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Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

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fourstar

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is doing dismal numbers at the box office right now, but so did the cult classic comedy it most closely resembles: Walk Hard – The Dewey Cox Story. The Judd Apatow-penned John C. Reilly comedy Walk Hard applied ZAZ-style spoofery to the musician’s biopic genre and wound up covering the entire history of rock & roll from its blues origins to its Vegas crooner swan song. Popstar picks up exactly where Walk Hard leaves off, mixing ZAZ spoofery with a Spinal Tap documentary format to skewer the modern state of pop music as it has developed since Walk Hard‘s release nearly a decade ago. It’s a shame both of these films failed to make waves financially (Popstar‘s seemingly complete lack of advertising couldn’t have helped there), but they do promise to hold onto a more significant longevity among their respective comedy nerd fandoms. Case in point, just look to the other The Lonely Island film that failed at the box office & found a second life among dedicated fans, Hot Rod. Popstar is just as funny as Hot Rod & just as primed for repetitive viewings, so there’s no doubt in my mind it’ll get the same cult comedy treatment as that militantly goofy title in the long run.

The really interesting thing about that lack of immediate financial success, though, is the way it plays directly into Popstar‘s plot. In the film former SNL player Andy Samberg embodies a versatile stand-in popstar archetype that covers enough ground to resemble any popstar of note you could name from Kanye to Bieber to Skrillex to whoever. Samberg’s titular popstar struggles to repeat past success with a solo record & tour that only do a fraction of the numbers landed on his hit releases. Over the course of the film he learns to put past grudges & current hubris behind him & give the people what they want: a cash-in reunion of the Beastie Boys-esqe pop group that first made him famous. In a lot of ways Popstar itself is Samberg’s way of giving the people what they want. Presuming that Hot Rod didn’t make as much money as it could have because its delightfully moronic daredevil subject matter isn’t exactly what audiences would expect from a The Lonely Island movie, Samberg & company return to their roots here to construct a full-length version of what made their SNL sketches & comedy albums popular decade ago: pop music parody. According to the film’s fantasy version of this well-deserved cash-in, they should be making absurd amounts of money right now, but that’s not exactly how things are working out despite the product being on-point.

Box office numbers & middling reviews aside, Popstar stands as Andy Samberg’s greatest achievement to date. His deeply silly magnum opus lovingly skewers the totality of hedonistic excess & outsized hubris on the modern pop landscape. The film nails the feel of modern pop documentaries in terms of style coopting the on-screen text & social media illustration of titles like Amy along with talking head “interviews” with folks like Nas, Questlove, and Pharrell, the exact kind of contributors you’re likely to see pop up in films like Fresh Dressed. Popstar builds a solid, believable base to hang its gags upon & that in-the-know confidence allows the humor to go as broad or as absurd as it needs to in any particular moment without throwing the audience off track. You’re never entirely shaken by a throwaway gag like a baby playing drums like Neil Peart or an artist responsible for the “brilliance” of catchphrases like “#doinkdedoink” having the self-confidence to declare the Mona Lisa “an overrated piece of shit” because the movie is well-calibrated enough to support those kinds of over-the-top indulgences. The format, the character, his world, and our own pop music terrain all back up each ridiculous gag Samberg throws at the wall,  making the film out to be an efficient little comedy machine in comparison to the sprawling, Apatow-dominated landscape comedic cinema’s been exploring to death in recent years. There’s certainly loose improv afoot in Popstar, but it’s arranged & edited into highly functioning efficiency.

I don’t think I’d call Popstar my favorite comedy of the year so far (it’s got the looming presences of Hail, Caesar!, The Mermaid, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, The Nice Guys and The Bronze to deal with there), but I do think it outshines its closest comparison point in recent months: Zoolander 2. My main complaint with Zoolander 2, a movie I quite enjoyed, was that it gets “a little exasperating in its never-ending list of cameos & bit roles […] The film is overstuffed with both celebrity cameos & SNL vets dropping in for a dumb joke or two.” Popstar somehow adopts that exact cameo-saturated format & makes it work like gangbusters. It’s impossible to review this film without name dropping some of the musicians (RZA, Usher, A$AP Rocky, Arcade Fire, etc.) & comedians (Sarah Silverman, Eric Andre, Bill Hader, an actually-utilized Tim Meadows, etc.) involved, but their presence is actually necessary for the format to work instead of being distracting & dilutive the way they were in Stiller’s film.

Popstar smartly & lovingly dismantles the entirety of pop music’s current state of ridiculousness from EDM DJ laziness to the devastation of a negative Pitchfork review, to Macklemore’s no-homo “activism” to U2’s invasive album release snafu. Celebrity obsession & absurd acts of cartoonish hubris play right into that surreally vapid world, so Samberg has established a work here where needless cameos &  unhinged silliness are a necessity just as much as they’re an indulgence. Long after the lack of critical or box office buzz are forgotten, Popstar might just stand as Samberg’s greatest to work, the most efficient application of his distinct sense of humor put to record.

-Brandon Ledet

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (1973)

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fourstar

Self-described as a “non-science fiction, not quite realistic, and not strictly historical film” and a “comedy of anxieties” Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (sometimes distributed under the ridiculous title Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future) is both just like & completely unique from every zany comedy title that immediately comes to mind. It’s easy to see echoes of the film’s sense of flippant, whimsical humor in works as varied as Monty Python, Scooby-Doo, and ZAZ comedies, but at the same time I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before. I’m not sure how many Soviet Russian slapstick comedies the average American movie buff watches in their lifetime, but this was a first for me.

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession is remarkable for its ability to dabble in the same visual play & artistic pranksterism as titles like the infamous, surreal Czech comedy Daisies while maintaining the accessibility of a sketch comedy show or a weekly sitcom. It’s about as fun as any crossroads between camp & high art as you’re ever likely to see and it’s one that boasts an unlikely specificity & context due to its USSR setting. Rarely is a comedy this artistically rich so recommendable for its entertainment value & basic humorous appeal to audiences who would normally turn up their noses at the idea of watching a hoity-toity foreign film outright. I could easily see it sitting among the works of folks like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson as the perfectly attractive gateway drug to drag youngsters into a life of art cinema geekery. Basically, I’m saying I greatly enjoyed this film as an adult, but really wish someone had shown it to me in high school. It would’ve saved me a lot of time in helping define & develop my own cinematic tastes.

The film’s plot is an exercise in cartoonish artificiality. A scientist/inventor risks losing the attentions of his beautiful actress wife by constantly hammering away at his latest project: a time machine. On the first, disastrous operation of his “apparatus”, the scientist opens the wall to his apartment to a hundreds-years-old castle setting and, through machinations not worth describing in detail, winds up swapping the places of his landlord, Ivan Vasilievich, with the 16th century dictator Ivan the Terrible. The landlord has a difficult time adjusting to his new digs. He’s initially mistaken for a demon by his newfound contemporaries before he disastrously assumes the throne of Ivan the Terrible in disguise (in addition to sharing a name & similarly predatory occupations, they also share an exact likeness). The “real” Ivan the Terrible, by contrast, does fairly well in the modern world. After briefly struggling with confounding inventions like recorded music, lightbulbs, and racy pin-ups, he somewhat comfortably settles into a world that still finds his demanding, violent attributes disconcertingly appealing. While the befuddled scientist struggles to return both Ivans to their proper places in time, the film bifurcates itself into being both a fish out of water comedy in modern times & a violent comedy of errors in ancient ones. It’s all very silly.

It’s difficult to describe the plot of Ivan Vassiliech without making it sound like a very thin, minimal work. Indeed, even certain gags within the film feel like something out of Benny Hill sketch or a mimicry of silent-era hamming. What’s most incredible about this film to me is in the way it distinguishes itself in the details. Its central time-bending apparatus is bizarre mess of sciency vagueness that makes Rick Moranis‘s goofy shrink ray in Honey I Shrunk the Kinds look downright realistic by comparison. Visual techniques like alternating between color and black & white film and mixing live action photography with animation heightens the film’s consistent playfulness to its own unique artform. The shattered fourth wall & movie-within-a-movie meta structure leads to inspired gags like the “real” Ivan the Terrible auditioning for a leading part in a movie about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan Vasilievich is flexible enough to both impress the idea with its meticulous, color-coded set design & to inspire guttural laughter with lines like “Please don’t put me to death, kind sir!” It’s an old-fashioned song & dance comedy that leaves enough room for genuine awe in its majestic Russian castle settings, which are used almost like a playground. Even the would-be bummer of a cop-out ending is significantly softened by the very polite concluding title card of “Ciao! Thank you for your attention.”

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession hits that perfect sweet spot of smart, well-crafted cinema that’s also eager to please & easy to digest. As soon as the first watch I felt like it had already been in my life for decades, like a fuzzy memory triggered by a particular scent. That kind of instant familiarity is difficult to come by, especially with a product this silly & this finely tuned.

-Brandon Ledet

Theatre of Blood (1973)

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three star campstamp

I’d love to live in a world where Vincent Price is considered “the world’s greatest actor”, but not like this. Not like this. Theatre of Blood is a puzzling meta horror vehicle for Price, both striking in the range it allows for the B-movie legend to chew scenery (plus its gore grotesqueness his films don’t usually approach) and disappointing in its lackluster execution. By all means, this gimmicky revenge thriller should be the exact kind of genre trash that has me head over heels, especially considering how unhinged Price manages to be in his lead performance, but by the end I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for what I had seen. This is decent schlock, but it had the opportunity to be much more significant than that. I didn’t hate it, but I really wanted to love it.

Price stars here as “the world’s greatest actor”, Edward Lionheart, a true thespian of the stage who refuses to take on any role unless it’s the lead part in a Shakespeare production. Fans agree that he is truly the world’s finest performer, but theater critics lock him out of all accolades due to his Shakespearean limitations. After a failed suicide attempt the bitter actor comes seemingly from beyond the grave to make each critic individually eat their own words (and, in one particularly brutal case, their own dogs) by killing them in elaborate ways that recall Shakespeare’s most notable works. There’s great subtext here about Vincent Price himself getting revenge on his own critics for brushing off his work as genre schlock by proving he’s at ease with difficult classical works, but for the most part the film is only exciting for its dozen or so brutal murders, which reportedly required six gallons of fake blood to bring to the screen.

What most confuses me about Theatre of Blood is its 96% approval rating on the Tomatometer. The film was a personal favorite for Price because he enjoyed being able to make money performing various Shakespeare monologues instead of pure horror cheese, which is totally understandable (if not more than a little sad). The truth is, though, that when Price isn’t performing these soliloquies or murdering his critics for an audience of Mortville bums, the film gets very one-note & boring, playing at best like a televised police procedural. It’s likely that people had fun with the film’s very campy tone & I’ll admit that the novelty of a grindhouse-esque work from Price that manages to be this silly is enjoyable in & of itself. I especially love its alternate title, Much Ado about Murder, as a note of exceptional  goofiness. However,  the film has nothing on similar revenge-minded works from the actor’s catalog like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, so there’s an oppressive cloud of seen-it-all-before hanging over the production. It’s at best on par with his other middling 70s meta horror, Madhouse, which isn’t too great of a position to be in at all.

Theatre of Blood is a serviceable Vincent Price flick probably best enjoyed in YouTube clips compiling its various gimmicky kills instead of watching its rough around the edges totality. As a critic, saying this might be inviting Price to rise from beyond the grave to smite me, but I’m okay with that. There are surely worse ways to die.

-Brandon Ledet

The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence (2015)

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halfstar

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I’m calling it now, folks. The Human Centipede 3 is the single least enjoyable motion picture I’ve ever seen in my life. I pray that never changes. This is a franchise that’s been known for its vile, misanthropic humor & shameless navel-gazing since its meme-like inception in the late 2000s, but I’ll admit to actually enjoying the first couple titles in what’s likely to remain cinema’s least prestigious trilogy of all time. Unfortunately for my eyes (but perhaps fortunately for my soul), I could not carry that mild enthusiasm into the third and, as the merciful title promises, hopefully final work.

I assume most people who would bother reading this review in the first place would be fully aware of the franchise’s central conceit, so I’ll do my best to spare you the (literally) shitty details here. Instead, here’s a brief overview of its, um, artistic trajectory. First Sequence, released wide in 2010, boasted the tagline “100% medically accurate.” In a way, it’s difficult to argue the point. It’s a small, quiet torture porn horror where the titular poop-eating science experiment fails immediately & miserably due to infection, as any reasonable person would expect. 2012’s Full Sequence upped the ante significantly & almost retroactively made its comparatively dull predecessor a joy to watch. Its tagline reading “100% medically inaccurate,” it tells the story of a mentally disabled, sexually perverse superfan of First Sequence recreating the film’s experiment in a warehouse and, major surprise, it actually kind of works. His centipede is longer and more durable despite the disgusting conditions of its environment begging for a life-ending infection to take hold. Full Sequence is not only meaner & more disgusting than the first film; it’s also much more satirically pointed, revealing an indictment of its own audience for being the sick fucks who would want to watch not one, but two of these atrocities in the first place. I saw the film at a packed New Orleans Film Fest screening at Chalmette Movies and was both tickled by the darkly comic depravity I had just witnessed & strongly tempted to ask each attendee what’s wrong with them for showing up in the first place on their way out the exit. The Human Centipede 3: Full Sequence thoroughly ruined all of that questionable goodwill.

The all-important tagline of Final Sequence is “100% politically incorrect.” I hope you can already see the problem there. Long gone are the morbid fascination factor of the first film and the unexpected satirical edge & audience hatred 0f the second. In their place is a desperately unfunny, try-hard “political” comedy of legendarily hideous & vapid proportions. The same intense focus on gore & human cruelty that’s consistently present throughout the franchise is in tact here, but Full Sequence finds entirely new, unwelcome ways to disappoint & disgust. In some ways it’s director Tom Six’s greatest achievement yet, as it is a truly depraved work surely no decent human being could enjoy without failing a litmus test that calls into question their capacity for empathy, compassion, maturity or potential for spiritual growth. If someone ever tells you that The Human Centipede 3 is their favorite film, do the world a favor and push them into the nearest incinerator. Anytime a property claims that its goal is to be “100% politically incorrect” prepare yourself to witness some vile, misanthropic shit that’s toxic at best in its societal & spiritual value. Final Sequence surpasses even that low bar of depravity, sucking all joy out of its entire franchise & anything else unfortunate enough to lie in its vicinity. By the time I made it to the end credits (no small feat, that), I had to fight back an urge to alternate between screaming & chugging hard liquor in a scalding hot shower.

Inexplicably, though, it’s not necessarily the “100% politically incorrect” humor that makes the movie such a chore to survive. It’s the lead performance by actor Dieter Laser that sinks the film decisively before it even gives itself a chance to offend the audience with an onslaught of rape jokes & racial slurs. Laser delivers what is, hands down, the single most annoying lead performance in the history of the motion picture as an artform, if not the history of scripted theater. He is loud, brash, incomprehensible, devoid of value. His work here should be legally deemed criminal with some kind of mandatory penalty leveled on him as a penance (though, hopefully not one that takes inspiration from the film itself). Did I mention that Dieter Laser is profoundly awful in The Human Centipede 3? Good, because he’s shit, or perhaps something even more difficult to stomach.

For those of you paying close attention to this franchise (God help you), you may recall that Dieter Laser played the Nazi-esque doctor in First Sequence who invented the human centipede torture meme in the first place. Both he & the actor who portrayed his copycat in Full Sequence are recast here as the heads of a prison in the fiercely Republican state of Texas despite this being a universe where the first two films exist & are available on DVD. As the warden & assistant warden of George H.W. Bush Prison (topical humor! funny!), these two evil fucks attempt to please their right wing governor (played by Eric Roberts of A Talking Cat?! & Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs fame) by implementing methods of discipline that wouldn’t fly on Adult Swim’s Superjail!. Laser explains openly, “I believe in bringing back medieval torture methods” when he’s not busy screaming racial epithets at the top of his lungs. His assistant does him one better by suggesting a recreation of Tom Six’s visionary work in First Sequence & Full Sequence. Their centipedal masterwork isn’t realized until the final fifteen minutes of Final Sequence, a choice that withholds whatever perverse pleasure could possibly derived from the spectacle of seeing the longest human centipede yet in favor of boring/annoying the audience with Laser’s beyond-grating lack of subtle nuance or basic dignity. You know exactly where the film is going and yet it drags is little insectoid feet getting there so that you can spend more time “enjoying” political commentary that relates conservative Texans to Nazis in the first two minutes & doesn’t bother expanding its scope from there. What a godawful piece of trash.

I’ll admit that I didn’t watch this film in the best environment. Instead of heckling it with friends on a late night or quietly squirming in a crowded film fest screening like the fist two, I swallowed this shit while enjoying my breakfast alone on a Sunday morning. I doubt a better venue would’ve helped much, though. Outside a couple stray one-liners like “We don’t get to deal with their shit no more. They just got to deal with each others'” and a doctor’s fretting that the experiment is “in serious conflict with [his] Hippocratic Oath,” there’s truly nothing of value here. Even the intense gore, which includes an up-close, believably real castration, pales in comparison to the depravity of Full Sequence. On its list of achievements, Final Sequence boasts the two most disgusting rape scenes I’ve ever seen in my life (two low points I hope to never experience again), only to pull back & reveal that one of them was all just a dream, an empty exercise.

Tom Six, who appears as himself in the film & is aptly described by Laser’s cruelly unbearable warden as “a poop-infested toddler” knows a thing or tow about empty exercises. His one true accomplishment in Final Sequence is making the longest centipede yet to appear in the series, but no one could possibly care, considering the rotting pile of garbage he births it in. Six appears smug here, proud of his work & its cultural impact, directly referencing a South Park episode his magnum opus inspired. He forms a makeshift human centipede Ouroboros here, fashioning a cinematic monster that greedily feeds on its own filth. Everything feels off, a complete failure overflowing out the sides of Six’s pull-up diaper. Only porn star Bree Olson seems comfortable with the production value & “political incorrectness” on display and for some reason Six feels the need to mercilessly punish her for it. A final scene of Dieter Laser screaming unintelligibly into a bullhorn aimed at no one in particular, perhaps a long-dead God, suggests that Six knows exactly what a shitty monument to nothing he’s constructed here, but that doesn’t make the nihilistic exercise worthwhile in the least.

Trust me, folks. I’ve been known to enjoy many a shitty movie in my time, but my claim that Final Sequence is the worst film I’ve ever endured is not a challenge or a low-key recommendation or a thinly-veiled dare. This is a hateful, empty work meant to be enjoyed by no one. No one. If you can avoid giving Tom Six even the microscopic revenue of a hate watch on Netflix I highly recommend toughing out a life without having seen a spiritless, self-obsessed work of misanthropic masturbation that might forever define of sewers of needless, failed horror cinema . . . if you can manage to bear the thought. At the very least, I’ll envy you.

-Brandon Ledet

Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (2015)

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three star

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As the less fortunate among you surely know by now, The SyFy Channel usually churns out its CGI mockbusters to siphon off money from the especially content-hungry in anticipation of major summer releases. While there’s no accounting for certain titles like Sharknado or Lavalantula, which have no “real” cinema counterparts to speak of, SyFy will usually pull a stunt like preempting del Toro’s kaiju love-letter Pacific Rim with its own mech suit cheapie called Atlantic Rim or riding the MCU’s Thor‘s coattails with some generic atrocity called The Almighty Thor, etc. My curiosity, then, was recently piqued while scrolling through Netflix after midnight when I noticed that SyFy had produced a film last year titled Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs. The most obvious comparison point to that title would be Jon Favreau’s better-than-its-reputation Cowboys & Aliens, but that film’s from all the way back in 2011 & Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs aired in 2015, so the timeline didn’t make much sense to me.

It wasn’t until I was a good 20 minutes or so into Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (thanks to a complete lack of willpower) that I remembered, oh yeah, there was a CGI dinosaur movie that came out last year. It was called Jurassic World and starred one of Hollywood’s up & coming leading men and made a ridiculous amount of money all over the world, despite apparently being less memorable than a box office flop that came out five years ago. By the time I had this epiphany I was too far into Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs to bail, though, and I just sort of gave into finishing it the same way your body gives into the numbness of freezing to death when you plunge into icy waters.

Truth be told, Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs isn’t all that bad when judged by the perilously low standards of SyFy mockbusters. The characters are laughably wooden & the entire premise is just as try-hard as they come, but damn if I didn’t laugh every time some dope was eaten by a CG dino. In a world of cowboy cliches that range from fallen rodeo hero to power-hungry sheriff to country music video skanks of all genders, a CG dino is more savior than monster. The wicked creatures are released early on from their dino treasure trove inside an active mine shaft thanks to a shitty little CGI dynamite charge and are thankfully violent at every given opportunity: chomping heads, removing guts, biting people purely out of malice instead of hunger. The mine shaft works like some kind of bizarre 3D dino printer, emanating countless copies of the same generic, raptor-like dinosaur that move in quick jerks like a video game glitch and bleed explosive methane, because why not? The movie drowns in its own mediocrity when there’s no dino mayhem on display, focusing mostly on a romantically-charged rivalry between the sheriff & his rodeo cowboy nemesis that no one could possibly care about, but the plot is mostly an inconvenience at best. The dinosaurs are easily the more interesting half of the dino-cowboy equation, but the movie knows it & does its best to disperse their murderous chaos evenly throughout the production.

I was just shy of abandoning all hope on Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs when a second round of explosions happened to set loose a new, more varied batch of dinosaurs. This is when the cowboy gimmick really pays off. Our rodeo hero lassos himself a wild one & ends up riding a stegosaurus like an ornery bull. There’s even an exploding T-Rex. Where else are you going to see that? Don’t answer that. Look, the production value is essentially on par with a softcore porno, the gore is goofy but never quite gruesome, and the plot feels like one beat in a screenplay instead of a finished product. Even SyFy’s signature celebrity stunt casting is lackluster here, featuring Eric Roberts of such prestigious works as A Talking Cat?! & The Human Centipede 3. If Roberts’s IMDb page is to be believed, he appears in roughly 4,000 projects a year, so that wasn’t much of a get by any measure.

Still, I chuckled at far too many dino attacks in this film to brush it off completely. This must be how the poor people who enjoy watching Birdemic must feel. I wasn’t excited when Cowboys vs.Dinosaurs left the door open for a sequel, but I honestly would be more likely to watch that then giving Jurassic World a second look. If you want to consider that an insult to one movie instead of a compliment to the other, that’s up to you.

-Brandon Ledet

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

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fourstar

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I’ve been a loud defender of the Michael Bay production of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles since it first oozed into theaters two years ago. I went as far as to call the film “The Best Bad Movie of 2014” & “the last five years of bad taste in a nutshell”. High praise, I know. My point was that it’s the exact kind of campy cheese that in its own trashy way reveals & documents more about the blockbuster filmmaking landscape than a more prestigious property possibly could. It’s most useful in this world was as a perfect encapsulation of our worst cinematic tendencies, a cultural relic for future generations of schlock-hungry fools.

That trashy time capsule’s follow-up, a sequel titled Out of the Shadows, is just as enjoyable as the first Ninja Turtles film, but for an entirely different reason. Instead of pushing the brooding grit of the post-Dark Knight era of needless reboots to its most ludicrous extreme like its hilariously hideous predecessor, Out of the Shadows calls back to the light, fun, cartoonish energy that made the original Ninja Turtles trilogy such a nostalgia-inducing pleasure in the 1990s. I guess you could argue that banking on 90s nostalgia is a snapshot on where blockbusters are seated in 2016, but that’s not what makes Out of the Shadows special. Here’s what does make it special: a manhole-shooting garbage truck modeled after the franchise’s infamous pizza van toy; a pro wrestler that plays a tank-operating rhinoceros; a perfectly hideous realization of the villainous mech suit-operating brain Krang; etc. Given enough time, this is a film both silly & visually memorable (read: deeply ugly) enough to generate its own future nostalgia entirely separate from that of a previous generation’s (not that it was above playing the 90s cartoon’s theme song over the end credits). Kids are going to grow up loving this movie and its reputation will outlast the short-term concerns of however well it does or doesn’t do at the box office this summer. In that way, it’s a successful work of art.

I wasn’t quite so sure about Out of the Shadows during its early plot machinations. Early scenes of Megan Fox’s April O’Neil working “undercover” as a nerd (a hot nerd, as the leering camera insistently reminds you) and the titular turtles airlessly navigating a CGI cityscape are a cruel, dull bore. My enthusiasm picked up fairly quickly, however, thanks to the aforementioned pizza van/garbage truck. You see, this isn’t just a recreation pizza-shooting toy from my own youth; it’s one that adds the ludicrous appendages of mechanical arms that operate cartoonishly oversized nunchucks. Why? Why not. The film’s plot gets kicked into action by a highspeed prison break (complete with producer Michael Bay’s calling card excess of explosions) that frees the wicked Shredder from the temporary shackles he’s locked in at the end of the last film. A teleportation device places Shredder in the mechanical hands of the evil alien brain Krang, who opens up a world of purple ooze (you can’t get much more 90s than ooze, right?), interdimensional portals, alien warships, and all kinds of other high-concept wankery. The goal of these conflicts is, of course, to provide simple obstacles for the turtles to overcome, but I have great respect for the over-the-top, Saturday morning cartoon choices the film makes to set those targets up. It’s certainly a refreshing change from the too-dark-for-its-own-good villainy brought to the screen by William Fichtner in the first film, as amusing as that was to watch.

While we’re talking Krang, I’ll just go ahead & say he’s very close to being the greatest villain I’ve seen onscreen all year (the slight advantage goes to the much more naturalistic presence of Black Phillip there). An unholy combination of Yoda, Audrey II, and the oversexed gator from All Dogs Go to Heaven, Krang’s vocal performance is perfectly pitched in its over-the-top scenery chewing. He’s not alone. Tyler Perry’s signature yuck-em-up hokeyness is put to brilliant use as a low level villain mad scientist that’s less Dr. Frankenstein & more Neil deGrasse Tyson meets The Nutty Professor. Will Arnett returns to his role as the scaredy cat cad of the previous film, but is allowed far more breathing room to ramp up the pomposity. One of my favorite gags in Out of the Shadows is a scene where Arnett’s bagging his own breath in ziplocks to sell to schmucks impressed by his newfound celebrity as the turtles’ wing man. Pro wrestler Sheamus is perfectly cast here in his own corny way & probably could live out the rest of his life playing bit parts in kids’ movies without breaking a sweat. Tony Schaloub is still a hideous CGI sewer rat father figure. Megan Fox is still a hopelessly bland non-presence, but I began to find amusement in the way she constantly posed & mugged for the camera for absolutely no reason at all. Oh yeah, and Dennis “The Dummy” Duffy from 30 Rock drops by just because. These aren’t performances that are going to win any awards, but they are perfectly suited for kids’ media goofery. Actually, Laura Linney’s performance as a besides-herself police chief might be worthy of an award in a more serious film, but she’s always perfect so there’s no real surprise there.

I don’t want to oversell the shift in tones here. This is still the bloated, grotesque CGI spectacle people understandably pinched their noses at two years ago. As much as I enjoyed every bizarrely lovable second of Krang content in Out of the Shadows, he’s still a disgusting, digital depiction of a sentient brain literally mashed inside a giant, clunky robot. It’s gross. But, hey, kids love gross shit. The film makes a conscious effort to move away from the Dark Knight grit of its predecessor to take delight in such cheap, silly pleasures as watching a two ton warthog eat a trash barrel’s worth of spaghetti while his hairy CGI nipples jiggle. I got the same feeling watching Out of the Shadows as I did with last year’s excellent Goosebumps adaptation: kids are going to grow up loving it & that’s all that really matters. I’ll even go as far as to say that the film finds genuine pathos in unexpected places, namely the teen turtles’ anxiety over the way society treats them not as the good guys, but as hideous, mutant monsters (a feeling all teens share at some point, right?). I especially like the way the turtles describe themselves as “four brothers from New York who hate bullies & love this city.” It gives them a real Steve Rogers or Judy Hopps vibe I can genuinely get behind. That’s not what makes this film such a deliciously fun exercise in trash cinema delirium (that’d be Krang), but it was yet another admirable aspect of a remarkably silly, deeply ugly children’s film I had no business enjoying nearly as much as I did.

-Brandon Ledet

Bloodsport (1988)

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Jean-Claude Van Damme stars in his breakout role as Frank Dux (pronounced “Dukes”). Dux is an army captain who was trained in martial arts by a childhood friend’s father. In order to bring honor to his teacher after his son dies, he travels to Hong Kong to fight in an illegal martial arts tournament called the “Kumite.” There are fighters from all over the world, and the tournament itself has a notorious reputation for being brutal and deadly.

Bloodsport is a movie dripping with borderline racism (sometimes extremely blatant) and toxic masculinity. The characters are not much more than stereotypes and poorly written caricatures. And there are numerous plot holes and things left totally unanswered. (How does his childhood friend die? What exactly is it that he does in the army?) But I think the biggest weakness this movie has is it’s totally nonsensical timeline. Event after event after event happens and then Dux says,”I’ll meet you for dinner tonight.”  When does he get trained for this tournament? In the two days before he leaves or sometime while he’s in the army? There’s no clear markers as to when anything happens.

Not to say there isn’t some genuine fun in this movie, such as the fight scenes. Considering that Bloodsport is a movie based around an illegal full contact martial arts tournament, it’s a really good thing that these scenes are entertaining. They’re full of unrealistic blood, definitely physically impossible fighting movies, and gratuitous slow motion, all set to an 80’s-tastic soundtrack.  It’s fighting movie cheese at its peak.

But as the two dimensional love interest Janice asks,”What is there to understand about a bunch of guys who have to prove themselves by beating each other’s brains out?” I don’t really think the movie ever truly answers this question, try as it might. The goals of honor and revenge aren’t fleshed out enough to mean anything, and you’re just left with bloody violence. Bloody violence that’s overblown and entertaining in it’s absolute ridiculousness, but still just pointless violence. And “That’s why they call this thing bloodsport, kid!”

-Alli Hobbs

Daikaijû Gamera (1965)

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I’m far from an expert in kaiju cinema, but recently catching a couple outliers in the genre, Reptilicus & Pulgasari, has sparked my interest a great deal. I’ve sen a good number of films that feature Godzilla & King Kong, who seem to be the top brass of kaiju fare, but there are so many other giant monsters of creature feature past that I’m missing out on between those borders. You can’t only listen to The Beatles & The Stones and claim to know the totality of rock n’ roll, right? As many times I’ve seen drawings or action figures of kaiju like Gamera, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, I don’t think I’ve ever given their originating films a solid, up-close look, which feels like a blind spot in my horror/sci-fi film education.

Daikaijû Gamera (literally translated Giant Monster Gamera and re-cut & released in the US as Gamera: The Invincible) doesn’t do much to buck the idea that once you’ve seen one kaiju film you’ve seen them all. It plays remarkably like the original Godzilla film (which was then a decade old) in terms of tone, production, and plot. The most crucial difference between the two works, of course, is the design of their titular monsters. Yes, Daikaijû Gamera is essentially a too-soon remake of Godzilla, but it’s a Godzilla remake that features a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that can turn its shell into a flying saucer. I don’t think I need to explain any more than that to get the film’s basic appeal across. It’s a concept that pretty much sells itself.

Illegal Cold War nuclear activity in the Arctic frees an ancient beast known a The Devil’s Envoy, Gamera. Yes, The Devil’s right hand demon is a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that once plagued the lost continent of Atlantis (according to the Eskimo tribes that witness his rebirth, at least). Scientists expect that the nuclear fallout that freed Gamera from his icy prison will be the creature’s very undoing. That is not the case. Gamera not only breathes fire. He inhales it. All weaponry, industry and nuclear destruction thrown in his path only make him stronger. Nations must put aside their potential World War III tensions to peacefully plan Gamera’s undoing, calling into question the way the unnatural power of nuclear war can loosen & anger forces of Nature like typhoons, dead aquatic life epidemics, and fire-breathing turtles the size of mountains. At one point an observer asks, “Something must really be wrong with Earth, huh?” The answer is a resounding yes and a lot of anxieties about the destructive nature of modern life is clearly on display here in the guise of giant monster mayhem.

Although Daikaijû Gamera is a direct echo of Godzilla & in many ways feels like a standard issue kaiju flick (on the sillier side of the genre), it also did a lot to establish that standard in the first place. There’s a brief scene involving a beatnik surf rock band & a major storyline about a little boy obsessed with turtles (and turtleneck sweaters, apparently) that telegraph a lot of the winking camp tone in kaiju films to come. At this stage of kaiju cinema the monsters are supposed to be majestic & terrifying, but Giant Monster Gamera hints at a future world where they function as heroes of children & monsters with a sense of humor. Godzilla may be the most looming influence over the entire spectrum of kaiju as a monster movie subgenre, but Gamera‘s impact is a lot more readily recognizable in the DNA of the genre’s goofy, 70s future in titles like (my personal favorite) Godzilla vs The Smog Monster.

Again, though, there’s really no need to sell Giant Monster Gamera as an innovator or a historical landmark to make its genre thrills feel worthwhile. You can get its basic plot in any number of 1960s kaiju movies, but where else are you going to get a giant, fire-breathing turtle that occasionally functions as a flying saucer (besides its eleven sequels)? This is a genre that survives on the strength and/or novelty of its monsters & Giant Monster Gamera did not disappoint on that end, not one  bit.

-Brandon Ledet

Pulgasari (1985)

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There’s a fascinating-looking book I’ve been meaning to read about the true life story of a couple who were effectively held hostage by now-deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and forced to make big budget propaganda films at his whim (A Kim Jong-il Production:The Extradordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power). South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife/actress Choi Eun-hee worked against their will to create North Korean versions of films Kim Jong-il, a huge movie buff, was obsessed with, except with a government-positive message at their center. This concept is already difficult enough to wrap my mind around in the abstract, but it’s even harder to reconcile with the reality of the one Shin Sang-ok movie I’ve seen from the era, the 1985 Godzilla knockoff Pulgasari.

Even without its exceedingly surreal context as a document of unlawful imprisonment under Kim Jong-il’s thumb, Pulgasari would still be highly recommendable as a slice of over-the-top creature feature cinema. I’m far from an expert in the hallmarks of kaiju cinema, but the film felt wholly unique to me, an odd glimpse into the way the genre can lend itself to wide variety of metaphors the same way zombies, vampires, and X-Men have in American media over the years. The titular monster ranges from cute to terrifying, from friend to enemy over the course of the film, which is a lot more nuanced than what I’m used to from my kaiju. Most of all, though, Pulgasari is fascinating in its self-conflicting nature as both a brutal tale of political unrest and a cheap thrills indulgence in goofy monster movie camp. The film’s bewildering backstory aside, I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

Just like how the size of its titular kaiju grows exponentially throughout its runtime, the budget of Pulgasari surprisingly expands as the plot trudges along. Beginning with an isolated village not unlike the bare bones sets of Yokai Monsters: Spooky Warfare, Pulgasari first appears to be a dirt cheap production. Its story is consistently engaging even through these humble beginnings, however. A small farming community on the brink of starvation due to a bad harvest & governmental over-taxing sees many of its young men taking up arms among mountainside bandits to raid government storehouses for survival. The government does not respond well to this transgression. The village is seized, its farm equipment melted down in order to forge military weapons & all suspected mountain bandits cruelly jailed. The oldest, widest member of the village prays with his dying breath for the gods to save the human race from government cruelty & the gods send Pulgasari. The demonic savior first appears as a miniature threat, but eventually balloons monstrously large, as does the film’s budget. Huge, large scale battles loaded with expensive special effects & tons of extras take over what initially feels like a limited scope fairy tale and ultimately blooms into a full-blown epic.

Let’s take a minute to discuss the awesomeness of Pulgasari himself. When he’s first brought to life through dying prayers & blood magic, he’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and is so ridiculously cute. Pulgasari’s costume is a little more flexible than Godzilla’s, so when he moves around he looks like a dancing toddler in a lizard’s costume & his miniature set includes the oversized props of films like Attack of the Puppet People. He grows from there by eating iron, taking bites directly out of government weapons, establishing himself as a hero of the people despite his demonic visage. Pulgasari grows large & terrifying, eventually looking like a cross between a lizard & a bull, and proves to be impervious to all weaponry. The visual charm of the monster wears of by the time he’s mountain-size and a scene where the government attempts to set him on fire stands as one of the most hellish, metal images I can remember seeing on film in a good while. Eventually, Pulgasari grows too large for his own good, unfortunately, and starts to strain the people he once protected’s limited resources with his unquenchable thirst for iron.

You might think that the way Shin Sang-ok made this film subversive was by portraying an evil, totalitarian government that drained the life out of its people, but that idea actually belonged to Kim Jong-il. The dictator saw that message as a warning of the dangers of capitalism when it goes unchecked. Okay. Shin Sang-ok, instead, stabbed at his captor’s legacy by likening him to Pulgasari, a hero to the people that would eventually betray them by growing too large & too greedy. Either way you read the film, it’s fascinating that that it was ever made under North Korean watch & I’m now all the more curious to read A Kim Jong-il Production as soon as I get the chance. Pulgasari doesn’t need that context to stand as a remarkable work, however. If you went into the film blind there’d still be plenty of spectacle & clashing tones to stick with you in a way more generic, non-Japanese kaiju novelties wouldn’t. This is not the by-the-numbers vagueness of Reptilicus. It’s something much more essential & idiosyncratic.

-Brandon Ledet

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

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There’s a certain retro-futuristic aesthetic that sets neo-noir visuals to a sci-fi context that I definitely have a soft spot for, but I don’t know exactly what to call by name. Captain America: The First Avenger & Batman: The Animated Series are the only titles that fit in this particular genre that were especially successful financially, as most examples I’d group in with them were notoriously disastrous flops: The Rocketeer, Tomorrowland, Predestination, The Phantom, etc. Although I don’t know exactly what to call this subgrene (future noir? fart deco?), its tropes are as clear as day to me. It’s a pure style over substance formula that intentionally matches the exquisite art deco architecture & fashion of the 1930s with the hammy swashbuckling of old comic strips & radio serials; extra points are awarded if the plot involves robots, aliens, or time travel. Imagine the pulpy dime store version of Metropolis and you have a decent idea of what I’m getting at.

True to form, the 2004 visual feast Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow flopped hard at the box office, but stands as an immaculate example of the future noir/fart deco aesthetic I’m vaguely describing here. One of the first Hollywood productions filmed almost entirely against a CGI backdrop (which is more or less the current industry standard for summertime blockbusters), the film masks its almost instantly-dated visuals with the soft focus haze of the era it intentionally evokes. The film has a falseness to it that it emphatically embraces instead of shying away from. Its absurd use of lighting & extreme Dutch angles gives the film the same surreal comic book context that recently wowed me when I first watched Sam Raimi’s goofily masterful Darkman. This “live action” cartoon landscape is thoroughly impressive, from its gorgeous/impossible architecture to its chintzy, child’s toy ray guns. It feels simultaneously old fashioned and newfangled and that exact air of self-contradiction is specifically what wins me over in this subgenre every damn time.

The film’s plot is set in an alternate universe version of the late 1930’s where an invading Nazi-esque threat invades US soil with gigantic laser-shooting robots & mechanical warbirds. Bold dame news reporter Polly Perkins (Gwenyth Paltrow, who has recently been growing on me thanks to her turn as the similarly-named Pepper Potts) follows this story down the proverbial rabbit hole, where she discovers a vast, world-threatening conspiracy that involves, among other things, dinosaurs, miniature elephants, and a gigantic Noah’s arc-type rocket ship. Her partner in this journey is a maverick airplane pilot (played by Jude Law in a goofy version of his Gattaca mode) hell bent on taking out our foreign invaders single-handedly like a true American. Will our two leads find love despite their stubborn, self-serving quests for independence? Does their potential romantic connection matter any more or less than saving the world? Do these questions matter at all in the face of the film’s towering attention paid to over-the-top visuals? Even if you haven’t seen the film I’m confident you can answer those questions yourself. The two leads are remarkably charming here, with a chemistry that only gets more potent as the plot rolls along, but they’re not at all what makes the movie a unique treat.

Critics were mostly kind to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow upon initial release, but audiences’ wallets were not. Even so, it seems almost criminal that the film stands as the only feature credit of director Kerry Conran. Kerry Conran is a fully functional auteur here, building a gorgeous, amusing world from scratch and it’s a shame to think we didn’t get to see how his work would’ve evolved along with CGI technology were it given the chance. I’ve tried to pigeonhole his sole film here into a hyper-specific subgenre, but that’s honestly selling the film’s idiosyncrasy a little short. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow might pull its visual references from long-gone eras of cinematic sci-fi, but I think its goals and accomplishments are much loftier than pure pastiche. At one point the film intentionally evokes comparison to the innovation of The Wizard of Oz, but that connection essentially stops at the novelty of its CGI backdrop. I actually think a better comparison point would be a more fartsy, less artsy version of what Guy Madden does. Just like with Madden, Conran’s visuals & ideas can be a little overwhelming to endure at feature length, but in isolation they each land with surprising success. I just wish there were more Conran-helmed visual feasts to go around, whether or not he continued to work in the fart deco subgenre I grew to love so much. Even those who don’t fall in love with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as a finished product are bound to recognize potential in its individual moving parts. Sadly, that particular world of tomorrow hasn’t yet arrived.

-Brandon Ledet