dark comedy

Eddington (2025)

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I remember when the first reviews of Beau is Afraid were coming out, one of the earliest reports were of someone who stood up as the credits rolled and shouted, “I better not hear any fucking clapping!” I saw that movie by myself on a Saturday morning because I love a pre-noon matinee, but this time, I went to see Eddington with a group of friends. One friend left the theater for two extended periods of time, and I assumed that they weren’t feeling well until, standing outside after the 145-minute runtime had come to its conclusion, they expressed righteous indignation over the movie’s pace and momentum. Another friend stated that they also felt the film was overlong, especially its final act, and said he would rank it 3.5 stars. I was a little too tired to get into it that night, but I thought this one was great. It’s not as exceptional as Ari Aster’s previous work, but it’s just as confident and feels like a return to his more conceptually focused first couple of films. 

The film opens in May of 2020, and we learn a lot about Eddington, New Mexico fairly quickly. As the town’s resident vagrant (an unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) approaches from the desert, we see that it’s not very large, maybe sixteen square blocks, and we learn later that a lot of what we do see is unoccupied. Just outside of town is the potential site for a new AI data center, the construction of which (and the accompanying “job creation”) are a center of the platform for Eddington mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for re-election. Garcia has followed gubernatorial guidelines for masking and social distancing, which has escalated what are likely long-term frictions between Garcia and Eddington’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), whose asthma makes him overly inclined to side with the “I can’t breathe with a mask” contingent. Cross’s home life is a nightmare; his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has moved into the home he shares with his wife Louise (Emma Stone), a temporary situation that has become extended, and which is further exacerbated by Dawn’s ceaseless, breathless repetition of too-online conspiracy ideas and justifications. There’s a shrine to Dawn’s late husband and Louise’s father, Joe’s predecessor as sheriff, in their already-cramped house, and Louise is clearly starting to be affected by the omnipresence of Q-addled discourse being broadcast in her home 24/7. She also makes creepy, Tim Burton-esque dolls that she sells on Etsy, unaware that all of her sales are coming from people that Joe pays back. Garcia’s house is a little more peaceful, as he parents his son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) solo while also running the town and a local bar. Without thinking it through or talking it over with his wife, he declares his own candidacy for mayor in the upcoming election, and he sets out to dethrone Garcia. 

This is not a stylish movie in the way that Beau or Midsommar were. It’s grounded, and for some, it may be too grounded. My frustrated friend grew very bored very quickly of how much of the film was taken up with people looking at their phones, which I think means that the film effectively captured the perpetual boredom (intercut with moments of intense existential dread) that came from the unfettered screentime that characterized the time period in which it’s set. Like a lot of real life conflict, many find themselves unable to invest in a film in which there are no characters to sympathize with or root for. Garcia is more than willing to sell out Eddington’s future by ensuring that the town will be rendered uninhabitable within a few decades—optimistically—by allowing its resources to be consumed by the data center, over the objections of the only person living in town who voices any dissent about what the project will mean to the town’s future. Later scenes set in his home also reveal him to be one of those toilet paper hoarders, which is a clever bit of visual storytelling in that it shows us that, for all his outward appearances of being progressive and compassionate, he’s susceptible to (and buys into) the same base panicky animal instincts shared by others. It would have been perhaps too pat a narrative if this selfishness in combination with his carelessness about the community and its environmental needs was compared to his acquiescence to COVID mandates put in place for the common good, and to have that realization of his hypocrisy be the catalyst for Joe’s mayoral campaign. Of course, that would also cause us to lend too much sympathy to Joe, and it’s important that we never think too highly of him or consider that any actions he takes could be reasonable on any level. Joe has to be detestable despite any sympathy that we may have for him as a result of what he’s dealing with at home; it’s imperative that he have no real ideals or ideology because the moment we can trace his violent impulses and their fallout to an internal ethical construction, we run into the danger of potentially empathizing with him. 

Every Aster protagonist prior to Joe is someone with whom we empathize, in part because their behavior stems from traumas that are completely external. In Hereditary, Toni Collette’s Annie has been driven to the point of madness by a lifetime of being gaslit by her cultist mother and the death of her daughter, so while her downfall is inevitable, it’s also relatable and understandable. In Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s Dani can come across as needy and difficult, but she’s dealing with the reality of her family’s tragic, horrifying death and the unspoken-but-not-unknown reality that her boyfriend is staying with her out of pity rather than compassion, duty rather than love. The title character in Beau is Afraid is impotent and pathetic, but his entire life is an endless nightmare constructed and architected by his mother in order to make him that way. Joe’s tragic flaw is entirely a matter of his pride. To the extent that his actions are affected by external circumstances, his acting out could be traced to the pandemic, but he’s not alone in dealing with that; literally everyone on Earth is dealing with the same problem. Beau’s world is designed to isolate and emotionally destroy him in a kind of actualization of the paranoid idea that “The world is out to get you,” while Joe is reacting to the events of very real time and place that we all experienced, but he (like many psychopathically individualistic people at that time) falls into the same paranoid trap. Beau was right; the world was out to get him. Joe, on the other hand, is very, very wrong. There’s not a single thing that Joe touches that isn’t worse for having come into contact with him, and every action that he takes results in making Eddington worse, less safe, and more fractured, and the events that spill out of Eddington into the rest of the world (notably the escalation of a Kyle Rittenhouse-esque figure to the national stage) also make everything worse. There’s no one to root for here, and that in combination with the laser-focus on a shaky, unsteady period of recent history makes for a movie that’s bound to alienate audiences despite its verisimilitude in comparison to the more surreal films in Aster’s C.V. I’ve loved all of his movies, but just as much as I wouldn’t blame someone for not enjoying Midsommar or Beau, I wouldn’t argue with someone who hated this movie because this is not a movie that’s meant to please. It’s doing something else. 

Not to keep putting this movie in conversation with all of Aster’s other work, but each of his movies have been about people on the verge, dealing with madness that works its way out of them. In this film, the madness is in everyone. Louise is a particularly pitiable figure, trapped in a place that she hates and surrounded by reminders of the past. Her father was sheriff before Joe, and her mother’s reverence for him seems to be a point of contention, with implication that he was abusive and that this abuse left Louise open to manipulation by Q-esque radical Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak is a curious figure here, as he had little real effect on the plot or on Eddington. Dawn, deep into her conspiracy rabbit hole, takes Louise to one of Peak’s meetings, where his improbable tale of childhood trafficking (which bears all the markings of false memory syndrome, if Peak even believes what he’s saying at all and isn’t merely being used to generate a cult of personality around himself) moves Louise to abandon her family and join him. Narratively, he simply removes Louise from the story, but on a more holistic level, he epitomizes the kinds of dangerous grifters who can emerge from times of social upheaval, and a demonstration of just how far-reaching their influence can be due to the rise of social media and larger communication infrastructure. He’s there for the same reason that goofy Sarah, the wannabe social justice influencer is: because Eddington is trying (and mostly succeeding) to create a panoramic externalization of the general American circumstances of 2020. And it works! For me, at least. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Vulcanizadora (2025)

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Are there still Godsmack fans in 2025? What kind of weirdo buries porno mags in the woods? Is it important to enjoy the company of the other person in your suicide pact? There’s lots to ponder in the latest feel-bad slacker comedy from director Joel Potrykus. Continuing his career-long collaboration with actor Joshua Burge, Vulcanizadora is yet another aimless indulgence in stasis & rot along the same lines as their previous breakouts Buzzard & Relaxer. The deep well of sadness beneath that surface layer of rot has never been as complexly layered, though, and Potrykus is almost starting to give off the impression that he actually cares about what he’s saying with his proudly low-effort art. The message he’s communicating has not evolved beyond “Life sucks shit, dude,” but there’s no reason that it has to. It’s worth repeating, because it’s true.

The real evolution in Potrykus & Burge’s collaboration here is that it has moved from behind the camera to the screen. The actor-director duo star in Vulcanizadora as two nu-metal wastoids on a camping trip in the Michigan woods, seemingly working towards opposite purposes. For his part, Potrykus’s Derek is hell-bent on making lifelong bro-trip memories with his camcorder & a small arsenal of fireworks, filming an amateur video he models after Faces of Death (but registers more as a 12-year-old’s backyard homage to Jackass). Meanwhile, Burge’s Marty has brought along some homemade fireworks of his own, and he is visibly annoyed by every one of Derek’s stunts that delays their ultimate purpose: exploding the two dirtbags’ skulls in a beachside double suicide. As with all of their work together, however, it’s ultimately a trip to nowhere, and the second half of the film drops all plot momentum to instead sit in the personal & familial disappointments that inspired the suicide pact in the first place. The laughs gradually fade, and all that’s left is the depression, isolation, and impotent aggression.

If Potrykus’s darkly comic portrayals of leftover late-90s metalhead machismo have dulled over the years, it’s because he now has more competition in similar comedic voices like Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley, and Kyle Mooney. Still, there’s an attention to detail here in the collected paraphernalia of the archetype that feels freshly observed: gas station snack piles, vintage porno mags, broken glow sticks, ditch weed, Audioslave karaoke, etc. Like the Freddy Krueger Power Glove prop in Buzzard, he also creates a uniquely upsetting object of his own design here: a piece of BDSM head gear designed to house the suicide-mission explosives in the wearers’ mouths. He also finds some novelty in airing his metalhead slacker routine out in the sunshine, leaving the Relaxer couch behind for a stroll in the woods. His creative dynamic with Burge otherwise hasn’t changed much, and that personal stasis is somewhat the point. Their pointlessly destructive pranks are even less becoming now that they’re the age when fatherhood & male pattern baldness have made their adult responsibilities more immediately apparent. Now their corrosive aimlessness has actual consequences, each remarkably bleak.

– Brandon Ledet 

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

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

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In the opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a young woman dressed as Missy “Supa Dupa Fly” Elliott drives alone on an unlit Zambian highway, abruptly pausing to inspect a dead body in the road.  Remaining in costume, she makes several nonchalant phone calls to family, notifying them that she has discovered the corpse of her Uncle Fred.  No one seems to be in a particular rush to help, and she’s reluctantly roped into the petty concerns of her party-drunk father, her more belligerently drunk cousin, her absent mother, and a police force that can’t arrive until morning because their one vehicle is already in use.  It’s only after Uncle Fred is scooped off the road in the morning hours that she can finally take off her comically oversized Missy Elliott costume and return to her regular self as the prodigal urbanite daughter, Shula (Susan Chardy).  Uncle Fred is also stripped of his costume in those daylight hours, as the sins of his living days are revealed by stripping away the respectability afforded to all corpses at their own funeral.  We quickly understand why Shula met Uncle Fred’s death with such an icy, deadpan detachment, and by then the joke isn’t funny anymore.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl starts on a sharp streak of morbid humor, then gets increasingly nauseating the deeper it digs into the Patriarchal sins it unearths, which is also how I remember Nyoni’s debut, I Am Not a Witch.  It’s a film about the value of a whisper network, likening its titular bird’s usefulness on African savannahs as a warning-signal for nearby animals that a predator is approaching to women who warn each other of a nearby sexual predator’s potential to harm.  The problem, of course, is that guinea fowl’s usefulness to other animals does little to save their own hides, as they presumably squawk their way into being eaten while everyone else scurries away.  We come to learn that Uncle Fred left many victims in his wake, notoriously preying on underage girls in his family & community with no consequences, since the advice his victims are given by their matron elders is “Don’t think about it, and don’t talk about it.”  There’s no real way to hold the now-dead man accountable, but Shula becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that his crimes against his own people should go undiscussed, and she subtly, gradually takes on the behaviors of a guinea fowl the longer his sham of a funeral drags on.  Maybe she can be a useful warning to others about the dangers of men like Fred; or maybe her animal noises of protest will only separate her out as a target for more cruelty.

Besides the gender politics of Shula’s quiet resistance to her family’s loving memory of Uncle Fred, Guinea Fowl is most engaging as an alienating look at Zambian funeral rituals.  Every aspect of Uncle Fred’s days-long funeral is seemingly designed to trigger Shula: her required presence, the women’s critique of each other’s crying techniques, the men outside who drink beer in wait of the women in the home to feed them after they perform the labor of mourning, the world-class victim-blaming of Uncle Fred’s teenage widow for failing to keep him alive, etc.  Meanwhile, Shula’s relationship with reality unravels as she dissociates from the absurd celebration of such a wicked man.  Her dreams & memories become increasingly intrusive, interrupting the flow of the narrative with images of her younger self observing Uncle Fred’s body, images of that body resurrected and covered in maxi pads, and vintage 1990s broadcasts of children’s television shows detailing the natural behaviors of the guinea fowl.  Those intrusions call into question the real-world credibility of other details like the floodwater floors of a local university or the music-video pool party atmosphere of the local library.  The film never fully tips into the fantasy realm, though; it just precariously teeters on the edge between worlds as Shula calculates what to do with her voice as one of Uncle Fred’s surviving victims.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl locally premiered at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was initially met with the soft laughter of recognition until the room went coldly silent the more we all realized what kind of story we were watching.  It’s an especially tough watch if you belong to a family that stubbornly ignores its worst members’ most heinous crimes for the sake of social politeness, which I assume accounts for just about everyone.  And if it doesn’t, please know that I am jealous. 

-Brandon Ledet

Medusa Deluxe (2023)

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I’ve been slipping into my laziest writing tendencies lately, defaulting to an oddly optometrist approach to film criticism.  Because I’ve been catching up with too many 2023 releases all at once in this final month of the year, it’s been too difficult to write about them all in individual reviews.  So, I’ve been forcing them into false-binary competitions, like an eye doctor operating a phoropter.  Which is better, 1 or 2?  1: the melodrama about child abuse; or 2: the melodrama about gourmet food?  1: the class warfare thriller about homoerotic lust; or 2: the small-town thriller about lesbian lust?  1: the literary drama challenging current trends in mainstream publication; or 2: the literary documentary challenging a long-dead author’s seminal novel?  Setting up these arbitrary binaries is an easy go-to when the only other option is assessing a film on its own merits (blech), and it’s a habit I hope to break soon.  However, I won’t be breaking it today.

It would be impossible to discuss the British whodunnit Medusa Deluxe without comparing it against the recent Irish crime comedy Deadly Cuts.  That is, if you’re one of the few people who’ve happened to see both pictures, which feels statistically improbable for anyone living outside the UK.  Still, I’m not sure how many dark comedies there are about murders behind the scenes at hairstyling competitions; I’ve personally seen exactly two, and they were released just a year apart in the US.  Sticking to the phoropter binary device I’ve set up for myself here, I’ll say that Medusa Deluxe is a lot more stylish than Deadly Cuts, spending most of its 100 minutes on a single, seemingly unbroken shot that investigates an off-screen murder in real time.  On the other hand, it’s also a lot less funny than Deadly Cuts, so as a head-to-head contest it’s kind of a wash (and rise).  To continue my mixed metaphor, it’s like the fine-tuning portion of an optometrist visit where you’re no longer sure which image is sharper, and you’re mostly just impatient to get the trivial comparisons over with.

Medusa Deluxe sets up unfair expectations of greatness by opening with its best scene, in which actor Clare Perkins runs circles around her costars talking shit about a rival hairdresser who’s just been killed & scalped hours before their regional competition.  Perkins continues to steal every scene she’s in as a rawly genuine, scrappy artist who’s ready to throw punches at anyone who challenges or disrespects her work.  It’s almost a shame that the movie isn’t a Rye Lane style walk-and-talk about her character’s daily routine running a salon instead of a real-time investigation of her rival’s murder, since no one else ever lives up to her performance.  As someone who doesn’t know their “poofs” from their “fontages”, I can’t report exactly what’s going on with her colleagues’ outrageous hairstyles as they wait around backstage to be interviewed by the cops, but I do know they’re beautiful works of art.  I also admire the way that the hairdressers’ usual salon gossip adapts so well to speculation of who amongst them might be The Killer, just as a lot of recent real-world salon gossip has devolved to speculation over true-crime tabloid stories of abductions & murders.  Only Perkins stands out as a memorable player in the stage-play drama of their predicament, though; everyone else is just chattering in gorgeous weaves, wigs, and hair sculptures.

First-time director Thomas Hardiman is showy here in the way first-time directors often are, following his small cast of characters around a labyrinth of tiny dressing rooms with the same handheld virtuosity that Friedkin used to shoot his early stage play adaptations.  If it were released in the 90s, it would likely be lumped in with the wave of Tarantino knockoffs that flooded video stores, detailing the stylists’ lives outside of competition instead of focusing on the crime that holds them captive, the same way that Reservoir Dogs is about the events around a botched bank heist instead of the heist itself.  Only, the competitive hairstyling world it depicts is more of a recent Instagram-era phenomenon, so it couldn’t have been made at all back then, leaving the much sillier Deadly Cuts as its only useful comparison point.  Both films are smart for choosing this specific subcultural setting, because of the opportunity for eye candy & sight gags (at one point, Perkins is “maced” with Tresemmé by a competitor) and because it’s the kind of insular community that fosters years of long-simmering resentments, which can turn violent.  Both also choose to conclude on a Bollywood-inspired dance video, which only intensifies the urge to compare them.  Medusa Deluxe is the more ambitious film of the two, but that also means it’s the one that asks you to take it more seriously, which both dulls its humor and opens it to more critical scrutiny.  Deadly Cuts gets away being with being the low-key charmer that’s good to have around for a laugh, like a pair of novelty sunglasses you don’t actually need vs. the regular prescription glasses you wear every day.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ed and His Dead Mother (1993)

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Ed Chilton (Steve Buscemi) is a mama’s boy; he may, in fact, be the mama’s boy to end all mama’s boys. See, her voice is still ringing in his ears, a year after her death. The late Mabel Chilton (Miriam Margolyes) went to her grave a full twelve months ago, leaving her hardware store to Ed, where he employs the kindly (Gary Farmer) and fields phone calls from the murderous Reverend Paxton (Rance Howard), who has frequent questions about what hardware would be best to kill his adulterous wife. On an otherwise normal day, Ed finds himself visited by A. J. Pattle (John Glover), a salesman peddling resurrection for the late Mabel, payable on delivery. Ed agrees, much to the chagrin of his live-in uncle, Benny (Ned Beatty), the exact kind of peeping tom horndog that pegs this movie to 1993. The object of Benny’s desire is next-door-neighbor Storm Reynolds (Sam Sorbo credited under her maiden name), who, in fairness, parades around intentionally, trying to attract attention. Uncle Benny is even further perturbed when his sister reappears in the flesh, little worse for wear. She and Ed both have something to fear from the unstable Rob Sundheimer (Jon Gries), a former employer who was convicted by Mabel’s testimony and who’s out on parole with vengeance in his mind. 

There’s something very familiar about Ed and His Dead Mother. It’s very tonally inconsistent in a way that really pigeonholes it as something that could only be created at a certain time; it felt a lot like My Boyfriend’s Back and Stepmonster. And wouldn’t you just know it, all three films were released in 1993 (there’s also a little hint of 1991’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead).  There’s some played-for-laughs not-quite-body-horror here that’s very reminiscent of Boyfriend; for one thing, a distinction is made between bringing someone back to life and bringing someone back from the dead, and as Pattle notes while upselling Ed another product, only latter was promised, not the former. As such, Mabel is forced to consume “life,” meaning living things (mostly roaches), but she isn’t above considering a neighborhood dog, or worse. We never have to see Mabel eat roaches like it’s Fear Factor, nor are we confronted with the image of a canine in distress; like Boyfriend and Don’t Tell Mom, there’s no real gore (at least until the end, where it’s still not very realistic), and there’s very little real sense of menace. Like Stepmonster, it places itself in a very specific time when someone can peep on their hot lady neighbor and the film acts like this is perfectly acceptable behavior that doesn’t soil our protagonist’s character, and here, this goes beyond simple safe-for-TV underwear shots, but a full-on bare-assed striptease and even frontal nudity, a little more than you’d expect from a PG-13 flick and especially something that you wouldn’t expect in a film where the humor feels as juvenile as the aforementioned movies. The sex factor is too high for kids in this movie, but the jokes are either too heady or too obvious for a more upper-teen demographic. It is still darker than any of those, however, as none of the end in a cemetery in which a man must bury his mother’s head in one corner and her body in another, lest she rise again. 

There are a lot of bits here that are quite good. The increasingly unhinged Reverend whose rage at his wife’s infidelities (with all of the church council no less, even the women — all at once!) is a lot of fun, and when we get to see another side of Pattle, whom we’ve only seen as a hectoring salesbully with Ed, sheepishly being lectured by upper management about draining Ed of every cent that he got from his mother’s insurance instead of giving so many discounts. Margolyes is clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery as Mabel, especially when she’s cartoonishly grinding meat, chasing dogs, and locking herself in the fridge. Glover is always fun, especially when he’s getting to push people around, and Buscemi carries the thankless lead role of the feckless Ed effortlessly. I just wish it was funnier, that it made me laugh a little more. Maybe I’m just not in the target demographic, but then again, I don’t know who is.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Beau is Afraid (2023)

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Middle-aged Beau Wasserman lives in a nightmare. To be more accurate, he lives in several nightmares, some of them in succession, some layered atop one another like an onion of misery. Beau is a man who is haunted: by images of overflowing bathtubs, by visions of choppy water, by memories of an unconventionally abusive childhood, by the gap in his life where his father should be, by the ever-present preoccupation with the possibility of death imposed upon him by congenital health issues, and by a thousand other intangible things that aren’t immediate threats but which nevertheless ostensibly guide him through his choices, moment by moment, day after day. Beau is also a man who is endangered, not by those things which haunt him, but by real menaces that confront him on a daily basis. His neighborhood is parodically dangerous, as if the entire area is the product of a fever dream of someone whose brain was rotted by conservative cable news fabrications about hellish city life. Just going home from his appointment with his therapist requires Beau to start sprinting down his street from blocks away so that he can get into his building and lock the door behind him before a menacing vagrant can chase him down; not in the abstract, either, as he’s actually racing against his attacker. There’s no real order or authority in the world; a dangerous nude murderer wanders the streets, there are men gouging each others’ eyes out between Beau’s building and the Cheapo Depot across the street, and there are automatic weapons being sold on the street with abandon. His home itself provides little comfort, as there is a known brown recluse in the building and he spends the entire night receiving increasingly threatening notes slipped under his door in regards to an increasingly loud sound system that does not exist. Beau is afraid, and he has every reason to be, but things really only get worse for him from here. 

Beau is Afraid is almost a picaresque. In fact, it opens almost exactly the same way that one of the foremost examples of the genre, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, does: with the protagonist’s birth. However, unlike Tristram (or Candide, or Huckleberry Finn), there’s not much appealing about Beau. He’s not roguish, or courageous, or even much of an active player in his own life. A series of horrible things happen to him and his only option, over and over again, is to run, because he has no defense against the things that haunt or endanger him. In each of these vignettes, things seem to be taking a turn for the better for Beau before deflating every potential chance for his luck to improve. He’s hit by a car, then nursed back to health by kind strangers, then that situation falls apart because of the impulsive actions of the family’s youngest child and he is pursued into the forest by a shell-shocked veteran, then he’s found by a woman who’s part of a traveling forest theatre troupe which performs a play that transports him on an emotional journey by playing out this hope-to-despair cycle in miniature, then the performance is disrupted by a spree killing, and so on. 

In the first scene following the opening P.O.V. birth sequence, Beau’s therapist asks Beau if he would return to a well that made him sick the next time that he was thirsty. This is a film with nigh-constant imagery of water, in its abundance and in its absence, and in the film’s first (of many, many) acts, we the audience are introduced to the arc words “always with water,” which is Beau’s therapist’s warning to him about his new prescription. Beau is adrift on that water (literally, by the end); he bobs in it and he is pushed by its motion as it surges and recedes like waves, and he is never in control. Beau’s journey truly begins when he is forced to leave his building to cross the street for a bottle of water in order to finish taking his pills because the water in his apartment is out. Because of circumstances beyond his control, he has to leave his building and apartment open in order to get back in once he does so, which results in his home being invaded and destroyed. After getting back inside, he immediately receives terrible news, resulting in his bathtub overflowing even before he can get in. 

This absence-to-abundance-to-absence imagery cycle is obviously no accident. Between the opening horror show that is Beau’s everyday life and the next vignette (which is at first hopeful and then violently terrifying, another cycle to be prepared for in this narrative), he flashes back to a childhood cruise that he took with his mother and on which he met his first and only love, Elaine. In all of these sequences, however, there’s one thing that we never see: the ocean. Characters dine above deck, sunbathe above deck, and take walks in the moonlight, but for the audience, all of this is happening against a backdrop of sky alone, as if in a void. In his dreams, Beau is in a bathtub (one that overflows, naturally, in abundance), watching a braver version of himself standing up to his mother and being punished for it by being sent into the attic. When he is being cared for by Grace and Roger, great attention is paid to the fact that he is given water in the monogrammed cup which belonged to their son, who was killed in action overseas. When he finds the actors in the woods, we see water pour over a point-of-view shot from Beau’s perspective as a fresh head wound is tended, and in the sequence in which the drugged, concussed Beau becomes the character on the stage who builds a life that is completely destroyed by a flood. In the end, Beau meets his destiny on the water, sailing out to face judgment for his supposed sins. The waves go forth and they retract, and a buoy rises and falls, and through it all, Beau has no agency in what moves him. 

This absence and abundance is everywhere. When Beau is taken in to be cared for by Grace and Roger, he is put in their teen daughter’s room, where she has posters for various K-pop acts and similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Marvel “grrl power” pin-ups on her walls. With regards to the former, she has posters both for a solo artist named Only1 and a gigantic boy band called KI55, as a reference to the number of members, all of whom are crammed onto the same poster in quarter-sized photos. I’m sure that there are many more that I’m missing or didn’t pick up on, because this film is dense, and for someone like me who loves details and puzzle pieces, there’s a lot happening. Much criticism has been directed at the film with regards to its length, but I only felt its runtime in my bladder, not in my attention. With that said, I’m not at all surprised that this movie hasn’t been to everyone’s liking. 

Beau is Afraid largely concerns itself with guilt, but it isn’t titled Beau is Guilty because Beau isn’t guilty, he is simply made to feel guilt. His therapist projects guilt onto him, his mother’s lawyer lays a guilt trip on him for his worthlessness, and his mother herself, in flashbacks and in the present, manipulates him over and over again and then pelts him with guilt when he reacts in just the way she has set him up to. Before we see her in flashbacks or the present—when she’s no more than a voice on the phone—we see that Beau has one photo of each parent; his father is a blur, his snapshot taken while he was moving, so that there’s no clear image of his face at all, and in the photo of his mother, she is holding him as a newborn, his bald head in the foreground, but instead of a gentle hand supporting his wobbly noggin, her long, pointed nails create an image of her son trapped in her claw like prey, which is all that he ever is. There’s even the implication that everything that he has suffered (or at least large parts of it) are the result of her machinations, given that there’s a photomosaic of her face at her home that is composed of her employees’ staff photos, and it includes a character who appeared earlier as a good samaritan Beau encountered. This isn’t the kind of movie that “makes sense” in the traditional way, as it’s a surreal fantasy that’s not supposed to be treated as a straightforward, rational narrative, so even when the film implies Beau’s mother has been acting behind the scenes, we’re still then treated to the revelation of who (or more accurately what) Beau’s father is, in a way that defies any attempt to rationalize what’s happened to Beau as being merely a protracted trial to demonstrate his love for his mother. 

There are two major touchpoints that the film reminded me of: mother! and Marie NDiaye’s 2007 novel Mon Cœur à l’étroit. In the case of the latter, there is a scene in the film’s first act in which Beau, unable to return to his apartment, climbs the scaffolding outside of the building and is forced to watch as his home is ransacked and destroyed, which was reminiscent of the scene in Darren Aronofsky’s film where the titular character is running from room to room, unable to stop her husband’s unruly party guests from destroying her meticulously planned and curated home. That sense of helplessness and desperation that you feel when empathizing with Jennifer Lawrence’s character in that movie is present here as well; everything in this movie is happening to Beau, as he has no choice but to continue to be compelled forward by the motion of the sea on which he is adrift, the tide carrying him to an unjust damnation. Mon Cœur à l’étroit, which was translated into English as My Heart Hemmed In in 2017, is about a woman who awakens one morning to the sudden realization that she is hated by everyone around her. Where Beau most resembles it is in the way that people interact with him. The protagonist of the novel, Nadia, is confused by all of her neighbors’ and friends’ sudden antipathy toward her, which is only further agitated by the fact that, when she confronts them, they all start to voice an accusation that trails off without providing any real information. This happens to Beau as well, as the people he encounters continuously approach him with variations on “You know what you did” and leave notes for him to find that say “Stop implicating yourself.” How much his mother was influencing things (not to mention how much that matters to the reading of the text, really) is up for debate; how much Mona Wasserman shaped her son’s reality is less important than how she shaped his perception of reality, which was … a lot. He can only perceive reality through the lens of guilt, both when she’s gaslighting him directly and when she’s gaslighting him by proxy through the way her abuse has shaped his brain so that he induces it in himself. 

Like Mon Cœur à l’étroit, mother!, and Tristram Shandy for that matter, Beau is Afraid will not be for everyone. It’s been pretty divisive, and I’m not surprised. Between the length of the movie, some detours into the kind of wacky ground that wouldn’t be out of place in a movie by The Daniels, and mainstream American audiences’ overall aversion to anything too complicated to be half-watched while you fart around on your phone, there are sure to be plenty of people who find this one off-putting, not fun, and too strange to enjoy, but I’m not one of them. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Do Revenge (2022)

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It probably comes as no surprise that I am a man whose limited social media use includes following the Twitter accounts of several Buffy-related content producers. I used to follow the one and only Mrs. Sarah Michelle Gellar on Instagram until I got sad that her manager was making her do the same branded social media content that fame bottom feeders like Patreon-less YouTubers and people who make cakes that are 80% fondant are doing; I felt like Sideshow Bob shivering upon learning that “TV’s bottomless chum bucket [had] claimed Vanessa Redgrave.” No judgment on our adulated SMG, of course; I love her like Broadway queens love Patti LuPone. I’m just saying everybody needs to go stream BTVS on Hulu like, right now, so that she never has to do another one of those unless she actually wants to. So, of course when I heard that Her Excellency was going to be in a new movie that was being billed as the high school version of Strangers on a Train, and that I didn’t even have to leave the house to see it, well, of course I was going to. 

At 28 minutes into Do Revenge, the traditionally attractive Drea (Camila Mendes, of Riverdale), having convinced gawkishly gorgeous Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to do revenge with her, gets excited: 

Drea: First we have to fix (pulls Eleanor in front of a mirror) … this. We have to do—

Eleanor: Please don’t say “makeover.” 

Drea: —a makeover! Yay! (jumps up and down)

Eleanor: (with vocal fry) Feels problematic.

Drea: It is, but it’s fun!

Do Revenge presents itself as a pretty conventional movie, and in many ways it is, despite its winking self-awareness that it’s trafficking in cliches. Prior to this scene, when Eleanor is offered a tour of her new high school, she responds “I mean, as a disciple of the ’90s teen movie, I would be offended if I didn’t get one.” It’s borrowing from a deep, deep well: high school-set literature adaptations, the sharp wit and ear for dialogue that permeates the mean girl movie canon, and revenge thrillers. The film opens with narration from Drea, who fills us in on how, from humble beginnings, she has clawed her way to the top of the social hierarchy at Rosewood Country Day, an elite private high school in the Miami area. “They all want me as a friend or a fuck,” she says. “I’m worshipped at Westerburg and I’m only a Junior.” Wait, no, shit, that’s Heather Chandler. The words are different, but the speech is the same: it’s the end of her junior year, and she’s done something or other with Teen Vogue. Her friends are mostly vapid hangers-on, and although she thinks of herself as a scrappy underdog, she’s just an Alpha Heather with good publicity. She’s also dating star student Max (Austin Abrams), a weaselly little rich boy who happens to be class president. Since they won’t be seeing each other, he asks her to send him a sexy video, which is then leaked to the whole school. She ends up painted as the aggressor when she punches Max in the quad, and it nearly costs her the scholarship she depends on. 

Humiliated, Drea spends the summer friendless, working at a tennis camp for rich girls, a group that includes Eleanor. When the girls there also get  their hands on the “leaked” video, Eleanor names Erica (Sophie Turner) as the distributor, and is impressed with how swiftly Drea ruins Erica’s life, planting cocaine on her and remaining calm in the face of Erica’s furious accusations. When Drea has car trouble at the end of the summer, Eleanor drives her back, and they bond, with Eleanor relating a particularly traumatizing story about being outed as queer by a girl she had a crush on, who also told gossipy lies about Eleanor being a predator. Eleanor also happens to be transferring to the same school as the girl who bullied her, which is also Rosewood Country Day. On the first day, Max gives a speech which appropriates the language of resistance in order to distance himself from accusations that he was the one who leaked Drea’s video, shames the people who shared and viewed the video, and humiliates Drea by making her stand up in the assembly. He also announces the formation of the new school club “The Cis Hetero Men Championing Female-Identifying Students League,” which is to be exclusively male and straight, for men to become better allies (I fear I’m underselling the intentional tastelessness and invoked odiousness here, but he’s just awful). Eleanor and Drea run into each other again in the bathroom, and agree to each do the other’s revenge: Drea will get close to and socially destroy Carissa (Ava Capri), the girl who outed and started rumors about Eleanor, and Eleanor will get close to Max and help Drea get her own vengeance, and then they act out the scene transcribed above.

You might be asking yourself where Sarah Michelle Gellar is in all of this; she’s the headmistress of the school who’s heavily invested in Drea’s academic success. Although her scenes are too few, too brief, and too infrequent (although every single entrance made me gasp and say “She looks amazing“), her presence is felt throughout the narrative, and that’s not just me singing her praises. All our favorites are here, blended into a pastel smoothie: one part Mean Girls if Janis Ian used to be Regina George; one part Jawbreaker if Vylette’s makeover was arranged by Julie in order to get back at Courtney; two parts Heathers if Veronica allied herself with Betty Finn instead of Jason Dean; there’s even a little zest of that scene in Cruel Intentions where Reese Witherspoon distributes copies of Ryan Phillipe’s catty little journal to the whole school, except this time it’s copies of Max’s data that proves he’s faking his apparent progressivism, from the top of his stupid earrings to the tips of his “masculinity reimagined” painted nails. And I’m not just projecting that; both movies use Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” for goodness’s sake. And that’s not even getting into the (frankly inspired) choice to have the school uniforms uniformly look like Cher Horowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard Easter attire (which gives the whole thing a D.E.B.S. flair). It’s like a greatest hits album, right up until the moment that it suddenly isn’t anymore: well-worn and funny until everything gets turned on its head. I won’t spoil the very Patricia Highsmith twist here, but it disrupts the complacency with the familiar into which the audience has been lulled in a clever way. You thought that just because there was a scene in this movie where someone gets a tour of all the school’s cliques like in She’s All That and Ten Things I Hate About You that it meant you were going to ride the whole thing out in your comfort zone, but there’s something fresh and new here, too. 

I’m not really sure what demographic this movie is aiming for, but I’m in it. A few years back, I asked about the decade’s successor to the legacy of the Heathers -> Jawbreaker -> Mean Girls pipeline and nominated New Year, New You as the heir apparent, but there’s something new and fun here. This one is also theoretically aimed at the contemporary teen market, what with the inclusion of Riverdale‘s own Betty with Cabelo, Outer Banks hunk Jonathan Daviss, Alisha Boe from Thirteen Reasons Why, and Stranger Things actresses Hawke and Francesca Reale. (After the recent and dreadful He’s All That, I can only presume that the rest of the cast is filled with TikTokers and former Disney sitcom children.) At the same time, the soundtrack, like the films from which the narrative cribs, is very 90s focused. Aside from the aforementioned Fatboy Slim, the soundtrack also features tracks from The Cranberries, Meredith Brooks, Harvey Danger, the Symphonic Pops, and even The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, if you can believe it. Drea and Eleanor first bond while the dulcet tones of Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going To Be?”, and, because someone wanted to make me happy specifically, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.”  And yet there’s also more contemporary music like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish (although the simple fact that I, a man in my thirties, knows them could mean that they are no longer cool).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)

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I was a late joiner to the Bong Joon-ho fan club. I didn’t see any of his films prior to the US release of Snowpiercer (which ended up being Swampflix’s very first pick for Movie of the Year), and I shamefully still—all these years later—have not doubled back to catch up with his early catalog.  Now that the runaway success of Parasite has made him an Oscar-certified sweetheart of the industry, Bong’s early films are easier to access than ever, so I have few remaining excuses to cover those blind spots.  It took nine long years for his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, to land proper American distribution, but now it’s just sitting right there on Hulu waiting to make you laugh & squirm along with the director’s other darkly funny genre pranks.  It obviously doesn’t match the budgetary scale of the eye-popping spectacles Bong would later deliver in films like Okja, Snowpiercer, and The Host, but it’s just as worthy of a post-Oscars re-evaluation of his decades-long career.  If nothing else, it’s good to be reminded that the adorable man who became a meme by making his Oscars statues kiss also has a deeply fucked up, vicious sense of humor.

Barking Dogs Never Bite feels like Bong Joon-ho’s version of the post-Clerks slacker comedy, complete with a couple of listless corner store clerks among its cast of downtrodden losers.  Gen-X apathy & ennui weighs heavy on its central players, a loose collection of near-destitute tenants of a multi-tiered apartment complex, barely earning enough through their entry-level jobs to feed themselves.  The title refers to the violent hijinks of an out-of-work academic whose peaceful days lounging around the apartment (which his pregnant wife pays for) are interrupted by a neighbor’s small, yipping dog.  The absolute worm of a man takes his frustrations over his stalled career out on various small dogs throughout the building, murdering them in an effort to quiet his own mind.  These outbursts of animal cruelty catch the eye of an anonymous notary who lives nearby, daydreaming about earning celebrity through heroic acts of vigilantism.  As the would-be vigilante tracks down the pathetic dog killer, the small minds & embarrassments of their daily routines pile up in an increasingly absurd tangling of their lives, somehow amounting to a pitch-black hangout comedy instead of a low-budget crime thriller.  It’s the exact kind of ironic slice-of-life slacker tale you’d expect to see at a film festival in the 1990s, except with a much sharper eye for visual gags & splendor than what you’d typically expect from movies on its budget level.

Bong’s debut is hilarious but vicious, which feels consistent with everything he’s done since.  Even so, violence against dogs is one of the few remaining taboos that make audiences squeamish, so it still cuts deep. It’s the kind of movie that’s almost pointless to log on the content-warning database Does the Dog Die?, as its entire purpose is to mash that exact taboo button.  The dogs that are killed are cute & pathetic.  Their murderer waits maybe a scene & a half before deciding to violently shut them up, not even suffering the expected montage where they annoy him for days on end until he snaps.  Even as someone with a high tolerance for shocking art, I was thankful that the film opened with an obligatory “No animals were harmed” title card instead of saving it for the end credits.  Still, I don’t know that I ever fully believed it, as whatever puppetry, camera trickery, or hidden harness support they used to depict the pups in peril was impressively convincing.  I was in love with Bong’s playful camera set-ups, non sequitur ghost stories, sped-up Benny Hill chase sequences, and onslaughts of discordant jazz, but I can’t claim that the puppy violence didn’t upset me.  It’s supposed to be upsetting, because Bong Joon-ho is a sick fuck, which is easy to forget as he’s become something of a Film Twitter mascot.

I remember there being a lot of memes at the expense of Chris Evans delivering the teary line “Babies taste best” in Snowpiercer, as if it were funny by accident.  I always found that mockery to be odd, as that moment didn’t feel especially over-the-top to me, at least not relative to every other batshit crazy thing that happens in that movie.  Having now seen Bong Joon-ho’s debut feature—a feel-bad hangout comedy about a series of dog murders—I’m even more convinced that the Snowpiercer memesters (likely just hungry to dunk on the limitations of Captain America’s acting talents) got it wrong.  Given Bong’s larger body of work, I believe that line was both intentionally funny and sincere.  It’s both a discomforting moment where a man deals with the guilt of surviving on the nourishment of baby-meat and a darkly humorous punchline that underlines just how depraved the film’s trainbound universe has gotten.  I’ve now seen Bong apply that exact discomforting humor to the onscreen death of puppies, so why not the off-screen death of babies? Lots to think about there, lots to consider.

-Brandon Ledet