comedy

I Want Your Sex (2026)

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Gregg Araki’s entire promotional campaign for his latest candy-coated slacker comedy has been focused on how Gen-Z is not having as much sex as Gen-X was at their age, a common online-discourse talking point you’ll hear echoed throughout the film itself. Araki will tell any interviewer who’ll listen about how kids these days aren’t fucking enough, that they’re robbing themselves of essential life experiences by being too socially timid during the most precious years of their sexual prime. Olivia Wilde acts as Araki’s Millennial mouthpiece for that complaint about the youth of today’s sexual cowardice in I Want Your Sex, while Cooper Hoffman acts as an ideological punching bag who has to suffer her blows, begging for forgiveness on behalf of his entire generation of anxious, undersexed dweebs. The only thing that saves this intergenerational dynamic from coming across as the “Old man yells at cloud” screed of a prurient 60-something curmudgeon is context & framing. Coming from Wilde’s onscreen persona as an art-scene dominatrix pushing her younger subordinate onto the mattress for a vigorous fuck session, Araki’s position shifts from a schoolhouse scolding to a form of negging dirty talk. It’s a way of teasing Gen-Z into having more sex with their elders in particular, not just each other, by turning that discourse into a degrading roleplay game all of its own — a playfully selfish maneuver.

Unfortunately, that kinky reframing of Gen-Z libido discourse is the only truly inspired idea in I Want Your Sex. The rest of the film swirling around it is just mildly naughty sitcom antics, with Cooper Hoffman playing Wyle E. Coyote to Olivia Wilde’s Roadrunner. Hoffman stars as a fresh-out-of-college slacker who’s openly groomed to become the next sexual plaything of his art-world celebrity boss, played by Wilde. Wilde pontificates through every conversation as if she’s always talking to press about her upcoming gallery show, exclusively communicating in platitudes about the philosophy, politics, and aesthetics of sex, which she’s built an entire career around commodifying in self-parodic pop art. The movie starts as a parody of Sunset Boulevard, with Wilde’s nude body floating face down in her own mansion’s swimming pool, which Hoffman’s befuddled underling has to explain to police detectives (Margaret Cho & Johnny Knoxville) in a classic noir flashback structure. Despite that tease of inevitable violence, the mood remains light & cartoony, to the point where even the S&M games between Wilde’s Norma Desmond dom and Hoffman’s Joe Gillis sub are too goofy to be taken seriously. Most of the kink in I Want Your Sex is comically gestured at instead of depicted in earnest. The seduction period where Hoffman is introduced to his boss’s dirty games is skipped entirely, with the edit jumping straight into depiction through montage rather than building genuine erotic tension scene to scene. The dialogue makes constant references to the act of pegging, but the only time a character straps on a harness onscreen is when they’re too drunk to figure out how it’s supposed to be worn. It’s a funny gag, but it’s also an indication that Araki may have lost some of his own sexually anarchic nerve as the decades have gone by. In his 90s indie days, he would’ve fully gone there instead of just talking about it.

For all of Araki’s preloaded discourse about the diminished returns of each generation’s sexual adventurism, the real story here is the diminished returns of each generation’s cinematic imagery. Araki recently gave an interview with GQ Magazine where he admitted that he vastly prefers the look & feel of digital cameras over the bulky analog film equipment of his early years, stating, “I love digital. I love the way it looks. I love the things you can do with it. I hate sprocket holes. I hate dealing with the labs.” It’s easy to see how that shift in format might’ve made Araki’s job easier & more fun, but he doesn’t seem to realize how detrimental it’s been to the overall quality of his work. I Want Your Sex‘s most pronounced visual idea is the contrast between the candy-colored pop art of Wilde’s art studio, the breakfast cereal commercial production design of Hoffman’s man-child apartment, and the grim, grey blandness of his checked-out girlfriend’s place, which is supposed to represent the sexless, passionless monotony of Gen-Z living (with Charli XCX playing its against-type spokeswoman). The problem is that, because it’s shot on digital cameras, there’s no richness or vibrancy to the colors in the more cartoonish spaces, and they end up looking a little bland as well, undercutting the point of the contrast. Some of the best touches of Araki classics like Nowhere & The Doom Generation are the absurd pops of color in the teenage fashion & interior decor, which is now being sacrificed for the convenience of digital filmmaking (an excuse that gets a little flimsy when you look at the high-contrast cartoon imagery of last year’s Araki-inspired, digitally shot Rats!). The unintended result is that I Want Your Sex often looks & feels like a straight-to-streaming comedy from an anonymous hack rather than the latest pop-art provocation from an indie cinema legend. Gregg Araki wants I Want Your Sex to read as a grand statement on the current moment in intergenerational sexual politics, but it instead mostly reads as a cute but inessential workplace comedy with a few more onscreen dildos than usual.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Hairy Bird (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the ensemble-cast boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (1998), a.k.a. All I Wanna Do, a.k.a. Strike!

00:00 Christopher Nolan
14:00 The Odyssey (2026)
33:00 War and Peace (1965-1967)
37:48 Conan the Destroyer (1984)
40:40 Red Sonja (1985)
46:30 The NeverEnding Story (1984)
53:20 Her Private Hell (2026)
1:00:11 The Taste of Tea (2004)
1:04:55 Millennium Actress (2001)
1:10:46 The Invite (2026)
1:20:12 After Hours (1985)

1:27:20 The Hairy Bird (1998)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

After Hours (1985)

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The time of another adaptation of The Odyssey is upon us, which means that it’s time for the underemployed to crack their knuckles and start making Letterboxd lists of films that are spiritually similar. One that’s been popping up more often recently is the Martin Scorsese film After Hours, one of the director’s more underdiscussed pictures. The 1985 dark comedy, set in the wee hours of the morning in New York City, follows word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) on, well, an odyssey across the city as he faces various challenges in trying to get back home from Soho. In a diner one night, he’s reading a Henry Miller novel when the lovely Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) strikes up a conversation with him. They flirt, and she tells him that she’s staying with a sculptress friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), whose work includes making plaster bagels with cream cheese. Intrigued, he calls Kiki’s loft later that night and Marcy invites him over, but he ends up losing the only cash he has on him, a $20 bill, when it’s blown out of a cab window. 

This is only the beginning of Paul’s troubles for the night. As it turns out, not only is Marcy already married (albeit separated from her husband, whose fetishization of The Wizard of Oz has made him incapable of orgasming without screaming “Surrender Dorothy”), she’s also already got a boyfriend, with whom she quarreled earlier in the night, prompting her flirtation with Paul in the first place. She behaves erratically, tells harrowing stories about her past that may or may not be true, has a book of images of horrific burns, and is constantly leaving the room to giggle and whisper conspiratorially with Kiki; she is, in short, a manic pixie nightmare woman. Paul sneaks out of the apartment but is unable to make his way home as he’s short the fare for the subway, as there was a price change that went into effect at midnight, and he makes his way to a late night bar, where he befriends bartender Tom (John Heard) and finds himself the object of desire for dissatisfied, forty-something cocktail waitress Julie (Teri Garr). Tom takes pity on Paul and offers to give him the dollar that he needs to get home but is unable to open the register. Paul leaves his own apartment keys as collateral in order to take Tom’s keyring and collect the spare register key from Tom’s place. On his way out, he’s spotted by some of Tom’s neighbors, who accuse him of being the neighborhood burglar who has been hard at work in the area in recent weeks, but he manages to convince them otherwise. 

Returning to the bar, he comes upon the real prowlers (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong) loading Kiki’s life size papier-mâché sculpture of a screaming man into their van, and he scares them off. Returning the sculpture to Kiki’s apartment, he finds her in the middle of a BDSM session with a hulking man named Horst, who scolds him for running off on Marcy. Paul attempts to apologize to Marcy but finds that she has overdosed on barbiturates. When he goes to Kiki and Horst for help, he finds that they’ve left a note saying they’ve gone to a club. Paul calls the police to report Marcy’s death and returns to the bar to return Tom’s keys. Tom has closed the bar for half an hour, but Julie, who lives across the street, invites him in from the rain. Her apartment matches her beehive hairdo, which shows that she’s stuck in the 1960s; it’s pink, decorated with the occasional rainbow, and stocked with an entire shelf of Aqua Net. After a few more contrived coincidences and turns of the vice that’s gripping Paul, he ultimately finds himself at the mercy of a mob that’s out for the blood of the neighborhood burglar, led by an irate ice cream truck driver named Gail (Catherine O’Hara). Will this be the end of Rico? 

After Hours is a very funny movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not considered one of the essentials in the director’s oeuvre. Paul’s initial situation is a familiar one, in which one finds themself in the home of someone that they barely know but slowly comes to the realization that instability can present as cute quirkiness on first impression, and has to extricate oneself with as much finesse as possible. From there, the continuous downward tumble and increasingly hostile interactions with the bizarre characters who haunt Soho’s streets during the darkest hours of the night make for a hilarious, anxiety-inducing social nightmare. It reads like an early version of Beau is Afraid, in which an ill-equipped everyman must grapple with an increasingly bizarre reality. Here, it’s because everyone involved is connected (Tom is, of course, the boyfriend with whom Marcy had a fight earlier in the night) and are caricatures of normal people with their neuroses turned all the way up. This makes for some very funny characters who are still well-observed. One of the bits that I enjoyed the most was when Julie invites Paul up to her apartment out of the rain while he waits for Tom to reopen the bar, and she puts on a Monkees record. When she realizes that Paul is in a somber state after finding a dead body, she soundtracks the new mood by playing Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” seamlessly changing the records. From the punks who try to forcibly shave Paul’s hair into a Mohawk at Club Berlin to the woman who lives beneath the club in a cluttered museum of antiques to a neighborhood that’s as trigger-happy for mob justice as Springfield, everyone is a portrait of a weirdo, and I loved After Hours for that. 

Three years after After Hours, screenwriter Joseph Minion would pen Vampire’s Kiss, known to the general public as the image source of an infamous Nicolas Cage meme, but which has a similar sense of humor to this one. This came right on the heels of another Scorsese comedy, The King of Comedy, which found a balance between being a funny comedy and a genuine thriller, and King continued the Scorsese tradition from Taxi Driver of having the source of danger be the character that we spend the film with. This one not only breaks that tradition by making Paul more of a Hitchcockian falsely-accused-man-on-the-run archetype who’s mostly the victim of circumstance (and a few poorly considered lies), but also in tone from King, having more of Minion’s fingerprints on it than Scorsese’s. There are no long tracking shots that are a hallmark of the director’s filmography, no fancy camera movement, just workmanlike competency, but this allows more room for the comedy to breathe, to the film’s benefit.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

The Invite (2026)

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After the much derided (but enjoyed by me) Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde was put in director jail for a while, only returning this year with the premier of The Invite, a comedy starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. Wilde and Rogan portray Angela and Joe, a couple whose married life is circling the drain, with Norton and Cruz as their upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pína. Taking place over the course of a single, awkward, semi-disastrous, illuminating dinner party that Angela and Joe host, the film plays out as a less biting, more comedic version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The strains on Angela and Joe’s married life are self-evident from the get-go. Angela is a consummate (and bad) liar who, when caught in her dishonesty, simply freaks out until something else comes up conversationally that distracts from her lies. She prepares an elaborate meal and charcuterie in her excitement over the dinner, which was only planned earlier that morning after a chance encounter with Pína, despite lying to Joe that she told him about it the night before, and that he simply didn’t listen to her. When Hawk compliments her on a designer rug, she claims to have found it at a flea market, despite the audience seeing her unpack it and lay it out during the film’s opening title sequence. It appears that she has chosen to fill her life with these falsehoods (and too many podcasts) to distract herself from its banality, despite that life being one that she chose, as she admits that she got her degree and never did anything with it. For his part, Joe is also dissatisfied, seeing himself as a failure due to the one hit wonder nature of his band, his employment as a music instructor at a third-rate, non-prestigious conservatory, and the fact that the couple and their daughter live in the apartment that he grew up in. From within the horizon of her own unhappiness, Angela can only see that they live in a beautiful home, have a daughter who adores her father, and that Joe has an ideal job, regardless of the lack of respect that his institution commands. 

Into this dynamic comes the duo of Pína and Hawk, whom Angela is desperate to impress and for whom Joe has nothing but contempt, as he finds Hawk’s casual small talk in the elevator annoying, not to mention that the upstairs couple’s sex life is both very active and extremely loud. The dinner itself is a disaster, Angela’s souffle is completely burnt, Pína is revealed to be a vegan (debatable, given that her contribution to the meal is a flan) and unable to eat anything other than the charcuterie olives, and Angela’s lack of planning means that their only option for wine is a bottle given to them by Joe’s late uncle to save for a future anniversary. The two break off into pairs, with Pína joining Joe for a joint in his office while Angela gives Hawk a tour of the house that ends with tequila shots. With everyone properly socially lubricated, Hawk and Pína apologize for the frequent ruckuses upstairs before Joe can address the subject more hostilely, and admit that they are swingers who are interested in their hosts. Angela is fascinated by the possibilities that this opens up, and Joe, initially resistant to the idea based on the assumption that he would be excluded, also warms to the idea. The results are moderately disastrous, but not in the way that one would expect. 

The Invite is an adaptation of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, with a screenplay from Rashida Jones and a co-credited Will McCormack, whose only feature writing credit prior to this was as a co-story writer on Toy Story 4. The script is a delight, capturing a great deal of insight into relationships and their idiosyncratic disconnections (or, as Leo Tolstoy might put it, each failing marriage is “unhappy in its own way”) while never losing sight of the fact that this is first and foremost a comedy. That doesn’t mean that the film treats every part of its subject matter with levity, with a particularly noteworthy scene in which Norton’s Hawk delivers a sobering monologue about his failures as a husband to his now-deceased wife, but even that is undercut by the fact that this is Hawk’s self-rationalization for his current sexual curiosity. Penélope Cruz struts around this film with the knowledge and understanding that she is one of the sexiest people on earth, and her calm, casual demeanor is as magnetic to the audience as it is to an enraptured Angela. I also found myself charmed by Seth Rogen here; much of his film career consisted of variations on the single central idea of “pothead gets into A Situation,” which has never been a brand of humor that resonates with me. In The Invite, Rogen is still the snarky stoner providing commentary on everything that passes before him, but he’s also a sad, trapped man, and he conveys that complexity in a commanding way. 

The real revelation here, as is the case with all of her projects, is Olivia Wilde. Booksmart was universally praised while the critical reception to Don’t Worry Darling was… harsh. It’s impossible to fully sift out every part of that backlash to the latter that had more to do with the casting and behind-the-scenes controversy than the actual quality, but criticisms of Darling included that it was a bit of a mish-mash, never fully committing to any of its myriad ideas enough to coalesce into a solid thesis. While that wasn’t a problem for me, The Invite is a film that’s so confident and singular in its vision that it feels like a direct answer to that critique. This film is the twenty-first century reinvention of Woody Allen’s 70s adultery comedies (the film is even dedicated in memoriam to Diane Keaton), but Wilde has so thoroughly committed to separating the art from the artist that she has taken on Allen’s role as both director of the film and neurotic lead, with great success. Wilde reveals herself here as a very talented physical comedian as well; one of the biggest of my many laughs in this film came during Angela’s argument with Joe about cancelling the dinner, where the camera shifts to a downward angle that positions the front of the oven on the left side of the screen. Wilde crouches into the frame, almost feral, gesticulating to the souffle within. It’s very confident, but also strangely vulnerable, and I loved it. 

A story like this has the potential to feel extremely heteronormative, especially as it revolves around two typical man/woman pairs, one of them sexually repressed and the other more permissive and exploratory. While it stretches belief that a modern day couple would be completely unfamiliar with swinging, if this were an American film of even a decade ago, the main couple would open things up a little, have an awkward interaction that proves that they really love one another, and resolve to recommit to heteronormative routines. The Invite doesn’t do that; in fact, it never gets to the “sex” part of the sex comedy, and instead has the encounter collapse before it ever really gets started. Angela and Joe’s relationship isn’t rattled by temptation in order to come out stronger on the other side; instead, the revelations that emerge from both the need for trust and the rejection of anger that open relationships demand highlights that each is miserable. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, as Pína tells them directly that, in her opinion as a psychotherapist, their relationship is over, but also that a new relationship can form between two people if they try. It’s sweet without being overly sentimental, and it works.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scary Movie (2026)

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Of all the various legacy sequels that are propping up the Hollywood economy right now, the overwhelming majority have very little reason to exist beyond desperately trying to milk the cow one last time before the entire industry is put out to pasture. The new Scary Movie, to its credit, is the one among them with the most justification to be made in the current moment. After all, the last time that one of these shallow parody films was released was nearly 15 years ago, and the last time that they really had anything to do with parodying horror movies was in 2006. Franchise originators Shawn and Marlon Wayans departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, all the way back in 2001. In the interim, a half-dozen horror trends have come and gone, so there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. We’ve seen the rise and fall of torture porn in Hostel and the Saw franchise, the glut of mid-aughts remakes that saw (among other things) Jackie Earle Haley take a turn as Freddy Krueger, a resurgence of zombie movies, an abundance of horror legacy sequels like David Gordon Green’s Halloween films and the Radio Silence-produced Scream sequels, MCU-ified horror like The Conjuring, and, of course, the much-vaunted rise of “elevated” horror. For 2026, though, the Scary Movie franchise returns to what it does … well, not “best,” exactly, since—despite the decline in quality over the series’ repeated returns to the well—none of these movies are particularly great, but it’s back to what it does adequately. 

Scary Movie (2026) bases most of its “plot” around 5cream, although its opening sequence most closely parodies Scream VI and cribs the NYC subway scene from the later sequel as well. The opening features a cameo from Carmen Electra and sees Teyana Taylor reenacting the opening sequence of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving was lured into an alley in New York City. Here, however, she summons a crew of burly men to assist her in kicking Ghostface’s ass. As part of the movie-within-the-movie series Horror Movie, Teyana’s would-be date/killer calls her directly after a couple of back-and-forth text exchanges, and they break the fourth wall by noting that an audible phone call provides better exposition for the presumed audience than on-screen text messages, citing that most people who would turn out for a Wayans Bros. movie “are probably illiterate.” It’s supposed to be self-aware mockery of the audience but it mostly belittles the filmmakers themselves, demonstrating just how little regard the script has for its audience. Make no mistake; I laughed myself silly during this movie (under the influence of an edible, admittedly), but there’s not a single joke in here that doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point. One of the best bits arrives near the end when Brenda (Regina Hall) pretends to have been shot so that she doesn’t have to go back into the killer’s house with Cindy (Anna Faris), and we see that she’s faked her injury with ketchup packets. It’s funny stuff, but then Brenda overexplains the joke, and it makes the whole thing less comic than if the film wasn’t (over)narrating itself. There’s a potential cut of Scary Movie that’s twenty minutes shorter, cuts several of the dead-on-arrival “comedy” bits, is less dialogue heavy, and would be twice as funny. 

It’s been some amount of time since the last time Ghostface showed up to harass Brenda, Cindy, Brenda’s closeted partner Ray (Shawn Wayans), and her brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans). In the intervening time, Cindy has had two daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday, who essentially play the parts of Sam and Tara Carpenter from the recent Scream sequels — because Jenna Ortega also played Wednesday Addams, get it? Brenda has had two kids of her own, the Chad and Mindy equivalents Brad (Gregg Wayans, who is thirty-seven years old) and non-binary Dei (get it?). With the return of Ghostface and an attack on Tuesday, Sara returns home alongside her clearly-the-killer boyfriend “Jack” to find her mother, who now has Jamie Lee Curtis’s frazzled white hair from the aforementioned Green-helmed Halloween films. This leads to Cindy’s reunion with Brenda, who has turned into a Ma-like figure for the local high school kids, including Shorty, who is in his third decade of attempting to graduate. Ghostface comes back to town, stirs up some interpersonal conflict between Sara and her mother (whose insistence that the return of Ghostface is all about her drives her daughter insane), some people die in wacky ways, and the film frequently finds itself sidetracked into various shallow references to contemporary flash-in-the-pan pop culture. That’s all that these movies have ever been; when they manage to parody something that stood the test of time, like The Matrix, it’s more of an accident than it is an insight into cultural longevity (and, like, everyone was parodying The Matrix). 

Last year’s rebootquel of The Naked Gun proved that there is a place for parody films in the market. It was so much fun that it led me to rewatch the original and its sequels, and I’ve also long been a proponent of Top Secret! and recently rewatched both Hot Shots films. The thing about those ZAZ parodies is that the jokes are so layered and come so quickly that even if one of them lands with a resounding thud, the movie moves along quickly enough that you’re laughing again moments later. In Scary Movie, every bit is 1.5-4 times as long as it should be, which means that even the jokes that do land can wear out their welcome quickly, and when there’s a swing and a miss, one still has to sit there for an interminable amount of time before we move on to the next bit. The first real clunker is when Cindy tries to remind Sara of the good times from her childhood, which is illustrated by taking her to see a mall Santa who’s actually the Terrifier; it goes on just shy of forever and isn’t funny at all. Other particularly unfunny sequences include full recreations of non-horror pop culture as well. After the memorably surreal image of Ghostface taking the place of Catherine Keener across from Shorty as Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, the film segues into Shorty’s Sunken Place, which he calls a k-hole before Ghostface corrects him that he’s in a K-Pop hole. This leads to a fully animated sequence that sees Shorty hooking up with the three leads of KPop Demon Hunters while spoofing the song “Golden” with a chorus that includes the refrain “Gonna be gonna be smokin’.” It’s peak “Remember this?” style parody, and although that film’s widespread success may mean that this “joke” makes sense in twenty years (we’ll see if the references to Smile and cameo from Kai Cenat do the same), there’s no amount of time that will pass for it to ever be funny. (That having been said, the choice to do a parody of the marketing campaign for Michael with “Tubi original” Jermaine, featuring Kenan Thompson as Jermaine Jackson, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But why is it here, in Scary Movie? That’s an orphaned SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.)

Ultimately, Scary Movie leaves one with too much time to linger on and ponder the bits that aren’t landing. I was one of a group of five who went to see this movie, and only two of us laughed enough for it to have been worth the price of admission (one of whom was me), one person seemed to enjoy parts of it, and two people utterly hated it. One of the haters was a surprise to me, given that this is a longtime friend with whom I’ve spent no small time over the years chatting about our fondness for the first two Scary Movie films; we recognize that they’re not very good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a certain nostalgia for movies that were airing virtually every week on Comedy Central during our formative years. He was the person I expected to enjoy this the most, since its comedy is really no different from the earlier Wayans Brothers-produced films. He was actively miserable the entire time, and I think that if you’re trying to decide whether this is worth your time, this is worth considering. It’s exactly as good as Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, and if you didn’t like those, you probably won’t like this. If you do have positive memories associated with those, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the humor of this one will land. All I can say is that, if you’re going to see it, you should try to get as high as Shorty beforehand (and for legal reasons, I remind you all to toke responsibly).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)

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In a somewhat baffling move, the makers of the Maisie film series decided, in the eighth of ten films and at the eleventh hour, to suddenly start paying some lip service to continuity between the comic outings of our beloved Maisie Ravier (Ann Sothern). When we last saw our heroine, she had joined the war effort as a riveter at Victory Air, and this film opens with her still in this job. Sweet Maisie has been burning the candle at both ends, continuing to work her swing shift while volunteering at the nursery to support the mothers working the day shift. Unfortunately for her (and to the comic delight of the audience), this has led her to develop a facial tic, causing her to wink frequently, usually at the most inopportune times. The doctor prescribes her two weeks paid vacation, and as luck would have it, an old friend is passing through on his way to Reno, where they could use a song and dance girl for a two week engagement at his hotel. Last time, we got to see just how far she would go to prevent a patriotic soldier from marrying the wrong woman. This time around, we get to see how willing she is to put herself in danger to stop a woman from divorcing the right patriotic soldier. Specifically, after buying the last plane ticket off of a woman who has rethought her Reno divorce, Maisie meets a young soldier named Bill Fullerton (Tom Drake), whose wife Gloria (Ava Gardner) has gone to Nevada under the mistaken belief that Bill married her for her vast family fortune, when the boy didn’t know anything about it until after the marriage. Maisie agrees to personally deliver a letter to Gloria, and sets out west for adventure (again). 

Shortly after arriving, Maisie meets this film’s love interest, “Flip” Hennahan (John Hodiak, who would star in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat the following year), a blackjack dealer at the hotel where they are both employed. Flip agrees to take Maisie to the ranch where Gloria Fullerton is staying, and although the reception Maisie meets there is cold, she feels satisfied in having done her duty. When she realizes she’s accidentally made off with Mrs. Fullerton’s matchbox, she asks to go back, but Flip admits that she can meet her basically any time, as the hotel’s manager is serving as the legal witness to Mrs. Fullerton’s residency for her divorce proceedings, and as such she comes to the hotel daily for lunch. Maisie’s quite taken with Flip’s willingness to sacrifice his gasoline rations on a frivolity just to spend the day with her, but the plot takes a turn when she recognizes “Gloria Fullerton” the next day. The woman in question is actually the real Gloria’s traitorous secretary Wini Ashbourne, who is in league with Gloria’s business manager Pelham (Paul Cavanagh, who previously played the largely absent patriarch in Maisie Was a Lady) to get Bill out of the picture so that they can embezzle Gloria out of house and home. To that end, they’ve employed master forger Clave, who’s staying across the hall from Maisie in the hotel. Rounding out the supporting cast is a truly charming performance by nascent choreographer (and future model for Disney’s Peter Pan) Roland Dupree, as a bellboy whose infatuation with Maisie leads him to play sidekick for her, even as she goes to increasingly extreme measures to stop the Fullertons from divorcing. Oh, and if you were worried about what happened to Breezy from Swing Shift Maisie, for once we also find out what happened to Maisie’s last boyfriend; specifically, “He got a little too interested in the native dancers … of Dallas.” 

This has all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect of a Maisie picture. Once again, her love interest is a man with a silly nickname (“Slim” in Maisie, “Skeets” in Ringside Maisie, “Hap” in Maisie Gets Her Man, and “Breezy” last time around). Maisie herself is brassy, funny, and occasionally pouty. She gets to do a big song and dance number, entitled “Panhandle Pete,” in which she pretends to make trick revolver shots and is pulled into and out of the performance area on a wheeled pony, to show off Ann Sothern’s talents at both. But there’s also some great novelty in this go-round as well. Flip is a different kind of love interest for Maisie, one that she’s interested in but doesn’t have to protect from the wiles of any other women, and Hodiak plays him as both quite taken with Maisie while also being frequently frustrated by her, and it’s a nice dynamic. He’s occasionally flustered by her endless questions, although “Are you married?” and “Are you a draft dodger?” are fairly reasonable ones to ask, all things considered. I was slightly disappointed that Swing Shift Maisie didn’t decide to go all in and have an espionage plot, but the filmmakers make up for that this time around. Although the scheme to defraud and embezzle Gloria isn’t exactly a spy thriller, it plays like one, so much so that when the three co-conspirators corner Maisie in her hotel room and hold her at gunpoint, it feels for the first time that Maisie is in real, actual danger. Pelham even slaps her across the face to shut her up, and I gasped aloud at this sudden intrusion of realistic violence into a series of films that, the potential starvation of the dust bowl migrants in Gold Rush Maisie aside, has had stakes about as high as an episode of my beloved I Love Lucy. 

The ending is high octane and slapstick in equal measure. Maisie has allowed Jerry the bellboy to come to believe that she’s working for the FBI after he catches her getting Clave drunk in order to get a confession out of him. Flip has become completely convinced that Maisie’s accusations of massive fraud and potential identity theft are the results of a breakdown; it’s patronizing, but the fact that Maisie was given leave from war work due to a nervous condition means that he has some decent grounds to believe that Maisie just needs help. With no evidence other than her word, Maisie enlists Jerry to help her kidnap Gloria from the courthouse before her divorce proceedings can begin, just to hold her long enough for Bill to arrive, as he’s finally been granted leave from the army, but won’t be in Reno until the afternoon. When they accidentally also abduct Wini, who was posing as Gloria to divert the paparazzi, all four of them are taken to the jailhouse by a traffic officer. There, Maisie must plead her case, while Flip arrives with a psychologist to try and convince the board to release Maisie into his care rather than be imprisoned. Maisie feigns a fainting spell and pretends to be completely out of it, which drops everyone’s guard long enough for her to escape custody, find Bill, and sprint to the courthouse to stop Gloria before it’s too late. In the end, they all end up locked in the judge’s chambers with dozens of looky-loos and court reporters trying to break the doors down. It’s terrific stuff, and I’m starting to feel a little disappointed that the end of the Maisie series is approaching, with only two features left. This one is definitely in the top three so far, and they’ve only gotten better as the movies have gone along. Nevertheless, the next time we see Maisie, the war will be over, and I can’t wait to see what our heroine is getting up to then. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swing Shift Maisie (1943)

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We’ve met Maisie, seen her take a misguided detour on the Congo River, watched her riff on Grapes of Wrath and Knockout, get paired off with Red Skelton, and even be a proper lady. At last, in 1943, we get to see Maisie (Ann Sothern) join the war effort in a film that could alternately be titled Maisie the Riveter. We once again find our heroine at the foot of her Sisyphean mountain: broke, single, and working a lousy showbiz job. This time, she’s in a dog circus, although she gets let go from this when test pilot “Breezy” McLaughlin (James Craig) gets into an argument over the phone with his employer about Breezy’s voluntary enlistment in the air force. The repartee that follows Breezy and Maisie’s meet-cute leads her to decide she’s going to go get a job at Victory Air Co., declaring that “if [he] can fly planes, then brother [Maisie] can build ‘em.” 

Maisie hits a snag early on when she’s unable to present her birth certificate (“You can see I was born,” she says, “There’s not much doubt it was in Brooklyn”), but she convinces a man to perjure himself by swearing an affidavit that he’s known her all his life and can vouch for her citizenship. She also settles into a boarding house run by matronly Maw (Connie Gilchrist), where she meets former Abilene beauty queen Iris Reed (Jean Rogers) in the process of trying to suffocate herself with an open gas pipe after failing to find acting work. Maisie encourages Iris to get a job at Victory Air with her, and to leave her private room and share one with Maisie, to help her money stretch further. Iris agrees, and initially the two of them hit it off rather well, before Iris meets Breezy and begins to make designs to steal Maisie’s man. Before he’s sent out for training maneuvers, she’s succeeded, and the two of them confess to Maisie that they’re planning to wed. Maisie has no hard feelings, and even promises to look after Iris on Breezy’s behalf while he’s away, but this ends up proving more difficult than expected when it turns out Iris has no intention of remaining true to Breezy in his absence. 

Rogers plays Iris as a hell of a vamp, and having a true heel to play against makes for a very strong comedic outing this time around. Maisie’s attempts to keep Iris from wandering astray by trying to get her involved in several of the social clubs in the boarding house and the surrounding neighborhood make for a humorous, if not uproarious, montage. Iris has to be dragged away from the photography club because the teacher is a little too eager to take her into the darkroom for private instruction; Iris surreptitiously sneaks away from the lady’s singing club during a high note; Iris lies in order to leave a meeting of the virtuous wives and girlfriends’ club. When Maisie catches her in the last of these, Iris claims she’s simply going for more knitting wool, to which Maisie retorts, “To pull over whose eyes?” All of Maisie’s ministrations of morality come to naught, however. Iris’s consistent refusal to wear her safety scarf results in her hair getting caught in machinery, and when she explodes at the foreperson afterwards, she’s fired, but quickly accepts an offer from one of the men in the factory to let him pay for a room for her in his building. She makes sure to shake down Maisie one last time on the way out. 

When Maisie first talks to Iris about the factory job, there’s a bit of a to-do about Iris’s birth certificate, and at first I thought that this might be leading up to the revelation that Iris was a spy, which would have been a very bold direction for a Maisie picture to take. Instead, it comes back around in a different fashion, and puts Maisie in some of the worst real danger she’s been in. After a series of misunderstandings, including being caught slipping encouraging notes into the cockpits of planes she’s working on and being observed reuniting with some German expatriate acrobats of her acquaintance (and doing a poorly considered old routine with them), Iris decides to rid herself of the nuisance that is Maisie Ravier. When Breezy lets the girls know that he’s taking leave in order to come back and get married to Iris sooner than later, Iris throws up as many roadblocks between Maisie and Breezy as possible, including telling the authorities about Maisie’s forged affidavit letter in order to paint Maisie as an enemy infiltrator, which leads to her detention by the authorities. Maisie, caring more about making sure that Breezy doesn’t marry an unfaithful woman, falsely confesses to this in order to get the police to stop Breezy and Iris from leaving town by claiming that they are co-conspirators. 

I do think it would have been more fun if Iris had been a Nazi spy, but it’s still a blast to see Maisie with such a strong foil for once. Jean Rogers brings a bit of prestige to the piece, and her breathy, narcissistic performance as Iris is a delight. The elements of war pictures that you’re more likely to associate with the time—intrigue, pining women who long for the return of their brave soldiers, the duty of sacrifice—are pretty absent here. Instead, we get a bit of a propaganda piece about staying true to the men who are over there sticking blades in Nazi guts, with the audience of virtuous women seeing themselves represented on screen as steadfast and loyal, those who are too cowardly to break things off or are using the men for their own ends get to be told off by Maisie through an on-screen avatar, and our boys over there can rest assured that Maisie’s keeping their girls back home in line. It’s not as emotionally honest as, say, To Be or Not To Be or Trouble in Paradise, but it’s great to see Maisie really go toe-to-toe with someone who can hold their own against her. Definitely a top tier outing for our girl. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)

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May is getting far behind us, but in my heart, it’s still Maisie May. It’s once again time to check in with our favorite perpetually down-on-her-luck showgirl, Maisie Ravier. Not since Maisie has Ann Sothern shared equal billing with anyone (where she was, bizarrely, credited behind co-star Robert Young). This time, it’s presumably because her co-lead was an honest-to-goodness star. 

Maisie’s Sisyphean existence continues, in which she finds herself beginning every film in dire straits with no mention of her past loves or fortunes. This time, she’s the living target for a knife-throwing stage act, but when the great Professor Orco allows his recent break-up to influence how he feels about women and how careful he is with his act, nearly killing her, she once again finds herself pounding pavement. Maisie takes an offer from a man who operates a strange kind of boarding house. Like Gold Rush Maisie, Maisie Gets Her Man draws on then-current events, with a contemporary review of the film from The New York Times citing that the place Maisie finds herself is a “background that seems to have been suggested by A. J. Liebling’s Jollity Building series in the New Yorker.” (That A.J. Liebling was already writing pieces about boxing for the New Yorker which would eventually lead to the publication of The Sweet Science is also probably not a coincidence.) Pappy Goodring (Allen Jenkins) owns a building where he rents out office spaces, although many of them are also currently occupied by people who can’t afford real lodgings. Everyone there has fallen on hard times; basement cafe operator Jasper is hypervigilant about potential dining and dashing, Ears Coffin (Rags Ragland) is a former wrestler who has become a talent agent who couldn’t book St. Paul on TBN, and Pappy himself is staring down bankruptcy, in no small part because of his soft heart for his tenants and their hot checks. The operation gets a cash injection with the arrival of Marshall Denningham (Lloyd Corrigan), who has come to the city to market his new mineral water. 

You may have noticed that Red Skelton isn’t mentioned at all in that paragraph. Frankly, this movie would almost be better without him. Skelton plays Hap Hixby, a wannabe comedian who’s come to the city from the sticks to try and peddle his particular brand of annoying prop comedy. He and Maisie first meet each other in Ears Coffin’s office, and he’s extremely obnoxious right out of the gate. Maisie seems exasperated with him from the first scene that they share, which leads me to believe that he’s supposed to be unpleasant, but the comedy of that only works if a character is annoying to the other characters and funny to us in the audience, which Hap is decidedly not. Luckily, we only have to put up with this for a little while, since the first time that he actually goes on in front of an audience (with Maisie as his plant), he freezes with such stage fright that he drops most of his more exhausting bits for the rest of the film. After a bunch of rigmarole, Hap ends up as vice president of Denningham’s Sapphire River Tonic, and the success of the business means that Pappy is able to fend off the bankruptcy proceedings of his creditors, a process that is helped along by Maisie accidentally getting drunk with said creditor on Denningham’s Sparkling Tonic (which is just tap water and hard liquor) and giving him the old Maisie speech. 

She and Hap confess their love for one another, but the following morning, his fiance from back home arrives in Chicago, and Maisie once again leaves without saying goodbye. As with Maisie, she finds out later that her former beau has gotten himself into legal trouble, namely that Denningham’s con has been found out and that he had taken on Hap as his partner so that he could leave him behind to face the ramifications while he skipped town. Unlike last time this happened, however, she has a much more active role in the action. Having joined a traveling song and dance troupe, she finds Denningham in the midst of his next scam and is able to trick him into telling her all the details while she sends for the police. She next sees Hap when her group performs a USO-style revue at the camp where he’s enlisted, which is the first time that any of these films have alluded to WWII at all; she does a patriotic number entitled “Cooking with Gas,” and the end card encourages the audience to buy war bonds and stamps in that very theater. It’s a strange tonal dissonance that seems to come out of nowhere, but at least the music is lively and the film ends on an upbeat note. 

This film has some of my favorite Maisie-isms so far. When she manages to fend off an apoplectic Professor Orco, she commands the men who intervene to “Let him loose boys, so [she] can claim self-defense.” After Ringside Maisie’s lamentation asking what kind of stars must have been over Brooklyn when she was born, Maisie this time says that “They must have repealed the law of averages when [she] was born.” She’s able to really give it to Hap a few times, too, with my favorite line being “Go ahead and open it; they don’t mail summonses, honey.” Unfortunately, this does very little to counterbalance the extremely unfunny third of the film that features Red Skelton trying and failing to find the line between annoying to Maisie and annoying to the audience. As that aforementioned 1942 NYT review said it best: “Maisie, no doubt, will recover. She will dismiss her failure with a shrug, then brighten up for her next adventure. We like her, cheap tinsel and all. We hope she gets her break next time.”

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ringside Maisie (1941)

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Ringside Maisie is a film in one of my least favorite genres: a sports comedy. Despite this, it manages to be pretty good. Considering that most of the sports films that I do end up liking generally tend to be ones about boxing or martial arts (like Creed), I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise. 

Once again, Maisie Ravier is en route to another job, and she’s run out of money, which prompts her to be ejected from the train on which she has stowed away. Why she needs to work after falling in love with a rich bachelor who was ready to settle down at the end of Maisie Was a Lady is unknown, just as we never hear why she never went back to the Bar-O Ranch that she inherited at the end of Maisie, or if/why things didn’t work out with Slim, her love interest in that film. Walking along the tracks, Maisie gets picked up by a young boxer named Terry Dolan (Robert Sterling, Ann Sothern’s real-life husband), who takes her back to the training facility. Terry’s manager, “Skeets” Maguire (George Murphy), is immediately suspicious of Maisie, assuming that she’s an athlete chaser of some kind, but he softens to her as the two get to know one another better. Terry admits to Maisie that he and his girlfriend Cissy (Natalie Thompson) are currently lying to Terry’s mother (Margaret Moffatt) about Terry’s line of work. When Maisie is fired from her job as a dancer for refusing to put out for her boss, she finds work as Mrs. Dolan’s companion, which gives her more time to develop a fondness for Skeets. When she learns that Terry wants to quit boxing and open a grocery store like the one his father ran before they lost their savings, Maisie encourages him to tell Skeets, insisting that the manager will understand, but Skeets instead insists that Terry must finish out his contract. When his next bout results in Terry being blinded, perhaps permanently, Maisie once again delivers an impassioned speech that makes everything right. 

Despite this being the longest Maisie picture so far, clocking in at 95 minutes, there’s not much more substantial to say about this one than any of the others. That having been said, I enjoyed this one immensely. I didn’t really buy the budding romance between Maisie and Skeets (perhaps because she has, naturally, more chemistry with Terry), but I did like the sweet relationship that forms between Maisie and Mrs. Dolan. Maisie is a woman for whom her forthrightness is a virtue, and she can’t be relied upon to be dishonest for very long. I was also shocked by the late-in-the-film sudden change in Cissy, who had theretofore seemed like she really and truly loved Terry, but who was ready to ditch him immediately. Watching Maisie tear into her for her fairweather love was as fun as it was watching her give Skeets a talking-to about his treatment of Terry. The tension continues to build throughout, especially once a specialist is brought in from Boston to perform a hail mary operation on Terry to reduce the swelling in his brain and restore his eyesight, which has the most immediate stakes of any of these films. It’s a fun watch, perhaps second only to Maisie Was a Lady so far. Will this love between Maisie and Skeets last? I doubt it, given that the next film is titled Maisie Gets Her Man. We’ll find out together, next time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond