reviews

Fire in the Sky (1993)

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After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia. 

The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him. 

For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface. 

This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freejack (1992)

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Hoo boy is this one a lot of fun, and it’s free, Jack! (Sorry.) Crackerjack racecar star Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking forward to marrying sweetheart Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) once he gets all of his ducks in a row. Unfortunately, this crisp November 1991 day is the day that he crashes his racer in a deadly fireball, leaving behind a heartbroken Julie. Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2009, Vacendak (Mick Jagger) and his crew of “bonejackers” cruise through a hellish dystopia in order to line up their machinery with Furlong’s past accident and teleport (or “freejack”) him into the future. See, scientists have figured out how to transfer consciousness from one body to another, gifting immortality to (the wealthiest 1% of) humankind; however, since everyone in 2009 has lived with such intense and prolonged pollution and suffering, the rich don’t want their bodies. Instead, people like Vacendak are bounty hunters for people who can be plucked out of the stream of time like a fish without causing any time-snarling shenanigans — that is, moments before their death and only if they wouldn’t leave identifiable remains anyway. When the bonejacker caravan is knocked out of commission, Furlong escapes. 

After making his way home and finding that Julie no longer lives there, Furlong stumbles into a church, where an atypical nun (Amanda Plummer) fills in the background of the new world order. She explains the concept of freejacking, the immortality machine, and why it looks so much like Class of 1999 outside. She is unable to find Julie online but is able to connect Furlong with his old manager Brad (David Johansen of New York Dolls), who promises to get him in contact with Julie. Elsewhere, Julie has done rather well for herself, rising to an executive position at a major corporation headed by Ian McCandless (Anthony Hopkins), where she works alongside the CEO’s right-hand man Michelette (Jonathan Banks). She, along with the other elites, lives in one of a series of skyscrapers in a gated part of the city, far from the hoarse cries of any yearning masses longing to be free. Furlong must convince her that he is who he says he is—not some guy who freejacked her lost love—and avoid capture by Vacendak, Michelette, or any other interested party for 36 hours, at which point the mind of the mysterious rich person who wants to take over his body will be too degraded to be redownloaded. 

This is exactly the kind of movie that the camp stamp was made for. Normally, a low-brow, high-concept movie like this requires the invention of some kind of fantastical breakthrough or discovery, but this film requires two miraculous feats of science (mind transference and time trafficking), which should push the envelope to the point of being too unbelievable. And, yeah, it is, but once you see the series of casual leather outfits that Jagger gets to parade around in, the minitanks that the bonejackers drive (one of them is indigo with pink detailing and the name Sheila emblazoned in neon green script), the hideously eighties stone offices, and what the creators believed passenger cars would look like in 2009, then it’s impossible not to just give in and have a good time. In a way, Freejack presages companion Rip-Van-Winkle-but-as-a-nineties-action-flick film Demolition Man, but while that film is, in many ways, a conservative’s worst nightmare about a future ruled by political correctness, Freejack is movie that recognizes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that corporate interests and wealth hoarders’ desperation to prolong their lives are the things that will/do dominate the 21st century. Both films, however, spend a lot of time exploring the fish-out-of-temporal-water nature of the protagonist after just a couple of decades while also demonstrating technological and social leaps that are completely impossible during such a short time frame. And, because Furlong is a racer, Freejack is also chock full of chase scenes and races against time, which create the illusion of plot progression even when it spins its wheels from time to time. 

If anything, this is the result of being overstuffed. Production problems on the film were rife (YouTube channel GoodBadFlicks released a pretty extensive overview a few months ago), and although it doesn’t seem to have had much of a cultural impact, it’s strange that this one hasn’t had its day in the limelight as a wrongly maligned, misunderstood classic. This was released just at the start of Estevez’s star renaissance, as The Mighty Ducks released later that year, and came right on the heels of Hopkins’s career-defining role in Silence of the Lambs. A lot of major performers meet at this crossroads, but it’s been all but forgotten in the wake of their other successes, but in spite of all of the studio interference, I think that there’s actually a pretty great nineties action flick here. This would be the decade that, in the wake of the eighties sci-fi action hat trick of Terminator, Predator, and Aliens, speculative fiction would become a dominating factor in action film before reaching its apotheosis in 1999 with The Matrix; Freejack, with its “spiritual switchboard” technology and the hijacking of people’s bodies, is a part of that cyberpunk evolution. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts; there’s a sequence near the end where Furlong confronts the person responsible for his freejacking in a spherical room that projects a series of holograms that represent the mind of the stored villain. Images fade in and out, and although I think it probably is not the exact effect that the filmmakers were trying to convey and a modern audience may reject them as “bad FX,” but I find their dreamlike gaussiness and the way that things appear and reappear to be a very effective visualization of the ever-changing thoughts and mental landscape of the antagonist. There’s so much attention to detail in so many places that are a true testament to Geoff Murphy’s work that, in spite of the production hell, this movie not only is more than functional but is in fact exceptional. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And hey — it’s available for free right now on YouTube (with commercials). Why not? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Aporia (2023)

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“Aporia” refers to a declaration of one’s doubt in something, often a statement which does not actually reflect the speaker’s actual belief. Within the Socratic method, it was the state in which Socrates left his verbal sparring partners after he picked apart their definitions of a concept through a series of questions that ultimately revealed his opponent’s lack of solid philosophical standing. More recently, it’s become largely synonymous with the word “paradox,” which was likely the reason that the word was chosen as this film’s title; however, if one perceives the word as reference to a statement that does not match the belief of the speaker, it actually makes for a fairly decent joke about this film’s overall lack of self-reflection. 

Sophie (Judy Greer) is deep in mourning over the loss of her physicist husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) eight months ago. Their soon-to-be-twelve daughter Riley, who shared her father’s love of rocketry and astronomy, is likewise adrift, withdrawing from her mother, skipping school, and preparing to sell the model rockets she and her father built together. After Sophie is forced to call on Mal’s friend Jabir (Peyman Moaadi) to help her out by collecting Riley from school when she is suspended, Jabir lets her in on a quantum physics project that he and Mal were tinkering around with before the latter’s death. It’s a time machine, essentially, although not of the normal transportation variety; instead, it’s capable of sending a single particle back in time to a certain place, meaning that it’s functionally a gun that kills someone in the past. Jabir originally started working on the idea because he could never get over the massacre of his family, the tragedy which drove him to immigrate to the U.S. in the first place; affecting the past that far back will require a great deal of power, but a shorter time frame might work. It’s untested, but he can no longer sit on the sidelines of Sophie’s life and watch her drown in her grief without offering her the opportunity to “rescue” Mal by “taking out” the drunk driver who killed him before the accident ever occurred. 

Mal’s inevitable return to life needs to happen ten minutes sooner (with less hemming and hawing about the moral implications and fewer, denser scenes of Riley acting out); this would also open up some room in Act II for more interesting discussion about the consequences of Sophie and Jabir’s action. There’s something very interesting that happens in here, as those who are protected from the memory ripple effect slowly become more disconnected from the world because they remember it differently. It would have been fun to explore with more butterflies getting squashed, so to speak, but since there are just a few changes to the timeline, we go from Timeline B, where the changes are limited to work schedules and furniture arrangements, to Timelines C (with no apparent ripple effects that our characters notice) and then D, where the changes are so extreme that Mal and Sophie’s lives are barely recognizable. 

The removal of Mal’s killer leaves his wife Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) a single mother in dire financial straits, exacerbated by her daughter Aggie’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the medical costs thereof. Feeling responsible for the other woman’s situation and seeing her own grief reflected in Kara, Sophie invites her to dinner, and Aggie & Riley strike up a friendship after some initial friction. When Aggie’s symptoms worsen and she ends up in the hospital, Mal, Sophie, and Jabir debate whether or not to kill a man who, a decade prior, embezzled Kara’s money from her successful bakery, leaving her unable to afford to both keep her house and care for Aggie. Although the trio is reasonably convinced that the death of “the Bernie Madoff of Arizona” just a few months earlier than his natural death will have no effect on their life situations, they emerge from the room where they shot the man through time only to discover that they are impostors in their own lives: unknown to old friends, greeted with warmth by unknown faces, and, for Sophie and Mal, faced with a child who is a stranger to them. 

There’s a lot of promise here that simply isn’t lived up to. If nothing else, this is a showcase for Judy Greer to do some more dramatic work, and she sells it. The writing here is often good, although its highlights are interspersed with a lot of dialogue that is fairly workmanlike. I won’t bother getting into the minutia about fictional temporal mechanics either as that’s a hobby for pedants and bores, but I will say that anyone who’s ever seen a movie with time travel (or time murder, as is the case here) in it knows that Jabir can’t go back to his youth and save his family from being killed. If he does, he never comes to America, he never builds the time rifle, so he never goes back in time, bake at 350° F for 22 minutes and you’ve got a paradox, which in this narrative means a reset. Of course, this also means that anyone who’s ever seen one of these knows that this will come into play once our heroes decide they’ve mucked up the timeline badly enough that they have no choice but to nuke the whole thing and hope that whatever versions of themselves exist in the new timeline land on their feet. It’s to the film’s credit that it ultimately embraces ambiguity in its ending, but it’s not enough for me to give this one a recommendation. It’s a shame, too; there are so many potentially potent building blocks in play that are undercut by the film’s handheld camerawork, which is a common choice for these cheapy sci-fi time travel flicks, but one which is at odds with the attempts at nuanced storytelling, discussions of ethics, and Greer leaving it all out on the field. The film is simply working against itself in too many places to come together into a cohesive whole, and in the end, it seems to lack the very conviction that one definition of “aporia” implies. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Good Boy (2023)

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Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway.  Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario).  By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales.  Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog.  Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production.  There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.

Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook.  It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning.  After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume.  Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.”  Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on.  Much less.  The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout.  It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.

For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching.  It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks.  It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy.  Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players.  However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide.  It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beast (1975)

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I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021.  All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him.  That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography).  A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture.  And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture!  The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime.  It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.

Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot.  Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes.  This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance.  And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union.  It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush.  You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries.  The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal.  The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail.  You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.

The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth.  Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress.  Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed.  Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity.  Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history.  There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place.  The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds.  The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).

Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to.  The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot.  There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand.  The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act.  “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason.  A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet.  In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies.  They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.

Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc.  As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places.  Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds.  In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience.  A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience. 

-Brandon Ledet

Cyberstalker (1995)

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There’s nothing especially unique about the mid-90s cyberthriller Cyberstalker.  Its novelty as internet chatroom techsploitation is not only drowned out by much bigger, louder Hollywood thrillers of its era like Hackers, Virtuosity, and The Net, but it also fought for video store shelf space with countless other direct-to-VHS cybertitles just like it: Cyberpunk (1990), Cyber-C.H.I.C. (1990), Cyber Tracker (1994), Cyberjack (1995), Cyber Bandits (1995), Cyber Zone (1995), Cyber Vengeance (1997), and cyber-so-on.  Cyberstalker‘s home video distributor Troma has since attempted to distinguish it from that overflowing bucket of cyberschlock by retitling it The Digital Prophet, but there are no marketing strategies creative enough to save it from the anonymity of content dungeons like Amazon Prime, Tubi, and PlutoTV.  The only distinguishing detail that might hook in an outsider audience who’s not a glutton for vintage cybertrash is a villainous role overperformed by horror convention veteran Jeffrey Combs, who counts as a major celebrity get for a film on this budget level.

Combs isn’t the main villain of Cyberstalker, though.  He’s just her cult leader & heroin supplier.  The titular cyberstalker is a reclusive chatroom nerd & comic book enthusiast played by Annie Biggs, an actress & director of little note.  Troma’s “Digital Prophet” rebranding makes some sense as a marketing ploy, then, since it centers the much more recognizable Combs, who writes the comic books that drive the actual cyberstalker mad.  Biggs plays a true believer in her dealer/abuser’s unhinged cyber-rhetoric, and her dedication to the cyber-cause gradually transforms her from a Lisa Loeb cosplayer shut-in to a cyborg dominatrix . . . at least in her mind.  As she recruits victims from the Cyberthoughts comics’ Cyecom chatroom, they only see her as a nerd with a gun.  The audience has the privilege of seeing the real world through her cyber-eyes, though, where her earthly body glitches out into PC monitor static and Windows 95 screensaver psychedelia.  It’s a little disappointing that the most novel, cyber-specific imagery in the movie is all in the killer’s head, but it is real to her and, thus, temporarily real for us.

No-name, no-relation director Christopher Romero attempts to treat this chatroom-murders novelty subject like a standard serial killer thriller, borrowing from the disembodied, leather-gloved hands of gialli and the window-blinds shadows of noir instead of intently pushing the vaporwave CG imagery to its Brett Leonard extremes.  In his most hilarious move, Romero even recreates the infamous Psycho shower scene with a handgun instead of a kitchen knife.  Despite those misguided efforts to dull down & normalize the film’s cyberthriller elements, there are still plenty moments of 90s techsploitation kitsch that shine through: the first victim is strangled with a modem chord; all victims read their Cyecom chatroom correspondence out loud for the audience’s benefit, like Sandra Bullock in The Net; and the final showdown with the cops on the killer’s trail is staged in a warehouse stocked with Dell computer monitors.  Of course, since there are countless other video store titles where you can find those exact mid-90s cyberthriller novelties, I should probably just be reporting on the one thing that might draw new audiences in to see Cyberstalker in particular: Combs.  The production could only afford Combs for a few scenes, but he makes the most of them, especially when performing a gunshot wound during the final shootout, making a full meal of his death like Paul Reubens in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.

I rented Cyberstalker for one American dollar.  It was a small fee to skip the ad breaks of whatever cyberequivalent I would’ve watched on Tubi instead if this one wasn’t so cheap to rent.  I’m sure I would’ve gotten just as much (and just as little) out of Cyber-C.H.I.C., Cyber Vengeance, or whatever random noun Tubi would’ve autofilled as I typed the word “cyber” in the search bar, but I have no regrets watching this randomly selected cybertitle.  If nothing else, I’ve never seen a serial killer character costumed to look like Lisa Loeb before.  The closest example I can think of is Carol Kane in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer, but even she had more of a Big Bad Wolf in Grandma’s nightgown look.

-Brandon Ledet

Jawan (2023)

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There was some mild online controversy earlier this year when American film critic Scott Mendleson referred to Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as “India’s Tom Cruise” in headline shorthand, as if SRK’s legendary career was secondary to its closest Hollywood equivalent. I’m going to risk doubling down on that accidental insult here by comparing those two stars’ current run of action blockbusters, hopefully in a more specific way. The cultural & industrial contexts of Cruise & SRK’s respective careers might be incomparable, but right now they happen to be the only world-famous movie stars keeping the lone-wolf action genre alive, and they’re both doing so decades past the point where they could reasonably play the archetype.  While Cruise has put in two old school star-power performances in the past year with M:I Dead Reckoning (yay!) and Top Gun: Maverick (booo!), SRK has done the same, if not better, in Pathaan and now Jawan.  Both stars have long enjoyed a kind of ageless, plastic handsomeness that they’ve tirelessly applied to nationalistic action spectacles in recent years, often to deliriously entertaining results.  And as outdated as that muscles-and-explosions version of action cinema feels this long after Stallone & Schwarzenegger’s heyday in the Reagan Era, Cruise & SRK both managed to surprise me this year in the exact same way.  There was a moment in the ludicrously overstuffed Dead Reckoning: Part 1 when it suddenly occurred to me just how many badass women Cruise had managed to gather around him as Ethan Hunt over seven entries in the ongoing Mission: Impossible series.  No longer relegated to minor roles as arm candy, distressed damsels, and refrigerated wives, Cruise had slowly built a small crew of fierce femme fighters in actors Rebecca Fergusson, Venessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, and Hayley Atwell.  While most lone-wolf action blockbusters provoke you to think “Dudes rock!” (including Maverick & Pathaan), there was a brief moment of Dead Reckoning that left me thinking “I love women so much!,” a much rarer feat.  So, I was delighted that SRK’s latest, Jawan, wholly dedicates itself to that same novel cause, at least once it gets the requisite hero worship of its macho lead out of the way.

Jawan stars Shah Rukh Khan as a renegade prison warden who routinely sneaks a small girl gang of select prisoners out of jail to help him commit wholesome acts of political terrorism.  In a plot similar to this year’s Ajith Kumar bank-heist actioner Thunivu, SRK’s populist terrorist only takes hostages for media attention, deliberately going viral so he can expose corporate & governmental greed directly to The People.  He never actually threatens the lives of the Mumbai citizens at the business end of his guns & explosives, but he uses their terror to amplify his political messages on social media & traditional newscasts.  It’s an extremist cause but a righteous one, ultimately re-routing corporate & governmental bribe money to heal societal ills like high suicide rates among farmers who owe predatory banks unreasonable sums, underfunded government hospitals left to rot without proper subsidies and, the issue closest to his heart, long-overdue prison reform.  It’s initially jarring to watch hundreds of women prisoners applaud their warden in universal celebration, not to mention the adulation of the hostages he takes at gunpoint while masking his identity in public.  He’s always on the right side of the Us vs Them political divide, though, a righteousness backed up by his wholly dedicated girl-gang prisoner crew.  It’s like watching SRK arm the cast of Gangubai Kathiawadi with rifles & grenades to aim at the politicians & bankers who damned them to poverty in the first place.  Of course, since law enforcement only exists to protect property, not serve the people, armed forces are sent to swiftly, violently shut down his one-man Joker/Anonymous movement ASAP.  And of course, since SRK is SRK, he escapes a fatal fate at the government’s hands by simply wooing the woman in charge, romancing her to his side of the fight as part of the gang.

I’ve maybe revealed a couple surprise, pre-intermission plot twists in the above paragraph, but there are plenty more to be discovered throughout Jawan (including a ludicrous development that directly addresses how far its star has aged out of these kinds of roles).  This is a non-stop entertainment machine, the full package.  It marries the recent transcendent achievements of South Indian action-blockbusters out of Tollywood & Kollywood with the classic payoffs of Bollywood masala cinema (by hiring Tamil director Atlee for a traditional big-budget Hindi production).  You can feel that marriage most clearly in the musical romance sequences, which in recent years have more often been downplayed as music video asides but here feature at a central, prominent place in the narrative, emphasized just as much as the CG action spectacle of its mass shoot-outs, liberally tossed explosives, and glimpses of flaming horses.  There are references in the dialogue to other mass-entertainers in the same vein like the S.S. Rajamouli historical action epic Baahubali and the reliably charming Indian actor Alia Bhatt, solidly rooting the film in a larger industry of peers.  SRK is a major, load bearing pilar in that industry, and he’s afforded plenty of screenspace to ham it up here, both as a dashing romantic lead and as a grizzled political terrorist who hides behind old-school Universal Monster masks styled after The Phantom of the Opera & The Mummy.  His appeal as an action star is universal (to the point where comparing him to Tom Cruise really is an insult to his own unique, unmatched celebrity), but it’s probably not out of line to note that he has a particular appeal to heterosexual women as an object of desire.  So, there’s something wonderful about the way this particular crowd-pleaser surrounds SRK with hundreds of women, filling the frame to cheer him on and fight beside him as if the entire gender as a social group were his co-star instead of his assigned romantic partner in South Indian “Lady Superstar” Nayanthara.  I was charmed by the brief flash of that army-of-women supporting cast in Dead Reckoning, but Jawan outshone that aspect of it with the same blinding commitment to excess that Pathaan outshone all other McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible sequels with, besting them at their own game (even while their MVPs played on entirely different fields).

-Brandon Ledet

Invincible (2001)

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“Why do I watch WrestleMania?  My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world.  In order to understand, you have to face it.”

“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”

“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them.  This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often.  Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.”  His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent.  Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans.  As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work.  That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.

Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany.  Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story.  In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform.  He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup.  Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth.  Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs.  Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power.  The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army).  In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.

Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”.  In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale.  In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime.  Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages.  That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers.  The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”.  Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero.  They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time.  He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles.  It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.

Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since.  While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners.  If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades.  He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries).  Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania.  Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Oldboy (2003)

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Like many bored, frugal Americans, I recently dragged myself out of the house on National Cinema Day to take advantage of the newly invented corporate holiday’s adverised movie ticket price of $4.  I very much appreciated the discount, just as I appreciate local theaters’ weekly $6 ticket deals on Tuesdays.  On the audience’s end, it’s nice to feel like we’re scoring a bargain; on theaters’ end, it’s a smart ploy to lure us through the door to buy the popcorn & cocktails that actually drive profits.  On both sides, it was just a great excuse to hide from the heat on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of recorded temperatures in New Orleans (so far!).  What I couldn’t get over while sweating my way through The Broad Theater’s parking lot, though, was the genius of stoking ticket sales during such a low tide of new, exciting releases.  Besides the promise of central air-conditioning, there just wasn’t much on The Broad’s marquee that looked like it would pull in a huge crowd without the $4 ticket deal.  Barbie & Black Beetle were the blockbusters on offer, neither of which were in their first-weekend rush; Passages & Landscape with Invisible Hand were their smaller, artsier counterbalance, neither of which are especially attention-grabby outside a small circle of media obsessives who know the names Cory Finley & Ira Sachs.  And so that left room on the marquee for the true heroes of the day: a restoration of the four-hour French New Wave manboy autopsy The Mother and the Whore and an opportunistic re-release of Emma Seligman’s stress-nightmare comedy Shiva Baby, working up some enthusiasm for the following week’s follow-up Bottoms.  Early this summer, when there was absolutely nothing of importance or interest to see in local theaters, IP-driven monstrosities like Fast X, Super Mario Bros, and The Little Mermaid clogged up local marquees for months, leaving us in a stagnant cultural dead zone.  By National Cinema Day, theaters & distributors had figured out the perfect way to fill that cultural void: robust repertory programming.

Truth be told, August’s best repertory re-release had already left theaters by National Cinema Day, but I made time to catch it at The Broad earlier that week on a $6 Tuesday deal.  A new digital restoration of Park Chan-wook’s international breakout Oldboy was re-released nationwide by the hip cinema distributor Neon last month, commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary.  That’s two whole decades of college-freshmen edgelords daring each other to watch this Totally Badass, Totally Fucked Up revenge thriller over a case of the cheapest beer that’s ever been swallowed. And since I was a college freshman around when Oldboy first hit DVD myself, it’s incredible that I had never seen it before its prestigious victory lap this August, enjoying the afterglow of Park’s more refined, acclaimed works like The Handmaiden & Decision to Leave.  My friend group just happened to get our grubby, beer-clutching hands on other edgelord starter-pack films of the 2000s instead: American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Club, Ichi the Killer, etc.  However, I am a movie nerd with an internet connection, so I have absorbed plenty of the details & circumstances of the sex & violence in Oldboy over the past couple decades of “You’ve got to see this fucked up movie!” cultural osmosis, to the point where I wasn’t sure what was left to be discovered by finally watching it once its re-release arrived at my nearest theater.  I mostly showed up to watch Oldboy out of solemn duty as a Cult Cinema enthusiast needing to mark a major 2000s title off my checklist.  So, given how familiar I felt with its major bullet points (and hammer holes), I was shocked by how well the mystery aspect of the movie worked for me as a new viewer.  Just like its reformed shitbag protagonist, I really wanted to know the whos & whys behind the elaborate torture schemes.  Unlike the titular oldboy, though, I was fully aware of how much we’d have to suffer to get to those answers.

As a digital “restoration”, the new Oldboy release is not some revelatory visual experience; this is not Criterion cleaning up & hyper-saturating a Technicolor marvel like The Red Shoes.  Neon’s Oldboy scan still looks stuck in the mid-00s, and it’s much more likely to impress a longtime devotee who’s used to screening it on a cathode-ray TV than a first-time viewer.  Its overt aughtsiness is integral to its prominence in the pop culture canon, though, so it’s for the best that it still looks of its time.  Its sickly fluorescent lighting is true to the aesthetics of American torture porn in that era—typified by Saw & Hostel—while its absurdly convoluted plot mechanics recall the grander, elevated European torture porn of the time: Martyrs, Calvaire, Inside, etc.  Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) may have been imprisoned & tormented in a small cell outside of time for fifteen grueling years, but he’s allowed a window to the outside world in a small motel-style television, where he consumes early-aughts pop culture & news coverage like oxygen entering his lungs.  Once “freed,” he’s equipped with a 2000s-vintage flip phone, a pay-by-the-hour internet cafe, and a rudimentary video chat platform that doesn’t yet stream audio.  Of course, he hasn’t really been freed at all, as the mysterious tormenter behind his imprisonment uses these wicked tools of the early internet to imprison him in a slightly larger cell (the massive city of Seoul instead of just one room inside it).  He’s trapped by the lack of reasoning behind his torment and the mysterious face responsible for it, given five days to solve the puzzle and secure his revenge before the punishment gets even more severe.  The audience knows he’s being played with like a half-dead mouse, but it takes a while to find the cat who’s batting him around, and it takes even longer to figure out why that cat hasn’t gotten bored of him yet. 

Maybe I’m wrong about that.  Maybe all audiences everywhere already know every beat of Oldboy, and I was the last genre gobbler around who could enter the theater without knowing exactly where its twisty story is going.  After so many years of dorm room canonization, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were no surprises left in Oldboy for the uninitiated.  I hadn’t seen it, nor read its comic book source material, nor spoiled myself with its 2010s Spike Lee remake, and even I already felt like I had its iconic hallway fight scene and the grimiest details of the final villain’s speech committed to memory.  It was a joy to squirm along with fellow in-the-flesh moviegoers during its scenes of covert incest & unflinching dental gore, though, and I was surprised by how much I cared about the motivation behind those grotesqueries beyond their shock-value novelty.  In fact, I skipped out on seeing a personal-favorite cult classic I’ve seen many times before (but never in a proper theater) to make time for that first-time watch of Oldboy, and I left a satisfied customer; it was up against a 50-year anniversary restoration of the landmark folk horror The Wicker Man that same week.  Neon’s re-release of Oldboy appeared to be a successful financial gamble too, surpassing the box office sales of the film’s original run in just a couple weeks.  I can only hope that success means more nation-wide repertory programming is on the way, bolstering the couple regular local slots The Prytania clears in its schedule for its Wildwood & Classic Movies series.  The Broad is pretty great about picking these releases up when they’re offered by distributors, which is how I’ve gotten to see other, obscurer cult classics like The Doom Generation, Funeral Parade of Roses, and The Last Movie for the first time in a proper theater.  It’s a rare treat that’s getting a lot less rare, and I hope that it becomes the go-to move when padding out release schedules during the leaner months on the theatrical release calendar.  It would certainly lure me in to buy more cocktails & popcorn, whatever keeps the projectors on.

-Brandon Ledet

Bottoms (2023)

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It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre.  Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice.  Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge, The DUFF, and Spontaneous.  If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes).  Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on.  I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.

So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy.  Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom.  The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show.  Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game.  In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior.  No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds.  The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom.  If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile.  Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.

The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition.  Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds.  Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc.  None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.”  There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points.  The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter.  In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly.  Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott.  It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.

-Brandon Ledet