Reviews

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

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I had a very difficult time getting anyone interested enough in the new Naked Gun to go see it with me, so much so that Brandon beat me to the punch with his review of it. Suffice it to say, we are in agreement that it’s a delight. And man, Elon Musk sure is catching strays out there in theaters this year, isn’t he? Between very thinly veiled versions of him appearing as villains in The Naked Gun, M3GAN 2.0, Superman, Mountainhead, and LifeHack, and a stand-in for him realizing that his whole life has been wasted and he’s likely hellbound in The Phoenician Scheme, this really hasn’t been a good year for him, has it? I doubt we’re going to Hollywood Carol him into turning his life around, but it sure is nice to see him getting egg on his face. But let’s return to a simpler time, when a movie’s evil villain didn’t have to be the richest man in the world, and when simply being a high-level drug trafficker with designs on killing Queen Elizabeth II was enough. 

Lt. Frank Derbin (Leslie Nielsen) of LAPD’s special unit called Police Squad has just returned from a vacation overseas, where he had a bit of a busman’s holiday in the form of busting up a conference of the United States’ then-greatest enemies, including Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Mikhail Gorbachev (whose famous birthmark Derbin reveals to be a fake). Upon returning home, he learns that his girlfriend has left him and his partner, Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), is in the hospital after attempting to bust a heroin operation aboard a ship in L.A. Harbor, where he was caught and shot by men who work for shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Nordberg’s wife begs Drebin to find the men responsible, but heroin found on Nordberg’s jacket points to him having been on the take; Drebin is given only 24 hours by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) to clear Nordberg’s name, as Police Squad has been authorized by Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand, aka Livia Soprano) to take charge of security operations for the impending visit of Liz II. Meanwhile, Ludwig instructs his unsuspecting secretary, Jane (Priscilla Presley), to get close to Drebin and learn what he knows under the guise of wanting to purge his company of any potential illegal activities. Jane and Frank immediately fall in love, but can he stop Ludwig’s plan to assassinate the queen, clear Nordberg’s name, and butcher the national anthem in 85 minutes? I mean 24 hours? 

I have pretty strong memories of watching The Naked Gun as a kid, but I think that I probably saw the film’s first sequel more often, given that it was likely cheaper to license for television. At the very least, very few of these gags were familiar to me (other than the scene in which Derbin accidentally drops Ludwig’s pen into a fish tank and ends up killing one of the prized tropical fish in the process of fishing it out). I think part of that might have been that child-me would have been a little bored by the film’s ending, as it spends a pretty long time at a baseball stadium, and as a reluctant little league player during the wave of Angels in the Outfield, Field of Dreams, Little Big League, and countless other family baseball movies, I would have tuned out. In fact, as much as I was enjoying this movie, the back half is largely eaten up by Frank attempting to stop an assassination attempt at Anaheim Stadium, and I started to feel my opinion of it waver. Luckily, the location allows for a lot of beats in which Nielsen gets to do something hilarious, which made up for the fact that the film parks itself there for so long. One of the best bits involves Frank faking his way onto the field by knocking out and taking the place of a famed international opera singer, which leads to him ending up on the mound, “singing” a half-remembered version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a delight, as is all of the stadium nonsense during which the queen is subjected to the vagaries of a baseball game, like having to ask someone to get out of your seat or ingest “dugout dogs” (one of which Ludwig discovers, to his horror, contains the remains of one of his lackeys who fell into the vat while trying to kill Frank). 

Humor is subjective, and one of the difficult things about reviewing it, as we’ve said before, is that the issue with a lot of discussions of comedy is that they can often simply devolve into recapping the jokes or reciting the dialogue. What I will say about the friend that I was finally able to convince to go see the new Liam Neeson Naked Gun was that he was glad I talked him into it, and that although he didn’t enjoy the sight gags as much as I did, he found the dialogue very funny, and I think that’s a testament to what works about Naked Gun conceptually. I love all of the visual puns and the playing around with the language of film (there’s a particularly funny bit where the camera pans from one room to another, with most of the characters going through the set door while Frank merely steps around the edge of the set wall), but even if that’s not something that you’re going to enjoy as much as I did, you’ll probably still get a kick out of the cleverness of the dialogue. I’d still say that this one ranks below my personal favorite spoof flick, Top Secret!, but that’s a high bar to clear, and I’ll admit that it’s not without its flaws—in particular, that it spends several minutes doing a direct parody of The Blue Lagoon rather than the genre tropes that it traffics in for most of the runtime is arguably worse than the baseball digression that happens in Naked Gun. 

It’s also interesting to look back at this one and see how much the most recent film drew from it without needing an audience to be familiar with its specifics. There is, of course, the scene in which two characters’ innocent misadventures are mistaken for degeneracy by an observer, Frank’s horny clunkily inelegant internal monologue upon meeting his love interest, and the scenes in which Frank gets raked over the coals by his superior. More specifically, when John Huston was explaining his master plan to his cronies in this year’s sequel, I said aloud, to my companion, “Isn’t this the exact plot of Kingsman?” (It is.) But the “use technology to brainwash people into committing acts of violence” villain plan is actually taken directly from the original, albeit on a much larger scale. In this film, Ludwig is able to use a remote device to turn people into Manchurian assassins; it’s never explained in any detail, as we just get close-ups of the sleeper agents’ watches when he pushes the button, and that’s all that we need to know. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. 

If you’re feeling a little nostalgic for an old school Naked Gun experience after seeing the new one, or need something to tide you over until you get the chance to check it out yourself, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Unusually for a comedy of its age, very few of the jokes have aged poorly, especially in comparison to some of “racial” comedy in the Hot Shots! movies; it’s possible that the film’s opening could come across as offensive if one wasn’t aware that the characters at the conference are specific world leaders/figures of the time, but that can’t be helped. If anything, the only thing that really dates this is the presence of the late (“alleged”) killer O.J. Simpson, but he’s not given much to do in this one other than be injured over and over again. That’s got to be worth it to somebody, right? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

DEVO (2025)

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A frequent lament you’ll hear from Millennial cineastes is that we, as a generation, deeply miss the Directors Label DVDs from the early 2000s. Collecting the music-video catalogs of then-young auteurs like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer, the series wasn’t just fun background texture for dorm-room hangouts; it was also a crash course in surrealistic filmmaking techniques, finding some of that era’s most expressionistic directors taking their biggest creative swings in the only commercially viable medium that would support that kind of experimentation. Since the music-licensing deals that made those DVD collections possible have become too convoluted & expensive to justify a reissue, those long out-of-print DVDs now resell for exorbitant sums, effectively rendering them extinct (unless you were able to protect your personal copies from scratches and friendly-fire splashes of beer & bong water). However, there is an equally vital DVD collection of music videos from that early-aughts era that’s still affordable on resale: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution. A DVD reprint of a music video anthology originally published on Laserdisc in the 1990s, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution collects all of the music videos produced by the American rock band DEVO from their proto-punk days in 1970s Akron, Ohio to their commercial-product days in 1990s Los Angeles, California. It documents the gradual mutation of the music video format from art-film experimentation to the crass commercialism of MTV, positioning the band as a sarcastic Prometheus of the medium. I watched those videos obsessively in college, inferring the creative & professional trajectory of what became my favorite band by studying how their cinematic output evolves across the disc, never fully understanding how all the pieces fit.

The new Netflix documentary DEVO is a wonderful addendum to that music video collection, reinforcing the band’s legitimacy as an intrinsically cinematic project. Director Chris Smith (of American Movie notoriety) has a lot of fun playing around with the pop-art iconography DEVO satirized in their music videos and graphic art, charting the intellectual & cultural decline of post-WWII America through a constant montage of its most absurdly inane commercial imagery. He also invites the band to discuss the ideology behind their songs & videos at length in the kinds of talking-head interviews standard to the straight-to-streaming infotainment doc. The main project of DEVO the film is to explain the political messaging of DEVO the band to a worldwide audience of Netflix subscribers who only remember them as the one-hit-wonder dweebs responsible for “Whip It.” The interviews mostly reinforce the intellectual seriousness of the project, explaining the band’s early history as a response to the Kent State Massacre and its career-high sarcastic mockery of the pop music industry that paid their bills. As a result, it goes out of its way to downplay the more ribald sex jokes of tracks like “Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth”, “Penetration in the Centerfold,” and “Don’t You Know” (the “rocket in my pocket” song) in order to convey the overall sense that they were a highbrow political act that was merely satirizing the ape-brain sexuality of fellow MTV-era pop groups. The narrowness of that argument doesn’t fully capture what makes the band so fun to listen to on full-volume repeat, but it allows Smith to deploy them as a soundtrack to America’s cultural decline in the 20th Century, which flashes in nonstop montage like a feature-length version of their video for “Beautiful World.”

There are plenty of vintage DEVO clips included here that I’ve never seen before, scattered among the more familiar lore of the band’s career highlights: their violent relationship with the factory workers of Ohio barrooms, their significance to the CBGB punk scene, their early brushes with David Bowie & SNL, their political-pamphlet arguments that humans evolved from “insane mutant apes”, etc. My biggest thrill, however, was seeing clips from the music videos on The Complete Truth About De-Evolution restored in HD for the first time, since I’ve been watching them on the same ancient DVD for the past two decades. Formally, there isn’t much variation on the typical straight-to-Netflix pop doc template that points to Smith as an especially significant filmmaker; it’s more in line with his recent, anonymous docs on Fyre Festival, Wham!, and Vince McMahon than his career-making doc on the production of the regional horror film Coven. If there’s any one choice that makes the film stand out among other infotainment docs of its ilk, it’s the narrowness of scope. Of DEVO’s nine studio albums, Smith only covers the first five — their most artistically significant (and each an all-timer). There’s no obligatory reunion & redemption footage in the third act after the band’s initial break-up, either, because the film is not about DEVO as a rock ‘n’ roll act; it’s about DEVO as a political act. It juxtaposes their most overtly political lyrics with the most overtly asinine cultural detritus of their era in order to convincingly argue that their music was more subversive than it was cynically mercenary. That’s something you can gather by directly engaging with the work yourself in The Complete Truth of De-Evolution, but it doesn’t hurt that the truth about DEVO is now even more complete.

-Brandon Ledet

Freakier Friday (2025)

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I am not immune to nostalgia bait. In fact, I’ve fallen for it in the past. I watched the entire first season of Girl Meets World based solely on my fondness for its 1990s predecessor (it’s terrible). I gave the 2016 Ghostbusters a pretty high rating that I’ve come to regret greatly over the years, and I genuinely love the Walt Disney personality-laundering Emma Thompson/Tom Hanks picture Saving Mr. Banks. Additionally, having babysat for younger cousins while I was in college and having a goddaughter born in 2009, I continued to be familiar with the larger Disney Channel oeuvre long after I aged out of their target demographic. I’m not going to argue that their work was ever especially great, but the pre-That’s So Raven era had a wider variety of original programming, with action series like The Famous Jett Jackson, for-kids supernatural spookfests like So Weird, and laugh track-free coming-of-age dramedies like Flash Forward (I know I’m really dating myself with the last one). As the channel grew more widely available at the basic cable level rather than at the premier price point, the popularity of Lizzie Mcguire was surpassed even by Raven, which people are quite fond of, but it’s Raven (and, to a lesser extent, Even Stevens) that committed what I would consider the network’s original sin: costuming became hypercolorful and quirky, characters were constantly delivering pithy one-liners and mugging to the audience, the laugh track became omnipresent, and everything became very same-y. It’s a generational curse, and one that I saw play out in many episodes of the shows that I was subjected to (or, as was the case with Girl Meets World, those shows to which I subjected myself). I’m almost 40 years old; I should not be burdened with so much knowledge of Austin & Ally or Wizards of Waverly Place or Suite Lifes on land and sea, and yet I am. (Good Luck Charlie is actually pretty good, though.) 

The waters that Freakier Friday is navigating are overcrowded. Legacy sequels to cash in on millennial nostalgia have flooded the market in the last decade, and while big budget genre franchise pictures like the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the ongoing Jurassic World debacle have been successful commercially with mixed critical reception, 90s/early-aughts family and romantic comedy follow-ups have generally been poorly received on both fronts. I think the biggest obstacle here is that the popularity of the Disney Channel School of Hyperactive Comedy Acting means that all sitcoms produced for children has to have all those hallmarks: aggressively cartoonish facial acting, forced quippiness, etc. I have a fondness for She’s All That despite it not being a very good movie, but then you graft the modern hyper style onto the recent He’s All That follow up and it just doesn’t work. People who grew up watching the Y2K Freaky Friday were going to turn out for Freakier Friday regardless, and the sequel could have easily and lazily taken the path of least resistance to churn out a low-effort, reference-heavy movie that mostly consisted of the teenage girls making goobery big-eyed faces over unimaginative puns and small cameos from returning stars Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. I was particularly concerned when every trailer that appeared before my screening was for an animated kids movie, which didn’t bode well for how much the feature would care about the adult members of its audience, but I was pleasantly surprised. 

It’s been 20 years since psychologist Tess Coleman (Curtis) and her musician daughter Anna (Lohan) body-swapped on the eve of Tess’s marriage to Ryan (Mark Harmon) so that they could walk a mile in each other’s shoes and gain a better understanding of one another. Anna has since “chosen to be a single mother,” has a career in musical management, and has her own issues with understanding her teenage daughter: tomboy surfer Harper (Julia Butters). Harper’s conflict with a recent transfer student to her school, British fashion-conscious Lily (Sophia Hammons), results in both of their parents being called to a conference with the principal, and it’s here that Anna meets Lily’s widowed father Eric (Manny Jacinto), and sparks fly immediately. Six months later, it’s now the eve of Anna’s wedding, and Harper and Lily are no closer to getting along, with Harper fearing that the family will move to London and leave her California life behind, while Lily worries that her father will choose to settle full time in LA, preventing her from attending the fashion school that she wants and severing the connection she feels to her late mother. When the two instigate a food fight, they’re punished by being forced to have a sleepover at Tess’s the night after Anna’s bachelorette party. It’s there that both the reluctant soon-to-be-sisters as well as Anna and Tess meet palm reader Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), who channels something that results in all four of the women swapping bodies. Harper exchanges places with her mother while Lily and Tess are swapped, and your typical body-swap antics ensue. While Tess-in-Lily and Anna-in-Harper are forced to go to school and attend the detention that the teens got themselves into, Lily-in-Tess and Harper-in-Anna set out to make sure that the wedding never happens, essentially making this a kind of spiritual sequel to Lohan’s other big Disney remake, The Parent Trap. This connection is made even more clear when Elaine Hendrix, who played the undesirable potential stepmother in Trap, appears here as a fashion designer who’s tasked with styling Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), Anna’s pop star client whose concert tour launch is the same weekend as the wedding. 

This is a solidly made little comedy with a surprising amount of heart. If the audience is meant to be teenagers, it refuses to talk down to them, and the film is just as interested in the stakes of Anna’s wedding as it is in the teenagers’ plots, and there’s even some time spent developing Tess’s stakes as well. Perhaps the intended target audience will be more emotionally invested in the points of view of Lily and Harper. I’m not really sure how having to finish high school in Los Angeles is going to affect Lily’s ability to attend a London fashion institute or that Harper having to move to London is going to be the end of the world, but it’s the kind of thing that kids and teens think are very high stakes (or, I could say, those are very Disney Channel Original Movie stakes), so it makes sense. That this is a text one will have different feelings about depending upon what age you are is a testament to how much more thoroughly thought-out this narrative is in comparison to more half-hearted attempts to go to the intellectual property well again. The plot between Anna and Eric is genuinely sweet; Harper has only ever seen Eric through the narrow lens of adolescence, as the father of her nemesis and an interloper who might upend her whole life, but she gets to see him through her mother’s eyes and witness how much he genuinely loves not only Anna but Harper as well. Eric’s love for Anna is clear (it doesn’t hurt that Manny Jacinto is perhaps the most beautiful man in the world), and we also get to see how much Anna loves him, and that insight into the adult world makes both of the girls see how selfishly they’ve behaved and hurt the people around them and try to stop their parents from calling off the wedding that they’ve spent most of the film trying to prevent. 

The film makes a very smart choice in passing off most of the heavy emotional lifting to its adult cast. Lily has a tear-filled breakdown near the end when she finally opens up about the fact that her homesickness for the UK is really just her missing her mother and that she knows she’s acted out very badly, and that her mother would be happy that her father found love again and would be disappointed in her for her actions, and the fact that Lily’s in Tess at the time means that Curtis gets to lean on decades of performing to sell the performance. Curtis is clearly having the time of her life in this movie, as she gets some great physical comedy work, crawling around on the floor, putting on a fashion show, and doing some good bits about what it’s like to  suddenly inhabit an ailing, aging body. Mark Harmon barely appears in the film, but in one of the scenes he makes an impression in, he and Tess have to compete in their Pickleball tournament, and Curtis is having so much fun that I had fun, too. Lohan isn’t called upon to do quite as much, since Jacinto’s “perfect husband material” material does most of the work in the scenes where Harper-in-Anna learns to think about someone other than herself, but she’s giving it her all in other areas. Part of the girls’ plan involves trying to get Anna’s high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) to fall back in love with Anna, and the directions that Lily gives Harper-in-Anna are comedically misinterpreted, and it’s a fun scene, made all the better by the fact that the teens are naturally completely blind to the fact that all these years later it’s Tess that Jake’s still horny for. It’s good comedy, and not what I was expecting from a decades-late sequel to a Disney remake I saw once twenty years ago because I was babysitting. (It even comes back around at the end when Jake’s date to Anna’s wedding is wearing the exact same dress that Curtis wore in Freaky Friday, sporting a similar haircut.) 

As for the actual teenage actresses, they both do good work with the material that they’re given, and most of their scenes are comedic. Butters merely has to play Anna-in-Harper as stressed out about making sure that Harper-in-Anna gets to her and Eric’s immigration interview and that Ella doesn’t psych herself out of her tour opening performance over her recent breakup. Hammons has a bit more meat to chew on, with one of her best scenes being Tess-in-Lily once again encountering Stephen Tobolowsky’s teacher character (he hasn’t been able to retire because the school put all of their retirement funds into cryptocurrency) and once again using her psychological skills to try and manipulate him. She also gets an emotional scene, too, and she pulls it off quite well. I hope that they had as much fun making this as Jamie Lee Curtis obviously did, and the end credits blooper reel lends itself to that conclusion. And hey, Rosalind Chao was there! I always love to see her. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the aforementioned pickleball tournament, which sees an appearance from June Diane Raphael as an aggressive player named Veronica. That means, with her appearance in Weapons, she appeared in both of the movies that topped the box office last week (thanks to my buddy Zach for pointing this out). If it weren’t for the fact that shouting “It’s June August! It’s June August” from my porch would make sense to no one, I’d be doing it. 

Freakier Friday is surprisingly heartfelt and earnest, and it’s also candy for your brain. Why on earth do two adult women get in on Ella’s Rolling Stone shoot? Who cares? If you’ve been burned by this particular brand of nostalgic entrapment before, this one might heal that wound. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Legend of Ochi (2025)

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For decades, whenever someone cited the “uncanny valley” effect of modern filmmaking, they were referring to the off-putting resemblance of CGI to real-life humanity. As computer technology inches nearer to photographic accuracy, the ways in which the images are still just slightly off become monstrously horrific, especially when rendering human faces. As a result, movie nerds tend to fetishize the practical effects of yesteryear, preferring the blatant artifice of movie-magic techniques like stop-motion, animatronics, and latex makeup transformations to the uncanny computer effects of our current corporate hellscape. Ironically, that fetishism has recently led to an entirely new uncanny valley forming between advanced practical effects and the CG graphics they’re meant to counteract. For instance, when the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts were mostly made by Nick Park’s hands in the early 90s, you could see the lumpy imperfections of his fingerprints in the characters’ clay bodies, unmistakably marking them with evidence of human touch. Now that Wallace & Gromit features like Vengeance Most Fowl are being produced by hundreds of collaborators for major studios like Netflix, those fingerprints have to be artificially applied, intentionally warping the clay so the machine-printed faces can’t be mistaken for computer animation. Likewise, the new children’s fantasy-adventure The Legend of Ochi features an animatronic puppet so perfect in construction & operation that it uncannily resembles its CGI equivalents in movies from less discerning filmmakers. Music video director Isaiah Saxon has spent years perfecting the puppetry & matte paintings of his feature-film debut to revive an industry overrun by computer-generated tedium with some old-world movie magic and old-fashioned awe. He didn’t think to artificially muck up the final product like Aardman Animations, though, and the result is so uncannily similar to CGI that you have to wonder why he even bothered.

The titular Ochi are magical creatures brought to life via animatronic puppetry. The species largely resembles the golden snub-nosed monkeys of China, except that its bites are poisonous and its children are adorned with Mogwai ears for maximum cuteness. The Ochi are introduced to the audience in a scientific text titled Carpathian Beasts & Demons to help distinguish them from the real-life primates they resemble. Their presence on the fictional, Romania-adjacent island of Carpathia is treated as vampiric & monstrous, with a crazed patriarch played by Willem Dafoe training a new generation of boys to hunt & kill the supposedly demonic beasts on sight. His daughter is not so convinced of the nobility in this mission, and she quickly befriends a baby Ochi left behind by one of her father’s hunts. The rest of the movie is an E.T.-inspired children’s adventure, in which the sullen teenager runs away from home to safely return the Ochi to his fleeing family in a coming-of-age act of rebellion. If there’s any modern update to that familiar formula, it’s in Dafoe’s mockery of Jordan Peterson-style manosphere philosophy, which he preaches to impressionable young boys while driving around his monster-truck chariot in antique battlefield armor. He has no particular interest in his daughter beyond her value as “a father’s greatest treasure,” while she rejects her extremely gendered role in the house by donning costume vampire fangs and cranking heavy metal tunes from the fictional band Hell Throne. The goodbye note she leaves when she runs away proudly declares, “I am strong and cool and don’t believe anything you say,” speaking for all teenage rebels everywhere in their universal language of sass. As a result, the movie should spiritually speak to any depressed loner children who resent their bloviating fathers—of which there is always an infinite supply—regardless of whether they’ve already seen an E.T. riff or three.

The Legend of Ochi evokes all of the childlike wonder and sarcastic teen humor needed to make this genre formula work, but neither of those elements are entirely convincing. Its teenage characters (Helena Zengel as the Ochi’s bestie and Finn Wolfhard as a burgeoning fuckboy who’s “only nice when no one’s looking”) mumble their lines under mops of greasy hair to the point of near indecipherability. They aim for deadpan comedy but overshoot to land at dead-eyed monotony instead. There are also long stretches of the adventure to Ochi territory that have no dialogue at all, which would test audiences’ patience at any age and suggests that Saxon isn’t used to filling up a feature-length runtime with his writing. The real disappointment is that the psychedelic magic of his past music video work for artists like Björk & Panda Bear fall short of inspiring awe here. His puppetry & matte-painting visual tricks, while admirably old-fashioned, are too technically perfect to convey their construction by human hands. When the trailer for the film first dropped, social media C.H.U.D.s baselessly accused Saxon of boosting his budget with A.I.-generated imagery, which had to be heartbreaking for an artist who spent multiple years fighting to render this passion-project fantasy world through the most practical, tactile methods possible. Still, the final result is a little too machine-perfect to inspire genuine awe, and you can easily see what stoked those accusations. There’s an uncanny valley effect in how close its state-of-the-art puppets resemble computer-generated images, leaving them a little off-putting & soulless despite the passionate craft behind them. Saxon technically did everything right here. The aesthetic is distinct; the puppets are cute and smoothly operated; the gender politics are pointed and relevant to the moment; the kids are authentically mopey & rebellious. That’s what makes it so frustrating that the movie never fully sings, even if it can demonstrably hit all the right notes in perfect pitch.

-Brandon Ledet

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet, 2007)

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In its most shameless hours, there isn’t much difference between Vice News journalism and the Mondo exploitation movies of the 1960s & 70s. Vice has well earned its reputation for bravely tackling subjects more traditional news media won’t touch, but that bravery often translates to a kind of in-your-face bravado that can cross over into shock-value exploitation. There’s a thin line between reporting on real-world violence and profiting from horrific images of that violence, and that line gets especially blurry when you package those images with youth-culture music & aesthetic signifiers. Of course, that pseudo-documentary/pseudo-exploitation hybrid journalism bothered me a lot more in the 2010s, when Vice News hit peak popularity and I’d be casually confronted with its graphic violence via friends’ TV & laptop screens while just going about my day. It all came back to me watching the 2007 documentary Manda Bala, though, which plays like a Citizen Kane-sized cornerstone in establishing the cinematic language of aggro hipster journalism in the Vice News era.

Self-billed as “a film that cannot be shown in Brazil”, Manda Bala is a high-style documentary about brazen crime & corruption in that country, the unlikely center of which is the world’s largest frog farm. At its core, it’s a film about extreme wealth disparity in mid-2000s São Paulo, transitioning between interview subjects via scale-busting helicopter shots of the sprawling city’s skyscrapers & slums. It documents crimes on the furthest ends of those economic extremes: flagrant political corruption that steals massive amounts of money from impoverished communities and those communities’ frequent kidnappings of the ultra-wealthy’s family members for quick ransom payouts. The frog farm is just one of many money-laundering schemes on the political corruption end, but it’s one that offers the film a point of visual interest as the overpopulated frog nests are rife woth amphibian cannibalism. Besides the unapologetically corrupt owner of that farm, other interviewees include former kidnapping victims, currently active kidnappers, anti-kidnapping detectives, bulletproof car salesmen, and a plastic surgeon who specializes in reconstructing kidnapping victims’ severed ears with their own rib cartilage. Hostage videos, surgery footage, and ballistics tests constantly escalate the violence of the film’s imagery while it alternates between shockingly candid interviews with the people who suffer that violence every day. Sometimes, the film’s eagerness to entertain feels callously flippant given the severity of its subject (especially in its upbeat Tropicália music cues), but its retro, shot-on-film aesthetic is gorgeous and its on-the-street reporting pulls no punches when detailing the violence on either side of the poverty line.

My used DVD copy of Manda Bala boasts that the film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, among a second prize for Best Cinematography. Given the state of the infotainment documentary in the mid-2000s, I believe that prize was deserved. The tonal mix of hipster cool cred & violent bloodshed in Manda Bala may have made me a bit queasy, but there’s no question that it’s better crafted than the nonstop onslaught of rote, cheapo digi-docs about George Bush, Wal-Mart, climate change, and the meat industry that cluttered up Blockbuster Video shelves throughout that decade. As much as the film relishes the quirky frog-farm imagery and Mondo hyperviolence of its subject, it does consistently hit the right political targets — explaining that the kidnapping epidemic is a direct symptom of the poverty caused by corruption, then going on to explain how that corruption is just a modern extension of historical Portuguese colonization. The film likely has just as legitimate of a claim as being a precursor to recent high-style arthouse documentaries like The Act of Killing & Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat as it does being a precursor to Vice News web broadcasts, but something about the confrontational, Mondo-style imagery read pure Vice to me. Maybe I’m too squeamish to differentiate true, hard-hitting journalism from shock-value exploitation; or maybe it’s okay to do a little of the latter if it draws attention to the former.

-Brandon Ledet

Weapons (2025)

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When preparing my review for Eddington, I couldn’t remember the bizarrely specific Pokémon-themed name that was going to be given to the AI data center being built outside of the titular town. In searching for a script for it online in order to get this name, I stumbled across a Reddit post that contained the screenplay for both that film and Weapons, and I inadvertently read a spoiler about Weapons in the beginning of the post before I could click away. To be honest, I didn’t believe it when I read it. It seemed like too much of a departure from what the advertising had presented, and I couldn’t reconcile the images that were already rattling around in my head from the trailers with the spoiler, let alone with the discourse already surrounding the film, all of which had firmly already centered itself around (pre)reading the “disappeared kids” narrative as being a school shooting metaphor. The spoiler didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but it did mean that I knew what the motivation was behind the film’s events before the film revealed itself, and I wish that I could have experienced this for the first time without that foreknowledge. 

The film’s poster tagline is also part of its opening narration: “[One] night, at 2:17 am, [almost] every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark … and never came back.” We see this first school day with most of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)’s class having failed to show up, all except for timid Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). A month later, there are still no clues as to the children’s location, and the community is still in a state of perpetual outcry, with particularly outspoken local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) calling for Justine’s arrest until she can explain what happened, a conflict that Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) attempts to prevent from escalating. We learn that Justine has had previous trouble with alcoholism and that this event has led her to drowning her sorrows once again, which leads her to have a one-night stand with an old ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Based on the pre-release information we had, one would assume that Justine would be our sole main character as we follow her along her investigation into the disappearance of her students (or that perhaps she is responsible and that the film will focus on Archer’s discovery of the extent of her involvement), but the film takes a different narrative approach, instead breaking its story into multiple sections that each focus on one character. 

Justine’s is first, of course, so that we can watch her struggle with facing the community of Maybrook while having no more answers to the children’s disappearance than they do, up to the point when she’s attacked by an apparently possessed friend, at which point the film then switches points of view to follow Archer. We see him waking up in the bed of his missing son, apparently regretting all the love he failed to show the boy when he had the chance (as we see later in Alex’s point of view section, Archer’s son Matthew is an outright bully, perhaps because of this lack of affection). He’s losing track of things at work, placing wrong orders and forgetting others entirely, and this scattered thinking can only refocus on one target: Justine. He’s frustrated with what he feels is insufficient investigation on the part of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), so he begins to follow Justine and vandalizes her car, but he comes to see that she’s just as lost in all of this as he is. I don’t want to get into all of the ins and outs of what we learn from each of these intersections between the character-focused sections because they’re much more interesting to see play out non-linearly, almost Magnolia style (which director Zach Cregger has admitted is an inspiration), before they weave into one another. It makes the whole thing feel grounded, filling in little realistic details through naturalistic dialogue — conversations about the excitement of coming home early from a business trip because it means that you’ll be home when you’re ovulating, Archer’s wife’s exasperated “I’m going to work” when she finds him asleep in missing Matthew’s room yet again, and the way that homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) spins a threadbare web of transparent but plausible lies to try and extort tiny bits of cash from friends still willing to take a call from him. There are large swathes of the film where you’ll completely forget that there’s a potentially supernatural mystery at play here because you’ll be more invested in the lives of the characters. That’s good filmmaking, baby. 

Weapons is doing pretty well on the discourse circuit. The film’s barely been out for a couple of days as I write this (on the Monday after the film’s release, having seen it in a packed theater Friday evening), and there are already many different takes on the film’s themes. I barely looked at social media today and saw more than a dozen memes about the meal that Marcus and his husband have prepared for their TV time (it includes seven hot dogs, ruffled potato chips, baby carrots, an ungodly amount of what I presume is ranch dressing, and chocolate chip cookies — iconic), and YouTuber Ryan Hollinger has already put out a video in which he claims that the film’s overall thesis is about alcoholism (even though I don’t completely agree with his analysis). Although alcoholism and addiction in general are running themes through the film, I think that the presence of these diseases is more about showing character through the ways that addiction can compel people to be the worst version of themselves. That compulsion isn’t limited to drinking or shooting up, though, as we see with Archer and how his vandalism and lack of focus are the result of his grief. If anything, the film is about parasitism and the way that parasites can compel their hosts, with addictive compulsion (i.e. the proverbial monkey on one’s back), sexual impulsivity, and grief themselves acting as metaphors for having a parasite that controls you, as the film’s villainous force does. I won’t say more than that to save you from being spoiled the way that I was. 

In discussion about the film over the weekend, a friend brought up that one critic’s complaint was that Cregger will always opt to go for a joke rather than a scare, and while I think that’s an oversimplification of the director’s style, I also don’t think it’s inaccurate, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. This is a movie about children disappearing, parents bereft of answers, communities in mourning, leaders navigating grief and expectations, and finding solace in feeding one’s diseases while also being very, very funny. Sometimes, Cregger will just throw in a little piece of weirdness just for the hell of it (the giant floating AR-15 with 2:17 shining out of it in LED alarm clock letters being the most obvious example), and that’s also a delight. It’s a rich vein for evaluation and re-evaluation, and I could possibly be enticed to see this one a second time while it’s in theaters. Recapitulating the jokes would be just as bad as giving away the ending (which is itself very cathartic and bloodily hilarious), so I’ll just give this one a whole-hearted recommendation and send you on your way, dear reader. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freaky Tales (2025)

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Marvel Studios’ output is quickly thinning in both volume and in cultural significance, with most of the studio’s episodic superhero adventures now being siphoned off to their rightful place: television. Superhero movies’ stranglehold on multiplex screen space is finally loosening, and the newfound breathing room is allowing for a wider range of theatrical counterprogramming to share the marquee with the usual Disney-brand corporate clutter. It’s also allowing former Marvel Studios directors to express themselves in more personal art, freed from the boardroom & shareholder obligations that come with billion-dollar IP. In the past, whenever Marvel picked up an indie-darling director like a James Gunn or a Taika Waititi, it meant that they would be trapped into churning out corporate #content for the rest of their careers, the same way James Cameron has voluntarily imprisoned himself in an Avatar sequel factory of his own design. This year has seen two exciting breaks from that trend, and together they suggest that there’s a very specific formula for escaping the creative funk that usually results from Marvel Studios employment. Both Sinners and Freaky Tales find MCU alumni from Oakland going out their way to depict cunnilingus and white supremacist ass whoopings in gory genre-mashup musicals, begging to be categorized in one of those two-movie Letterboxd lists with absurdly long titles. While one of those Oaklander pattern-breakers found great financial success in every American multiplex, the other had only a whisper of a theatrical rollout before quietly popping up on HBO Max months later. Still, they combine to represent a hope for a brighter future, one with fewer superhero blockbusters, more onscreen sex, and populist art that’s unafraid to alienate fanboy bigots.

Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck have assembled a mixtape homage to Fleck’s youth in 1980s Oakland. Old school rapper Too $hort acts as a local cultural ambassador for the scene, which is a smart move for two white directors depicting a city so widely associated with Black pop culture. Besides coining the title Freaky Tales in one of his classic tracks, Too $hort also acts as the anthology film’s wraparound narrator, appears in a cameo role, and is depicted as an onscreen character by fellow Bay Area rapper Symba (who acts out the film’s onscreen depiction of cunnilingus, an essential part of the Marvel-deviation formula). More improbably, Freaky Tales also features a lengthy battle-rap performance of the infamously raunchy Too $hort track “Don’t Fight the Feelin’,” something I can confidently say I never expected to see given the superhero origin story treatment in a movie. Likewise, I never thought I’d see a fictional depiction of an Operation Ivy concert in a movie either, which is where this violent Oaklander saga begins. In the first section, the local Oakland punk scene bands together to violently dispose of the Nazi skinheads who repeatedly crash their (seemingly nightly) Operation Ivy shows. This is followed by the “Don’t Fight the Feelin'” origin story, a video store crime spree featuring celebrities Tom Hanks & Pedro Pascal and, finally, a heist sequence in which Golden State Warrior star Sleepy Floyd plays a career-high basketball game before slaughtering the home-invading thugs who kill his family while he’s on the court. Besides the local legend of Too $hort, Ben Mendelson is the main connective piece between these freaky tales, playing a creepy cop who houses & deploys Nazi skinheads to do his evil bidding. Every tale is about stomping those Nazi shitheads into the ground, and yet the mixtape soundtrack does not include the Dead Kennedys classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” likely because that song spiritually belongs to San Francisco on the other side of The Bay.

There are some retro cult-cinema signifiers here that ring a little hollow, especially in its Pulp Fiction-aping anthology format and its dual use of both video tape tracking and visible reel changes via digital filters. Still, Freaky Tales feels convincingly authentic to Fleck’s civic pride, adapting his & Boden’s superhero filmmaking impulses to something more personal & heartfelt. The visual manifestation of there being something special in the air in mid-80s Oakland is in the frequent strikes of green lightning, a supernatural power that flows through major players like Too $hort, Sleepy Floyd, and the Operation Ivy scenesters. It’s a communal energy that sometimes translates to Scanners-style superpowers, but for the most part it’s more vibe than fact. The real power here is the communal ability to stomp out Nazi bigots when everyone works in unison, which the movie has a lot of fun depicting in absurdly bloody detail during its biggest action set pieces. There are no fewer than four song changes during Sleepy Floyd’s slaughter of the home-invading skinheads, so that he can act out his Bruce-Lee-doing-Blade superhero fantasy for as long as the budget will allow. Freaky Tales loves Oakland, hates Nazis, and believes Too $hort to be the golden god of the local scene, which is a sentiment with more auteurist specificity & political conviction than you will find in any Marvel movie. It cannot pretend to share the same cultural impact as fellow Oaklander-done-good genre mashup Sinners, but it does share its refreshing glimpse into a post-MCU future, where big-budget movies are surprising & fun again and the furthest-right end of their potential audience is no longer coddled for the sake of making a few extra bucks.

-Brandon Ledet

The Naked Gun (2025)

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It’s generally bad practice to review a movie’s cultural context (or, worse, its tabloid press) instead of reviewing the movie itself, but I cannot resist the bait this time. The new genre-spoof legacyquel The Naked Gun is review-proof in the way most absurdly silly comedies are. Its plot, construction, and themes are all secondary to its efficiency in telling jokes, which are better experienced onscreen than in text. As a joke-delivery system, The Naked Gun may not hit the same rapid-fire rhythm as previous Police Squad! movies from the 80s & 90s, but it does hit the same success rate as previous Lonely Island-brand movies from director Akiva Shaffer (Popstar, Hot Rod); it’s very funny from start to end. The most surprising & rewarding aspect of the movie has occurred offscreen, however, playing out in the tabloid headlines of grocery store checkout lines. Regardless of whether you’ve seen the film, you’re likely already aware of the unexpected real-life romance that’s developing between its two stars, whom I can say with full confidence we are all rooting for. It was top of my mind watching the movie opening weekend, anyway, to the point where it was actively informing & enhancing the text instead of distracting from it. There is something innocently, infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s tabloid flirtations that makes this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise – so much so that my everyday happiness is now directly tied to their still-developing romance. It’s already a generous enough gift that the new power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85-minute comedy with my friends, but now I desperately need them to stay together until one of the three of us dies. They have made me their snowman.

If the significance of being Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s snowman is lost on you, it’s because you have not yet seen The Naked Gun. I am citing the kind of absurdist, for-its-own-sake gag that can only be referenced through the vaguest terms without spoiling what makes it funny. The highest compliment I can pay to The Naked Gun is to report that it is tightly packed with those snowman gags, each of which had me laughing myself breathless in public: the owl dad, the heat-vision dog, the jazz club scat, the bodycam chili dogs, and so on. There is no shortage of deliriously silly nonsense. Of course, it gets away with indulging in that goofball free-for-all because it’s working within a familiar structure that doesn’t require set-up or explanation. Shaffer’s The Naked Gun continues the same detective-story spoofery as the ZAZ-era Naked Gun films, dusted off with a few updated cultural references. Liam Neeson stars as Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the deadpan dolt police detective Frank Drebin played by Leslie Neilson in the original series. In fact, Drebin’s entire LAPD station is staffed by the sons of former Police Squad! characters, allowing for metatextual jabs at both the film’s own preposterous participation in the legacyquel format and the real-life legacy of former Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson. Neeson’s casting is smart beyond his name’s homophonic resemblance to Neilson’s. He’s similarly self-serious as an onscreen persona, having now starred in almost two solid decades of post-Taken thrillers worthy of goofy self-parody. He plays Frank Drebin, Jr. with the straightest face he can manage, which makes all of his overly literal, Amelia Bedelia misunderstandings of basic figures of speech consistently funny. The investigation in this specific episode also deals with a megalomaniac tech-bro Elon Musk stand-in (Danny Huston) to help bring the Naked Gun format up to date, and there are specific parodic references to recent thriller titles like Mission: Impossible – Fallout that do the rest of that work. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a modern-day Naked Gun movie, except with a few self-contained, sketch-comedy deviations specific to its director’s Lonely Island pedigree.

What I did not expect from a modern-day Naked Gun was to be emotionally moved by its central romance. Filling the role of previous series love interest Priscilla Presley, Pamela Anderson co-stars as Neeson’s buxom femme fatale Beth Davenport. An author of “true crime” novels based on stories that she “makes up” herself, Davenport becomes overly involved in the investigation of her software-engineer brother’s death, teaming up with Drebin to take down the Musky supervillain who killed him. After an initial noir-trope meeting in the Venetian-blinds shadows of Drebin’s office, the unlikely pair are caught off-guard by how immediately, intensely attracted they are to each other, which is impossible to fully differentiate from Neeson & Anderson’s publicity-cycle romance. Many of the broader noir tropes spoofed here ring true to their real-life relationship, especially when Drebin laments that he wakes up every day in his “lonely cop apartment” mourning his “dead cop wife,” echoing Neeson’s recent public perception as a perpetually grieving widower. Likewise, Davenport’s eagerness to get in on the action of the Police Squad investigation as a true-crime junkie recalls Anderson’s struggle to earn her way back onto the big screen after Hollywood discarded her as leftover 90s eye candy. I was happy to see her shine in a role worthy of her recent late-career makeover after that Delicate Betty Boop magnetism was wasted by last year’s Awards Season dud The Last Showgirl. I was also relieved to see Neeson back in the tabloids for something that wasn’t sexually objectifying or bizarrely racist. More so that I can ever remember, I am genuinely happy for this millionaire celebrity couple and emotionally invested in their long-term success. As for The Naked Gun, it’s difficult to guess what its own long-term success might be. It’s neither as densely packed with rewindable background visual gags as the original Naked Gun series nor as instantly rewatchable as the sing-along music video sketches of Shaffer’s Popstar, but it’s still dependably funny and—for at least as long as its real-life love affair lasts—romantically sweet.

-Brandon Ledet

Together (2025)

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I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!

I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best. 

As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely loved Together. 

The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there. 

There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone. 

What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry. 

This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Phantom Lady (1944)

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Civil engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) finds himself alone in Anselmo’s Bar one night with two tickets to see the Broadway’s Chicka-Boom-Boom musical revue. He approaches an equally lonely woman (Fay Helm) in an extravagant hat and convinces her to accompany him, as he has been stood up. At the show, prima donna performer Estela Moneteiro (Aurora Miranda, sister of Carmen) is wearing identical head garb for her performance and grows incensed when she spots that a woman in the audience is wearing the exact same hat. The theater-going couple also get the attention of accompanying drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), who makes eyes at the woman. As Scott walks the mysterious woman back to the bar where they met, she refuses to give him her name, saying that “It’s better this way.” When he returns home, he finds himself greeted by Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), who is curious as to why Scott’s wife is dead in the next room. Scott admits that he and his wife argued that evening, their anniversary, and that he left to let off some steam. The only person who can confirm his alibi is the woman that he was with all night. Although his presence is confirmed at the bar by the bartender (Andrew Tombes) and his delivery to the theatre is collaborated by the cab driver, both of them—rather sweatily—proclaim that he was alone and that there was no woman with him, with or without an elaborate hat. 

It’s here that the film switches gears and our true protagonist appears: Carol Richman (Ella Raines), Scott’s secretary, whom he has nicknamed “Kansas.” She knows he’s innocent, and when he’s convicted, she continues to try and find the “phantom lady” who can testify to Scott’s location. First she stakes herself out at Anselmo’s and gives the bartender the evil eye for nights on end before finally following him through the streets to confront him about why he lied about Scott being alone; when the bartender breaks free from the mitts of a group of men who intervene when he threatens Carol for following him, he winds up straight in front of an oncoming car and is killed. Things really come to a head when Carol, now assisted by a recalcitrant Inspector Burgess (who now realizes that a guilty man would never have hung onto the specific alibi that Scott did), poses as a “hep kitten” in order to go home with Cliff the drummer who, in a drunken state, admits that he was bribed to pretend he never saw Scott’s oddly-adorned companion. While Carol goes to summon Burgess, Cliff is confronted by the man who bribed him, who disposes of him before Burgess and Carol can return. The last hope is to try and get the truth from Estela Moneteiro, but the diva is so vain about her headwear that she had her own version of the hat destroyed upon seeing a copy in the audience and proclaims that she never saw the woman. But if they can find out who made the hat . . .

I’m not sure that I could name another single noir where the protagonist is a woman. Sure, there are always femmes fatale and ladies with gams that go all the way up to heaven, but it’s a rare surprise to see one leading the investigation, tracking down leads, and working tirelessly to prove the innocence of their love. That it takes so long for Carol to enter the picture is hardly worth mentioning, since the film moves at a breathless clip from the moment she appears until the film’s conclusion, and we move at a good pace since we’ve only got eighty-seven minutes to tell this tale. The only time that the film starts to feel a little slow is when Carol finally manages to track down the phantom lady, discovering that she’s named Ann Terry, and the woman is in a state of period-appropriate heartbroken mourning. Her fiance died mere days before they were to be married, and the night that she attended the theatre with Scott was apparently the only time she’s left her home since the incident. When Carol finds her, she’s only half there, behaving as if she’s been dosed with downers to keep her from hurting herself (which, given the state of medicine at the time, very well may have been the case). The conversation between the two is, then, naturally stilted, but watching Carol talk to Ann like she’s a child and only getting half answers is a bit frustrating to watch, and really throws a speed bump into the mix. The only thing that ensures that the film’s momentum continues is the knowledge that we in the audience have that the co-investigator who has joined her by this point is the murderer of the late Mrs. Henderson (and Cliff), and that keeps the suspense alive. Their final confrontation once she discovers the evidence is effectively tense, and I genuinely wasn’t sure that Carol was going to make it out alive. 

Robert Siodmak directed this picture, one year before The Spiral Staircase and two before The Dark Mirror. He partnered on this one with producer Joan Harrison, a name I’m quite familiar with from seeing it in the opening credits of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as her screenplay credits on Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, and Suspicion. A contemporary reviewer stated that “Miss Harrison is doing nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better,” and although this film doesn’t hold a candle to the consensus classics that her longtime collaborator created, it’s quite comparable to a fair bit of it (and much better than some of his later works, or even some of his middle period clunkers). I’d like to think it’s Harrison’s involvement in this one that made it a woman-centered uniqueness, which transcends mere novelty. Of course, that same bent is likely the reason that we have the protracted sentimental scene between Ann and Carol, but that cost is well worth the reward of just how much more interesting this one is than a lot of other noirs of the period, many of which were cheap and disposable, putting it in the same category of excellent genre representatives that have withstood the test of time, like D.O.A. I’ve also found myself stumbling into a bit of a Siodmak retrospective this year, and he continues to impress. There’s visual flair here that sets this one apart from its contemporaries as well, as one would expect from a film that has an opening credit for “Phantom Hat design,” and there’s a fantastic sequence late in the film set in the apartment/studio of a sculptor, where ominous heads of various sizes oversee the events as they play out, which makes for a foreboding feeling. The sequence in which Carol poses as floozy “Jeannie” to catch the eye of Cliff and try to get more information from him includes a detour where he takes her to a cramped room that appears to be little more than a storage space where some of this other musician friends play frenzied jazz. The quick cutting of the film to match the energy of the music, combined with the isolation of the location and the buckets of sweat that everyone’s shedding, give us the sense that Carol is in real danger, even if the text contains no actual peril, just the general vibe of it. 

Like Dark Mirror, where this one falls apart a little is in its fascination with the psychology of the killer. Burgess goes on a long-winded speech about “paranoiacs,” ironically delivered to the person that the audience is now aware is the killer, and how impossible it is for them to fit into normal society and how they’re perpetually distressed. All of this happens while the killer seems to be barely able to control his hands and then faints at the end of the conversation, yet Burgess takes no note of the obvious implication that the man feels guilty about something that Burgess has said (he does seem to be a little more paranoid about this after, but not enough to warn Carol to be careful directly). The murderer spends quite a lot of time with Burgess and Carol as part of the investigation, and while there’s a lot of fun to be had as they get closer and closer to the truth while he becomes less and less able to control his obvious anxiety, it also makes them look a little stupid. I would have bought the narrative that he simply killed Scott’s wife for the reasons that he eventually gives (that he flew into a rage when she admitted that, even though she was cheating on her husband with him, she had no intention of running off together) and that the rest of his killings were to cover his tracks. I haven’t been able to find specific information about what the original intended ending for the film was, but I have found a few offhand references to changes made to the climax because of the Hays Code, and it’s possible that this psychological focus was also a result of compliance with the Code’s mandates; maybe he was just a killer in the initial text and the rest was grafted on. It feels that way, but that doesn’t make this one any less enjoyable. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond