reality tv

The Running Man (2025)

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It’s strange that we got two different films this year that were based on Stephen King novels that he originally published under his pseudonym of “Richard Bachman,” with The Running Man premiering just a few short months after The Long Walk. I haven’t seen the 1987 adaptation of Running Man since I was a kid, but I remember skimming the original text once in my adolescent years and not seeing many similarities, and reading that the earlier film had largely taken only a few concepts from the novel and changed much of the meat of it. Edgar Wright’s new film, based on a cursory examination of the text’s summaries online, hews closer to it, with a few modernizations to account for changing technology, as Bachman/King’s original, despite being set in 2025, couldn’t have foreseen the ways that we’d build our own dystopia. What struck me about this is that although The Long Walk was written when King was a student in the 1960s and was published in 1979, both that narrative and this one focus on a man driven to participate in a widely broadcast, necropolitical bread and circuses-style contest that ends in either death or functionally endless wealth. For The Long Walk, it’s clear that King drew inspiration from the seemingly endless Vietnam War, the first war to be televised. (As a side note, the Latin for “bread and circuses” is panem et circenses, with the Long Walk-inspired Hunger Games taking the word “panem” as the name of the nation in which it takes place.) The origin of what inspired The Running Man is less clear. 

Regardless, this made me curious about whether, consciously or unconsciously, King shunted the works in which he expressed rage against an unfair and unjust system into his Bachman-credited works while keeping his King brand spooky (as of the 1977 publication of the first Bachman novel, aptly titled Rage, King had published Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining). Rage, which has nothing to do with The Rage: Carrie 2, has become semi-notorious since publication, as to the rise of school shootings in the decades since its publication has haunted King, who removed the book from publication after it became associated with some actual acts of violence. In that novel, main character Charlie Decker retrieves a pistol from his locker after being expelled and goes on a rampage, but he does so with no real ideology and the only clues we get to his reasoning are flashbacks to his abusive childhood. 

That’s not quite in the same wheelhouse as Running Man or The Long Walk, but the latter two do share similarities to the 1981 Bachman novel Roadwork, which could best be synopsized as “Charlotte Hollis does a Falling Down.” Roadwork features a man named Dawes whose sentimental attachment to the industrial laundry where he is employed and the house in which he raised his deceased son Charlie leads him on a campaign against the expansion of a highway that will result in both being demolished. He eventually finds himself in a standoff with the police before he detonates the house himself while inside of it, and the epilogue confirms that the highway extension project had only been approved so that the city could build the minimum number of miles to secure future federal funding. Roadwork was a contemporary novel, so it lacked the speculative fiction future setting of the dystopias of The Long Walk or Running Man, but despite a more realistic setting, the protagonist is still a person who, like the boys in the former and the running men in the latter, finds himself forced by an inhumanly callous and bureaucratic system into a path from which there seems to be no escape. It lacks the “being broadcast to the masses” element, but it is replaced by the fact that the piece is bookended by excerpts from a journalist who interviews Dawes both before and during his rampage. 

With that frustration with (and ultimate defiance of) the system being a foundational element of most of the Bachman-credited works, and with the globalization of virtual omnipresence of social media creating a world in which most people have willingly submitted themselves to an online surveillance state, it’s not surprising that we would get a Running Man remake (or re-adaptation). And, if you’re going to do it, I can hardly think of a better person to play protagonist Ben Richards than Glen Powell, who has the handsome face and toned body to please a ravenous viewing audience, both those watching the film and the TV—or rather “FreeVee”—show within it. Edgar Wright has made some of my favorite little oddballs over the years; I was a huge fan of his Sean Pegg/Nick Frost/Jessica Hynes-nee-Stephenson TV series Spaced as well as Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and his Scott Pilgrim adaptation, and even if I was lukewarm on The World’s End and never saw Baby Driver, I was more fond of Last Night in Soho than most. The early reactions to Running Man, many of which expressed frustration with Wright and recommending he re-team with Pegg and Frost, had me worried, but I ultimately had a pretty good time with it. While catching up about recent releases we had seen in the top half of our recent podcast episode, Brandon and I talked about our different reactions to Predator: Badlands, and aligned on the fact that it was the perfect movie for a mid-afternoon beer at an action flick; this is exactly the same experience. 

Ben Richards (Powell) is a laborer who has been blacklisted from virtually every job because of “insubordination” like telling a union rep about radiation leakage; that one megacorporation has a monopoly on virtually all industry doesn’t help. When his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is planning to hit a third shift at the seedy nightclub where she waitresses so that they can try to get medicine for their ill infant daughter, Ben instead heads off to audition for one of the many game shows that are presented on the megacorp’s FreeVee service. He promises that he’s not foolish enough to try and get on The Running Man, a show in which the contestants must try to stay alive for thirty days while staying ahead of the elite five person “Hunter” team led by the mysterious masked McCone (Lee Pace), the omnipresent “goons” (the corp’s privatized police which have replaced all other law enforcement in the U.S.), and all private citizens, who are incentivized to record and report the Runners with cash prizes. He ends up not having a choice, as he gets slotted to The Running Man after various physical and psychological tests, and he’s talked into accepting the signing bonus that will get baby Cathy in to see a doctor by network exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). Killian tells Ben that he thinks he has what it takes to go the distance, and even as he tries to endear himself to Ben by admitting that he says that to all the players but “this time [he] really mean[s] it,” Ben sees right through him, promising that he’ll destroy him in the end. Killian directs him to amp up his rage issues for the camera, and then Ben and the other runners, Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and Jansky, are introduced to the in-studio and at home audiences by host Bobby T (Colman Domingo), where they’re painted as thieves, welfare parasites, and malcontents, to the jeers and boos of the frothing populace. 

The rules are simple. Viewers at home can record and submit footage of the Runners via an app, and they get cash payouts both for confirmed sightings and if their contribution helps “eliminate” the Runner; Runners have to stay alive and on-the-run while recording a ten-minute tape per day and then mailing it in, supposedly anonymously. After a near miss with the Hunters while staying at a similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from YMCA, Richards meets Bradley (Daniel Ezra), a rebel who takes him in as part of the underground resistance and whose online presence as an anonymous exposer of the secrets of the broadcasts means he can provide all the exposition that Ben needs. He helps secret Ben to Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), another rebel who plans to get Ben to an underground bunker after pre-recording his tapes so that he can lie low, and whose house is booby-trapped to the gills. Ben attempts to get more information out about the real activities of the megacorp, but his tapes are edited before broadcast to show him confessing to having enjoyed killing the goons sent after him and that he literally eats puppies. The longer he stays alive, however, the more the in-universe audience transitions from believing the villainous image that the show paints him as to finding him a bit of a folk hero. 

Before Bachman was outed as King, some contemporary critics compared the “two” writers’ work and usually found that although their styles were very similar, Bachman’s endings tended to be more bleak than King’s, which were often dark but ended on an optimistic tone. I’m not sure I really agree; Carrie ends grimly, as does ‘Salem’s Lot, but this apparent discrepancy was highlighted specifically by Steve Brown, the bookstore clerk credited with cracking the case that Bachman and King were the same person, so there must be some merit in that analysis. The recent adaptation of The Long Walk makes minor changes to the ending (mostly regarding who wins) but retains that work’s dark tone. Wright’s reimagining of the finale of King’s Running Man rejects the original climax, in which Ben crashes a stolen jet into the megacorp network building, in favor of having Ben escape the plane’s destruction prior to the plane being destroyed by the megacorp’s missiles so that he can become the figurehead of a revolution. I’m not terribly concerned with textual fidelity, all things considered, but it’s worth noting that all of the Bachman texts have downer endings. Charlie is killed by the police at the climax of Rage, the winner of the titular Long Walk runs toward a specter of death on the other side of the finish line, Dawes blows himself up in Roadwork, and Ben Richards of the novel is a martyr (at best), not a revolutionary. Even the latter works that were published after Bachman’s true identity was exposed, Thinner and Blaze, end with their protagonists losing weight to death and being shot to death by the police, respectively. It does feel like The Running Man, in either prose or film form, shouldn’t really have a happy ending; it could have had a merely poignant one. Instead, this one ends in such a way that although it is a complete story in and of itself, it’s deliberately open-ended enough that it leaves the door open for a sequel that it should not have. 

Politically, the film is kind of shallow. Ben Richards is a man with a short fuse, and his driving need is to provide for his family. He is a man with a motivation but without an ideology, and although he takes up arms against the system, one never buys that his personal vendetta against Killian transcends the personal into the revolutionary. We never learn what becomes of Ben’s wife and child in the novel, and that kind of ambiguity makes for a more interesting text, giving you something to mull over, while the film explicitly shows him reuniting with his wife after “winning” the game, after a fashion. There are the occasional very minor references to our contemporary real world and its problems. The only broadcast FreeVee that seems to exist consists entirely of game shows and a Kardashians spoof called The Americanos, which reflects a lot of the current media landscape, and there’s one piece of graffiti that reads “A[ll] G[oons] A[re] B[ad],” but no one is going to go into this film and see themselves in any of the characters with negative traits. That’s not something that every film needs to have, but when one is making a satire, which this film purports (and occasionally manages) to be, if there’s nothing that challenges the viewer to recognize himself in the brain-rotted masses who cheer for the death of an innocent man because of manipulation tactics, then what are we doing here? When the film does hit, it does so in the way that the audience is manipulated. In one particularly noteworthy scene, the mouthpiece of a show that gives Richards a bonus for the death of a goon brings all of the children of the dead men on stage for a candlelight vigil. It’s good stuff, and it’s in these moments that the film manages to show a little of the edge that it’s reaching for but failing to grasp. 

It sounds like I’m really down on this film, and that’s not really the case. I had a good time, and this was a well-paced action thriller with a likable leading man and some side characters who, if they can’t be fully fleshed-out, can at least be quirky. Glen Powell’s selling some tickets based on his towel-clad hostel escape alone, I can assure you. ‘Tis the season of heavy, heady prestige dramas like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, After the Hunt, Die My Love, and still more in the days ahead, and sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s pretty to look at and decently constructed, even if it’s a little empty, just to break things up a little. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Reality, TV, Violence, Pornography

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I have owned the same used copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi actioner The Running Man for as long as I can remember. It’s been so long that the DVD itself has become just as kitsch as the cheesy 80s movie it stores. Between its standard-definition transfer, its double-disc presentation of both wide & full-screen formats, and its 3D-animated menu transitions, it’s a time capsule of physical media’s ancient past. What really dates that Special Edition DVD set, however, is its special features menu, which includes two short-form documentaries explaining The Running Man‘s continued cultural relevance into the early 2000s. One disc includes a featurette titled “Lockdown on Main Street,” which links the film’s themes of totalitarian government surveillance to the privacy-violating overreach of the Bush Administration post-9/11. Topical! The other disc’s featurette “Game Theory” covers the prescience of the film’s game-show premise in predicting the dystopian state of reality TV in the early aughts, which had then recently mutated from early human-interest documentaries PBS’s An American Family & MTV’s The Real World to more preposterous, sadistic programs like Survivor & Fear Factor. The titular, fictional TV game show The Running Man is a government-sanctioned crime & punishment program in which prisoners fight for their freedom against homicidal American Gladiator types with deadly weapons & pro wrestler gimmicks. The real-world state of reality TV hadn’t gotten quite that malicious by the early 2000s, but the other fictional programs advertised during its fictional television broadcasts—Paul Verhoeven-style—weren’t too much of an exaggeration. For instance, the commercial for a show titled Climbing for Dollars, in which contestants climb a rope over a pit of barbed wire & rabid dogs, no longer felt all that outlandish in a world that had already produced Fear Factor or the Japanese game show “A Life in Prizes” (as documented in last year’s The Contestant). Even when that Special Edition DVD was produced in 2004, the film’s dystopian game show America still seemed plausibly achievable by its far-away future setting of 2019.

The Running Man‘s quirks & charms have not changed much over the years. As a pun-heavy action showcase for a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s just as amusing now as it was four decades ago. The worst you can say about the way it has aged is that it’s been outshone by its Verhoeven-directed contemporaries RoboCop & Total Recall, which make for much sharper & more vicious satire. Oddly, the short-doc featurette “Game Theory: An Examination of Reality TV” feels much more out of date, since it speaks to current trends of reality TV production in the early 2000s instead of predicting what the format might evolve into in the future. There’s something surreal about watching talking heads explain the basic components of reality television after decades of drowning in household-name series like Real Housewives, Below Deck, Love Is Blind, The Bachelor, etc. Everything from those shows’ reduced production costs to the way they’re cast for conflict to the way their semi-scripted & heavily edited version of “reality” is a far cry from pure documentary filmmaking is spelled out as if the audience is considering those factors for the very first time. Even if obvious to a modern audience, there is still something validating about hearing former Survivor contestants and Fear Factor showrunners explain that what they’re attempting to capture is a genuine reaction to artificial scenarios — a conscious mix of reality & artifice. Sometimes, it does help to hear an everyday concept defined in simple terms like that, even if in this case it feels like explaining the existence of water to a fish. The fictional TV program The Running Man could not be more artificial; it has a pro-wrestling promotion’s relationship to Reality. The pain, shame, and death that contestants suffer on the show is real, though, which is why it’s totally plausible that massive audiences would tune into its bread-and-circuses entertainment spectacle as nightly appointment viewing. It’s the same sadistic impulse that recently inspired Netflix executives to greenlight a “real” version of The Squid Games to cash in on the popularity of the fictional one, with predictably inhumane results.

This early-2000s “Game Theory” understanding & definition of reality TV is both accurate & incomplete. It gets across the reality TV audience’s bottomless sadism, but it largely ignores the sexual voyeurism that also makes the format so enduringly popular. The success of Survivor & Fear Factor may have made it seem like society was headed towards more physically violent & punitive television programming in an impending Running Man dystopia, but it’s arguable that the format has veered towards a more sexually pornographic impulse instead. While early reality-TV breakouts like The Real World & Big Brother offered brief, night-vision glimpses into its contestants’ private sex lives, more recent shows like Love Island, Temptation Island, FBoy Island, MILF Manor, and Naked Attraction have disposed of any pretense that the audience cares about anything else but sex. While The Running Man & “Game Theory” only acknowledge the format’s sex appeal in context of casting hottie hunks & babes as eye candy, there were other early examinations of the format that fully understood its reliance on sexual voyeurism. For instance, No Wave filmmaker Beth B’s 1996 documentary Visiting Desire plays like a direct response to & escalation of the sexual voyeurism of MTV’s The Real World. Triangulating the middle ground between Annie Sprinkle, Marlon Riggs, and the street interview segments of HBO Real Sex, Visiting Desire is a social experiment shot in the cultural dead zone between reality TV & amateur pornography. It starts with a sequence of therapists & psychologists explaining the function of Fantasy in healthy adult sexuality, staged in a black-box void to look like an especially risqué episode of Charlie Rose. Then, Beth B points her camera at a series of NYC pedestrians, who ruminate on what fantasy they would want to play out if they could share a bedroom with a stranger for 30 minutes, no boundaries. Finally, she puts that scenario to a live test, bringing two strangers at a time into a sparse set decorated with only a bed, a chair, and a box of Kleenex, with 30 minutes to act out a fantasy of their choosing. It looks & feels like the set-up to an amateur porno, but the bridge from fantasy to reality becomes too intimidating in the moment for most participants to cross, and it ends up playing like an art-gallery video loop instead.

Already a few years into the initial run of The Real World, Visiting Desire totally understands the basic appeal of reality television. Beth B has set up an intensely artificial scenario (30 minutes of filmed fantasy play with a total stranger) hoping to illicit & capture a genuine human reaction (sex, or something like it). It’s not accurate to call it a failed experiment, exactly, but the range of genuine human behavior captured in the film isn’t as sexy nor as gratifying as its premise promises. Some participants are committed to the semi-scripted fantasy of their choosing: trading spankings, swapping clothes & gender roles, instructing a stranger to masturbate, etc. Unsurprisingly, NYC punk scene legend Lydia Lunch is especially game to lean into her dominatrix persona for the camera, fully playing out each fantasy prompt she’s confronted with regardless of whether she shares any attraction with her scene partner. Most participants completely chicken out, though, shying away from the fantasy they entered the room ready to perform and, in several instances, breaking down crying. That fear and that emotional release still count as unexpected genuine reaction to the artificial “reality” of the project, but they also so obviously miss the mark of what Beth B initially proposed that the cast often apologizes to the camera for not giving her what she wants. While the Running Man “Game Theory” undersells the pornographic aspect of reality TV, Beth B’s take on the format also misunderstands an essential component of what makes it work in the first place. 30 minutes is simply not enough time for her cast to adjust to her artificial environment or, more importantly, to her camera. In “Game Theory”, a former Survivor contestant describes how awkward she felt during her initial hours in front of the cameras, but then she became a more natural version of herself a few days into the shoot as she adjusted to their presence. All Visiting Desire has time to capture is that initial, awkward awareness of the camera without breaking through to the comfort that allows for genuine human response to its artificial scenario. If it were a multi-episode TV show instead of academic video art, it might’ve gotten somewhere genuinely interesting (and genuinely sexy). Instead, it’s a mixed-results experiment that’s neither pure documentary nor pure pornography.

If there’s anything instructive about this early reality-TV academia, it’s that Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man adaptation is unlikely to have much new to say about the violent or pornographic extremes that make the format popular. The Running Man-style violence of game shows like Survivor & Fear Factor peaked twenty years ago, while the pornographic avenues the genre has recently taken instead have no relation to the film’s Stephen King-penned source material. It’s difficult to imagine a new Running Man could even be dated in the fun way, not without Arnold Schwarzenegger quipping, “I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist, because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” in his trademark Austrian accent. The cartoonish action cinema of the original Running Man movie was already outdated by the 1990s, and the American game-show dystopia it predicts was already in full swing by the 2000s, long before its 2019 setting. So, what’s even left for a new movie adaptation to accomplish? Based on current trends, the future of reality TV looks a lot more like the semi-pornographic artifice of Beth B’s Visiting Desire, flaws & all. Maybe that’s what we should be remaking instead, now that TV producers know exactly how to manipulate game show contestants into fucking on camera. It would likely make for some very popular major-network primetime porn, à la Love Island UK (or whatever happens to be your island-themed softcore game show of choice).

-Brandon Ledet

The Contestant (2024)

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Japanese television personality Tomoaki “Nasubi” Hamatsu has lived an incredible life.  As with anyone who’s lived an incredible life, that means he’s doomed to be immortalized in a bland documentary or biopic, often one after the other.  The British documentary The Contestant has bravely stepped forward to get the ritual going, sitting Nasubi down for talking-head interviews about his traumatic years in the public eye, supplemented by late-90s archival footage of the horrors he describes.  The details of his life make for a great Wikipedia page but not necessarily a great feature film, as evidenced by the final half-hour of the runtime spinning its wheels detailing Nasubi’s post-fame charity work instead of sticking to the subject at hand.  Most Wikipedia biographies aren’t illustrated with video clips, though, so I suppose The Contestant saves you the additional time & effort you’d spend opening a second tab for YouTube searches while you’re scrolling on the toilet. 

It feels cruel to refer to Hamatsu by his nickname, since it started as a schoolyard insult.  Bullied for being born with a “long face”, the name “Nasubi” refers to the “eggplant” shape of Hamatsu’s head.  That bullying followed him into young adulthood too, as the aspiring comedian struggled to find a healthy balance between making people laugh vs being laughed at.  His desperation for approval led him to becoming the star of the “A Life in Prizes” game show segment of the Japanese variety show Danpa Shonen, in which his bullying escalated to full-on torture.  At the instruction of producer Toshio Tsuchiya (an obvious villain that the film nudges you to boo & hiss at in his own appearances as a talking head), Nasubi was isolated in a room with nothing but postcards and a rack of magazines for fifteen maddening months, with the goal of earning ¥1 million’s worth of prizes from sweepstakes contests.  Provided no clothes and no food (beyond an occasional packet of crackers to keep him alive), Nasubi’s semi-voluntary imprisonment for “A Life in Prizes” was presented as an experiment to see if someone could survive on magazine contest winnings alone.  Really, though, he was televised as a one-man geek show for an entire nation to mock, often with a nightmarish laugh track underscoring his daily suffering.  As you’d likely assume, the experience fucked him up psychologically, and it’s taken him decades to find any joy or mutual trust in humanity again.

The late 90s and early 2000s were an ugly time for pop culture, most vividly reflected in the early stirrings of reality TV.  Nasubi’s 15 months of fame only slightly predate the most obvious Western comparison points for “A Life in Prizes”—Big Brother and The Truman Show—and it doesn’t feel much eviler than most of what followed that decade.  I’m sure someone could slap together a sinister montage of Jerry Springer clips that would make America look like a vicious hell pit, for instance, and maybe someone should.  Still, even if Tsuchiya’s manipulation of his pet reality star isn’t more extreme than behind-the-scenes stories from the sets of shows like The Bachelor or Below Deck, that doesn’t mean he’s not a monster.  Nasubi barely survived his time on Danpa Shonen, winning over a huge audience of fans with his goofball celebrations of receiving prize packages of car tires, camping tents, and dog food, but that micro-celebrity did not translate to a sustainable career once Tsuchiya ran out of ways to extend the gimmick of his imprisonment.  It took a long time for Nasubi to rebuild his identity and his sense of place in the world after the entertainment industry spat him out, so it’s easy to forgive The Contestant for its third-act cheerleading of his charitable work in the years following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  That doesn’t make for great cinema, necessarily, but it’s at least a kinder impulse than what guided the last camera crew to center him in the spotlight.

The Contestant is not a great documentary, but it is great trash TV, in that it allows you to indulge in several of the most popular genres of trash TV (reality, game show, true crime) while still feeling morally superior to them.  No matter how much disgust the film expresses for Danpa Shonen‘s exploitation of Nasubi, it can’t get around the fact that its own existence perpetuates that exploitation.  The reason most people will watch The Contestant is to see the bizarre, out-of-context clips of a naked, lonely man starving to death on TV for mass entertainment, so it’s a little rich for the movie to act as if it’s above its subject.  If I learned anything about Nasubi that I didn’t retain from reading his Wikipedia page, it’s that he’s credited for inspiring the association of the eggplant emoji with the penis, since his nudity was censored by producers with a floating eggplant symbol.  Otherwise, the only reason to watch the movie is to watch Nasubi suffer, as opposed to just reading about his suffering in plain text.  It’s the same perverse enjoyment that true crime obsessives get out of looking up crime-scene photos and serial-killer mugshots after hearing about them on podcasts.  I can’t claim that I’m above that impulse either, since I chose to watch this documentary out of my own morbid fascination with its subject; I just wish it had chosen to challenge me a little more and indulge me a little less.

-Brandon Ledet

Jackass Forever (2022)

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When we revisited 2002’s Jackass: The Movie for the podcast, I was thinking of the Jackass series as a reality-TV update to Pink Flamingos.  There’s an old-fashioned geek show quality to Jackass‘s ever-escalating gross-out “stunts” that feels perfectly in tune with the infamous singing butthole & dogshit-eating gags of John Waters’s midnight-circuit cult classic.  Twenty years later, that shock cinema tradition is still very much alive in Jackass Forever, the fourth (and likely final) film in the Jackass canon.  Refreshingly, it features the most onscreen peen I’ve ever seen in a mainstream American film, but the penises in question are being punched, bitten, stomped, flattened, stung, and otherwise mangled for the audience’s freaked-out amusement.  If there’s been any discernible evolution in the types of stunts the Jackass crew have zeroed in on over the decades, they’ve clearly become less invested in skateboarding & BMX culture and a lot more intrigued by the durability of dicks & balls.  Laughing along with each new stab of jovial genital torture, I was again reminded of watching Pink Flamingos and other John Waters classics in the theater with fellow weirdos, where the laughs always hit way harder than they do alone on your couch. 

The thing is, though, I don’t know that Pink Flamingos ever reached as wide or as otherwise unadventurous of an audience as Jackass has.  Someone in my suburban megaplex theater brought their baby, which I’ve definitely never seen at a John Waters repertory screening, and I think that’s beautiful.  I also don’t know that I’ve ever found a Waters film to be this heartfelt & sentimental.  For all of Jackass‘s boneheaded commitment to gross-out gags, it’s also now a beautiful decades-long story about friendship; that friendship just happens to be illustrated with smeared feces & genital mutilation.  If not only through the virtue of having been around for over twenty years, Jackass has graduated from MTV-flavored geek show to undeniable cultural institution.  It’s like an absurdly idiotic version of the Seven Up! documentary series, except that we learn less about its subjects’ decades of personal growth than we learn about their ongoing quest to light an underwater fart on fire.  Jackass Forever concludes with clips from the original Jackass film & television series juxtaposed against “stunts” that were revised or repeated for this final installment, and it’s easy to get emotional about how far the performers have come in the past twenty years – even though they are doing the exact same shit in middle age that they were doing as near-suicidal twentysomethings.  And since that growth happened on television & suburban megaplex screens instead of exclusively in hipster arthouse theaters, there’s a huge, mainstream audience out there who was along for the entire bumpy ride (including an all-growed-up generation of critics who now get to make lofty comparisons to cultural institutions like Seven Up! & Buster Keaton with a straight face).

One major advantage of having a generation of like-minded sickos grow up laughing along to Jackass stunts is that the old guard no longer have to take the brunt of their own idiocy.  Jackass Forever is functionally a passing of the torch to a new crop of social media geek show performers who are willing to risk concussion, suffer electrocution, and belly-splash into cacti, while most of the veterans stand back to provide color commentary.  That’s not to say the original crew don’t get their dicks sliced & mashed alongside the baby geeks under their wings; you can just feel a “We’re getting too old for this shit” sentiment cropping up when it comes to the harder-hitting stunts – understandably.  I always found the absurdism of the more convoluted gags to be a bigger draw than the neck-breaking life-riskers anyway, and Jackass Forever delivers plenty of those over-the-top novelties: penile bees’ nests, penile ping-pong paddles, penile kaiju, penile everything.  I don’t know that the next generation of performers highlighted here carry enough of that absurdist streak to effectively echo the Jackass brand into the future, but they do have the fearlessness of youth on their side, which makes them useful human shields for the stunts performed here.  The only memorable personality among them is a goofball YouTuber named Poopies, and it’s only because his name is endlessly fun to say. Poopies.

The best way I can advocate for Jackass Forever as essential 2022 cinema is to report that I laughed for the entirety of its 96min runtime, to the point of total physical exhaustion.  It was a cathartic theatrical experience, given how few comedies I’ve seen with a crowd in the past two years – a difficult circumstance to ignore given that there were two scenes featuring cameraman Lance Bangs puking into his COVID mask.  I ended up clearing an entire workday to go see it with friends, a couple of whom could not tag along because they already had other plans to see it opening weekend.  What I’m saying is it’s the can’t-miss Event Film of the season, and it doesn’t need high-brow accolades from the likes of Kirsten Johnson or The New Yorker to legitimize its artistic value or wide-audience appeal.  You can expect those accolades to only get loftier & more hyperbolic in the decades to come, though, so it’s very much worthwhile to catch up with Jackass while it’s still a populist crowd-pleaser and not just one of the more transgressive cult curios in the Criterion Collection (alongside Female Trouble, In the Realm of the Senses, Salò and, if we’re counting laser discs, Pink Flamingos).

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #140 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Real Cancun (2003) & Reality Movies

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Welcome to Episode #140 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four crass attempts to translate the Reality TV boom to the big screen, starting with The Real Cancun (2003).

00:00 Welcome

01:24 Punk Vacation (1990)
03:05 Deadly Manor (1990)
07:30 New Order (2021)
12:40 Old (2021)
20:40 Jungle Cruise (2021)
23:40 The Killing of Two Lovers (2021)
29:12 Street Gang (2021)
32:15 I Blame Society (2021)

39:35 The Real Cancun (2003)
1:06:30 From Justin to Kelly (2003)
1:28:28 Ringmaster (1998)
1:46:02 Jackass: The Movie (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

They’re Watching (2016)

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Roger Ebert used to repetitively quote (among other platitudes) a Howard Hawks phrasing that a good movie has “three great scenes and no bad ones.” The most frustrating thing about the straight to VOD horror cheapie They’re Watching is that it gets the first part of that formula so right & then disastrously loses control of what makes it at all special or distinct as a work of genre filmmaking in the second part. They’re Watching opens with an incredible hook & goes down punching in its glorious closing minutes of witchcraft-driven mayhem, but everything between those bookends is so mind-numbingly dull that it’s difficult to praise anything the film accomplishes. You cold sub out entire scenes, characters and plot points from this film with any number of digital-era found footage horror cheapies without losing or gaining anything particularly memorable in the process. This interchangeable, generic quality wouldn’t be such a big deal with a lot of films of this ilk, but They’re Watching tips its hand just enough to show that it could be a clever or imaginative horror flick with the right amount of effort. It just didn’t feel the need to bother.

They’re Watching teases the go-for-broke mayhem of its final moments in an opening scene of extreme violence, but that isn’t the hook that makes the film feel promising. It’s the framing device of a travel/real estate reality TV show that affords the it great potential. The bright, bubbly, inane visual & narrative palette of a daytime travel show is a fantastic contrast to the film’s ultraviolence and in its opening minutes of adopting the format I was tricked into thinking I was watching something special or worthwhile. Unfortunately, the movie immediately drops the gimmick to instead indulge in some abysmally dull, by-the-numbers found footage tedium. The film punishes American tourist archetypes as they try to find “first world inspiration” in the Eastern European country of Moldova, but instead of depicting their pain through an innocuous television show that takes classist delight in remote locations “where the Old World meets the New in surprising ways,” it instead spends almost all of its runtime functioning like the most forgettable Blair Witch Project knockoff imaginable. It doesn’t help the Blair Witch connection at all that the property the victims/television crew is profiling is a witch’s cabin in the woods. It also doesn’t help the film’s overall appeal that the only line of agreeable dialogue is when somebody shouts, “Alex, shut the fuck up!” to the most obnoxious tourist among them. Our American Idiots mock Moldovian poverty & superstition in a constant stream of offenses (to the point where they dare film undercover footage of a child’s funeral), so the audience does want to take delight in their inevitable comeuppance. However, forcing viewers to spend time with these sleazoids as they party & hangout between television tapings is cruel & unusual punishment for those following along at home.

There are some interesting images & ideas luring around in They’re Watching that suggest a better film that could’ve been produced in more capable hands. The film particularly makes great use of a prophetic painting & the common frog in its witchy mayhem, an all-out bloodbath of body-destroying telekinesis & general badassery. Too bad that bloodbath arrives too late in the game to save the film from its overall tedium. Instead of having three great scenes & no bad ones, They’re Watching has one great concluding scene, one go-nowhere opening gimmick, and a whole heap of grey mush in-between. I don’t know what that ingredient list is a recipe for, besides maybe a less-than-compelling disappointment. I’d almost rather it didn’t have one great scene at all, so that I wouldn’t have known that it was capable of more than it bothered delivering.

-Brandon Ledet