sci-fi

Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020)

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Bill & Ted Face the Music finds our lovable slacker buds, William S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), still at the great work that Rufus (the late George Carlin) foretold for them: the song that would unite the world. They’re also middle aged, with daughters of their own, named for the other: Wilhelmina “Billie” Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine) is dark-haired, shy, and androgynous like Ted, while Theadora Preston (Samara Weaving) is blonde, confident, and hyperactive like Bill. The film opens on the wedding of Missy (Amy Stoch), who was once our hapless duo’s babysitter, then was Ted’s step-mother, then Bill’s step-mother, and is now marrying Ted’s younger brother Deacon (Beck Bennett, taking over for Frazier Bain). At the reception, Bill and Ted plan to perform the first three movements of their latest composition, entitled “That Which Binds Us Through Time: The Chemical, Physical, and Biological Nature of Love and the Exploration of the Meaning of Meaning — Part 1,” and it starts with throat-singing and theremin, so I’m on board, but it’s not a crowd pleaser. At the suggestion of their wives, the princesses (Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays), Bill and Ted attend couple’s therapy with their respective spouse, as a quartet. 

Meanwhile in the future, time and space are falling apart. Rufus’s daughter Kelly (Kristen Schaal) and widow The Great Leader (Holland Taylor) have different interpretations of the prophesied Wyld Stallyns song, with the latter believing in her father’s vision of universal unity through the power of music, and her mother hoping to put things back on track by reluctantly killing the Stallyns. To that end, she sends a time-traveling murderbot (Anthony Carrigan) to hunt them down across space and time. Learning about the dire situation, Bill and Ted steal their old phone booth time machine and move progressively forward in time along their own lifelines in an attempt to acquire the song from their future selves. Meanwhile, Billie and Thea travel through time to acquire various historical musicians (and Kid Cudi) in preparation for the performance. 

The sad thing about Face the Music is that, all too often, Bill and Ted are the least interesting things in it. This movie made me feel young, and then it made me feel old, and then it made me feel young again, but not in a way I was happy about. There’s just a little too much happening here, in a sequel to a movie that knew just how many juggling pins it could keep in the air at one time, and there are too many narrative threads. Offscreen, the princesses have been invited by future versions of themselves to see all of space and time and see if there’s any way they can actually be happy in their marriages to the men of the title (not to sound too much like the boys, but, like, that plot is majorly a downer). Meanwhile, the daughters are having their adventure, which is a mixed bag; Weaving and Lundy-Paine are both great here but are sometimes forced into delivering dialogue that hits the ear with neither subtlety or comedy. They have a kind of abridged version of Excellent Adventure as they collect Mozart, Hendrix, and Louis Armstrong (Daniel Dorr, DazMann Still, and Jeremiah Craft) and others, to form a supergroup rather than for a history project, but each encounter feels more expository than fun. They encounter one instance of resistance in their plot and overcome it almost immediately, then have nothing but easy success from there on out, which doesn’t make for a compelling watch. Conversely, each future version of the adult Bill and Ted is drunker and less helpful than the last, and these encounters go on for too long (especially in 2025), making the whole thing feel more like a labor than a good time. Then, as if that weren’t enough, we get a slight rehash of Bogus Journey with a trip to Hell, where the guys, their daughters, several time-displaced musicians, and Ted’s dad once again meet up with Death (William Sadler) to get back to the world of the living in time to perform the song and prevent the end of existence as we know it–because, if there’s one thing you have to remember, it’s this: the clock in San Dimas is always running. 

I didn’t even get into the plot that’s running concurrently in the future in which The Great Leader keeps getting summoned into the same amphitheater to look at the hologram of space and time (represented as the earth as a turntable, with a record deck at the equator like Saturn’s rings) to fret, which seems to happen nearly half a dozen times. In an overstuffed movie, it’s crammed in there too for some reason but there seems to be a disconcerting lack of a narrative purpose for us to keep going back there. Obviously one would want to get their money’s worth when hiring Holland Taylor, but from a story standpoint, there’s just no reason to keep doing this; a ninety-three minute movie shouldn’t have 125 minutes of plot crowding it up like the suitcase of a Looney Tunes character, as it leaves no breathing room and creates the situation mentioned earlier, in which character dialogue is rushed and overly expositional.  

I loved Bill & Ted in my youth, and no one wanted this movie to be better than I did. There are a few solid jokes here, but even some of the best are in service of generating a nostalgic feeling, which isn’t the wrong way to go with this particular franchise, but could have been scaled back by about 35% and had both more room to breathe and been just as effective. Lundy-Paine and Weaving are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and they’re up to most of it, but there are lines that they’re asked to sell that are simply impossible to pull off, and while Reeves has continued to carve out a niche for himself with John Wick and one-off minor roles in things like Neon Demon, Alex Winter has remained largely out of the public eye, mostly making documentaries. It’s great to see him here; he seems to be having the most fun of anyone, and it’s infectious, even when the film drags. It’s a less than delightful end(?) to a franchise that had a better ending in Bogus Journey.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Possessor (2020)

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The most often repeated observation about actor Andrea Riseborough is that she loses herself in roles to the point of being unrecognizable.  Among other examples, Riseborough’s turns as the titular metalhead loner in Mandy, the titular grifter in Nancy, and the daughter of the titular dictator in The Death of Stalin are all so distinctly unique in both performance and physicality that it might not even occur to you that the same actor was cast across the roles.  That chameleonic quality might be frustrating for Riseborough’s professional need for name recognition, but it is fascinating to watch in terms of pure excellence in craft.  It’s also, I assume, a major factor in why she was cast as the lead of Brandon Cronenberg’s latest feature, Possessor, which seemingly took note of her absence of persona and built an entire fucked up sci-fi horror around it about the loss of Identity.  A damn good one too.

Riseborough stars as a near-future corporate assassin who hacks into unsuspecting marks’ bodies to pin her public executions on them, avoiding arrest and collecting massive bounties.  We catch up with the assassin one too many missions into this grotesque routine, losing her grip on her own persona as the borders blur between her host bodies and her original self.  Much of the film involves an especially disastrous mission where she cannot escape the host body she intends to assassinate a Jeff Bezos-type Big-Tech Asshole with, trapped inside his dirtbag son-in-law and becoming increasingly violent the longer she loses herself in the role.  The two dueling personae inside that one shared meatbag start to fight for control in increasingly upsetting ways, represented onscreen through surrealistic melting wax figures & video art freak-outs.  It’s a fight between actors Riseborough & host-body Christopher Abbott to take over as protagonist just as much as it is a fight between assassin & unsuspecting scapegoat.  Both performers are spectacularly upsetting as they squirm uncomfortably inside their own warring bodies, but it’s a struggle that speaks directly to Riseborough’s reputation as a chameleonic actor in particular.

Brandon Cronenberg does little to avoid the inevitable comparisons to his father’s previous triumphs here.  As the assassin’s bloodlust for grotesque, pointless cruelty escalates, the film’s genre shifts from pure sci-fi thriller to outright surrealist body horror in the Cronenberg family tradition.  Casting Jennifer Jason Leigh as the assassin’s handler and using plug & play brain ports as the company’s means to hack into host bodies at least serve as direct acknowledgements of this cinematic inheritance, directly referencing the iconography of eXistenZ in particular.  There’s plenty of modernization & innovation at play here that elevates Possessor above mere tracing-paper ditto work, though.  The horrors of the Jeff Bezos-funded surveillance state that completely obliterates the boundaries of privacy & autonomy to the point of hacking into our goddamn bodies feels distinctly of-the-moment and a worthy application of the body horror tropes that David Cronenberg helped pioneer.  There’s so much about Possessor that’s unique to our current, nightmarishly inane hellscape, including casual use of the term “cuck queen” and non-stop onscreen vaping.  It’s indebted to body horror classics of the past, but not at all tangled up in attempts to recreate them.

It’d be outrageous to claim that Possessor is about Andrea Riseborough’s eerie absence of a solid persona.  On a conceptual level, this is clearly a film that’s most interested in the identity & autonomy we’ve all given up in our march towards a corporate data-mining hell future.  Casting Riseborough in that central role of a professional impersonator who can’t hold onto her original persona as she loses herself in her assignments can’t help but feel like a deliberate, knowing choice, though.  It builds off her established reputation as an actor in fascinating, terrifying ways, which adds additional depth to the bodily & technophobic grotesqueries that drive the plot otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

The FP (2011)

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As the pandemic continues to rage around us virtually unchecked, threatening to bring the age of movie theaters to an ignoble end, the Alamo Drafthouse has continued to work hard to keep itself afloat during this year and with an eye on the next. Alongside the mind-boggling and largely unnecessary loss of life, Austin has seen the permanent shuttering of two of its pop culture stalwarts, Vulcan Video and I Luv Video, both of which managed to survive both the large scale destruction of independent video stores by corporate giant Blockbuster and its competitors as well as the endangerment of the home video rental marketplace as a whole when Blockbuster was itself ousted by the rise of DVD-by-mail retailer turned streaming giant Netflix. Drafthouse is still hanging in there, and one of its COVID-necessitated diversifications was the introduction of Drafthouse at home, which saw the delivery to one’s home of a mixed six pack of beer, six single serving liquors, and one Drafthouse Films DVD. Two months into the pandemic, my old roommate and one of his current housemates were kind enough to send two such packages on to me as a gift for my birthday. It’s a kind and thoughtful gift, and I wish I could say those same adjectives held true for the first of the films I watched. 

The FP is trying very desperately to be something greater than the sum of its parts, but is held back and ultimately defeated by some extremely questionable choices with regards to world-building and humor. 

Our setting is the real world California suburb of Frazier Park, but in an alternate reality. Most plot descriptions you’d find tucked away in various corners of the internet refer to it as an apocalyptic future, but what we’re presented with isn’t really a potential future of our present reality (or of the potential future reality of the film’s release year of 2011); it’s situated firmly in a not too distant future as imagined by the sci-fi creators of the 1980s (you know, Turbo Kid rules). For example, despite being made within the past decade, all communication is done via payphones and pagers, and the most advanced technology that appears on screen is one of those programmable raver kid LED scrolling text belt-buckles, as worn by our protagonist JTRO (Jason Trost) and his older brother, BTRO (Brandon Barrera). The film’s commitment to that 1980s aesthetic, even when using what is clearly digital video, is admirable and reflects the sincerity of the film overall. It’s just too bad that the film’s worst choices render it nearly impossible to defend. 

We first meet JTRO, of the “248” gang, on the eve of his planned battle with the lieutenant of the leader of the rival “245” gang in the FP, or Frazier Park. After getting a pep talk from BTRO, he faces off against his opponent in combat—at Dance Dance Revolution, er, I mean “Beat Beat Revelation.” JTRO wins his match handily, but when BTRO steps up for his fight against rival gang leader L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), his legs give out and he dies in his younger brother’s arms, ceding control of the FP to 245. We then flash forward to a year later, when BBR emcee KCDC (Art Hsu) tracks down JTRO in the forest, where he’s been working as a lumberjack. Citing that the FP has become a hellish place since the 245took power, made even worse by L Dubba E inheriting his family’s liquor store and thus having control over the sole source of alcohol for the entire community, KCDC convinces JTRO to come home and restore the FP. 

Upon his return, JTRO learns that an old flame of his, Stacy (Caitlyn Folley), has taken up with L Dubba E in order to maintain a steady supply of booze for her abusive father, lest he turn to harder drugs as many others have in the intervening year. He also learns that getting the community back on its feet won’t be simple, as JTRO must first gain enough street cred for L Dubba E to consider his  challenge (as Dubba E says in his one good line, this is because of “Politics and shit”). To help out, KCDC brings JTRO to BLT (Nick Principe), who serves the role of the “wizened master” in this hero’s journey. Can JTRO train hard enough to beat L Dubba E and save the FP, win Stacy’s heart, and avenge his brother’s death? 

On the face of it, the idea of a gangland showdown revolving around battles performed using an interface that is essentially-identical-to-but-legally-distinct-from Dance Dance Revolution is funny, and has a lot of potential charm. You’d think that if there was going to be a failure in the film it would come from these sequences, as there’s only so much investment you can expect from an audience watching someone else play BBR, but these clashes are generally some of the more fun parts of the movie, with dynamic and innovative camera choices, synchronized movement from the opponents, and great shots of extras hamming it up as colorful eighties-style punks. The training montages that appear throughout the second act are also effective in capturing the essence of the films of this type that came before, and there’s a shot where JTRO is ambling down a mountain road en route back to Frazier Park and comes to an unobstructed view of the valley below that is legitimately beautiful. The performances are also much better than you’d expect from a low ($45,000) budget film starring mostly people from the neighborhood. Trost is fairly wooden, but I feel comfortable giving the benefit of the doubt here and saying that’s deliberately evocative of the antagonists of the films from which this plot is lovingly cribbed. Special mention should also be made of Folley, who, although amateurish in some of her delivery, displays genuine vulnerability and internal conflict at other points, and her mimicry of well-meaning-but-dimwitted tropes is well-studied. 

Where this film fails is in its South Park-esque edgelordery. Trost is not only the lead here, he also has a Story By credit, and he gets co-credits with his brother Brandon Trost for both Screenplay By and Director, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but he’s openly stated that the idea for the film came to him when he was 16, and … it shows. If you were to sit down and read this script without any context, you’d expect this to have an all-Black cast based on how frequently the n-word appears, or at least you’d pray that it wouldn’t be an almost all-white cast. Spoiler alert: you’d be wrong. There are no Black people in this film at all*. A late-in-the-game “explanation” that the “n***a” variant used almost exclusively but pervasively is an acronym (that I won’t bother transcribing here) does nothing to quell this problem. Most of the uses come from KCDC, a (non-Black) POC character doing so as part of his hype man schtick, but again, there’s no real excuse for this: the people who made this were young white kids from Frazier Park and thought that the co-option of BVE/AAVE and gangsta archetypes was hilarious (in case it needs to be said: it is not). And did I mention that the L Dubba E had a giant golden grill that encompasses the entire upper row of his teeth? Or that his gang uses Confederate imagery? Or what about the fact that when we finally meet Stacy’s father, whom we’ve only heard screaming from offscreen to this point, he emerges from their trailer wearing femme undergarments, just because it’s “hilarious” to make a couple of transphobic jabs at the expense of a character we’re supposed to hate? If this were floated as a Drafthouse film in 2020 instead of 2011, it probably wouldn’t get past the first round of consideration. At least I hope it wouldn’t. 

The FP almost has a lot going for it. An original concept, a specific vision, an encyclopedic knowledge of the material being reimagined and rebuilt: all great things to have when building what this movie wanted to be. But an uncritical adoption of Black culture (which isn’t to say that a critical use of AAVE by white kids as inspected by these particular filmmakers would have been better–it definitely would not have) and tone-deaf jokes that misgender and actively engage in othering turn what could have been a worthy part of the pantheon of eighties reimagination that contains treasures like Turbo Kid and Son of Rambow into another forgotten amateur indie. If I had a storeroom full of DVDs of this, I’d be foisting them off on people if I could, too. 

*Shockingly, this reflects a 0.0% Black/African American population for the real-life Frazier Park, which tells us that virtually every aspect of Black culture present in the real Frazier Park and in the film is completely appropriated, which kind of says everything, doesn’t it?  

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Body Snatchers (1993)

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It turns out not every movie adaptation of the 1958 novel The Body Snatchers is Great; some are just Okay. The 1956 and the 1978 adaptations—both titled The Invasion of the Body Snatchers—are reputable sci-fi horror classics, but that streak apparently ended when the material was imported into the 1990s. Body Snatchers ’93 had ample talent behind it to match the reputation of its looming predecessors, including the same producer as Invasion ’78 (Robert H. Solo) and creative contributions from genre film legends Abel Ferrara (director), Stuart Gordon (co-writer), and Larry Cohen (story). Unfortunately, that deep talent pool doesn’t amount to much onscreen. This particular Body Snatchers is serviceable but forgettable, something that might be easier to overlook if there weren’t so many superior realizations of the same material to compare it to.

Whereas the first two Body Snatchers adaptations explored themes of Conservatism, conformity, and paranoia in American cities & suburbs, this 90s Kids™ update moves its action to a military base. A moody teen brat who’d rather listen to her Walkman than her parents is horrified when her family moves to the rigid, regimented confinement of a military base to accommodate her dad’s career. That horror over militarized conformity only worsens when alien pod people start replacing the humans among the macho brutes in her midst, eventually including the few burnout friends she’s made on the base and members of her own immediate family. The manifestations of that horror are familiar: alien tendrils invading sleeping victims’ orifices and already-converted pod people snitching on still-human holdouts with hideous shrieks. They’re just updated with a new backdrop location & updated 90s era effects.

Weirdly, the film that most makes Body Snatchers ’93 feel obsolete is not any of the preceding direct adaptations of its source material but rather a loosely-inspired work that arrived to theaters five years later. Between the film’s 90s grunge sensibilities and its moody teen girl POV, it recalls a lot of what Robert Rodriguez later achieved to greater success in The Faculty. Body Snatchers is dourer & less fun than Rodriguez’s film, though, which I suppose is the Abel Ferrara touch. As a result, it’s difficult to find much in this film worth recommending that hasn’t been bested elsewhere, except maybe in a few standalone scares: a deflated goo-filled skull here, an alien-infested bathtub there, etc. Still, it’s a moderately serviceable sci-fi horror that sneaks in a few effective chills & practical gore showcases in a tight 87min window – even if they aren’t in service of something spectacularly unique.

-Brandon Ledet

Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon (2020)

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I remember being thoroughly charmed by Aardman Animations’ Shaun the Sheep movie five years ago, but I don’t remember much of anything about the movie or what happens in it. I suspect that’s because not much of anything happens in it at all. Adapting the Wallace & Gromit spin-off series for the big screen meant having to upscale the adorable sheep’s stop-motion farmland hijinks with a trip to The Big City to mark the occasion. Aardman did a great job of downplaying that necessity, though, keeping Shaun’s fish-out-of-water antics amongst urban chaos as low-key & pleasantly charming as possible. Unfortunately, it seems that the sequel had to go even bigger in scale to justify its own existence and lost some of that low-key charm in the process. You can even feel the sequel’s mood-deflating excess in its Michael Bay flavored title, Farmageddon, which is maybe the exact opposite of what you’d want from a low-stakes animated comedy about a cute sheep.

In theory, I’m all for a War of the Worlds inspired sci-fi throwback within the Shaun the Sheep universe. The eerie theremin soundtrack cues, spooky green lights, and 1950s throwback UFOs that differentiate Farmageddon from the first Shaun the Sheep movie land it squarely in my aesthetic wheelhouse. It’s the cutesy, impish alien creature that toddles out of those UFOs that killed the mood for me. In a slightly altered repeat of the first film, Shaun has to travel into town to help an alien creature that crash landed near his farm find her spaceship so she can travel home. This prompts a very familiar series of gags where Shaun has to hide the fact that he’s a sheep operating undercover in People Places, except this time he’s also covering for a purple, childlike space alien who’s constantly hyperactive from guzzling too much candy & soda. I know I shouldn’t fault a kids’ movie for featuring an obnoxious, brightly colored alien mascot character with magical powers and a bottomless love for sugar; she’s not designed for my entertainment. Still, it’s an impossible fault to ignore, considering that all of the funniest gags in the film involve the sheep on the farm and not the sci-fi add-ons referenced in the title.

There’s no reason to be too harsh here. Although Farmageddon is nowhere near as successful as the first Shaun the Sheep movie, it’s still cute & charming enough to be worthy of a lazy-afternoon watch. Its space alien Poochie character and godawful Top 40s pop music soundtrack threaten to tank the entire enterprise, but the Aardman brand is too strong to allow that to happen. This is still an adorably animated stop-motion love letter to silent comedy greats of the past like Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati – one with winking Film Geek references to movies like Modern Times & 2001: A Space Odyssey. If it can use the brightly colored sugar rush of its alien mascot to hook younger children into that Antique Cinema nerdom (and sci-fi genre nerdom to boot), who am I to complain? I missed the low-key charms of the first film while tagging along behind that purple, sugar-addled beast, but Farmageddon still occasionally gave me something to smile about elsewhere.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beach House (2020)

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One of the pitfalls of regularly watching genre movies is that they start to blend together if you don’t diversify your diet. The way genre films can repeat and reshape the same story templates into thousands of uniquely meaningful variations is a beautiful thing. However, if you watch, say, five varying riffs on The Thing or Groundhog Day in a month the barriers that distinguish each individual film start to break down. All of that is to say that the modestly budgeted Lovecraftian horror The Beach House was very poorly timed, to no particular fault of the film itself. In a year where The Beach House has to compete for attention with fellow new releases Color Out of Space, Sea Fever, and The Rental—all of which cover nearly identical genre territory with much larger budgets & creative resources—it has almost no chance of standing out as its own distinct vision. Still, the benefit of working within the realm of genre is that these familiar templates have their own guaranteed entertainment payoffs baked into their recipes. It took me a while to warm up to The Beach House as a worthwhile, distinct product, but it does eventually get pretty gnarly while staging its climactic mayhem, conjuring a few memorably horrid images that will continue to haunt me despite the rest of the film’s overbearing familiarity.

(Like in Sea Fever), The Beach House features an aspiring scientist, who (like in The Rental) finds herself in a tense social situation while intoxicated with her boyfriend and a strange couple at vacation home, until (like in Color Out of Space) an extraterrestrial infection mutates the people & landscape around her into a grotesque Lovecraftian hellscape. It’s not just the familiarity with these archetypes & settings that makes the film difficult to sink into. The melodramatic CW Network-flavored acting style and the influence of drugs & alcohol also confuse what’s intentionally off in the protagonist’s surroundings and what’s just mistakenly inauthentic & cheesy. It’s impossible to fully get your footing in the film’s early goings, where it’s unclear whether there’s already something sinister in the air or if the dialogue is just being unevenly performed by the subprofessionals the modest budget could afford. Things quickly pick up once the parameters of the beachside Lovecraft horror become explicitly clear, though, and the hideous chaos of the back half more or less erases the tedium of its build-up. I’m not sure the film has anything more to say than “Don’t take edibles with strangers in an unfamiliar location” or “Never trust a fuckboy named Randall” but its pseudoscientific descent into primordial horror is well staged once it gets past those first-act speed bumps.

There are a few isolated, truly grotesque images in The Beach House that should perk up any horror nerds who make it past the doldrums of the film’s early stirrings. Whether seeking out those scattered nightmare visions for their own sake is enough to justify watching an entire movie is dependent on your own appetite for this kind of material. That’s especially true in a year where it’s bested in nearly every way by Color Out of Space in particular, which goes so much further in both its supernatural mayhem and its off-putting performances that The Beach House almost feels wholly redundant, if not just poorly timed. It might have fared better in a different year, but I can’t pretend that it registers as anything particularly memorable in our current context.

-Brandon Ledet

The 6th Day (2000)

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Every year for my birthday, I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie as a gift to myself. Something about that Austrian galoot’s heyday as the live-action cartoon version of an American action star makes me warmly nostalgic in a way no other media can. This year, I took a risk by revisiting one of the lesser loved action flicks from the final days of Arnie’s golden era, just a few years before he switched from explosions to politics. The 6th Day held up much better than expected as a dumb-as-rocks nostalgia trip, though, with the camp value of its early-aughts futurism aging like fine wine over the past couple decades. More importantly, it was surprisingly solid Schwarzenegger Birthday programming (something I should remember for future celebrations). Not only does the film deliver two Arnies for the price of one, but it’s also set on his own character’s birthday for at least the first half of the film. My only regret is not timing my viewing where I could have blown out my birthday candles at the same time as my favorite muscled-up goofball.

In short, The 6th Day presents an alternate reality where Joel Schumacher directed Total Recall, and it’s just as delightfully stupid & gaudy as that sounds. In the near future—”sooner than you think”—a Totally American Dad (and helicopter pilot for an X-treme sports snowboarding company) has his life derailed when he is cloned against his will by an evil Bill Gates type and his scientist lackeys. Horrified to discover that he’s been replaced in his home (and marital bed) by his own clone, Schwarzenegger vows to take down the Evil Scientist Dweebs who ruined his life with the only tools he knows: punches, explosions, and one-liners. Beyond the chase scenes & mustache-twirling villainy that earns the film its vintage action movie credentials, The 6th Day is essentially just a collection of kitschy predictions of what the “future” is going to look like circa 2015. Some of these predictions are supposed to read as Super Cool to the macho set: the continued sports world dominance of the XFL, remote control helicopters you can pilot with video game joysticks, programmable slutty hologram girlfriends, etc. Most predictions are supposed to be terrifying & dystopian: the criminalization of tobacco use, creepy robot smart-dolls made for little girls and, most importantly, the Dolly the Sheep cloning experiments being extended to creating human life. And Schwarzenegger’s at the center of it all, just trying his best to be a good Husband & Dad like every red-blooded American should.

Admittedly, The 6th Day can’t compete with the very best of Schwarzenegger’s macho American caricatures, as seen in trash-action classics like Commando & The Running Man. Still, it’s charming to see him doing his thing so many years after he already spoofed himself for it in Last Action Hero. Playing off the film’s cloning theme, Arnie lands not one but two “Go screw yourself” one-liners, as well as the self-referential zinger “I might be back.” That is comedy, folks. There’s also something adorable about his character’s quest to return to a life of chomping cigars and making love with his wife, which is positioned as being in direct opposition to The Modern World. The details surrounding this macho, all-American throwback kitsch can be surprisingly grotesque, as the cloning gimmick at the center of the movie essentially makes human bodies disposable and, thus, fair game to dismantle. No amount of severed thumbs, limbs, or intestines can fully pave over the childlike naivete at the film’s core, though, and the violence ends up coming across as more live-action Looney Tunes than anything genuinely severe. The 6th Day is a little overlong and very much overwhelmingly macho, but it’s mostly a hoot. It will likely never enjoy the same Cult Classic reputation as other brainless action spectacles from Schwarzenegger’s prime, but I find it to be one of those classics’ better late-career clones. I can’t wait to blow out my birthday candles with Unkie Arnie on my next revisit.

-Brandon Ledet

Bacurau (2020)

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One of the major benefits of genre filmmaking is that you can repeat & mutate stories audiences have seen hundreds of times before and still make them freshly exciting. In its most basic terms, the Brazilian whatsit Bacurau is a delicately surreal sci-fi take on “The Most Dangerous Game”, a short story that has been reshaped into countless genre films as wide ranging in tone & purpose as Hard Target, The Hunt, The Pest, and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity. Bacurau is so deliberately disorienting in its own psychedelic mutation of “The Most Dangerous Game”, however, that it’s not until well into its runtime that you even recognize that’s what it’s going for, despite the story’s cultural familiarity. It’s a film that’s so gradually, subtly escalated that you don’t notice how truly batshit its central scenario is until you’re deep in the thick of it. Yet, it incorporates trashier genre filmmaking signifiers like screen-wipe transitions, extreme split-diopter framing, 1950s UFOs, and the casting of Udo Kier as its central villain so as not to lose its traditional action movie cred while pursuing its more artsy-fartsy ambitions. This is a film that uses familiar tropes & techniques to tell a story we’ve all heard before in a new style & context that achieves something freshly exciting with those antique building blocks. In other words, it’s genre filmmaking at its finest.

The title Bacurau refers to a fictional small town in near-future Brazil, “a few years from now.” The town begins the film in mourning, having lost its community leader & matriarch to old age. Then, the town descends into full on crisis mode as it is mysteriously erased from all online maps of Brazil and is surveilled by retro UFO-shaped drones. The film delays allowing its audience any solid footing for as long as it can, deliberately bewildering us in the first act to mimic the mental state of the Bacurau citizenry. Once the hunting-humans-for-sport aspect of its plot emerges from the confusion, however, the crisis only becomes exponentially more intriguing & thrilling. Like all great genre films, Bacuaru deploys its familiar plot template to address something intimately specific & fresh in metaphor that its premise has not been applied to before (not to my knowledge, anyway). This small Brazilian community is literally hunted from all sides by outside capitalists who see them as subhuman: gun-crazy American tourists, wealthy São Paulino elitists from the opposite end of the country, and even their own local government. It’s a literalized exaggeration of the kinds of exploitation that strains nearly all low-income POC communities no matter how remote, which only makes the exaggerated ultraviolence of the town’s bloody revenge on their oppressors all the more satisfying once it inevitably arrives.

If there’s any clear message being communicated in Bacurau, it’s to be found in the film’s emphasis on community & solidarity. Part of the reason it’s so difficult to get your footing in the first act is that the film has no clear protagonist. Each member of the community is allowed their own command of the film’s POV in time, and it’s the way they equally value each other’s contributions to the town’s daily survival (from doctor to musician to sex worker) that eventually sees them through what looks like an impossible crisis. Meanwhile, the racist, capitalist scum who seek to destroy the people of Bacurau for frivolous entertainment end up destroying each other in the process instead, as their selfishness & individualism makes them too weak to function. There’s a lot to praise in the way the film reshapes its “Most Dangerous Game” inspiration source to make it freshly exciting in both its aesthetics & politics. If nothing else, it has a low-key hallucinatory effect in its matter-of-fact handling of surreal circumstances that I can only compare to other recent South American films of a similar political bent: Monos, Zama, Icaros, Good Manners, Electric Swan, etc. It’s the focus on communal solidarity and de-emphasis of the individual that really distinguishes the film as something freshly exciting for me, though, especially considering the action genre’s long history of Lone Muscle Man hero worship.

Bacurau traffics in such familiar tones & thematic territories that it takes a while to fully register just how overwhelmingly odd it is in its distinguishing details. It’s clearly one of the stranger new releases I’ve seen so far this year, but I don’t know that I fully realized that until I was fully immersed in its climactic bloodbath. This is genre cinema alchemy, the kind of bizarro outlier that reminds us why repeating these stories in new, evolving contexts is a worthwhile practice in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet