that entails.

Some time after that, we were joined by the rest of the attendees, including a large group of friends with at least two married couples in the rotation. They were all very chipper and I sensed they were longtime pals, and it was nice to see that there were a couple of single men among them, because that meant that the wives in the group didn’t force their husbands to only fraternize with other married friends. But upon seeing the two single men in the group turn to give each other an intimate smooch, I realized, nope, they’re all married.

One of the straight husbands excused himself, and his wife looked over to the others, as he walked away, and casually declared “He has a very small bladder!”, to which another wife responded with “Oh really? I have the best bladder in the world” and I almost piped in with “…for a woman, maybe”, but I didn’t want to ruin their fun. Because I actually enjoyed watching them, it reminded me of my younger days when I was the third wheel to my married friends, interrupting them every time they were about to kiss.

There was an intro by the Frida’s projectionist — whose name I didn’t get, I’m sorry to say, I believe it was Don, but don’t hold me to that — and he brought down the Frida Cinema’s founder, Logan Crow, the director of programming Trevor Dillon, and various volunteers, giving each of them their time to shine as we applauded them all.

Then he handed the mics over to the two ladies who would be our camp counselors for the evening: Becca and Isa, who are the social media director and volunteer coordinator for the Frida. They broke down the details of the evening, in regards to the schedule and the breaks between films, as well as a polite request for us to be considerate with our trash. 

Then, it was on to the marathon proper — which started off a little too scary for us, as the first film appeared very yellow on screen, forcing the projectionist to stop the movie and fix the situation. One quick bathroom break later, all was well again, and from that point forward, it was smooth sailing all night.

 

Now you kids might want to sit up close and listen to this oldhead tell you about a period in the late 90s when Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson brought back the teen slasher with their surprise hit Scream. Hollywood wanted in on that sweet, sweet money, so along came a bunch of horror films starring a bunch of pretty faces, rather than the more relatable, attainable types that starred in these kinds of movies back in the 80s.

Among these cash-ins was the 1997 slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer, directed by Jim Gillespie, and also written by Williamson, who adapted the novel by Lois Duncan. This was the first film of the evening, which takes place in a seaside North Carolina town, where we’re introduced to four friends celebrating the 4th of July, all of them recent high school grads with plans for the future.

By the way, for any designated drivers reading to this: Tie up your drunks. Tie them up or knock them out, because there is still the possibility that one of these intoxicated assholes is going to do something that will take your attention off the road for one second, and that’s all the time needed for some sad-assed fisherman to stumble onto your speeding vehicle’s path. That’s what happens to our quartet, and rather than do the hard but correct thing in calling the cops, they instead dump the body in the ocean, swearing to take this secret to their graves.

A year later, one of them, Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) comes home from college and it’s clear that the weight of that man’s death weighs heavily on her soul, as it does on the souls of her ex-boyfriend Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), and her friend Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar). As for the fourth of their guilty party, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), he’s an overly pumped-up, rage-filled jock, and therefore has no soul, so he just continues to be his usual aggro self, and all of us in the audience found his very extra behavior very entertaining to watch.

Soon, our group begins to receive anonymous notes with the title of the film written on them, which brings out major scared & paranoid vibes in the entire gang. They want to know who is the I in question. Is it the goofy-ass nerd from The Big Bang Theory? Or maybe it’s creepy-ass Anne Heche. There’s also a strong possibility that it’s one of them. But my money is on the scary hook-wielding figure in a rain slicker, and I have to give this dude some serious props for his excellent handwriting and his top-notch hook skills, he probably uses the same hand for both.

The audience seemed to appreciate Julie’s use of a very 90s Internet to search for clues, as well as her very 90s hair bangs, while I also got a kick out of the killer’s very supernatural ability to show up and disappear anywhere, as well as his ability to transport dead bodies in record time — in broad daylight, no less.

My apologies for what might have come off as an insensitive comment regarding Anne Heche’s character, and to be real with you, due to her recent passing, her tragic and unsettling role carried with it a tragic and unsettling air that obviously wasn’t there in my previous viewing.

But rather than dwell on that sad truth, I will dwell on a possibly sadder one. This viewing took me back to when my friends and I saw this at the cinema back in ’97; we had a good time and then went to grab a bite at In-N-Out Burger where we had a serious discussion about which of the actresses in the film we’d most want to bang. One friend was all about Hewitt, having been into her since Party of Five, while my other friend was a big Buffy fan, and so that’s where his penile loyalties lay.



As for me, I was the outlier who preferred the actress who played Helen’s sister, Elsa (Bridgette Wilson), because it was my understanding that dat Veronica Vaughn is one piece of ass, and on top of that, her character wore glasses, and as some of you might already know, the only thing hotter to me than one pair of tits are two pairs of eyes. Of course, each of us would then accuse each other of lying about wanting to fuck any of the ladies, because clearly he was gay — except we used a different word, because the 90s were a more innocent time for hate speech.

An even sadder post-script to that anecdote: Ten years later, I met up with one of those high school friends. It had been a while, so we caught up, reminisced about the old days, then went to see Transformers. At the end of the night, as I drove him back home, he tried to get nostalgic by making those humorous assumptions about my sexuality again. As per usual, I told him, Yeah sure, I’m totally gay, and you’re all I want, you big hunk, you. Except, this time, he kept going, and so again I jokingly said Yes. But he would continue, and eventually it got very uncomfortable because it didn’t sound like he was joking anymore. It sounded like he was seriously trying to get me to admit that I was gay. So I seriously answered him No. 



But that wasn’t enough. He still wouldn’t let up. This went on for way longer than it should’ve gone. I told him this wasn’t funny anymore, and frankly it was getting annoying. And so he asked again.



I had enough. I slammed hard on the brakes and pulled the car off to the side, nearly colliding with a parked PT Cruiser. It got real quiet, and you could smell burnt rubber in the air. I looked over at my friend and saw fear in his eyes as I began to roll up my sleeves. Then I reached over, angrily unzipped his fly, furiously pulled out his cock, and violently sucked him off. After we both finished, I wiped my mouth and told him “Listen, you son-of-a-bitch, a gay man wouldn’t have given you such a bad blow job, and a straight man wouldn’t have stayed hard — let alone gotten hard in the first place!” That shut him up. Then I took him home, wished him well, and dropped him off. I never heard from him again, although I did get an anonymous text the following year that read “I know what you did last summer”, but I ignored it.



Anyway, it held up for me, the movie, I mean. It’s a solid slasher, and it’s a lot more beautifully shot than I remembered — props to cinematographer Denis Crossan — this is definitely from a time when movies used to look like movies. I enjoyed it just as much as I did the last time, even if all the scares weren’t as strong the second time around. But it was fun to watch others jump up and scream every once in a while. It also warmed my heart to hear the entire audience burst into a rapturous cacophony of applause, cheers, and laughs after Hewitt delivered quite possibly the most iconic line of dialogue of her entire career. 

That’s not the only moment where the audience reacted as such; during the intro, we were asked to cheer any time the holiday of the film was said out loud. In this film’s case, we cheered every time someone mentioned the Fourth of July. 



But what I thought to be the worst part of the movie back then, remains the worst part today; there’s a scene where Helen comes back home after a long day, and she goes into the kitchen to grab a soda, and it’s so awkward and unnatural the way she stands over her kitchen table, pouring her drink into a glass in the most assholish way — with the glass standing straight up, so that she gets 90 percent foam and 10 percent soda — taking a couple sips from the glass in a manner more befitting someone with a gun to her back. Then she takes off for her bedroom, with both the half soda can and the half empty glass still on the table. I guess she figured the killer who just crept into her house might be thirsty as well.

After a break, we returned to the Fire Lodge, where the hosts announced that both theaters were opened. Then they invited Mikey Aguirre, the gentleman behind See It on 16mm, on stage; normally he tours to various cinemas to screen films on 16mm, but that night he was there to pitch his selection for the night, the 1989 Spring Break/Easter slasher, Nightmare Beach, which would play over at the Mess Hall. The hosts then told us that those who were going to see Aguirre’s choice would also have the bonus of participating in an Easter Egg hunt before the film, where we could find eggs containing movie passes and various other goodies.



The hosts then tried something new for Camp Frida; a wheel appeared on screen, divided into sections, each section representing a different film. The wheel was spun, and whichever film the arrow settled on would be the one that would play right there in the Fire Lodge. Among the films were New Year’s Evil, the 2006 remake of Black Christmas, and 1995’s Day of the Beast (also a Christmas film). Unfortunately, it landed on 2001’s Valentine, which I saw back then and never wanted to see again. So it was an easy choice for me — and apparently most of the audience, as many of us ventured next door, some of us going to our saved seats.

I was so busy settling into my new seat, that I forgot about the Easter Egg hunt until an overzealous gentleman swooped over to my lonely section and grabbed all the eggs surrounding my oblivious ass, and all I could do was laugh.

 

Nightmare Beach starts off in true 1980s Spring Break style: With a serial killer being executed by electric chair. Diablo is his — was his name, and he was the leader of a particularly crime-happy biker gang, but he continued to swear his innocence in the murders almost up until the moment of his execution, where he then swore that he would return to exact his revenge. One crispy convict later, we’re treated to a credit sequence montage of college beach bodies having fun up and down the Florida burg of Manatee Beach, before settling in to introduce the various potential victims and killers.

Our main doofus is Skip, a college football player who recently fucked it up for his team during the Orange Bowl and is understandably forlorn about it, despite attempts by his horndog teammate Ronny to cheer him up by reminding him that they are indeed there for Spring Break! and all which that entails.

While Ronny employs the “Ask a hundred women to sleep with you, and one will say Yes” technique of scoring, Skip prefers the company of Gail, a local bartender who is almost as much an Eeyore as Skip — but she has a much better reason for her down syndrome. You see, Gail’s sister was one of Diablo’s victims, and she was there for his execution, so there’s both fear and uncertainty over what she witnessed, and what she was told — feelings that grow even stronger once it’s revealed that Diablo’s body has disappeared from its grave.

Perhaps not too coincidentally, a mysterious leather-clad biker — identity hidden by helmet — is driving around town in his souped-up motorcycle, complete with electrified passenger seat for unlucky hitchhikers. But since hitchhiking was becoming less of a thing by ’89, he supplements his murder-cycle by going on foot, killing people by electrocuting them or burning them with exposed live wires or big furnaces that shoot out flames at lengths that defy logic.

But you know how it is with these Italians, logic has about as much place in a horror movie as a Negro in their sister’s bedroom. Oh, yeah, about the filmmakers; during his intro, Aguirre credited the direction of this eye-tie production to Umberto Lenzi, who among various gialli and Euro-crime films, is probably most infamously known for the grindhouse fave Cannibal Ferox — aka The One Where A Chick Gets Hooks Through Her Breasts. But Lenzi claimed to have quit the production before shooting began, only sticking around at the request of replacement director James Justice (who co-wrote the screenplay), in a position that I can only speculate as being the Obi-Wan to Justice’s Luke Skywalker.

Either way, this ultra-goofy, terribly-acted movie was so much fun to watch with a crowd. When not being entertained watching the killer turning people into crispy critters, we were equally entertained by the scenes featuring the most Floridian of men and women. There is so much WOOOO! going on, most of it coming from this random dude who keeps popping up to scream “Go gators!”, he always popped up when you least expected it, and it never failed to make many of us in the audience crack up. There are also plenty of scenes involving wet t-shirts and oiled up bodies, and it’s all equal opportunity as we watch both sexes get reduced to eye candy, because that’s the America that I believe in.

Speaking of America, this movie features quite possibly the most realistic cinematic portrayal of high ranking officials and civil servants — at any level — that I’ve seen. They are all so incompetent and self-serving; as the body count rises, the mayor and the chief of police decide to cover it up by burying the bodies in a salt mine, and they have a doctor to help them falsify the records. The mayor doesn’t want to look bad, and the chief is just a power-tripping asshole, and it’s heavily implied that the doctor uses Bill Cosby tactics to satisfy his Kevin Spacey tastes.

I’d hate on the chief and the doctor, except they’re played by John Saxon and Michael Parks, and they were never not awesome, regardless of who they played. And while you never see Parks do any of the abhorrent things he’s accused of, you do see him hilariously pull out a flask every single time he gets or gives bad news, and the audience always cheered whenever that flask come out.



Also included in this assortment of assholes is a pervy hotel manager who goes into a supply closet that also happens to have a hole drilled into it, allowing him to spy on a hooker in the next room who has a great racket going. She hooks her johns by giving them a sob story about being a student short of cash. I think this is a very smart ploy, because it allows dudes who are too proud to pay for it to sleep with a woman who is totally out of their league. As far as they’re concerned, this hot chick was totally into them, and so, sure, here’s a couple hundred bucks to help her with that other thing.



There’s also a prankster, who among his heee-larious pranks, goes around pretending to be a shark on the beach, freaking everybody out. Man oh man, do I fucking hate pranksters. Do you wanna know why? Because these motherfuckers — you know what? For your eyes sake, and for the sake of my high blood pressure, I’m gonna move on. Suffice it to say, motherfuck a prankster.

After the break, we all returned to the Fire Lodge, where someone came out to to give us the bad news — it was last call for alcohol — and the good news — they would be serving pizza after the film. Then the hosts returned to announce the next film playing in that theater: The first of two Jamie Lee Curtis movies that take place on a train during New Year’s Eve, Terror Train. Then they spun the wheel to reveal the alternate feature: the 2009 zombie flick Dead Snow. 

Having already watched Terror Train during the Camp Frida live-stream in 2020, I decided to go with the other film, which I had never seen. So off I went, back to the Mess Hall, with my large cup of Cherry Coke that I didn’t finish during Nightmare Beach.

Easter is this Norwegian film’s holiday, and so we watch how kids over there do Spring Break: Somewhere in some snowy hinterland, up in some mountain cabin. So we’re going to not going to see a bunch of exposed skin, which is for the best, because we’re not talking beach bods for most of this crew. But I get it, in the cold you’re gonna want some extra layers of warmth.

So anyway, we’ve got seven of them; four dudes and three chicks, and you’d think the tubby movie geek of this funky bunch would be the odd man out. Wrong. He actually ends up being the first — the only one! — to score, with a rather attractive woman, despite their being nothing particularly alluring about him, visually or personality-wise. 

Again, let me remind you, he’s a movie geek, and as you, me, and the rest of the movie geeks know, movie geeks are the absolute fucking worst, that’s why we have to find another movie geek if we wanna fuck, and that just makes two of the fucking worst, who are also the worst at fucking, getting together to fuck, and if two of the fucking worst who are the fucking worst at fucking end up fucking, that means some of the fucking worst end up having fucking kids — and their kids are the fucking worst.

They usually grow up to be pranksters.

So back to this fat fuck and his hot chick. He leaves the cabin to go take a shit in the outhouse, and after dropping a deuce and wiping his ass, this lady just steps right into the outhouse with him, and it’s like, if being in a small space that reeks of shit isn’t going to cool her jets, then I suppose she’d be turned on by the piece of shit sitting before her. He doesn’t even have to make the first move, instead, she picks up his hand — the same hand he used to wipe his shitty Norwegian ass with — and begins to suck his fingers. 

Lady and gentleman, it was at this point, that the jaded black-hearted cynic who has watched real death videos and who found A Serbian Film kinda dull, this garbage human whose words you are reading, began to feel something approaching the temptation to faint. 

But instead I took a deep breath, picked up my cup of Cherry Coke and sucked on the straw as if it were my old friend’s cock — strengthening my resolve. My eyes rolled back down from my head, and I was able to continue watching as this poor damaged woman rode this chunky cowboy into an orgasmic state of fecal-scented bliss. 

It was here that I felt I was truly watching a horror film. And so I was relieved when the zombies finally arrived.

And who are these zombies? Nazis. You see, back during World War II, a bunch of these SS scumbags had occupied this part of Norway, and they did their thing, raping, pillaging, murdering the villagers, because that’s what one does for their country. But eventually the villagers fought back and killed most of them, but some of them escaped and froze to death. 

Well, here they are, back from the dead, and ready to reich and roll. The survivors are left to fend these zombies off, using their wits and what little weaponry they have at their disposal. I enjoyed this absurd splatter flick featuring creative kills, and filled with blood, entrails, severed body parts, and various viscera, even though this is definitely more of a movie geek joint that takes stuff from fondly remembered genre films and gives them its own spin. It’s less about reinventing the wheel and more about redecorating it.

The movie openly references its cinematic inspirations, particularly the works of Sam Raimi, specifically Evil Dead II, and so, it has that same kind of horror-comedy blend, albeit a much darker form of comedy. I also appreciated some of the nasty turns and surprises it takes along the way, and it plays no favorites when it comes to its characters, regardless of what you’d expect based on their types.

This was directed by Tommy Wirkola, who also co-wrote the screenplay, and he went on to direct Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, which I’m now interested in checking out because I’d like to see what he turned out on a big Hollywood scale. But I’m also left thinking that if this guy, an obvious movie geek himself, intended on painting such an unflattering portrait of one, as he did in this film, or was this in fact, some kind of wish fulfillment.

Like, I can imagine some super nerd who jizzes over movies and comic book properties and movies about comic book properties, working up the kind of fear and resentment towards the opposite sex, and so that ends up mixing in with his passion to just be able to, you know, actually kiss a girl. And the larger that fear and resentment grows, the more toxic that mix becomes, until eventually that nerd goes from thinking “Man, I wish a nice girl would let me take her out for a chocolate malt” to “Man, that sexy slut should hunger for my four inches so bad, she’s willing to smell my shit to get it.” 

It was during the following break that the pizza arrived, and me being overly assumptive, assumed that it was as complimentary as the coffee for VIPs. Two slices and seven dollars later, I returned to the Fire Lodge, where trailers for holiday-themed films played in the background, including Thankskilling, Bloody New Year, Gremlins, Eyes Wide Shut, Jack Frost, and Uncle Sam. 

Then the hosts returned to announce the next film playing in the Fire Lodge: the 1987 Thanksgiving body-counter Blood Rage, which was introduced by a gentleman whose name I can’t recall, but he’s from the website HorrorBuzz. He talked about how this movie was a favorite with everyone from HorrorBuzz, and that they’ve screened it twice for their Horror Movie Nights at the Frida. He talked about what a wild film it was, and I agree, as it is an annual viewing for me every November. 

 

 

 

 

But as much as I would have loved to experience a nutty flick like Blood Rage with a rowdy sleep-deprived crowd, I made the difficult decision to instead go with the wheel’s choice for the Mess Hall: 1986’s April Fool’s Day, a film I always meant to watch. So off I went, but not before stopping for a cup of my free VIP coffee, of which I took two sips before tossing it in the trash, where it belonged, then I silently wept for those who had to pay for that disgusting brew. 

Only a handful of people chose to watch this film, and the projectionist stuck his head out from the booth to thank us for giving this movie a chance, because he felt it was a pretty good movie worth a watch. He also warned us that the movie would begin in a strange aspect ratio, but not to worry, that’s intentional on the film’s part. Then someone in the crowd douche-ily ordered the projectionist to “roll film!” and the projectionist mumble-responded some appropriately snarky comment about how he was going to get the film print ready, as if this entire evening’s slate wasn’t being presented digitally.

So yeah, the film opens with a narrower aspect ratio, because we are watching footage from someone’s video camera, introducing our cast of college cutups, as they travel by ferry to visit their friend Muffy at her island residence for the weekend during Spring Break. The most recognizable of the group is Kit, played by Amy Steel, who is best known as final girl Ginny from Friday the 13th Part II, and Arch, played by Thomas F. Wilson, who is best known as one of cinema’s greatest bullies, Biff Tannen, from the Back to the Future trilogy. 

As for Muffy, she’s played by the Valley Girl herself, Deborah Foreman, who gives a very interesting performance as someone who comes off both very friendly while also vaguely creepy. It’s like she’s not quite all there, and despite her sweet face and lovely smile, there’s something possibly sinister brewing underneath — and that’s when the film connected the dots for me, when she is shown setting up various pranks all throughout her property. 

I knew it — a prankster! And on the weekend of April Fool’s Day, no less! Oh, she’s having herself a blast messing with her guests, placing whoopie cushions on their chairs, or setting the same chairs up to fall apart, she’s screwing with the light switches, jacking up the water faucets, and worst of all, she serves them franks & beans for dinner. Not that I dislike franks & beans, but c’mon, that house screams Chateaubriand, man, you gotta class up the cuisine for your guests.

But on the other hand, they deserve it. They really are all a bunch of assholes, when you get right down to it, the best kind of privileged White people that Reagan’s America had to offer. All they do is goof around, make gay jokes, work out, kick soccer balls, try to fuck each other, and wear sunglasses because their future is so bright. And so I couldn’t get too upset once they start disappearing, only to reappear at room temperature, in various states of Dead.

So it leaves a viewer wondering if this is all Muffy’s doing as well. As mentioned before, she carries a faint air of psycho killer, and the opening credits even show us a flashback of Muffy’s childhood, where she receives a jack-in-the-box but a scary monster doll pops out instead. You hear her scream, and it’s the kind of prank that might seem minor in retrospect, but come on, man, the only thing kids have in common is that they are all little shits, otherwise they are each unique and different in every way, and so some kids handle scary stuff better than others. And while some might give a quick yelp and move on, and some might go crying for their mommies, others end up becoming Psycho Freaky Jasons. You just never know.

It’s like this one time that I saw a friend put on a monster mask and hide behind a couch as his two-year-old toddler came stumbling into the living room. His mother and I protested against this, but he was dead set on having his fun. As so out he popped, going “Rraawwgh!” at his baby boy — who then gave out the most ear-piercing scream, dropped to his knees, and I’m sure tears weren’t the only liquid he excreted that moment. His mother then started yelling at my friend, practically beating on him, while their son fell onto his back, crying for some kind of comfort. I immediately bid farewell and walked home, choking back the lump that was growing in my throat, wiping away the pesky moisture forming in my eyes, because that’s the kind of pussy I am. 

The last time I saw that child, he was a preteen, wearing a shirt featuring a drawing of a farting dog with the words “Blame the Dog” under it, but I couldn’t tell you if that was a sign of trauma or not. But his mother is no longer in the picture, and the father is a big Trump supporter, so clearly there was some damage done. Anyway, I think the important lesson to be learned here is don’t get a girl pregnant at 15 years old.

While this is lumped in with other slashers of the era, April Fool’s Day is more in the spirit of an Agatha Christie mystery; we watch these characters hang out, and on occasion, a body will pop up. And on the rare occasion that we are shown a victim’s final moments, the film cuts away before things get bloody.  The violence is pretty tame, and the film’s R rating is more about the language and sexual situations. Because of that, I can easily recommend this to people who otherwise stay away from these kinds of movies.

I can also easily recommend this to people in general, because I felt this was a pretty good movie. It’s a good mystery featuring well-executed scenes of suspense, which shouldn’t surprise me, considering this is from Fred Walton, the director of the original When a Stranger Calls. But despite these guys not really being my kind of guys, I actually enjoyed watching them. Some of it feels improvised, rather than scripted, and it all feels natural. I not only believe that these characters were friends, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the actors themselves already were friends, or became friends during the shoot.

Even though this movie is over 30 years old, and is probably most known for its ending, I’m still going to keep mum on the conclusion, for the sake of anybody out there who hasn’t seen it. But I really liked the bold choice that this film made, and I can imagine many who saw this back in the day found this film to be a breath of fresh air, and I can imagine many others being pissed off by it.

But it’s greatest accomplishment is that it’s a film featuring people playing pranks on each other, and somehow I was left smiling by the end of it! Because I fucking hate pranksters!

I’m sorry, I held back while talking about Nightmare Beach, but forget it, I’m going both barrels right here and now. You wanna know why I hate pranksters? In my experience, pranksters love to prank but absolutely hate it when they get pranked, which proves to me that pranks are really just some screwed-up and cowardly way to be hostile to others, while laying all the responsibility on the victim. Because if you get pranked, and don’t find it funny, then you are the asshole. wHaT’s WrOnG? dOn’T hAve A sEnSe oF hUmOr? is the defense these absolutely worthless cunts pull out like badges from the Twat Police, after assaulting you. 

Tell a prankster that you do not like pranks, and they’ll accept it as a challenge that was never given, and so they will proceed to prank you. There’s a word for that kind of person, who will insist himself on you, despite your request that he doesn’t — and pranks are just another way to insist.

I swear to god, if I become King Dictator of the World, I’m having all pranksters executed; put ’em on their knees, give ’em two to the back of the head, and bill the bullets to their families, China-style. The bodies of the executed will be cremated, and the ashes will be sent to their loved ones, and when they open the urn to scatter the ashes, a wacky spring-loaded snake will jump out at them. What’s wrong? Don’t have a sense of humor?

Back at the Fire Lodge, we were told that instead of the wheel, they would name films and the two that got the most applause from the audience would play next; the winners were The Return of the Living Dead from 1985, and Night of the Demons from 1988, which I had already seen at a previous Camp Frida, and thought was OK, so I instead stayed put for the zombie flick, which I’ve seen on the big screen a couple times already, and wouldn’t mind watching again.

The 4th of July is mentioned at the very beginning, but never mind that, we’re not here for fireworks, we’re here for zombie mayhem, and that’s what we get during this film which mostly takes on the 3rd. Still, I’m surprised that throughout this entire film, not one early firework is seen or heard in the background. I don’t know about the film’s setting of Louisville, Kentucky, but over here in Southern California, you can’t stop someone from lighting fireworks before the 4th. They usually start as early as April, and they don’t stop until late September, if we’re lucky.

I don’t think you even have to be from SoCal to recognize that this supposedly Southeast location is obviously Los Angeles. So we should be catching glimpses of the occasional errant firework set off by some overzealous cholo, because it’s always a cholo flaunting the off-season fireworks. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a requirement of the lifestyle.

Anyway, everyone knows that George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead is a work of fiction. What this film presupposes is, maybe it’s not?  That’s what Frank, a senior employee at a medical supply warehouse tells the new hire Freddy, that the film was based on a real incident and that the zombies were sealed into airtight containers by the Army, and that one of those very same containers is stored in the warehouse’s basement. 

Of course, curiosity gets the better of the two, and off they go to check out the formerly living corpse, which results in them getting sprayed with zombie gas — while bringing back the dead, for good measure. The two call in their boss, Burt, to help them deal with the walking corpses that just won’t stay dead. Even worse, these things all have a hankering for human brains.

Meanwhile, Freddy’s punk friends are killing time at the neighboring cemetery, waiting for him to clock out from work. They’re unaware of what’s going on, and so when one of them, a pink-haired chick named Trash, openly admits to fantasizing about being eaten alive, she has no idea how soon that fantasy will become terrifying reality.

The rest of the film is just one long chain of fuck-ups, ranging from colossal to monumental to apocalyptic. Written and directed by Dan O’Bannon, who up until this point was known for writing Alien, Blue Thunder, and my favorite Tobe Hooper film, Lifeforce, his directorial debut is a top-notch entry in what I like to call the “Everybody’s Fucked” sub-genre. Because no matter what these characters try to do to contain the situation, they’re all fucked. It is a nihilistic work, but it’s also good times, because O’Bannon is able to balance out the doom with an overall sense of fun — and it never stops being tense and exciting. He knows the right tone for any given scene; when to make things funny, when to make them scary, when to make them disturbing, and when to make them tragic.

O’Bannon is strongly supported by a pitch-perfect cast, including the late great trio of Clu Gulager as Burt, James Karen as Frank, and Don Calfa as Ernie, the undertaker from the mortuary next door (and who might also be a secret Nazi, but I already talked about those assholes two movies ago). Then on the punker side, you have a bunch of those assholes, so I’m just going to point out Thom Matthews as Freddy, Beverly Randolph as Freddy’s girlfriend Tina, and Linnea Quigley as the aforementioned Trash, who despite her limited screen time, arguably leaves the biggest impression on a viewer, at least she did on me.

There’s also Spider, played by Miguel A. Nuñez Jr., whose previous film was Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, where he played a victim taking a shit in an outhouse, but unlike those filthy Scandinavians in Dead Snow, he and his paramour don’t fuck on the toilet. Instead they sing to each other while she waits for him outside the shitter, like a normal human being.

Overall, I really enjoy this movie, despite half of the soundtrack being comprised of non-stop screaming. It doesn’t matter if it’s comedic screaming or screams of genuine terror, screaming’s screaming, man, and it can get grating. Most of it comes from Frank and Freddy, who scream at how badly they fucked things up, at the sights of melty reanimated bodies clamoring for braaaaains, and from the agonizing pain as they slowly die from exposure to the gas, becoming zombies themselves.

But the other half of the soundtrack is a mix of cheesy 80s synth score and a bunch of boss tunes by bands like 45 Grave, T.S.O.L., and The Damned, sounds that never get old — unless you’re young, then that stuff is old by default. But they’re bad jams, nonetheless.

While I prefer Romero’s original Dead trilogy over this one, as far as zombies go, I have to give it to O’Bannon, because I find his version of the undead to be horrifying. It has nothing to do with Romero’s zombies being slow and O’Bannon’s being fast, because they’re both equally scary for their own reasons. No, it’s because Romero’s zombies can be killed; one shot to the brain will do ’em dead. But it doesn’t work that way with O’Bannon’s zombies; you can brain ’em, decapitate ’em, dismember them, and they’re still moving.

To add pain to injury, it hurts to be a zombie in O’Bannon’s world. They need to consume human brains to take away from the pain, they’re like junkies desperately fiending for a fix. So you gotta look at it like this: If you die and become a zombie in Romero’s world, well, your non-life involves slowly walking the earth, chowing down on the occasional human, and stopping at the neighborhood mall every once in a while. It doesn’t seem like a bad existence, I mean, I don’t hear them complaining. And once someone separates your brain from your spinal cord, its lights out, and any possible suffering you might have had as a zombie, is finally over.

But become a zombie in O’Bannon’s world, and you’re fucked forever. You are in everlasting pain, save for those brief moments of relief that come from cracking open a skull and diving in for some delicious brains. But that won’t last, and there you are, running in search for more relief. And if someone shoots you in the head, it does nothing. Hell, it might actually hurt more. And if someone machetes your head off your body, you are now burdened with yourself, having to carry your head around with you — provided you can find it. And if you get chopped up into pieces, there will never be relief.

Should you decide to suicide, well, that’s one way to solve your problem in Romero’s world. But suicide is not an option in O’Bannon’s world, not unless you want to throw yourself into an incinerator, but if you also happen to be infected with zombie cooties when you burn, well, congratulations, you’ve just infected the air with your self-made zombie gas, further spreading the pain, you inconsiderate asshole.

Anyway, I really dig it: gory, funny, scary. The ending’s a bit odd, it feels like they ran out of money and scrounged something up in editing, but that’s a very minor complaint towards a major accomplishment. I also forgot that the movie begins with a disclaimer informing the viewer that what they are about to see is all true, using real names and real places. So take that, Fargo.

Everybody was happy to find donuts waiting in the lobby, while I was happy they were free; I grabbed a glazed twist and stepped outside to enjoy my sugar rush with some fresh air. Then, we all gathered at the Fire Lodge for a final spiel from Trevor Dillon about the history of Camp Frida, and then the various volunteers were shouted-out for their hard work in putting this night together and working this night together, and we all gave them a round of applause. Then Becca and Isa came back out to reveal the final film of the night: 1988’s Maniac Cop, which features a climax that takes place during St. Patrick’s Day.

Somebody is killing innocent people on the streets of New York City — somebody with a badge — and perhaps if you’ve never heard of the Maniac Cop series, you might have actually been surprised when it was revealed not to be Bruce Campbell’s brief red herring of a character, but instead a bigger man with a bigger chin, played by Robert Z’Dar. And perhaps if you’ve never heard of the Maniac Cop series until now, my apologies for spoiling it for you.

But that’s part of life. The way I see it, everybody takes a beating sometimes, and everybody gets at least one movie spoiled for them; back in 2019, I was walking towards the Vista Theater to watch Avengers: Endgame, and two kids from the previous showing were walking the opposite direction, loudly recounting who died in the end. I wanted to push the little bastards into oncoming traffic, but nobody was driving at that moment.

Back to the movie, in which I can only guess writer/producer Larry Cohen wanted Whitey to understand the fear that Blacks and minorities feel in the presence of our local Officer Friendlies — and make a profit while he’s at it — and so here’s another example of why I feel genre films were the best and remain the best at social commentary, compared to, say, your usual Oscar bait claptrap that prefers to ladle it all over until every crevice is coated in Message.

For the especially thick-headed types in the audience, there’s a man-on-the-street interview where a Black guy mentions three of his friends having been shot by cops — and you know he’s not talking about our Maniac. That’s just common behavior by the pigs in blue, who know a paid vacation is worth the risk of being that one in a million who gets made to be an example. Hell, that’s better odds than your average criminals gets when they commit murder.

William Lustig was the perfect guy to tell Cohen’s story; his B-movie action/horror chops are on full display here. When I first saw this on cable, my 4th grade mind was blown when the identity of the Maniac Cop was revealed, and our leads found out how much of a scary indestructible force they were up against. Speaking of which, I love how the movie switches protagonists on us with only a half hour left to go. I really wish more movies would continue to surprise us this way.

I forgot Tom Atkins starred in this, as the lieutenant investigating these murders. He’s the one who introduces the idea that the killer is a police officer, and so, the fact that we have a policeman who wants to hold another policeman accountable for violent acts against helpless, unarmed, law-abiding citizens means that if you have trouble finding this movie in either the Horror or Action category of your preferred streaming service, well, you’ll probably locate this under Fantasy.

Or perhaps you’d find this under Documentary, if one were to go by the shitheel captain, played by William Smith, and the shitbird commissioner, played by Richard Roundtree, the latter having broken my heart. I mean, look at you, Shaft, your ass used to be beautiful, you used to be the man who would risk his neck for his brother man, and now here you are, standing up on behalf of The Man. 

Going back to Atkins, he’s been in plenty of films over the years, but I kinda wish he would have a Robert Forster-esque resurgence, where you’d see him pop up in bigger movies more often. Maybe if we can take Tarantino’s attention away from some wannabe starlet’s feet for two seconds, we can tell him to hook Atkins up with a role in his next project.

Also, I don’t know if this is a hot take or whatever the kids call it these days, but I’m not a fan of 80s-era Bruce Campbell. No no no, I don’t mean as an actor, I mean his look. I think he started looking more manly in the 90s, when he started gaining some age on his face and some meat on his bones. Or maybe I’m projecting, as the years creep up, the doughnuts take their toll, my hair loses volume, and I begin waking up sore for no reason — and I’m no Bruce Campbell to begin with. Either way, I like my Bruce the way I like my beef: aged and thick.

My only real issue with the film is more of a budgetary one, in that I can easily tell the scenes that were shot in Los Angeles and the ones that were shot in New York. I recognized quite a few downtown L.A. locations here and there, plus a palm tree or two where there should be zero.

But hey, at least they could afford to film in both cities! If you were to make this movie today, I bet you would have the leads mixing it up with actors who have Eastern European faces and who speak East Coast slang with vaguely Borat-esque accents, driving on cobblestone streets around 19th century architecture lined with creepy dry-branched trees, with everything looking blue and severe. Welcome to New York, everybody!

Props to Sam Raimi, by the way, for appearing in a cameo as a news reporter, and for saying “St. Patrick’s Day” a bunch of times during his brief scene, causing us in the audience to break out into cheers and applause every few seconds. It was pretty funny; in my sleep-deprived state-of-mind I imagined that Raimi was performing his scene live, and he knew that saying the name of the holiday would induce this Pavlovian response from the crowd, and so he toyed with us, the way he toys with his actors, particularly his favorite punching bag, Campbell.

Anyway, I don’t have as much to say about this one as I would if we were talking about the sequel, which I remember being even better. But this first film will always be remembered as the one where Larry Cohen and William Lustig displayed their courage, by speaking up to declare that All Zombies Are Bastards. 

After the film, the hosts came out to wrap up, and we all gave each other a round of applause, before going onstage to take a photo together. I took part in posing with everybody else, while making sure to stand in a place that would keep me hidden — the best of both worlds for someone like me. And so, a little before 8:00am, Camp Frida 6: Holiday Horrors ended with those of us who made it through the night stumbling out bleary-eyed onto the wet streets. 

 

 

 

 

I ended up stopping in Fullerton to grab some thematically related breakfast at Zombee Donuts, where all their delicious pastries were decorated like coffins, eyeballs, snakes, spiders, monsters, and of course, zombies. They weren’t making them look legitimately scary, they were made up to look cute and cartoonish, and that’s probably why there were plenty of little kids there. They tasted just as lovely as they looked. The donuts were pretty good too.

 

 

These are the tragedies, folks.

 

I don’t know what it is about me, maybe I just have “Suckafied’ written on my increasingly large forehead, and only those with plenty of baggage to unload can read it.

My coworker — we’ll call her Leena — asked me to lock her office door after I stepped in to drop off a contract. Then, in tremulous voice, she recounted a side-business deal that she had formed with who she believed to be her partners. Of course, that day she found out that they had cut her out of the deal right before the getting was green. After her confession, followed the inevitable — her eyes brimmed with tears, bordering on overflow, which was my cue to hug her. 

As she began to ruin my nice shirt with her blend of tears and makeup, I told her that she was right to feel how she felt, and if she had to cry, then cry. While she sobbed, I acknowledged the betrayal she suffered, but told her that it would soon become the past, and she would come out of the experience wiser.

I then asked her to do me a favor: For god’s sake, Leena, please don’t go dark on me.

That’s exactly what I asked her, “please don’t go dark”, because I didn’t want her terrible experience to justify being meaner and crueler to others in future ventures, screwing over others the way she was screwed over by her “partners”.

Be wary? Yes.

Act stronger? Sure.

Avoid being so overly trusting? Absolutely.

But you can still be kind. You can always be kind. Just don’t expect kindness in return, that’s for the other person to decide, that’s the other person’s problem. But every once in a while, you’ll run into the occasional foolish idealist, and I swear to you, Leena — I swear to you — that your kind manner in a world full of motherless fucks will be appreciated. And if we’re all lucky, that fool will show kindness to others.

It was then that I caressed the back of her head, in a “there, there” fashion, as her sobs began to subside. Then, I gradually moved my hand to the top of her head, where I began to apply subtle pressure in a crotchward direction, hoping she’d get the hint.

Upon feeling her kneecap make brutal contact with my magnificent testicles, I realized she might’ve gotten the wrong idea.

With tears in my eyes, I asked “Lesbian?”

With rage in her eyes, she asked “Pig?”

Ugh, I should’ve known — a feminist. Had I known she was one of those, I’d have approached her differently.

You see, fellas, the way to handle one of these fuckin’ feminists is to play nice, invite her to your place, give her a glass from the Cosby Vineyard selection, and once she’s out for the count, you sneak her over to your home in the country and subject her to bondage, torture, and mind games.

At least that’s what the absolute based chad of the 1969 film The Laughing Woman does. His name is Sayer (Philippe Leroy) and his latest lady to be taught this important lesson is Maria (Dagmar Lassander), an employee at the philanthropic organization he runs. While discussing an assignment, Maria makes the mistake of telling Sayer that she is in favor of male sterilization, and I guess it’s not enough that he responds with a “Well, actually” for the ages. Because he then invites her to his apartment for a couple of friendly drinks between employees, which as mentioned earlier, is really just a prelude to Sayer breaking the poor girl’s spirit.

For a long time, I only knew of this film because I was a fan of the music score by the late, great Stelvio Cipriani, but it wasn’t until the Here and Now that I actually watched the film it was made for. But unless you’re into this sort of thing, the stuff Sayer subjects Maria to can be tough to watch. He ties her up, he ties her down. He tapes her mouth shut and forces her to watch him enjoy breakfast. He turns a goddamn firehose on the woman. Worst of all, he forces Maria to rub oil on his disgusting bare man-feet. That alone would be enough for me to wish for death.

Which is in fact, what Sayer wants of his guest, by the way, as he later casually confesses to Maria that he kills his female guests to achieve sexual climax. Look, I’m not gonna kink-shame the man. I mean, whatever floats your boat, right? Some guys can’t cum unless they have a finger in their ass, others need to be asphyxiated, and then you have the real weirdos who can’t cum unless they insert their penis into an orifice. Either way, I don’t judge.

Now, normally, as a coward with a tiny d— ahem — normally as a real man with a fast car, I don’t mind watching women in movies learn their place, but the problem is that Lassander’s character resembles none other than The Adorable Amy Adams (specifically during her Lois Lane days), and since Superman wasn’t coming to save this damsel-in-distress, I wanted this fuckin’ asshole Sayer to die a thousand penis and/or anus-related deaths.

Written and directed by Piero Schivazappa, and also known under the titles Femina Ridens and The Frightened Woman, I can see some calling this film yet another misogynistic portrayal of attractive women in dangerous situations, and I can see some calling this a feminist critique on what overly sensitive and destructive man-babies we males are. I think both parties are right, because this is one of those deals that has it both ways, and depending on your point of view, the ending works either as a justification, or an excuse for what preceded it.

The film’s refusal to make its stance explicit for the average viewer, kinda reminded me of an S. Craig Zahler joint, in that it’s super-fucking-questionable as far as the filmmaker’s personal politics, but goddamn if it ain’t an excellent film all the same. But I also feel that maybe there wouldn’t be so much doubt about the film’s intentions, had this been written and directed by a woman, rather than a dude — an Italian dude, no less — in the late 60s.

Actually, I take that back. Had a chick made this flick back then, it would be seen as misandrist.

Nevertheless, I really liked this movie! It has a pretty whacked-out sense-of-humor that only makes everything more unsettling. And somewhere along the way, just as I figured out where this film was headed, it instead takes a welcome detour that was less disturbing, more wacky, but just as entertaining.

Visually, it’s a real treat; a nicely photographed assortment of snazzy late 60s outfits and super-stylish set design, everything looking very Pop Art and Mod. Most of the film is set in Sayer’s country getaway house that is full of furniture that looks aesthetically pleasing but uncomfortable to actually use. There’s also a dream sequence involving a giant art installation that looks like a woman’s spread legs, with a razor-lined door placed exactly where you’d expect it to be.

Leroy and Lassander are both great in their roles. Sayer comes off cold and calculating — that is, whenever he is in total control. But as the film continues, it becomes more clear that it is indeed, all just an attempt at appearing strong while holding in his emotions — because as we all know, emotions are for women. He meets his match with Maria, who despite being held against her will, despite being knocked down both figuratively and literally, gives as good as she gets. Because a strong-willed woman can only do so much when you have some proto-Red Pill-taking motherfucker standing in her way.

And c’mon, dude, just because Lassander kinda looks like Amy Adams doesn’t mean I’m actually watching Amy Adams, and so, when Maria danced while slowly taking off what looked like a swimsuit made of white gauze, I felt no shame, no need to tell the precious star of Arrival and Enchanted to stop debasing herself for our perverted carnal pleasure.

Because it wasn’t Amy Adams. It was someone else.

No, instead, I said “Take that shit off, ya fuckin’ hoo-er!” OHHHHH!

Of the current new releases at the local cinema, Pearl (the prequel to Ti West’s film X) stood out. Unlike it’s successor, which was a dark and gritty throwback to grindhouse flicks, and brought to mind the early works of Tobe Hooper, Pearl takes a different approach that brings to mind the works of Douglas Sirk; an overly-bright and polished Technicolor widescreen melodrama, with a lush music score reminiscent of Frank Skinner and Dimitri Tiomkin.

Set in 1918, the film follows the murderous psycho freaky oldster from X — the titular Pearl — back when she was just a young adult with zero human kills under her belt. Pearl (Mia Goth) lives on a farm in Texas with her parents, while her husband Howard is overseas fighting in the First World War.

With one man out of the country, and her father infirm, it is up to Pearl and her mother to share in the everyday chores, upkeep, and various household responsibilities. Any spare moment she has, she uses to unwind; for example, she’s fond of dancing in the barn to a rapt audience of cows and chickens, which reminded me of something Oprah Winfrey said in an interview about how when she was a little kid, she would entertain herself by playing to an audience of chickens in a coop. I forgot exactly what this playing comprised of, so I couldn’t tell you whether she sang to them, or interviewed them, or gave them free cars.

But unlike Oprah — god, at least let’s hope so — Pearl is shown to be wearing a mask of sanity which has a tendency to slip every once in a while. We witness such slippage during the opening scene, when Pearl indulges the psychopathic murderer underneath by casually picking up a pitchfork and using it to stab a goose who was not invited to her barnyard show. She then feeds the goose to an alligator at the lake, and we’re left with the sense this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I reckon that alligator’s been eating good for quite a while.

I thought it was pretty clever for West and Goth (who also co-wrote the screenplay) to set this film during the Spanish Flu pandemic; we watch Pearl ride her bike into town to pick up medicine for her father, and upon arrival, she puts on her face mask, because that’s what people did back then, they didn’t have the Internet, so the only place the crazies had to share their wackadoo conspiracies was on the street corners, where they’d shout their thoughts or picket with signs, all the while being justly ignored. Unfortunately, today, similar lunatics have millions of online followers, and some even hold political office. 



In the interest of retaining any readers from the other side of the argument, I offer this alternate version of the previous paragraph: 



I thought it was pretty clever for West and Goth (who also co-wrote the screenplay) to set this film during the Spanish Flu pandemic; we watch Pearl ride her bike into town to pick up medicine for her father, and upon arrival, she puts on her face mask, because that’s what people did back then, they didn’t have the Internet, people were easily-led sheep who questioned nothing and accepted what the government told them, and those who knew the truth were unfairly ignored. Fortunately, today, similar truth-tellers share their knowledge with millions of online followers, and some even hold political office!

During one scene, Pearl goes to the movie theater, and while watching the chorus girls on-screen, she briefly pulls up her mask in order to take a sip from her father’s bottle of morphine. At the same time, I briefly pulled up my mask in order to take a pull of bourbon from my flask. Realizing this moment of synchronicity between film character, film viewer, and time periods — back then, there was a global pandemic, there were countries at war, and an increasing worldwide partiality to fascist regimes; today, we’re in a global pandemic, we have countries at war, and there’s an increasing worldwide partiality to fascist regimes — I thought Wow, next verse, same as the first!



I felt a kinship with Pearl at that point, and to be painfully honest, I even identified with her a few times in ways that I will keep disconcertingly private. And as far as murderous tendencies go, I am possibly worse than Pearl, because while she goes around stabbing geese, I prefer to choke the chicken. While she takes out people standing in the way of her dreams, I enjoy distracting my loneliness by extinguishing millions of potential doctors, astronauts, and school shooters.

Pearl’s dream is to become a dancer in the big city, and it’s something that absolutely has to happen for her, there is no other option. She has to leave her stifling existence on that farm, with its laborious obligations set upon her by her overly stern (aka German) mother. Upon making the acquaintance of a kind and handsome projectionist, she sees not just temporary company sans hubby, but a possible ticket to Dreamland, population: Pearl.

But knowing what we know about this character — at least those of us who’ve seen X — we might not be aware of what will happen, or how, but we do know what the final outcome is going to be. And so, we watch the set up as things begin to look promising for Pearl, awaiting the inevitable heartbreak — and the aftermath that will surely follow.

Those expecting a slasher-horror film may be disappointed; this is more of an off-kilter character study that eventually results in some bloodshed. Come to think of it, I think this qualifies as an entry in the God’s Lonely Man sub-genre, alongside recent examples like Joker and Saint Maud. The tone of the film straddles the line between Sincere and Winking, which can put some people off as well. But I really dug this, and I think this works better as a film than X. 

A huge part of why this film worked for me is Mia Goth’s performance as Pearl, who I found having lots of sympathy for, despite her violent inclinations. She’s a sicko, all right, but she’s also very earnest! The climax of the film hinges on the strength of the actor at the center of it, rather than gore or suspense, and that’s because the climax of the film isn’t a kill spree, but a monologue. But holy shit, what a monologue — and what a delivery!

Hers is the kind of performance that leaves me of two beliefs:

1) Mia Goth is a great actress
2) Mia Goth is a broken human being

And I’m thinking, ¿por que no los dos? I mean, most great actors are both of those things, hence their ability to pull such effective expression of genuine emotion. Plus, she’s hooked up with Shia LeBeouf and has a kid with him, so you fuckin’ know that’s some extra pain to pull from. Some people are talking Oscar buzz for Goth, which I doubt will happen, not because I think she’s undeserving of such accolades, but because the Academy treats horror movies the way they treat the troubling past histories of some of their award recipients: They ignore them.

And don’t give me this “What about Get Out?” bullshit. At most, that was an anomaly, and I think the large assortment of old White people who voted for it probably gave Jordan Peele his Best Original Screenplay not because he wrote an excellent film and deserved the award — which he did — but because he put the idea in their rapidly aging Caucasian brains that maybe there’s a chance that science will create a brain-swapping procedure that will allow them to switch places with younger Black people. They awarded him for giving them hope, and this was their way of saying “Thank you kindly Black filmmaker. You’re one of the good ones.”

Anyway, Pearl’s not only a good movie, it also features one of my favorite end credits to a film, a sort of unholy blend of the closing credits to both Call Me By Your Name and the television comedy series “Police Squad!”. I was about to say Pearl has the most unnerving end credits I’ve seen in a film, but I’m going to give the edge to Call Me By Your Name because those credits involved a child crying over his pedo-cannibal first love. Whatever, Elio, boo-fucking-hoo, why don’t you go eat a dick — that is, if the fuckin’ Lone Ranger hasn’t already eaten it first.

I’ve been trying to watch all the unopened Blu-rays on my shelf (thanks Criterion Barnes & Noble sales!) and the latest one to rid of its shrink-wrap is the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ 1991 epic Until the End of the World.

This ultra-ambitious sprawl of ideas takes place in the near future of 1999, where a nuclear satellite has gone haywire (thanks India!), and will soon crash-land somewhere on Earth, bringing its final resting place the mother of all kabooms.

Sure, there are some people who are really freaked out, such as one man who Debbie Downers a  bar full of people about how he can’t believe anyone is still able to drink/hang out/try to get laid, when Imminent Nuclear Death is hovering above us. Otherwise, the majority appear to be as worried about the situation as one can be about something that is absolutely beyond one’s control, which is to say, the state of worry that allows one to continue living their lives, because you know, there are bills to pay and babies to raise, there’s life to live.

It’s not unlike how the world’s been living ever since we got two sneak peeks of Armageddon back in 1945 — and I’m not talking about the Michael Bay movie. Every so often, some tribal chief tries to establish dominance by threatening the unthinkable, flashing those nukes as if they were Glocks in a rap video. There’s certainly some of that going around right now with the whole Ukraine situation occurring during this foul year of Our Lord, 2022.

I blame Rocky Balboa, myself; I thought he patched things up between the Russkies and the rest of the world, back in 1985, but evidently he didn’t, and now the fate of humanity depends on not pissing off this ex-KGB fuck, this over-compensating tyrant who poses bare chested on top of horses like some ultra closet-case trying to convince everyone he’s fiercely hetero, but only succeeds in making himself look even gayer.

At best, if this asshole ends up pushing the Big Red Button of Win, he will come off as omnisexual, because he will have fucked everyone in the ass — men, women, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Eh, but at least you’re not gay, right, tovarish?

Back to the movie. So yeah, people are living their lives despite potential apocalypse, and we focus on one of them, this lady named Claire (Solveig Dommartin), who is currently getting her lost weekend on by partying it up in Venice, Italy, drowning her sorrows after finding her husband Eugene (Sam Neill) getting super-cozy with her best friend back home in Paris.

Once she gets that out of her system, she decides to return, but not necessarily back to her husband, it’s more like, you know how it is, your bed at home is always going to be more comfortable than a bed elsewhere. Sometimes there’s a cheating schmuck sharing that bed with you, but what can you do? So yeah, she’s driving back, and on the way, she takes a detour in order to avoid a traffic jam, thus beginning the chain of events that lead to Claire going on a globetrotting adventure with a man named Sam (William Hurt), involving a bag of stolen money and a special device that records images that blind people will be able to see.

Along the way, we see the differences and similarities between Claire and Sam. Both of them have a habit of pretending to be someone else; Claire does this by wearing a wig, and Sam does this by using aliases. But while Sam does this to avoid capture by the government agency searching for him (and the special device), Claire does this, well, just to take the edge off the ennui.

One gets the sense that Claire feels unfulfilled, but that even she doesn’t really know what to do to fill that void. Sure, she has a habit recording things on her little video camera, but even then, it’s all very aimless, purposeless, it’s recording just for the sake of recording. For all the cutting edge technology used in this film’s version of 1999 — talking car navigation systems, widespread use of HDTV —  it was still too bright and early a time for something as evil as social media, or TikTok. I’m sure if those were available, Claire would do all right with her time posting numerous videos of herself dancing while singing Elvis Presley songs.

Instead, she keeps herself busy by meeting Sam, losing him, finding him, losing him again, and then finding him again, in a journey through France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States aka The Greatest Country in all of God’s Kingdom and Don’t You Forget You Godless Socialist Commie Foreign Fucks. The entire journey is narrated by Eugene, who along with a private detective are on Claire and Sam’s trail, for reasons of love and money.

At best, I can only describe the first half of this film as a rambling flirtation with the idea of the possibility of an international chase flick/romantic movie, but really all just an excuse for Wenders to hang his ideas and thoughts of both the current state of humanity and where he sees it heading. The second half then dials it down with one final hop to South Australia, switching gears to something more cerebral, but also more emotional. It’s here that we are introduced to Sam’s parents, played by Max von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau, and where we discover that Sam’s father is the inventor of the device for the blind. But we also discover that as brilliant as Sam’s father is, well, as a father to Sam, he’s less than adequate.

I can give away plenty more and still leave a lot for you to discover, but I’ll only go as far as to say that there’s another future tech invention that features in the film, and it allows one to record a person’s dreams, which one can then view. Now that sounds problematic enough for me, but it gets worse when a couple characters find themselves addicted to watching their own dreams, they’re glued to their little portable monitors and lose their shit if they run out of battery. So let’s give Wenders the Nostradamus award, because the people in this film don’t look much different from you and me on our phones and tablets nowadays. Only difference is that most of us are watching other people live their dreams.

But at least the people my age still know what it’s like to step outside and do things without the need of something that requires an energy source, I fear we might be the last generation to have that ability. God forbid an EMP knocks out the entire grid; while some of us can always find entertainment in partaking in various sports of kings such as football, and while others can indulge in various sports of the poor & foreign such as soccer, any kid born after Kim Kardashian fucked Ray J is going to be lost without the Internet. Some might get so despondent over not knowing what to do with their time, they might take their own lives — once again proving that every cloud has a silver lining. Fuck them kids.

Wenders has gone on record saying that he set out to make “the ultimate road movie”, which makes perfect sense; if anyone knew about making movies about interesting characters traveling cross country, it was the director of Paris, Texas and Kings of the Road. The difference was that for this film, Wenders didn’t stick to one part of the country, or hell, one country.

Instead, he somehow managed to finagle over $20 million dollars — which today would be in the neighborhood of $50 million — to make an art-house film about the dangers of falling into “the deep well of narcissism”, which would take place in nine countries and four continents, which would be distributed by Warner Brothers, and not even give the motherfuckers a single decent action scene in the entire picture. (At most, there’s a really brief shootout where they don’t even use muzzle flashes, just sound effects and goofy pratfall music.) It’s pretty wild to think about, especially today. People talk about how they don’t make movies like this anymore, but I feel they’re mistaken. They still make movies like this, just for much, much, much less money.

While I loved the ambition behind it, overall I only liked the film. The problem for me is that despite the introduction of more emotional elements in the second half, it still fell short in getting me to actually care for any of the characters — to say nothing of even liking them — and so I always felt detached. I was only able to observe with little to no sympathy, and only a smidge of empathy in the most extreme cases.

(Yes, I know that earlier in this post/episode, I declared having sympathy and empathy for a psychotic ax-murderer, yet I had little to none for a bored woman and a man trying to help blind people see. Yes, I understand I need help, but before I do, may I introduce you to my pet alligator?)

Despite its flaws, this is still very much a film by Wim Wenders, and so it works as a film to which one can just simply vibe. The whole thing left me feeling as if I had witnessed the last magnificent and desperate gasp of the kind of offbeat indie/arthouse movies that were everywhere in the 1980s. It’s as if Wenders’ knew that these kinds of movies were going to be an endangered species in the 90s, and so he figured that while the getting was good, why not take the bastards for all the money he could get from them? 

A wise move, in retrospect. As I said before, they don’t really make these kinds of movies anymore, and in my opinion, Wenders’ narrative work from the 90s onward has not matched his previous films like Wings of Desire. But that can be said about many of his contemporaries; of the quirky filmmakers from the 1970s and 80s I group along with him, I think only Jim Jarmusch has managed to keep his pimp hand strong and firm through the decades.

Anyway, it’s a great-looking film, shot by the late, great cinematographer Robby Müller, who can make even the most dull settings look like they came from another universe, and I got a kick out of the mix of matte paintings blended with the real locations.

It’s also a great sounding film because Wenders got a very impressive roster of artists to contribute songs; U2, Talking Heads, R.E.M, Depeche Mode, Elvis Costello, Jane Siberry, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and many more. I know it’s an overused cliche of a line, but the soundtrack is just as much a character in this film. It’s no surprise to find out that while the movie bombed at the box office, the soundtrack did quite well.

In conclusion, I feel Wenders’ vision of the future in Until the End of the World is a positive one, and I base that simply on the fact that there’s a scene where a boy uses the Power Glove to make phone calls on his video phone. Because only an unabashed optimist could see any kind of a future for that piece of shit.

Those were just but a few of the movies I watched while nursing the pain in my balls. I still can’t believe Leena did that. It’s like, some women just don’t get it, man. I’m just an old-school gentleman, that’s all. That’s what I keep telling my coworker, my boss, Human Resources, the cops, my lawyer. But they don’t want to hear about it, because that’s the goddamn woke liberal feminist agenda for you LET’S GO BRANDON

All chili burgers are bastards

“Because I’m a pussy” is one answer, I suppose.

Another answer could be “Because I’m afraid of catching COVID”.

But the one that feels the most true to me would have to be: Because I’m afraid of catching and then giving COVID to somebody else, specifically someone with an immune system best described as “lower-tiered”.

See, I do have faith that being vaxxed and boosted will keep my symptoms to a passable level of unpleasantness, were I — excuse me — when I catch Da Rona.

(By the way, it’s nice to know that I still have faith in something, right?)

Anyway, the question to the answer I gave at the top of this tirade is this: Why do I feel hesitant about attending — let alone buying a ticket to — the American Cinematheque’s Sunshine and Noir movie marathon at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, which at that moment — Saturday, May 14th, 10:19 am — was to begin in T-minus 1 hour and 41 minutes?

Having found an answer to that, another question followed: Should I stay or should I go?

A couple quick clicks, a shave, and a shower later, I became the answer, and I was on my way to the freeway. I slowed to a stop at the left turn lane of the intersection, with only a Honda Civic ahead of me. The arrow turned green, but the driver was too busy looking down at his cell phone. As a believer in honking the horn only as a last resort — for example, to tell someone “We’re about to crash!” or “I’m about to run you over!” — I flashed my lights. No dice.

He must’ve really been into whatever was on that phone, that must’ve been a really funny TikTok. After another polite Euro-style flash of the high beams, the light turned yellow, leaving me no choice but to give the inattentive driver a good ol’ ring from the Armenian Doorbell. Sure enough, that did the trick, and the man jolted up in his seat and made the turn. I followed, and as the arrow turned red, I stepped down on the gas, so as not to find myself blocking traffic.

As I entered the straightway, I was surprised by how fast I passed the Honda Civic. See, with the exception of an on-ramp or two, I haven’t really opened up and let loose with my now eight-month-old vehicle. Not that I was looking for that. While my car is known for having some extra pep in its step, it was ultimately more of an aesthetic choice for me. I’m a cruiser, not a racer, I just wanted a daily driver that made it clear to everybody else on the road that I have a mid-life crisis and a tiny penis.

But there I was, having placed a wee too much weight on the gas pedal, and I was zooming. It was a safe run, though, because other than the Honda that I just gapped, no other vehicles occupied this four-lane road, just mine. And it was then that I heard someone whisper from the reptilian, little-dicked part of my soul, and it whispered ”Go faster”.

I never fully understood Stephen King’s novel “Christine” until that moment. But it possesses you, causes you to think differently, act differently. At that moment, I gave in and upgraded from a standard-level douchebag to a Douchebag First Class. I became what I formerly detested — and I didn’t give a fuck. With even more weight on the pedal, I was now going 65 in a 35. I was overwhelmed by the sudden speed, but in a good way, and for the second time in my life, I felt like I was in a Fast & Furious movie.

(The first time, by the way, was about 20 years ago, when I was at a store in Echo Park ordering a tuna fish sandwich with no crust, and an aggravated gentleman strongly recommended that I take my business to Fatburger, which I thought was helpful, but then he called me a “faggot”, which I did not think was helpful.)

Yes, my brother and sister, I was definitely living my life during this quarter mile stretch, and I found myself growing more and more excited, more and more confident, more and more happy. Oddly enough, my penis was turtling itself within my crotch, but what am I gonna do, buy another car?

No, of course not. Instead, I was about to let out a most feminine yelp after glancing over to my rearview mirror. Because that’s when I noticed a small black & white dot that rapidly grew bigger and bigger until it became the form of a police cruiser.

I took my foot off the pedal, but I didn’t hit the brake; I felt that would’ve been too obvious. No, dummy, just slow down naturally and hope for the best. 65 went to 55, which was still much too fast here. But no lights yet, even though the cruiser got even closer.

And that’s when I saw it: A dialysis clinic up ahead. Just as I could make out the driver’s mirrored sunglasses and salt & pepper mustache in my rearview mirror, I made a hard left into the parking lot of the clinic and screeched into an empty spot — with the cruiser still behind me. I grabbed my N95 and my phone, got out of my car, and made a brisk fast-walk for the entrance of the clinic. I fumbled my mask over my face while pretending to talk on the phone, mumbling something about my poor mother or my poor sister or maybe the both of them, sprinkling in the word “dialysis” here and there, loud enough for the cop in the cruiser to hear me as he slowly passed by.

I stepped into the lobby, which thankfully was empty, thereby saving me the absolute guilt that would come with seeing the faces of the genuinely ill — people whose difficult situations I was effectively making a mockery of in order to save my stupid ass — and I looked back to see the cruiser exiting the parking lot, and getting back to prowling the streets, in search of something darker and more innocent to asphyxiate.

A few minutes later, I went back to my car and proceeded to drive to Santa Monica in a matter more befitting a safe Saturn owner, instead of a douchebag in a Dodge.

After finally finding a parking spot in this Permit Only neighborhood, I strolled down Montana Ave, enjoying the beautiful sunny day while overhearing such sidewalk cafe exchanges as “You need matcha”/”I don’t do matcha” before arriving at the Aero, where I showed proof of vaccination, my I.D., and my ticket. 

This was my first time back at the Aero since October 2019; the place looked the same except for some sanitizer dispensers here and there. All of the volunteers and staff were masked, while it was more of a 50/50 thing with the attendees.

It was a very good turnout, but it wasn’t a sold-out show either, and so there were plenty of options for me to sit. Before the show started, I took the opportunity to go outside and snap a couple shots of the marquee and the posters, because if you don’t take a picture of something, did it ever really happen? I snapped a few shots while overhearing a volunteer telling a curious passerby about today’s marathon: Six horror films from the 1980s that take place in and around Los Angeles. 

Unlike the annual Dusk-to-Dawn Horrorthon held at this establishment, “Sunshine and Noir”, which was co-presented by the film screening group Cinematic Void and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was not an all-nighter. Instead, this would begin at noon and end by midnight.

(By the way, the name “Sunshine and Noir”, is a reference to author Mike Davis, who has written about Los Angeles in various books, articles, and essays. In his book “City of Quartz”, Davis describes how depending on who you ask, the city is either beautiful or ugly, sunshine or noir.)

The show began with a short film consisting of clips from various L.A.-set horror films from the totally radical 80s, with Missing Persons’ “Walking in L.A.” on the soundtrack. Then, James Branscome from Cinematic Void stepped onto the stage and asked us how we were. We gave a polite round of applause, and then he accused us of not having had our coffee yet and made us give him a louder reaction. He must’ve thought it was Grant Moninger day. It ain’t Grant Moninger day is it? Nah man, it ain’t Grant Moninger day. So while everybody else cheered louder, I pretended he was Elia Kazan receiving his honorary Oscar and I was Ed Harris and Amy Madigan.

Branscome then introduced a lady by the name of Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh, who was the curator for this event; she talked about growing up in Los Angeles during the 80s, and being entertained by the many horror films she watched on VHS during that period, while being more or less traumatized by the Night Stalker killings that occurred around that time. This combo of fictional and non-fictional slashing in the City of Angels created a “culture of fear” that set the tone for the rest of her life.

She’s not alone. I mean, I’m sure I’m around the same age as her, and I feel I had a similar personal upbringing with movies and the world around me — and I think she’s right in that many horror films of that era that took place in our grand metropolis, were also reflections of what all of us in L.A. — even the very young — were seeing, feeling, and more importantly, fearing.

I think the first and last movie of the marathon are more like accurate reflections, while the films in the middle were more like funhouse distortions, which is to say, they might be skewed but they’re working from something real. And that’s why I also agree with Mitchell-Rohrbaugh’s belief that “Los Angeles has never been more Los Angeles than in these films”.

She then talked about how horror is her favorite genre, and that watching a horror movie every day helped her get through this pandemic — not that it’s over, of course — and then she thanked us all for coming out to enjoy these films together, before calling out to the projectionist to “roll it”.

The first film was John Carpenter’s They Live, the 1988 action/sci-fi/documentary starring Roddy Piper as Nada, a drifter who arrives in Downtown Los Angeles, looking for work, only to discover that aliens are the reason why the gap between the haves and have-nots has become wider. It turns out E.T. is the CEO of a multi-galaxy conglomerate that is exploiting our planet and turning it into a third-world, uh, world.

With the help of technology that disguises their formaldehyde faces and allows subliminal messages everywhere, They not only live while we humans sleep, but they also make sure that we remain divided with distractions and disinformation. Some humans in power are well aware of this — because they were bought off — and the police are no help because, well, they’re the police, they’ve always been the jackboots on the side of the elite, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, regardless whether the elite get around in Rolls Royces or UFOs.

(Besides, it was never the cops’ job to protect people anyway, just to hold them back while some monster goes around shooting their kids for 45 minutes.)

Keith David co-stars as a fellow prole named Frank who’s just trying to make a living for his family in Detroit, and his character starts off trying to school Nada on how — to quote a character David played in another movie — “the poor are always being fucked over by the rich, always have, always will”. Nada, on the other hand, is neither cynic nor defeatist, he’s a believer in the American Dream and the concept of working hard in hopes of a better life.

Yet later in the film, after Nada has discovered the truth and is trying to share this info with Frank via a pair of sunglasses that allows the wearer to see the aliens hiding among us, Frank wants none of it. So badly does he not want to know, he actually puts up a fight with Nada that lasts so long that we in the audience couldn’t help but laugh each time it seemed as if the dustup had been settled, only to start up again. By the end, we broke out into applause after witnessing what I can confidently call one of the greatest fight scenes in all of cinema, not just because it’s an impressive bout of old school street fighting, but because it says so much about the two characters.

It’s like, despite all the shit we talk about how fucked everything is, most of us in this life want — no, we need — the blissful ignorance that comes with plausible deniability because it will make getting through this life less of a fucking chore, man. To threaten us with the truth is also a threat to said deniability, and we’ll be damned if we have to Actually Do Something About It, because that’s a road that leads to, well, I don’t know what it leads to but it sure as hell has no steady paycheck, no 4K television, no Netflix, no goose down pillow, no medical, no dental, no food on the table, no roof over our heads. Face me with the potential loss of all of that, and, well…I might have to beat your ass.

Look man, I lived half my life with Nada’s idealism but have gradually turned into Frank. I wouldn’t want to put on the glasses either. But you know what, if any of you fuckin you-foes are listening out there, I will allow you aliens to recruit me for some of that sweet sweet good life, now that I know — more than ever — how stacked the deck is against the rest of us. Like homeboy said, “might as well be on the winning team”, right?

I say: Fuck the losing team. They never say “Thank you” whenever I hold open the door for them, and they don’t know how to raise their fuckin’ mewling hellspawn, letting them run all over public places, screaming their fucking heads off. Yeah, fuck them, fuck them kids, and just me give my fuckin’ fancy teleportation watch.

Anyway, this is my favorite John Carpenter film, and if aliens ever came to our planet, and they were kind aliens, and they wanted to know all about humanity, I’d sit them down to a triple feature of this and Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and that’ll bring them up to speed as to why our species is so fucked, and so rather than trying to get all kumbaya with us, they should instead just nuke us from orbit. Because it’s the only way to be sure.

The second film was Brian Yuzna’s 1989 dark comedy Society, which focuses on Beverly Hills high school rich boy asshole Bill, who despite having it all thanks to mommy & daddy’s money, feels uneasy amongst his family and friends. He attends regular sessions with his therapist, but that doesn’t seem to help, because for every piece of advice the doc gives him to take it easy, there’s a super-awkward encounter where he walks into his parent’s bedroom and finds mom, dad, and sis all on the bed, dressed a tad too scantily and sitting a little too close to each other.

On the other hand, there are nice perks to this life, such as having sexy classmates gleefully spread their legs and exposing their crotch at him. Never mind that’s he trying to win a debate over the school’s dress code during this, it’s the thought that counts, really. 

As Bill is told later in the film, it’s really more about what you’re born into, rather than being brought into it — “it” being high society. You’re either part of it, and you’re living a privileged life with a bright future already planned out for you, or you’re one of the have-nots, and you’ll most likely be slowly devoured. I might mean that literally or figuratively, I don’t know.

OK fine, I do know. If you’ve ever heard about this movie, it’s because of its memorable “shunting” climax — and for very good reason. It’s a wonderfully grotesque orgy of sex, gluttony, and body horror, a kind of mix of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali come to nightmarish life by way of Luis Buñuel. Thanks to the excellent effects work by Screaming Mad George, bodies writhe and merge into each other, blending into each other, appendages going in and out of orifices, coated in so much icky gooey slime — or at least I hope it’s slime.

But the truth is, take away those final 20 minutes, and Society is just a bad movie. It has hints of being a genuinely satirical look at wealth and privilege, but only skirts the surface level. And maybe that was the intention of the screenplay, to just be a fun little nasty gross-out flick with just a wee mite of socio-economic commentary — which is why I’m laying the blame squarely on director Yuzna. Mostly everything is captured in a flat and listless — and frankly cheap looking — way. There’s a strange alien quality to the performances and the presentation, but only half of it feels intentional.

With little to no grasp of tone, he instead chose to set everything to a Weirdo setting of 11, which eliminates any potential for dread or mystery. It’s like, how can I give a shit about Bill’s quest to discover the truth about his family, when I’m too busy wondering what in the fuck is up with that lady who likes to eat hair? By the time the twist comes along, it’s merely the nuttiest of the nutty things. Yuzna did get much better at the job with his next film, Bride of Re-Animator, so I suppose it’s better that he swung and missed with this one rather than that one.

I feel that in stronger directorial hands, this could’ve been a cult classic worth its reputation. Instead, I can only recommend it if you’re gonna skip to those final 20 minutes, or watch the whole thing with an audience, like I did, because the crowd really did seem to dig it a hell of a lot more than I did, based on their audible reactions that grew louder and wilder as the film went on.

The third film was The Slumber Party Massacre, a 1982 slasher directed by Amy Holden Jones, working from a screenplay by acclaimed feminist author Rita Mae Brown. Set in and around the Venice neighborhood of L.A., the film opens with Trish, a high-schooler whose parents are going out for the weekend, and you know what that’s like, right? You get the house to yourself, and it’s party time, right?

That is, if you’re everybody but me. I don’t know what the fuck was wrong with me, I was a goody-two-shoes as a kid. My parents knew there was nothing to worry about whenever they left me home for the weekend, all I was gonna do was watch movies and eat pizza by myself. Granted, I didn’t have friends, but still. But even if I did, I would prefer, at most, to just have a small intimate get-together, like Trish does here. But unlike Trish’s slumber party, mine would not include beer and weed because I was still on some D.A.R.E. bullshit, I really believed in that Hugs Not Drugs bullshit.

Of course, as much as I would be totally fine watching a group of attractive women portraying teenagers giggle and goof around in their underwear for 76 minutes, the film has to live up to the “massacre” part of the title, and so we are then introduced to escaped psycho killer Russ Thorn. This dude is the real deal, he lives to kill; almost immediately he’s back at it, snatching an overly-attractive phone repairwoman into her van and using her power drill to metaphorically have sex with her. It’s a pretty effective sequence because it happens during the day, while there are people around, but apparently her van is one of those super special soundproofed models, because the guys outside sure as hell can’t hear her very loud screams.

I think this movie takes place in an alternate universe version of Venice where the drinking water is contaminated, causing severe hearing loss to the residents. There are many instances where you’d think someone would hear the loud drill, or the screams that follow, and yet, no they don’t.

By the way, while there is blood, this isn’t one of the gorier films of its type. You’d expect plenty of shots of drills penetrating flesh, but that’s not the case here. Jones instead takes the “what is imagined is worse than what is seen” approach, and what little gore there is, is used judiciously. This would be a problem if the movie sucked, but it doesn’t.

I think it’s because even with the brisk runtime, you get to know enough about these characters that they make an impression on you, and it’s mostly a positive one. No one is really a specific archetype in this film, save the killer and a couple of horny dudes who crash the slumber party. They’re a little more complicated than you’d expect for the usual Dead Meat types in these movies. Among them is Trish’s neighbor from across the street, Valerie, who declines an invitation to the party and stays to babysit her little sister Courtney instead. I liked watching the interactions between Valerie and Courtney, they felt genuine.

There’s also a nice sense of humor to the film, coming in at the right moments; my favorite involves a character being so hungry, she’s willing to take the pizza from a dead delivery guy. It’s over the top, and yet, I can see doing something like that, I mean, I’m probably gonna die anyway, and so long that there’s no blood or guts or anchovies on the pizza, I might as well enjoy a last meal.

A lot of it is fake scare city, and yeah, sometimes the characters do dumb things, but it felt like Jones knew that, she knew she wasn’t fooling anybody, and so she did the best job possible while working within the tropes and trappings of the genre. But the characters helped carry this a long way, and it is fairly suspenseful at times, I mean, it says a lot that I didn’t want any of the characters to die, and when they did, I was like a denied Swiper from “Dora the Explorer”: Oh man! And you bet your ass when it came time for the killer to get his, Jones doesn’t disappoint. It’s a good one, and in conclusion, I still watch movies and eat pizza by myself, it keeps me strong and feeling young.

Following the film, Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh returned to the stage to introduce her guests for a mid-marathon panel discussion: Slumber Party Massacre director Amy Holden Jones and They Live producer Sandy King Carpenter.

Jones talked about how she moved early in her career from editing to directing, even going so far as to film the first ten pages of the screenplay for Slumber Party Massacre on her own dime in order to convince Roger Corman that she was the right gal for the gig. Things got complicated when she was offered to edit E.T. The Extra Terrestrial at the same time; Jones felt that editing a film for Steven Spielberg made the most financial sense, especially since she recently had a baby. But to be given the opportunity to direct was one she always wanted, and it was an opportunity that was almost never given to a woman. So Jones made what she admitted to be an “insane decision”, and took the very risky chance at directing what very well could’ve been forgotten drive-in fodder.

Jones felt the original script needed work, and so she gave herself the extra task of rewriting it; despite that, she and almost everyone involved in the film didn’t have the highest hopes for what they would end up with. But upon viewing the film for the first time, the cast & crew were elated that the final outcome was pretty good!

She was surprised by some of the negative critical reaction, particularly from those who clutched their pearls that a woman could direct something that was perceived to be misogynistic. Jones disputed that by saying that the violence in the film was much harsher against the male victims, and tamer against the women, and besides, “…that’s the friggin’ genre, man.”

Like Jones, Sandy King Carpenter made her bones working for Roger Corman; she started in animation, then moved on to live-action because she felt it wasn’t good to sit in a dark room all day talking to herself. She and Jones then talked about how despite being cheap, Corman fostered a healthy collaborative attitude that resulted in all the people who’ve worked for him to still have fond memories to this day — something that, King added, cannot be said by people working at Blumhouse. Met with nervous laughter from the crowd, King casually responded “Trust me.”

At this point, third guest, actress Kelli Maroney had arrived — traffic was a bitch — and so Mitchell asked for her opinion on how the horror genre compares between the 80s and today; Maroney felt that it has gotten better and more respected, despite some self-conscious attempts at what is known as “elevated horror”, a term Maroney hates. She felt that back in the day, horror films were considered disreputable and they were what people worked on to pay their rent, but today, actors and filmmakers genuinely want to be involved in horror, because there’s a love for the genre.

Mitchell then asked the panel if there was ever a time in the business when any of them were scared to make a stand and “push back” but went ahead and did it anyway; Jones brought up being vocal about her disapproval of the casting of Woody Harrelson during pre-production on the 1993 film Indecent Proposal, for which she wrote the screenplay. She felt he wasn’t a strong enough lead to stand up against Robert Redford’s character. Later, she sat in and observed a focus group following a test screening of the film, along with Paramount studio head Sherry Lansing; when the moderator asked the group for things they didn’t like about the film, one of them responded by saying they didn’t know why Harrelson was in this movie. Upon seeing Jones’ chuffed reaction, Lansing replied “Grow the fuck up.”

King’s response to Mitchell’s question was that she wasn’t raised to be afraid of anything, and that she believes that a combination of being married to a feminist and simply not giving a fuck about what people think, makes it very easy for her to share her opinions. She also shared an anecdote about how once on the set of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, someone asked “Who exactly are you?” and she responded: “I fuck the director”. Upon seeing the man’s aghast reaction, she added “You’re gonna say it when I walk out of the room, so let’s just get past that.”

Maroney’s answer was that because she was lucky to have her first three projects directed by openly collaborative women, and so, the rude awakening came later when she found that her input wasn’t nearly as welcomed as it had been before. But she found that the best way to register any concerns or complaints was to bring them up in the form of a non-threatening question, asking the other party to explain something to her, and then taking it from there. Somewhere along the way, she felt it easier to make these stands once it became clear to her that as a lead actress, she felt a responsibility to make sure that others in the cast & crew felt safe and taken care of.

Maroney also brought up that she had very little problems in regards to more sleazy types trying to get fresh with her, and she feels that it was because of her wise-guy personality that made it not worth the effort. The way she saw it, they figured she would say something loud and embarrass them. King agreed, saying that her own take-no-shit attitude — plus not-so-veiled threats of bodily injury towards the aggressor — made it easy to dismiss such unwelcome advances. She also added that based on talking with younger women working in the business today, it seems like that this happens more often now than it did back then, because the guys doing this kind of shit nowadays are mostly entitled rich kids, whereas in her day, they were just morons.

The question about the future of the horror genre was brought up to the panel, and Jones felt that there was indeed a very bright future for horror, on account of there always being something out there to be afraid of, coupled with the fact that horror remains one of two very profitable types of movies that Hollywood will easily greenlight — the other being comic book movies.

She also brought up that more serious fare, such as dramas and character-oriented pieces, can be equally enjoyed in the cinema or at home, but watching a horror film in a theater with a crowd is an even more enjoyable and rewarding experience. King added that horror will always be around, because it is a genre that is most capable of telling universal and uncomfortable truths, whereas “important” films are mostly just preaching to the converted.

Maroney added that the cathartic benefits that come from watching a horror film more than guarantees that this is a genre that will always be popular, especially if the world we live in continues to give us reasons to be afraid, and considering what’s going on around us, society is probably more afraid than ever.

Mitchell-Rohrbaugh then opened it up for questions from the audience, which was my cue to get the fuck out of there, and I wasn’t alone, as I can hear the unmistakable chorus of CLUNKA CLUNKA CLUNKACLUNKACLUNKA from the suddenly unoccupied seats flapping back into place as those of us with no appetite for extreme cringe made a beeline for the exits to use the restrooms, get more snacks, fresh air, etc.

But I did come back in time to see the ladies get a nice and well deserved round of applause. These ladies were very entertaining, so open were they with their honest opinions and thoughts on the business, as well as particular movies (both Gandhi and The Power of the Dog were thrown some very amusing shade along the way). I really liked them, they all had a healthy amount of Don’t Give A Fuck flowing through their veins.

After a half-hour break for dinner — I just had coffee — the marathon continued with the fourth film, 1986’s Chopping Mall, a very tongue-in-cheek horror/sci-fi/slasher, directed by Jim Wynorski and starring none other than Ms. Kelli Maroney from the panel discussion. This one is about a group of teens and young adults or maybe they’re all teens who look like young adults or they’re young adults who look like teens, but c’mon, it’s the 80s, these actors are all probably mid-to-late 30s.

Anyway, they have the worst timing in the world, because decided to stay overnight at the shopping mall for a little fuck party, which also coincides with an electrical storm that causes the 3 robot security guards on the premises to malfunction and go full ED-209 on anybody still inside. Now these youngsters have to survive the night, as they’re locked in with these killbots until dawn.

The entire movie takes place in a shopping mall, and was shot at both the Sherman Oaks Galleria and the Beverly Center. The opening credits sequence is a montage of various mall activities, and it’s all very nostalgic for a kid like me who remembers when shopping malls were, you know, a thing; at one point, there’s a shot of a Licorice Pizza record store, which was greeted by applause from the audience, as was Barbara Crampton’s name in the credits, because she is the bee’s knees wearing the cat’s pajamas.

It’s interesting seeing Crampton play a Valley Girl type given to say stuff like “totally”, and to be honest, she’s a tad miscast. I know that sounds like sacrilege to say that about genre royalty, but I’m not saying she’s bad. She just seems too smart for the role, if that makes sense, she comes off too intelligent for what I felt was supposed to be more of a Dumb Wild Friend role. Of course, her IQ points drop dramatically once the robots start doing their thing, so maybe it was intentional, maybe the filmmakers were going for someone who was pretty With It until things get serious.

Maroney, on the other hand, plays a nice girl-next-door type who is later revealed to be like an ultra-capable chick whose talents get to shine because of this situation. She turns out to be a crack shot with a revolver, because her father was in the Marines — not unlike her MAC-10-wielding character in Night of the Comet, who also learned to shoot from her military father. Why the armed men in the film don’t give her a gun after this is revealed, I don’t know. Oh, wait I do know: Because they’re men. (Of course the answer was in the question, sorry about that.)

Maroney’s character is definitely who I would want to be paired with in a situation like this, whether we’re running from robots, zombies, multi-racial gang members. Because she can take care of herself, she can also take care of me, and she has zero problem making the first move in an intimate situation, and that’s something a scared and lazy fuck like me absolutely appreciates. But yeah, she’s awesome, she doesn’t let her emotions get the best of her, the way they get the best of half of these assholes who either run screaming towards their death or run screaming away from it, but either way they’re screaming and that just helps a robot get a better laser aim to explode their heads.

Oh yeah, there’s a pretty hilarious and well done head explosion here. It got a great reaction from the crowd both times — the second time being a very inspired replay during the closing credits.

This was actually the second time I watched this film with an audience; the last time was in 2010 at a Jim Wynorski triple feature at the New Beverly Cinema, which I covered in my blog. Maroney was there for a Q&A, and I got a kick out of her garrulous nature, even if I was kind of a dick about it in the blog, likening the contrast between her and fellow guest Wynorski to a slightly tipsy-but-talkative wife and her more buttoned-up husband at a dinner party.

Anyway, it’s a fun and fast hide-and-seek thriller that does the job while not taking itself seriously. There are some cool cameos from awesome people like Dick Miller and Mary Woronov, and goofy references to other movies and filmmakers, because it’s that kind of movie. Despite the title, nobody gets chopped, there’s just that one head explosion as far as gore goes, but there’s plenty of nice ownage from the robots, as they electrocute, immolate, drop people from heights, etc. The only thing I didn’t like was an early scene of a fat man pigging out at a pizza place, because I never found watching someone shove plates of food in his face — while getting it all over his face and clothes — remotely in the vicinity of funny. It’s just gross. But ooh, dear reader, if I only knew what was in store for me in the next film.

The fifth film was the very offbeat, off-the-wall, and off-putting 1987 comedy Blood Diner, directed by Jackie Kong. Talk about a movie that hits the ground running and never stops, and so I will: The story begins with two little boys being visited by their uncle, who happens to be an escaped mental patient responsible for a series of brutal cannibalistic slayings. He bids farewell to them, steps outside to get shot to death by police, and then the opening credits begin. After that, we flash forward 20 years to health obsessed L.A., where the two brothers, Mike and George, own and operate a popular vegetarian restaurant, and I’m guessing the reason why people like the food there so much is because occasionally some human flesh finds it way into the recipes.

Turns out, the two brothers have adopted their late uncle’s wacky beliefs involving a blood cult and an ancient goddess named Sheetar. They have already successfully reanimated their uncle’s brain and eyeballs and placed them into a jar, where he further instructs them as to what is required to bring Sheetar back to rule the world: The body parts of various promiscuous women.

By the way, I’m pro-cannibal. I’ve talked about this before on social media, and to the people who used to be my friends before I told them this, but I’d have no problem eating a person if it was served to me right. Now, I’m not saying I’d eat all of the person, but if you give me a nice prime cut of human steak, hot off the grill, I’m digging in. I wouldn’t go in for, like, guts or entrails or brains, though. Just some butt roast or grilled breast would be enough. I’d be picky about the person, though; I wouldn’t eat a really skinny person or a really fat person. Also, they’d have to be attractive, because having a pretty or handsome face goes a long way towards me wanting to eat you.

See, I’m definitely a meat eater, but not all kinds of meat. I mean, I’ll eat pork, I’ll eat chicken, I’ll eat fish, and I can absolutely eat cows till the cows come home — so then I can eat them too — but I won’t eat cats and I won’t eat dogs. Because while I’m indifferent to cows, pigs, chicken, and fish, I love cats and I love dogs. But I sure as fuck hate people — and I can see getting the most pleasure from eating you motherfuckers. Mmmm, your cruel, selfish, narcissism would melt in my mouth as I chew away your pettiness, and your lack of empathy would go down so smooth with some red wine. Great, now I’m hungry.

That’s OK, I just have to think about this movie some more and my hunger will go away, because Blood Diner is one of those movies where everything in its universe is gross. Regardless of what a person is eating, human or vegetable, it’s all filmed — and eaten –in the most unflattering of ways. There’s an even worse version of a fat guy eating messily compared to the dude from Chopping Mall, and the film revisits him from time to time. Oh Christ, you watch him get the slop all over himself, he burps nonstop, and at one point, he projectile vomits his meal all over everybody else. Dear reader, this was the only time in the entire marathon where I actually cringed and had to look away — and remember, I watched Society earlier that day.

Speaking of which, I felt this movie had a much, much better handle at the kind of comedy it was trying to be, compared to Society. This is all-out, wacky-as-fuck, and offensive with its never-ending onslaught of gags, I mean, Jackie Kong is throwing out kitchen sink after kitchen sink, and if one doesn’t hit you, the next one will. Sure, there are much better horror comedies out there, but this one wasn’t bad, man, I actually laughed a few times.

The audience, on the other hand, laughed throughout, from beginning to end. There was one guy a couple rows ahead of me, he got so overwhelmed with laughter from a scene involving a potential victim defending herself with kung-fu, that even after the scene was over, he couldn’t stop laughing, and then he started wheezing and coughing, and that’s when my vision was blinded by the giant words COVIDCOVIDCOVIDCOVID and I had to close my eyes and will the words away, lest my night be ruined by unwelcome anxiety. The words did go away, I made sure that my mask remained snug over my nose and mouth, and continued watching the film.

I don’t know if this is a good movie, but it plays great. The crowd got pretty rowdy with this, and I’d say half of the laughs were about the movie being funny and half were about the incredibly high levels of WTF-ery to the proceedings. I mean, it’s the kind of movie where a ventriloquist and his dummy are being questioned by the authorities and it’s all played straight, it’s the kind of movie where a woman gets her head dunked into a deep fryer and comes out of it with an perfectly round fried ball where her head should be.

I’d probably like this even more had I seen this 20 years ago, because that’s when I was at the peak of my love for all things Troma, and this is possibly the best Troma movie that Troma never made. I do know I’d like this less if I had I seen it alone, and so I’m glad I saw it with a very appreciative crowd at the Aero.

The sixth and final film of the night was the 1984 thriller Angel, directed by Robert Vincent O’Neil. Set in and around Hollywood Boulevard, this story focuses on Molly, a teenage honor student with a most surprising after-school job; at night, Molly becomes “Angel”, and she walks the streets selling her body to various johns. Thankfully, the movie spares us the dirty deeds, and instead focuses on the interactions between Angel and her fellow workers of the night. Among them is a crossdresser named Mae, an old cowboy street performer named Kit Carson, and Crystal, who is not long for this world.

See, there’s also a real piece of damaged work prowling the streets, and he’s already racked up a few kills, all of them hookers. No sooner are we introduced to Crystal when this nameless killer picks her up and takes her to a motel room for some post-mortem loving. Yup, this serial killer is also a necrophile, and the film does way too good of a job giving us glimpses into his cracked psyche; as we watch the killer get Crystal’s body ready for sex, the soundtrack plays music that sounds more at home in a romantic story. So he’s one of these sickos who probably thinks this is a way to express genuine affection to these unfortunate women — whereas when I fuck a dead girl, there is no affection involved at all, it’s just about getting laid. But at least I’m not a hypocrite. 

Before Crystal’s demise, we are treated to a scene of her having a chat with a young street performer who clearly has a crush on her. It’s kinda sweet, and I’m watching this, thinking, “oh, so I guess there’s gonna be a subplot about these two becoming a couple?”, and well, it clearly doesn’t go that way. The next time you see the young man, he’s at the crime scene the morning after, utterly heartbroken while being questioned by a cop.

It’s these extended non-plot-related detours that result in Angel hitting harder than I expected, because it spends so much time with each of these characters, it feels like the filmmakers care about these people too, and so, I ended up caring about them as well. They don’t judge these characters, and neither should we. It’s not just Molly that I wanted to see make it out of this situation OK, it’s everyone — well, except for that fuckin’ killer, I wanted to see that motherfucker get his big time. And yet, the filmmakers even manage to extend but some touch of pity to this beast that killed women.

Poor Molly’s story isn’t fully revealed outright, it’s given to us piecemeal, as we watch Lieutenant Andrews of the LAPD get to know her more while investigating the murders. He’s clearly seen it all, and he knows how girls like Angel end up: either locked up, strung out, or dead. In his gruff tough-love way, he tries to convince her to get off the streets, but Molly/Angel is afflicted by the hardheadedness that comes with being a young person who thinks they already know everything.

When not watching her ply her trade up and down the boulevard, we watch her at private school, and I have to give it up to Molly, for her abilities to burn both ends of this candle. She works late, and is still able to get up early and catch the bus to school. We never see her do any drugs, so it can’t be that. We see her do her own homework and we see her study, so it’s not like she’s banging any teachers to help her pass like that chick from Malibu High did.

I guess she’s just really focused, and she’s really good with time management as well, because as we see in one scene, she turns down a nerd’s request for a date at school, which I think is more about not wanting to toss an extra ball into her juggling act. Hell, she could’ve just blown him and I’m sure he would’ve done all of her homework, give her answers to all of the tests, and she could’ve probably gotten him to do her laundry — even if that would mean losing the occasional pair of socks and undies, and having a good idea why they’re missing. But Molly has her principles, she would never entertain any of that, and I respect the hell out of her for it.

There were a couple scenes involving some scumbag jock at Molly’s school that left me just about ready to yell at the screen, because I hated this motherfucker soooo much, that flames…flames on the side of my face, anyway, I’m pretty sure if I had seen this at home, I would’ve yelled.

I’m on Team Molly. Not only am I on Team Molly, I’m on Team Molly’s Friends. I’m on the side of Molly’s friends, is what I’m saying, I liked her and I liked them too. I liked Mae, Kit, her landlady Solly. They’re played by Dick Shawn, Rory Calhoun, and Susan Tyrell. What a difference that giving a fuck about characters makes for me.

It’s the “giving a fuck” part that changes this from a sleazy exploitation joint, to a very gripping drama about these characters just trying to get by. Some of them seem content with their lives, and I found myself wondering if they really did feel that way or if they were deluding themselves. Molly/Angel is clearly deluding herself, because she thinks she has it figured out, but it’s more like she needs that delusion in order to have the strength to continue living this double life of hers.

Don’t get me wrong, Angel does the job as an exploitation joint, it delivers the thrills, especially whenever that nameless killer gets in the mix. There are a couple of genuinely exciting and suspenseful sequences, including one at a police station that goes shockingly out of control. I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, especially during the climax, which had people in the audience break out into applause a couple times.

Donna Wilkes gives a very sympathetic performance as Molly, Cliff Gorman does a very solid 70s/80s-era cop turn as Lt. Andrews, and John Diehl is both scary and pathetic as the killer. There’s plenty of gritty early 80s Hollywood atmosphere, well shot by cinematographer Andrew Davis, who went on to direct 1993’s The Fugitive, which was really good but could’ve used a teenage hooker or two.

This was a great fucking movie, man, it really took me by surprise. I liked it so much, I think I might just forget about watching the three sequels that followed, because let’s be real, after this class act of a picture, there’s no place to go but down — not unlike Angel on a Friday night.

And so, the Sunshine and Noir 1980s L.A. Horror Marathon came to an end; I’m glad I went through with my last minute decision to attend, rather than let my anxiety get the better of me…this time, at least. I mean, here’s hoping COVID and Monkeypox don’t get together, fuck, and have a baby, because who knows how I’ll feel then, or if I’ll be feeling anything by then, shit, I’ll probably be dead by MonkeyVid-69 or whatever the fuck that shit’s gonna be.

Anyway, I enjoyed myself at the Aero; it was fun to watch some movies for the first time, rewatch some old favorites, and hell, it was worth sitting through Society again just to experience the final 20 minutes with an audience. With the exception of that movie, which was presented in a crisp digital print, the films were projected in 35mm; They Live looked and sounded the best, while Slumber Party Massacre had a reddish/pinkish tint at times, but otherwise looked good.

By the time Angel ended, it was a little past 11pm, and for the first time in a very long time, I stepped out of a movie marathon feeling just as awake as I did when I went in. It felt nice to know that I could go to bed that night and still enjoy the following Sunday as a full complete day, rather than sleep through most of it, as I usually do after an all-nighter.

I mean, I get the appeal of watching movies till the wee hours of the morning, because that’s pretty much all I’ve done most of my life. But as I get older, I’m also getting the appeal of having a good night’s sleep. Which is not to say that I’m anti-all-nighter now, I’m just even more pro-all-dayer.

Anyway, having only subsisted on a couple cups of coffee the entire day, I was starving; I figured I’d follow up a Los Angeles-based movie marathon with a Los Angeles-based meal, so I drove responsibly to the original Tommy’s burger stand on Beverly and Rampart near Downtown L.A. and ordered a triple chili cheeseburger, chili cheese fries, and a large Cherry Coke. It hit the spot, man. It was so good, and when I began to imagine the chili being made from people meat — specifically ground pork from the police officer that followed me that morning — it tasted even better.

The scenic route to Oblivion

 

NOTE: For those wondering why I posted an end-of-year list in April, that’s because this was supposed to be posted in January, but I had issues with the intro, which I felt was too dark. Normally, I don’t care about such things, but I didn’t want to start off the New Year with such a bad vibe. I prefer to save such gloom for June. So I ended up editing it down by 2/3, leaving it a relatively tame shadow of its former self — and it still seemed too bleak. So I shelved it. Well, cut to a few months later, 2022 is shaping up to be yet another mother, I stopped caring, and so here it is. I’ve since deleted the longer version, but I’m sure those thoughts will pop up here and there in future posts, that is, if there is a future. See, there you go, my mind is always good at brewing up awfully negative things like that. I’m optimistic like that.

 

It wasn’t always like this.

For the longest time I used to stay away from the kind of real death videos that kids can easily view on various Reddit forums. Meanwhile, god forbid your child wants to check out a graphic novel about the Holocaust at the school library. But yeah, I found them ghoulish and depressing, so I avoided them. But  during the first couple weeks of 2022, I discovered that they really help at stabilizing my mood.

And the less anxiety I have, the easier it is to accept that everything will not be all right, and that’s OK, because that’s just how it goes.

You see, I don’t get enjoyment out of them, I get…well, I get constant reminders as to why I shouldn’t just (REDACTED, FOR REAL, YOU’D NEED TO BUY ME A FEW DRINKS IF YOU EXPECT ME TO REALLY SPILL TEA ON MYSELF). I am reminded to appreciate the precious time I have conscious and above ground. I am reminded to search out and appreciate the beauty I can find in this ugly, ugly world, even in the mundane. I am reminded — as I watch a faceless man have his arms chopped off by cartel members, or watch a woman drown in an icy river to the screams of her young children — that things can always be worse.

And so, I’ll keep on truckin’; I’ll continue treating others as I wish to be treated, and in return, I’ll continue to be left wanting. But that’s OK, because one, it makes me feel better than everybody else, and two, I’ll be too busy being grateful for remaining a mere background extra in the scariest, most disturbing horror film ever made: Life on Planet Earth. 

And should I find myself upgraded to being a star or featured player in this horror film, let’s say I catch a brick in the face during my morning commute due to some little kid tossing one from the freeway overpass, and footage of my hollowed out face and sprawled out corpse makes it onto the Interwebs, where it will accompanied by humorous comments from the anonymous living, well, c’est la vie. It was nice while it lasted — up until that moment, of course. Cut to black. Roll credits. 

Moving on from the real horror show we’re living in to the fake ones we watch for entertainment, there’s a movie podcast I listen to, and it’s called Trick or Treat Radio and they mostly cover horror, but they also will do other genres like sci-fi or fantasy, to name a couple. They focus mostly on independent and lower-budgeted films, as they like to champion the little guy, but they’ll also review bigger movies here and there. They are also not held to current releases, and so they’ll occasionally cover films from the past; sometimes they can be a year old, sometimes they can be from decades ago. The show is currently hosted by three gentlemen who go by the monikers Johnny Wolfenstein, Ares God of War, and Michael Ravenshadow, and episodes usually run from two-and-a-half to three hours.

The show is broken into three parts; the first part is not unlike an old-school Howard Stern Show episode, with the hosts mostly bullshitting about their everyday lives while busting balls. The middle part is the bulk of the show, where they discuss that week’s film (or films), with each rating the film a Trick (which is bad) or a Treat (which is good). And then the last part has them winding down while reading emails and listening to voicemails. At the end of the year, they have a special episode where they each list their Top 13 films from all the movies they covered during the last 12 months. 

I really enjoy the show, and have even appeared a couple times as part of their Patreon takeover episodes where they invite patrons to program an episode and co-host. For 2021, I thought it would be fun to participate by watching along with the show. So week-by-week, I’d watch what they watched, write up my thoughts on each film, and post my thoughts on social media. Then I would listen to the episode and find out how my thoughts compared with theirs. I really enjoyed the experience; it was not unlike, say, being part of a book club — only they didn’t even know they were even in a book club.

I also compiled my own Top 13 list, and I certainly wasn’t going to keep it to myself, so I’m sharing it here with the rest of you. My criteria for the choices on my list were simple: If it was reviewed between January and December during that year, and it was new to me, it was eligible. I disqualified the Patreon takeover films, and the Monsterpiece Theatre viewings where Patreon listeners would get together with the hosts to do a special episode to discuss a particular movie. Anyway, here’s my Top 13 list of movies that were covered on the Trick or Treat Radio podcast in 2021:

13. THE MAID (2020, dir. Lee Thongkham): This Thai film is about a young woman named Joy, who starts a new job as a maid for a wealthy family, you know, the kind with a miserable husband, a miserable wife, and a little daughter who gets little to no attention. Along the way, Joy realizes that the previous maid might’ve quit for *very* understandable — and frightening — reasons.

During the first half, I found this movie to be OK, and I thought I knew where it was going, but then I was emotionally suckerpunched by a revelation at the midpoint. From that moment on, what started as a decent haunted house flick, turned into a different kind of genre — and it became a better and more entertaining experience for it, leading up to a 30-minute-long climax that got me so worked up, I actually started yelling at one of the characters just as my DoorDash order arrived. the poor girl thought I was calling *her* a fucking cunt, can you believe it?

12. BLOODY HELL (2020, dir. Alister Grierson): A dude named Rex decides to escape his terrible life in Boise, Idaho by taking a sudden random trip to Helsinki, Finland, only to find that he’s succeeded in jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. To say more would be spoiling the fun in discovering what happens to the poor schmuck.

The style of the film is very chaotic and frantic, but not in some annoying wannabe-kewl xxxtreme sort of way. It comes off very methodical and it works. The tone reminded me of something like READY OR NOT with Samara Weaving, in that it’s a dark comedy with plenty of laughs and blood. Also, I think lead actor Ben O’Toole is like Samara Weaving in that they’re both secret Australians. Actually, I think this entire movie is secretly Australian. It’s like they know we still haven’t forgiven them for Crocodile Dundee and so they feel they have to be sneaky about it.

11. SYNCHRONIC (2019, dir. Aaron Moorehead, Justin Benson): Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play paramedics in New Orleans, and they’re both trying to make heads or tails out of the rash of junkie overdoses on a new drug called — wait for it — Synchronic, the kind of narcotic that would feel right at home alongside cine-drugs like Nuke and Slo-Mo. 

This moody and stylish sci-fi flick is very intriguing and features great chemistry between the two leads. The film also pulls a neat trick in starting off as very serious, then turning into something more fun and at about the halfway point. It also ends at the perfect moment, a skill that even seasoned filmmakers often lack, so kudos to the relative newcomers behind this joint. I’d wish the two directors luck in the future endeavors, except they’re working on Marvel stuff for Disney Plus now, so fuck ’em.

10. THE NIGHT HOUSE (2020, dir. David Bruckner): Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a teacher grieving over the suicide of her husband. Soon, she begins to hear strange sounds and see odd sights, and they all are connected to his death. 

On the surface, this is an above-average mystery/ghost story that suffers from an overreliance on jump scares, but below the surface, this is an excellent drama about loss, the grief that follows, and the inability to deal with either. This is made even stronger by Hall’s excellent performance as Beth, a woman who puts up a tough sardonic front while trying to mask the pain she’s going through. Hall definitely deserved an Oscar nomination for her work here, which is why she didn’t get one. 

9. MALIGNANT (2021, dir. James Wan): A woman begins to have strange visions of people being brutally murdered, and soon finds out that not only are these murders real, but that she and the killer are somehow connected. Director James Wan gives in to his inner overly caffeinated 14-year-old self with this very entertaining mix of Dario Argento, Stephen King, 80s Italian horror flicks, and 90s American slasher movies.

Some might be put off by its gleeful, unapologetic wackiness, but yours truly was in Good Times City, population: Me. But c’mon Wan — why did you have to cast your wife in a supporting role?

Crikey! No mate, my Sheila’s very talented, mate, she co-produced the movie with me and, uh, koalas and Outback Steakhouse and shr–

Sure, Jimmy, I don’t know why you’re wasting your time jawing at me, when I know you’re already late for your weekly meeting at the Good Hollywood Husbands Club. Yeah, that’s right, I’ve seen you guys hanging out together: you, Rob Zombie, Judd Apatow, and David Mamet, all holding your wives’ purses. 

8. THE VIGIL (2019, dir. Keith Thomas): Yakov, a former member of the Orthodox Jewish religion, has been convinced by his mentor to be the Shomer for a recently deceased man. What that means is that he’s to sit vigil overnight, praying for the dearly departed, protecting him from evil. What follows is a long night full of evil spirits who don’t take No for an answer. 

Mostly set in one darkly lit room, this slow-burn old-school creeper can be at times borderline monotonous, but it’s done with purpose — and when those scares hit, they hit hard. It helps that I genuinely cared about the main character, so big props to Dave Davis as Yakov, who really does get run through the wringer — both physically and emotionally. This was originally placed at #10, but I was able to Jew it down to #8.

7. THE MEDIUM (2021, dir. Banjong Pisanthanakun): This one’s a fake documentary that follows a local shaman in Thailand; her name is Nim and when she was a young woman, she was possessed by a goddess, granting her the supernatural ability to heal people. But during a family visit, Nim begins to notice strange behavior from her niece that echoes the behavior she had pre-possession. Could this mean that the niece is next in line in the shaman business?

A canny riff on The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Poltergeist, and Paranormal Activity, this movie is not unlike what my ex-girlfriends have said about spending the night with me: Long, slow, increasingly disturbing, and when it was over I didn’t want to go through it again. 

6. CENSOR (2021, dir. Prano Bailey-Bond): Set in the United Kingdom during the 1980s “video nasty” period, this film focuses on Enid, whose government job is to watch horror films and then tell the filmmakers what parts to cut out in order to make their work safe for the general public. Her flavorless life gets an unwelcome spicing up when the news comes out that a man murdered his family, after watching a film that she had approved for release.

This very effective mix of mystery and psychological horror not only convincingly recreates the 1980s in its settings, but in its representations of the kind of lower-tiered horror films that were often censored or outright banned in the UK during that time. I think this would sit nicely alongside David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in that very narrow video store shelf labeled “mind-fucking flicks about about mind-fucking VHS tapes”.

5. SAINT MAUD (2019, dir. Rose Glass): Maud, a hyper-religious hospice nurse, takes the assignment of caring for Amanda, a terminally ill dance choreographer. As this short, sad, and scary character study continues, we find that Maud’s beliefs are less about faith and more of a fanatical certainty. 

The way this portrays the character of Maud, I’d place this in the sub-genre of “God’s Lonely Man”, although in this case it would be “God’s Lonely Woman”, as it puts to mind similarly-structured films like Taxi Driver and First Reformed. This was an A24 release, but I like to imagine an alternate universe where Troma got a hold of it, and changed the title to Jesus Freak Nurse or something. Anyway, it’s a great film and Morfydd Clark is stellar in the title role.

4. THE EMPTY MAN (2020, dir. David Prior): A widowed ex-cop named James is on the search for the missing daughter of a family friend. Along the way, he learns of the legend of “The Empty Man”; if you blow into an empty bottle on a bridge, he is summoned, and three days later, you are irreversibly and permanently fucked. Figuratively fucked, I mean, not literally. Anyway, guess what the fuck James ends up blowing?

This is a deliberately paced work of detective fiction with a strong supernatural bent and plenty of creepy atmosphere, reminiscent of something like the 1987 film Angel Heart or even 1973’s The Wicker Man (the non-bee, non-Cage one). It features a strong lead performance by James Badge Dale, and I was surprised to see Nietzsche-an and Schopenhauer-esque concepts and beliefs being thrown about. I did kind of groan upon seeing a high school named “Jacques Derrida High School”, but hey, I still appreciated the effort. 

3. VICIOUS FUN (2020, dir. Cory Calahan) 

and 

WEREWOLVES WITHIN (2021, dir. Josh Ruben): I’m cheating here and putting two movies in the same spot, but that’s because I feel they were both equally fun viewings and they’d make a cool horror-comedy double feature. 

Vicious Fun takes place in the 80s and follows Joel, a horror magazine writer, who accidentally ends up sitting in at a support group meeting for serial killers. This one is a borderline cartoon with just the right amount of blood and goofiness. It’s very funny, and it’s one of the few films I’ve watched during the pandemic that I wish I could’ve seen in a packed theater, because I think this would play great with an audience.

Werewolves Within is about the new forest ranger in town, Finn, and his attempts to keep everybody safe and sane during a rash of attacks that appear to be the work of a werewolf. Populated by wacky characters, who I found all so entertaining, this light-hearted movie could’ve forgotten about the werewolf and I still would’ve found this to be a very good time. It also features a very 90s-tastic bar that I wish existed in my neighborhood; I would’ve become a alcoholic for sure, but man, what better way to pickle your liver than to have Ace of Base blaring in your ears while you’re doing so. 

2. COME TRUE (2020, dir. Anthony Scott Burns): Teenage runaway Sarah takes part in a sleep study where her dreams will be recorded and studied. Sleep paralysis and visions of dark figures with glowing eyes ensue. 

This is less of a horror film and more of a mood piece, but man, what mood! It’s an incredibly stylish film with arresting use of sound and visuals; I loved the way this film looked with its very sharp angles, precise framing, and colored lighting, and the music by Electric Youth and Pilotpriest is retro synth heaven. There’s even great use of a song from the soundtrack to Michael Mann’s Manhunter, I mean, that’s the kind of movie we’re talking about.

This is also one of the few films I’ve seen that comes close to capturing the feel of a dream, specifically the kind of bad intangible dreams I’ve had, where I’m not sure what I had just slept through, but it left me feeling unsettled upon waking up — that’s how Come True felt to me. 

And now, for my number one Trick or Treat Radio film of 2021…

1. LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021, dir. Edgar Wright): Small town girl Eloise moves to big city London to study fashion design; she rents an old room that has clearly not been changed since the 1960s, which is fine with her because she’s obsessed with the 60s. Soon, she begins to have way too lucid dreams about a girl from that decade named Sandie, and so Eloise begins to experience Sandie’s life as she makes her way in the city as a nightclub singer. This all sounds pretty cool, except for the fact that Eloise’s late mother suffered from mental illness, and so there’s the possibility that these nocturnal visions she’s having are doing her some similar damage.

I’ll be honest, this one took a little while to grow on me, but once the plot kicked in, I was absolutely  committed to this excellent psychological thriller. Even though he’s best known for comic riffs on genre movies, Last Night in Soho is Edgar Wright’s most serious film to date, putting the screws to both the main character and the viewer, with only the occasional moment of humor to break the tension. 

Considering the director and this premise, I expected a visually exciting movie with plenty of cool 60s Britpop tunes on the soundtrack, and that’s what I got. But what surprised me was how much I cared for the characters of Eloise and Sandie; as written by Wright and Kristy Wilson-Cairns, and performed by Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, I found them painfully sympathetic and wanted them to come out OK at the end of their journeys. I plan to watch this again soon, but I feel this one ties with Hot Fuzz as my absolute favorite film from this director. 

 

Now, the Trick or Treat Radio boys also gave out their honorable mentions, so I’ll go ahead and give you my two honorable mentions. The first, just barely missed the list at #14: the 2021 film Titane by Julia Ducournau, and it’s an incredibly strange and original tale about a very odd duck who models at car shows (she’s a chick, not a duck, though). It starts out as one kind of movie and then turns into another, and my interest throughout was never less than 110-percent. It’s certainly not for everyone, with off-putting audaciousness involving body horror and the intentionally unlikable lead character, mixed in with dark comedy and genuinely emotional moments. But it definitely worked for me.

The second honorable mention wasn’t covered on the show, but it was recommended by former co-host Monster Zero, and that’s the 1981 film Evilspeak, directed by Eric Weston and starring Clint Howard in what is basically a male version of Carrie — except I think I prefer the climax of this film to Carrie‘s. We watch Howard’s put-upon nerd get the full bully treatment by his classmates, but thankfully, he’s able to get back at them with the power of the dark lord Satan, and when he does, it is b-e-a-utiful. During this particular time, it seems more and more that the real world is lacking in justice, as the assholes in society keep getting away with things scot-free. And so, if it takes an otherwise cheesy movie to feed my justice demon, so be it. 

Well, that covers my Top 13 of Trick or Treat Radio movies of 2021. And because one bad turn deserves another, here are the rest of the films covered that year on their podcast, placed in order from best to worst: 

14. Titane (2021)

15. The Last Broadcast (1998)

16. Spare Parts (2020)

17. Caveat (2020)

18. Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

19. Promising Young Woman (2020)

20. The Green Knight (2021)

21. Wolf Guy (1975)

22. Sons of Steel (1989)

23. Kandisha (2020)

24. The Advent Calendar (2021)

25. Army of the Dead (2021)

26. Hunted (2020)

27. The Boy Behind the Door (2020)

28. V/H/S/94 (2021)

29. The Deep House (2021)

30. Martyrs Lane (2021)

31. In the Earth (2021)

32. The Tunnel (2011)

33. Knocking (2021)

34. Sator (2019)

35. Antlers (2021)

36. The Banishing (2020)

37. Two Heads Creek (2019)

38. Raw Force (1982)

39. The Stylist (2020)

40. Jakob’s Wife (2021)

41. Koko-di Koko-da (2019)

42. Lucky (2020)

43. Son (2021)

44. The Queen of Black Magic (2019)

45. Fried Barry (2020)

46. Primal Rage (2017)

47. The Spine of Night (2021)

48. The Last Matinee (2020)

49. Black Friday (2021)

50. Sound of Violence (2021)

51. The Dark and the Wicked (2020)

52. Psycho Goreman (2020)

53. Demonic (2021)

54. Clapboard Jungle (2020)

55. Dachra (2018)

56. Skull: The Mask (2020)

57. Honeydew (2020) 

Well, there you have it. Here’s to another year of movies; I intend to watch along with Trick or Treat Radio during 2022 as well, but who knows what awaits all of us. And in that spirit, here’s to another year of uncertainty, and here’s to the foolish but sincere hope in the high unlikeliness that when we make it to the end of this horror movie, there will be a post-credits stinger. You know, something like The Avengers eating shawarma, but forever.

Don’t let your aim ever stray

Podcast version can also be downloaded here.

I was long overdue for a new wallet.

As I entered my local mega-chain retailer, I noticed a lady of the Hispanic persuasion at the customer service section. She looked to be in the hardest version of her late fifties, and she had a sizable assortment of pants and shirts on the counter. Behind the counter, were two employees; the male employee was translating what the lady said to the female employee, and all I caught was something about not having tags for the items. 

I continued my merry way, and picked up a wallet — one of those RFID-blocking jobs. Then I went to the self-checkout line, and I heard a commotion. It was the two employees politely-but-firmly telling the older lady that she could not take those shirts and pants back to the clothing department. She angrily shrugged them off and tried to make a beeline to her intended destination, but the male employee blocked her, and she tried to push the man out of the way. The female employee then got on a walkie-talkie and called for security, and I think she may have thought she was far enough from earshot or she just didn’t care, because I distinctly heard the employee refer to the lady as “this bitch”. 

The lady became increasingly unruly, her voice got louder, and this was now becoming A Scene. The security guard — all ninety-eight pounds of gangly shy teenager — arrived and politely-and-only-politely asked her to leave, or at least that’s what I could make out, over the lady’s much louder and angrier voice.  

I was only able to make out the occasional swear word from the lady’s mad invective, because despite being a Spanish-speaker myself, my Spanish is Mexican Spanish, which is to say, slow enough to be able to comprehend the fully-pronounced words being spoken. Her Spanish, on the other hand, was Non-Mexican Spanish aka Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Dominican, etc., a fast-paced onslaught of partially-completed dialogue which is where the stereotypical rat-a-tat-tat speech you hear in such funny movies come from.

There’s also a third kind of Spanish: Castilian, which is what you hear Gwyneth Paltrow speak impressively in interviews. It’s what they speak in Spain, but they speak it with a lisp. Imagine Ice T speaking Spanish, and that’s Castilian. 

Anyway, our Non-Mexican Spanish speaker was vocally motherfucking the employees, while slowly but surely inching closer to verboten clothing department. She, like everybody else, had her mask on, so I was grateful for that, but I kept expecting her to pull it off to do something stupid, like spit at people. Instead, she violently shoved the boy guard, nearly toppling him over a display stand containing discounted Blu-rays and DVDs.

Listen, I’m not really an anxious person, or at least, I only get anxiety when I have to go to parties or get-togethers or any other kind of otherwise friendly situation with friendly people. But as far as negative scenes go, I’m surprisingly chill. I’ve had firearms aimed at me by cops and non-cops alike — those are long stories for another time, preferably after you’ve bought me dinner — and I was either too calm and/or stupid to freak out about it. 

But this situation with the lady literally made my heart beat faster and harder with every passing second. I also began to sweat despite the excellent air-conditioning in the building. At that point, I just wanted to leave, and every cell in my being started to scream GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. But the lone stubborn cell located somewhere in my testicular area responded with “Nah, buy the wallet, then leave.” 

So I waited as the guy six feet ahead of me began to check out his various household products, all the while reasoning with my heart and my sweat glands to please — please! — keep it together for a couple more minutes. And that’s when I heard the unmistakable sound of the absolute worst thing for me to hear. It is the sound that had, has, and will drive me into Lovecraftian depths of insanity, if I hear it long enough. It is my vocal Kryptonite, this sound, and it makes me feel helpless, anguished, scared, and enraged all at once:

It was the sound of a crying baby.

A placid-looking Asian woman and her well-behaved daughter had just entered the store, pushing a baby cart containing a toddler who should know better. But the spoiled boy on the overworked cart was pitching the biggest of fits. 

I desperately scanned the vicinity for an available register elsewhere, and there certainly were some available, if one wanted to wait behind scores of other customers. I even thought about just leaving while tossing a random employee twice the amount of the wallet’s cost — after all, I’ve pulled similar moves at restaurants, leaving money on the table mid-meal because of inconsiderate parents bringing their screeching spawn — but I knew that would just cause more drama. 

Lady and gentleman, I had managed to make it for nearly a year-and-a-half of this goddamn pandemic without losing my shit, yet here I was, about to punch that clock. Because I don’t believe in God, I could not pray to Her. Because I don’t believe in people, I could not depend on anyone else doing the right thing. But I still believe in myself! And so, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and I transported myself somewhere else — anywhere but that store.

I don’t know where I went, all I remember is that it was not unlike the darkness, quiet, and serenity I fantasize about taking myself everyday. It was nice. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder and I opened my eyes and my ears and the baby was still screaming and the lady was still angry. I turned around to see who the tapper was; a young Asian woman, holding a basket, smiling while motioning towards the now-available register.

So I stumbled over to checkout my item, and looked over to see the angry lady with the clothes, now being walked off the premises while screaming mashed-together way-too-fast Spanish, but I was able to make out the swear words, and she would end every sentence by pointing at each employee and screaming: “Corona-vee-ruuus! Corona-vee-ruuus!” They managed to get her out of the store, and as she angrily walked out with the clothes, she gave out one last gesture of defiance by slamming her fist twice against the front window. 

As soon as the register spat out my receipt, I grabbed that and ran out the store with my new wallet, while making sure I was going the opposite direction of wherever she was going. When I got home, I still felt kind of rattled, so I turned on the Roku and looked for something to watch, and that’s when I remembered: Oh my goodness! The Adorable Amy Adams had two films released on Netflix in the past year, and I’ve yet to watch them. Then it all made sense; the angry woman, the crying baby, the anxiety, the despair, all of that was the universe punishing me for ignoring our dear Triple A. 

Based on the memoirs of author/venture capitalist, J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy begins in 2011 with young Yale law student Vance burning the candle at both ends. In addition to doing the school thing, he’s working three jobs to make up for what financial aid won’t cover.

Money is definitely a big issue for the man, who in true modern-day American spirit, pays for things with multiple credit cards of varying limits and overextensions. It’s too bad I didn’t know him back then, otherwise I could’ve preached him the gospel of micropayments, but I’m sure he’d dismiss me on account of being a dirty ethnic and what do I know? 

Anyway, you’d think with his workload, Time is something of which Vance has little to no amount, and yet, he also has a girlfriend. I guess it wasn’t enough for this asshole to have his hands full, he just has to have them fuller, and just as he’s about to begin a week of interviews for a potential paid summer internship at one of the big law firms — RING RING goes the celly. It’s a call from his sister back home with the bad news that his mom has not only gone back to bootin’ up that damn heroin, the dumb bitch has gone and gotten herself OD’d.

And so Vance drives his fried baloney sandwich-lovin’ ass back home to Ohio in an attempt to get help for his absolute mess of a mother, and the film flashes back to Vance’s youth in 1997, a year that shall remain forever glorious because that was the year that Good Burger graced silver screens all across this great nation. Unfortunately, this movie never acknowledges the release of that film, but at one point they do play “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs, so I’ll let it slide.

We watch as younger tubbier 1997 Vance lives with his mother Bev, played by The Adorable Amy Adams, but in the case of this film, I will have to refer to our Triple A as The Aggravating Amy Adams, because my word, what a goddamn trial! As we find out throughout the film, Bev wasn’t always a completely addled chore of a human being. Having graduated high school, she went on to have a respectable career as a nurse, but somewhere along the way she started sneaking away an extra pill or two from her patient’s prescriptions, and so on and so forth.

Faster than you can say Mommie Dearest, Bev displays magnificent feats of head-spinning manic-depression; she’ll start as a happy loving mom who will gleefully drive her son to go buy some baseball cards, then one wrong word about one of the latest in a long line of boyfriends later, she’ll stomp on the gas pedal and wonder aloud about just ending it for the both of them in the kind of fiery car wreck that would make Duane Hall jizz in his pants. 

I think it’s supposed to be frightening to watch, but as someone who hates kids — especially crying ones — I got a huge kick out of watching Amy Adams beat the shit of this child. She’s raining down thunder and calling him names and while I’m sure other viewers might be thinking “She’s a monster!”, I was like Go Amy Go! 

(By the way, the opening of the film features another adult punching another child, and that was also something I applauded during this film and will applaud in any other film.) 

Adams is pretty amped up throughout this movie, and that’s both a highlight and a lowlight. To clarify, I don’t think it’s Adams’ fault and I found it easy to find the truth in her portrayal of a boyfriend-hopping drug addict with emotional issues.

OK, I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “Well, of course you don’t think it’s her fault, it’s never your precious Amy Adams’ fault”. First off, get your fuckin’ head — get your fuckin’ head straight — she’s not my Amy Adams, she’s her own Amy Adams, thank you very much. And second, nobody’s perfect and everybody is fallible, even The Triple A.  

But I don’t think it’s a bad performance, it’s a lopsided one — and I don’t blame her so much as the filmmakers for that. See, the problem is that the movie doesn’t give us nearly enough of sober even-tempered Bev to compare & contrast with the drugged-out hotheaded Bev that we see, like, ninety percent of the time — and so, where are we to find any range, where are we to find the tragedy in what her character has become, if we don’t ever really get to see that much of the better angels of her nature?

When you look over at the comparatively subtle performance by Glenn Close as Vance’s grandmother Mamaw, I don’t think it’s a surprise that she ended up being nominated for an Academy Award while Adams wasn’t nominated at all. Of course, I use the word “subtle” for lack of a better one. Maybe “nuanced” would be a better one? Maybe not?

What I’m saying is that as Mamaw, Close plays a tough-but-fair granny with a cigarette practically fused to her hand. But she’s not just playing a one-note type, we get to see more of what makes her tick. For example, we find out that in her earlier years she ran away from a troubled home, only to have found herself in a brand-new version of the same thing.

On the other hand, we’re mostly told that Bev grew up observing some of this turmoil, and we’re told that she was particularly close to her father, despite the growing rift between the family. It would’ve been nice to actually see some of this, the way the film was eager to have us see Bev’s wild and crazy antics, giving us plenty of Effect but very little Cause.

I get that there’s only so much to get across in under two hours, so what I’m saying is maybe director Ron Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor should’ve worked more on finding the right balance before committing anything to celluloid — ahem, I mean digital files.

It’s too bad because here and there we see hints of Howard and Taylor’s potential in making a very effective film; for example, the flashback format enhances the heartbreak because when we see a scene of Bev choosing to clean her act up, it only hurts more, because we know from the present day scenes that it didn’t work out that way for her. 

But overall I was left feeling as if I had watched an early rough cut for what could’ve been a really good movie. Instead, Hillbilly Elegy is kind of a mess that’s less a proper adaptation of the book and more like a haphazard dumping of all the book’s various threads into Thunderdome and forcing them all to fight each other for narrative supremacy: It’s a mother & daughter story, a mother & son story, it’s a fish out of water tale, a fish back in water tale, it’s a drama about dealing with an addict in the family, a comedy about cultural differences, and an overall lesson on how one must not fall into the same rut that previous generations fell into because of family trauma.  

Regarding that last part; I did feel that the running thread about characters being placed at the crossroads of doing the right thing, and sticking with family, right or wrong, was something Howard and Taylor did get 100-percent right.

Now I haven’t read the book and for all I know, it handles all the above-mentioned themes, topics, and plotlines a lot better. Not that I’ll ever find out, because I’m not gonna read that fuckin’ book. I mean, the only reason I watched this movie was because The Adorable Amy Adams starred in it. But I don’t give an inkling of an iota of a shit about J.D. Vance, and I know the ending already: He goes on to become an ardent chugger of Orange MAGA-cock. The End.

The second Amy Adams film I watched on Netflix is also an adaptation of a book by a morally questionable author, (and where she also plays an unstable character): The Woman in the Window, written by A.J. Finn — and I was about to do an entire bit about how that’s not even his real name, and what kind of cowardly douchebag would write under a pseudonym?

Uh…

While we’re talking similarities, I found myself way beyond flattered upon realizing that my favorite living actor is playing…me! I mean, look, Adams’ character, Anna, is a shut-in who keeps her human interactions to a minimum, preferring to plant herself on her comfy couch drinking and watching movies all day until she passes out. It’s like looking in a mirror, only not.

Obviously they changed many details, like the name, gender, and occupation — for the record, I am not a female child psychologist recently separated from her husband and child. I don’t live in a NYC brownstone, nor do I rent out the basement of my brownstone to some dude played by Kurt Russell’s son.

Speaking of that dude, there’s a scene between him and Adams that shows quite possibly the biggest difference between the movie’s version of me and the real me who is currently talking to you, and that is the way we celebrate my favorite holiday, Halloween. Let’s just say we wouldn’t see eye to eye on that issue.

Also, Anna suffers from genuine agoraphobia, whereas I am just insufferable. Anna’s attempts to step outside result in her getting overwhelmed by her phobia, whereas my attempts result in me getting overwhelmed by my hatred of humanity, then returning home to bitch about these people on various social media posts and blog/podcasts. 

By the way, my misanthropy is why I didn’t have as difficult a time as others during this pandemic, because as much as I enjoy going out to eat and going to movies, I enjoy not going out even more. If anything, the outside world completely showed me its whole ass during this past year-and-a-half, the outside world confirmed my worst suspicions about it, the outside world said “It’s OK to stay inside”. 

The plot begins a-brewin’ when Anna partakes in her other usual pastime: Being a fucking snoop, which is something that I would never do. But here she is, spying on her new neighbors across the street, played by Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore.

They have a son, played by somebody’s somebody, and he’s one of those shy awkward teens that make you either want to hug and tell them It’s OK, or you want to slap the shit out of them and order them to stand up straight and Speak Loud Enough So Everybody Can Hear You.

Anna gets friendly with the son, becomes wine buddies with the wife (who’s amusingly named Jane Russell, like the actress), and is the requisite minimum of polite with the husband.  But soon Anna finds herself in a Rear Window kinda situation, except in this case, it’s more like Front Window, because it appears that she spies with her little eyes the husband doing something really bad — maybe even permanent — to the wife. But good luck convincing everybody else, Anna. 

See, something happened in Anna’s recent past; it is the reason for her agoraphobia, the separation from her family, and the lovely prescription drugs that she washes down with vino. Anna is all kinds of all over the place, and even her shrink is kinda getting tired of her shit. The shrink, by the way, is played by Tracy Letts, best known for writing the plays “Bug” and “Killer Joe” and for writing the screenplay to this movie.
Director Joe Wright makes a pretty canny choice of having Anna’s everyday movie-watching consist of Alfred Hitchcock classics. Normally I’m against this sort of thing, because showing classic movies within your movie usually results in people wishing they were watching the classic instead. But I think it works here — regardless of how you feel about this movie — because it allows the viewer to consider the very real possibility that Anna is just seeing things.

Hell, I remember spending a three-day weekend at home fucked up on booze, weed, and shrooms, watching nothing but Shaw Brothers kung fu films all day and night. By Tuesday, I was convinced everybody around me had disgraced me and the Shaolin Temple. So why wouldn’t Anna think she’s in the middle of some real Hitchcockery?

Oh, that’s another difference between Me and Anna; you can straight up O.J. a bitch six feet in front of me, and as far I’m concerned, I didn’t see shit, I don’t know shit, I don’t want to know shit. I was busy tying my shoes the entire time, officer. But no, Anna’s calls the pigs over and digs herself an increasingly deeper hole with a She’s Imagining Things shovel. 

Now the movie is referencing Hitchcock, and it’s aping Hitchcock, but the end result actually felt more like Dario Argento. This felt kinda/sorta like an American giallo at times, with a wonderfully garish mix of colors and lighting, a pulpy plot that favors trash over class, and where emotion beats out logic — it just needed an extra on-screen murder or two or three. I don’t think it’s as good as early Argento joints like Deep Red or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage — this is an American distillation of an Italian genre, after all — but it’s still a fun watch, if watched in that context.

I understand the reviews for this are pretty terrible, and I kinda get it; with a prestige cast and crew of award-winners and nominees behind it, one might expect something a bit more hoity-toity, and this ain’t that. But I will not stand anybody who might have the audacity to say that Amy did not come to play.

She is excellent as Anna, and she manages to come off as both prickly and wounded — probably from being so prickly, she can’t help but hurt herself the most. She has a couple of certified emotional bangers late in the film; both are monologues, one given to a group of people, another to a camera, and either one would’ve made for a great Oscar clip in the category of Best Actress in a Fun Trashy American Sorta-Giallo. 

The film was delayed multiple times — much to my dismay — partially due to COVID-19 making a theatrical release not the most eligible option, and partially due to reshoots. I don’t know what came out of the reshoots, but if I had to guess, the climax of the film was one of the results, because it does feel the most out-of-place with the rest of the movie. I’ve nothing against the climax, but I wished the film would’ve slowly worked its way to that wildly different tone, rather than suddenly whiplashing the audience into it. 

Also, I wonder if the reshoots are the reason Jennifer Jason Leigh’s role seems so minor for someone so major; she doesn’t really get much to do with a role that could’ve been given to somebody cheaper for the same effect.

Actually, her role isn’t that much smaller from the rest of the supporting cast, who definitely live up to the “supporting” part, because this really is The Amy Adams Show. If Anna can’t leave her house, that means the movie doesn’t leave her house. She spends most of her time alone, and so the other characters are left to be occasional visitors or intruders. If I hadn’t known about the novel, I would’ve totally assumed that this was based on one of Tracy Letts’ plays, because this story could easily play out on a stage.

While the movie is expertly made and very well-acted, I couldn’t help but think that there was an even crazier and better version of this story begging to be told, just aching to let its freak flag fly, and I’m afraid Joe Wright was just a bit too buttoned up a filmmaker for the job. This needed someone like Brian De Palma or Paul Verhoeven or Julie Taymor — someone with a strong sense of the operatic, absurd, and theatrical. They also would’ve known how to make the climax and the rest of the film feel like one and the same.
Hell, why not give it to Argento himself? It could’ve been his best American work — or his worst movie ever, although I don’t know how the latter would be possible, unless he had Brian Tyree Henry’s character turn into a praying mantis somewhere along the way.

Minor complaints aside, I thought this nutty little ditty fit the bill, and it passes the test as actual entertainment and not simply an Amy Adams thirst watch, because I’m pretty sure I’d still dig this movie if it instead starred, uh, I don’t know, uh, maybe, uh someone like Isla Fisher, or Karen Gillan, or Jessica Chastain, or Emma Stone, or Christina Hendricks, or Bryce Dallas Howard — you know, any random actress would do. 

Well, it was nice while it lasted. I don’t mean the Amy Adams double feature, even though that was nice as well. I’m talking about my brief post-vaccinated return to the outside world. I got to eat in a couple of restaurants, went to see a couple movies in actual movie theaters. But I’m going back inside. Not because of a virus or its various variants, no way. My reason is something else, something that I feel was best expressed by one America’s last great poets of the late 20th century, Andrew Dice Clay, in his 1993 special No Apologies: “…’cause people are scumbags”. 

Touché.

Click here to download the podcast version of this post.

I’m officially out of the movie rambling request business — or so I thought I was, until I remembered that I still had one request left, and it was from my friend Alec who asked if I would ramble about the 2002 Brian De Palma film Femme Fatale. I said “sure thing buddy”, because it would be a good one to go out on, and it was a film I had already seen and watched, having seen it twice on opening weekend in the Fall of 2002.

And as luck would have have it, the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Los Angeles was about to have a 35mm screening of the film, and I thought “perfect, just in time for my ramblings about the film”.

Except this was February 2020, and it was no longer Fear that was infectious, and what was Over There was now coming Over Here. Priorities changed fast, and I felt my time was better spent panic-stocking on food, water, and ammo, rather than jerking off about a movie for a friend. Wait, that didn’t sound right, I don’t mean I was literally jerking off for my friend, I mean — you know what, let’s just move on.

So, speaking from the relatively calmer waters of March 2021, I can say it’s been one hell of a year, even for those who weren’t personally affected by The Virus That Will Not Be Named, and while it’s certainly not over yet, at least…um, at least we can….um…

Ah, I know. At least I won’t have to shake anybody’s hand anymore. I was never a fan of handshakes to begin with, partially because of my existing germophobia, and because I hate having to squeeze the other person’s hand so hard, lest they think less of me. Silly me, I always thought you got to know somebody by how they treated people, and not by the strength of their grip.

Sometimes I’d get a person practically crushing my hand with their grip, and then I would have to respond by whipping out my dick to show him who’s boss. Which nine times out of ten, would mean they were boss. So I’m done with handshakes forever. From now on, it’s namaste & bowing and if you don’t like it, you can take that bigger cock of yours and go fuck yourself.

The film opens with Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir classic Double Indemnity playing on the tee-vee, and I always felt that showing a classic film within your film is a move as dicey as Andrew Clay, and more often than not, the unintentional result is that the viewer is reminded that there are better films out there that he or she could be spending their time on, rather than the film on which they’re currently wasting their time.

In the case of Femme Fatale, it works. Not that I feel they’re equals, because I don’t — sorry Bri, but I gotta go Team Wilder on this one. But what De Palma is doing by showing you a scene from that film is making it very clear to the viewer that he knows damn well that he’s not reinventing the wheel, but rather, doing his own spin on a genre. And by introducing the main character of his film watching that film, he’s planting some seeds that will sprout big time by the end of Femme Fatale — and based on the constant liquid motif that runs throughout this picture, De Palma is watering the hell out of those seeds. 

And who is this main character, anyway? Well, she’s Laure Ash, played by Rebecca Romijn, who is credited as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos on account of her being married to John Stamos at the time. She has since divorced Stamos and is currently married to Jerry O’Connell, and so she now goes by the name Rebecca Romijn-Fat Kid-From-Stand By Me.

So Laure is introduced watching Double Indemnity in her hotel room, but is then interrupted by a dude who turns out to be her partner in a heist they are about to pull off at the Cannes Film Festival located conveniently across the street. What follows is a fifteen-minute sequence that I feel fits very comfortably among De Palma’s best set pieces; it takes place during a movie premiere and involves Laure, her partners-in-crime Racine and Black Tie, and a model named Veronica who is wearing a gold and diamond number that, uh, I don’t know if it qualifies as a top or is just a piece of jewelry, but whatever it is, it leaves very little to the imagination as far as tits go. It’s like, I guess I’m left to imagine what her nipples look like? But aside from that, I can draw this chick from memory; it would be a stick figure with long hair…

(I never said I was Bazille.)

The movie being screened at this premiere is the 1999 film East/West, directed by Régis Wargnier and starring Sandrine Bonnaire, and I guess De Palma is a fan of this movie about Russian expats returning to Soviet Russia only to realize you really can’t ever go home again. Whatever the case, both Bonnaire and Wargnier appear as themselves in the film, and I like to imagine De Palma telling Wargnier about his idea to include him in this movie where he’s going to play a dude who is unknowingly cucked by a tall blonde.

See, Veronica is Wargnier’s date at the premiere, and Laure’s part in the plan involves seducing her away from the director, so they can have some We Time in the ladies room. And so, Wargnier’s left in the screening room, watching his film play to a captivated audience — but what’s the point when you don’t have a sexy broad sitting next to you to impress with such an experience? This poor man was depending on the thunderous applause to get this chick wet, thereby doing half of the work for him, and thereby making it easier to slip in the saucisse later that night.

Instead, he can only politely smile at his leading lady Bonnaire — who he either already banged during the making of his movie, or he fucked it up and got friend-zoned somewhere along the way — and he can only sit impatiently while both Veronica and Laure are in the restroom, dyking out harder than a couple of Tegan and Sara fans hopped up on Ecstasy. And while Veronica is caught up in the rapture of lady love, Laure slowly strips the diamond-encrusted coils away from the model, and drops them to the floor, while Black Tie waits in the next stall to swipe it all away.

It is all hypnotically shot by Luc Besson’s regular cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, and it’s lushly scored by composer Ryuichi Sakamoto — who is doing a little bit of swiping of his own with a track that sounds very much like Ravel’s Bolero. While there is dialogue spoken during this sequence, the visuals are strong enough that one could watch this with the sound off and understand it 100-percent, as with most of De Palma’s best sequences. One would understand the various actions and reactions by the perpetrators and victims of this heist, and one would definitely understand that both Romijn and the actress playing Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) are absolute goddamn smoke shows here. 

By the way, let’s get this straight: With the constant fetishistic lensing of women and their gyrating bodies and lovingly filmed lips against other female lips, this movie is male gaze as fuck. And as a pig with a penis, I have no problem with it whatsoever. But if you have a problem with it, well, there are plenty of places on the Internet to go pitch a fit and bitch about it — as for me, I’m just gonna sit back and laugh and thank God I’m a part of the patriarchy because this is a maaaann’s world!

Suffice it to say, things don’t go as planned, blood is spilled, and even worse, names are called. It ends with Laure skipping off with the diamonds, while a bleeding Black Tie informs his partner about this betrayal over the radio mic, telling him something in French that the subtitles translate as “The bitched double-crossed us”. 

Now, that’s not a typo on my part, that’s how it’s spelled in the subtitles: B-I-T-C-H-E-D. As in someone having complained in the past tense. 

I wondered if De Palma meant “bitch”, B-I-T-C-H, but there was a mistake with the subtitle people. But then I thought, really? I mean, De Palma comes off as someone who’d be a bit of an exacting perfectionist in his work. Would he allow such an obvious error to slip by? Hell, it didn’t so much “slip” as it fuckin’ did a Michigan J. Frog “Hello My Baby!” dance across the stage. I’ve seen it spelled this way in the 35mm prints I’ve watched, it’s spelled this way in the Region 1 DVD from Warner Brothers, and it’s spelled this way on the version I watched last weekend on HBO Max.

No, it can’t be a mistake, it must be intentional, I thought. And so I looked up other uses and definitions for “bitched”, and here’s what I found as the top definition on Urban Dictionary: 

Uh, so maybe it was a mistake.
 
A lot of Femme Fatale’s fun comes from not knowing where it’s going, and tripping out when it gets there. Granted, this film came out in 2002 and that’s enough for me to recite my standard sarcastic asshole routine about how I don’t want to spoil a film that is now old enough to vote. But this certainly wasn’t some blockbuster movie that took the world by storm that everybody quotes from, nor was it spoofed in one of the Scary Movies or one of those Seltzer/Friedberg pieces of shit — this movie bombed and was pretty much forgotten except by film geeks and maybe Mr. Skin types. 

So I won’t get into it in any further detail that could potentially spoil it. But the funny thing is, there is an alternate trailer for it that rather cleverly spoils the entire film if you pay super close attention; it plays nearly the entire film from beginning to end in very fast motion, occasionally stopping for a moment at regular speed, before speeding up again, and it goes all the way to the end credits. It’s one of my favorite movie trailers and you can find it online. 

Anyway, skipping some plot developments here and there, we jump ahead seven years, and the men Laure double-crossed are back on the search for her, and more importantly, the diamonds. We are then introduced to a photographer played by Antonio Banderas; his name is Nicolas Bardo (no relation to Brick), and he’s not so much out-of-work as he’s just not really looking for it. After a phone call from his manager (voiced by an uncredited John Stamos), he takes a quick-cash gig where all he has to do is take a photo of an ambassador’s wife. 

This leads to Bardo making the acquaintance of Laure Ash, who is trying to lay low in an airport hotel. Bardo, thinking himself quite the slickster, barges into her room, taking on the guise of a very effeminate man. Some may find this portrayal offensive, and these same people may also find themselves unable to comfortably sit down for the rest of their lives, on account of the excruciating pain emanating from their backsides. 

Wait, I’m afraid that didn’t come out right. I was trying to say that these people are butt-hurt, but not like something caused them to have a sore ass, such as an uncomfortable chair or a leatherman’s fist. And I’m certainly not making the connection that the kind of people that would have a literally hurt butt would be the ones to get offended. I mean I’m talking about overly sensitive types, that’s what I — oh my god, first I quoted the N-word, now I’m implying that the homos can’t take a joke, oh geez — PLEASE DON’T CANCEL ME. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: Antonio Banderas worked with Pedro Almodóvar before Femme Fatale, and he’s continued to work with him after Femme Fatale. So I’m sure it’s all good. 

As Bardo, Banderas plays someone who has probably gone through life being crafty in both the literal and figurative sense: as a part-time paparazzo, he knows all the tricks in getting the perfect shot from those who’d rather not have their picture taken, and he also has this giant collage of photos on his apartment wall, forming one giant landscape of the view outside his window.

But soon Bardo finds himself in over his head, as it becomes increasingly clear that he is going up against someone craftier and who looks a lot better in a pair of panties. Or so I assume. For all I know, that sexy Spanish stallion might rock a French cut like nobody’s business. But until I actually see that — and god knows I’ve tried — I will have to give the advantage to Laure. 

The second half of the film becomes a Parisian journey for Bardo in and out of sterile hotel rooms, standard police stations, and seedy night spots. I’m not kidding about those seedy night spots, by the way. I mean, one of the patrons at a scuzzy bar full of drunken, horned-up Frenchmen is none other than Le Tenia from Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible — so you know it’s gotta be bad.  

Despite not being given any moments of what my friend Alec and I refer to as Pure Unadulterated Banderas (basically moments where he hams it up), Antonio Banderas is very well-cast and game for a role that requires no trace of ego, as his character finds himself increasingly humbled. A role like Bardo could be ruined by some actors who would try to maintain too much strength throughout, plus, going back to ego, there are more than a few scenes where it’s very clear that Rebecca Romijn has a good three or four inches of height on the dude.

I love that; because more often than not, Hollywood does that thing where they always have to make the shorter male actor appear to be as tall as his female co-star, or worse, taller. Because I guess the average moviegoer isn’t ready for that idea, that women can possibly be taller than men. So points to Banderas and De Palma for not giving a fuck about Romijn looking like she could easily cradle Banderas and rock him to sleep. And I say this as someone who pays women to rock him to sleep. Don’t kink-shame me.

Of course, the tall woman/short man visual helps to further sell the idea that Banderas’ character is outmatched compared to Laure Ash, but I feel that’s more of an unintentional bonus that was realized after the leads were cast in these roles. 

Banderas is great as the schmuck, and Romijn is very good as the titular femme, doing a fine job with either being conniving or just simply not giving a fuck. Although to be honest with you, I actually thought she did a better job at playing hurt or fragile. And it left me wanting to give her a hug — and not the kind of hug that I already want to give her, you know, a hug that allows me to perv out while feeling her body against mine while smelling her and all that, no. I mean, like a genuine hug of compassion and warmth. Or so I’ve been told about such hugs, if such hugs actually exist.

Not that it matters, because if I’m not doing handshakes, that means hugs are out the window as well. Because while you motherfuckers are trying to go back to normal, I’m prepped for the new normal: I’m talking Demolition Man for real, which I knew was coming. I didn’t go around saying “be well” all this time for shits & giggles, you know.

I am not as well-versed in Rebecca Romijn’s roles as an actor; most of what I’ve seen her in is from the late 90s and early 00s. I know her as Mystique from the X-Men movies, and I know her as The Bearded Lady from Dirty Work, and I know her from that Rollerball remake and the audio commentary she did on said Rollerball remake. But this rewatch reminded me to search out any other movies where she shows a more vulnerable side, because I think that’s what she does best. 

Something staring me in the face this whole time that I’m just noticing now is that Romijn’s current husband Jerry O’Connell was in De Palma’s previous film to this one, Mission to Mars. And at the time, Banderas was married to Melanie Griffith, who had worked with De Palma in both Body Double and The Bonfire of the Vanities. I don’t know what my point is other than some random trivia with which to pad out these ramblings. But I’m sure they all at some time or another have compared Working With Brian De Palma stories at some time or another, I’m sure.  

Anyway, this is all just a long way to say that I’ve always really liked the film. It never tops its opening set-piece, but that’s because it’s really the only set-piece, and it’s kind of a ballsy move by De Palma, as if he were saying “OK, normally this is what a movie leads to, but I’m just gonna go ahead and start with it, and then you’re still gonna stick around to see what happens next because I’m gonna rock your world in a different kind of way”; and he does.

That opening heist precedes a fun, sexy, and twisty joint, complete with the usual audacious De Palma touches here and there — both in the screenplay and in the way he presents these scenes. There’s split screen, slow motion, hypnotic camera movements, giddy splashes of blood, tits, and ass, Gregg Henry, and just the general overall feeling that De Palma is gleefully fucking with you — the viewer — the entire time. And you either go with it and enjoy the ride, or you feel strongly negative about the experience.

In other words, it’s 100 percent pure Brian De Palma, in the same way that films like Blow Out and Raising Cain are 100 percent pure De Palma. Movies like The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible, as awesome as they are, are more like 70-80 percent pure De Palma. 

Femme Fatale is also probably the last solid film — pure or otherwise — that De Palma has made, as of this Foul Year of Our Lord 2021. I remember liking his following film The Black Dahlia in 2006, but I also remember making a lot of excuses for it. Then came his 2007 found footage Iraq War movie Redacted, which wasn’t my cup of tea. Then I saw his 2019 film, Domino, which felt less like a real movie and more like the pilot for an internationally produced television series, the kind that plays in syndication on weekend afternoons. I’ve yet to see his 2012 film, Passion, and so I hope that when I finally get around to that one, it will feel more like the De Palma I know and love. If not, well, you can’t have everything, right? 

Well, I don’t have anything else to say, so instead I’d like to close out by catching up on some comments and e-mail from my fans. I mean, I haven’t posted a real rambling since December 2019, I’m sure I have some people out there who have wanted to stay in touch.

So here’s the first comment: It’s regarding my post on the film Righteous Kill, starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Oh man, I posted that one back in 2009! Anyway, this comment was left on my WordPress site, which is the same as the Blogger site, it’s just a backup. Anyway, it’s from someone named “George” and he says: 

OK, cool. He’s clearly referencing the skater character in the film played by Rob Dyrdek, and he certainly was a moron, but I think he’s a few years too old to be considered a millennial. But I get where you’re coming from, George, and I appreciate the comment!

Next, I have a comment left on my Instagram, where I leave much shorter ramblings on movies, and you can find me there at “efcontentment“. And this comment is regarding my post on the Paul Thomas Anderson film Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler, and which came out the same year as Femme Fatale. 2002 was a good year for movies! Anyway, he says the following: 

Well, I don’t think Anderson was doing a review on Adam Sandler’s character, but more of a study, and I felt this was a very interesting study on an emotionally fragile human being who was able find a meaningful connection with a lady who was able to understand him. And what you call “personal life crap”, I call the intriguing drama that comes from Sandler’s day-to-day interactions with others as he tries not to get emotionally overwhelmed. Anyway, thanks for the comment, oh and I almost forgot, in regards to your opening question, the WTF podcast with Marc Maron has nothing to do with this blog — but I sure wish it did! 

And finally I have an e-mail sent to me by a “Jonathan Baker” and it’s titled “amyadamsismywaifu” and it says: 

And so I won’t. Anyway, thanks for reading — now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the bank! 

I also suck at responding to e-mails.

 

Click here to listen to the podcast version of this posting.

I’m a shitty friend when you get right down to it, specifically when friends request things of me, like, I don’t know, let’s just say, uh, ramblings about movies on this blog.

The way it goes is this: a friend will ask “Hey, I’d like to read you talk about this particular movie” and I’ll go “Sure thing, buddy” and my reaction should be “Holy cats, somebody actually reads this blog? I should show them my appreciation and get to work on this immediately!”

Instead, it’ll be about a year before I go, “Well, I guess I’ll blog about this movie now” and then I’ll watch the movie — which is the easiest part of the whole process — and right after the movie, I’ll sit down in front of the computer, open up the ol’ Blogger, stare at the blank white page on the screen for a few minutes, and then I’ll open up another window and spend the next few hours watching YouTube videos featuring cats or dogs or cats and dogs or videos about credit cards or videos about food reviews or videos about video game play-throughs and OK wait wait wait wait wait wait wait —

Don’t get me wrong. I know watching-other-people-play-video-games sounds kinda lame, but let me clarify myself — let me defend myself — and tell you that I don’t watch those stupid “Let’s Play” videos, you know, the ones where people talk through their play-through, as if I cared about what they have to say as they play? No way! I just want to see somebody beat a game I’ve had difficulty with in the past, just so I can see how to go about it if I were to play that game again.

As for the food review videos, I’m very selective; I don’t go in for those “mukbang” or gang bang or whatever they call those videos about people eating on camera. And I certainly don’t go in for any of those videos featuring stupid fat fucks making stupid fat fucking faces on the thumbnail next to a picture of a slice of pizza. I’m not gonna click on that thumbnail just to watch some stupid fat fuck shoving pizza in his face and go OMIGAAAWWWD THIS PIZZA BE SEX ON WHEELS DOWN MY TRRROAT, SON!

But while I’m in Unreasonable Hater mode, you know which YouTube videos I will never understand actually having an existence? The absolute worst kind? Reaction videos. These are the ones where someone or a group of someones will sit and watch a clip of a comedian or a movie trailer or something like that, and these are easy to spot because their thumbnails always consist of that person or persons sitting next to each other making some goofy-ass reaction face — maybe a couple with their hands up to their mouths while making the OMIGOD face, like people do in movies but never in real life — and usually on the lower right hand corner is the video to which they’re making said reactions.

Do you see what I’m doing here? Do you see? I’m procrastinating, I’m hesitating over here and that’s how I do when it comes to other people requesting things of me. It’s hard enough to sit my fat ass down to write about stuff I plan to write about, but it really comes down to the plain and simple fact that if I have a choice between spending my time talking about a movie I watched or using that time to just watch another movie? Well, sweetie, I don’t know how to tell you this — or actually, I do know: I’d rather use my time to watch more movies.

And by saying this, by confessing this — I realize that the true enemy is not my procrastination, it is not what I choose to do with my time, but it is time itself that is the bad guy. If I had more time to sit around and watch movies and eventually get around to doing something, that would be great. But instead time is what it is: the ultimate prison, where I’m held in this cage of hours, minutes, seconds, and the clock just keeps ticking ever so forward towards finality. I need more time! Then maybe I can fit in all the stuff I want to do.

But alas, time remains something linear and fleeting, for it is but a strict progression of cause to effect — it is not some wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff in which I can hop back and forth and up and down and everywhere else. Because I’m not a Time Lord, and that lady and gentleman, is how you make a clumsy-ass segue.

Requested by my buddy Kris Wallace — at least I hope we’re still buddies — the 1996 made-for-television film Doctor Who: The Movie begins with a Time Lord known only as The Doctor, who is transporting the remains of The Master, who is an evil Time Lord and also the Big Bad of this entire series.

Maybe I should take it back a little bit, in case you’re too far from a phone to Google it; this is a show that’s been around since the 1960s and it’s about these beings known as Time Lords — they’re aliens or demi-gods or whatever, I don’t know — and they have the ability to do the hipping and the hopping around time and space. The series focuses on one particular Time Lord — that would be our boy The Doctor — going on many different adventures along with his Companion, which I guess is the proper English way to say “sidekick”.

They get around in a time & space craft called a TARDIS, which looks like a British police box because those were a common sight back during the show’s creation in the Jolly Old. Had the show been created today, he’d probably get around in a food truck.

Like James Bond, the Doctor has been played by various actors over the years, but unlike James Bond, they actually acknowledge the change by explaining that the Doctor has to regenerate into a new body whenever there’s too much mileage and wear & tear on the current one. Like the James Bond movies, the otherwise consistently released series took a hiatus between the late 80s and the mid-90s. Unlike the James Bond movies, the mid-90s return of Doctor Who resulted in another hiatus that ended up lasting nine years.

Also, unlike the James Bond movies, Doctor Who is a television series. I don’t know why I even compared the two when they are completely different things. Why did I do that? Because they’re both from the U.K.? That’s some embarrassing shit right there. That’s like welcoming your British friend to the United States with a boxed set of The Best of Benny Hill, assuming your Limey pal is gonna dig it because Hey, Benny Hill is from the U.K. too! And let’s go get some fish & chips too, because that’s what you people eat, right? That’s really fucking embarrassing and I apologize for that and so let’s move on.

So the film begins with The Doctor chilling out in his TARDIS, the remains of The Master stored in a box, but because the Master is literal slime, he (or it) manages to ooze out the box and fuck with the TARDIS so that it has to make an emergency landing on Earth — specifically San Francisco 1999 (as played by Vancouver 1996), where we are then introduced to some Asian-American bros having a shootout with other Asian-American bros. I assume they’re bros, because after shooting at some people, they all give each other high-fives.

The Doctor arrives, stepping out of his TARDIS just in time to get caught in the crossfire and take a couple slugs to the chest — that’s just the preferred way for Americans to greet visiting foreigners — and the sole surviving Asian-American bro on the scene, Chang Lee, gets him an ambulance.

Lee must’ve fallen out of bro-love with his bros, because despite his friends having just been killed in the shootout, he never even gives them a passing thought from this point forward. His priorities are on claiming The Doctor’s personal belongings from the hospital, which really, that’s just a shitty way to live your life, stealing the belongings from some dying Hobbit in an emergency room. Why does Lee not care about his dead friends? Who knows what had happened before we were introduced to his character? Maybe Lee’s bros had just admitted to running a train on his mom and they even had the photographed proof of it?

That would explain why this young man never goes home at all during the entire film, even though serious end-of-the-world stakes do get raised later. I don’t know about you, but even if I found out that my mom once let my closest friends give her the rotisserie chicken treatment — if I knew that all of existence was going to end tonight, I’d still want to stop by and say Goodbye to her. I just wouldn’t let her give me a kiss.

Anyway, The Doctor is taken to a hospital and he ends up dying in the emergency room, and this is where I tell you that up until this point, he’s been played by Sylvester McCoy, who was the Seventh incarnation of the Doctor in the television series. But after he goes tits up, the baton is passed to Doctor Number Eight, who is played by Paul McGann, who I thought was not only fine as the Doctor, I actually preferred him to McCoy, if for no other reason than that I prefer my Doctors to be less Bilbo Baggins and more Aragorn. His introduction has a very Resurrection of Christ feel to it; he steps out of the morgue, still wrapped in a sheet, with flowing shoulder length hair — but no Jesus beard — and the sight of this causes Young and Fat pre-Mad TV Will Sasso to pass out.

The Master, meanwhile, ends up possessing a paramedic played by Eric Roberts, and when you consider the fact that Eric Roberts really likes to work and will take on any job handed to him, including advertisements for motorcycle clubs and walk-in bathtubs, it’s not hard to imagine that maybe this paramedic is supposed to be the real Eric Roberts, making some extra dough between movies, commercials, television shows,  and music videos, by helping to save lives. This is made even more believable when Eric Roberts’ wife Eliza Roberts shows up later in the film in the role of Eric Roberts’ wife.

I’m not bagging on Eric Roberts, by the way. I’m just pointing out that it’s fairly obvious that if there’s a paycheck attached, he’ll take it. I think he’s awesome and based on his appearance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 film adaptation of Inherent Vice, he’s still got it. Now you can argue that his performance in this film might not fit what you define as the word “good”, but I dug, and you can tell he’s having a blast doing it — and typical of Mr. Roberts, he’s puts in 100-percent.

(UPDATE AFTER THE FACT DUE TO POOR RESEARCH: in 2019, Eric Roberts returned to the role of The Master for the Doctor Who audio story “Day of the Master”, also featuring Paul McGann as The Doctor.)

So The Doctor sets off to find Eric Roberts, who is now decked out in a leather jacket and sunglasses ensemble that made me wish I lived in an alternate universe where Eric Roberts played The Terminator. With the help of stupid gullible Lee, Roberts opens The Eye of Harmony, which I guess is to the TARDIS what the Flux Capacitor was to Doc Brown’s DeLorean. It also has the potential to mess with the fabric of time and space in the most severe manner possible.

Because this is all happening on New Year’s Eve, The Doctor has until the stroke of midnight to stop Eric Roberts before it all goes to shit, as I alluded to earlier while talking about my friends banging my mom. By the way, it hurt to even write about that, but sometimes you have to commit to the nasty shit that spills out of your head in an attempt to make these ramblings remotely entertaining. This is what I do for you and my hungry ego.

Because this film was intended to revive and continue the Doctor Who series, it was also made as a sort-of re-pilot in an effort to garner new fans — namely, the goddamn Yanks across the pond — and so as a convenient way to explain the going-ons to newbies while not boring the seasoned fans, the tellers behind this story give the newly regenerated Doctor amnesia. As the plot thickens, The Doctor realizes what his own deal and reason for being is, in turn helping Joe and Jane Murica, who are watching this at home on the Fox network realize Doctor Who’s whole deal and reason for being.

Oh, that Joe and Jane Murica, now that there is a couple made for each other. Love at first sight, it was — they both grew up in a small town with true American values, working for a living unlike these lazy goddamn millennials who expect to have everything handed to them, and now here they are, in the current year of 1996 as they sit back and eat freshly popped Pop Secret movie theater flavored microwave popcorn, watching this weird movie on the tee-vee about some guy from either England or Australia — it’s the same thing — and he’s chasing after Julia Roberts’ brother from Star 80, and hey, Jane, who’s the lady he’s with the whole time?

Well, Joe — that there is Doctor Grace Holloway, the cardiologist who figured something was up with this gunshot victim because his x-rays showed that he had two hearts, and her suspicions were confirmed after said gunshot victim came back to life. So now you have Doctor Holloway helping out The Doctor, which I guess makes her his new Companion.

But here’s my question, having only a passing knowledge of this television series: has the Doctor ever macked on one of his Companions before? Because that’s what happens here, he and she have themselves a little kissy smooch-smooch action and if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to shoot myself in the face for writing “kissy smooch-smooch action”.

Ladies, if you’re ever in the sad position of being my date and somewhere along the way I ask for a “little kissy smooch-smooch action”, you have every right to cancel my creepy ass on some old Louis C.K. shit, as if I had blocked the exit and asked you do that for me — not that I would ever have the balls to do something like that, cornering you and asking for a “little kissy smooch-smooch action”. Besides, it’s not like I’m in some position of power to help or hinder your career, I’m just me. So all a move like that would get me is a swift punch to the nose, and as I fall to the ground in a pathetic crumple, trying to stop the blood from gushing out my snout, you walk past me triumphantly to the strains of a Beyonce song, stepping out the door while calling me a “little-dick motherfucker”. And I just don’t need that kind of pain and humiliation in my life.

Not like Dr. Holloway is having any better luck on the dating circuit; early in the film, she gets paged during a night out with her boyfriend at the opera and has to leave to attend to her life-saving duties. This frustrates him and he ends up packing up his things from her place and walks out on her. This Val Kilmer’s stand-in-looking motherfucker is a real lame-ass; I mean, dude, you could’ve married that chick and eventually you would’ve had some of the sweet, sweet doctor cash coming your way.

Of course, that’s just what I think, and this is coming from a guy who would have no problem with my partner being the primary breadwinner in our relationship. The only time I’d have an issue with it would be knowing that every time we’d have a serious argument, she could always pull that card on me, and at any time she could be like “Then why don’t you go get a fucking job and stop leeching off of me, how about rather than writing those stupid ramblings about horror movie marathons, you go fucking get a job so I don’t have to support your lame ass. My father was right, I never should’ve dated outside of my race!”

Speaking of race, the two doctors race their way towards the film’s mid-90s television-budgeted computerized special effects extravaganza — aka the climax — but then a motorcycle cop gets in the way, stopping them, and so the Doctor pulls out a bag of jelly beans from his coat and offers it to the policeman in order to distract him. It’s a good thing the Doctor is as lily white as the cop; if the Doctor were a man of the darker persuasion and instead of Doctor Who it was Doctor Bho, I’d think there are about 41 ways — all of them the same — that it could’ve gone as soon as the Doctor reached for those jelly beans.

I’m going to go ahead and spoil a big part of this, so just skip ahead a paragraph or two, if it really makes a difference to you. But by the end of the film, a number of people have died during this adventure, including Lee and Doctor Holloway. After The Doctor defeats The Master, he then turns back time, and suddenly this golden mist comes out of the Eye of Harmony and goes into the dead bodies of Lee and Holloway and shazam! His friends are now alive again.

So wait a minute — what was that golden mist and why did it come out of the Eye? Was that mist supposed to be their souls? Is the Eye a gateway into the afterlife? Are Heaven and Hell just a big part of the whole timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly mess? Should I really just relax?

To add further confusion, The Doctor then sends them to the first day of the year 2000. So does that mean he only brought Lee and Holloway back, while all the other poor schmucks like the various security guards, the non-possessed version of Eric Roberts, and even Eric Roberts’ wife stay dead? That’s not fair, dude. Either change all of it or none of it, don’t just pick and choose what to fuck with — determining who gets to live and who has to die, I mean, who the fuck are you, Doctor Who? OK, enough of that.

So here’s the deal, folks. I am not what they call a “Whovian”, but I have seen a few episodes and like I said earlier, I have a passing knowledge of the program, at least enough to be able to sound like I know what I’m talking about, should I find myself in a conversation with real Whovians  — and I can always bullshit the rest. But what I’m about to say could possibly expose me as a fake to those people

— Doctor Who: The Movie doesn’t feel that much different from the series.

I can’t fault the film for not letting us get to know the characters beyond a basic surface level that is relevant to the plot at hand; had this Doctor Who reboot/continuation been picked up as a series, I’m sure they would’ve delved deeper into what makes the characters of Lee and Holloway tick — to say nothing of The Doctor himself. As for everything else, I don’t know what the general consensus among Whovians is when it comes to this movie, but I thought it was just fine. I mean, I’ve seen better episodes than this film, but they’re all about the same when comes to their overall entertainment value.

While I’m at it, let me piss off another group of hardcore fans of a popular science-fiction fantasy property: the Star Wars movies are all more or less equally good to me. I swear to you, I’m not trying to be a contrarian — if anything, it’s an opinion I’ve kept to myself up until now, because I’m not looking for a fight. I paid good money to see every one of those movies in the cinema and I always felt I got my money’s worth. Now please leave me alone, I don’t want trouble, just get out.

Anyway, I’m guessing one reason Doctor Who: The Movie might not be seen in as bright a light as everything else in the Who-verse — or whatever the hell you nerds call it —  is that the producers were not only intending to introduce Doctor Who to American audiences, but that it was also going to be an American-centric program (despite being shot in Canada) and the Brits could either love it or leave it and it wouldn’t mean a goddamn thing because what’s a little place like the United Kingdom compared to big bad America, right?

But, like soccer and the metric system, America rejected this television movie/backdoor pilot, because we had better things to watch on television like “Suddenly Susan”. But it did do well on the correct side of the pond, to which I’m sure these same producers then did a 180 and used the U.K. numbers as a selling point in a desperate attempt to have the show picked up. It wasn’t, and it took nearly a decade before it came back and stayed for good, currently featuring a female incarnation of The Doctor, which you know has to be pissing off somebody out there.

And that’s all well and good, I’m glad the show has a huge following and all, but when it comes to watching a time-traveling do-gooder on television, give me “Quantum Leap” any old day. That’s right, I said that shit: Quantum Leap, bitches! I lied about not wanting trouble — NOW FIGHT ME COWARDS