comedy

Deux Dupieux

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Keeping up with Quentin Dupieux is hard work, even as a fan.  The prankster Frenchman’s filmography is as prolific as it is silly, as he’s only surpassed in his routine creative output by Matt “The Madman” Farley.  Every time I review “the new Dupieux” for this site, he’s already released at least two more recent films on the Euro festival circuit, which will inevitably be followed by yet another new Dupieux before those achieve US distro.  So, while I am here to write about the two “new” Quentin Dupieux movies that arrived in America this year, I also have to acknowledge that his actual-latest film, The Second Act, has already premiered at Cannes and is still pending US release.  That’s three new features total since I reviewed Smoking Causes Coughing at last year’s Overlook Film Fest (and three more films than most aspiring directors will get to release in their lifetime).  The man is a machine that produces silly comedies at an alarming rate, like that haywire conveyor belt of chocolate treats that tormented Lucille Ball.  This must be how more serious critics feel about Hong Sang-soo.

The best of this year’s silly treats was the semi-biographical comedy Daaaaaalí!, in which Dupieux pays flippant homage to master surrealist Salvador Dalí.  The absurdly elongated title is in reference to how the multiple actors who portray Daaaaaalí pronounce their own name, often while bragging in third-person.  Dupieux is unafraid to poke fun at his artist-subject’s ludicrous ego and public misbehavior, likely because his own creative debt and reverence for Dalí is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated aloud.  The matter-of-fact surrealism of Dupieux’s humor already amounts to a career-long tribute to Dalí in its own way, so much so that the director finds it difficult to complete a film about the much more famous artist without feeling like a failure.  Daaaaaalí! is a loopy, prankish comedy about the impossibility of making a worthy, satisfying movie about Salvador Dalí.  Dupieux’s onscreen avatar is a young journalist who repeatedly attempts to film a full-length interview with Dalí but can never quite pull the fluff-piece documentary together, mostly due to whimsical sabotage from her subject.  Instead, Dupieux sends her down a labyrinth of circular-logic dreams, time-jumps, and actor swaps that make no linear narrative sense, attempting to match the audience-trolling humor of Dalí’s work at large while staging living-tableau recreations of specific Dalí paintings.  That way, Dupieux can’t disappoint himself in his homage to a personal, professional hero, since he openly admits defeat before the project starts in earnest.  With Daaaaaalí!, Dupieux combines the professional self-parody of Deerskin and the anything-goes-at-any-moment sketch comedy of Smoking Causes Coughing into a single, silly picture – finding a delightfully uneasy middle ground between his two career-best titles to date (assuming he hasn’t released an even better one since I started typing this paragraph).

Something I’ve noticed about Dupieux’s recent output is that his increasingly silly ideas for movies are outpacing his already hectic production schedule, so that recent works like Daaaaaalí! and Smoking Causes Coughing play more like sketch comedy revues than single-concept feature films.  That’s not the case with his recent title Yannick, though, which is an unusually focused & abrasive effort from the goofball auteur.  An all-in-one-night black comedy about a low-rent theatrical production that’s threatened at gunpoint by an audience member who doesn’t appreciate the show, Yannick finds Dupiuex holding his audience hostage and heckling us about our own grossest impulses in a single-location limbo.  The most interesting angle on it is trying to figure out if Dupieux considers himself one of us or one of the suffering artists who find it impossible to please us, mocking dissenters in his audience for making their personal criticisms loudly, publicly known to the detriment of fellow theatregoers who are quietly enjoying themselves.  There is some formal playfulness in how he shoots the players from the audience and the audience from the stage like two warring sides of a never-ending conflict, pontificating on how even a successful stage play is already a kind of hostage situation in reverse.  It’s just unclear whether his portrayal of the play’s titular heckler as a braying jackass is an insult to the audience’s intelligence or if he’s supposed to be a common-denominator mouthpiece voicing populist derision against needlessly pretentious, fussy art, which is something Dupieux might identify with as a man who’s dedicated his life’s work to being as silly as possible at all times.

If you’ve gotten used to Dupieux’s rapid-fire delivery of absurdly silly ideas in movies like Daaaaaalí!, the feature-length, single-idea fixation of Yannick can be a little tiresome, even at a mere 67 minutes of runtime.  It’s still interesting to decipher within the larger context of Dupieux’s career as a public figure, which is always what happens when you watch too many movies from a single director.  Out of context, Daaaaaalí! is likely still entertaining as a remarkably silly movie about a remarkably silly art-world icon, but the larger project of Dupieux’s career leads us to wonder where the director sees himself in the onscreen relationship between portraitist and subject.  That goes doubly for Yannick, where the most interesting piece of the puzzle is deciphering what our auteur du jour is attempting to communicate about the relationship between artist and audience.  It’s the same way that fellow Quentin’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is about Tarantino’s relationship with his industry, or the same way that every Matt Farley movie is now about the greater Matt Farley project, most recently exemplified in the self-parodic Local Legends: Bloodbath.  To be a Quentin Dupiuex fan is to be someone who routinely watches two or three of the silliest movies released all year in a single sitting and puzzling through what they’re saying about Art and The Artist.  Dupieux used to make movies like the killer-car-tire horror comedy Rubber about how nothing in life has any meaning or reason behind it; now he makes movies about what believing & embodying that ethos has done to his art and to the artist behind it.  I’m assuming he doesn’t have a solid answer to that personal quandary yet, since he he’s been making a lot of them.

-Brandon Ledet

Local Legends: Bloodbath! (2024)

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Despite his deliberately milquetoast appearance, Matt Farley is a man of extremes. I see both the best and the worst version of myself in the Massachusetts-based backyard filmmaker, whose tireless self-promotion as a self-published artist is simultaneously admirable and diabolical.  As the world’s foremost Matt Farley scholar, Matt Farley is fully aware of this extreme duality in his own creative & professional drive, nakedly confessing to it in his self-portrait series Local Legends.  The original Local Legends was a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a D.I.Y. artist, breaking down the exact economics of how he makes a living improvising the novelty pop songs that fund the projects he really cares about: sincere rock anthems & regional horror comedies.  That film’s sequel, Local Legends: Bloodbath!, is a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a manic narcissist, breaking down the tireless self-promotion routines Farley has to maintain every waking minute to keep his Motern Media brand afloat through sheer momentum – all to satisfy his insatiable ego.  As a pair, the Local Legends films portray Matt Farley as both an aspirational figure and a cautionary tale for self-published songwriters & filmmakers.  Yes, it is possible for the average person to dedicate their entire life to their creative pursuits, but the level of self-obsession required to make that work will transform them into a grotesque monster unworthy of an audience’s admiration.

Not much has changed since the “Matt Farley” of Local Legends broke down his business model & production schedule a decade ago.  Farley’s still cranking out thousands of improvised novelty songs and carefully composed, heartfelt ballads for anyone who’s curious to listen.  The only thing that’s changed, really, is his increased demands for attention & compliments, which has escalated to him renting out music venues on his own dime just so he can feed off his half-empty audience (or half-full audience, depending on your perspective) in real time.  That personal stagnation and professional doubling-down has apparently strained every relationship in Matt Farley’s life.  His wife, his bandmates, his filmmaking partner, and even his audience regulars just can’t seem to match Matt Farley’s enthusiasm for the “Matt Farley” project, abandoning him one by one as he falls further down the novelty-song rabbit hole.  This triggers the return of Matt’s crude businessman alter-ego from the first Local Legends, who arrives on the scene to “eliminate distractions” from his production schedule.  I don’t remember the Business Matt persona looking so much like Paulie Walnuts last time, but the new look makes it all the more disturbing to watch him strangle friends & family to death for slowing down the poop-themed novelty song recording sessions that pay the bills.  Then you remember that he, too, is Matt Farley, who hilariously brands himself as “The nicest guy in showbiz!” despite all the murders.

With Bloodbath!, Matt Farley finds a way to push Local Legends under the horror-comedy umbrella that covers the rest of his output, while maintaining the original’s confessional honesty.  This genre-shifting sequel is very funny as a barrage of self-contained inside jokes, but it’s also genuinely unnerving in its honesty about every artist’s bottomless self-obsession, regardless of success or prestige.  Some of the jokes are benefited by having been fully submerged in the Motern Media filmography, like Farley’s madness being represented in his increased consumption of “coffee milk” or his businessman persona shooting lighting out of his fingertips, à la Druid Gladiator Clone.  Most are Bloodbath!-specific, though, and only become funny through repetition.  By the fifth time Farley repeats inane phrases like “statement analysis” or “No good deed goes unpunished” or leads his half-empty/half-full audience through a sing-along encore of a song about house keys, the laughs are frequent and genuinely earned.  Anyone initially uneasy with the rudimentary imagery’s hideous day-for-night greys or blown-out white balance clipping is gradually rewarded by sticking it out for what Farley is always determined to deliver: funny jokes and good times shared with friends.  Like the best of Motern’s output, Bloodbath! does a great job of making you feel like you’re part of that inner-circle friend group, building its own inside jokes without requiring knowledge of extratextual material.  Still, it’s a work best paired with its less fanciful, more documentary original, since they combine to give you the full Matt Farley experience: the praiseworthy underdog artist and the exhausting, off-putting narcissist.

-Brandon Ledet

Rumours (2024)

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Before things go to hell for the characters of director Guy Maddin’s Rumours, one of them suggests that they get down to the business at hand, citing that the G7 Summit “isn’t a summer camp.” You wouldn’t know that from the way that the so-called leaders of the so-called free world behave. For the most part, they behave like a group of high schoolers assigned to work together on a project and treat the summit with exactly as much gravitas as—or perhaps even less than—an after-school club. These two hooked up last year and one of them wants to get to work on their group statement while the other is still unrequited; one guy is content to sit back and let others put in all the work; another person thinks that they’re doing inspired, powerful work when in fact his contributions are meaningless flim-flam; and there’s the one little weirdo who wants everyone to like him and has cured meats in his pocket. You had one of those at your high school, too, right? 

This year, Germany is hosting the conference, under the leadership of Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett). After a few photo ops, the seven adjourn to a gazebo to work on their joint statement about the never-expounded-upon “current crisis,” but not before they stop off to take a look at—and get a photo with—an archaeological discovery on the grounds of the castle at which the conference is taking place. It’s a “bog body,” mummified remains over two thousand years old. Owing to the unique composition of the soil, the flesh remains intact while the body’s bones have completely liquefied. It’s noted that the corpse has had its genitalia chopped off and hung around its neck, and this is specifically mentioned to be a punishment that ancient peoples of the area practiced in rebellion against weak, inept, or otherwise failed leaders. We learn that U.K. P.M. Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) slept with the supposedly charismatic Prime Minister of Canada Maxime LaPlace (Roy Dupuis) at a previous summit, although this time around, she simply wants to focus on the “work,” such as it is. Representing the U.S. is President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), a doddering, elderly man whose sleepiness, apathy, and exhaustion are attributes clearly mocking current White House occupying chickenshit Joe Biden. French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) is a vain, self-important man whose greatest desire is to be appreciated as a deep thinker by the others, while Italy’s P.M. Antonio “Tony” Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), for whom this is the first summit, finds easy acceptance among the others through his genuineness, although he comes across as naive as a result. Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takhiro Hira) is … also there. 

Maxime has an emotional outburst just as the gazebo dinner is finished, and the rest of the group pair off to brainstorm ideas for their statement while he stalks about the woods nearby, calming himself. President Wolcott tells P.M. Lamorte that it’s not worth working on, that no one takes these statements very seriously and that it’s fine to slack off a little, leading him to regaling the newcomer with exactly the kind of “good ol’ days” talks that geriatric politicians love to spout. Broulez and Iwasaki passionately discuss a potentially powerful opening statement, but we later learn their collaboration produced nothing but meaningless buzzwords amid wishy-washy ideology. Ortmann and Dewindt likewise make little progress, as each time one of them makes a statement that expresses any strong ideas, the other cautions for the need to walk this back so as to appear nonpartisan. Things take a turn for the worse when the regrouped seven realize that they are completely alone, and that no staff has appeared for some time. The nearby catering set-up is long vacant and the castle in which all their aides and staff should be is empty, quiet, and locked. From here, things get surreal and bizarre, as the seven try to find out what is happening and make their way back to so-called civilization despite their isolation. More bog bodies start popping up, potential pagan rites are performed and witnessed, there’s a giant brain in the woods, and an A.I. chatbot designed to entrap potential child predators may have gained sentience and decided to destroy mankind. 

If Rumours is only two things, it’s both funny … and toothless. One Gets The Point very early on, and that drum is beaten over and over again. Perhaps this obviousness is the point. After things have gotten very strange and dangerous, one of the characters comments on the potential of viewing each of the world leaders in attendance as a microcosm of their represented nation and that the events playing out before him is an allegory. Of course, this comes at a time when France is being hauled around in the woods in a wheelbarrow, revealing that the film’s Canadian director may have little respect for the boot-shaped nation. That observation doesn’t hold up, however, and this might have been a stronger film if it had gone fully allegorical and used the summit as an opportunity to play out personified international relations, but that’s not what Maddin is aiming to do. What was advertised as a satire is more of a farce. It’s funny that, upon viewing a photo of the hatchback sized brain that Maxime discovered in the woods, three of the male delegates comment that it must be a woman’s giant brain because “it’s smaller than a man’s giant brain would be,” despite this being a completely novel event. We’re meant to laugh at the inherent sexism of the patriarchy, and we do, but it has no bite to it. Characters behave like they’ve reunited for, as noted above, a summer camp getaway, with special attention being paid to everyone being sad that this is likely Maxime’s last summer at camp with them; he’s facing legal trouble for an utterly (and realistically) banal monetary scandal. Tonally, it’s like he’s being punished by his parents and not being allowed to come back next year, and the rest of the leaders treat his serious legal trouble (which is legitimately unethical) with the frivolous dismissal of the kind of low-level mischief that might cause a kid to be grounded from going to camp. 

The comedy works, but ironically, its aim is as broad and meaningless as we are meant to find the film’s characters’ lukewarm politics to be. Again, that may be the point, but that justification doesn’t move the barometer for how much I like the piece in a positive direction. When the humor works best is when it plays a little dirtier. Maxime gets a text message, supposedly from a girl named Victoria, and Dewindt tells him that he may be chatting with an A.I. chatbot that was created in order to ensnare pedophiles by messaging potential sex criminals, citing that people in their positions of power are statistically more likely to be sex pests. Hilda suggests that they play into the scenario, as if they “trip the alarm,” so to speak, the authorities will trace the phone, and they can use this to be rescued. However, on the off chance that they may be speaking with a real child in need of help, they must also play down the creep factor to avoid psychologically harming Victoria. This observation about the frequency with which power overlaps with sexual abuse is one of the only times that the film is really cutting, taking aim not just at the facile nature of empire and its pageantry but at the seductive and corrupting nature of invisibility and immunity. That this leads into a good running gag in which the group must brainstorm messages that are creepy and gross (but not too creepy and gross) seems almost indicative of the fact that if the film leaned harder into the satire and less into the farce, the jokes would land with more punch. 

This isn’t really the kind of film that you can spoil, but this film does end in an apocalypse. There’s a big stew of what might be happening: the bog bodies rise from the earth as (compulsively masturbating) reanimated undead, with the implication that there might be something primal and supernatural at work; “Victoria” may have gained sentience and masterminded a cleansing of the earth in order to start anew; the big brain in the woods and its psychic effect on those around it may be related to the latter or could be another concurrent apocalyptic scenario. It doesn’t really matter if these are connected or not, as the group makes its way back to the castle and, covering themselves in the reflective silver emergency blankets that they find in their G7 gift bags, prepare to give their joint statement. Maxime, using scissors and tape, rejects a statement that “Victoria” has created and covers it with excerpts from the various things that different characters have managed to scribble down over the course of the movie. There’s Biden’s Wolcott’s sleep-talking nonsense about “need[ing] a slip to go to the sleep tank,” dutifully transcribed by Lamorte. There’s sections from another character’s ramblings that begin with a metaphor of marriage for international relations before devolving into a revealing glimpse at an attempt to negotiate for non-sexual physical intimacy with a disengaged partner. Throughout the film, characters express reverence for previous G7 Summits and the “powerful” declarations thereof, citing passages that are perhaps pleasing to the ear but ultimately hollow. As the film ends, they stand on a balcony to make their address to an empty lawn, their blankets reflect an orange sky and distant pillars of smoke, making the mirrored surface look more like translucent plastic that contains nothing of substance. The statement is delivered with gusto but signifies nothing, their drama observed only by the undead, one of whom seems to be mocking them by masturbating over their self-congratulatory nonsense. 

The film is a decent success as a comedy, although it lacks the unusually-expressed but nonetheless palpable sentiment that makes something like My Winnipeg work. I’d call it a cynical meanness, but it’s not nearly cynical or mean enough. As a result, it’s not a success as a satire. You’ll laugh, but it’s unlikely to stick with you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

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Memoir of a Snail is a new stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of 2009’s Mary & Max: a stop-motion dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness.  It’s also the best movie I saw at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was met with waves of warm laughter and audible wincing from a packed audience (whereas Mary & Max played to mostly empty theaters when it went into wide release 15 years ago).  I’m really into what Adam Elliot’s doing.  He’s got a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to his work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt.  Thankfully, this time Elliot borrows a little Jean-Pierre Juenet whimsy to help cut the bitterness of that despair, but it’s not an entirely convincing affirmation about life’s silver linings. Even though he ends his morbid tale of lifelong sibling suffering on an unexpected happy note, he’s still the living personification of the “Do you think a depressed person make this?” gag from Parks & Rec.  Elliot makes sad little tableaus about lonely shut-ins for a sad little audience of lonely shut-ins . . . Then you see all the celebrity vocal performance credits in the concluding scroll (Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanksi, Nick Cave, etc.) and assume he’s gotta be doing somewhat alright.

Memoir of a Snail is a story told to a snail by an adult woman dressed as a snail.  Continuing the epistolary format of Mary & Max, Grace Pudel (Snook) recounts her entire life’s journey to her favorite pet mollusk (Sylvia, after Sylvia Plath), occasionally pausing to recite letters written by loved ones – namely, her estranged brother Gilbert (Smit-McPhee) and her geriatric bestie Pinky (Jacki Weaver).  All three are lonely souls who’ve had a real tough time of it, having lived lives defined by tragic isolation from family, depressive bouts of self-hatred, and cruel bullying from small-minded townies.  Grace has found joy only in those two remaining members of her family, and most of her life since being orphaned as a child has been a struggle to restore that family unit in a single location.  The struggle is mostly inward, but it’s externally marked by Grace’s obsessive collection of snail-themed clutter.  She lives alone and gradually turns her small-town home into a shrine to all things snails, carpeting the floors, walls, and shelves with snails & snaily tchotchkes, burying herself under the weight of a singular personal obsession instead of reaching out for genuine human contact.  She even costumes herself as a snail in her everyday dress, signaling to the world that she’d rather find safety in her own shell than be vulnerable to the worst of humanity.

Adam Elliot admits to the audience that he sees a part of himself in Grace Pudel by making her great ambition in life to become a stop-motion animator.  The gamble there is hoping the audience will see ourselves in Grace Pudel too, which is a pretty solid bet if you’re sitting inside watching stop-motion cartoons about loneliness at a film festival instead of enjoying the crisp Fall weather outside.  Elliot throws a lot of cruelty at us, including especially vicious sequences involving gay bashing and nonconsensual force-feeding fetishism.  If you’re the kind of shut-in sad sack who occasionally grumbles “Goddamn life!” to yourself at your lowest moments, though, there’s plenty humor to be found in Grace’s never-ending misfortunes, like when her adoptive parents find more joy in swinger culture than being around her or when her brothers’ adoptive religious-nut parents speak in tongues like cattle auctioneers during prayer.  There’s a kind of classic Tim Burton sentimentality to Memoir of a Snail that acknowledges how miserable life can be for social outsiders while celebrating those outsiders for their eccentricities.  Elliot is eager to illustrate monstrous, unforgivable human behavior at every turn, but he just as often underlines the survival need for human touch & companionship.  While Grace’s constant search for silver linings might read as sad & desperate, she does always find them.

-Brandon Ledet

Fresh Kill (1994)

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Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang has never stopped making experimental cinema since she first made a splash on the 1990s New York indie scene.  You just wouldn’t know it based on the scope of her reputation & distribution.  Just last year, Cheang directed a video game-inspired animated sequel to her early-2000s cyberpunk porno I.K.U., the very first pornographic film to screen at Sundance.  That kind of provocation should be making indie publication headlines, but she doesn’t get the same festival-coverage attention as other post-cinema shockteurs like Gaspar Noe or Harmony Korine.  At least, she hasn’t since her 1994 breakout Fresh Kill, which got positive reviews out of TIFF and has lived on as an early-internet cult classic, reaching Cheang’s widest audience to date.  Even so, it’s a challenging work with niche appeal, and as far as I can tell it never landed any form of official distribution on tape, disc, or streaming.  Smartly, Cheang is currently taking a break from continuing to push her art in current work to instead return to that early-career triumph, touring the country with newly restored 35mm prints of Fresh Kill for a 30th Anniversary victory lap.  The only legal way to watch the film in 2024 is to meet Cheang herself at the cinema, so that you can see with your own eyes that she is still active, engaged, and ready to share her Digital Age outsider art with the public.

The title “Fresh Kill” refers to a massive landfill that was located near Staten Island when Cheang made the film in the early 90s but has since closed.  At the time, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, which Cheang extrapolates to imagine a world that’s all one big landfill where half the waste is televised media babble.  The movie has characters and events but no real narrative to speak of.  It’s mostly a simulation of channel-surfing through our post-modern apocalypse, sandwiched between hipster lesbian hackers and dipshit Wall Street bros on the couch.  The lesbian couple get by salvaging and reselling junk from the landfill and working waitress shifts at an upscale sushi restaurant.  They go from politically aware to politically active when their daughter eats a can of contaminated fish from the evil, global GX Corporation, which causes her to glow green and then mysteriously disappear.  In retaliation, they recruit fellow sushi shop employees to hack GX’s databases over dial-up connection and expose their food-supply pollution to the world via public access TV editorials (in one of the earliest onscreen depictions of “hacktivism”).  The Wall Street bros are also poisoned with GX’s green-glow pollution via their trendy love of sushi, but they react in a different way; they try to rebrand as eco-friendly businessmen so they can make a quick profit off the public’s newfound interest in environmentalism (in an early onscreen depictions of corporate “greenwashing”).

One of the first images in Fresh Kill is a TV art-installation piece erected at the titular landfill – a wall of cathode-ray screens that seemingly only receive broadcasts of infomercials and public access call-in shows.  It’s easy to reimagine the entire film as a video-art installation piece, as its narrative doesn’t progress so much as it alternates perspectives.  The central couple’s home & sex life vaguely adheres to typical 90s indie drama structure, but it’s frequently interrupted by nonsense chatter from the sushi restaurant that keeps their lights on as well as the TV broadcasts that keep them addled, including friendly, heartfelt commercials from GX.  There’s a total breakdown of language across these alternating, post-modern windows into 1990s NYC living, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups experiments and subsequent declarations that “Language is a virus from outer space.”  Lizzie Borden’s no-wave classic Born in Flames took a similarly kaleidoscopic approach in its editing, and I was happy to hear Cheang mention it is a contemporary work in her post-film Q&A.  Fresh Kill is just as politically enraged as Born in Flames, but it’s also not nearly as serious, allowing its characters to goof off in go-nowhere skits about lipsticked fish lips, orgasmic accordionists, and supermarket dance parties without worrying about diluting the seriousness of its messaging.  Cheang tries something new every scene, confident that it’ll all amount to something meaningful when considered in total.

The political activism angle of Fresh Kill made it a no-brainer programming choice for Patois Film Fest, who thankfully booked a Shu Lea Cheang tour stop in New Orleans.  The venue choice of The Broad makes a little less sense, since they do not have the capability to project celluloid like The Prytania.  The newly restored print of the film was shown as a digital scan, then, which occasionally led to unintended freezing as the laptop struggled to process the video file without lag.  It was a fitting format choice in its own way, though, since the miscommunication of the machinery projecting the film matched the miscommunication of the multicultural characters who all speak in different languages and idioms throughout, often simultaneously.  Fresh Kill imagines a world overwhelmed by waste.  A lot of that waste is physical but just as much is cultural, calling into question what value there could possibly be in filling our world and brains with so much disposable media & jargon.  Since Cheang has since gone on to experiment with the visual textures of pornography & video games, I have to assume it’s a question that’s continued to occupy her own mind, and I’d love to see the result of that tinkering.  Hopefully this victory-lap restoration of Fresh Kill will lead to those works being more accessible for people who missed their festival runs, like the recent Criterion box sets celebrating the similarly overlooked, underdistributed, politically furious films of Greg Araki & Marlon Riggs.

-Brandon Ledet

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

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Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes? 

Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie. 

I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity. 

You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wicked Little Letters (2024)

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They may not be respected as taste-arbiters or as models of good theater etiquette, but the elderly moviegoers of America are the core customer base that keep cinemas running.  While movie studios are flailing in their courtship of a teenage audience that would rather be playing videogames or watching influencer ads at home, the Senior Discount crowd is keeping the industry afloat with only minimal pandering.  Every local film fest, repertory series, and daytime matinee in the nation owes a significant chunk of its cashflow to geriatric retirees, who generally have a much more adventurous approach to art-film programming than younger audiences, who tend to save their trips to the cinema for major Event Films instead of taking a chance on whatever happens to be out from week to week.  It’s a shame, then, that most movies that are cynically marketed to the 65+ age demographic are so … safe, so toothless.  Senior Citizen Comedies like Book Club and 80 for Brady mostly function as feature-length advertisements (for 50 Shades of Gray and the NFL, respectively), relying on the excess charm of their all-star casts without actually giving those actors much to do.  There’s a hint towards sexual naughtiness in their playfully saucy humor, but the movies are afraid to follow through on anything genuinely risqué, in fear of offending or alienating the morals of its target audience.  They take their customers’ attendance & amusement for granted.

Within that context, Wicked Little Letters is essentially a John Waters comedy for the senior set.  A 1920s period piece about women’s changing roles in public life post-WWI, it looks & feels like a routine BBC Films production that packs cinemas for weeks without ever attracting a single attendee under 30.  It doesn’t sound like those movies, though, since its dialogue features long strings of profane, nonsensical insults referring to various characters as “mangy old titless turnips”, “bloody fucking old saggy sacks of chicken piss”, and “fucking old steaming bags of wet leaking shit.”  I know Mrs. Harris was met with an icy response when she went to Paris, but I don’t remember it being that extreme.  Wicked Little Letters is about a pre-Internet shitposting campaign in which a not-so-mysterious letter writer bombards her otherwise wholesome British community with handwritten outbursts of extreme profanity.  Set against the backdrop of women “losing their decorum” after taking on traditionally masculine roles in public life during the war, it’s a comedic overcorrection wherein one especially peculiar woman takes a little too much delight in being able to express herself through cuss for the first time in her pious life.  It played very funny at home, but I imagine its pottymouth punchlines got even bigger laughs in the theater among its target demographic, considering the uproarious response to Mr. Molesley laying out the wrong silverware or whatever in the Downtown Abbey movies.  Its biggest swing is that it does not baby its very much grown-up audience, which is a rarity in this style of comedy.

As a gumshoe mystery and subsequent courtroom drama, Wicked Little Letters is less of a whodunnit than it is a howcatchem.  Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley star as next-door neighbors with unlikely mutual admiration.  Buckley is a loudmouth, hard-drinking Irish lass who says & does exactly what she wants at all times, unburdened by any filters of ladylike public behavior.  Colman is Buckley’s older, more socially restrained frenemy, mostly as a result of the strictly religious, emotionally abusive oppression of her father (Timothy Spall).  Colman is also the sole recipient of the first barrage of pottymouth hate mail, which is immediately blamed on Buckley, given her public disregard for decorum.  Unconvinced that a woman that brazen would hide behind the anonymity of a pen, a local policewoman (Ladyparts guitarist Anjana Vasan) launches an off-the-books investigation of who’s really behind the transgression, which quickly escalates beyond a neighborly spat to instead terrorize an entire community.  It’s immediately obvious who is guilty, and a lot of the early comedic tension is in watching her barely contained amusement with her own naughtiness give herself away.  The fun of the investigation is in watching a small group of women join the effort to expose the truth and vindicate their foul-mouth lush of a friend.  Like with John Waters’s classic suburban invasion comedies, the movie pits the hypocrisy of the upstanding Christian majority against the winning charm of “queers and drunkards” in the court of public opinion and declares a clear, populist victor.  It’s delightful.

Of course, you won’t find any singing buttholes, cannibalized cops, or drag queens eating dog shit in Wicked Little Letters.  All of its naughty profanity is purely verbal, but when contrasted against the typically safe, toothless comedies of manners in this milieu, it’s more than enough to earn its laughs.  I’m sure the real-life gossip column story that inspired the movie is much grimmer & more complicated than how it’s presented onscreen, but I don’t know that there’s any way to depict morally uptight Brits reading the words “You’re a sad stinky bitch” without inviting an audience to laugh.  This audience deserves that laugh, too.  They’ve been drawn to the theater with the promise of naughty, risqué comedies so many times that it’s nice one finally decided to deliver the goods. 

-Brandon Ledet

But I’m a Bootlegger

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1999 was an incredible year for the high school comedy.  It was the year of Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 Things I Hate About You, Drive Me Crazy, Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, Election, and the lesbian conversion-therapy satire But I’m a Cheerleader.  Only, I didn’t immediately see But I’m a Cheerleader the year it was released, nor did I find a copy at my local video store in the years that followed.  Jamie Babbit’s calling-card comedy was just as revered as its better-distributed contemporaries among my friends in the early aughts, but as someone who relied on the limited, sanitized selection of the Meraux branch of Blockbuster Video in those days, it just never made its way into my bedroom VCR.  So, But I’m a Cheerleader fell under a distinctly 90s category of movies that I saw for the first time after listening to their CD soundtracks for years.  See also: Clueless, Romeo+Juliet, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; all bangers.  I eventually fell in love with the candy-coated production design and post-John Waters queer irreverence of the film proper when I finally had access to it on DVD in the 2010s, but it already occupied a pastel-painted corner of my mind by then thanks to the familiar sounds of Dressy Bessy, Wanda Jackson, and soundtrack-MVP April March (whose anglicized cover of “Chick Habit” fully conveys the movie’s tone & aesthetic before you’ve made it through the opening credits).

Imagine my shock, then, to recently learn that But I’m a Cheerleader never had an official soundtrack release.  To me, its pop music soundscape is just as iconic as any teen movies’ you could name – Fast Times, Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, whatever.  And yet, there was apparently no legal way to access that soundtrack outside watching the movie start to end, straining to hear the songs past the spoken dialogue and VHS tape hiss.  In retrospect, the copy of the soundtrack I owned in high school must have been a burned CD traded with a friend, which was some truly heroic mixtape work that I never fully appreciated until now.  Come to think of it, I remember that CD having more April March tracks than the one that’s actually associated with the film, so I’m not even fully sure what was on it anymore.  It was a one-of-a-kind bootleg put together by an obsessive fan who was frustrated that they couldn’t access an official release, passed around as an act of public service thanks to the modern miracle of the CD-R drive. It may not have been accurate to the track list of the songs as they were sequenced in the film, but it was accurate enough to the cheeky humor, swooning romance, and cult enthusiasm of But I’m a Cheerleader that it kept the movie fresh in my mind for as long as it took to find it.  It’s yet another reminder “bootlegger” is just a dirty word for D.I.Y. archivist.

I didn’t know about this outrageous distribution oversight until a recent screening of But I’m a Cheerleader at a neighborhood bar, hosted by Future Shock Video.  A kind of bootleg revival of the vintage video store experience, Future Shock has been screening VHS-era classics around the city in recent months, mostly to promote the opening of their new weekends-only storefront.  This particular screening was a special one, though.  As a Pride Month event and a fundraiser for the Covenant House homeless shelter, Future Shock not only projected But I’m a Cheerleader for a packed barroom, but they also dubbed a small batch of unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtracks on audio cassette.  By now, the movie itself has unquestionably been canonized among the Queer Cinema greats, but I was still delighted that the event was designed as a celebration of its all-timer of a soundtrack in particular.  I was also shocked to learn that the practice of distributing that soundtrack has always been a mixtape-only endeavor, when it should have been in just as many record stores as the official tie-in soundtracks for Clueless or Can’t Hardly Wait.  It turns out that passing around copies of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack was just as much of a public service in the early 2000s as it is now in the mid-2020s.  My Sharpie-labeled CD copy then was not as pretty as the cassette I picked up the other night, though, so I’m including pictures of Future Shock’s version below.

It’s not too late for an official release of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack.  If anything, the time is ripe.  Not only is the film more widely seen and beloved than ever, but its exclusivity as a first-time release would also play directly into physical media obsessives’ debilitating FOMO.  I just watched a bar full of young, queer movie nerds crowd around a humble tripod projector screen to watch this movie with their friends on a Wednesday night; there’s an audience for it.  Until that historical wrong is corrected and the soundtrack receives its first official release, all you can really do is make your own mixtape version based on the track list compiled below.  That can be a little tricky for the more independent artists on the soundtrack like Tattle Tale, who do not have the same far-reaching distribution as a Wanda Jackson or a RuPaul.  Speaking from experience, though, you could probably just sub out a similar-sounding track from the Tattle Tale-adjacent act Bonfire Madigan and no one would really know the difference.  Thankfully, Future Shock did not cut any corners in their own unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack, but it would have been okay if they did. The off-brand, inaccurate version I had on CD in high school still did the trick.

  1. “Chick Habit (Laisse tomber les filles)” by April March
  2. “Just Like Henry” by Dressy Bessy
  3. “If You Should Try and Kiss Her” by Dressy Bessy
  4. “Trailer Song” by Sissy Bar
  5. “All or Nothing” by Miisa
  6. “We’re in the City” by Saint Etienne
  7. “The Swisher” by Summer’s Eve
  8. “Funnel of Love” by Wanda Jackson
  9. “Ray of Sunshine” by Go Sailor
  10. “Glass Vase Cello Case” by Tattle Tale
  11. “Party Train” by RuPaul
  12. “Evening in Paris” Lois Maffeo
  13. “Together Forever in Love” by Go Sailor

-Brandon Ledet

The Sweetest Thing (2002)

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The Sweetest Thing is a major-studio comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a lovelorn socialite who’s become disenchanted with the nightclub hookup scene.  Having matured to the point where she’s ready to seek Mr. Right instead of Mr. Right Now, she drops everything going on in her busy life to crash a wedding in the suburbs where she knows she’ll run into Thomas Jane, the kind of cute guy whom she would normally bed & ghost instead of genuinely getting to know.  She’s joined on this impulsive road trip by her high-powered businesswoman bestie, Christina Applegate, who gently pushes Diaz out of her comfort zone as she gives being romantically vulnerable a shot for the first time in her life.  Meanwhile, they both support their good mutual friend, Selma Blair, as she recovers from a recent traumatic breakup by letting loose with a few low-stakes, short-term flings for comic relief.  It’s a story of three self-determined women supporting each other through the final years of their twenties in the cutthroat world of San Francisco dating.  Heck, they might even find true love along the way.

That plot description fits the version of The Sweetest Thing sold in its contemporary trailers & advertising: a cookie-cutter romcom the whole girl squad can enjoy.  It’s also technically accurate to the events of the story told in the film itself, and yet it is still a lie.  Many gaggles of gal pals were deceived by it in the dark days of 2002, when they lined up for a wholesome Girls Night Out and were instead taken on a road trip through the dankest pits of Hell.  The Sweetest Thing imagines an alternate reality where Romy & Michele are evil, high-functioning, and lethally overdosed on episodes of Sex and the City.  Diaz & Applegate play deeply awful people – the most selfish, morally repugnant women to ever disgrace a martini bar.  Blair plays a dead-eyed hedonist who continually stumbles into Rube Goldbergian sexual scenarios that expose her private bedroom indulgences to the wider San Francisco public, including nearby priests & schoolchildren.  By the time her luckier-in-love besties tease her by playing keep-away with her cum-stained laundry on a city sidewalk, it’s clear what kind of romcom this truly is: a demonic one.  Funny too.

While The Sweetest Thing may look like a classic Hollywood romcom from a safe distance, up close it’s clearly rooted in the tragically chintzy days of the post-9/11 2000s. It does not shy away from potential association with the most prominent “Women get horny too” media of its era, Sex and the City; it even opens with man-on-the-street interviews about Diaz’s heartbreaker behavior with her previous sexual partners, a device heavily relied on in early seasons of that landmark HBO sitcom.  There’s a lingering Farrelly Brothers stench to its over-the-top raunch, however, which includes gags involving exploding urinals, maggoty backseat leftovers, and an ocular glory hole injury everyone sees coming except the woman who suffers it.  Even just the casting of Cameron Diaz alone feels like a nod to that Something About Mary tradition of mainstream raunch, which brought a hetero brand of John Waters gross-out humor to the corporate multiplex.  The “Unrated” DVD version of the film also includes an impromptu electroclash flash mob, wherein our three hedonistic heroines lead an entire restaurant of strangers in an extended dance number about the joys of giant cocks.  What a trashy time to be alive.

Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble brings little of note to the table here besides his working relationship with Selma Blair, apparently having gotten at least two all-timer comedic performances out of her to date.  If you want an auteurist read on The Sweetest Thing, you have to look to screenwriter Nancy Pimental instead, whose credits mostly consist of TV episodes for bad-taste comedies like Shameless, The Mick and, most importantly in this context, early seasons of South Park.  Critics, audiences, studio execs, and advertisers all seemed baffled by what Pimental was up to in her big-screen debut, but she was clear-eyed in her mission.  She wanted to make a girly version of the kinds of gross-out, reprehensible comedies that boys got to make all the time, dressed up in the surface aesthetic markers of the safer, sanitized material that’s more routinely marketed to women.  The biggest tip-off of her self-awareness is in the requisite dress-up montage before the climactic wedding-crash, in which Diaz & Applegate try on costumes from popular Hollywood comedies of previous decades.  When they dress up as characters from Pretty Woman, Grease, and Desperately Seeking Susan, they’re giving studio executives exactly what Pimental was contracted to deliver.  When they dress up in the pastel tuxedos from Dumb & Dumber, Pimental is signaling something entirely different to the audience.  She wanted to make something chaotic, evil and, above all else, dumb.  She succeeded greatly, and it’s a shame she hasn’t been given this much room to play around with genre expectations since.

-Brandon Ledet

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam (1985)

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Much like nu-metal, Crocs, and exposed-thong whale tail, it appears that VHS tapes are hip again.  There’s already been widespread aesthetic nostalgia for the tape-warp wear & tear of vintage VHS tapes in horror cinema from the past decade or so, as evidenced in titles like Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special, Rent-a-Pal, Beyond the Gates, Censor, V/H/S, and VHYes.  But now I’m starting to see more appreciation for the physical tapes themselves, not just digital simulation of their degradation.  Soon after the old-school video store Future Shock opened in Mid-City, renting both VHS tapes and VCR players, I attended an unrelated screening of the classic 1987 slasher The Stepfather at The Mudlark Theatre, projected from VHS to a hanging bedsheet.  At the start of the movie, the audience warmly chuckled at the tape’s brief tracking issues and the projector’s struggle to calibrate its fuzzy image quality, but that attention to format eventually gave way to sincere tension & unease.  It was a genuine 1990s sleepover atmosphere, as if we had snuck an R-rated movie past our sleeping parents.  It was also very likely the first time I’ve watched a movie on VHS in almost a decade (specifically, since we covered Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month in 2015), since that’s around the time I gave away my VCRs because they all kept eating my tapes.

You don’t have to go to bootleg repertory screenings at Marigny puppet theatres to get in on the VHS nostalgia wave, though.  While the collection & exhibition of physical VHS tapes is the domain of only a few true sickos, plenty movie nerds are exposed to VHS scans on a regular basis without intentionally looking for them.  Anyone who regularly spends time searching YouTube, Tubi, Archive.org, and thrift-store DVD stacks for cheap-access cinema has been subjected to a deluge of sub-professional digi scans of VHS tapes, which are just as rampant now in the golden age of boutique Blu-ray restorations as they ever have been.  Consider the curious case of Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a 1985 comedy that had an initial theatrical release on celluloid, but is unavailable for streaming in HD.  All official, legal uploads of the film to sites like Tubi, Freevee, and PlutoTV are the same scan of a vintage VHS cassette, since the film was a much bigger hit as a video store rental than it was as a theatrical release.  That’s likely because the VHS cover dared to advertise the appearance of the popular character Ernest P. Worrell, despite the fact that his last-minute inclusion in the film is essentially a celebrity cameo.  In theaters, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam was an anonymous, immediately forgotten comedy starring some nobody named Jim Varney.  In video stores, it lingered on the shelves for years, boosted its official branding as An Ernest Movie.  Even now, it’s still a kind of VHS rental, just one that’s untethered from a physical presence.

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam officially marks the first big-screen appearance of Ernest P. Worrell, the fast-talking Southern fool who’s always mugging directly to the camera and addressing the audience as his good friend “Vern”.  Before he was camping, slam-dunking, saving Christmas, going to jail, and getting scared stupid in his career-making star vehicles, Ernest was a recurring character in a series of 1980s television commercials directed by John Cherry, starring rubber-faced comedian Jim Varney.  Cherry (from Nashville) & Varney (from Kentucky) mostly sold their Ernest ads to the Louisiana & Mississippi at first, but the popularity of the character spread wide enough nationally that they figured they could cash in with a legitimate feature film.  Ernest was only one of Varney’s many stock characters, though; longtime Varney Heads will surely recall fellow ad-break mainstay Auntie Nelda, Varney’s old-biddy drag act with a perpetually sprained neck.  Instead of capitalizing on the popularity of Ernest in particular, Cherry & Varney chose to use The Riddle of the Gloom Beam as a showcase for every character Varney had in his comedic repertoire, giving the actor room to test-run a bunch of vague, go-nowhere archetypes like Evil German Scientist, Australian Militia Maniac, Filthy Pirate, and Literal Trash Monster, along with playing the hits.  It’s less comedically specific than the official Ernest movies as a result, working more like a sketch comedy revue than a feature film.

The titular Dr. Otto is, of course, a Varney creation: a broad mad-scientist character costumed with a living human hand for a hat.  The evil lair where he regularly attempts world domination looks like what might happen if Rita Repulsa couldn’t afford to pay the light bill, but it’s lavishly decorated with a wide range of evildoer machines that don’t do any evil thing in particular except light up & smoke.  His first plan of attack is fairly agreeable, using his “gloom beam” machine to erase all official records of debt, throwing banks & credit card companies into chaos, to the point where CEOs are putting revolvers in their mouths onscreen in what’s ostensibly a children’s film.  Later, he threatens to use the gloom beam to kill all the world’s first-born children like a Biblical plague, but let’s not focus too much on that plot point.  Instead, let’s all boo & hiss at the hero that the banks & government nominate to take Dr. Otto down: a square-jawed American patriot named Lance Sterling (Myke Mueller), Dr. Otto’s childhood rival.  In flashback, we witness the disturbing difference between Lance’s privileged, WASPy upbringing and Dr. Otto’s miserable life in the gutter, which only encourages us to root for the mad scientist as he seeks revenge on the planet.  That’s what makes it okay to cheer on the many disguises he takes in the present—including crowd favorites Ernest & Nelda—as they do objectively evil things to prevent the squeaky-clean hero from saving the day.

None of the individual jokes or visual gags in The Riddle of the Gloom Beam are especially funny, but the movie is charming anyway.  It’s high-energy, low-budget independent filmmaking, making up for a lot of the dead air between failed bits with aggressive music-video editing tactics and handmade arts & crafts ingenuity.  It’s also incredibly dark considering the average age of its target audience.  If nothing else, it’s got to be the only children’s film I’ve ever seen include a minutes-long Deer Hunter parody, making for two visual references to suicide by gun.  When I was a kid, television and the video store were cultural democratizers.  Jim Carrey & Robin Williams may have had more legitimate, widespread distribution in brick & mortar movie theaters, but Varney was their professional equal in my mind at the time, thanks to then-lifelong exposure to Ernest ads & videos in the Southern market where he hit heaviest.  If The Riddle of the Gloom Beam had any chance of earning cult-classic status, it would’ve needed a lot more Ernest content instead of flooding the screen with Varney’s lesser-known comedic personae (despite those characters’ later appearances on his short-lived CBS sketch show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!).  Cherry & Varney soon figured that out in better-remembered titles like Ernest Goes to Jail & Ernest Scared Stupid, which have a much more distinct comedic personality than this early outing even if they don’t match its creative, try-anything energy.  Thus, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam is the exact kind of title that belongs on VHS; it would feel sacrilegious to watch it in any updated format, since it’s such a relic of its era.  And in a way, that makes Tubi just as hip and plugged-in to The Moment as your local underground video stores and D.I.Y. neighborhood rep screenings (as long as you politely ignore the fact that the company is owned by Rupert Murdoch).

-Brandon Ledet