pop punk

Rats! (2025)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Hollywood studios are struggling to get back on their feet after years of being knocked to the ground by blows like the COVID-19 pandemic, labor union strikes, and the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Industrial Complex. That’s bad news for shareholders & below-the-line workers alike, but it has cleared a lot of space on local marquees for microbudget indie cinema that would otherwise be elbowed out of the frame by superhero flicks, nostalgic remakes, and other Disney products of that cursed ilk. It’s easy to doomsay about the future of theatrical moviegoing in our current blockbuster lull, but I can’t get too dispirited by a trend that’s left room for independently-funded filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun, Vera Drew, Kyle Edward Ball, Robbie Banfitch, Matt Farley, Kansas Bowling, Dylan Greenberg, Mike Cheslik and Ryland Tews to land major headlines & showtimes when just a decade ago their work would’ve been stuck in straight-to-Vimeo purgatory. Maybe it’s a bad time to own a movie studio, but things are looking up for outsider artists with attention-grabbing filmmaking styles, an active After Effects subscription, and a dream.

I’m excited to add Maxwell Nalevansky & Carl Fry to that growing list of microbudget freaks who’ve landed major impact with minor resources in this new era of outsider cinema. Their debut feature Rats! calls back to an older tradition of Texan slacker art sparked by a previous independent cinema boom, but I don’t know that any of those post-Linklater buttscratchers were ever as exceedingly gross or as truly anarchic. A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk, Rats! is a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens. Set in small-town Texas in the mid-aughts, it follows the daily follies of a permanently stoned graffiti artist who earns himself a night in jail when he’s caught tagging the town’s beloved public phone booth. The especially deranged cop on his case offers him amnesty for this crime if he rats on his small-time drug dealer cousin, whom she suspects of selling nukes to Osama Bin Laden but does not have the evidence to prove it. Meanwhile, a local serial killer is systematically removing the hands of unsuspecting victims around town, which also gets unfairly pinned on the cousins despite their collective ambitions mostly amounting to ripping bongs & chilling out. There isn’t much else going on in terms of plot, but much violence, romance, pop-punk whining, and lazing about ensues.

Rats! estimates what it might be like if the singing-butthole sequence of Pink Flamingos were staged in the live-action cartoon playhouse of Cool as Ice. The audience is afforded no time to adjust to its cavity-boring sugar rush, as the film frequently cuts to one-off Looney Tunes gags & nauseating Farrelly Brothers gross-outs without warning. It’s an unrelenting editing rhythm that’s sure to trigger a fight-or-flight response in unsuspecting viewers, but it’s also one with promising cult-classic potential for those who stick with it, given the density & intensity of its jokes. Like with other recent outsider-art triumphs like The People’s Joker & Hundreds of Beavers, it only gets funnier the more time you spend with it, as it builds its own inside-jokes with repeated gags like its persistent, nonsensical mispronunciation of the word “hands.” There might be some subversive political commentary in its lampooning of fascist suburban paranoia and its declaration that “The only good cop is a dead cop,” but for the most part its only goal from minute to minute is to make the audience laugh, and it consistently succeeds. Everything else is just a loving effort to make every frame as cartoonishly 2007 as possible, collecting as many totems from the era as it can in 85 breakneck minutes: an Alkaline Trio poster, a Converge t-shirt, a McCain/Palin billboard, Game Stop & Hot Topic shoplifting sprees, Xanax tablets, a panini press, etc.

Yellow Veil is giving Rats! a proper theatrical run before it hits VOD, including a local screening at The Broad on 3/28. Regardless of its immediate response from a wide audience, that level of distribution is an immediate victory for a film this cheap, this gross, and this prankishly abrasive. Not that long ago, it likely would have stalled on the regional festival circuit before trickling into self-published online platforms. That’s cause to celebrate, preferably over 40ozs and Black & Milds with your closest knucklehead friends for the full effect.

-Brandon Ledet

We Are Little Zombies (2020)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I remember watching Edgar Wright’s video game breakup comedy Scott Pilgrim vs. The World in the theater and finding it charmingly cute, certainly better than its box office & immediate critical reception implied. As its then-teenage cast has grown into mid-level fame and its then-teenage audience has grown to become the critical establishment in the decade since, Scott Pilgrim‘s underdog status has long faded away. If anything, praise for its 8-bit video game nostalgia and self-critical, anti-romantic twee sentiments is absurdly overstated by now, and what was once a low-key charmer has become overloaded with unsustainably hyperbolic accolades as a modern classic – at least in online Film Nerd circles. Nothing has made that gradual canonization more absurd to me than catching up with the recent coming-of-age comedy We Are Little Zombies, which pushes the same twee video game nostalgia aesthetics everyone drools over in Scott Pilgrim to much more consistently exciting, surprising extremes at every turn. We Are Little Zombies is one of those over-achieving stylistic showcases where every single in-the-moment comedic gag & tangential flight of whimsy makes you shout, “That’s so cool!” at the screen; it’s just absolutely overflowing with creativity. I now understand where the Scott Pilgrim die-hards are coming from, because I’ve seen that movie’s stylistic flourishes exploded into a vibrant, over-the-top spectacle much more suited to my own maximalist tastes.

Like most twee fantasy pieces and whimsical coming-of-age stories, We Are Little Zombies’s flashy sense of style mostly just functions to obscure the deep well of pain flowing just below its manicured surface. The plot is simple; four freshly orphaned children meet at their parents’ simultaneous funerals and run away to form a surprisingly successful (but ultimately doomed) pop punk band. The pint-sized lineup of Little Zombies are all emotionally numb to their grief, so they write vibrant pop songs about their apathy as a form of art therapy. Most of the structural conflict in the film is typical to a rise-to-fame rock band narrative, deriving from evil record company executives converting their art into capital. However, from scene to scene their journey is guided strictly by video game logic, wherein their instruments must be acquired like digital armor and the record execs are level bosses who must be defeated. The vibrant colors, rapid cuts, 8-bit score, and continually surprising shot choices that power-boost this video game surface aesthetic feel like they belong to a kinetic live-action cartoon populated by hyperactive kids in constant search of their next sugar rush. Instead, the Little Zombies are decidedly anti-emotional as a band, despondently stumbling through their shitty little lives in the exact way their collective name implies. The only time they appear to be having as much fun as first-time director Makoto Nagahisa is having behind the camera is when they’re playing their candy-coated pop punk tunes, and there’s a genuine tragedy to how easily that collective art therapy is corrupted for a one-hit-wonder cash-in.

In terms of its mind-melting, genre-defying maximalism, there are a ton of psychedelic Japanese freak-outs I’d compare We Are Little Zombies to before citing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Suicide Club, Hausu, Funeral Parade of Roses, Wild Zero, etc. Still, the two films’ overlap of pop punk soundtrack cues, twee heartbreak, and video game surface aesthetics make the comparison unignorable. We Are Little Zombies amplifies the little touches that make Scott Pilgrim charming into an explosively entertaining video game dreamscape that much more clearly, consistently registers as Something Special to my eyes. It’s apparently now my turn to overhype an underseen, underloved video game fantasy piece until people are sick of hearing about how great it is. Hopefully, I’ve got at least a decade until the tides turn against it.

-Brandon Ledet