sci-fi

Fried Barry (2021)

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Last year, I praised the lost-in-time horror whatsit The Berlin Bride for feeling like it “travelled here from a previous era when movies could just be Weird as Fuck without having to justify that indulgence by Saying Something.”  The new straight-to-Shudder curio Fried Barry made me eat those words just a few months later; I regret everything.  An episodic, self-amused tale of drug abuse and alien abduction, Fried Barry desperately wants to be an instant-cult-classic geek show but lacks any of the propulsion or command over atmosphere that would make that distinction possible.  It’s all hacky, edgelord comedy stunts and no attention to tone or purpose.  Equally obscene and tedious, it’s essentially a half-speed horror version of Crank – with all the “insensitive” political jabs and mouthbreathing misogyny that descriptor implies.  It’s a movie that deliberately strives to be Weird as Fuck without having to justify that indulgence by Saying Something, exactly what I asked for.  I can’t say exactly why that for-its-own-sake exercise was mesmerizing to me in The Berlin Bride but punishingly boring for me here.  I can only shrug Fried Barry off as A Bad Movie that only gets worse the longer it hangs around.

If Fried Barry has any of the potential cult-status value it’s clearly desperate to earn, it’s as a kind of “dare” film for teenagers who are technically too young to watch it.  The film opens with a cheeky warning that it’s strictly for an 18+ audience, which reads as a wink that you need to be 15 or younger to be excited by its meaningless transgressions.  The titular Barry, described by his loving wife as a “useless piece of shit”, is immediately shown shooting heroin into his arm in a hideous series of post-Tony Scott rapdifire montages, emphasizing just how Edgy and Fucked Up the next 100 minutes are going to be.  While high, Barry is abducted by aliens, who probe both his anus and urethra for good measure, then commandeer his body for a joyride on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa.  From there, the aliens take a nightlife tour of the city, periodically stopping for improv-heavy bits of cringe humor among the “useless piece of shit” locals.  The film is caught halfway between a PSA about how overwhelming it is to trip balls in public and a PSA about how obnoxious it is to simply go nightclubbing.  In either instance, you’re going run into the worst people, and they’re going to spoil the mood.

For the most part, the movie rests on the decision to cast Gary Green as Barry, as he does have the kind of arrestingly odd bone structure that David Lynch could build an entire movie around.  It probably goes without saying that first-time director Ryan Kruger is no David Lynch, at least not yet.  Whether it’s because of the heroin or the alien body possession, Green isn’t asked to do much here besides stand around as a human prop.  His episodic adventures mostly focus on the much less fascinating bit-part actors who bounce their own inane performances off him, pausing occasionally for gross-out eruptions of gore.  If this dynamic has any chance of working, it’s in the first half of the film when seemingly everyone is uncontrollably attracted to Alien Barry and impulsively propositions him for sex.  If the film had committed to the all-out sexual bacchanal of that premise, it might’ve at least had a unifying theme or purpose to its grotesque pageantry.  Instead, it’s an excuse to sneak in some on-screen titties for the under-15 crowd and for a blatantly homophobic gag where Barry murders his one potential male partner.  And then the sex stops all together mid-film at the tongue-in-cheek “Intermission” title card, abandoning the one thread of continuity that tied all this meaningless bullshit together.  Pity.

A movie this obscene has no business being this boring.  Maybe a version of Fried Barry where an alien invader inspires human locals to break all their previously held sexual taboos on-sight might’ve been something worthwhile.  Maybe a version of Fried Barry that was more heavily scripted instead of relying on Improv 101 edgelord humor would’ve been less irritating.  Maybe a version of Fried Barry where women were allowed to be more than just victims, whores, and nags might not have sat on my stomach so queasily.  Can’t say.  All I know is that this version feels pointlessly obnoxious, and not in the fun way.

-Brandon Ledet

Oxygen (2021)

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It’s not unusual for a high-concept, single-location sci-fi thriller to quietly emerge on Netflix to little fanfare.  That’s a regular routine for the streaming behemoth, which is wholeheartedly committed to a quantity-over-quality ethos (give or take the few high-profile projects a year it desperately promotes for Oscars attention).  It is unusual, however, to immediately recognize the director & star of said sci-fi streaming schlock.  I was under the impression that the bulk of Netflix’s disposable sci-fi was entirely generated by algorithm, the same as Hallmark Christmas movies and SyFy Channel mockbusters.  I was shocked, then, to stumble onto Oxygen, the latest film from Crawl and High Tension director Alexandre Aja.  Oxygen is visually and effectively indistinguishable from any generic sci-fi cheapie that magically populates on the Netflix homescreen from week to week, despite Aja’s usual command over in-the-moment tension and the obvious talents of his main collaborator, Inglorious Basterds star Melanie Laurent.  I also can’t fault Aja for collecting a pandemic paycheck where he could; after all, someone’s gotta point the camera in the right direction before the algorithm autofills the rest of the details.

I will admit that for the first fifteen minutes or so of Oxygen, Aja does feel alive and actively engaged with the material.  The film opens with a kind of humanoid egg hatching, with Laurent emerging from a synthetic skin sack inside what appears to be an Apple-store purchased iCoffin.  Confused about who she is or how she got there, she fights against the restraints that keep her in place inside the locked sleeping pod to no avail.  The flashing emergency lights, warnings of drained oxygen levels, and emerging hallucinations & memories that introduce us to this far-fetched, high concept scenario are effectively nerve-racking . . . for a while.  Then, Oxygen stops being a shock-a-second thriller and settles into mystery-box sci-fi at its emptiest.  Laurent’s distraught future-prisoner solves the mystery of her own past and her current predicament by effectively Googling herself for the rest of the runtime, with the aid of a voice-command Internet surrogate.  If you strip away a couple jump scares and CG-aided camera twirls, the film is basically just someone talking to an iTunes visualizer for two hours.  That set-up is no more thrilling now than it was when your buddy Kevin tripped too hard on mushrooms and debated a laptop screen in your 2007 dorm room.

It’s not impossible to sustain feature-length tension with just one on-screen character and a series of phone calls and Google searches.  It’s wild how much more tension I felt in Locke, for instance, where there’s pretty much no visual flavor and the movie’s basically about listening to concrete dry.  And, hell, if there was ever going to be a time to release a film about someone being isolated in a small, locked space with only a series of talking screens to connect them to the outside world, this might be it.  Still, there’s nothing about Oxygen that stands out from the week-to-week sci-fi sludge that oozes up from the streaming service sewer grates on Netflix, despite the pedigree of the names behind it.  I was basically pleading out loud at my television for more boobytraps and fewer Google searches by the end of the film, which I doubt is the kind of squirming-in-your seat anguish Aja was aiming for.  If I was that desperate for a new sci-fi release where a trapped woman makes a series of desperate phone calls, I should have just rewatched the bizarro action-horror Shadow in the Cloud.  At least that one has some personality to it, albeit a goofy one.

-Brandon Ledet

Little Joe (2019)

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There haven’t been many movies about the COVID-19 pandemic that have earned ecstatic praise from pro critics or general audiences (Host is maybe the one exception I can immediately recall).  However, there have been plenty of movies praised for capturing the eerie, isolating mood of the past year despite being conceived & produced before lockdowns started in earnest.  While people don’t seem to have much of an appetite for COVID-specific films while we’re still collectively suffering through this global crisis, there is a detectable interest in films like Palm Springs, She Dies Tomorrow, and Vivarium that stumbled into resonating with “these unprecedented times” entirely by happenstance.  It’s possible, then, that the little-seen Cannes darling Little Joe would’ve generated a lot more discussion if it had arrived just a few months later than its streaming premiere date in December 2019.  It’s a quiet little sci-fi chiller that never stood much of a chance of wowing general audiences, but its accidental parallels to the never-ending COVID pandemic might’ve been enough of a hook to at least lure more esoteric film nerds to the screen.

I want to call Little Joe a twee update to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s much icier and more emotionally detached than that would imply.  The gorgeously manicured costumes & sets echo a fussy dollhouse aesthetic that’s familiar to twee filmmaking.  However, like the similarly confectionary Swallow, it’s too emotionally reserved to be pigeonholed as twee despite its prim, femme decor.  In the film, a plant breeder at a high-security laboratory brings home a new developmental species to cheer up her lonely teenage son.  The plant was scientifically engineered to make its owner happy through the release of “natural” toxins, like a pseudo-organic alternative to Prozac.  Gradually, her son and her coworkers more directly exposed to the plant stop behaving like their authentic selves.  They’re noticeably happier, but they’re also emotionally numb to anything that isn’t the care, protection, and reproduction of the experimental house plant.  They’re obsessed with it.  It’s a subtle Body Snatchers riff with no visual signifiers of traditional horror, only characters losing any edge or dynamism to their baseline personalities.

There are a few surface details to the film’s laboratory setting and health pandemic themes that can’t help but recall current cultural moods surrounding COVID: face masks, hand sanitizer stations, corporate indifference to working class vulnerability, etc.  What really resonated with me, though, is Little Joe‘s parallels to our current house plant craze – the sudden boom of people filling their homes with living things to combat the emotional isolation of a year we’ve mostly spent apart.  In Little Joe, that choice is presented as a metaphor for a failed work-homelife balance, wherein a work-obsessed mother completely ignores her lonely teenager son.  She doesn’t initially notice that his personality has been zapped away by her house plant surrogate, because she’s too distracted with spending as much time in the lab as possible.  I don’t believe the film is overtly moralizing about working mothers’ ignored domestic responsibilities, but rather exaggerating how hard it is to admit when you do care more about your own life and career than you do your child because others would wag a finger at you for it.

Little Joe does a great job of making its genetically engineered houseplants ~spooky~ in the subtle bug-skitter sounds of them unfurling in slow-motion puppetry.  It’s also frustratingly inert, though, seemingly on purpose.  The camera moves in slow, clinical pans and zooms that de-emphasize the importance of the characters talking in-frame, as if it’s as disinterested in them as they are to anything that’s not the plant.  Meanwhile, the big deadline that’s driving the tension and escalation of the plant’s production is referred to only as the upcoming Flower Fair, which is a pretty hilarious conflict for what’s ostensibly a horror film.  Little Joe is quietly funny, stubbornly anti-action, and just eerie enough to string you along if you’re not expecting anything especially flashy out of it.  It jerks the audience around on a leash as it strolls to the inevitable conclusions of its Body Snatchers plotting, but it does so gently, as if it doesn’t really care if you follow along.  I’d recommend it most to people who’ve been spending way more emotionally charged alone time with their house plants than they have with friends or family in the past year, which should cover just about everyone.

-Brandon Ledet

The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021)

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On a recent episode of the podcast, I found myself derailing a discussion of Toy Story 3 to complain about the bland, unimaginative sheen of mainstream computer animation, as pioneered by Pixar.  No matter how much admiration I could muster for the daringly morbid themes Toy Story 3 injected into the mold of a modern children’s film, I couldn’t help but be distracted by its autopilot visual aesthetic.  In the wake of Pixar’s resounding success with the Toy Story franchise (the first entirely computer-animated feature films in wide release), we’ve traded in the tactile charm of stop-motion animation and the expressive zeal of hand-drawn 2D illustrations (outside the few anime blockbusters that sneak into American distribution every year) for the least imaginative form of animation possible.  There are scenes in that Toy Story sequel where two characters are talking in close-up that are literally just a loose collection of vague colorful orbs and googly eyes, arranged in a shot/reverse-shot configuration.  It’s depressing to watch as an animation fan, especially since there are so few alternatives to the 3D computer animation approach Pixar has solidified as an industry standard.

During that tangent of old-man grumblings, I forgot to mention that there was a recent computer animated film that I found encouragingly expressive, turning my stubborn mind around about the general uselessness of the medium:  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.  The offset screenprint aesthetic & psychedelic strobe light effects of Into the Spider-Verse were outright dazzling in the theater, whereas most modern children’s films just deploy their expressionless 3D orbs as vessels for hack jokes in celebrity voiceover.  I was reminded of my oversight in failing to single out Into the Spider-Verse as a sign of hope in an otherwise dire mainstream animation landscape while watching the newest release from the same animation wing at Sony, The Mitchells vs The Machines.  Also produced by beloved comedy nerds Phil Lord & Chris Miller (with major contributions from some of the folks behind Gravity Falls), The Mitchells vs The Machines repeats a lot of the same visual techniques that made Into the Spider-Verse such an industry standout in 2018.  It’s more heartwarming & cute than it is blindingly psychedelic, but it’s at least a promising sign that Into the Spider-Verse will not be left behind as a one-of-a-kind anomaly.  The current Pixar standard will not reign supreme forever.

It’s worth noting that The Mitchells vs The Machines meets me more than halfway in trying to work past my CG animation biases.  Not only is its teenage protagonist a nerdy cinephile (something I’m obviously guilty of), but her road trip adventure with her parents orbits around a technophobic distrust in modern, automated tech – falling within the confines of my love for Evil Technology movies that dutifully warn that the Internet is trying to kill us all.  On her way to freshmen orientation at film school, a movie-obsessed dork butts heads with her old-fashioned, tech-sceptical father, while her mother & brother struggle to keep the family’s final days as a unit as memorably pleasant as possible.  That central father-daughter rift is exponentially heightened by a sudden Robot Apocalypse, triggered by an over-ambitious Tech Bro (voiced by Eric Andre) whose willingness to give smartphones power over our daily lives gets way out of hand very quickly.  The movie does its best to temper this humans-vs-technology premise with some counterbalance positivity about the joys of the Internet (mostly in how it connects our cinephile hero to other likeminded weirdos across the country), but it mostly just chronicles a Bob’s Burgers style traditional family’s struggles to adjust to a rapidly automated, synthetic world ruled by laptops & smartphones.

While I’m not as breathlessly enthusiastic about The Mitchells vs The Machines as I was for Into the Spider-Verse, I am tickled that I have an example of a modern computer-animated film that both summates & subverts my skepticism over the technology of the artform.  The Luddite father character isn’t exactly a satirical punching bag in his stubbornness to adapt to modernity, but I did feel as if my unease with an increasingly computerized world (as opposed to the “authentic” world it has replaced) was being openly mocked through that surrogate.  I enjoyed being ribbed like that.  I could go on to complain about how the film’s most expressive, most exciting variations on the CG animation format were the traditional 2D illustrations doodled in its margins, if not only because we used to live in a world where we could have movies entirely animated in that style.  My nostalgia for older formats shouldn’t supersede what’s accomplished here as a shake-up in the medium, though.  This is an energetic, visually imaginative kids’ movie that pushes past the usual limitations of what most CG animated movies of its ilk attempt.  Not for nothing, it also gets online meme humor in a way most mainstream movies would fall on their face trying to emulate.  It’s a film firmly rooted in the language and the humor of a technological world it also thumbs its nose at.

My only real complaint, then, is that it’s a (mildly) technophobic comedy with a Le Tigre song on the soundtrack that’s somehow not “Get Off The Internet”???  Seems like an oversight.

-Brandon Ledet

Psycho Goreman (2021)

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Psycho Goreman is the movie I most desperately wanted to see made when I was ten years old.  In other words, it’s an R-rated version of Power Rangers. The Astron-6-adjacent horror comedy deliberately evokes the live action Saturday morning TV programming of my youth in its tone & imagery, but ages up the humor of that vintage 90s Kids™ media with hack jokes about how believing in God is for rubes and wives are humorless nags.  I can’t say that novelty lands especially sweetly in my thirties, especially since its So Random! sense of humor is poisonously self-aware, but I’m convinced I would have absolutely loved it when I was still a child obsessed with monster movies & shock comedy — the same way I’m sure the world’s biggest fans of the equally unfunny Deadpool movies are the children who are technically too young to watch them but snuck them past their parents. 

At least Psycho Goreman is aware of its ideal audience, as evidenced by its explosively violent little-girl protagonist.  After bullying her soft-hearted brother into digging a massive hole in their backyard for her own sadistic delight, our audience-surrogate sociopath discovers a long-buried magical amulet that unleashes an ancient evil unto the world, à la The Gate.  The amulet affords her total command over the wicked monster that emerges—the titular Psycho Goreman—an intergalactic mass-murderer who’s embarrassed to be indentured to the “two brainless meat children” who discover his remote control.  It’s pretty much a hangout film from there.  Psycho Goreman delivers purposefully overwritten Pinhead speeches about the evil acts he’d like to commit once freed; his pint-sized girlboss makes him perform menial demeaning tasks for her own amusement instead; and an intergalactic council of outer space weirdos directly out of a Power Rangers episode plot to destroy “PG” while he’s temporarily indisposed.  It’s all very cute, even if the jokes it’s in service of aren’t very funny.

I’m not opposed to this type of ironic 90s Kid™ retro-nostalgia on principle.  If nothing else, I’ve enjoyed similar homages to the era’s cultural runoff in films like Brigsby Bear, Turbo Kid, and the actual Power Rangers reboot.  I just didn’t connect with the self-amused meta humor of this particular specimen in that genre, something I should have expected as soon as the similarly limp WolfCop trailer preceded it on my local library’s copy of the DVD.  Still, Psycho Goreman has a lot going for it visually, with enough practical gore, rubber-suit monsters, and stop-motion grotesqueries to pave over the dead silence of its jokes falling flat.  More importantly, while I’m no longer a taboo-craving ten-year-old, plenty of little weirdos out there still are.  If they can manage to sneak this naughty R-rated novelty past their parents while they’re still at the right age, it could birth a ton of lifelong horror nerds.  I’m choosing to count that as a net good, even if I’m not as personally enthusiastic about the movie as I wanted to be.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #132 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Astounding She-Monster (1957) & A Tale of Two Shirleys

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Welcome to Episode #132 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee and Brandon investigate the urban legend that Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers/Seven Beauties) is actually an alias of Shirley Kilpatrick (The Astounding She-Monster), a relic of pre-Internet rumor & speculation.

00:00 Welcome

03:45 Sabrina (1995)
08:30 What Lies Below (2020)
12:50 The Demon Lover (1976)
16:30 Demon Lover Diary (1980)

21:21 Shirley Stoler vs. Shirley Kilpatrick
30:30 The Astounding She-Monster (1957)
40:30 The truth about the Shirleys
43:55 Seven Beauties (1975)

Additional research provided by CC Chapman

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

– Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet

The Humanoid (1986)

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I really do try my best to not be a snob.  I pride myself in being able to evaluate films on their own terms, careful not to dismiss a work outright because of its genre or budget or level of prestige.  Still, I obviously have personal hang-ups & biases I’ll never be able to look past, and they do make me helplessly snobbish about certain movies from time to time.  One of these major hang-ups is my general distaste for computer-animated children’s films, including from widely beloved institutions like Pixar.  Outside of more adventurous experiments in form like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, the majority of CG animation looks like dogshit to me.  Even films that’re praised by industry experts for their exquisite, time-consuming animation of ocean waves or animal fur look lazy & uninspired to my biased eye, so I know this is a personal hang-up and not some objective truth.  Meanwhile, I’m easily wowed by traditional 2D animation even if the movie is objectively lazy & uninspired, as is the case with the straight-to-video sci-fi anime The Humanoid.

The Humanoid is a 45min relic I found collecting dust on YouTube, where all forgotten media goes to effectively disappear.  At first glance, it appears to be a backdoor pilot for a retro Saturday morning cartoon show, introducing the audience to a Alien-knockoff spaceship crew who travel from job to job, planet to planet, collecting paychecks by doing Good.  This particular mission feels fairly self-contained, as the crew meets the titular humanoid—an android named Antoinette—who’s learning to become more human while also protecting her home planet from colonizer corporate villains.  There are a couple stray laser fights & chase scenes peppered throughout the film, but most of the story concerns Antoinette’s struggles with human emotions & desires, as well as her ultimate decision to sacrifice herself to save the spaceship crew, so they can putter onto their next adventure.  The result is that the only compelling character in this would-be series pilot dies at the end of the “episode,” making it difficult to imagine the adventure continuing in future installments.  There’s also a decisive finality to this hilariously overwritten epilogue addressed to Antoinette, which also suggests this was always meant to be a standalone piece:

“Who can say a machine has no soul?  Aren’t humans machines too? Mechanisms of flesh and blood.  Across the endless light-years . . . life, mind, and spirit must flourish in a variety of forms.  And as long as there is life, there will be love.  Antoinette — I’m sure we’ll meet again, somewhere in the vastness of time.  Until then, I send my blessing.  Wherever you may be.”

If The Humanoid isn’t a pilot for a Saturday morning cartoon show, what is it exactly?  My best guess is that it’s a coffee commercial — not for any particular brand of coffee, mind you, just for the general, basic concept of Coffee.  There’s very little in the way of thrilling robo action in this film, but there are plenty of hilariously inane conversations about how great the coffee is on the planet-of-the-week.  Seriously, there are at least five lengthy discussions of its robust flavor & aroma.  The film’s opening narration includes the line “It’s only memories of Earth and the rich smell of this coffee that keeps my spirits up.”  It’s closing scene muses “Coffee? my salvation from my day-to-day drudgery”.  In-between, characters occasionally interject “This coffee tastes great!” just to keep the product at the top of the viewer’s mind.  It’s maddeningly inane, making you question whether the generic villains’ quest for a MacGuffin “energy source” on the planet will ultimately result in the discovery that there is no power source greater than the rich, bold pick-me-up you can find in a hot cup of joe.  And, as an advertisement, it totally works!  I desperately want a cup of coffee right now.

So, here we have an action-light sci-fi cheapie that’s supposed to be about an android’s quest for human emotion, but it is actually about how great coffee tastes.  The thing is, though, that it still looks great.  This might be straight-to-VHS fluff with a retro Saturday morning cartoon vibe, but its animation is intricately detailed & vibrantly imaginative, especially as it builds to its explosive, overwrought climax.  It’s hard to imagine any modern-day, computer-animated children’s media putting this much effort into its visual aesthetics, and this really is the bottom of the barrel in terms of passionate anime artistry.  I try my best not to be a grump about how modern media doesn’t stack up to my nostalgia-tinged memories of the types of media I happened to grow up with.  Comparing the look of low-effort 80s schlock like The Humanoid to today’s $200mil CG animation monstrosities is too depressing to ignore, though.  I genuinely feel like we’ve lost a basic attention to visual craft (or at least a collective sense of good taste) in animated media over the decades.  At this point, it’s only the memories of vintage cartoons and the rich smell of coffee that keep my spirits up.

-Brandon Ledet

Tank Girl (1995)

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As much as I love Birds of Prey, I’m still in shock that a Major Studio superhero movie ended up landing in my personal Top 5 films of 2020, much less Swampflix’s collective Top 10. The hyper-violent, hyper-femme irreverence of that film feels like a major disruption of the usual smash-em-up superhero tedium, if not only for the novelty of watching Women Behaving Badly in the context of a mainstream action movie. That doesn’t mean that Birds of Prey is a total anomaly, though. In fact, its major precedent is decades-old at this point, a similarly anarchic Girls Doing Violence superhero gem from the way-back-when of the 1990s. There is strong proto-Birds of Prey energy running throughout the 90s adaptation of Tank Girl, right down to Margot Robbie & Lori Petty doing the same Sadistic Betty Boop Voice as their films’ respective antihero leads. It’s a shame neither movie was a hit, since they’re easily the most exciting specimens of superhero media since Burton revamped Batman as a fetishistic horndog.

Lori Petty stars as the titular Tank Girl, a sugar-addled rebel scavenger in the not-too-distant-future of 2033. Water is in scarce supply, leaving a power vacuum filled by the mega-corporation Water & Power (not to be confused with the infamous enema porno Water Power) under the direction of evil overlord Malcolm McDowell. The water-rich oligarchy in this Mad Maxian desertscape entertain themselves at Hype Williams-style future-brothels; the resistance is led by mutant kangaroos; and Naomi Watts hangs around as a sidekick brunette. As with Birds of Prey, none of these plot details or set-decoration eccentricities matter nearly as much as the central performance that anchors them. Lori Petty bounces off the walls as a manic Bugs Bunny anarchist, openly mocking every inane indignity that distracts from the one thing she loves: blowing shit up in her girlified battle tank. Like with Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Petty’s Tank Girl is the blinding fireworks show at the center of this film, and everyone else is just there to gaze at it in wonder – even the mutant kangaroos.

It’s incredible that the Tank Girl movie doesn’t have more of a prominent legacy in the pop culture zeitgeist. The only time I remember this film being around was when Comedy Central was looping some cut-to-ribbons edit of it to pad out their daytime broadcasts in the early 2000s. I was fascinated by the out-of-context snippets I would catch from those broadcasts as a kid, but never enough to watch it from start to end (a feat I’m not sure anyone’s accomplished with any commercial-padded Comedy Central movie broadcast). I was taken aback, then, that the actual movie is so unapologetically Vulgar. Tank Girl has enough Saturday Morning Cartoon energy that it feels like it was made for kids, but Petty’s hyperactive antihero is an omnisexual social anarchist who challenges every taboo she can point a tank at, like Bugs Bunny smooching Elmer Fudd in drag. In just a slightly better world, that kind of horned-up flippancy would be celebrated as one of the all-time-great superhero performances, but 25 years later we still live in a world where Birds of Prey was allowed to tank at the box office (even though it improves a lot of this film’s already stellar chaotic highs through revision). I don’t get it.

A lot of early-MTV Cool was deployed to boost this movie’s marketability, including a Björk-scored strip club routine, an Iggy Pop cameo, and an opening-credits remix of DEVO’s “Girl U Want.” Still, you can tell it was underfunded & under-supported in its time, if not only because many of its transitional exterior shots & action sequences are supplanted with panels from the original Tank Girl comic. I found that choice to be a boon to the movie’s stylistic palette—borrowing a post-Love & Rockets indie comics patina from the source material—but it’s also frustrating that a vision this fun & this idiosyncratic was left so scrappy while contemporary superhero tripe like Spawn, The Phantom, and Judge Dredd were just torching piles of cash. I would have loved to see Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl vision on the scale of Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey budget. Recent history has only proven that it would’ve still been ignored & discarded, but you can’t account for general audiences’ lack of taste. This is the superhero media that should be culturally celebrated & exalted, but instead we’re still struggling to shake off the dour, self-serious conservatism of the Nolan era; shame on us all.

-Brandon Ledet

Space Sweepers (2021)

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There haven’t been any new releases during this neverending pandemic that have made me miss the big-budget blockbuster experience. Maybe it’s because titles like Tenet, Mulan, and Wonder Woman ’84 have been locked behind exorbitantly expensive paywalls, followed by a mile-high wave of tepid reviews. There have been plenty of mind-melting arthouse experiments released straight to VOD in the last year that I would have loved to have seen in a proper theater, but it feels as if the bigger studios have been holding back The Good Stuff when it comes to their money-making popcorn movies. Space Sweepers is the definitive end to that drought. The straight-to-Netflix Korean blockbuster is the exact kind of sci-fi pulp entertainment I miss seeing on the big screen with easily pleased opening-weekend crowds and buckets of overpriced snacks. It’s doubtful that Netflix would have ever released Space Sweepers to giant-screen multiplexes even in “Normal” times, but all the same it’s the first film released in the past year that truly made me miss the summer blockbuster ritual.

Like with all multiplex blockbusters, the action sequences in Space Sweepers are a confounding CGI cacophony, just as difficult to remember after the credits as they are to comprehend in the moment. I was genuinely lost during the opening set piece, in which rival crews of space-junk scavengers race for possession of a malfunctioning satellite or cargo vessel or whatever. It’s the character beats between those blurred-CG action sequences that distinguish these monster-budget sci-fi spectacles anyway. In this case, the audience plays stowaway with a motley crew of intergalactic junkyard scavengers captained by The Handmaiden‘s Kim Tae-ri. Their go-nowhere routine of working their way deeper & deeper into debt is disrupted when they accidentally scoop up a dangerous bomb disguised as the most adorable child in the universe. That pricey, lethal, cute-as-a-button cargo puts them at odds with an evil white capitalist who runs what’s remaining of humanity as a technocratic megacorporation. The resulting conflict is essentially The Guardians of the Galaxy vs. Elon Musk, with all the money-torching glut & irreverent, character-based humor that descriptor implies.

Space Sweepers works best as an intergalactic hangout film. Any scene that doesn’t involve the ragtag space crew interacting with their adorable kid/bomb cargo can only feel generic by comparison, including all the laser shoot-outs & space-chase action sequences that eat up most of the budget. The more you get to know the crew the easier it is to be charmed by the film at large. From the tough-guy lone wolves learning to care for a defenseless child-bomb to the transgender android scrounging spare credits to purchase their ideal body (a much more explicit version of the allegory teased in Alita: Battle Angel), it’s a pure joy getting to know these reformed reprobates. I also cannot stress enough how cute the kid-bomb they’re debating whether to sell is. The cutest. It’s the exact effect I get from most big-budget crowdpleasers at the multiplex: I may forget everything that happens to them, but if the characters are likeable enough than I don’t really care. These characters are very, very likeable, and I’d happily pay money to see their adventures continue with an in-the-flesh crowd on the other side of this eternal hell year.

-Brandon Ledet