demi moore

Nothing But Trouble (1991)

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For most of my life, I’ve heard about what a terrible movie Nothing But Trouble is. From my friend Michael telling me that the appearance of Dan Aykroyd’s judge character’s phallic nose scarred him as a child to the fact that the film was the subject of one of the earliest episodes of the movie-mocking podcast How Did This Get Made? (all the way back in 2013!), all signs pointed to this movie being utterly irredeemable. Our very own Brandon has even called it “a cinematic abomination.” With Spooky Season starting to get into swing, it happened to come up again in conversation when talking about what to watch among a small group of friends, and it ended up being a surprising crowd pleaser (as well as a crowd disguster). 

Chris Thorne (Chevy Chase) is the publisher of a financial newsletter who meets Diane Lightson (Demi Moore), a beautiful lawyer, on the elevator up to his Manhattan penthouse for a party in his honor featuring some clients whom he despises. She’s been dating one of her clients who is now proceeding with some kind of landfill redevelopment plan she warned him against, and she enlists Thorne to drive her to Atlantic City the following morning so that she can meet with her ex/client in person. Two of Thorne’s obnoxious South American clients (they’re stated to be Brazilian but speak Spanish rather than Portuguese, and an image of their documents later indicate that they are from Argentina), siblings Fausto (Taylor Negron) and Renalda (Bertila Damas), invite themselves on this trip and cannot be avoided. The unlikely quartet takes off for Atlantic City, but the siblings insist that they packed a nice picnic lunch and that they should leave the highway and instead take a nice back road so that they can enjoy it. After detouring onto a series of country roads that feature nothing but the blighted panorama of industry, Thorne fails to make a complete stop at a sign in the rural nowhere of Valkenvania. Although he at first attempts to evade the pursuing officer, Chief Dennis (John Candy), the beat-up old police cruiser proves capable of overtaking Chase’s European luxury car. Dennis hauls the group before the local Justice of the Peace, Alvin Valkenheiser (Aykroyd), who doesn’t take kindly to out-of-towners. 

All of this set-up is the least interesting thing in the whole film. Chase is a charisma-free doorjamb in this one. He’s always been stated to be someone who was difficult to work with and all material I’ve read about this film indicates that Nothing But Trouble was just another notch on the old asshole bedpost for Chase. Moore and Chase feuded constantly on set, and Chase spread his malice around by acting like the larger paycheck he was making for starring in the film gave him seniority over director/co-star Aykroyd, to the point that multiple sources state that someone in the crew threatened to drop a brick on his head if he kept it up. I’m not really sure how contemporary audiences read this film, and I’m curious if they found Thorne to be a sympathetic character and if that is part of the reason that this failed to find an audience. My reading of the text is that Thorne is an unrepentant asshole; he sees a beautiful woman crying and immediately maneuvers to be alone with her in an elevator to take advantage of her presumed vulnerability, nearly sends her off with his driver when he’s hungover on the day of their trip and only decides to proceed when he sees Diane’s skimpy outfit, and allows himself to be goaded into trying to outrun local police because it stokes his ego. Although it’s arguably not fair that he’s going to end up dead on Judge Valkenheiser’s compound simply because the judge has a grudge against bankers (Thorne’s protestations that he’s a financial advisor falling on deaf ears), he’s also a smug and arrogant yuppie whose flirtation verges on predatory, and his constant smarm at the presumed lack of sophistication regarding the people of Valkenvania (accurate or not) doesn’t make him someone in whose fate we are terribly invested. Ironically, however, this makes the harrows of the situation in which he finds himself more palatable than if the film featured a more likable character (or actor). 

Negron’s character was the first to get a legitimate laugh out of me, when he begs Thorne to find “a nice vista” for them to pull over at, and that’s mere moments before the car chase begins, a solid chunk of the way into the film’s runtime. Once the group is captured and sequestered at the Valkenheiser manse, things really start to pick up. We get a solid idea of what terrible fate could befall our leads when a car of even more unsavory characters arrives in Valkenvania and appears before the judge, only for him to sentence them to death via Bonestripper, which is a roller coaster that ends in a mashing metal mouth and which features a hair metal theme tune that plays every time that Bonestripper appears; the description is literal, as the end of the machine is a chute which disposes Halloween decor skeletons into a pile, complete with cartoonish sound effects. It’s ridiculous and quite a lot of fun, and although I understand the need to establish a more grounded reality outside of Valkenvania in order for the outlandish, deadly Saturday morning hijinks to land, it’s a shame it takes so long to get there. The Valkenheiser home and compound is an excellent location and effectively quite creepy; there’s a genuine sense of a former power in decay as a mansion that was clearly quite elegant in its day is now covered in detritus juts out of the middle of a maze of scrap metal. There’s even a great matte painting as the quartet first enters the compound where we can see a downed airplane at the property’s periphery, visually implying that this place is nothing but an industrial graveyard. My friend Sam marveled at “the pulley budget alone,” and the production design here really is something to admire. 

We haven’t gotten into the prosthetic work yet, and it’s probably this that people find the most distasteful, or at the very least off-putting, about the film. Both Candy and Aykroyd appear in dual roles, and while Candy’s characters don’t require a lot of time in make-up (there’s the previously mentioned Officer Dennis, but also Dennis’s presumed twin sister Eldona, who’s just Candy in drag), Aykroyd’s sure does. The biggest groan of disgust came after the midpoint of the film, when we see Judge Valkenheiser preparing for bed, and he removes his already disgusting (and dick-like) prosthetic nose to reveal that he has no nose at all and there’s just scar tissue where it would be. It’s a great bit of grossout prosthesis, credit where credit is due. Less convincing (but no less disgusting) are the severely deformed twins Bobo (Aykroyd again) and Li’l Debbul; imagine someone in a more realistic padded sumo wrestler suit that’s been slightly deflated, then covered with a fine mist of bacon grease. They are always wet, they are always disgusting, and every moment that they’re on screen is revolting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not also fun. 

In a contemporary review, LA Times critic Peter Rainer described the film as “a slap-happy cross between Psycho and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” and Baltimore Sun’s Lou Cedrone called it an attempt at a comedic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I would make similar comparisons, although the cultural touchstones I would reach for are probably more esoteric. The town itself and its insular nature bring to mind Deliverance or the arrival of our characters to the dilapidated town in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, through the lens of the comedic shenanigans of Scooby Doo or Scary Movie 2 (whether this is damning or not is up to you, dear reader). I wouldn’t move this movie to the top of any lists, but as a Halloween season watch that’s troubling but largely bloodless, it might be of interest to some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Striptease (1996)

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This year’s Oscar race for Best Actress has narrowed down to two fierce combatants: Demi Moore for her career-reviving role as an aged-out aerobics TV show host in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance vs. Mikey Madison for her career-making role as a wronged erotic dancer in Sean Baker’s Anora. Thankfully, they’re both great performances in great movies, but since this is Awards Season, they share a combined running time of 280 minutes, which is a lot of homework to squeeze in before this Sunday’s ceremony if you’ve fallen behind on the syllabus. So, at this point it’s probably best recommended to watch the one title that combines those two flavors in one easy-to-swallow, two-hour treat. 1996’s Striptease stars Demi Moore in a career-pinnacle role as a wronged erotic dancer, lacing up her stripper boots and spinning the poles years before Mikey Madison was born. It’s got none of The Substance‘s gross-out humor nor any of Anora‘s violent despair, but it does find the exact Venn-Diagram overlap where Moore & Madison’s awards-season spotlights currently intersect. It’s also, on its own terms, a total hoot.

Released just one year after Paul Verhoeven’s vicious camp classic Showgirls, Striptease is mostly remembered as a hollow echo of one of the great erotic thrillers of its era. Despite their shared strip club setting, the two movies are wildly different in tone & intent, which makes Striptease‘s lighter, fluffier approach hugely beneficial in retrospect. It’s shockingly cute & playful for its scummy setting—populated with perverted Congressmen & gropey strip club patrons—ultimately playing more like a precursor for Miss Congeniality than an echo of Showgirls. Like Madison in Anora, Moore stars as an erotic dancer who has to chase down her fuckboy ex to get what’s owed to her (in this case, custody of her young daughter) while suffering a series of screwball hijinks that are tonally incongruent with the violence threatened by the crime-world goons circling around her. Moore was no young upstart ingénue at the time of filming, though. Her performance was the highest paid actress gig in Hollywood history at the point of paycheck, and she deserved every penny. Unfortunately and unfairly, it was also the start of her professional decline that hadn’t fully recovered until this year’s Oscar campaign, three decades later.

On a technical level, Striptease excels foremost as a feat of mainstream screenwriting. In an opening scene that lasts less than a minute, we’re introduced to Demi Moore in a Floridian divorce court, pleading to a good-old-boy judge not to grant custody of her daughter to her pill-head ex (Robert Patrick), whose flagrant criminality caused her to lose her job as a secretary for the FBI. That’s some incredible efficiency. From there, we immediately jump eight weeks into her new career as the rising-star dancer at The Eager Beaver, a humble strip club that struggles to match the class-standard set by its better-funded rival, The Flesh Farm. In that club, Moore exclusively strips to Annie Lennox tunes in absurdly athletic, MTV-style strip routines that recall Adrian Lynne’s girl-on-the-go 80s classic Flashdance . . . with a lot more nudity. She also makes fast friends with a cast of adorable fellow dancers and their living-cartoon bodyguard, played by Ving Rhames in what might be his career-funniest performance. Every exchange between Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff is genuinely, warmly funny and hints to a screenplay that was refined trough several joke punch-ups by screenwriter-turned-director Andrew Bergman. That affable tone then goes a long way to soften the thriller elements that threaten to sour the good mood but never can, not in a movie where Ving Rhames trades quips with a pet monkey in perfect deadpan.

Burt Reynolds anchors the serious end of the plot in a deeply unserious role as a drunken lush Congressman with a panty fetish, who is so obsessed with Moore’s rising-star dancer that he at one point douses himself in Vaseline and huffs her dryer lint just to feel close to her. The role perfectly completes the comedic pervert trifecta established by his more celebrated parts in Boogie Nights & The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, balancing out the thriller requirements of his character with some vintage kinky kitsch. Because the Congressman is so obviously, publicly horny for Moore, his staff has to clean up the trail of witnesses to his depravity with murderous violence, which escalates the stakes of Moore’s custody struggles. To the Right-Wing Christian voter base, he’s a God-fearing soldier of Christ who uses his office to uphold Family Values in the Deep South. To anyone who’s ever been alone with him, he’s a dangerously horny freak with no functional sense of interpersonal decorum, a total menace. Meanwhile, Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff are portrayed as adorable women struggling to make do with “honest work.” Sure, a couple of them have the largest breast implants you’ll ever see outside of a Russ Meyer film, but they’re truly a wholesome bunch who love & support each other. It’s really very sweet, especially in comparison with the sleazy lawyers, politicians, and fixers in their orbit.

Demi Moore is more widely beloved for earlier 90s classics like Indecent Proposal & Ghost, but Striptease might be the best total-package encapsulation of what makes her great. She’s funny, she’s relatable, and she’s an exquisitely sculpted physical specimen that defies the usual limitations of the human body. A lot of the subtext of her role in The Substance relies on the audience’s understanding that she is a perfectly calibrated Hollywood actress who is still made to feel like she’s not living up to the impossible, illusionary standard set by her industry; Striptease puts her body on display in the same way, which had to have been a vulnerable act even at the height of her star power. The main struggle of Mikey Madison’s Oscar campaign this year is that she doesn’t have that built-in rapport with her audience, since she’s really just getting started. Her body is also being ogled in her star-making role, though, so it would be great to see her compare notes with Moore in a dual interview discussing what it’s like to work a stripper pole on a 50-foot movie screen with nowhere to hide from strangers’ eyes. You’d think that, because of the time of its release, Striptease would’ve been a lot more dismissive or gross about Moore’s fictional dancer than Anora was about Madison’s, but that’s really not the case. The two women were both given a chance to play these vulnerable, wronged sex workers with full heart, humor, and humanity, sidestepping the nastier, scuzzier tropes typically associated with the archetype. And they were both great at it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Substance (2024)

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What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after). 

Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety. 

That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me. 

Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before. 

Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

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Gen-Z nostalgia for the early aughts aesthetic has been a tough adjustment for me, a Millennial nerd who suffered through that era in real time.  I do not think back to frosted tips, muddy JNCO strips, or Paris Hilton DJ sets with any lingering fondness.  If anything, I see that time as the nadir of modern pop culture.  I recognize that this is the same personal bias that my parent’s generation felt when Millennials aestheticized the 1980s during my college years.  Where I saw new wave neon punks & synths, they flashed back to cheap beer and overly teased, fried hair.  Likewise, there’s a novelty to hearing Limp Bizkit & Linkin Park for the first time in the 2020s that I can’t share as someone who vividly remembers my own cringey years as a nü metal dipshit when those groups first premiered on Alt Rock Radio™.  So, no, I cannot share in any cultural reclamation for the early-aughts movie adaptation of the Charlie’s Angels TV show, in which music video director McG amplifies all of the cheese & sleaze of the era to maximum volume.  Opening with a KoЯn guitar riff, a casually racist gag in which Drew Barrymore goes undercover as Black man in LL Cool J’s skin, and nonstop thinspo ogling of uniformly skinny women’s exposed midriffs, Charlie’s Angels wastes no time with its vicious onslaught of eraly-2000s kitsch.  It’s cinema’s most efficient, thorough crash course in the grotesque cheapness of the early aughts, celebrating everything I loathe about the era and my own participation in it with alarming gusto. 

Its sequel, however, is innocent.  If you do find yourself wanting to indulge in some delicious 2000s kitsch without making yourself sick on day-old fast food, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is the much healthier option.  You don’t even have to bother rewatching the 2000 original, since the sequel reintroduces its central trio of undercover lady spies with newly sharpened personalities for a fresh start.  Drew Barrymore plays a tough-but-girly tomboy, Lucy Liu plays an overachieving perfectionist, and Cameron Diaz plays a goofball ditz with a heart of gold.  They’re all best friends and frequently save the world while dating cute guys; it’s pretty easy to follow without any additional background info.  It also repeats a lot of the more successful gags (along with some of the more racist ones) from the first movie but does a much better job connecting them in the edit instead of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – not much, in the original’s case.  The only way Full Throttle is inferior, really, is that it’s significantly less gross than the first Charlie’s Angels film, making it less accurate as a time capsule of pop culture’s darkest days in the early 2000s. It makes up for it by continuing to pummel the audience with nonstop needle drops & cameos, though.  P!nk, Eve, The Olsen Twins, and members of OutKast, Jackass, and The Pussycat Dolls all appear onscreen while Kid Rock, Nickelback, and Rage Against the Machine rage on the soundtrack.  You never lose track of the movie’s place in time.

Regardless of Full Throttle‘s relationship with the first Charlie’s Angels film or with early-aughts culture at large, it’s a consistently entertaining, maximalist novelty.  Full Throttle is, at heart, a charmingly goofy action movie that makes great use of McG’s candy-coated music video aesthetic, disregarding the guiding laws of physics & good taste to deliver the most joyously over-the-top pleasures it can in every frame.  The girls now have the superhuman power of flight, Crispin Glover frequently disrupts scenes as a feral goblin assassin with no effect on the plot (wielding a sword and only communicating in yelps), and every set piece is an excuse for kitschy costume & production design stunts, often set against a full backdrop of CG flames.  The Angels are costumed as nuns, shipyard welders, strippers, hotdog vendors, and car wash babes during their world-saving adventures as they fight off a bikini-clad Demi Moore and an oiled-up Justin Theroux sporting an Astro Boy fauxhawk.  Whereas the first film was entirely about the fashionista posturing of those outfit changes, McG wastes no time getting to the action this go-round.  Within 10 seconds of entering the frame, Diaz hops onto a mechanical bull to distract a bar full of Mongolian brutes while her teammates rescue a political prisoner, eventually erupting the room into a free-for-all brawl.  Soon, they’re flying through the air in and out of exploding helicopters, and staging wuxia-style gunfights on flying motorcycles.  It took the Fast & Furious franchise seven films to get to the delirious CG action nonsense this series achieved in two.

Full Throttle might be McG’s best movie, but its only strong competition is the straight-to-Netflix 80s-nostalgia horror The Babysitter, so that’s a weak superlative.  What’s more important is how much of an improvement it is over his first crack at this franchise, to the point where he’s somewhat rehabilitated my disgust with the early-aughts pop culture that’s currently making a comeback.  You can even feel that positive shift in which respective Prodigy song the two films choose as their central motif: “Smack My Bitch Up” for the first Charlie’s Angels, betraying its underling baseline cultural misogyny, and “Firestarter” for Full Throttle, punctuating its ludicrously explosive action payoffs.  It’s even apparent in the two films’ appreciation for the Tom Green brand of shock comedy that was rampant in that era.  In the first film, Green appears onscreen himself as an empty symbol, relatively restrained in an extended cameo role that references his real-life tabloid romance with Barrymore.  By contrast, Full Throttle is not afraid to get its hands dirty, prompting Diaz to participate in the live, gooey birth of a baby cow in a sight gag that would’ve been perfectly suited for Green’s magnum opus Freddy Got Fingered.  Having just fallen in love with her sadistically prankish romcom The Sweetest Thing, I’m starting to develop a genuine fondness for Diaz’s gross-out goofball humor in that era, which I suppose means I’m warming up to the idea of appreciating early 2000s culture at large.  I’m just not quite ready to hear KoЯn score a fight scene yet without a little winking irony to soften the blow.  Those Issues Tour memories are still a little too fresh.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Sneakers (1992)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1992’s Sneakers, is a mainstream thriller about elite hackers played by middle-aged movie stars instead of teenage Mall Goths.  As a “cyberpunk” thriller about elite early-internet hackers, it is absurdly un-hip.  I’ve come to expect my movie hackers to be young, androgynous perverts dressed in glossy patent leather, not near-geriatric celebrities who tuck in their shirt-tails.  However, as a big-budget Dad Movie that plays with 90s-specific cyberterror anxieties, I found it solidly entertaining.  It feels like a dispatch from a bygone studio filmmaking era when movie stars actually drove ticket sales, so that their importance on the screen is stressed way more than directorial style or production design – which are slick enough here but deliberately avoid calling attention to themselves.  Even among the movie’s biggest fans, I get the sense that it satisfies most as a comfort watch steeped in nostalgia for that era, right down to the clunkiness of its landline phones and desktop computers.

I appreciate Sneakers‘s appeal as a star-studded studio thriller, but I personally prefer my Evil Technology movies to be just a smidge goofier, sexier, or more stylistically over the top.  Thankfully there are plenty of trashier, less reputable 90s thrillers about computer hackers to choose from.  Here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month but want to see something a little less sensible.

The Net (1995)

For something just a smidge goofier than Sneakers that still sticks to the mainstream star-vehicle format, I’d recommend the much-mocked but highly entertaining The Net.  The Net stars Sandra Bullock as a loner computer hacker, vulnerable to attack because she’s friendless in the world. Watching Bullock’s slovenly hacker eat junk food & code in her “cyberchat” computer dungeon really pushes her Sweetheart Next Door onscreen persona into absurdly unbelievable territory. Bullock’s inability to lose herself in a role comes hand in hand with movie star celebrity, a suspension of disbelief audiences are willing to accommodate because we love seeing these megastars perform, Everyday Sweethearts or no.  It’s the same suspension of disbelief that asks us to buy a middle-age Robert Redford as the hippest computer genius on the planet or Dan Ackroyd as a Mall Goth conspiracy theorist, when more reasonable casting would’ve skewed younger or nerdier.

Besides Bullock’s natural star power & effortless charm, The Net’s main draw for modern audiences is its glimpse at 1990s era fears & misunderstandings of online culture, which is pushed to a much goofier extreme than the standard political thriller beats of Sneakers. The film’s main conflict involves an encrypted floppy disc that hackers are willing to murder Bullock’s online slob to obtain, exploiting then-contemporary audiences’ fears of the vulnerability of digitally stored information. Characters anxiously explain the vulnerability of our “electronic shadow” in a world where “our entire lives are in the computer,” waiting to be hacked. The film’s tagline bellows, “Her driver’s license. Her bank account. Her credit card. Her identity. DELETED.” Most of The Net‘s basic thriller elements derive from Bullock’s helplessness in the face of this online identity persecution limiting her mobility & capital as she protects the McGuffinous floppy disc.  On the sillier end, there are also primitive AOL-era emojis, in-dialogue explanations of terms like “IRL” (all-caps), and exchanges like “You’re hacker too?,” “Isn’t everybody?,” to help color The Net as a so-bad-it’s-good early Internet relic.

Where The Net truly gets good for me is in its lack of confidence that its chosen subject is sufficiently cinematic. Unsure audiences will bother reading online chatroom text to themselves, Bullock’s computer “helpfully” reads out the chatter in exaggerated robotic voice synthesizers. Discontented with merely displaying online data in matter-of-fact presentation, harsh music video edits & slashing sound cues are deployed to make computer readouts more “dynamic” (read: obnoxious). To add some explosive energy to the onscreen thrills, the film’s evil hacker syndicate graduate from hijacking online personal data to hijacking personal airplanes – essentially hacking victims to death in fiery crashes. It’s all deeply, incurably silly, a tone that only improves with time as its moment in tech becomes more obsolete.  Whereas Sneakers molds a traditional, reasonable political thriller formula onto a 90s cyberterror setting, The Net goes out of its way to stress the contemporary gimmickry of his computer hacker plot to the point of delirium.

Disclosure (1994)

For something “sexier” than Sneakers, I’d point to the Michael Douglas erotic thriller Disclosure, which features the middle-age movie star in yet another deadly battle with a femme fatale who desperately wants to fuck him to death . . . this time with computer hacking!  Douglas stars as a misogynist computer programmer whose daily sexist microaggressions are turned back on him a thousandfold by his new bombshell boss (and sexual harasser), played by Demi Moore. It literalizes the 90s-era War of the Sexes in the same queasy way all these mainstream erotic thrillers do, which you’re either going to be on board for or not.  However, this particular example is flavored with an Early Internet tech obsession that includes wide-eyed wonder at cell phones, emails, video calls, and CD-ROMs – placing it in the same techno-espionage realm as Sneakers, just with the absurdity dialed to 11.

There is no actual, consensual sex in Disclosure, despite its erotic thriller patina.  Most of the frank, adult conversations about sexuality are contained to legal mediations about the gendered nature of consent and power in the workplace.  The actual computer hacking portion is also minimal in its screentime, but once it arrives it is a doozy. The climax of the film is staged in a Virtual Reality simulation of a filing cabinet in a digital hallway, with Michael Douglas frantically searching for confidential files while a Matrixed-out killbot version of Demi Moore systematically deletes them with VR lasers.  Of all the examples of movies overreaching in their attempts to make computer hacking look visually dynamic and Cool, this is easily up there in the techno-absurdism Hall of Fame.  It’s also lot more thrilling than it sounds on paper, depending on your taste for this kind of horned-up, technophobic trash.

Hackers (1995)

And of course, no list of 90s computer-hacking thrillers would be complete without the over-styled, undercooked excess of 1995’s Hackers.  When I was picturing my ideal version of Sneakers—young perverts in fetish gear throwing around the word “elite” as if it were the ultimate honor—I’m pretty sure I was just picturing Hackers . . . a film I had never seen before.  Whereas Sneakers is careful to present its corporate espionage computer hacking in a reasonable, rational context that’s careful not to deviate too far from the mainstream thriller norm, Hackers fully commits to its Computer Hacking: The Movie gimmickry.  Jonny Lee Miller stars as a child hacker (alias Zero Cool) who has to lay low after being convicted for hacking into the systems of major American banks, then emerges as a hip teen hacker (new alias Crash Override) who’s pinched for a similar corporate espionage crime he did not commit.  Will he and his elite-hacker friends be able to out-hack their evil-hacker enemies to clear their names before they’re sent to prison?  Who cares? The real draw here is the rapid-edit visualizations of computer hacking in action, wherein Zero/Crash closes his eyes and zones out to psychedelic clips of vintage TV shows & pop culture ephemera while his hands furiously clack away at his light-up keyboard, techno constantly blaring in the background.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for something while you’re watching it for the first time?  Hackers has everything I want in movies: tons of style, no substance, mystical visualizations of The Internet, wet dreams about crossdressing, Matthew Lillard, etc.  In the abstract, I recognize that Sneakers is technically the better film, but its competence keeps it from achieving anything half as fun or as surreal as this 90s-teen derivative.  I very much appreciated Sneakers as is, but I spent its entire runtime re-imagining it as my ideal version of a 90s computer-hacking thriller . . . only to later discover that Hackers already is that exact ideal.  It’s, without question, the most ridiculous and most essential film in this set.  Hack the planet!

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, is a deceptive work of broad commercial appeal that also carries out a wicked subversive streak just below the polite charms of its genteel surface. Fried Green Tomatoes looks & acts like a Normal movie aimed to stoke mainstream America’s nostalgia for “The Good Old Days” of the vintage American South. That bait-and-switch allows the film to constantly veer into abrupt bursts of absurdist humor, grisly violence, and heartfelt lesbian romance without much of an uproar from its Normie audience. It’s that exact clash between the conventional vs. an underplayed indulgence in the bizarre that makes the movie such a treat for me. It’s both proudly traditional & wildly unpredictable, paradoxically so.

It would be difficult to recommend further viewing for audiences who want to see more films that pull off that exact balancing act between tradition & subversion. Luckily, though, Fried Green Tomatoes is not the only film around that heavily relies on the traditional charms of fierce Southern Women to sneak its own hidden agendas & indulgences past mainstream audiences’ defenses. Here are a few suggested pairings of movies you could watch if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience more cinema that falls on the quietly dark side of Southern twang.

Crazy in Alabama (1999)

In my mind, the clearest parallel to Fried Green Tomatoes‘s clash between the conventional & the morbidly bizarre is the 1999 black comedy Crazy in Alabama. The only major difference is that Fried Green Tomatoes is subtly subversive, while Crazy in Alabama is gleefully over-the-top. Melanie Griffith is flamboyant as the anchor to the film’s violent side, playing a kooky Southern Woman who poisons & decapitates her abusive husband so she can run off to become a Hollywood star (a straight-up trial-run for her future role as Honey Whitlock in John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented). Lucas Black costars as her favorite nephew, whom she left back home to deal with the exponential civil unrest of the Civil Rights 1960s. These two disparate storylines—one where an over-the-top Hollywood starlet regularly converses with her husband’s severed head (which she carries around in a hatbox) and one where a young white boy becomes a local hero by bravely declaring “Racism is bad” and attending fictional Martin Luther King, Jr rallies—are only flimsily connected by occasional phone calls shared between these two unlikely leads. It’s the same bifurcated, traditional vs. absurdist story structure as Fried Green Tomatoes, except that there’s nothing subtle at all about what it’s doing. Everything is on the surface and cranked incredibly loud (which suits my sensibilities just fine).

If you need any convincing that these movies make a good pairing, consider that Fannie Flagg, the novelist who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, has an extended cameo as a roadside diner waitress in Crazy in Alabama. Flagg’s entire purpose in her one featured scene is to cheer on Griffith’s crazed, wanted-murderer protagonist out of admiration for her breaking out of an abusive marriage in the way she personally saw best (sawing off her husband’s head). The audience has to share that baseline appreciation for wild Southern Women at their most hyper-violent to be fully on-board with either of these titles, which is partly what makes them a perfect match. Just don’t go into Crazy in Alabama expecting the same quiet, controlled hand that doles out the absurdist tangents in Fried Green Tomatoes. It’s the first feature film directed by Antonio Banderas and he eagerly allows the space for his then-spouse, Griffith, to run as wild as she pleases.

Now and Then (1995)

This suggestion is something of a cheat, since Now and Then is technically set in Indiana. However, it was filmed in Georgia and looks & feels entirely Southern to my Louisianan eyes. Like Fried Green Tomatoes, its story is bifurcated between two timelines: the increasingly cynical days of the 1990s and a rose-tinted view of a simpler past that was both more dangerous and more romantically Authentic. It even begins its feature-length flashback to “The Good Old Days” by explaining that children used to have to go on adventures & get into mischief to entertain themselves “in the days before MTV & Nintendo . . .” While the adult versions of our central group of childhood friends indulge in a distinctly 90s brand of Gen-X sarcasm (especially among Rosie O’Donnell & Demi Moore’s moody banter), their childhood versions purely ascribe to a gee-willickers coming-of-age adventurism that’s purely heartfelt & sentimental (as portrayed by child actor superstars like Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, and Gaby Hoffman). From the crisply uniform tableaus of freshly built cookie-cutter suburbs to the sequences of young girls singing Motown hits in unison while riding bicycles down dirt roads, the nostalgia on display here is lethally potent, to the point where I genuinely could not tell if this is the first time I’ve seen it. Now and Then is the exact kind of VHS-era lazy afternoon comfort viewing that feels as if it’s always been part of your DNA.

Unlike Fried Green Tomatoes & Crazy in Alabama, Now and Then doesn’t use this nostalgic charm as a cover for extreme dips into subversively morbid subject matter. If anything, it ultimately plays more like a softer, safer variation on Steven King’s nostalgia-classic Stand By Me, complete with the wistful narration track from a jaded adult who’s “seen it all.” The childhood friends at the center of the picture do launch their own D.I.Y. investigation of an unsolved murder from decades into their town’s past, one that invites ghostly seances, potentially dangerous strangers, and brief moments of lethal peril into their otherwise safe suburban lives. Mostly, though, the threats that arise during this murder mystery aren’t meant to elicit a genuine in-the-moment danger so much as they’re meant to highlight the conflicts & insecurities that haunt the girls’ variously troubled home lives and internal struggles with self-esteem. I’d most recommend Now and Then to Fried Green Tomatoes fans who’re more into that film’s nursing home visits & nightswimming intimacies than its freak train accidents and wild swerves into cannibalism. It’s a much better-behaved film overall, but an equally nostalgic one in its scene-to-scene details (including the ultra-specific 90s Girl™ fantasy of getting to smoke cigarettes with a young Brendan Fraser at his beefcakiest).

Steel Magnolias (1989)

Our one major stipulation for Movie of the Month selections is that they must be films that no one else in the crew has seen. Because bits & pieces of Fried Green Tomatoes were constantly looping on television when I was a kid, I honestly wasn’t sure if I had ever seen it all the way through before or not. Once I got into the lesbian & cannibal tangents that distinguish the film from its fellow works in the Southern Women Nostalgia canon, though, it was clear that I hadn’t actually seen it – at least not as a complete picture. In fact, I had been mistaking my memories of the title with another, unrelated work that similarly got the round-the-clock television broadcast treatment in the 1990s: Steel Magnolias.

Having now watched Fried Green Tomatoes & Steel Magnolias back-to-back in their entirety, I can confirm that they’re really nothing alike, except that they’re about the lives of fierce Southern Women. I much preferred Fried Green Tomatoes out of the pair, but Steel Magnolias was still charming in its own way. Adapted from a stage play, the film is mostly centered on the life & times of a small clique of heavily-accented women who frequent the same beauty shop (run by matriarch beautician Dolly Parton). Like a hetero precursor to Sordid Lives, much of the film’s humor derives from the Southern idiosyncrasies in the women’s mannerisms & idle banter as they gossip in the beauty salon between dye jobs & perms. The darkness that creeps into the frame springs from the women’s lives outside the salon, particularly the medical drama of a fiercely protective mother (Sally Fields) and her severely diabetic daughter (Julia Roberts) who pushes her body too far in order to live up to the Southern ideal of a traditional housewife.

The details of the medical melodrama that drives Steel Magnolias fall more into tear-jerking weepie territory than the wildly violent mood swings of Fried Green Tomatoes, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. The most outrageous the film gets in any one scene is a moment of crisis when Sally Fields has to force-feed orange juice to a deliriously over-acting Julia Roberts in the middle of a diabetic seizure. Her repeated shouts of “Drink the juice, Shelby!” had me howling, and I’m sure that scene is just as iconic in some irony circles as “No wire hangers, ever!” is in others. All told, though, that storyline is too sobering & sad to mock at length, and you have to genuinely buy into the dramatic tragedy of the narrative to appreciate the film on its own terms. I won’t say it’s as convincing of a dramatic core as the unspoken lesbian romance of Fried Green Tomatoes, but it’s effective in its own, smaller way. Anyone with endless room in their hearts for Southern Women as a cultural archetype should be able to appreciate both films enough for Steel Magnolias to survive the comparison.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #34 of The Swampflix Podcast: #ReelTimeJaws & The Butcher’s Wife (1991)

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Welcome to Episode #34 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our thirty-fourth episode, Britnee makes Brandon watch the Demi Moore magical realism romcom The Butcher’s Wife (1991) for the first time. Also, Brandon & Britnee discuss #ReelTimeJaws, a Jaws-themed movie-watching project created by stand-up comedian & podcaster Howard Kremer. Enjoy!

-Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet