Reviews

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

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Brandon forewarned me that he didn’t much care for Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, but based on what he related about the film, I had a feeling that I would enjoy it more than he did. For the entirety of the its darkly comedic first half, I barely went more than five minutes without a hearty chuckle. Around the midpoint, however, even though the film’s comedic tone remained largely the same, the laughs became fewer and farther between. Immediately after leaving the theater having watched the film, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had been let down by the fairly conventional (as much as that descriptor can apply here) second half, and we are very much aligned on what works and what doesn’t. 

Good Luck opens with a purported time traveler (Sam Rockwell) arriving in a diner called Norm’s, where he informs the smartphone-addicted diners therein that he has arrived from the future to alter the upcoming AI quantum singularity — not by preventing its creation at the hands of a nine year old genius (as its genesis is supposedly inevitable) but by uploading a software patch that will result in the AI having a sense of ethics and benevolence. This is his 117th attempt to put right what once went wrong, as he is convinced that some combination of diners will result in the correct team to keep this apocalypse from kicking off. Using knowledge of the customers he’s gained in previous time loops, he gathers a small squad: ill-fated Boy Scout troop leader Bob, high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), boisterous Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and offbeat loner Ingrid (The White Lotus season two’s Haley Lu Richardson). Together, they have to make it out of the diner and across the city so that the future man can plug in a USB that will prevent the apocalypse, all while avoiding trigger-happy police, mask-wearing assailants wielding automatic weapons, and eventually, a chimeric monster made of cats. 

Interspersed with this journey are the vignettes about the diners and their individual experiences with the various pieces of technology that will converge into our future overlord. While working as a substitute at the school where Janet is employed full time, Mark discovers that the students have become mindless automatons that—between verbalizing the occasional brand name—act as a horde at the direction of something within their phones. Susan loses her son in a school shooting but is presented with the opportunity to “resurrect” him, after a fashion. Ingrid suffers from a condition that makes her nose bleed in the presence of wireless signals, leaving her little opportunity to find gainful employment; for a time, she’s able to get by as a generic “princess” character for little girls’ birthday parties, but as the prevalence of children using smartphones increases, she finds even this avenue to be a dead end. Compounding things, her equally luddite boyfriend is eventually tempted to try on a set of VR goggles, which leads him to choosing to “transition” into the virtual world full time, leaving her completely alone. Finally, we also get to see what the time traveler’s life was like growing up, in a world in which half of the population lives “jacked in” to the AI’s perfect virtual world, while the other half has perished. 

You’ll notice that the first two backstories sound bleak, and while they are, the darkness within them is played for some great satirical humor. Mark and Janet’s story is a zombie pastiche that plays out like David Tennant-era Doctor Who attempting to do a Black Mirror plot, and although its “phones make you stupid” concept comes off as a bit of intergenerational youth-bashing at first, the blasé treatment of a school shooting is just observational enough to punch through the discomfort of the situation. Susan’s story is much more heart-breaking, as she learns that her son has been gunned down in another “unpreventable” school shooting, but that he can “come back” in a cloned form that is mostly subsidized by the government since he was the victim of campus-based gun violence. He’s not the same, of course, and she reluctantly accepts the delivery of a shallow shadow of her child who occasionally recites ad copy about a low-calorie peach tea. It’s very grim stuff, but this is also the funniest part, as the tragedy is treated with the same casual shoulder-shrugging that mass shootings in America are given in reality, and all of the bits within it land: the salesman who can hardly disguise his annoyance at being given a “first timer” or his boredom as he tries to speedrun Susan through her customization options, the vapid disregard for the tragedy that other moms who have already replaced their children before display, and the couple who have clearly succumbed to madness after going through the process four times and decided to do a “goofy one” this time around. This is also the more straightforward Black Mirror… let’s say “homage,” as this essentially smashes together the plots of “Common People” and “Be Right Back,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective unto itself. 

It’s here that the film takes a downward turn for me, as the flashbacks we get for both Ingrid and the man from the future are completely lacking in moments of levity, even of the extremely dark kind. Ingrid’s loss of the one person she thought she could trust, who was turned into an obedient slave to the machine after only the smallest temptation, isn’t fun to watch. It’s also where the film feels the most reactionary in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of the film’s thesis. Ingrid’s boyfriend, after spending his days in the VR headset over the course of less than a week seems to become completely radicalized without any regard for how his lifestyle change affects his partner. She comes home one day to find him having prepared dinner for them, acting out of character, and it’s during this seeming return to their happy domesticity that he springs on her that he’s going to “transition,” which seems like a loaded term in this context. What he’s doing is essentially allowing himself to be voluntarily hooked into the nursing home equivalent of one of those goo vats from The Matrix and live the rest of his life in the perfected version of reality that the machine promises. If anything, he’s “uploading,” but the use of transition, in combination with other behaviors, feels like a regressive take. Perhaps this is best demonstrated in his frustration that Ingrid doesn’t understand the niche slang that he’s suddenly picked up from those people he’s meeting online, you know, the ones predatorily encouraging him to transition? It hews too close to right wing conspiracy signaling for me, and I didn’t like that. 

As one would imagine, the future man’s childhood is the most bleak, and as a result, when the back half of the film has to try and maintain a sense of comedic balance with the first half, it has to push its jokes out of the vignettes and into the framing device of the group trying to divert the quantum singularity before the timer on the traveler’s wrist finishes its countdown. This narrative has been jokey throughout, but the bits within it vary wildly in their success. Sam Rockwell yelling at a diner full of people? Goes on too long before he starts to demonstrate his knowledge of people gathered from previous loops, but once that starts, the jokes start to land better. Convincing Bob to draw the fire of the assembled police force outside? Decent enough, but barely consequential. In the second half, this has to escalate, so instead we get some exposition about the programmer’s access to both 3D printing tech and (presumably) the cloning potential from the company that “resurrected” Susan’s son and so we get a kaiju made of memes that didn’t work for me at all. It did get a 50% approval rating in my screening, since my viewing companion and I were alone and he enjoyed it, so it may work for others. The final showdown goes on for just a little too long and is, as noted in the intro, a bit of a conventional place for this narrative to go (its few “twists” will surprise no one but children). Bizarrely, the film concludes open-endedly; it’s not exactly calling for a sequel, but it’s clear that the ending is written with greater importance placed on that possibility than the importance of a satisfactory conclusion. Given that the film had plenty of things to say but had already run out of them by the time it ended, I think an ending that was either optimistic or nihilistic would have been a wiser way to go, rather than an unambitiously ambiguous one. It’s a little overcooked, but the highs of the first half carry it across the finish line despite the lows of the second, and it averages out to be pretty good overall. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #259: Magnolia (1999) & 2026’s Best Director Nominees

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Welcome to Episode #259 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble-cast drama Magnolia (1999).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 Soy Cuba (1964)
09:46 Safety Last! (1923)
18:45 My Bloody Valentine (1981)
22:30 Twisted Issues (1988)

27:12 Magnolia (1999)
52:17 Black Panther (2018)
1:15:27 Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)
1:26:26 Heaven Knows What (2014)
1:47:00 Thelma (2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Flowers in the Attic (1987)

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During a recent discussion with friends about the name of a book shop in our city and how we find it unwieldy and off-putting, one person in the group stated that if he ever opened a bookstore, he would call it “Flowers in the Attic.” I asked if he knew what Flowers in the Attic was about, and he admitted that he didn’t; he just liked the poetry of the phrase. To demonstrate why this would be, at best, a bad name for his future hypothetical business, I suggested that we watch the novel’s 1987 film adaptation, which (naturally) happened to be streaming on Tubi. [For those interested, the 2014 Lifetime adaptation of the novel is also on Tubi, but the service doesn’t seem to house the channel’s further adaptations of the three sequel novels for some reason.]

Cathy Dollanganger (Kristy Swanson) has the perfect life. The second eldest of the Dollanganger kids, a couple of years younger than older brother Christopher Jr. (Jeb Stuart Adams) and a half decade older than twins Cory and Carrie, she is doted upon most by her beloved father, Christopher Sr., a fact that her mother Corrine (Victoria Tennant) takes note of. On his thirty-sixth birthday, Chris Sr. dies in a car accident, and as the family’s savings dwindle and they lose their home, Corrine packs the family up and takes them to the home of her parents, known in this film only as “the grandmother” and “the grandfather.” Grandmother (Louise Fletcher) is a harsh and cruel woman who wastes no time laying down the house rules and her interpretation of religious doctrines, which are, to her, one and the same. Some of them are reasonable, like ensuring that the boys share one bed while the girls share the other, while others, like that the children are to be silent at all times, are more authoritarian. Corrine explains to her children that Grandfather is very old, and Corinne must keep the kids’ existence hidden from them until she “wins back [her] father’s love,” and that once she has, he’ll recant his previous disinheriting of her and the family will once again be financially secure. 

Of course, the most famous thing about Flowers in the Attic is that it’s a novel that deals with the taboo subject of incest. Notably, Cathy and the others have to be kept secret from Grandfather because they are the product of an incestuous relationship between their Corinne and Chris Sr. (Later books would overcomplicate this genealogy but Chris Sr. is stated to be the much younger half-brother of the Grandfather, making him Corinne’s half uncle.) This is also the stated reason that Grandmother is so monstrous to her own grandchildren, as she considers them abominations, despite their innocence. The 1979 novel on which the film was based, written by author V.C. Andrews, was derided upon publication for being utterly deranged but nonetheless proved to be shockingly popular, enough to warrant a few sequels during her lifetime (and some after that, but we won’t get into it). I read it years before I was even aware that there had been a film adaptation, and with that in mind, although this movie is difficult to defend from an objective standpoint, it’s the best way to enjoy this story with as little disgust as possible. Although the previous generation’s incest is kept intact as the inciting reason for the Dollanganger kids to be locked away in the attic, the film cuts out the relationship that develops between Cathy and Chris as the two enter puberty in complete isolation, which could be argued to both undercut the darkness of the narrative and make the more “young adult novel” elements of the original story blossom, no pun intended. It’s ultimately more toothless, but also more palatable. 

Flowers in the Attic is by no means a good movie, but it’s one that I can’t help but watch any time I’m presented the opportunity. Fletcher isn’t asked to do much here but retread the same beats that netted her Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the film is wise to keep her out of frame with the child actors, who are universally dreadful. Swanson went on to have something of a career, albeit a brief one, but Adams appears to have mostly disappeared following Flowers, and the film world did not mourn his absence. He’s stilted, wooden, and clearly far too adult to convincingly portray a teenaged boy capable of being overpowered by Grandmother. Tennant’s portrayal is a mixed bag, as I think she subtly underplays Corinne’s financial panic and understandable horror at returning to Foxworth Hall but goes too broad later. I could almost buy that she is resentful of what she perceives as a lack of gratitude for her sacrifice on the part of her children, the film makes no time for her to have a meaningful aside glance, deep in troubled thought, as she reaps the benefits of her family wealth while her children grow emaciated and pale from lack of sunlight and exercise. There’s no evolution from the Corinne who genuinely loves her children but can’t provide for them and thus must accept a literal whipping from her parents in order to return home to the Corinne who coldly tells the remaining children that Cory has died in the hospital. It’s really on Fletcher to carry the whole thing, performance-wise, and she manages to make it work despite a role that she probably could have sleepwalked through. 

I’ve never been able to put my finger on why this film has had such staying power in my mind, and it might simply be that this is a weird tonal and narrative mish-mash. Wikipedia suggests that it could be considered part of the psycho-biddy genre, but the story mostly involves juvenile fiction elements in the form of its fantasy about adolescent self-sufficiency and competence as Chris and Cathy come to act as surrogate parents to the younger two. The novel is often considered to be a gothic text, which is fascinating to me as it clearly does align with the kinds of plots one would find in most European (specifically English) gothic stories—the old dark house, the unwanted relatives in the attic, subordinated passions, etc.—but Andrews was an American writer. American gothic lit usually eschews those elements, trading castles for caves and replacing the metaphorical representations of the horrors of the old world with the existential terror of the “wilderness” of the Western Hemisphere. Andrews’s novel, for better or worse, is probably the primary example of an American writer, specifically a Southern American writer, crafting a European style gothic story set in the American south. The first time I saw this film was when I was in grad school, broadcast over a local New Orleans affiliate that I could pick up with my rabbit ear antenna, and I was deep in the study of American gothic literature at the time—as my intended capstone thesis was originally going to be about the influence of Calvinism on the gothic traditions of the U.S.—so that’s probably why it got so solidly lodged in my mind. 

What’s fascinating about Andrews’s work is the fact that, deranged though the material itself may be, the author had a very distinct prose style. This was a trashy but popular novel that was adapted into a trashy and mostly forgotten movie, but when one thinks about contemporary literary output that would fall under the same subgenre now, the difference in actual literary quality is staggering. For all of its many, many faults, Flowers in the Attic isn’t slop. I say this as someone who is in the process of editing one of his own novel manuscripts right now, and I’ll freely admit that my own prose is not as good as Andrews’s. That carries over into the film adaptation as well. This is clearly a very cheaply made film ($3.5M) that spent most of its money on sets and (one hopes) Louise Fletcher, but even for mass-produced schlock of the late eighties, it still functions on a higher technical level than some theatrical releases I’ve seen in recent years, and it’s also fully committed to its bizarrely melodramatic tone. The periodic slow-motion shots of Grandmother unveiling the leather whip as she prepares to beat her daughter while Grandfather watches or her brushing Cathy’s treasured ballerina music box to the floor to shatter into dozens of pieces manage to somehow be both campy and utterly sincere, which is probably why it’s gone on to be a cult classic. That it never deviates from that tone even when Swanson is wearing perhaps the worst wig in the history of cinema is a testament to its staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)

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We love Park Chan-Wook around here. We recently discussed Oldboy on the Lagniappe Podcast (and Stoker years before), there was strong support for No Other Choice around here last year (it ended up in the number eight spot for our collective top ten of 2025), and I was personally very fond of both Decision to Leave and Lady Vengeance. It seemed to me that his thrillers generally have more cultural penetration in the west than his comedies, and I was finally able to track down a copy of I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, his 2006 romcom via my library. Alas, it is with a heavy heart that I report that I didn’t care for it. 

Young-goon (Im Soo-Jung) is a young woman working in a factory building transistor radios, when one day the instructions on the overhead loudspeaker tell her to slash open her wrist and insert connecting cords under her skin. Following what is presumed to be a suicide attempt, Young-goon’s mother admits to the psychiatric facility’s doctors that her own mother (Young-goon’s grandmother) had been admitted to a sanatorium in later years, after decades of her own delusions, including that she was actually a mouse. Before leaving Young-goon at the hospital, her mother advises her not to admit to anyone that she believes that she is a cyborg. On her first day, the seemingly catatonic Young-goon is observed by Il-soon (Rain, credited here as Jung Ji-hoon rather than under his stage name), a boy who is serving time after being diagnosed as an anti-social kleptomaniac, as Young-goon climbs out of bed after everyone else is asleep and puts in her grandmother’s dentures, seemingly in order to commune with the various machines around the facility. 

Il-soon’s supposed thievery around the hospital seems to revolve around other patients’ delusions that he is stealing some part of their essence, and he goes along with these ideas by pretending to “transfer” various neuroses between them. These stolen possessions are as ephemeral as one patient’s ability to play ping-pong or another’s neurotic “courtly behavior” of only walking backward. Within her own psychologically unwell self-storytelling, Young-goon believes that she must overcome the seven deadly sins for cyborgs, which include expressing gratitude, daydreaming, and having sympathy. She asks Il-soon to steal this from her, and he’s romantically fascinated enough with her that he attempts to work within the schema of her madness to try and nurse her back to health. Namely, Young-goon has been allowing another patient to eat all of her food because she believes that she gets all the energy that she needs from holding batteries, but knows that if she’s noticed not taking food during meal times, she’ll be forcefed, and if she stops eating altogether, she’s in for shock treatment. 

This movie comes at an important inflection point in Park’s filmography, coming right on the heels of his “Vengeance Trilogy” and before he experimented with more standard horror forms (2009’s vampire horror Thirst) and working in English (directing the aforementioned Stoker and producing Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, both in 2013). Bracketing Cyborg on both sides are films that Park wrote but did not direct: Boy Goes to Heaven, a fantasy romcom, in 2005, and 2008’s Cush and Blush, which is a more straightforward comedy but with clear romance elements. The Vengeance Trilogy is a set of dark, miserable films, and if I spent years of my life making them I would want to lighten up a little bit with my creative output for a while too, if for no other reason than to get the taste out of my mouth. Unfortunately, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK doesn’t work much as a romance (the tagline “She’s crazy; he’s crazy about her” is as accurate as it is awful) and the comedic elements mostly fail to land as well, since so much of it is dependent upon the viewer laughing at people with sufficiently severe mental illnesses to warrant medical intervention. 

One of the patients is a consummate liar, a pathological “mythomaniac,” whose constructed narratives are there to replace the memories that she’s lost as a result of application of ECT “therapy.” Another patient lives an entire life within a compact mirror in which she imagines herself as one of the von Trapp children, while the same overweight patient who eats all of Young-goon’s food believes that she is capable of flight by rubbing together two socks of her own creation that repel her from the ground via static electricity (the script is much meaner about her weight than it is about her madness). All of this becomes important because Il-soon is able to weave together all of their counter-factual beliefs into a series of stories that, theoretically, will draw Young-goon out of her own delirium. This doesn’t work, although it does reach a decent ending when Il-soon refashions his sole beloved possession into a “device” that will allow Young-goon’s cyborg form to allow her to convert food into energy instead, including a cute scene in which he pretends to put the mechanism into her back. Despite feeling like the natural conclusion to the story, the film goes on for another fifteen minutes of nonsense that doesn’t make the whole any more complete or enjoyable. 

As a fan of this director, I reached what felt like the halfway point of the film’s total runtime and was ready for it to deliver a big midpoint twist that would make everything prior to this point fall into place, but this was not to be the case. The two of them don’t escape from the psych hospital and find that their reality is as malleable as they believe it to be, nor is it revealed that all of these seemingly goofy hijinx surrounding our characters is reflective of a darker objective reality outside of either of their perceptions. There is a moment where it seems like the movie is going to really break out of the box and go in an interesting direction, as Young-goon’s “battery” reaches its full charge and she starts laying down automatic weapons fire out of every fingertip, massacring the staff of the place (whom she associates with the sanatorium employees to whom her grandmother was remanded). This proves to be another fantasy sequence, however, as Young-goon then faints from starvation and the forced feeding begins in earnest. 

It’s only in these fantasy fugues that Park really shows off his distinct style. So much of the film is shot in the sterile confines of the asylum that the breaks from reality feel like a breath of fresh air. The girl with the Sound of Music obsession who is only ever seen with her back to the camera and observing the world through her reflection allows for some impressive transitional trickery as it zooms in and out of her mirror, which is fun. Overall, however, this misses the mark for me, and it isn’t one that I would recommend. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Twisted Issues (1988)

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The shot-on-video punk scene relic Twisted Issues is difficult to categorize with a solid, workable genre definition. The project started as a no-budget documentary about the local punk scene in Gainesville, Florida, and scraps of that initial idea make it to the screen in-tact, detectable in lengthy scenes of D.I.Y. punk showcases in dive bars & living rooms and in montages of kids lazily pushing their skateboards down endless suburban pavement. However, sometime during production, someone decided to actually make money off of this endeavor, and the project deviated into the most viable option for low-budget, low-talent backyard filmmakers to earn a spot on video store shelves: it became a horror film. One of the skateboarding slackers became a monstrous horror icon who could hunt & kill his buddies in standalone vignettes, fleshing out the monotonous punk-show footage with the kinds of goof-off gore gags that could later be strung together in the edit to tell a somewhat linear story. It’s in that post-production edit where director Charles Pinion mutated the project a second time into something much stranger and less definable than either its documentary or creature feature versions could’ve achieved on their own. He transformed it into an oddly surreal piece of outsider art, constantly teetering between happenstantial genius and total incoherence.

True to its initial pitch, a large portion of Twisted Issues illustrates songs from local punk acts like The Smegmas, Hellwitch, and Mutley Chix with ironic news footage clips, unrelated skateboarding footage, and staged acts of violence that match the images suggested by their lyrics. The non-music video portions of the film follow one skateboarder in particular, who’s murdered in a hit & run by car-driving bullies straight out of The Toxic Avenger, then resurrected by a Dr. Frankenstein-style mad scientist to avenge his own death. The undead skater picks up a sword, hides his disfigured face behind a fencing mask, and screws his foot to a wheel-less skateboard that gives him a classic Frankenstein limp. Once loose on the streets of Gainesville, he kills his former bullies one at a time in standalone scenes that could be assembled in any order of Charles Pinion’s choosing without affecting “the plot.” The most curious decision Pinion makes, then, is including himself onscreen as a godlike figure who watches all of this gory violence and punk scene tomfoolery on his living room television. His character is clearly part of the scene, as he sometimes shares dead-eyed interactions with buddies who he later watches get killed on the TV as if he were tuning into late-night cable creature features or the local news. He’s also clearly in control of the film’s reality in some loosely defined way, as if everything we’re watching is only happening because he’s observing it through the screen. Is Pinion the punk rock Schrödinger? If a skater falls off his board and no one’s around to watch it, did he really scrape his knee? Could God videotape a gore gag so gnarly that even He couldn’t stomach it? The omniscient television set is the only element of the film’s narrative that can’t be fully defined or understood and, thus, it’s the one that elevates the picture from cute to compelling.

Twisted Issues grinds its metaphorical skateboard straight down the border between sloppily incoherent slacker art and sublimely surreal video art. Given the means and circumstances of its production, that TV-static-fuzzed incoherence was likely the only honest way for these kids to make movies, considering that every single suburban experience in that era was mediated through beer cans & TV screens. The filmmaking is, to put it kindly, unrefined. Every dialogue exchange is dragged out by awkward pauses that double their length. Each vignette is harshly separated by a cut-to-black transition. When it comes time for an original score to fill in the gaps between local punk acts, sequences are set to the most pained, aimless guitar solos to ever assault the human ear. The undead skateboarder’s accoutrements and the weapons used to fight back against him are all props that appear to have been collected from the local nerdy Sword Guy’s bedroom (credited to Hawk, who plays a nerdy Sword Guy mystic in-film to maintain verisimilitude). The whole thing is very obviously a document of friends goofing around on the weekends between punk gigs & service industry jobs, which in a roundabout way fulfills its initial mission. The way Pinion pieces everything together through the all-seeing eye of his bedroom TV set is impressively surreal, though, and it abstracts the entire picture into something that can’t be outright dismissed as home movies of local punk mischief. He mixes his friends’ goof-off hangouts with war atrocity footage recorded off TV news broadcasts. He matches local bands’ lyrics to scripted scenes of violence to the point of verging on making an SOV movie musical. Most significantly, he likens the act of shooting, editing, and watching all of this footage to a kind of godlike omnipotence that underlines the plasticity of reality in all media. He made art out of scraps.

-Brandon Ledet

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)

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Usually, when cult sitcoms get a “The Movie” treatment I’m already a fan of the show. By the time televised series like The Simpsons, Beavis & Butt-Head, Strangers with Candy, Trailer Park Boys, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Reno 911! mutated into their “The Movie” forms for the big screen, I was already multiple seasons deep into their respective runs, pre-amused with each character’s respective faults & follies. It’s always been frustrating, then, that part of getting a “The Movie” version of a TV show has meant having to dial the clock back to the very beginning, re-explaining the series’ basic premise to a wider audience who might not already be in the know. So, it was kinda nice to finally watch one where I actually did need that labored reintroduction, instead of being impatient to get past it. It also helps that this particular Sitcom: The Movie adaptation makes the act of dialing the clock back to its origin point a major aspect of its plot, instead of pretending that the intervening seasons didn’t happen so latecomers like me don’t feel left behind.

Nirvanna the Band the Show started as a web series in the mid-aughts, later graduated to a cable-broadcast sitcom, and has since been pulled from distribution so that there’s currently no legal way to catch up on it if you’re not already a savvy fan. You don’t need to have seen Nirvanna the Band the Show to appreciate Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, though, since it is so deliberately recursive in its themes & plotting that it functions as both an escalation and a recap. The film opens with series co-creator Matt Johnson rushing down the stairs of his Toronto apartment to manically accost his in-universe roommate (and show co-creator) Jay McCarrol with an elaborate scheme on how to book their band a gig at local music club The Rivoli. You quickly get the sense that the plan to get the gig is more thought out than the gig itself, since their copyright-skirting rock group Nirvana The Band doesn’t seem to have any completed original songs beyond some opening stage choreography. It’s also quickly assumable that each episode of the show is another failed plan to book a show at The Rivoli in particular, which after nearly a decade of elaborate coups they likely could’ve accomplished by rehearsing instead of scheming. So, the movie itself functions as a two-parter episode of the original show, escalated in scope to match the grander scale of its canvas — a classic TV-to-big-screen adaptation formula.

In the first half of this escalated two-parter, Matt & Jay illegally skydive off the observation deck of the CN Tower (Toronto’s version of Seattle’s Space Needle) in a botched attempt to promote their hypothetical Rivoli gig on the baseball field below. In the second episode, they improbably travel back in time to 2008 via a magical RV camper (powered by a long-discontinued soda called Orbitz) to re-manipulate their earliest attempts to book The Rivoli from a new vantage point. Matt keeps pushing the plans to further, more ridiculous extremes while Jay keeps trying to find a safe exit to this vicious cycle, only to be pulled back in by the magnetic allure of lifelong friendship with his favorite tragic idiot. There are three major stunts that make this particular double-episode feel worthy of its “The Movie” designation: its non-permitted stolen footage pranks at the top of the CN Tower, its seamless reintegration of aughts-era footage with the modern-aged Matt & Jay, and the constant copyright-skirting references to Back to the Futures I & II (continuing the show’s legally iffy association with the actual band Nirvana). Otherwise, it’s the story of two small, pathetic people reliving the same ruts & routines they’ve always been stuck in, which is exactly what you want out of a long-running sitcom.

Obviously, the other thing you want out of a long-running sitcom is for the joke to still be funny, which is a bar Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie clears effortlessly. One of its funniest sources of humor is in taking stock of how much pop culture has changed since the show started, with the clearest indicators that our two pet bozos have returned to 2008 being a wide cultural acceptance of pop icons who are now social pariahs: Bill Cosby, Jared Fogle, the playfully homophobic bros of The Hangover series, and so on. It’s a running gag that plays on the fact that culture has progressed more than we think in the past couple decades, even if Matt & Jay personally haven’t. The only thing the passage of time has done for their own internal dynamic is added a layer of sweetness to their routine buffoonery. When they revisit their earliest domestic scenes together as middle-aged men who are still go-nowhere slacker roommates, it plays like a bickering married couple who rediscover their love for one another by recreating their first date. Only, being stuck in their ways is part of what makes their friendship so hilariously tense in the first place, so their relationship is ultimately more co-dependent and mutually destructive than it is healthy or cute. It’s important that they don’t grow as people so their dynamic can stay as funny as possible, which is something that modern post-Good Place sitcoms tend to forget. I hope to watch them not learn or grow in past episodes once the show is back in full public view.

-Brandon Ledet

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)

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2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was the first—and to this day—only movie I’ve ever watched on a bootlegged camrip. I was a senior in high school at the time, and there was something still novel about torrenting a movie online before it was officially released in theaters, no matter the quality. A friend smuggled a copy of the movie on two CD-Rs into our high school art class, where we cheered & squealed over Quentin Tarantino’s newly achieved levels of cartoonish bloodshed & overwritten dialogue. I’m sure I also saw the movie in theaters that same week, but I don’t remember that experience. I do remember Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 being in constant rotation as second-hand Blockbuster liquidation DVDs during my college years though, casually thrown on the living room TV when no one’s sure what to watch (the same way Boomers in no particular mood end up listening to the Beatles as an automatic default). Vol. 1 was always The Fun One, Vol. 2 was always The Boring One, and they were always buried behind a layer of standard-definition fuzz and only half-paid attention to, like animated dorm room wallpaper. So, twenty years later, I might have just experienced The Kill Bill Saga the way it was meant to be seen for the very first time, despite having been in the same room with “Tarantino’s 4th Film” untold dozens of times. Only, not exactly.

The Whole Bloody Affair is a new, seemingly finalized edit of the two Kill Bill movies, now smashed together to create one monstrously ginormous butt-number. Tarantino has been casually playing around with this project since 2006, undoing the Weinsteins’ work of splitting his mid-career epic into two separate parts by occasionally trotting out this one-long-cut version into prestigious venues like the Cannes Film Festival and his own vanity movie theater The New Beverly Cinema. The original uptown location of The Prytania recently secured a 70mm print of the film and has been running it on loop for the past few weeks, giving its local New Orleans rollout a prestigious feel it wasn’t afforded when DCPs were screening out at the Metairie AMC Palaces last December. So, it’s funny that I still left the theater feeling like I’ve only seen Kill Bill in a compromised, mucked up form. It seems that in Tarantino’s current, meaningless pursuit to land the “Perfect Ten” filmography, he’s gotten distracted by some George Lucas-style tinkering with the original texts. I’m willing to forgive the new silly title cards underlining that both halves of this picture technically count as “The 4th Film” in the Tarantino oeuvre, since the original project was split into two parts by meddling producers. Still, though, I’m skeptical that his original intention was to make a 5-hour movie with a Fortnite cutscene epilogue (“Yuki’s Revenge”), which is what The Whole Bloody Affair ultimately amounts to. I’m also unsure why he felt the need to extend the original films’ anime segment with newly commissioned footage, other than that no one is around to tell him “No” anymore because his most looming collaborator is currently, rightfully imprisoned. All of the newly printed material inserted into the Kill Bills of old are a waste of time & resources, but if putting up with those distractions is what it takes to revisit these films on celluloid with a savvy crowd I’m willing to go along with this fussy nerd’s legacy-curation bullshit just a little bit. At least he didn’t retroactively add a CGI Bruce Lee into the picture, Jabba the Hutt style.

Just as Kill Bill has changed over the years (through newly added animation, alternate takes, and a self-imposed intermission), so have I. It’s difficult to say anything about how this project’s place in the larger cultural zeitgeist has shifted, since it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with it and, more importantly, I’m no longer a teenager. I hadn’t personally seen much anime, wuxia, or kung-fu cinema when Kill Bill first came out, so the film’s stylistic flourishes are no longer as impressive to me now having seen The Original Texts like Lady Snowblood or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Like all Tarantino pictures to date, there’s nothing in Kill Bill that represents the best of any genre he liberally borrows from, but he has admittedly remixed them all into something undeniably entertaining & cool — like a video store DJ. Allow me, then, to play overly-opinionated video store clerk for a moment myself and talk about where this outing ranks in Tarantino’s filmography. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 has always been Jackie Brown‘s strongest competition for the best of his best, and the newly restored cartoonish violence of the Crazy 88s fight sequence (previously censored for MPAA approval) only strengthens that case. It succeeds through the same method that Jackie Brown does, by employing real-life participants from the vintage genres he’s riffing on: Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier & Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, respectively. If The Whole Bloody Affair does Kill Bill any favors in the greater Tarantino rankings, it does so by elevating Vol. II, integrating it more smoothly with its better half by dropping the “Until next time …” teaser that once divided them. And yet, the newly, needlessly extended anime sequence drags the first half down a little, so who knows (or cares). Everything else that’s changed about these movies is a jumbled mix of passing time and personal maturity. The choppy bangs, flip phones, and low-rise jeans scattered throughout the revenge epic have marked the passing of time since it first premiered in the early aughts, when all those props & fashion accessories felt as natural as oxygen. I’ve also found a new appreciation for Lucy Liu’s performance as the unlikely assassin turned yakuza figurehead O-Ren Ishii, with her Big Speech about her gender & heritage bringing unexpected tears to my eyes through sheer fierceness. I’m sure that in 2004 I was just happy to watch her decapitate an underling in the following seconds. It was a simpler time; I was a simpler man.

You will find no plot summary here, as I’m already embarrassed to have added this much text to the server space reserved for discussing Tarantino’s filmography. All I can muster the energy for is observations about how the passage of time can dull or distort a movie that means a lot to you when you’re a teenager. For instance, it’s much easier to be dazzled by a live-action Hollywood film indulging a brief diversion into anime when you’re not as hyper aware that there’s much better anime out there; extending that sequence with five additional minutes of footage doesn’t help either. It’s also much easier to enjoy Tarantino’s work in a vacuum without decades of hearing him say things that range from idiotically petty (taking out-of-nowhere potshots at Paul Dano as “the worst actor in SAG”) to outright evil (showing support to IDF soldiers during the ongoing genocide in Gaza). Even if you want to engage with the movies themselves and ignore the man behind them, he’s now stuck in a navel-gazing thought loop that makes the task impossible. Tarantino is currently terrified of directing another feature film because he might mess up his self-assigned “Perfect Ten” filmography, so he’s turned himself into a lowly film podcaster instead, and his niche topic of discussion is his own work. It’s shameful. There are two unqualified positive things I can say about Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: 1. Its theatrical release is the only good thing to have come out of Tarantino’s current self-analysis era, and 2. It was smart of him to bury his newly commissioned Fortnite animation sequence after the 20 minutes of end credits, where few people are likely to see it. Otherwise, everything that I like about The Whole Bloody Affair I already liked about Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2: two solidly, separately entertaining pieces of post-modern pop art from one of Hollywood’s sweatiest loudmouth bozos.

-Brandon Ledet

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

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The easiest way for a low-budget horror movie to become a perennial classic is to stake its claim on a specific calendar date, so it has an annually recurring slot for ritual rewatches. This has been common knowledge since at least as far back as the first-wave slashers of the 1970s, with Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and Halloween guaranteeing annual royalty checks from subsequent years’ cable TV broadcasts. Christmas & Halloween have proven to be popular seasonal settings in that scramble to claim a ritual calendar date, while other titles like April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, and Mardi Gras Massacre have found much less competition in more casually celebrated holidays. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine staked its claim on Valentine’s Day relatively early, and has only been challenged by the occasional novelty like last year’s Heart Eyes or 2001’s Valentine in the decades since. It’s proven to be a difficult film to top for Valentine’s Day horror supremacy, since its killer’s method of ripping out victims’ hearts to stuff into heart-shaped Valentine chocolate boxes is the perfect balance of novelty & brutality needed to leave a mark on the genre. It also arrived early enough in the slasher cycle to participate in this Holiday Horror tradition with full sincerity, avoiding the Scream–era meta irony that ruins a good, silly scare with the distraction of self-awareness. If you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a classic horror title set on that holiday, there’s still really only one viable choice (give or take its relatively well-respected 2009 remake).

That’s what makes it so funny that My Bloody Valentine is a hat-on-a-hat situation. It would’ve been more than enough for it to stand out as a novelty slasher by delivering a killer who’s improbably activated by his home town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations. Instead, it adds the extra detail that its masked killer moonlights as a coalminer, inviting mine-specific tools & settings into each staged kill that have no direct association with the holiday in question. Yes, he uses his mining gear every kill, and yes, those kills are inspired by how much he hates his town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance. He’s a complicated guy with a lot going on. The more generic version of this slasher template can be found in the previous year’s Prom Night, in which a tragic childhood accident is avenged once those responsible are old enough to attend their senior prom. Shot in Canada but set in Anywhere, Small Town America, there’s nothing specific about the background details of Prom Night‘s setting — deliberately so. My Bloody Valentine was also shot in Canada (as frequently confirmed by the Canadian pronunciation of “sorry”), but you are unlikely to mistake it for the town you live in unless you happen to live in a cloistered coalmining community where every male person in your life has spent some time working in the mines. The inciting tragedy in this case was an accidental explosion that happened while the rest of the town was enjoying the local Valentine’s Day dance, carelessly leaving five workers to perish in the mines below. So, whenever the town decides it’s time to move on with their lives and bring back their Valentine’s Day traditions, masked killer Harry Warden returns to avenge his fallen coworkers (whom he unfortunately had to cannibalize to stay alive in the maddening days leading up to his own rescue). It’s two seemingly unrelated things—Valentine’s & coalmining—forever welded together in a single ludicrous screenplay.

My Bloody Valentine attempts to smooth over the discordance between its two competing novelty settings by focusing on the kind of love-triangle romance that typically springs up when you live in a small town where everyone knows each other from cradle to grave. You see, local golden boy T.J. (Paul Kelman) tried to leave small-town life behind by moving away to Los Angeles, but he quickly crashed & burned and shamefully found himself back in the mines. While T.J. was gone, his golden-haired girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) started up a new relationship with his former bestie Axel (Neil Affleck), but now that he’s back in town he wants to default to their previous relationship. Will Sarah choose to reignite her white-hot passion for T.J., or will she stick with the stabler, nobler partnership she’s since built with Axel? Who gives a shit? The romantic melodrama at play here is necessary to justify the holiday setting, but it’s difficult to pay too close attention to its stakes when there’s also a crazed killer in town ripping out the trio’s friends’ hearts and plopping them into the hotdog waters, beer coolers, and chocolate boxes at their unsanctioned Valentine’s party, thrown behind the sheriff’s back. All that really matters is that the kills are consistently brutal and consistently afforded a mining-town specificity in the killer’s mask, weapons, and venues of attack. Shooting the majority of those kills down in the mines may darken the screen a little too much to reward modern home viewing, but they look great on the big screen, especially in the pop iconography of the opening scene, when a buxom blonde strokes the phallic hose of the killer’s mask mid-hookup before she’s penetrated with his pickaxe. Gnarly.

Speaking of horror-movie calendar watching, this year is especially apt for a My Bloody Valentine screening (an opportunity pounced upon by ScreamFest NOLA at The Broad earlier this week). That’s because Valentine’s Day happens to fall on a Saturday this year, the day after Friday the 13th. That’s also the case in the film itself, which we’re informed via title cards announcing both dates: Friday the 13th, then Saturday the 14th. It’s highly likely that My Bloody Valentine was greenlit as an attempt to capitalize on that calendrical coincidence in 1981, hoping to make Harry Warden as much of a household name as Jason Voorhees. The film did not succeed there, but it’s still the first title that comes to mind when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day horror and coalmining horror, which is an impressive double-dip success in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

OBEX (2026)

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In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.

In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.

The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.

-Brandon Ledet

Bunny (2025)

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2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense. 

In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves. 

The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated. 

With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond