furious 7

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Yesterday, I posted my list for the best films I saw in 2015, but with the exceptions of a couple outliers like Magic Mike XXL & Mad Max: Fury Road the whole thing reads as a little too . . . stuffy, dignified. To get a fuller picture of what the year looked like, here were the 15 films I most enjoyed on the trashier side of cinema, the ones we slapped with a Camp Stamp.

1. Goosebumps – The same way films like The Monster Squad, Hocus Pocus, Witches, The Worst Witch, and (on a personal note) Killer Klowns from Outer Space have introduced youngsters to the world of horror (and horror comedy) in the past, Goosebumps is an excellent gateway to lifelong spooky movie geekdom. It strives to stay true to its half-hokey, half-spooky, all-silly source material, resulting in a film that’s genuine dumb fun from beginning to end, but still packs a sharp enough set of teeth that it might just keep a tyke or two awake at night.

2. Unfriended – This laptop-framed live chat horror flick is so ludicrously invested in its gimmickry that it comes off as kind of a joke, but the commitment also leads to genuinely chilling moments that remind the audience a little too much of their own digital experiences. As a dumb horror flick filmed entirely from the first-person POV of a gossipy teen operating a laptop, it’s both way more fun & way more affecting than it has any right to be.

3. Spy – Paul Feig & Melissa McCarthy’s latest collaboration updates the mindless excess of the superspy spoof genre (seen before in films like Naked Gun, Austin Powers, and MacGruber) with a surprisingly sharp sense of humor lurking under its crass irreverence. If nothing else, Jason Statham’s monologue in which he brags about his past adventures might be the single funniest (and most relentlessly dumb) scene of the year.

4. Furious 7 – I watched all 7 Fast & Furious movies for the first time this year and can say with total confidence that this was easily the most over-the-top in its absurd disregard for physics, human nature, and good taste. What a fun, ridiculous spectacle of an action movie.

5. Turbo Kid – A cartoonish throwback to an ultraviolent kind of 1980s futurism that probably never even existed. It’s difficult to believe that Turbo Kid didn’t previously exist as a video game or a comic book, given the weird specificity of its world & characters. It’s a deliriously fun, surprisingly violent practical effects showcase probably best described as the cinematic equivalent of eating an entire bag of Pop Rocks at once.

6. Deathgasm – An authentic look into a metal head teen’s colorful imagination, Deathgasm is a gore-soaked, go-for-broke horror comedy about a high school metal band’s war against a zombie apocalypse. It’s delightfully gross & oddly sweet.

7. Krampus – Director Michel Dougherty’s first film, Trick ‘r Treat, was a comedic horror anthology devoutly faithful to the traditions of Halloween. His follow-up, Krampus, thankfully kept the October vibes rolling into December traditions in a time where so many people do it the other way around, celebrating Christmas before Halloween even gets rolling. All hail Krampus, a soul-stealing demon who acts as “St. Nicholas’ shadow”, for bucking the trend.

8. The Final Girls – If you happen to be a fan of 80s “camp site slasher films” like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp and you enjoy meta genre send-ups like Scream & The Last Action Hero, please check out The Final Girls as soon as you can. It not only participates in the trope-referencing meta play of Wes Craven’s Scream, but because of its outlandish movie-within-a-movie concept, it also adopts the dream logic of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Although the film’s main goal is undoubtedly a goofy, highly-stylized comedy, it also reaches for eerie, otherworldly horror in its central conceit.

9. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – Pretty much a repeat of what I had to say about Furious 7. I watched the entire Mission: Impossible series for the first time this year & the newest installment, Rogue Nation, easily stood out as the most over-the-top entry in the fairly silly action franchise yet.

10. Russell Madness – A family comedy “produced by” Air Bud about a Jack Russell Terrier who finds success as a mixed-species pro wrestler. Need I say more? The only flaw in its execution of what had to be the dumbest premise of the year is that they didn’t stick with what must have been the original title: Russell Mania.

11. American Ultra/Victor Frankenstein – I can’t defend essentially anything I’ve ever read Max Landis say on the internet, but I can say that he wrote two of the most mindlessly fun, delightfully excessive examples of trashy cinema that I saw all year.

12. Patch Town – A horror comedy Christmas musical about an evil Cabbage Patch dolls factory, Patch Town sounds like the kind of Sci-Fi Channel dreck that would settle for a couple odd moments & a celebrity cameo, then call it a day. Instead, it milks its concept for all it’s worth. Its high-concept, low budget weirdness is calculated, sure, but it’s also surprisingly thorough in pushing that concept as far as it could possibly go & even better yet, it’s genuinely funny.

13. Everly – A scantily clad prostitute played by Selma Hayek attempts to reunite with her family and escape a life of indentured servitude through an onslaught of gun violence. Cornered in a condo, Hayek’s Everly has to shoot her way through an army of Japanese gangsters, bumbling bodyguards, and fellow prostitutes to achieve freedom. If this sounds stupid & gratuitous, it’s because it most definitely is. Everly isn’t a film where any themes or ideas are explored in new or interesting ways and the violence is a mere exclamation point. It’s a film where violence is the entire point.

14. R100 – Late in the run time of this surreally campy BDSM comedy, the film addresses the audience directly by suggesting that, “People won’t understand this film until they’re 100 years old.” Even that timeline may be a little too optimistic. Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto, the juvenile prankster who brought the world the cartoonish excess of Big Man Japan & Symbol, R100 initially pretends to be something it most definitely is not: understated. The first forty minutes of the film are a visually muted, noir-like erotic thriller with a dully comic sadness to its protagonists’ depression & persecution. It’s around the halfway mark where the film goes entirely off the rails genre-wise, dabbling in tones that range from spy movies to mockumentaries to old-school ZAZ spoofs. It’s doubtful that even 100 years on Earth will give you enough information to make sense out of that mess.

15. The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown – What can I say? I’m a sucker for pro wrestling cinema. The dumber the better. In The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown the unholy marriage of the title not only connects both The Flintstones’ Honeymooners-style comedy and the WWE’s complete detachment from reality with their collective roots in working class escapism, it also revels in the most important element in all of wrestling & animation, the highest form of comedy: delicious, delicious puns.

-Brandon Ledet

The true story at this point of the Fast and Furious franchise is the story of an ever-ballooning budget. The 2001 debut installment cost $38 million to make, which it of course spent on fast cars & Ja Rule, depending on ultra-macho cheap thrills like rap rock & lipstick lesbianism to fill in the gaps. In 2015 a Fast and Furious movie costs $250 million to make, which gives it the freedom to tear down entire cities on the screen, no Ja Rule necessary. The first three or so Fast and Furious movies serve mostly as cultural relics, time capsules of bad taste in the early 00s. As the budget continued to expand (along with Vin Diesel’s delightfully long winded musings on the nature of “family”) so did the scope of the action sequences and the feeling that the franchise had actually started to pull its own weight as a unique intellectual property. The street racing & Ja Rules of the early films are mostly gone, but far from forgotten as the series has become completely wrapped up in its own mythology, pretending that the past was more significant than it was and pushing what they can do in the present to any & all ridiculous heights allowed by the strengths of an ever-sprawling cast & budget. Furious 7 may have taken my top spot in the franchise (although that may just be the post-theater buzz talking) simply because it’s so much movie.

Furious 7’s charms depend greatly on the six films that precede it (this marks the first time that the Tokyo Drift storyline is in the rearview), but it uses that well-established history to its advantage as a launching pad for its larger-than-ever set pieces and relentless fan service. It’s difficult to imagine just how much a newcomer would get out of early scenes where Vin Diesel’s Dominic struggles to keep his “family” together, including the significance of details like the house they worked so hard to hold onto, the struggle to keep Paul Walker’s Brian out of danger, and the faulty memory of Michelle Rodriguez’ Letty. There’s an excess of callbacks to seemingly insignificant details like a tuna sandwich from the first film, images & music lifted directly from Tokyo Drift (within which Lucas Black ages a decade in the blink of an eye), a return to the Race Wars (the ludicrous name of a street racing competition I still can’t believe no one in that world finds fucked up), outrageous stunt casting of flash-in-the-pan rappers (in this case the most-insignificant-yet, Iggy Azaelea), and increasingly obnoxious product placement for Corona. There was even a return to the excessive ogling of the early films, but with a modern update. If the gratuitous leering of the early 00s was Generation Lipstick Lesbian, Furious 7 poses the modern era as Generation Dat Ass, featuring a peculiarly intense focus on the female posterior. The only thing that was really missing was a backyard cookout. To a newcomer these callbacks could feel superfluous at best and grotesque at worst, but for a fan (even a recent convert such as myself), they’re pleasantly familiar.

That’s not to say that a pair of fresh eyes would have nothing to enjoy here. At a remarkably brisk 137 minutes, Furious 7 is packed to the gills with action movie surface pleasures: self-described “vehicular warfare”, flying cars, smashed buildings, absurdly intricate martial arts sequences, drones (or as Tyrese Gibson’s Roman calls them, “space ships”), hacker technobabble, rap music, and the aforementioned near-naked asses. On the gender-swapped side of that butt fetish is a gratuitous shot of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s mostly nude, entirely exceptional body lounging in a hospital bed that is sure to raise a couple heart rates. Although The Rock isn’t afforded much screen time, he makes the most of it. Besides appearing undressed, he also puts his pro-wrestling background to good use in some epic shit talking (“I’m gonna put a hurt on him so bad he’s gonna wish his mama had kept her legs closed”) and a fist fight in which he delivers his signiature “Rock Bottom” move to Jason Statham. However, even that fight pales in comparison to the stunts performed by legitimate hand-to-hand combat artists Ronda Rousey & Tony Jaa. The film could’ve used more of crowd favorite The Rock (and personal favorite Jordana Brewster), but the additions of newcomers like Rousey, Jaa, and total weirdo Kurt Russell more than filled the void.

There was also something missing in the absence of longtime Fast and Furious director Justin Lin, particularly in the scaled-back “family” talk that reached its fever pitch in Fast & Furious 6. Considering the real-life loss of Paul Walker, however, the “family” speeches that are included feel all the more significant. When Dominic says “I don’t have friends. I got family,” you could easily substitute the word “friends” for “fans”. Anyone who has made it this far into the Fast and Furious ride (or at least tuned in after the not-so-great fourth one) is likely to feel an affinity for the franchise that not only excuses, but emphatically embraces its trashy, trashy charms. Paul Walker’s transformation from a “sandwich crazy” undercover cop to an action movie legend was a gradual one that has now sadly come to a close. It’s always a bummer to watch a family member go and Furious 7 does a great job of giving him a proper send-off. The focus on fan-pleasing callbacks and the transition from the “family”-heavy Justin Lin run into a new era (in which Walker will not be joining us) distinguishes Furious 7 from the six previous installments, while still honors them with a lofty reverence. It’s sure to please the franchise’s established fans as well as gather some new ones along the way. There really is just so much movie here that anyone who enjoys loud, obnoxious action films in any capacity is likely find something to latch onto.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

Brandon’s Top Camp Films of 2015

Furious 7 (2015)