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So, I enjoyed The Drama quite a bit. In fact, I think it’s one of the better films released this year — not the best, but strong in a way that modern rom-dramedies so often aren’t. It’s caustic, occasionally tactless, and also big-hearted, empathetic, and smart. It’s complex, like people are. Messy.

I didn’t enjoy Dream Scenario as enthusiastically as some, but I think Kristoffer Borgli is one of the more interesting new filmmakers around, even if throwing praise his way has recently gotten tricky. His latest movie, born from that primordial stew of human frailty, is good. More, it’s well-observed; a near 1:1 example of how some folks behave on social media whenever a scandal hits, a reflection to which an unsurprising number seems to have taken exception. In the film, characters are exposed to the unpleasantness of other people’s lives and react poorly. Some indulge in schadenfreude and try not to think about how that makes them hypocrites. In The Drama, none are without sin, though some stains bleed through more prominently than others. Here’s the most interesting part: there’s no moral high ground in this movie, just what we bring to it. I think that pisses off some people.

If you haven’t seen The Drama, you should. If you have someone special in your life, you’ll likely appreciate the messiness of it. Maybe you’ll flinch in recognition from time to time. It’s a love story, but for much of the film, it feels like the antithesis of one, where love is a mug’s game played with little heed to self-preservation or even sense, and always ends in disaster. It follows Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) as their wedding nears, only for Emma to reveal something from her past that recontextualizes her in Charlie’s mind and heart. I won’t spoil what this is, even though it’s the film’s inciting incident, but I will say that Emma’s secret is surprising and disturbing, and that Borgil follows through on most of the ways this revelation devastates Charlie and Emma’s lives, privately, socially, and professionally. It’s all so marvelously squirmy, if not necessarily profound.

Quite a few critics are currently picking at the knot of The Drama, and, as in any Big Discourse, some criticisms are solid, while others seem strangely defensive, as if extolling the virtues of this specific film were to reveal some inner flaw to friends and peers. The movie takes no moral high ground, so we must, or there’s no ‘There’ there — those kinds of things. Every angle of the film has been fed through the commentary thresher, from Borgli’s handling of Zendaya’s character’s race to co-star Alana Haim being so persuasively antagonistic that she must be, y’know, like that, to Borgli simply not understanding the very characters he’s created. While I disagree with all of those takes, I’ll sit out unpacking them individually, as some are too knee-jerk silly to bother with. Some movies just glance off people.

I should know. Recently, I watched Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man for my 2020 Watch-Thru project. I saw on the surface why so many people praised that movie, the topical #MeToo component that employs abuse as shorthand for its terror, yet I didn’t feel the resulting tension was nearly as effective as all the praise led me to believe. And that’s okay. Sometimes I’m with the majority, sometimes I’m agin it.

This isn’t to say The Drama is some rich text that only I can decipher or that it’s above reproach. In its churn, Borgli sometimes forgets to center certain characters, making it harder for us to interpret their motivations. (Though I do think that this incongruity is part of the point.) His thoughts on American trauma often smacks of tourism. But I will argue that its surface pleasures of emotional discomfort and sexual politics are so engrossing, and the performances that reflect them so convincing, that there’s plenty to appreciate about it, especially after its hook sinks in and chaos takes over. After all, what’s there to justify all this hand-wringing if not a challenging and complete movie? If there were nothing there, if Borgli had written stock characters or used our tragically perennial American blight as mere window dressing to gussy up a shallow script, as some (even I) have suggested, then why are all these sneering dismissals so resoundingly full-throated? A few nerves have been struck, and not just the nerve that twitches whenever someone sees a movie they feel is beneath them.

However, this is one instance where Discourse is, sadly, an essential part of appreciating a film. Watching people fire off missives either for or against what Borgli has accomplished, and comparing our own opinions to them. Bickering. The Drama has spread its sticky tentacles into real life, as hot-button movies so often do, and too few of us are above playing into its clutches. Which brings me to another criticism of the film: my fear that the initial impact it had on me might not hit as thoroughly on a second viewing. I’m excited to test that out sometime. I wonder if The Drama, beyond its hook, has enough juice to endure as an adult drama-of-errors even five years from now, or if A24 has successfully marketed yet another effective “twist” movie that burns brightly for a time, only for its ashes to be mixed into the streaming dung. Time will tell.

(Oh, and what Emma has to say is not a twist, but that’s another newsletter.)

That’s all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? What’s your show right now? Drop any favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.

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THE MOVIE: Razor Blade Smile

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: September 19, 1998 (Lund International Fantastic Film Festival); September 14, 1999 (DVD)

NEW FORMAT: 4K scan and restoration of the original 16mm Kodak film print by Silver Salt Restoration, supervised by director Jake West. From Severin Films.

RE/PLAYING: Jake West’s Razor Blade Smile is about as immaculate a time capsule for the mid-Nineties as you’re likely to dig up, a techno-thumping, leatherbound vampire nerd party so convinced it’s cool that it eventually comes around to being precisely that. It’s fine if some folks can only enjoy it from a distance as a kind of ironic curio — I’d conduct a reevaluation of my personal taste if I were them — but as a budget-minded deconstruction of the vampire myth that stretches its concepts like Silly Putty and has the grace to not take itself too seriously, there is plenty to cherish here.

For starters, like any proper vampire movie, its lurid delights proliferate. Corn syrup runs down fishnet stockings. Our heroine, a lusty, busty vampire assassin named Lilith Silver (Eileen Daly), is an “equal opportunity” lover. The movie’s sub-villain, ostensibly the film’s piss-take on Van Helsing, is a dorky police inspector (Jonathan Coote) who steals angel dust from evidence and promptly puts it to use. On top of all this is a not insignificant amount of gun- and bed-play and an obsessive eye for costuming and makeup, amounting to a stylish, borderline softcore action/horror charisma engine that goes to great lengths to give us weirdoes our money’s worth.

Sidebar. Even if you’ve never seen Razor Blade Smile before, you actually have. That’s Underworld (2003), which shares visual influences with many sources, primarily The Matrix and Blade, but feels especially indebted to Razor Blade Smile, considering Lilith’s visual proximity to Kate Beckinsale’s vampire assassin character, Selene. Its status in the British cult/goth canon as an influential post-Hammer bloodchild is well established, as the disc’s special features state frequently and proudly; Severin Films has done a service by securing its immortality for the next few generations.

So, yes: Lilith Silver, an assassin nymphet who frequently seduces her human paymaster Platinum (Kevin Howarth) and sips cocktails in human vampire-wannabe clubs in London. Her story isn’t high art or even romantic, and she knows it, dismissing the pretentiousness of beloved vampire tomes like Dracula and their various legends as ridiculous — “Fuck Bram Stoker,” is her stance. She goes one further during her opening narration: “I bet you you think you know all about vampires — believe me, you know fuck all.”

See, according to Lilith, vamps turning into bats or mist or whatever else is bullshit. She advocates practicality in furthering the vampire myth among the normies, which in this context means vinyl jumpsuits that barely zip over her bustline and stashing an arsenal of scythes, Uzis, katanas, and 18th-century pistols in red plush-lined coffins. I’ll tell you what’s impractical about her vampirism: those chompers. Massive, curved canines that make it impossible to close her mouth and sometimes turn sibilance into slush. She also quips a lot for a deadly assassin: “Game, set, match,” Lilith purrs, as she empties entire clips into two tennis-playing henchmen. Still, her approach to unlife makes sense. For example, her choice of career as an assassin suits her lifestyle: lots of designer coats and sunglasses; no annoying human bosses to answer to; and her feeding habits conveniently fold into the work. Of course, just as Lilith settles into a kind of routine — whatever that means for a posh immortal — complications arrive when Platinum’s latest job puts the Masonic “Illuminati” in her crosshairs, led, naturally, by the vampire who turned her all those centuries ago: Sir Sethane Blake (Christopher Adamson).

Arriving just as Stephen Norrington’s Blade hit theaters and before the Underworld series by at least half a decade, as silly as it can be, Razor Blade Smile feels like it’s staking out the vanguard of something. Vampire chic, to be sure, but there’s something jittery and synthetic lurking in its edits and camera angles — music video cinema, perhaps, the kind of hyperactive visual noise that proliferated more soberly in a broad range of early-Aughts horror films, from 28 Days Later to Jason X. Here, these aesthetic impulses feel instinctive, and oddly foundational. All this guilelessness also evokes fond memories of late-Nineties TV that leaned hard into its respective genres, like Lexx and Kindred: The Embraced and even Night Man, leaving me feeling a bit wistful for a kind of entertainment that simply isn’t produced anymore.

Beyond Daly’s indomitable charisma, Razor Blade Smile relies heavily on style, but its deadpan humor keeps it grounded and, more importantly, fun. There is a defensiveness to its stylistic flourishes — the vampire Illuminati dwell in stuffy-looking spaces that sometimes look like budget hotels, either overlit or swaddled in shadow depending on the mood West is conveying. You see what he was going for: cool spaces that look ancient, cutting-edge, or some mix of both (see: Blade), but the resulting cheapness contributes to the charm. This quaintness vanishes entirely in a scene where Lilith, after a bout of intercourse and murder, rides a cab through the London night, with wide-angle shots and blurred street lamps creating a vampire-dork approximation of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels. There are other, smaller grace notes, my favorite being a blink-and-miss-it moment where Lilith struts through a graveyard by day, her figure passing through the sun as if in defiance of it. If budget was a concern for West, he was very good at keeping it off-camera.

I haven’t mentioned its kick-ass soundtrack yet, which boasts Bauhaus (“Bela Lugosi’s Dead”), Fields of the Nephilim (“For Her Light”), Curve (“Recovery”), and even squeezes in Mozart’s Requiem just for funsies. I’m compelled to keep batting for Razor Blade Smile, but it's enough to say I’m impressed that a vampire movie, made by people who grew up on a heady diet of Hammer Horror, Anne Rice, and tongue-in-cheek American fare like Fright Night and The Lost Boys, can still function on a visual and visceral level that is distinctly its own. Even if later films have refined or even surpassed this work, West’s appreciation for the genre makes Razor Blade Smile unique, from its gleeful bloodshed to the absolutely cracked twist finale that indulges the kinkier side of immortality. So, while what passes as cool changes from decade to decade and rarely for the better, Razor Blade Smile hits us with at least one universal constant: the visual purity of a dual-wielding vampire assassin babe remains eternal.

ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: After you take in the fullness of Smile, I recommend firing up Vampires Forever, a 95-minute documentary by Jake West that details how the British vampire scene of the 80s both influenced and embraced the film, rife with fun anecdotes about how West became a filmmaker, what was in the water at the time of his creative awakening, and how Eileen Daly became the prima vampire of Britain, among other endearingly strange tales about the counterculture’s ascent.

Follow that up with some of West’s earliest work, including Children of the Night, a vamp doc he directed for Film4 in 2000, and Club Death, his 1993 short film that contains much of the DNA that makes up Razor Blade Smile. Also worth exploring are West’s commentary for this short and the making-of feature Welcome to Club Death, as both are energizing peeks into his creative process. The two commentaries for Smile, one archival and one new for this release, are clutch and often adorable (both feature West; the first with production designer and long-time friend Neil Jenkins, and the second with Daly). And anyone interested in how West, along with Silver Salt Reproduction, managed to restore the film from its original print should check out Smiling Sharper, which provides engrossing technical context.

Among the other deep dives into the film’s production, my personal favorite concerns the movie’s semi-official and incomplete sequel comic strip, Dark God Rising, featuring interviews with writer Paul Rogers, artist John Gallagher, Daly, and West about where Lilith Silver’s story goes after Razor Blade Smile, replete with terrific scans of the original pages published in the underground mag Usher.

RE/PLAY VALUE: Severin’s three-disc resurrection of Razor Blade Smile exists at the nexus of several deeply held nerd obsessions, an essential purchase for those who love vampires, gore, sleaze, underground comics, horror, dubious techno, and the queasy, disreputable magic that happens when it all blends into one singularly frightful affair. Ruthlessly curated and housed in a slipcase emblazoned with Eileen Daly’s wild kill-face, Razor Blade Smile sets a ludicrously high bar as my favorite physical release this year so far.

FILM: 7.5 / 10
DISC: 9 / 10

Razor Blade Smile is available on Blu-ray now. For more info, click this.

Written and directed by Jake West.
Starring Eileen Daly, Christopher Adamson, Jonathan Coote, Kevin Howarth, Heidi James, and David Warbeck.

This is Re/Play, where we take a fresh look at an older film, TV series, or video game to see if fond memories hold up under remastered scrutiny. This week: Arrow Video’s restoration of Red Sonja, and 88 Film’s presentation of Sakuran.

THE MOVIE: Red Sonja

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: July 3, 1985

NEW FORMAT: 4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible), with original lossless mono audio and optional DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround audio. From Arrow Video.

RE/PLAYING: Whatever grandiosity or dramatic sweep its director, Richard Fleischer — no stranger to cinematic grandeur, mind you, nor the Hyborian age — had in mind for Red Sonja, this end result must have been a letdown. For me, watching this again as an adult is like walking into a movie midway; I seem to have missed all the stuff worth investing in. The origin of Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), violent, tragic, and genuinely disturbing, is presented as a clip show to a movie that never existed. We see her family slaughtered, her home burned, herself ravaged by an army, only to be reborn as a warrior out for revenge, courtesy of a spirit who grants her abilities beyond those of mortal men. I appreciate any movie that gets straight to business, but when we learn next to nothing else about Sonja over the remaining 80-odd minutes, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve been denied a more interesting film.

So: Red Sonja, seasoned in the art of war, ventures forth to exact vengeance on Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman). Gedren is a wild adversary for this kind of story, a Hyborian heavy responsible for all those atrocities visited upon Sonja as punishment for being denied her, um, company, and now the keeper of the Talisman, a green, glowing doo-dad that threatens apocalypse. With her objective established, all that’s left for Sonja is to move from point A to point B, with precious little standing in her way aside from a lusty gatekeeper (Pat Roach), a metallic water lizard, and a brawny warrior who’s only slightly more than meets her eye.

That’s Kalidor (Schwarzenegger), a hero cast in a vague Conan mold — rights issues kept Robert E. Howard’s other hero from appearing in this movie — who insists on trailing Sonja like a fawning groupie. Also joining her is Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr.), prince of the decimated city of Hablok and “Master of the World,” whom we meet tottering on the fingertips of a broken giant. He’s a beggar prince flanked by a kindly servant, Falkon (Popeye’s Paul Smith), whose size masks a gigantic heart. Pity Tarn doesn’t appreciate it — more because of his age than any grief associated with his lands being laid flat by Gedren. Sonja’s advice to Falkon: take the kid over your knee and beat some manners into him. On her quest to defeat the evil queen in the land of eternal night, Sonja is meant to learn the value of men. Saddled with the likes of Kalidor and Tarn, it’s fair to ask: why bother?

The humor is agony. There’s a bit where Gedren’s mage conjures a vision of a nude woman instead of locating Prince Tarn, like a porn tab left open on a work laptop. Banter between Nielsen and Schwarzenegger plays like action figures in the hands of a kid more interested in peculiar sexual dynamics than action. The sexual politics of the film are just as dubious. Sonja tells Kalidor he can’t have her unless he defeats her in combat — naturally, the first thing he does is unsheathe his sword. “If you yield only to a conqueror, then prepare to be conquered, little Sonja.” The ensuing fight (with real metal swords) eventually exhausts both of them until they collapse against a tree, spent. The metaphor is cheeky and lands at a satisfying impasse — no satisfaction for her, but then, none for him either.

The finale, which arrives sooner than you’d expect, does that thing where the ultimate power becomes so unstable the camera shakes uncontrollably until it’s neutralized. The visuals of this modest armageddon are, for the most part, genuinely striking. A bridge made from a beast’s skeleton draped over a river of lava is a standout. Other bits are merely charming, like that metal water lizard that obligingly pops its head above water so Sonja can smack at it with her sword. It drags Schwarzenegger into a whirlpool for what feels like seven hours, yet it is somehow adorable. Some of this action requires squinting — like Kalidor and Sonja’s forest-set, unorthodox mating ritual — as Arrow’s grainy transfer adds a layer of noise over the film’s darkness that is already tough on the eyes.

At least the haze complements how tough the film is on the brain. Red Sonja is like playing a game of “And Then:” and then this happens, and then that happens, on and on until it’s suddenly over. Every plot detail plays out as it must, as Sonja inches inexorably towards her destiny. Characters quip instead of thunder (save for Tarn, whose belligerence picks up his fellow stars’ slack), and their inner dramas barely register. I suppose that makes the finale, where Gedren and her mage test Sonja’s resolve through the power of magic, a revelation. For a moment, it looks like our heroine may prevail only at great cost. Of course, she comes out fine and victorious. But that’s all kid cartoons require: a happy ending. Sonja’s story might not be particularly thrilling, but at least we can’t deny that its silliness is kinda fun.

ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: Red Sonja comes armed with Arrow Video’s typically exhaustive arsenal of new and archival conversations. Start with the commentary from comic book expert Dave Baxter, who offers excellent context on Red Sonja’s origins, how the film deviates from Howard in favor of Sonja’s Marvel Comics iteration, among other interesting trivia and insights I found lacking in some of the other extras.

“Red Sonja vs. Kalidor: The Making of a Misunderstanding” is another highlight, if only for its candor from assistant director Michel Ferry, who recalls the production in hazy, diplomatic terms that nonetheless suggest something borderline ramshackle about the production, despite the committed work of costume/production designer Danilo Donati. Production manager Stefano Spadoni digs a bit deeper with “The 12 Labors of Red Sonja,” though his focus drifts toward the sturdy professionalism of the Italian craftsmen who kept the whole thing from collapsing outright. And check out “The Prince and Me,” where Ernie Reyes Jr. looks back on his childhood experiences of being dropped into a sword-and-sorcery circus. His fondness for this period is infectious, even if the film he commemorates doesn’t quite earn it.

Then there’s “A. Schwarzenegger, The Man Who Raised Hollywood,” a slapped-together, 15-minute career overview of Arnold Schwarzenegger that feels imported from another disc entirely. It’s a baffling inclusion considering so many subjects in these supplements mention how Schwarzenegger overshadowed Nielsen’s film debut and how many of them seem generally uninterested in the woman who played Red Sonja.

According to my handy-dandy press materials, this release is fitted with a perfect-bound booklet featuring essays by John Walsh, Nanni Cobretti, and Barry Forshaw, along with a double-sided poster showcasing artwork by Renato Casaro and a set of six postcard-sized art cards. I can’t speak to their quality firsthand, but I’m sure it makes for an impressive set, in true Arrow fashion.

RE/PLAY VALUE: With its high-grain transfer and nice audio mix of clanging steel and Ennio Morricone greatness, Red Sonja is amusing enough to watch, but own? For me, shelving Red Sonja after having seen it and all its supplemental materials means having one more thing to dust. This one’s mostly for Arrow, Schwarzenegger, and Hyborian/Marvel completionists, but casuals looking for a campy time will find much to appreciate.

6.5 / 10

Red Sonja is available on Blu-ray now. For more info, click this.

Directed by Richard Fleischer.
Written by Clive Exton and George MacDonald Fraser.
Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ernie Reyes Jr., Paul Smith, and Sandahl Bergman.

89 mins. / PG-13. Includes insinuations of rape and bloodless swordplay.

Stills sourced from DoBlu.com.

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THE MOVIE: Sakuran

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: February 24, 2007

NEW FORMAT: High-Definition Blu-ray disc, 5.1 DTS-HD MA and original stereo audio formats. From 88 Films.

RE/PLAYING: Sakuran is the kind of movie that will leave you questioning if you’ve ever seen color before. Adapting Moyoco Anno’s single-volume manga, the film evinces the same pleasure in the Edo period’s lavishly-patterned costumes and decor that the graphic novel did. First-time director Mika Ninagawa had made her name as one of the leading lights of the ‘90s “Girly Photo” movement (for more on that scene and the complicated legacy of its moniker, I recommend this excellent Aperture essay by Moeko Fujii). Whereas the movement was largely associated with a sort of slice-of-life spontaneity and lightweight commercial cameras, Ninagawa’s work was often characterized by careful staging and vibrant color, a visual style uniquely suited to translating Anno’s source material to the screen.

Sakuran unfolds almost entirely within the Yoshiwara district of Tokoyo, which for centuries was set aside as a red-light district. It focuses on our female protagonist, whose name varies but is mostly known as Kiyoha, who was sold into a brothel as a child. We follow her through her early years (where she’s portrayed by Ayame Koike) as an attendant to a high-ranking prostitute who entertains elite clients, known as an Oiran (Miho Kanno). Reaching 17, Kiyoha (now played by triple-threat singer/model/actress Anna Tsuchiya) blossoms into a great beauty, making her an object of envy both to the aging Oiran Takao (Yoshino Kimura) and her peers. From here, Kiyoha navigates love, friendship, and rivalry within the candy-colored prison where she is interred.

Kiyoha gives Tsuchiya a real opportunity to flex her strengths. The young sex worker is effortless in her seductive charm, but also strong-willed and volatile. At her most stubbornly defiant, Tsuchiya brushes up against the edges of screwball comedy, coming off at times like a violent, foul-mouthed Lucille Ball. Yet alongside this reckless strength of will, Tsuchiya conveys her character’s desire to be loved and her willingness to connect with others despite the loneliness of her position as a rising star in a highly competitive environment where women are both placed on a pedestal (sometimes literally) and reduced to property.

Sakuran is often spoken of in relation to 2005’s Memoirs of a Geisha, an American prestige picture that reinforced Western misconceptions around Japanese courtesans. Ninagawa spoke of screening the film as an example of what her movie should avoid. Kiyoha’s propensity for brawling with her fellow brothel workers and rejecting clients who displease her acts as a corrective to Memoir’s demure damsels, who reap their narrative rewards through passivity.

Ninagawa brings her experience as both a fine-art and fashion photographer to bear through the magazine-spread framing she applies to her protagonist. Taken together with J-pop veteran Ringo Sheena’s soundtrack that skitters between jazz, pop, and alt rock, the film recalls the glossy anachronism of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette from the previous year. Both works feature powerful women challenging the confines of their gender against backdrops of opulence, and Ninagawa underscores this reality through the goldfish motif that winds its way through the film. Already a fixture of the director’s photographic work, the fish in the film present as objects of shimmering beauty, often floating in water so clear as to resemble thin air. But this beauty is contingent upon their captivity; a goldfish in the wild will grow into a common carp. They are objects confined for the pleasure of others, forever looking out into a world they can never enter.

I am ambivalent about the film’s ending and its apparent promise of happiness for the principal characters (though Nanigawa contends it’s more ambiguous than it appears). Even so, Sakuran is a visual marvel. Yoshiwara, and particularly the brothel where Kiyoha resides, is a kaleidoscopic playground filled with indentured beauties adorned like tropical birds flaring their plumage. Scenes scattered across the various showrooms, sitting rooms, and private chambers are a riot of diverse patterns that push and pull against one another as they settle into sublime harmony. Art Director Namiko Iwaki was nominated for an award from the Japanese Academy for their art direction (the fact that they lost to this suggests that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not the only awards body that makes frequently baffling decisions), but equally worthy of recognition were Yuko Sugiyama and Daisuke Iga for their eye-popping costuming and Takuro Ishizaka for lensing it all to perfection. All the film’s theatrical shock and awe is preserved in this Blu-Ray edition.

ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: The disc is a little light on extras, but what’s there is nice. Jasper Sharp’s lavishly illustrated essay in the meaty companion book provides much-needed historical context on the floating world of Yoshiwara and its place within the popular consciousness over the past 4 centuries, and head Fangoria news writer, Amber T, provides a helpful introduction, though one you may want to watch after the feature if you want to avoid spoilers. Josh Slater-Williams’s commentary track is the MVP, though, demonstrating a deep knowledge of the figures in front of and behind the camera.

RE/PLAY VALUE: A visionary film debut with a revisionist eye toward depictions of Japanese courtesans, set in a world of orgasmic visual splendor. 88 Films’ sleek Blu-Ray does right by this long-overlooked gem.

8 / 10

Sakuran is available on Blu-ray now. For more info, click this.

Directed by Mika Ninagawa.
Written by Yuki Tanada.
Starring Anna Tsuchiya, Yoshino Kimura, Miho Kanno, Hiroki Narimiya, Mari Matsuki, Masanobu Ando, Matsatoshi Nagase, Ayame Koike, Minami, and Miho Kanno.

111 mins. / Unrated. Includes nudity and mild sex scenes.

Stills sourced from DVDBeaver.com

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THE FILM: Bubba Ho-tep

THE YEAR: 2002. As America rushed headlong into its digital future, the hot-rodding days of rock ’n’ roll were as long gone as the empire of ancient Egypt. That was old people music, and pyramids full of Cadillacs and guitars were being swept under the sands of time.

THE SPECS: Written and directed by Don Coscarelli; starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce, Heidi Marnhout, and Bob Ivy; distributed by Vitagraph Films. Rated R.

THE MAKE: In January, 1956, “Heartbreak Hotel” tore across the world’s airwaves. R&B sung by a white boy with pouting lips and gyrating hips, it made suicidal depression sound deliriously sexy and turned Elvis Presley into a global phenomenon. Twenty-one years later, after a rollercoaster ride of fame, fortune, pills, and fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, Elvis’ heart broke for the last time, and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll died on the can. Rumors that he faked his death sprouted like cemetery weeds and thrived thanks to swindlers, lunatics, tabloids, and fans who couldn’t accept the truth of his passing. If legends can die, so can anyone, and thoughts dark as those get people all shook up.

But the willingness to face death is what keeps horror cinema alive, as anyone who’s seen Don Coscarelli’s 1979 midnight masterpiece Phantasm can attest. The surreal tale of a grieving teenage boy fighting against an otherworldly mortician, Phantasm was spiced with science fiction and action, produced improvisationally from a rough script and shot on weekends with help from Coscarelli’s friends and family. The film’s cult success allowed the filmmaker to continue forging his own path, directing several Phantasm sequels, The Beastmaster, and a music video for Dio. His strangest and most endearing work was yet to come.

In the Bubba Ho-tep Blu-ray special features, Coscarelli tells how a bookstore clerk turned him on to Joe Lansdale, an East Texan author of horror, crime, and westerns. Initially lumped in with the Eighties splatterpunk movement, Lansdale stood out from the pack thanks to the quality of his prose, his committed stance against racism, and his own talent for blending genres. Eventually, Coscarelli optioned the film rights to “Bubba Ho-tep,” a novella in which Elvis Presley, still quite alive, finds himself wasting away in a rest home imperiled by an undead Egyptian mummy. Originally written for an anthology of Elvis stories inspired by his mother’s nursing home experiences, even Lansdale thought it was too weird for the big screen. Coscarelli tackled the script himself.

Studios hated the idea, but it found a champion in Bruce Campbell. Campbell’s path to B-movie fame began when he produced and starred in The Evil Dead, the directorial debut of his high school buddy Sam Raimi. Evil Dead was an instant classic, spawning two sequels and leading to a healthy career for Campbell in the realms of genre, including a recurring role on the syndicated Hercules and Xena TV shows and a terrific one-season stint as the star of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. His career arc paralleled Coscarelli’s to a T; Campbell felt they had a natural affinity and sense of common purpose. A natural showman always happy to ham it up for his fans, he was a perfect fit for Elvis’ rhinestone-studded jumpsuit. And so, with just enough money to finance a six-week shoot, Coscarelli and Campbell were ready to rock.

THE REVIEW: In most creature features, death arrives ahead of schedule, often cutting down a gaggle of teenagers whose lives have barely begun. In Bubba Ho-tep, the reaper is right on time. By the start of the film, Campbell’s elderly Elvis is well past his prime and living out his last days in Shady Rest Retirement Home. It’s an unsentimental space; the daughter of his deceased roommate is seen tossing a Purple Heart in the trash. Bedridden and hardly able to distinguish dreams from reality, time skitters past him in sharply edited flashes as the home’s yellowed wallpaper and harsh fluorescent lighting compound his woe — a lamentable tomb for a King buried beneath the weight of past mistakes. 

Yet even when he’s just lying around, Campbell radiates charisma, infusing every near-death rattle with equal touches of misery and humor. His performance only partially retreats from the cartoonish physicality of the Evil Dead trilogy, though Campbell’s calibrations ultimately reveal a person behind the caricature of Elvis’s memory. Underneath sunglasses, fake mutton chops, and fantastic old-age makeup, his expertly controlled mugging still lands: be it an insouciant sneer, a hound dog leer, or tremulous regret, Campbell manages to ground the film’s sublime outrageousness. And once he’s out of bed and moving — with the help of a walker, natch — he blends Presley’s swagger with the cautious movements of an older man. This performance is magic.

Campbell is joined by the renowned actor, director, and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, who brings dignity to an outlandish character — a quirky old-timer who insists he’s President John F. Kennedy, still alive but “dyed” Black. His room is a highlight of the film’s spare but stellar production design, complete with a red phone (just in case Moscow calls) and a model of the Texas School Book Depository. Together, these cultural titans confront a mummy feeding on the meager souls at Shady Rest, knowing its victims won’t be missed. Unfortunately, the titular Bubba Ho-Tep (stuntman Bob Ivy) isn’t much of a monster; it’s short on personality and isn’t very scary, although the gag about it writing bathroom graffiti in hieroglyphs is pretty good. Still, ‘Tep’s purpose works symbolically as one last shot for Elvis to redeem his soul before the final curtain falls.

Brian Tyler’s score features gorgeous, reverb-heavy guitar work, and the sound editing throughout is superlative (check out the pneumatic wheezing of an iron lung in an early scene). It almost makes up for the lack of actual Elvis songs. Yet the realities of budget filmmaking didn’t keep Coscarelli from wringing every drop of faux-Texan atmosphere from his production. And each supporting player does their part to prop up the verisimilitude, especially Ella Joyce as Elvis’ nurse, who eventually disappears from the story without explanation or even a fun death scene. The two bumbling, philosophizing undertakers could have wandered in from a production of Hamlet, and a cameo by Reggie Bannister (Phantasm) adds extra street cred.

Growing old is a slow, gnawing process, and fittingly, Coscarelli allows the story to unfold at a relaxed pace that encourages us to ponder how Elvis might have wound up in this wild situation. Is this all just the pathetic hallucinations of an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff? The question of what defines us and whether it even matters looms over everything. Just as his film blurs the line between screwball comedy and horror, Coscarelli fuses fact and fiction into a vulgar, peculiar, bittersweet tribute to the struggles of aging in a culture obsessed with now. For that reason, and for the wonderful performances it gave us, Bubba Ho-tep stands the test of time.

NOSTALGIA-FEST OR REPRESSED NIGHTMARE? Like a sock-hop in Hell, Bubba Ho-tep is a rockin’ good time.

RETROGRADE: B+

In light of his decades of hard work and all of the cinematic grooviness he’s given his fans, we here at DoomRocket would just like to say to Mr. Campbell… thank you. Thank you very much. — Matt.

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How’s everything? Did you catch the big show last night? We sure did. Now, I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of folks earnestly and/or viciously share their opinions on its outcome, yet, as these things usually work out for the glitziest program on television, the Teen Titans defeated the Evil Dragon and reclaimed their favorite song, restoring balance across the universe. Truly, a powerful night for us all. Why are you looking at me like that?

No, I did not watch the Oscars last night. We’ve been celebrating my girlfriend’s birthday these last few days (a worthy endeavor, you’ll agree), and we decided to close out the weekend with everyone’s favorite stay-at-home activity: organizing our comics while watching Teen Titans GO!, which happens to be one of our favorite programs. Again, what is that look?

One of several very valid reasons I’m not among those upper-crust critics you see smiling in pictures on the internet and TV is that I don’t feel as compelled as they do to chase the emptier aspects of the entertainment industry. The Oscars are an easy lay-up for hits and reader interest, I know, and once upon a time, I played that game. Eons ago, DoomRocket was home to OSCAR-BATE, our annual best/worst awards-season feature where we wrote extensively about the Who Shoulds, Who Shouldn’ts, The Snubs, and other similar dross. I realized I really hated writing about that stuff. One telling sign that I didn’t enjoy it, apart from the feature’s name: I purged most of its articles from my original site years ago.

This overall discomfort with the politics of the entertainment industry is why I don’t enjoy doing press interviews, previews, and exclusives — it’s just promotion for promotion’s sake, the part of the business that forces PR types to tolerate critics and our huffy/stuffy opinions about their products in the first place. When I tried to jazz up these pieces with my thoughts and insights — meager as those so often are — I found the desperation of the whole enterprise, from the press contacts prodding me for coverage to my own attempt to seem like a polished professional (something I will never be good at pretending to be), too frustrating to bear. I can’t imagine wanting this kind of career, let alone pursuing it.

This isn’t to suggest that if you enjoy watching and writing about the Oscars, I think I’m somehow above you. Sure as shootin’, I ain’t. Hey, I like having fun writing about things, too! But my personal avoidance of the showier aspects of pop culture is why I’m so selective about what I cover now. Instead of unpacking the big To-Do about celebrity opinions — like that miserable clusterfuck over Timothée Chalamet’s take on ballet, or Jessie Buckley’s existent or non-existent beef with cats — I much prefer unearthing the virtues and deficits of the stuff that puts these famous faces in front of us. To me, it’s more interesting to discuss a performance than to argue about the performer’s personal opinions. Am I subscribed to Chalamet’s Substack? Buckley’s Ghost page? Those things do not exist, and so I am not. They are not my friends and never will be, so I’m not invested in their worldview.

There are two types of people who concern themselves with the opinions, fortunes, and perceived personality deficits of famous people: those who are paid to do so and those who are not. The latter is enormously sadder than the former. There are three types of folks who care about the Oscars: those who are paid to do so, those who view it as the bar for cinematic quality (it isn’t), and those who like to watch famous people look charming in nice clothes. As for those three, how anyone decides to spend their private time is their own business. And if I’m stopping all these folks from reading DoomRocket by refusing to write about awards season, I’m sure I’m sorry for that.

Perhaps foolishly, I believe that everyone who enjoys genre fare, regardless of medium, will find something to appreciate about this tiny outlet, but I don’t claim that there’s a serious overlap between mainstream pop culture writing and weirdoes who like strange stuff. So, if sharing honest opinions about which successful person deserves a gold statuette is needed to gain subscribers, I’m happy to stay on the fringes. The Oscars aren’t what film criticism is about, and it never will be.

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THE MOVIE: Highway to Hell

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: August 10, 1990.

NEW FORMAT: A region-free Blu-ray featuring an SD master of the original video (or “the original tape elements”). In stereo. From Visual Vengeance.

RE/PLAYING: I always admire displays of honesty from any physical media label, but this disclaimer before the Blu-ray edition of Bret McCormick’s Highway to Hell is a beaut: “We have created the following Blu-ray using the best materials available at the time[…] Often these movies were originally created and/or edited on tape, sometimes even with consumer grade equipment[...] We are confident you will enjoy the movie regardless.” Honesty — and confidence!

Odds are, if you’re among the folks cracking open Visual Vengeance’s release of McCormick’s 1990 Hitcher retread, you will enjoy the movie regardless of its transfer’s inevitable smudges and smears. You’ll enjoy it for these deficits, as most who watch these regional no-budget thrillers do. Real ones know cruddiness is among esoteric physical media’s primary joys — the rough edges are the point. In this regard, Visual Vengeance has overachieved; Highway to Hell looks and sounds as good as it ever will or perhaps should, a happy ending for a movie that, for folks who don’t scrounge around for movies like Highway to Hell, has long been easy to overlook.

I just compared McCormick’s road thriller to The Hitcher, like that’s a novel insight. Robert Harmon’s 1986 film had been a modest success for TriStar Pictures, and the relative cheapness of that film’s setting — the American highway — made it a cinch that home video copycats would glom onto its popularity. Stop me when this starts sounding familiar: mercurial mass-murderer Toby Gilmore (Benton Jennings) pinballs around the expanse of a desert highway for generally undefined reasons and kills a handful of travelers along the way. Cars explode. An innocent young person (Blue Thompson) becomes the target of the killer’s ire, and a manic game of cat-and-mouse ensues.

Roger Ebert declared in his no-star review of the film that The Hitcher was “diseased, corrupt” and “reprehensible,” describing Rutger Hauer’s character as an empty vessel with no backstory to explain his depraved violence. Perhaps he’d spare an extra star for ol’ Toby, as Jennings plays him as an unmistakable psycho as opposed to Hauer’s comparatively subdued performance. Both men are maniacs, but Toby’s sheer belligerence makes the mayhem in Highway to Hell graspable in that prosaic, blunt-force way that The Hitcher worked overtime to avoid. Toby doesn’t put up with anybody’s shit, he says, and often. So naturally, when someone gives him shit — about not killing them, or stealing their car, or having a machete brandished in their face — Toby responds in kind. Harmon’s film aimed for something more existentially terrifying; McCormick is out for a cheap thrill.

The film begins with Toby getting his bearings as a free man recently sprung from a Texas hoosegow. He eventually finds a black duster that gives him a silhouette suspiciously close to Hauer’s in The Hitcher, which is all well and good. For funsies, he steals the radical shades belonging to the film’s heroine, Fran (Thompson), a hip young photographer driving home from the big city. McCormick isn’t borrowing from The Hitcher so much as riffing with it, adding some wonky bebop palaver to Harmon’s moody, menacing bassline. It’s a fun experiment, but there’s only so much McCormick accomplishes with it; for bombast, he manages an exploding car and a helicopter budget; for depravity, there’s a bit where a cat nibbles at the remains of a murder victim — a fluffer version of the police dog scene from The Hitcher. The film is conspicuously silly, almost as if McCormick made this movie for himself and his friends to laugh at rather than for profit.

There is a strange serenity to all this guilelessness. Some of it is found in the shimmering Texas horizon, which manages to look majestic despite the lack of artistry in the photography. Most is gleaned from Greg Synodis’s music, slurred-out minor notes that play like the guitar player is slowly bleeding out — appropriate, given the material. Even with these minor grace notes, Highway to Hell struggles to hit feature length. We’re subject to long stretches of Toby wandering the Texas expanse, swinging his new machete like a dink. There’s a useless subplot about a cop with a personal vendetta against Toby (exploitation hero Richard Harrison), who eventually stumbles into the finale after Fran and her lethal passenger have settled accounts, acting like he accomplished something. The film is grating, unfocused, and unpleasant. I enjoyed it.

ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: Visual Vengeance went all out for this one: slipcase cover; reversible sleeve art; a small poster for the disc’s surprise second movie, Redneck County Fever (1992) from Highway’s screenwriter, Gary Kennamer; motion menu screens; and video store genre stickers, all of which I was happy to receive. Essential on-disc features: director’s commentary from McCormick, and ditto Redneck County Fever, which nearly made me turn this piece into a double-feature; “Red Hot Asphalt” is a 90-second remembrance of the film from Richard Harrison that you have to see to believe (“It was a mess! I just wanted to get out of there”). More comprehensive is a delightful chat with star Blue Thompson, who looks back on the production with good humor.

RE/PLAY VALUE: More ambitious than your typical thriller knock-off and not entirely devoid of low-fi charms, Highway to Hell is a high-effort cheapie that keeps its maniac busy and the body count rising. The effort put into its latest home video release is a testament to Visual Vengeance’s reverence for the regional no-budget genre movie. Taking in the fullness of the disc’s offerings, you may become an acolyte of the form yourself.

FILM: 5 / 10
DISC: 9 / 10

Highway to Hell is available on Blu-ray now. To snag a copy, click this.

That’s all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? What’s your show right now? Drop any favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.

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Whenever a film festival comes around, I roll up like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I pack my “Wanna See” sheet with as much as I can with the intention of watching everything. This behavior stems from a kind of deliberate amnesia on my part — I “forget” that I won’t be able to watch them all, so I pretend that I will, despite history proving time and again that I will only have time for maybe ten of them. After all, I say to myself, I am a Critic; such is my duty! Then life does that thing that life so often does and presents all the things that I must accomplish before sitting down with all the festival’s offerings I’ve loaded up on like so many egg rolls. Before I know it, I’ve caught an even smaller handful of everything I initially set out to see. Wash and rinse.

What’s so hard about watching movies, you might be asking through your screen. I’ll tell you: I have this annoying need to write about everything I watch. It’s not the “Letterboxd effect” (that narcissistic urge to have A Take on everything) but the act of criticism itself. I live for the ritual of watching a thing, sitting in front of my laptop, and assembling my thoughts into something worth reading — not just for all of you, but for me, too. I love criticism; I’m the kind of dweeb who’d ask my favorite critics to write a capsule review on a cocktail napkin like it were an autograph. (At least, if I ever had the nerve to speak to any of them at length, I might.) Criticism is like caffeine to me: I never seem to get enough despite the sheer amount I consume. So, I commit my allotted festival time to writing as much as watching. It makes keeping up with the hardcore film-hounds who watch everything at a festival impossible. But I remember all that I’ve seen because I took the time to write something beyond a single-line take. Much of what I see takes up residency in my mind, and the better films become part of The Canon.

As I’m sure all of you terrific subscribers are quite aware, I was granted press access to this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, a personal achievement I hope to repeat next year. The fest’s acute focus on new voices makes selecting from all its features and shorts uniquely thrilling — I chose twenty films to watch, saw only ten of them, and wound up liking, and sometimes loving, all of them. It was the kind of experience I hope for from every festival. Quality, not quantity.

And so, with the ten films I saw (and wrote about) at this year’s Slamdance, here’s my official top five, all of which I hope find theatrical engagements and/or streaming homes as soon as humanly possible.

5. HOUSE 4

A spartan depiction of detention and rehabilitation from the perspective of inmates at a Berlin youth prison that offers no solutions and makes no bones about the prospects of its subjects, a sobering reminder of who society is failing, who we’re collectively letting slip through the cracks. [Review.]

4. MATAPANKI

A descent into punker decency, with its hero (Ramón Gálvez) gaining powers by chugging an alcoholic elixir that awakens his mutant genes, much like spinach amps up punch-power for Popeye. Blistering black-and-white photography with chaotic splashes of paint and a driven urge to thrash, I respect this. [Review.]

3. TONY ODYSSEY

A thoughtfully human and explorative film that projects philosophy, art, perception, crime, passion, death, and rebirth through the cracked prism of Tony (Kelson Succi), whose funky spiritual apotheosis comes courtesy of a psychotropic dose of fun fed through his eyes. Takes many detours, some vivid and alive, others disturbing, all of them a crucial part of a modern, Fellini-esque journey to the strange, unpredictable expanses of a person’s soul. [Review.]

2. THE PROJECTIONIST

From Alexandre Rockwell, who assembles a coterie of wonderful faces — chief among them, Vondie Curtis-Hall in a career-topping performance — for a bebop crime drama about a reel spinner whose violent past comes roaring back into his life with compound interest. Poetic and sweet, grimy and severe, Rockwell crafts a film of shimmering imagery and offbeat comic moments, with a tragic yet no less lyrical finale that reveals the dreams that come after a lifetime devouring the classics. [Review.]

1. SNOWLAND

At first blush, a minor, slight offering that quickly builds into something indelible and powerful, Jill Orschel’s shimmering documentary about the inner life of writer, women’s rights advocate, and artist Cora Lee Witt continues to stand out in my mind. It’s a story that underscores the vitality of people and what we’re all capable of creating despite the worst that life can throw at us. Of all the films I saw at this year’s Slamdance, Snowland is the one that left me a blubbering, grateful mess. [Review.]

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BLOOD BARN

What do you do with a movie like Blood Barn? You can’t drag it for aspiring to be the best-worst Evil Dead rip, and you don’t want to overpraise it for barely clearing the baseline of competence. Blood Barn isn’t the first Dead wannabe, and it certainly won’t be the last (as you’ll see in the next review), though I worry that aspiring schlockmeisters aren’t absorbing Sam Raimi’s lessons in no-budget filmmaking so much as aping the essentials — the speed-freak camera runs, branch violence, and blue-faced ghoul-making that belong to The Evil Dead, which director and co-writer Gabriel Bernini borrows here like the family Oldsmobile.

You know the setup. A group of twenty-something camp counselors gathers at a cabin in the woods where ancient powers lurk. The foliage becomes aggressive. Some of them get possessed — the big subversion of expectations being that the demons are dead family members of Josie (Lena Redford), a final girl with surprisingly zero agency who can’t confront the evil dead on any dramatically satisfying level. Her horndog friends are no help: they drink beer, play cards, and skinny dip. One points to his hairy ass and says, “Look!” Most of them die. A barn factors into the film, though I couldn’t tell which interiors were barn and which were cabin, or whether they were two separate structures; there are precious few establishing shots. There are, however, copious awful jokes and a healthy smattering of gloppy gore. Finishing it in one sitting, if you finish at all, will depend on your tolerance for movies made on the financial and creative cheap.

I think Bernini should watch fewer movies in preparation for his next one, should he endeavor to make it. New filmmakers feel obliged to emulate the cadence and energy of what inspired them to make movies in the first place and, in their inexperience, end up outright copying them. They’ll call it “homage” when it’s anything but. This impulse stifles creation and limits inspiration; naturally, there’s little of both found in Blood Barn. I grant it this: it occasionally gets inventive with Bernini’s meager budget. The makeup is adequate, and there are fleeting — and I mean fleeting — moments of gonzo, Troma-tinged energy I respected. But this isn’t Blood Barn, whatever that might have been; it’s The Evil Dead. And it wasn’t the lack of budget that made The Evil Dead a durable schlock-horror classic; it was Raimi and his cast and crew. Bernini wrote a love letter to them with Blood Barn, but I wouldn’t blame them for hitting this sucker with a Return to Sender.

3 / 10

Blood Barn is streaming on Screambox now. For more info, click this.

Directed by Gabriel Bernini.
Written by Alexandra Jade and Gabriel Bernini.
Starring Chloe Cherry, Lena Redford, Bambina, Sam Lanier, Felipe Di Poi, Pierce Campion, and Simon Paris.

74 mins. / Unrated. Goop-goofs and deeply unsexy post-coital patter.

THE BEHEMOTH

The Behemoth is a horror movie so eager to get to the splashy gross-out stuff that it forgets the important things movies need to be interesting, to make the decapitations and flesh-rending actually hit. It features all the horror movie basics you expect — a gross-out opener, a final girl, a twist, another twist, a shock ending — and fumbles them all. However, Kai E. Bogatzki’s film boasts better-than-decent gore effects and an ick-factor higher than the typical STV crud, so I’ll give credit where it’s due. At least the folks who made this knew they had to have something on offer.

First, the fumbles. The film’s story structure is so scattershot, I wonder if the script had a second draft. The credits suggest some kind of disconnect in how this stuff normally works: the film is “written and directed by Kai Edmund Bogatzi,” and the screenplay is “by Orso Vesperini.” Does this suggest Vesperini wrote the script based on a story by Bogatzi, and that they conducted their collaboration via carrier pigeon? It’s a deeper mystery than what’s on hand here, though when I write it down, The Behemoth’s plot does make a sort of sense: Rebecca (Sarah Dawes) and Ryan (Ryan Wichert) vacation at an Airbnb run by Christine (Beatrice Fletcher); they take a gondola ride and watch a movie; Christine and her shithead boyfriend (Wilfried Capet) engage in screaming matches next door; said shithead gets kidnapped and butchered by a local religious cult; said cult then kidnaps Christine for a ritual to awaken their leviathan god; then, a twist. On paper, it’s clear as day.

I struggle with whether to spoil the first big twist, as it’s the only narrative flourish that works, and doing so won’t make the movie sound any more intriguing than its filmsy dump-on-streaming setup already suggests. Suffice it to say, Rebecca, like me, doesn’t like where her vacation is heading, and through her, the story eventually finds its focus character. From there, the film shambles to its perplexing final sequence, where, after ripping off the splatter ending to Fede Alvarez’s version of Evil Dead (swapping the chainsaw for a concrete saw to avoid outright plagiarism), Bogatzi gives us the origin of the cult’s whole deal, explaining how these specific characters became involved in their devious schemes. Prior to all this, the film shifts focus from one character to the next seemingly at random, including a register jockey in a #RestoretheSnyderverse T-shirt who feels like he’s there to attract a contingent of viewers who could use a distraction from other hopeless causes. Won’t they be disappointed!

Now, the good stuff. There’s a cave sequence that comes out of nowhere and pulls the movie away from its dreary location and interior photography, lending it some of the primordial atmosphere it otherwise lacks. The eponymous behemoth never grows into the tyrant god the cult hopes it will, but it does perform decapitations and mandibulectomies convincingly enough — and in a pretty dress, to boot. These beats are vastly outnumbered by the film’s generic approach to Lovecraftian terror, Raimi splatter, and hopscotch narrative. But any movie with the decency to wrap things up under ninety minutes and make me go “hey, now” at least twice can’t be all bad. Just mostly bad.

3 / 10

The Behemoth is not currently streaming. For updates, click this.

Written and directed by Kai E. Bogatzki.
Also written by Orso Vesperini.
Starring Sarah Dawes, Ryan Wichert, Beatrice Fletcher, Johnny Vivash, Wilfried Capet, Alison Harris, Max Evans, Thilo Gosejohann, and Stephanie Dickson.

83 mins. / Unrated. Features a healthy blood budget.

That’s all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? What’s your show right now? Drop any favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.

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CLOVERS [USA]

Clovers, a maddening yet strangely absorbing feature documentary by Jacob Hatley and Tom Vickers, centers on life’s great pursuits. Money, security, a future worth living for, inner peace, it’s all there. And here comes the bummer: all these things remain just beyond the grasp of the film’s subjects. There’s a keen sense they’ll keep trying, even if their rewards are smaller than they hoped — or if they come at all. This film, however, isn’t about validating their perseverance.

The film drops us into Clovers, a strip-mall casino just barely clearing legality that serves as life’s current waystation for Jennifer Paschal, a sunny former prison guard turned counter jockey at the new local gambling spot in the town of Asheboro, North Carolina. A couple of sequences find Jennifer practicing with the automatic she brings to work; one nagging worry is whether she’ll need to use it. She’s a captivating subject and the film’s primary source of light, which becomes even more heartbreaking during a scene where her cheery façade falters as she discusses her current situation at thirty-eight, obliquely contemplating whether life has passed her by. That’s life as Hatley and Vickers capture it in Asheboro, a town that seems ever on the precipice of something good or bad, its people waiting nervously for that which may never come.

The cycles of poverty and desperation shaping Asheboro during this period aren’t interrogated. (This story begins in 2016.) The film isn’t here to diagnose social dilemmas, only depict what they have wrought. And it finds devastation on these faces, in their mechanical smashing of buttons on colorful gambling machines with ashtrays overflowing. Observed from this distance, we wonder about everything that led to this purgatory. Some viewers will be tempted to judge Jennifer or Sharon McNeill, a Clovers regular with a son wandering town addicted to opioids. They may even judge Hatley and Vickers for miring in irony, as during an extended sequence set on Election Night 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hilary Clinton. They linger on the glee and relief of McNeill — who spends her days caring for the bill-paying stroke victim living in her home — as if it’s a gotcha, given rural America’s ongoing struggles despite the political and financial fortunes of the man many among them regard as their champion.

Jennifer’s life yields lovely moments as she puts her best face forward, and it aches when her situation from the vantage of her perch at Clovers doesn’t improve during the film. Inversely, Clovers’ most outrageous subject is J.D. Cranford, an addled kitchen worker — and father/drug supplier to McNeill’s troubled son — festooned with tattoos and drawn to transcendent rituals of body suspension that drive the unnerving finale. He’s a curious fellow whose resignation towards fate and existence would almost feel monastic if there wasn’t an adrift young man looking to him for guidance. Instead, in a hollow far from Clovers’ deceptive lights and buttons, J.D. conducts his pursuit of the inner peace life so often denies him. As ropes pull him skyward, he seems to approach euphoria just as Hatley and Vickers cut to black. What positive effect this ritual will have on him is unknown; the closing tag suggests things are about to get much worse. By then, the filmmakers may have felt they’d seen enough.

6.5 / 10

Clovers premiered on February 21 at the Summer Chastant and David Pierce Theater. For more info, click this.

Written and directed by Jacob Hatley and Tom Vickers.

95 mins. / Unrated. Includes hallucinogenic drug use, gnarly family dynamics, and a test of elasticity for one person’s flesh.

MATAPANKI [Chile]

Rare is the film that knocks genres together like paint-chipped action figures and still looks like a million bucks despite a DIY budget, but Matapanki from Diego “Mapache” Fuentes is it. Set in Chile’s thriving punk scene, where an unlikely battle for national freedom from imperialism soon erupts, Fuentes wastes no time getting to his particulars. If you’ve read a superhero comic, much of this will resonate. Ricardo (Ramón Gálvez), local punk and party guy, loves his booze so much he grabs a strange bottle from the pissing corner of a show and takes a belt. The hooch awakens his “fighting gene,” shifting him into Super Saiyan mode whenever he imbibes. As he shows off his powers, friends and family — including his sainted grandmother (Rosa Peñaloza) — remind him that, yes, with great power comes… ah, you know the rest.

A welcome surprise is the graphic aesthetic Fuentes applies quite literally to the frames whenever Ricardo gulps his mighty elixir and hulks out like Popeye at a spinach buffet. Paint smeared across all this high-grain b&w imagery has a Xeroxed texture that speaks to zine culture (a staple in all respectable punk scenes) and rotoscoping, a method used in the immortal Fleischer Superman cartoons. And aesthetics aren’t his only weapon. In his cast, he finds endless stores of pit energy, and the fight scenes born from Ricardo’s exploits as a friendly neighborhood vigilante — including accidentally yanking off a phone thief’s arm — are exceptionally well-blocked. Punches land with a satisfying “oof,” and political cronies who come for Ricardo quickly learn the error of their ways as they sail through the sky to an abrupt nap.

At its core, Matapanki pulses with a current of community and national pride that permeates through every blistering frame. In Ricardo, Fuentes crafts a folk hero, someone who confronts the world’s ills with that “fuck off” radiation that only the best punkers possess. Even when the scale swells to Toho proportions, its themes of communal respect and personal dignity remain. When the dust settles and the smashing ends, sacrifices have been made, and tears are shed. Unlike most superhero epics, Matapanki never lets grief’s schmoopiness get in the way of a proper thrash.

8.5 / 10

Matapanki premiered on February 20 at the Landmark Sunset Hollywood Theater. For more info, click this.

Written and directed by Diego “Mapache” Fuentes.
Starring Ramón Gálvez, Diego Bravo, Antonia McCarthy, Rosa Peñaloza, and Rodrigo Lisboa.

71 mins. / Unrated. Boasts rampant boozing and some light amputation and decapitation.

THE BULLDOGS [USA]

The Bulldogs is a snapshot of American anxiety, a sanguine rendering of that old can-do axiom, “keep on keeping on.” Over the span of a year, Ori Segev and Noah Dixon captured life in the Ohio village of East Palestine following the catastrophic train derailment that spilled tons of carcinogens into the area. Segev and Dixon bookend their film with two controlled explosions, both man-made but at cross purposes. The first came when local authorities chose the quickest way out of a mess, burning off 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride into the air. The second is a Fourth of July celebration, a testament to East Palestine’s steadfastness, succinctly embodied by the community’s eponymous high school mascot.

The first plume still smolders in the village’s collective memory. Some have since moved on, like Rick Tsai, a local chiropractor who mounted a congressional run to facilitate change, that nebulous buzzword that’s somehow always hard to define yet is always said loudly. Others, like community advocate and Tsai supporter Jami Wallace, relocated after discovering poisons in their home, losing everything. Life in East Palestine became a media circus until Fox News and CNN found new stories to chase, with pundits and opportunists descending on the town’s plight to bolster their platforms; naturally, as anywhere in the United States, East Palestine’s population is split on How Things Ought To Be.

The film assembles gorgeously in the edit. Segev’s wide shots play like modern Rockwell, capturing American can-doism performed under immense psychological and spiritual strain. Certain compositions stand out: a woman in zombie makeup beneath an American flag, bereaved over a friend’s sudden death; the school marching band standing in uniform under a sky threatening rain; a taxidermist working a fresh piece; a coil of chemical sheen swirling in the creek that runs through the village. As with any modern American snapshot, the contrasts are harsh and not always pleasant. A visit from then-President Joe Biden draws protestors from beyond East Palestine, blighting their Main Street with clashing agendas. Local pillars, like the pizza impresario John Cozza, watch the frothing mayhem imposed on their quiet town with bemusement.

Yet The Bulldogs pushes past this noise to locate the people who keep their village humming along. Folks like Barb Kliner, a local podcaster intent on promoting a more optimistic outlook for her home. Keller Bupp, the carrot-topped student who reads the school announcements, clashes cymbals in band, sells hot dogs during the summer, and seems primed for a local leadership role someday. They represent the other side of East Palestine, the benign, unglamorous day-to-day that rarely grabs headlines. Kliner, Bupp, Wallace, different in temperament but bound by home, are the steadfast people who keep struggling American towns like this alive. They are the bulldogs.

8 / 10

The Bulldogs premiered on February 20 at the Landmark Sunset Hollywood Theater. For more info, click this.

Directed by Ori Segev and Noah Dixon.

87 mins. / Unrated. Mild political blustering.

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For more info on Slamdance, click this.

SANTA ZETA [Spain]

A stylish, vibey thriller blending influences from Tarantino to Korine, Antonio Muñoz de Mesa’s Santa Zeta luxuriates in the destination spots where fun rules and truth stays just out of reach. It’s a lot on first blush. The film frequently overuses the tools at its disposal — like slow motion, which constantly edges the suspense of its multiple chapters toward underwhelming climaxes — but these many (many) indulgences serve a purpose. Keep watching. There’s more meat on the bone here than its lean premise suggests.

That premise, by the way: Spanish travel influencer Zeta (a whirlwind Nekane Otxoa) uses her profile as cover to hunt pedophiles across the globe. Rather than indulge in the salacious brutality similar films gleefully lean on, the film dwells in weightier stuff. Its thematic muscle trains on the treachery of memory, interrogating how a person’s Whole Deal hinges on a single, devastating lie. As writer, director, and editor, De Mesa takes the long road to his ruminative turns, letting sequences coast at a casual stroll that creates drag during his ferocious first half, where Zeta farms aura for imaginary cameras while her bewildered targets look on. All her glittering vigilantism initially plays like The Punisher gone r/ImTheMainCharacter, leaning too hard on mordant humor and chronic online-isms, as in Zeta’s fruitless hunt for Miley Cyrus’s nonexistent Walk of Fame star, a stretched-out gag that underscores the extent of her influencer messiness; earlier, we watched her purloin a fur coat in Seoul.

While Santa Zeta gets its points across in big, glitzy letters, the less busy latter half mines richer ore. We follow our narrator — who grows more unreliable as her story goes on — toward a conclusion rendered in vivid, expertly shot sequences that clash productively with the film’s more harrowing subject matter. One standout bit juxtaposes Zeta filming a food truck chef crafting an exquisite fish tostada with glimpses of a heinous L.A. predator’s morning routine, an impressive sequence that encourages closer inspection as small details — like a pill Zeta should be taking but isn’t — gain mounting significance.

As the meaning behind her righteous killing spree nears, the film abruptly concludes in a messier and quicker manner than its measured complexity and length would suggest. Catharsis suffers. Yet, that emotional ambiguity, like everything else about Santa Zeta, feels intentional: the ugliness Zeta confronts, her hostility and rage, can finally exhale into an unsettling, hard-won freedom. Whether we accept her journey at face value is our problem, not hers.

7 / 10

Santa Zeta premiered on February 21 at the Landmark Sunset Hollywood Theater 4. For more info, click this.

Written and directed by Antonio Muñoz de Mesa.
Starring Nekane Otxoa, Africa Giron, Arlette Torres, Ivan Villanueva, Darci L. Strother, Izoko, and Jordi Monedero.

117 mins. / Unrated. Zeta travels inward to address horrific memories.

SNOWLAND [USA]

Sometimes a documentary brings me into another person’s world with such disarming tenderness that I’m humbled by the privilege. Such was my experience watching Jill Orschel’s Snowland, a beautiful, affirming film about perseverance, creativity, and the inner life of people — specifically, the life of writer, women’s rights advocate, and artist Cora Lee Witt, a singular person for whom I want nothing but the absolute best.

Years ago, Cora (pen name “C. Raven”) broke away from her husband and the death-grip of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, setting in motion a social upheaval that reverberates through her community to this day. From the abuse, terror, and psychic scars she endured as a child bride, she conjured “Snowland,” a glacial fantasy realm of cosmic serenity populated by characters who reflect the many facets of her inner light. Orschel follows Cora as she tries to sell her Snowland series to a willing producer — her goal is to build a family dream house from the proceeds — as her steadfast daughter Becca begins her own creative awakening, a journey that inevitably leads her outward from the mother she reveres.

Through her story’s seemingly never-ending uncertainty and change, Cora’s strength endures, and Orschel captures it beautifully. The director limns the harsher edges of Witt’s history through lush stop-motion sequences pulled from her fae-inflected artwork (realized by Park City artist Bridey Bush), which animate the reveries that seem to always flicker just behind Witt’s gaze. The effect is an awesome, transporting reminder of how strength is derived from dreams, how a person can endure so much darkness that their continued survival feels like magic. In Snowland, Cora’s light persists. It shimmers.

9 / 10

Snowland premiered on February 20 at the Summer Chastant and David Pierce Theater. For more info, click this. And this.

Directed by Jill Orschel.

90 mins. / Unrated. Addresses sexual assault and child abuse.

TONY ODYSSEY [Brazil]

Like a smack to the face, Thales Banzai’s Tony Odyssey is a jolt of psychotropic energy that’s easy to love and hard to shake. It asks the heavy questions that surface when your brain is goofed out on substances, but this ain’t dorm room philosophizing; it plays more like future-shock Fellini, or techno-wired Trial-era Welles. With restless invention and a manic charge, Banzai pulls us into the headspace of Tony (Kelson Succi) and Ivy (Iraci Estrella), two low-rent criminals fresh off the biggest score of their lives and ready to celebrate. The frenzied journey that follows, refracted through feverish camera tricks and audio-visual distortion, is intoxicating. This is the kick in the teeth I was hoping for from this year’s Slamdance.

I want to bang on about its ideas and visuals, but first, the story. We meet Tony as he grinds away at a bar of the menacing Mr. Casio (Sandro Guerra), working off the bad kind of debt that never gets paid. Fate tips in his favor when, paired with his partner-in-crime Ivy, the duo pilfers a pouch of black-tar lysergic drugs, making good their escape as Casio swears vengeance. They cook up a batch, drop the illicit elixir into each other’s eyes, and their odyssey kicks off in earnest.

Elevating everything is Succi’s endlessly thoughtful screenplay, which pivots from flights of fancy (a kite that yanks Tony into the sky) to prickly debates about the emptiness of contemporary art, as provided by a contrarian old-head at a local café. In Banzai, Succi has found his creative match; the former’s surrealism blends with the latter’s metatextualism, creating a vivid, playful energy that hangs in there even as the film flirts with preciousness. One precarious example: “What about Brazilian cinema?” a futuristic hipster asks the old man, at which point Banzai lets the boom mic poke into the frame, his slate clapping cut on this marvelous tirade. The bit lands even as the filmmakers yank the rug out from under us. Neat trick.

This discussion of art permeates the film and speaks to generational and cultural upheaval. It draws a line between the dusty contrarians whose best days are behind them and the youthful voyagers who venture forth into their wide-open futures. That friction of perception and art makes far more sparks in Tony Odyssey than its funky crime caper antics, but that’s part of its appeal. And Banzai doesn’t waste a frame as Succi lets loose his blistering, sweat-slick fever dream on us. Tony’s message lands with eye-widening clarity: if you want more from life, go look for it — but do it with everything you are. If that makes sense, Tony Odyssey will knock you flat. I’m still on the floor.

9 / 10

Tony Odyssey premiered on February 23 at the Summer Chastant and David Pierce Theater. For more info, click this.

Directed by Thales Banzai.
Written by Kelson Succi.
Starring Kelson Succi, Iraci Estrela, Sandro Guerra, Antônio Pitanga, Leci Brandão, Teuda Bara, Luiz Bertazzo, and Chico César.

105 mins. / Unrated. Tony takes a porno detour midway through the film.

For more info on Slamdance, click this.

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THE PROJECTIONIST

The Projectionist feels like a full-circle moment for Alexandre Rockwell. Years after taking Sundance by storm in 1992 with his b&w, movie-obsessed feature In the Soup, he returns to the comforts of his obsession — the movies — and to the monochrome that often yields the medium’s most striking images. Why bring his latest to Slamdance instead of Sundance? Perhaps for the same reason Slamdance exists in the first place: Sundance often glosses over the creatives who keep the independent film scene alive, and Slamdance never will. (Fittingly, Slamdance welcomed The Projectionist as its opening-night film.)

Amid its artistry, The Projectionist is also a crime movie, with Vondie Curtis-Hall playing a reformed button man whose violent past is thrust upon him via a coterie of colorful heavies played by the likes of Kevin Corrigan, David Proval, Kasi Lemmons, and Michael Buscemi. The budget Rockwell works with is likely equitable to that of In the Soup, perhaps less. Like any good artist, he accomplishes much with it.

It’s fundamentally a movie about movies — not their making, but the indelible effect their images have on us. Rockwell juxtaposes shots from The 400 Blows and Steamboat Bill, Jr. with those Curtis-Hall’s character screens in the theatre of his mind. It’s at that nexus of aesthetics and nostalgia that we find Sully (named, perhaps, after the late Sully Boyar, who featured in Rockwell’s Soup and Somebody to Love), who runs the classics in a dying movie house. There’s a Jarmuschian quality to Sully’s amblings between bursts of sorrow and violence — a deadpan New Yorker quality where oddball companions flit in and out as the story requires. A young woman sits in his apartment stairwell by day, holding a silent vigil until her nightly torments from her father end; on the roof, a poem-brained street artist soaks up the city and finds inspiration from faces. It’s certainly lucky that Curtis-Hall’s is the kind of face the camera loves, his life-forged lines offering the kind of emotional shorthand most artists dream of.

While Rockwell spends much of his film wading into syrupy sentimentality, there’s a darkness to Sully’s story that must be countenanced. Through nightmares flickering behind his eyes, we gather his wife (Karyn Parsons) was killed as a consequence of his criminal life; his daughter, now grown, has gone without a father and seems unperturbed by the fact. He had everything. Now, his life is an inventory of what remains: memories, names, faces, some here, some on the way out. When Sully paces his small apartment, the cinematography from Sam Motamedi simmers; we know through the repetition of telling stories such as these that Sully will ultimately succumb to darker impulses.

So he does, keeping Rockwell busy juggling tones along with his aspect ratios. Resisting a single emotional register, he ends up with many, stacking moods until sentiment, menace, nostalgia, and pulp layer into a fascinating wobble. The performances hold them up, ditto the photography, easing the film’s many shifts from hope to despair and back with a smoothness that suits the bebop noir Rockwell later serenades us with. While The Projectionist takes a small-time approach to noir’s tough-guy jargon, chunky squibs, and broken fingers, its modesty compounds into a touching and strangely haunting finale. We’ve seen it before, but as The Projectionist reminds us, revisiting the classics is reason enough to keep the reel spinning.

8 / 10

The Projectionist premiered on February 18 at the DGA Theater. For more info, click this.

Written and directed by Alexandre Rockwell.
Starring Vondie Curtis-Hall, Karyn Parsons, Kasi Lemmons, David Proval, Kevin Corrigan, and Michael Buscemi.

94 mins. / Unrated. Bones break, and blood spills.

HOUSE 4

Incarceration and rehabilitation go hand in hand in Philipp Schaeffer’s meditative documentary, which examines the processes of criminal reintegration with a clinical eye and formal bluntness. Set almost entirely in a Berlin youth prison, Schaeffer follows a handful of inmates as they shuffle through the daily rigmarole of prison life, from shop work to courtyard bullshittery to sessions with therapist Mrs. Missala, who offers each of her patients, regardless of offense, an even hand. Spanning the course of a year in 70 minutes, there’s little space for Schaeffer to form a thesis, so he observes, deploying slow tracking shots and natural light to allow us to ruminate on the confines of detention. His creative direction also invites us to consider Missala’s perspective — to sit in her seat, to feel sympathy for those who feel remorse and frustration for those who don’t. His film offers a final glimpse of Missala smoking a cigarette outside House 4 after a seemingly successful prisoner release before going back inside, leaving us to consider what the future holds for the boys who dwell there still.

8 / 10

House 4 premiered on Sunday, February 22, at the Landmark Sunset Hollywood Theater 4. For more info, click this.

Directed by Philipp Schaeffer.

70 mins. / Unrated. Features dark insinuations of violence.

THE LEMIEURS

The LeMieurs is an unassuming account of an unassuming American life. It observes the day-to-day banality of small-town existence, where decent people keep time with life’s major milestones: birth and death. This isn’t a showy or electric film — bonds aren’t tested, animosity doesn’t fester, and its subjects are too aware of the camera to perform for it — yet there’s a current that runs through Sammy LeMieur’s documentary that kept my interest. For four years, he recorded his family. Generously, he welcomes us to his footage, and we watch the seismic shifts in their lives occur gradually but inevitably.

LeMieur’s film is about a family confronting generational change, what happens when the Gibraltar at its center finally yields to time and reshapes the landscape. Sammy follows the five sons of his grandmother, Beverly, who face the final years of her life with good humor if not some visible strain. They map out dinner rotations and visits, and the grandchildren, now adults, play a significant role in the logistics. In this new generation, the film finds its strength: Eli runs the family funeral home with Kyle and Seth, three young, sturdy pillars in this small Minnesota community compelled to pull double-duty as professionals and mourners when death hits close to home. Two such losses unfold in the film.

LeMieur wisely sidesteps the rhetorical trap of soliciting reflections on the passage of time or the meaning of death. His approach is gentler, checking in with the people in his life who wearily but willingly bear the extra weight. That includes Steve, the father of Sammy’s cousin Tony, whose sudden death opens the film and hangs in the air as a family mystery, its particulars dismissed by genial Midwestern decorum. Revelations aren’t Sammy’s purview, and that’s okay.

The star of his film, the person around whom Sammy’s film and devotion orbit, is Beverly, his grandmother, who, throughout the film, nears the end of her life. The biggest shock of the film comes from the gradual transformation of her home: rooms once filled with memory (and her good chair) are polished into suburban sterility for her heirs. Beverly was the LeMieurs’ gravitational constant; through her departure, Sammy captures the reverberation of loss that changes his family with notable restraint. There’s no judgment here, just a recognition of what’s been lost. His generosity suggests another source of family strength, even when he stays behind the camera.

7 / 10

The LeMieurs premiered on February 20 at the Landmark Sunset Hollywood Theater 5. For more info, click this.

Directed by Sammy LeMieur.

74 mins. / Unrated. Features brief salty-dog banter.

BRB

BRB takes us back to 2007, a time of brooding scene kids, popular teen dramas on The WB, chat room trysts — truly an era of minor dial-up tragedies. Director Kate Cobb returns us to that halcyon era with a bright, buoyant coming-of-age story that questions what’s important in a teenager’s life when it feels like everything is — beyond what’s found at home, anyway.

Cobb’s film, a levelling up of her feature debut Okie, centers on Dylan (Zoe Colletti) and Sam (Autumn Best), close sisters approaching the first of life’s many crossroads. Dylan, eighteen and stuck on her deadbeat musician boyfriend (Richard David), is ready to fly the coop. Sam, fifteen and more introverted, navigates her own private turbulence. Her fascination with a popular teen drama has brought an online boyfriend into the picture, and with him, an eating disorder that the film addresses with deliberate caution. With their parents off on a marriage-saving cruise, the girls plan an abrupt road trip to Chicagoland for Sam to meet her digi-beau in person as Dylan secretly plots a surprise pounce on her touring ex. Cobb empathizes with both arcs and avoids embellishment; wisely, she trusts the actors to locate her film’s nuance with sharp instincts and sisterly chemistry.

On that front, while the screenplay by Michael Waller and Sydney Blackburn explores familiar roads — crappy motels, a romantic detour, secrets and lies boiling over as the odometer climbs — it gathers energy in the offramps. Their dialogue nails the rhythms of mid-2000s adolescence without veering into caricature (“frick” gets dropped just enough), and emotional meaning is compounded through surprisingly small comic touches more focused on character than period. (I’d quibble about the rate of “literallys” kids said in 2007, but I was well into my twenties, so I’ll sit that out.) What resonates after BRB concludes are the mascara-smudged memories Sam and Dylan create out of their fading innocence, and their mutual acknowledgment that saying goodbye comes sooner than later. Cobb’s affecting road movie runs on a tight budget, but its emotional mileage suggests a filmmaker who’s prepared to tackle larger work without sacrificing the finer details that give her best movie yet its inner life.

7 / 10

BRB premiered on February 20 at the DGA Theater 1. For more info, click this.

Directed by Kate Cobb.
Written by Michael Waller and Sydney Blackburn.
Starring Autumn Best, Zoe Colletti, Beth Lacke, Keith Kupferer, Richard David, Dan Haller, and Cristian Lager.

93 mins. / Unrated. Eating disorders and teen pregnancy are broached.

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SHELTER

Far be it from me to criticize the formula Jason Statham has embraced lo these many years since 2002’s The Transporter. It’s provided reliable vehicles for him that occasionally hit escape velocity. You remember The Transporter: Statham as an iron-jawed precision instrument ferrying high-value “packages” for the rich and dangerous, until one assignment involved a young woman in peril (Qi Shu) and his morally upright macho-hero instincts kicked into overdrive. Statham has tackled variations of this ever since, more or less, though if any of them took a more lacking approach to this formula than Ric Roman Waugh’s Shelter, I haven’t seen it.

Shelter once again finds Statham in precision-instrument mode as Michael Mason — explicitly referred to as such by a shady MI6 honcho played by Bill Nighy — and once again, he protects a girl from danger. Bodhi Rae Breathnach plays Jessie, whom Mason must safeguard for reasons we’ll get to, though not before he makes a goofy nod to The Transporter by calling her a “package.” Breathnach’s youth is an interesting contrast to fifty-eight-year-old Statham, who appears to be shooting his way into a late-career Liam Neeson phase. It’s a logical progression from his Taken-style turns in A Working Man and The Beekeeper, where bad guys persistently underestimate his characters with a very particular skill set. With a salt-and-pepper beard and thousand-yard stare, Statham looks right at home as a former MI6 assassin who scoffs at his mercenary sell-by date. As a surrogate dad, however, the role foisted upon his character in Shelter’s first act, well. That’s a different story.

At first blush, the movie seems like a remix of Homeland, where Statham rescued his daughter from a maniac drug lord. This time, the antagonists are Nighy’s unsanctioned MI6 kill crew, the very people Mason once worked for until he was given an assignment he found objectionable. Exile followed, and Mason wound up on a Scottish isle manning a thematically on-point lighthouse that hasn’t functioned in years. Jessie and her uncle bring him supplies — an arrangement that includes ferrying crates of booze and porridge — until a storm rolls in and sinks Jessie’s ride back to the mainland, uncle included.

Inconveniently for Mason and conveniently for the plot, Jessie is an orphan, stranded with a torn-up ankle and no place else to go. Did she not have friends? An invested teacher? A social media presence? Ward Perry’s screenplay isn’t interested in figuring out Jessie as a person. Instead, she’s an unwanted interruption to Mason’s daily routine: mean-mugging the horizon line with his nameless dog, playing chess by himself, and staying cocooned in the warming fugue state only liquor can provide. The plot kicks into gear with an overcautious trip to the mainland for first aid (hospitals aren’t for lammed-up former assassins), where THEA, an unregulated English security apparatus, promptly clocks Mason’s mug. Trouble soon comes ashore, and Mason’s history inadvertently puts Jessie in the crosshairs.

Her ankle, incidentally, corrects itself rather quickly once Nighy’s MI6 goons arrive, who Mason dispatches with the acute brutality one expects from a sturdy Statham joint. And it’s true: Shelter isn’t short on action. Directed by a former stuntman, I’d be disappointed if it were. There’s a lively recurring battle of attrition between Statham and a silent merc named Workman (Bryan Vigier) that often, and amusingly, ends with a draw. But its dramatic stakes are boilerplate. A stoic, repentant killer finding his paternal instincts as the caretaker of a spirited teenager is our premise, generic as that is, but it remains just that: empty scaffolding that houses plenty of seat-squirming kinetics but precious little pathos to give them a charge.

There’s never that moment where Jessie and Michael click as a surrogate family unit, leaving David Buckley’s enveloping electronic score (reuniting with Waugh after Greenland) to supply most of the film’s dramatic oomph. Once the preliminaries are set and Mason and Nighy take their personal beef to the streets of London, Shelter hustles toward its seemingly inevitable ending, where Michael and Jessie forge a lasting bond despite all odds. The problem is that in their mad dash for survival, the film never stops to ask what compels Michael to keep Jessie safe — only that it’s the right thing to do. In forgetting to interrogate what it means to protect, Shelter forgets to lay the foundation for its melodrama. The formula remains intact, but Statham’s latest vehicle runs on fumes.

5 / 10

Shelter hits U.S. and U.K. theaters on Friday.

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh.
Written by Ward Parry.
Starring Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Bill Nighy, Naomi Ackie, and Daniel Mays.

107 mins. / Rated R for perfunctory gunplay and some clean slice-em-ups.

WORLDBREAKER

With a title that boldly overstates its scale, Worldbreaker is a minor-key post-apocalyptic drama with a setup we’ve seen countless times before. Child and father, living rough, enduring a horde of monsters — a B-movie riff on 28 Years Later that lands the same month as its sequel. And unlike another movie in theaters this week with a superficially identical two-hander (see above), Worldbreaker has loftier genre ambitions and, despite its meager budget, lays real groundwork for a satisfying ending and, perhaps, a sequel, should enough folks salvage this from the early-year dross. I enjoyed the movie because it tells its conventional story well, leaning into its tropes and limitations with good humor and a big heart. Turns out those two things still go a long way in a generic genre-masher.

The film follows Willa (Billie Boullet) and her father (Luke Evans) as they flee an attack by the “breakers,” spindly spider-men from deep within the Earth who have rendered the planet nearly uninhabitable for what’s left of humanity. Willa’s mom (a blink-and-miss-her Milla Jovovich) is the sword-wielding leader of Kodiak, a severe, women-fronted militia that hunts breakers where they surface through cracks in the mantle called “stitches.” A frayed society is barely held together by Kodiak; during one especially gnarly battle, Willa and her father are evacuated and separated from Battle-Mom, who’s forced to choose between her family and humanity’s last army. She makes the painful call and sends her family packing, though she and her husband have prepared a fallback: an isolated island away from the breakers where most of Worldbreaker unfolds.

It’s classic budget-minded action filmmaking. Brad Anderson, on a workhorse streak since The Machinist became a sleeper success in 2004, bookends the movie with its relatively expensive beasties, focusing more on its slower, more tender core that, ironically, is more interesting to watch. This choice will irk those who want little more than the idle thrills of seeing Jovovich slice monsters in half, but patient moviegoers will find enough emotional weight between Boullet and Evans to stay invested. Willa and Dad end up almost exactly where you expect, given the unnecessary flash-forward opener, but their bond holds, and it’s faintly affecting when Evans stops spinning his boisterous fables about a legendary mountain man long enough to see that his little girl is ready for the wars ahead. (One fun bit in Joshua Rollins’ script is how it questions who that mountain man really was, as Evans, a Hobbit vet, performs like a survivalist Gandalf with flashes of Aragorn peeking out from under his Brillo beard.)

The film’s broken society is also intriguing. Sexism in this matriarchal world cuts against men, who we learn are more susceptible to a breaker plague that turns humans into the monsters’ eyes and ears. Their standard — the Kodiak, named for that warrior whose legend no one seems to get right — gives people the inspiration to continue fighting. The first concept is murky and seems to spoil the story just as it starts, while the second is executed with just the right note of awe that it works. The movie also has a confusing view of humanity before the end times: “We were too blinded by the light of our own happiness to see the darkness buried right under our own feet,” Evans tells his daughter. On a blackboard, he’s written: “overpopulation, tribalism, global warming.” How humanity squared this unbridled joy with those innumerable crises before the breakers arrived, however, is left to the imagination, and there’s not enough there to paint a clear picture. Maybe that’s sequel business.

And if there is a sequel, Boullet proves herself ready for it. Worldbreaker is, at heart, a story of maturity, putting childhood away to face the brutal realities ahead. Preparation is Willa’s religion: it’s what’s kept her parents alive, shaped by her mother’s ferocity and her father’s warmth. She’s a willing acolyte to both — to her peril, as she discovers late in the film — yet is still kid enough to keep her beloved stuffed dog close. By the second time we see Willa raise her own sword and let loose a battle cry, the movie has clicked; a lesson has been learned, and a new line has been drawn. To see Willa hold that line on her own, I think, is a story worth being told.

6.5 / 10

Worldbreaker hits limited release this Friday.

Directed by Brad Anderson.
Written by Joshua Rollins.
Starring Milla Jovovich, Luke Evans, Billie Boullet, and Mila Harris.

95 mins. / Unrated. Features CG breaker-brain leakage and some distressing business in a cave.

Braving the gauntlet of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that’s bad for you is DoomRocket’s HOT PRESS. This week: not-so-sour-grapes Sundance highlights, and a 2020 In Film update.

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Despite my ability to say “pretty please” quite well, I have once again been denied remote press access to the Sundance Film Festival. I used to have a rule for myself to temper my expectations as a low-rung film critic: any festival that has a platinum credit card as a sponsor is probably outside my reach. Of course, that’s not always the case (hello, CIFF! Love ya), and I shouldn’t complain too much; aside from the not insignificant matter of money, there’s nothing really stopping me from flying out to Utah and attending Sundance, so I’ll keep my FOMO grousing to a minimum.

Besides, for being small-time, I do okay. I’m covering or even attending several festivals in the year ahead; the first being, I’m excited to report, the Slamdance Film Festival in Los Angeles, scheduled from February 19 to 25. You can expect updates from me about that festival in the coming weeks.

While I am unable to review most of this year’s Sundance films yet (at least until they screen at festivals with less refined tastes), nothing is stopping me from updating my watchlist with its 2026 lineup. So, in the spirit of sharing, I wanted to highlight the five films from the fest that I’m most excited to see this year. Letterboxd links are included for your convenience.

I Want Your Sex (dir. Greg Araki). Reviews for Aaraki’s first film in twelve years are out, and they’re a jumble of “Araki ain’t got it no more” and something about Gen Zers being prudes and whatnot. Few answer the one question concerning this film I need to know: Is it sticky? Those who know, know that Araki’s movies tease the eyes and test patience; hopeless indulgence is what he excels at. So, if this kinky-lookin’ thing — starring Olivia Wilde as a dom boss out to rock Cooper Hoffman’s world — accomplishes the tease part, at the very least, I shall be satisfied. If nothing else, this should be a fresh proving ground for Hoffman, who, outside of Licorice Pizza, is still finding his stride.

Antiheroine (dir. James Hall, Edward Lovelace). According to its synopsis, an “unfiltered and unapologetic” documentary that follows Hole co-founder/actor/absolute legend Courtney Love as she prepares for her first music drop since the 2015 single “Miss Narcissist.” In an age where virtually every famous person gets their own flattering docu-profile, I’m hoping this will push past the pretty formalities of brand management — after all, there is new music to be promoted here — and dig deeply into the many losses and victories of the famously tempestuous life of Love. I’m especially hopeful there’s some attention carved out for her thrilling Miloš Forman Era.

The Best Summer (dir. Tamra Davis). Another music doc, this time from music video director and filmmaker Tamra Davis (Guncrazy, Billy Madison, CB4), who shares her archive of POV footage from her time with artists like Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Pavement, The Amps, Rancid, Foo Fighters, and Beck during the ‘90s. Described as an “intimate backstage” look at “an era-defining moment in music,” Davis has powerful nostalgic vibes to overcome, though I’m hopeful her footage sparks enough electricity to create a truly immersive movie experience — one so alive that it makes my dusty middle-aged ass feel something beyond just angst, if only for a couple of hours.

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (dir. Josef Kubota Wladyka). From rising director Josef Kubota Wladyka, a ballroom melodrama out of Tokyo about a recently widowed dancer (Kumiko The Treasure Hunter and Pacific Rim’s Rinko Kikuchi) who develops a deep infatuation with her studio’s new instructor. Kubota’s buzzy 2021 drama Catch the Fair One currently sits at the top of my watchlist, and my instincts tell me I’m not going to want to miss his latest feature. Also, what a title!

Josephine (dir. Beth de Araújo). Doing my best not to succumb to festival hype, but this drama about a family (Gemma Chan and Channing Tatum) attempting to cope with their traumatized daughter as she spirals into violence, feels like the kind of heavy-duty weepie that redefines what we consider a prestige drama; see: Ordinary People, The Ice Storm, Secrets & Lies, etc. The preliminary notices coming out of Park City, indicating that the film might be great, definitely boost my excitement — but then again, that’s hype for you.

Also on my radar: Filipiñana; Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass; The History of Concrete; The Huntress; Joybubbles; The Only Living Pickpocket in New York; Saccharine; Undertone; The Weight

As I wrote two weeks back, I’ve begun my 2020 Watch-Thru project. It’s been fun — watching movies is fun, go figure — but one aspect of the project was proving tricky. How do I present my ever-evolving ranking in this newsletter or in other features? That decision was more difficult to land on than I care to admit. My solution: I’ll post links to my ongoing Letterboxd 2020 ranking as the year progresses. And even though this will be a year-long thing — considering all the other things I watch for work and fun — I’m already excited to see how my ultimate ranking shakes out. I’ve also decided to rewatch one or two of the precious few 2020 titles I’ve already seen so that this new ranking is as balanced as it can be. (Empty Man, Tenet, your second chance at bat is coming!) With that, here’s what I caught this week.

THE HUNT

If you remember this one at all, it’s for the controversy surrounding its release — Universal Pictures shelved this violent run-and-gunner before it could drop theatrically due to a series of mass shootings at the time. The film’s showy, politically-minded topicality was a point of contention, too: its premise, where a cabal of liberal elites kidnap and then hunt select conservative “deplorables” for sport, stirred the Fox News-fronted beehive; once it hit theaters at last, more left-leaning critics felt its goofball depiction of modern white-lib values were condescending and/or too centrist to have any satirical impact.

For folks who take a political stand with the kind of movies they do or do not watch, I can suggest an easy pass for Craig Zobel’s The Hunt, as it will likely just irritate you. But for those seeking a modestly inventive, if somewhat dim, survival-comedy-of-errors where the main characters change as quickly as its corkscrew plot and feature a coterie of skilled character actors — headlined by a sublimely peculiar Betty Gilpin, who struts away with the whole production — well. There’s no shame in indulging the nimrod part of your brain that enjoys silly action movies with lousy social commentary. Besides, what better way to hone your sound, analytical mind than to engage with content you feel is beneath it?

6 / 10

DEREK DELGAUDIO’S IN & OF ITSELF

I’m the worst for magicians. Let’s say I’m shown a trick. If it’s done with skill, I’ll remark on the execution instead of being awestruck when a card pops up in their hand from thin air or what have you. I can’t provide the response that’s sought by the magician, but it’s nothing personal; magic isn’t for me. I’m just not wistful enough to ignore that someone is trying to fool me.

I prefer the sleight-of-hand I see in movies. They require much more than skill, misdirection, and a captivated audience to succeed. Maybe that’s why I took a chance on Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, a filmed performance of his off-Broadway one-man show — to see if Derek’s prestidigitation might create something I’d never seen before on screen. He certainly is a skilled illusionist and storyteller. I was initially captivated by what I saw as the film played, to the point that when it ventured into animation and voiceover elements I assumed weren’t part of his live performance, I was yanked out of the moment and reminded that I was watching an elaborate ruse. That spell is broken by director Frank Oz (yes, that one), who produced the stage shows and was likely so excited to film it for a wider audience that he couldn’t help but add a few technical flourishes of his own.

It’s not Oz’s heavy hand that makes me dislike this movie, but rather DelGaudio’s weepy-eyed attempts to make complete strangers feel seen. That sounds harsh; let me explain. See, in In & Of Itself, quarter-memoir, quarter magic show, half a deceptively minimal stage production, is about identity — who we think we are, and who people see us as. At the beginning of each show, DelGaudio has each member of the audience choose a card from a wall that best describes them — leader, mom, hero, feminist, brother, and on and on it goes — for reasons that are crucial to their experience later in the show.

I won’t spoil what that is for those of you who might want to see what DelGaudio has up his sleeve, but the way people react to the way he stares into their eyes and delivers his emotional coup de grace had me howling. Did these people forget that this guy’s a David Blaine-level trickster? (Fun fact: he, among other distracting appearances from folks like Bill Gates, pops in for an uncredited cameo.) That he’d just talked up the years he spent refining his magic act — card tricks meant to keep the mark unmoored — or that he also said and thematically reiterated that inside him is both a safe dog and a dangerous wolf? What’s so profound about any of this? On the surface: everything. One layer deeper, and it falls apart. It’s just a show, and an unbearably pretentious one, at that. Yuckier still is how many people sob openly at his shows. How desperate are we to be seen? DelGaudio knows. It’s the core hook of his show.

I admit again that I was led along for a time as DelGaudio spun his yarns and pulled off a fun trick here and there. But any resonance beyond that — emotional, philosophical, take your pick — I was not convinced. One thing that nipped my interest in the bud: near the end of his show, he wept. Asshole that I am, I asked myself: Does he cry during every performance? (Which, according to other outlets, amounts to well north of 500?) Can he truly feel emotions so deeply that they, even with repetition, trigger such profound responses from him? Or is turning on the waterworks just another part of his act?

And so, another question. Who am I? In almost forty-three years since I entered this world, I’m happy to report that I still haven’t figured that out. But I’m grateful to Derek DelGaudio for making me accept that I am, among many other things, a healthy skeptic.

3 / 10

2020 Ranking.

That’s all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? What’s your show right now? Drop any favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.

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THE MOVIE: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: October 1982.

NEW FORMAT: Newly restored transfer from 35mm to 4k UHD/Blu-ray with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround audio format. From Fun City Editions.

RE/PLAYING: Like any cult film worth its salt, the story of how Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains became the cultural touchstone it is today is every bit as interesting as the film itself. Shot in 1980, The Stains languished in post-production hell for two years before meeting with a dismal test screening that doomed it to a nominal-at-best theatrical release, followed soon by interment in Paramount’s vault. There, the film languished until the late ‘80s when the USA Network acquired its rights on the cheap for Night Flight, its midnight programming block. From there, the film acquired a small but devoted fanbase, particularly among the young women who would eventually make up the late-‘80s/early-‘90s grunge, hardcore, and riot grrrl scenes.

The Stains’ failure with mainstream audiences feels as inevitable, in hindsight, as its eventual cult status. It is both deeply (sometimes embarrassingly) of its time and shockingly ahead of it. The story centers around three teen girls — Corrine “3rd Degree” Burns (Diane Lane); her sister, Tracy (Marin Kanter); and their cousin “Peg” (Laura Dern, may her name be forever blessed) — who form a punk band and attempt to escape their dying rustbelt hometown by going on tour with washed-up glam rockers, The Metal Corpses, and their antagonistic English punk openers, The Looters. The film follows a predictable (if severely compressed) rise-and-fall narrative, with Corrinne and her band gradually coming into their own on the tour, attracting a fearsome grassroots fanbase, before succumbing to industry pressure and “selling out.”

Apart from its cast of mostly then-unknowns, the film was stuffed with punk rock royalty, including The Tubes’ Fee Waybill as Lou Corpse, former Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook, and The Clash’s Paul Simonon, who serve as the backing band for Ray Winstone’s volatile Billy. The film’s gritty, authentic look inside the lives of a touring punk band likely wasn’t much of a draw to mainstream audiences largely indifferent to punk rock, and, as a straightforward narrative, The Stains didn’t have a ton else to offer. The load-bearing relationship of the film between Corrinne and Billy never totally coalesces. Billy begins the film dismissive of Corrinne, but becomes gradually convinced of her star power after witnessing her physical transformation (Lane’s iconic side-shaved “skunk cut”) and her obvious passion and intensity as a performer. The two have a brief fling, but their relationship deteriorates when Corrinne mistakenly believes that Billy is trying to replace her on the tour, and she stabs him in the back by stealing The Looters’ signature song.

All this is fine on paper, but the thing is, the film is very sympathetic toward Billy, and Billy just deeply fucking sucks. We’re meant to see him as a “serious artist” who “really believes” in what he writes, and when he turns on Corrinne, the film expects us to be on his side. Winstone does a fantastic job, even this early in his career, imbuing Billy with the charisma and gravitas necessary to make him watchable, but he can’t change the fact that his character is a patronizing, self-important fuckboy who is merely perpetuating the same misogynist, paternalistic attitudes that he despises in The Metal Corpses.

The mixture of alienating niche aesthetics and uneven storytelling was bound to hurt the film in its own time. But what none of this accounts for is the film’s incendiary gender politics. Written by Nancy Dowd (who took her name off the film after her terrible treatment on-set), The Stains is deeply attuned to the current of feminine rage that would burst its dam in the coming decades. Corrinne and her bandmates are fighting against a culture where women are expected to get knocked up in high school, either work their way to an early grave like Corrinne’s mother, or fill their empty lives getting day-drunk with neighbors like her aunt. The Stains are met with derision and hostility from nearly every man they encounter, including from their supposedly “counter-cultural” tour mates, The Looters. The only support the band receives comes from their rasta bus driver, Lawnboy (Barry Ford, in what appears to be his only film credit), and a local anchorwoman, Alicia Meeker (Cynthia Sykes), who immediately recognizes what Corrinne represents to her growing legion of fans.

The appeal of The Stains has less to do with their music (a sort of shambolic pastiche of Kleenex and The Shaggs) and more to do with Corrinne’s explicit rejection of the options available to young women. Her insistence on her prerogative to wear revealing clothing while proclaiming, “We don’t put out,” precedes the heated discourse around bodily autonomy and “slut shaming” that entered popular discourse in the teens by a good three decades. She addresses the open contempt that women often experience from the men around them, who both desire them sexually and revile them for existing as sexual beings. It’s not a wonder, then, that rock luminaries such as Courtney Love, Allison Wolfe, and Tobi Vail all saw something of themselves in the film.

I do, however, feel the need to point out that The Stains’ sexuality is not entirely benign. Fifteen-year-old Diane Lane spends a good chunk of the movie in a sheer shirt and no bra, as do the legion of teen “skunks” who ape her dress. My handwringing over this may feel reminiscent of the censorious male news anchor played by John Lehne, but keep in mind these are underage girls exposing themselves, not as a personal style choice, but for a job, one that should have done more to protect them. Lane’s nude shower/love scene is even more egregious, a fact that Lane herself reflects upon in her commentary track with Dern.

The tension between the film’s emancipatory message and exploitative impulses is a microcosm of the larger contradictions that make Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains such an interesting artifact. It captures a snapshot of the punk movement at a time when punk was in a transitional state between its earliest waves and the hardcore explosion, and it grafts that onto a fairly rote rise-and-fall narrative. Its attempts at satirizing the music business feel pretty toothless, but Corrine’s white-hot rage at being a working-class teen girl trapped in a world of patronizing, predatory men burns just as brightly in 2026 as it did in 1980.

ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: Fun City’s Stains restoration includes two of the archival commentary tracks, one from Lou Adler and one from Diane Lane and Laura Dern, that were part of the out-of-print Imprint Blu-Ray, and none of the other features unique to that edition. The new supplementals, however, are quite good: an informative making-of featurette by Sam Green and Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore director, Sarah Jacobson; and “I Was Command Central,” an audio interview with Night Flight’s co-creator, Stuart Shapiro. The latter feature gives great insight into the peculiar circumstances that birthed this important clearinghouse of cinema oddities, with a particular focus on how it introduced The Stains to the wider world, and the way the film came to be emblematic of the programming block in the minds of viewers.

Perhaps the greatest interest to skunks will be the deleted and extended scenes, alternate opening, and daily footage from the “Professionals” video shoot. The deleted scenes include commentary by cultural historian Marc Edward Heuck, who provides context based on the surviving scripts (the scenes themselves don’t have extant audio). Add in a pair of new commentaries, one by Heuck and another where Heuck is joined by TV writer Jake Fogelnest, and you’ve got a tidy little mountain of content.

RE/PLAY VALUE: An intriguing mess of a film, marred by its limitations but shining brightly as an early pop-culture reflection on a critical musical movement, as well as a prescient articulation of female rebellion. Whether you’re a fan of punk rock or just want to see three future giants of the film industry take their first steps, you’ll find a lot to appreciate in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, and Fun City Editions’ new scan preserves it all in crisp detail while still maintaining that lovely 35mm film-grain.

7 / 10

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains is available on Blu-ray January 20. For more info, click this.

Directed by Lou Adler.
Written by Nancy Dowd.
Starring Diane Lane, Laura Dern, Marin Kanter, Ray Winstone, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Paul Simonon, Fee Waybill, Barry Ford, and Black Randy.

[Ed. note: The Blu-ray edition, not the 4K disc, was used for this review.]

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Instead of relaxing, or working, or spending time with friends and family, I spent my Sunday morning craning over my laptop, revising my Letterboxd rankings. Here’s something nobody tells you when you become a professional critic: when it comes time to rank the best of the year, it’s best to only include films based on their theatrical release date for that year (limited or wide doesn’t matter), not their production date. For years, an embarrassing number of them, I did the opposite.

Luckily, I’m just dim enough to have realized this on my own last year — which, in a way, makes DoomRocket’s Best Movies of 2025 my first “real” ranking, at least the one that exists on the same plane of reality as my peers. These things don’t matter to normal people, obviously, I know; I used to be one. But, as I attempt with extreme sweatiness to be taken a tenth as seriously as critics much better at this than I am, I beat myself up over shit like putting Phil Tippett’s Mad God on top of my “2021, RANKED” list instead of 2022, where it belongs (as its US limited release was in June of that year). Growth, it is a cruel mistress.

So there I was, going through those LB lists, when I realized I only watched eleven movies released in 2020. COVID year. I strain to recall what the hell I was doing back then. Watched older movies and TV, I suppose. Played lots of video games. Drew. I was gainfully employed in a warehouse, which stayed open during lockdown (whilst observing masking and social distancing). I worked insane hours. The only thing I had the bandwidth for then was Hell’s Kitchen reruns, I guess; that’s all I remember watching!

The films I saw in 2020: Da 5 Bloods, Freaky, Underwater, Tenet, Wonder Woman 1984, The Old Guard, Unhinged, Jasper Mall, The Empty Man, the Borat sequel, and that Harley Quinn movie with the obnoxious title. (Okay, twelve: I completely forgot I saw The Last Blockbuster, though that may be for the best.)

I am now accepting recommendations for 2020 releases because, at the moment, my Letterboxd does not feature a “2020, RANKED” list, and I have to fix that. Knowing that I had a gap year — limited in releases though it was, considering Everything That Happened — is driving me nuts. I may do a ranking right here on DoomRocket if I feel the year’s crop merits reflection. Not that I have time for it, but I smell a project brewing!

And so my 2020 Watch-Thru begins in earnest with The Kid Detective, a perfect example of why this project is worthwhile. Movies of this stripe — unassuming mid- to low-budget genre fare that’s well-made, well-written, well-performed, and just strange enough to stick — come around often enough and are just as easy to miss. I’d heard of it during its festival run, then was reminded of its existence again when the RedLetterMedia fellas talked it up in 2021. It sounded right up my alley: a murder mystery about a washed-up child gumshoe in the vein of Encyclopedia Brown, played by Adam Brody.

Given the weight of introspection that gives the film its oomph, you’d assume its writer/director, Evan Morgan, had been at this for a while. Turns out it’s his first feature, and we haven’t seen another from him since. I hope we do; this movie is smart, wryly funny, emotionally present, and unafraid to explore noirish rough stuff. And his premise is brilliant: a wholesome Hardy Boy minus one, now all grown up, his potential spent, that eager spark in his eyes extinguished by adulthood’s many disappointments. The gossamer past is back there with the ghosts; depression and addiction keep him company now.

Morgan preserves the storybook archetypes of kid-detective fiction, giving this tight 90-minute caper a chaptered structure where each sequence brings something surprising to the fore — either a clue that advances the mystery or a character beat that underscores the diminishment of innocence, often both. The screenplay has these tropes cold. The person who wrote it clearly knows a thing or two about becoming a grown-up before you’ve fully appreciated being a kid.

The Scholastic details are incredible. Cracked-mirror Carolyn Keene stuff. The Red Shoe Gang, once responsible for Willowbrook’s mildest misdemeanors, now grown into skinhead bikers. The Overnighters, a subculture of teens who loiter at the local high school on weekends because Willowbrook has gone to seed and the school is where the good drugs are. The grumpy candy store owner who promised ace child gumshoe Abe Applebaum (Brody as an adult, Jesse Noah Gruman as a youth) a lifetime supply of free ice cream, learning bitterly that life goes on for quite a while when kids don’t leave the nest. Abe’s parents, once proud and supportive, now exhausted by his failure to launch and fearful for his health and safety. The fact that this guy is named Abe Applebaum — what a great kid detective name.

Where did it all go wrong? We learn that, years ago, Abe’s burgeoning career took a turn when a crime far beyond missing cats crossed his desk. Cold, unfeeling reality seeped into his squeaky-clean, right-and-wrong world and changed him just as adolescence set in. Abe froze in time; Willowbrook didn’t. So, decades later, when a teenage girl (Sophie Nélisse) comes to his office with his first-ever murder mystery (he’s hungover), the world that snaps into focus is one he is profoundly unprepared to navigate. The high-school mystery that follows, mired in drugs, death, and worse, initially suggests a softer, after-school-special version of Rian Johnson’s Brick — less existentially angsty but just as clear-eyed about life’s cruelty and how casually it steamrolls the young. That feels about right, though there’s also enough offbeat, Altman-like Long Goodbye energy coming off it, too. When the case took its last turn, I was so involved with the characters that I was hardly ready for where they would end up.

I liked Brody in this. With his soft features under a mop of unwashed hair and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he’s inspired casting. As the film veered into darker territory, I briefly wondered if the twists might have hit harder with an actor sporting sharper features, someone with a more hard-bitten aspect. Turns out Brody was perfect all along: his soulful eyes drew me into Abe’s case; when he’s knocked out by its shocking revelations, I was too. Brody’s muted CW looks are the perfect shorthand for the contrasts Morgan’s trucking with: gee-whiz Willowbrook mythology and genuinely hard-edged noir shit. I went in knowing nothing beyond the basics and was surprised by the richness this otherwise modest film had in spades. I won’t spoil one thing more about The Kid Detective for you.

8.5 / 10

Written and directed by Evan Morgan.
Starring Adam Brody, Sophie Nélisse, Tzi Ma, Wendy Crewson, Sarah Sutherland, and Maurice Dean Wint.

97 mins. / Rated R for Abe’s life choices and the grim alleyways he ventures into.

That’s all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? What’s your show right now? Drop any favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.

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PRIMATE

As his mid-budget horror career has progressed, Johannes Roberts has refined one of the genre’s most economical premises into a dependable go-to formula: the closed-location creature feature. His tightly constructed setups, as seen in chomp-’em-ups like Storage 24 and the 47 Meters Down series, gather a group of attractive faces for a night of horrors that, while not always especially memorable, are reliably entertaining in the moment. His latest, Primate, may feature his smallest slaughterhouse yet. Set almost entirely around a cliffside swimming pool in Hawaii, the film introduces an especially unusual nemesis to keep its cast hostage: a rabid chimp named Ben.

Like all decent killer-animal movies — Alexandre Aja’s Crawl and Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows spring to mind — Primate relies on the claustrophobic terror of a relentless animal encounter and gets creative with its brand of beastliness. It stands out most through the initially affectionate nature of Ben, who wears a red T-shirt, snuggles a teddy bear, and communicates in American Sign Language with his human family. A sweetheart — at least, until he goes bananas. Ben is brought to life by Miguel Torres Umba, who, in a mostly convincing practical suit, leads the ensuing chaos with chest-thumping brio. Luckily for the people in this story, while chimps are incredibly strong — as Primate cheerfully demonstrates during its most gruesome moments — they can’t swim; naturally, Roberts wrings every bit of tension from baleful Ben as his victims-to-be tread water, desperate to escape his furry clutches.

Before the bloody monkeyshines, though, we must sit through the preliminaries: There’s Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), who returns home to her novelist father (CODA’s Troy Kotsur) and younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), accompanied by bestie Kate (Victoria Wyant), studly Nick (Benjamin Chen), and adversarial Hannah (Jessica Alexander, who pops up later this month in FX’s The Beauty). Lucy’s homecoming, the film hints, is charged with obligation — her mother, a famous animal linguist, has died of cancer, leaving dad distracted and overworked, and Erin isolated — but the company on this trip is mostly agreeable, and there’s the family pet to keep things lively. That’s Ben, the smart chimp Lucy’s mom kept at home like a domesticated Jane Goodall experiment.

We learn, during a jarring opening sequence that jumps forward in time for a cheap shock, that Ben has been bitten by a rabid mongoose. He escapes his pen, the fur soon flies, and Lucy and her friends stake out their one advantage against their pursuer in the family pool. Roberts tightly frames his constricted spaces to amplify the tension, giving Ben the uncanny aspect of a slasher villain like Michael Myers or Scream’s Ghostface. And, like Scream, Primate can’t resist milking laughs from its own absurdity; one doomed character voices the audience’s most reasonable question: “Who the fuck has a chimp for a pet?”

It’s a fair question, all things considered — particularly if Ben’s killing spree has survivors, which might land Lucy’s dad in legal hot water — though Roberts, working with co-writer Ernest Riera (47 Meters Down), at least gestures toward a justification. Ben was important to Lucy’s mom. He’s family, which makes his violent turn all the more tragic for her.

This drama should lend weight to the mayhem, but whatever emotional heft the film hints at quickly gives way to crowd-pleasing carnage. Given Ben’s connection to Lucy’s late mother, one might expect some catharsis in her inevitable showdown with the chimp: being wounded by Ben could be seen as a horrifying extension of her mother’s work; as such, harming him could be a symbolic betrayal of her memory. At a trim 90 minutes, Primate has little patience or even curiosity for that kind of introspection. If nothing else, at least it commits to the shocks. On those terms, it overdelivers, providing January audiences exactly the kind of genre ridiculousness for which they braved the cold. Primate is smart enough not to make a monkey out of them.

6 / 10

Primate is in wide release this Friday.

Directed by Johannes Roberts.
Written by Johannes Roberst and Ernest Riera.
Starring Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, and Troy Kotsur.

89 mins. / Rated R. Ben does stunningly violent things to the human body.

PAYING FOR IT

There are two versions of Paying for It: one from Chester Brown’s experience, and one from Sook-Yin Lee’s. The two were a monogamous couple in the late Nineties, when Brown’s autobio-comic odyssey — about breaking up but sharing space, feeling single and horny, and finding contentment with sex workers — began. Lee’s request to alter her and Brown’s relationship to pursue romance with someone else, as Brown kept living in her house, is the inciting incident for Paying for It and, apparently, the moment that further enriched them as people. Clearly, as Lee has adapted Brown’s comic account of these events to film, the two remain close. (We even see Brown’s hands arrange the title cards, and the interstitials and credits feature his indelible line.)

When you hear about relationships like this, if you’ve never experienced one like it, the impulse is to think, “Good for them, and none of my business.” But we can’t help but poke our noses in, can we? I mean, these kinds of relationships are fascinating and fun to gossip about — from an outsider’s perspective, they can be seen as messy, and schadenfreude, if we can be honest with each other, is a dish everyone indulges in. Messy is easy drama, but drama told well, with humor and honesty — that’s what makes good movies.

Paying for It is a good movie. Visually and functionally, it resembles another adaptation of an alternative comic strip, Terry Zwigoff’s take on Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World: hyperfocused on the zeitgeist on when/where it’s based (here, late-Nineties-to-mid-Aughts Toronto), acutely kinder to the oddballs and freakazoids as depicted in the original work (mostly to Brown himself), and almost cartoonishly colorful where the original comic is monochromatic. Lee’s recollection of the period in which Paying for It is set feels more vivid than Brown’s, possibly because Lee is a more outwardly vibrant person than Brown is, or was. He, an underground cartoonist, she a video jockey for a popular music channel — he, alone with his calculating artist’s brain; she, surrounded by life, electricity, and excitement. Both contain reservoirs of emotion and empathy; they just express them differently.

What’s striking about Lee’s adaptation is how she presents Brown’s isolation, an honest depiction of details that make their separation feel so raw, poignant, and navigable. The jugs of water Chester (Dan Beirne) insists on keeping around, just in case the city cuts off the water again. His furtive peeking around corners when he knows new (and notably studlier) paramours are home. The sounds he hears her make with them in her bedroom, which used to be theirs. Then there’s the initial frustration during Chester’s first experience with a sex worker — he frantically jots down directions from a payphone using the same Micron pens he uses to ink his comics. The euphoric jolt just after, and the excitement of his burgeoning exploration. Lee’s screenplay is observational, yes, and also very careful to convey the guarded understanding and consensual aspect of polyamorous sexuality, especially when, later in their story, romance works itself into Chester’s transactional experiences.

Lee is also kinder in her adaptation to the sex workers themselves, whose names and faces Brown, in his original comic, obscured for the purposes of privacy. She adds fleeting yet deliberate emphasis to their perspectives, showing how consent and mutual respect give them agency, presenting their voices and choices as integral to their lives rather than secondary to Brown’s narrative. The film sidesteps his interior judgments of body types and sexual preferences — in the film, Brown, fleshed out by Beirne, is more agreeably obsequious to life as it comes compared to the cerebral, distant, nigh-robotic aspect the cartoonist gives off in his work.

Ultimately, Lee is kinder to herself, too, no longer a character amidst the noise of a cartoonist’s wiggly attempts at personal understanding but her own person, with a host of friends, hurts, anxieties, and pursuits entirely her own. Lee’s story, fleshed out as “Sonny” by a terrific Emily Lê, counterbalances Brown’s — and provides a voice that didn’t, and can’t, exist in it. Chester’s sexual pursuits are methodical, open, and blunt, which makes them seem cold and, as stated by his funky coterie of friends, weird. Sonny’s is open-hearted and more emotionally perilous, which leads to unflattering, sometimes stilted moments that capture the iffiness of her own romantic dramas. Messy might be how open relationships function, thriving in the tumult of living. I don’t know. As messy as Paying for It can be, it has united two people in a way that, like their relationship, feels entirely their own. One part funky Gen-X memory hole, one part situationship melodrama, and the rest, completely, unapologetically, human.

7 / 10

Paying For It hits limited release on January 30. For more info, click this.

Directed by Sook-Yin Lee.
Written by Sook-Yin Lee and Joanne Sarazen.
Starring Dan Beirne, Emily Lê, and Andrea Werhun.

85 mins. / Unrated. Contains a whole bunch of full frontal.

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2025

10. Wake Up Dead Man (dir. Rian Johnson)

A funereal yet feisty whodunit that reinvigorates Knives Out after the overly smarmy Glass Onion, with Daniel Craig’s Blanc investigating a twisty closed-door mystery centered around a penitent (and, yes, studly) priest (Josh O’Connor). Reflective, autumnal, and less obsessed with Twitter noise, this was a return to form for Rian Johnson. Possibly his best since Brick.

9. Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie)​

Guiraudie’s small-town thriller is a darkly funny purgatory piece where death, desire, and selfishness ferment into hostility and violence, trapping its drifting antihero (an enigmatic Félix Kysyl) in a sticky French quagmire that’s as perverse as it is perversely delightful.

8. Frankenstein (dir. Guillermo del Toro)

​My kind of messy. A sweeping, gothic triumph and an imperfect horror nerd-out with del Toro taking his lifelong obsession with The Monster to create a haunting, heartbreaking masterwork best experienced on the grandest scale possible. Shame most folks caught it on Netflix.

​7. April (dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili)

​I didn’t expect this to hang in with the best I’d seen in 2025, but Kulumbegashvili’s stone-silent meditation on the death grip institutions have on the vulnerable continues to haunt my thoughts (much like a certain metaphorical entity from the film I could mention). Each careful, devastating sequence has effectively bled into my subconscious, a shadow play of unsettling, towering power.

6. Reflection in a Dead Diamond (dir. Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani)​

With unabashed bande dessinées energy, Cattet and Forzani expose the toothlessness of modern Bond, their film a meaner, freer, more seductive bootleg that pushes the spy fantasy into violent, erotic arthouse territory.

5. Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger)

A funky ensemble drama with playful, genre-driven ambitions that ends with one of the wildest finales of the year, Weapons confirms Zach Cregger is the real deal. Lean, vicious folk-horror that grinds grief, paranoia, and the American rot that feeds both into one ferociously entertaining nightmare.

4. 28 Years Later (dir. Danny Boyle)

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s scorched-earth revival of their 2002 zombie thrasher matches the original’s brutal frenzy, explores misguided national isolationism, and boasts instances of soaring beauty. If it weren’t so obviously a Part 1, I’d say it was the best major horror release since, well, 28 Days Later.

3. Eephus (dir. Carson Lund)

Lund’s minor-key, deeply heartfelt, cosmically curious baseball epic is a pitch-perfect reminder of how some things in life, no matter how good and simple, must submit to the unstoppable march of time. The funniest, most achingly poignant film of the year.

2. Vulcanizadora (dir. Joel Potrykus)

As a former Ypsilantian, Potrykus’s latest bruised me with middle-aged Michigan memories: WRIF radio noise, bad choices under a forever gray sky, bleary afternoons with Cheaters reruns, oof. I felt my age with this one. A raw-nerve slacker lament powered by Joshua Burge’s locked-in performance and one shocking sequence fueled by desperation and angst. A scrappy, personal, DIY gut-punch I continue to love.

1. One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Propulsive, intricate, borderline transcendent — especially during that holy-shit final car chase — here’s a scorched-earth ride about vicious cycles and desire at the end of the world so invigorating I wanted to run it back immediately. So good, I forgive the stark squishiness of its finale. Peak-PTA, movie of the year.

​THE NEXT 10, OR: HONORABLE MENTIONS

11. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia (Review)
12. Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (Review)
13. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (Review)
14. Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (Letterboxd)
15. Frédéric Hambalek’s What Marielle Knows (Review)
16. Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (Review)
17. Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch (Review)
18. James Gunn’s Superman (Review)
19. Ari Aster’s Eddington (Letterboxd)
20. Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger (Review)

Best Movies I Saw In 2025 That Won’t Get A Theatrical Release Until Maybe Next Year

OBEX, How Dark My Love, The Sparrow in the Chimney, Akashi, To Kill A Wolf

Movies I Missed For One Reason Or Another

Marty Supreme, Resurrection, The Mastermind, No Other Choice, Sentimental Value

THE WORST FILMS OF 2025

4. Captain America: Brave New World (dir. Julius Onah)

Some will tell you that Marvel Studios is kaput. Others will say they’re just in a slump, or that Endgame set the bar for success too high. I don’t have the energy for that right now. I will tell you, based solely on this botched Captain America relaunch, that Marvel Studios is in desperate need to relearn what movies are, pronto.

​3. Steve (dir. Tim Mielants) 

Message movies are essential. They highlight a significant issue and urge us to think about it. Steve is a message movie so convinced it’s doing us a service that its confidence in painting only with broad strokes, clumsily showcasing the struggles of a spiraling teacher (Cillian Murphy) and his at-risk student (Jay Lycurgo), unintentionally exposes its shallowness. An obvious awards-grubber.

2. HIM (dir. Justin Tipping)

I have to admire Tipping’s ambition here — I like messy provocations like any sensible horror hound — but he smothers demonic metaphor with hyperactive football blitz, and the result pushes every idea he has to the most obvious extreme until style bludgeons substance and leaves it twitching in the end zone. It was my #1 draft pick for worst of the year, until I saw:

1. The Legend of Kingdom Come (dir. Remsy Atassi)

A junk documentary that shows less interest in art or comics history than it does in selling a few DVDs and Blu-rays of itself to gullible superhero completists who might be duped by the portentousness of its title. From the scattershot talking-head sequences to Alex Ross’s gorgeous artwork being smeared in AI-enhanced aftereffects, here’s a comics doc so aggressively empty that I walked out of its Music Box world premiere embarrassed to be a comics reader and a moviegoer.

The 25th annual Whistler Film Festival, based in Whistler, British Columbia, is back to celebrate the finest filmmakers working in Canada today. This year’s selections featured a packed house of talent, which made narrowing my review choices down to just three a real trial, let me tell you. I am quite happy with my picks. So, in review: Kurtis David Harder’s Influencers; Nick Davis’s You Had To Be There…; Mayumi Yoshida’s Akashi.

INFLUENCERS

It’s cute, in an on-the-nose sort of way, that the murderous lead of the unlikely Influencer franchise is named “CW.” It’s clumsy and a little strange, and suggests that this “death to all social media influencers” thriller traffics in the same glossy, soapy energy as the American TV network with the same initials. And so what if it does? What happens when the movie turns out to be good anyway? Clearly, the writer/director of Influencer, Kurtis David Harder, enjoys toying with his audience. This playful approach benefits his Influencer films; that detached, quasi-celebrity, eye-rolling, lip-glossed, reality-TV/social-media phoniness satirized and/or embodied by certain banal offerings from The CW, it’s all right there in Harder’s films. Crucially, he uses it as an accelerant for the rage of CW herself, the influencer serial killer played with mesmerizing, coiled poise by Cassandra Naud.

Harder again writes and directs, this time with a spryer, more De Palma–inflected ambition that gives the sequel an even livelier pulse. His eye for our grim, impersonal modern age, where few can go three consecutive seconds without chasing the next dopamine rush on their phones, remains sharp, and Naud is even sharper as the elusive and lethal question mark at the center of his filmmaking enterprise. When Harder and Naud’s talents lock into stride, Influencers matches the original’s low-rent sting and occasionally even surpasses it.

But there is a void at the center of both films that screams to be filled, a hollow space where CW’s motivations for slaughter should be. Influencer had the hook of CW hiding in plain sight, living large on her victims’ contacts and credit limits as a form of recompense for… well, we never quite figured that out. In Influencers, Harder treats audience curiosity as noise to be tuned out. He breezes past certain sequel obligations — like explaining how CW escaped the first film’s twist ending — and zeroes in on the present. It should be enough for us to know that CW is alive, has a posh French girlfriend (Lisa Delamar), and still occasionally entertains the irrational urge to kill. For anyone looking for surface-level thrills, Influencers overdelivers. The source of the blood caked under its fingernails remains unexamined.

Still, it’s true: the lurid fascination of watching CW case her next victim and execute her wicked game is a great hook on its own, and the film front-loads its ridiculously entertaining first half hour with just that before moving on to its main attraction. Prompted by Harder’s calling card — opening credits dropping as the second act starts (the posturing auteur’s version of a TikToker holding their lav mic between their fingers) — Influencers then shifts into a moodier tempo, with CW and her returning arch-nemesis Madison (Emily Tennant) hunting each other through Bali via Instagram metadata and follower lists. (Sidenote: the best job in the world is being Harder’s location scout.) There’s some chatter about Madison’s life after she was framed for CW’s crimes, and the toll being an influencer takes on those with enough self-awareness to look inward, but in Influencers, plot trumps introspection.

Not that this isn’t still incredibly fun to watch. There is an especially tantalizing subplot involving Jacob (Jon Whitesell), a chauvinist streamer whose knotty relationship with a right-wing influencer (Veronica Long) initially gets lost in the churn of Madison’s revenge quest and later becomes the focal point of CW’s rage. Eventually, the characters catastrophically converge, leaving an impressive bloody mess and trampling over the interiority that Harder feints at in the film’s more poetic moments. The film rallies with a finale that’s as audacious as it is stunningly ridiculous, buoyed by Naud’s hypnotic performance; CW is a genuinely novel horror creation, an accidental folk hero for those (like me) who view most social media influencers as the antithesis to culture. While Harder seems determined to elevate her to slasher-icon status, his franchise can only coast on vibes and Naud’s presence for so long before that void at its center needs to mean something. Should CW’s zeal for death require context? Or is she merely a proxy offering catharsis for sickos like us? Something to explore, perhaps, in chapter three: Influence.

Influencers made its British Columbia premiere at the Rainbow Theatre on December 4. For more info, click this.

7.5 / 10

Written and directed by Kurtis David Harder.
Starring Cassandra Naud, Emily Tennant, Georgina Campbell, Jon Whitesell, Veronica Long, and Dylan Playfair.

110 mins. / Unrated. The film is bookended by impressive displays of bloodletting.

YOU HAD TO BE THERE…

Here’s a documentary so warmhearted and fun to watch that I felt a tiny stab of grief once it ended. It’s so tapped into its history, so lovingly attuned to an era that no longer exists, that it almost makes me wish I grew up Canadian.

It’s Nick Davis’s You Had To Be There, a film with one of the longest titles I’ve ever encountered, and will spare my fingers the exertion of typing it out in full during this review.* Besides, “you had to be there” is very succinctly put on its own, a curt but kind thing to say for those who lived and experienced the primordial stew that was the theatre scene in Toronto back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, from which leapt a handful of long-haired drama weirdos who changed the shape of comedy for half a century.

The story goes that in June 1972, the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto staged Godspell, produced by Stephen Schwartz (of Pippin and Wicked fame) and John-Michael Tebelak (who died in 1985), which brought together what can only be described as a cosmic convergence of exceptional Canadian talent: Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Paul Shaffer, Victor Garber, Rudy Webb, Gerry Salsberg, Jayne Eastwood, Valda Aviks, and Avril Marie Chown.

Naturally, the documentary is a riot thanks to the Godspell cast, who recount the era in which the musical made its splash with a natural ease that either comes from colossal talent or the repetition of the telling (probably both). Alongside comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff and a handful of admiring comics (Jeanene Garofalo, Heidi Gardner, and Gary Gulman, who flit in and out of the film, providing not a whole lot of additional context to the proceedings), they recount the “stuffy” conservatism of Toronto in the Seventies and the dearth of comedy available in its culture. The Wayne & Shuster Hour was about the extent of the yuks available on TV, and Canadian live theatre and film was best described by Jayne Eastwood (in the film’s best joke) as “My Long, Slow, Snowy Walk to Death.” Into that landscape burst Godspell, that shaggy, high-energy, peace-and-love Biblical rush that is retrospectively seen as the Genesis point for SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and popular comedy as we knew it in the decades that followed.

The film also serves as Martin Short’s unofficial origin story. You Had To Be There, in a sense, owes its very existence to him and his audio recordings of the production (one amusing bit sees Schwartz gently chiding the illicitly-made tapes while also acknowledging their value). Short’s comedic awakening and his delayed rise post-Godspell, woven through the film, provide it with a sturdy emotional spine. With very little video of the musical known to exist, Davis wisely entrusted Ace & Son Moving Picture Company with animating the interstitials, which deepen the film’s funky, whimsical Boomer cadence. (One especially charming bit has a cartoon Short adjusting Frank Sinatra’s bowtie during a performance of “My Funny Valentine.”)

And the trivia! My favorites: Gilda Radner landed her role with a hyperactive rendition of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah;” overalls, apparently, were “the unofficial uniform” of Toronto’s theatre scene; John Candy apparently hated the musical (though exactly why is left out of the movie); and the “Friday Night Services” post-performance shindigs at Levy and Short’s place, where cast members and pals (Catherine O’Hara, Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd among them) gathered for a bit of improv and mischief, resembling a scene that Short compares, only sort of jokingly, to Paris in the 1920s.

While You Had To Be There is an unabashed love-in, it doesn’t shy from the personal stuff: Victor Garber’s regrets about leaving the company for the Godspell movie (whose director allegedly dismissed the stage cast as mere theater folk); Short and Radner’s brief romance; Radner’s death to cancer and it effect it had on her friends; the overlapping circles of friendships, flirtations, and moments of chance (with Dave Thomas being the last ringer to perform in the musical before it closed in August 1973); and a disturbing account form Avril Chown, whose career ended abruptly after the Godspell engagement due to sexual assault she experienced as a cast member on a CBS children’s program.

What puts You Had to Be There head and shoulders over the more typical nostalgia-doc template, beyond its frankness and limitless good humor, is Davis’s thesis: that comedy greatness doesn’t emerge from a vacuum, but from community, collaboration, and, crucially, luck. As a chronicle of why this particular crop of Canadians became pillars of modern comedy, it makes a convincing case with a simple message: history hinges on small, strange coincidences, like a musical in an unlikely city performed by an eclectic group of folks at exactly the right moment in time. Lighting in a bottle. If you weren’t there to experience it—which, come on, who among us actually were—this is easily the next best thing.

*Okay, just this once: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way). It’s a good title, and true.

You Had To Be There… made its Western Canadian premiere at the Rainbow Theatre on December 4. For more info, click this.

8 / 10

Directed by Nick Davis.
Written by Jane Mendelsohn Davis and Nick Davis.
Starring Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Jayne Eastwood, Paul Shaffer, Dave Thomas, Stephen Schwartz, Avril Chown, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mike Myers, Heidi Gardner, Janeane Garofalo, Dan Aykroyd, Gary Gulman, and Martin Short.

98 mins. / Unrated. Some blue language and one brief recounting of sexual assault.

AKASHI

With days left to 2025 and as the Whistler Film Festival winds down, Mayumi Yoshida’s Akashi promptly dropped into my inbox and asserted itself as the most confident, assured, and memorable debut feature I’ve seen this year. Guh, how I wish I’d seen this with an audience, where Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s moving score reverberated through a theater instead of my stuffy living room, where Jaryl Lim’s gorgeous black-and-white Tokyo photography flickered across a proper screen. Instead, I watched it with my cats, who stared as the guy who feeds them quietly wept into his sweater. Still, Akashi is a gift in any venue.

In the days after her grandmother’s death, Kana (Yoshida) returns to Tokyo, a place she once called home before she left for an artist’s life in Canada ten years earlier. Her sisters have settled into an adulthood she barely recognizes in herself; now, a little nephew is running around the family house. Her parents have hit a kind of emotional gridlock: mom keeps busy with friends, while dad, a traditionalist, frowns at the dinner table. Life in Tokyo moved on without Kana but also oddly stayed the same, which makes her feel unmoored. Vancouver, with its casual friendships and well-worn single life, will keep; Tokyo, where she once loved Hiro (Ryo Tajima), who left her at the airport all those years ago, and where her grandmother’s secrets are waiting to be uncovered, hits her with the demands and responsibilities of now and no longer feels like home. (Maybe that’s why Yoshida shoots the present in black and white and bathes the grandparents’ past in vivid color; memory is generous, and today tends not to be.)

The rich details Yoshida puts into this story give her dramatic crescendos devastating oomph. Hiro clocking Kana’s “Gaijin vibes.” Mom serving her wayward daughter breakfast with a fork. That agonizing distance of inches between Kana and Hiro during their first goodbye in ten years, where she seems one breath away from collapsing into his arms. Akashi makes room for Kana to contemplate old promises made and broken, and acknowledge that persistent, ambient hum of “what if.” The film asks, gently and with no small amount of poetry, whether happiness can exist under the rigid structures of tradition or if it’s best to let the heart wander, especially if the detours lead nowhere. It’s impossible not to feel wistful right alongside Kana about the past, not to entertain faded dreams, not to indulge her faint hope that maybe love might pick up where it was left long ago. Akashi acknowledges that there’s a whole lot of road between now and then, but it also presents the tethers that hold them together: the mental tracing of a face; a painting of profound emotional importance hung just outside of prominence; a letter kept secret that says everything.

That’s the power of Yoshida’s film; it centers on the importance of being present. Shows us which memories we should hold tight, and which are okay to let go. So that, when we’re older, we don’t drift through life feeling like we botched the map somewhere back there. To feel happiness in sorrow, to imprint the faces of those we miss against the night sky wherever we are, and find them, vivid as yesterday, unmistakably here.

Akashi made its Whistler premiere at the Squamish Lil’Wat Cultural Centre on December 5. For more info, click this.

9 / 10

Written and directed by Mayumi Yoshida.
Starring Mayumi Yoshida, Hana Kino, Ryo Tajima, Sayaka Kunisada, Bun Kimura, Yuriko Onuma, Hiro Kanagawa, and Jess McLeod.

100 mins. / Unrated. Some light boozing, and an earth-shifting amount of yearning.

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REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND

James Bond has held his dominant perch in pop culture for so long that every other suave super-spy can only wilt before the instantly recognizible silhouettes of Connery, Brosnan, Craig, etc. As far as this specific archetype goes, Bond tops all. Yet, when I watched the Bond-inflected Reflection in a Dead Diamond, which you should check out when it hits Shudder in December, I was struck by the bleak reminder of how bland and largely toothless the franchise has been for decades — and that we still have Bond’s Amazon era to look forward to, too. Tribute, pastiche, homage, whatever label you want to slap on it, Reflection in a Dead Diamond looks and feels like an unofficial yet superior bootleg of the real thing, free to chase the extremes of the fabled spy’s violence, sexuality, and ever-shifting identity with a freedom we simply do not associate with that world-famous brand with its adorable double-0 license to kill. It’s said that Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale flirted with the arthouse; this one seduces it.

Rife with Seventies Hong Kong snap-zooms, Leone-flavored close-ups, sequences of extreme brutality shot and edited to nigh-abstraction, all punctuated with vivid, inventively deployed colors, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s film feels alive in a way Bond hasn’t in ages. How best to describe it: It’s almost as if the visually playful Bond title cards, the series’ hallmark, were the entire feature instead of the credits. Set in a scenic seaside hotel where an aged secret agent (Fabio Testi) waits out his lonely remaining days far removed from sex and explosions, Diamond immediately locks in with the narrative efficiency of a pulp novella: our idle spy sips cocktails as a gorgeous woman sunbathes near the coastline, her bare chest glistening with diamonds which send him spiraling down memory lane to his most consequential mission against the elusive assassin known only as “Serpentik.”

From here, Cattet and Forzani take Bond’s iconography — the Baccarat tables, the beautiful femme fatales, the sports car with gun turrets behind the headlamps — and dismantle it, infusing their spin with the freaky flavor of the Giussanis’ Diabolik and other notable Italo-European comic strips, with shades of Milo Manara and Guido Crepax glimmering in the film’s many dazzling facets. (These lush influences are so prominent that the movie’s own attempts at comic art, used where expensive action sequences might have gone, feel comparatively flat.) The sights are a wonder, but the sound design is something, too: the pull of a leather jumpsuit as a body tenses for a brawl, the crunch of a lead pipe against bone, that fucked-up sound glass makes when it’s pushed into flesh, it’s all rendered with a fidelity to the many textures and dimensions of international intrigue writ large. Ridiculous yet immaculate images that both reflect and refract legend, distorting the bland competence of cinema’s most famous examples of espionage to indelible funhouse proportions.

9 / 10

Reflection in a Dead Diamond will stream exclusively on Shudder beginning December 5.

Written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
Starring Fabio Testi, Yannick Renier, Koen De Bouw, Maria de Medeiros, and Thi Mai Nguyen.

87 mins. / Unrated. I haven’t seen hooks do that to someone’s skin since Hellraiser.

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THE LONG WALK

For a feature-length misery trudge set at three miles per hour, The Long Walk is surprisingly fleet-footed in its presentation and a pretty damned compelling viewing experience, to boot. I can’t speak to the story as originally written by Stephen King (in his “Richard Bachman” days), and I sure wish I had never known this was once going to be directed by Frank Darabont. But Francis Lawrence (Constantine) nails the contours of this destitute post-war America, where civic pride is taught at gunpoint and public morale depends on an annual competition in which fifty boys are chosen to walk as far as they can for wealth and one life-altering wish. The catch is a doozy, too: If they stop, they die.

It’s the carrot and stick approach, and the stick is wielded by The General (Mark Hamill). And he does not spare it, keeping the boys marching ahead with fear in their hearts and their eyes on the prize. This year’s crop includes Ray (Cooper Hoffman), a soft-boiled recruit embittered by the broken system that birthed this madness, and Pete (David Jonsson), a clear-eyed optimist whose decency and inner light cut through the film’s oppressive, slate-gray despair. Given how YA dystopias have gnawed through similar conceits over the last two decades, The Long Walk risks feeling like a post-Hunger Games relic, one more exercise in gloom with a photogenic cast shuffling toward their doom.

Lawrence’s grip on pacing and tone keeps things lively. He takes a basic approach to the material, focusing more on the monotonies (and, it should be said, agonies) of the road ahead, stashing the horrors of failure largely in the rearview but keeping the threat of it ever-present. Internal complexities are relegated to flashbacks and chatter between Hoffman, Jonsson, and the largely capable cast around them, but they can only do so much within the confines of such dully competent imagery (from Jo Willems, who, guess what, shoots next year’s Hunger Games), which avoids imbuing the ceaseless visuals of pavement, trees, sky, and rural ruin with awe or imagination. So it’s left to the cast to shoulder the existential heft, and the results are a mixed bag. Hoffman strains (heroically but visibly) for gravity, while Judy Greer, in a sliver of a role, devastates with the raw emotions of despair and hope that eventually define the story. Unsurprisingly, Jonsson (who impressed me in Alien: Romulus) walks away with the whole production, lending warmth to his character’s bracing endurance and grace. The Long Walk might traverse a fallen nation’s further collapse at a weary trot, but in Jonsson’s hands, our hearts’ pace quickens.

7 / 10

Directed by Francis Lawrence.
Screenplay by JT Mollner.
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill.

108 mins. / Rated R. The pavement becomes slick with red.

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For two years, the world has played spectator to an endless progression of monstrous and increasingly brazen acts of genocidal oppression occurring within the Gaza Strip. Israel, responding to a terrorist attack that claimed nearly 1,200 lives on October 7, 2023, launched a two-year pogrom that has killed 69,000 Palestinians and counting. The magnitude of death and suffering beggars the imagination. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, the new documentary from Iranian expatriate filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, communicates the human cost of this bloodshed by narrowing its focus to a single young woman and her community.

Farsi was introduced to Fatma “Fatem” Hassona through a refugee living in Cairo. Fatem is a 24-year-old woman living in Gaza. Through a series of recorded video calls from April 2024 to April 2025, we learn about her world. Fatem is an amateur photojournalist, and her still photos and videos document the lives of ordinary Palestinians amid the ruins of their civilization. During that span of nearly a year, she travels from Al-Tuffah in northeastern Gaza to Sana’a in the west and back, staying nights in shelters, friends’ houses, and her own home in her devastated, nearly abandoned neighborhood. The Israeli forces are an unseen but often still very much heard presence throughout. She talks about not being able to walk around her neighborhood in the early days of the conflict because of snipers posted on the roofs of nearby buildings. You can hear the planes, Apache helicopters, and the distant sounds of explosions and gunfire. In one dramatic moment, a call is interrupted by a loud boom, and Fatem points her camera out her window to reveal a plume of black smoke rising from a building a mile or two away. Fatem chronicles the loss of various family members (13 dead in the months before her introduction to Farsi, including her grandmother and year-old cousin), neighbors, and friends.

But Fatem is more than just a window into the plight of the Palestinian people. She is an observant Muslim with faith in Allah’s grand design. She is a musician and a poet. She is teaching herself Morse Code. She possesses a radiant smile, and though the constant hunger, deprivation, and depression exact their toll on her as the months wear on, that smile is never far from her face.

In Fatem, Farsi sees a sort of mirror reflection of herself: Farsi is an artist who can never return home for fear of political persecution; Fatem is an artist who will never leave. But though Fatem desires to travel the world and see Tehran and the Vatican, she is steadfast in the notion that Gaza is her home and where she is needed most. At the same time, the film doesn’t sanitize Fatem. When Farsi asks about her feelings on the massacre that occurred on October 7, Fatem confesses ambivalence and a certain pride that Palestinians demonstrated to the world that, despite their lack of modern military, “We can fight for our land, and we can still resist.” The admission is an uncomfortable one to take in, one that points to a deep, dangerous anger over decades of subjugation that many of us in the West have only begun to acknowledge.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a difficult film to watch, for its content, certainly, but also for its presentation. The majority of the film consists of video calls via cell phone recorded by Farsi. The lack of a stable internet connection within Gaza means the calls are subject to poor resolution, lag, dropped audio, and frequent loss of connection. These technical difficulties underscore the isolation of the Palestinian people; Farsi draws a direct connection to Iran’s throttling of the internet to prevent communication with the outside world. It asks much of the audience, though, to endure the static and choppy presentation in order to arrive at the film’s wealth of insight.

And the insight the film provides is, indeed, invaluable. I wish that we could compel every American to watch this, to understand the full scope of the horrors our tax dollars have been bankrolling. Despite the ceasefire that went into effect on October 10 this year, nearly 250 more Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli settlers in ongoing efforts to drive them from their land. So long as Netanyahu’s ethno-nationalist regime remains in place, the people of Palestine will never be safe or free. Though the “war” has ended, the international community cannot allow the present state of Israel to return to the status quo. Fatem cannot become just another statistic.

8 / 10

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk opens at the Gene Siskel Theatre in Chicago on November 21. For more info, click this.

Directed by Sepideh Farsi.

113 mins. / Unrated. Contains photography of the aftermath of Israeli bombing, including some human remains.

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[This is the final part of a four-part Deep Dive. Part One: click this. Part Two: this. Part Three: right here.]

INSIDES AND IN-NESS, NEVER INSIDE OUT: LIMINAL SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY HORROR

If there is one thread of 21st-century horror where House of Leaves has exerted an undeniable influence, it is in the prevalence of liminal space as a site for terror. “Liminality” is a concept that entered the popular lexicon through academic discourse, and it denotes the idea of a “between” space or a borderland. The Hallway in the house on Ash Tree Lane represents a corridor from our world to something else, but what remains on the other side is unknowable, unreachable. The presence of the Minotaur notwithstanding, the principal source of fear and dread in The Navidson Record comes from the uncanniness and non-traversability of this allegedly liminal space.

The Hallway appears to be a manmade space, logically could only be a manmade space, yet it is eerily devoid of any ornamentation or stylistic embellishments that would mark it as such. “Nothing there provides a reason to linger,” Zampano writes. “In part because not one object, let alone fixture or other manner of finish work has ever been discovered there.” But beyond even the cold featurelessness, the Hallway is defined by its instability and shifting geography. The structure’s proportions change randomly, and a distance that took you minutes to traverse could take a lifetime to recross. We witness the terrifying rapidity with which these changes can happen when Navidson and his friend Billy Reston, having staged a rescue mission for comrades trapped in the Hallway, become separated when Reston, loaded into a rope gurney at the top of a long staircase, is snapped suddenly away from Navidson as the staircase expands to unfathomable length.

In his “Liminal Scares” essay for Bloody Disgusting, Luiz H.C. identifies a variety of cinematic inheritors of House of Leaves’ spatial horror, including the three I’ll explore in more detail here. These works “capture the book’s liminal atmosphere by adapting ideas that have permeated popular culture in the two decades since House of Leaves was published.” Bill Watterson’s indie horror comedy Dave Made a Maze (2017) is the most obviously indebted. The film opens on Annie, returning home from a trip to discover that her partner Dave has created a cardboard structure in their living room that he claims is a maze, and inside of which he appears to have been lost for three days. Forbidden by Dave from disassembling his creation, Annie and several of the couple’s friends and acquaintances head inside to rescue him.

Right off the bat, the similarities with House of Leaves are easy to spot. While Dave’s labyrinth sports a whimsical, Michel Gondry-like aesthetic, it behaves in the same sort of self-constructing, almost organic way that the house on Ash Tree Lane does. The maze even sports its own Minotaur, albeit one much more aggressive in its pursuit of those trapped along with it. Another interesting similarity is the suggestion in both works that these environments are, in some way, psychoactive. Though never conclusively stated, Zampano entertains the theory that the Hallway may be reactive towards and reflective of the people who enter it, citing as evidence the fact that it seems to eject non-human animals summarily. Even Zampano’s Minotaur itself appears to modulate its aggression based on that of the Hallway’s visitors. This idea is less developed in Dave Made a Maze, but it is still present. When Dave’s friends ask why his Minotaur would want to kill them, he cryptically responds, “It’s me.” There are indications that the seeming hostility and malevolence of the space are connected to its creator.

A better-known and more recent exploration of the horror of malleable spaces is Kyle Edward Ball’s ambient nightmare, Skinamarink (2022). In the film, two young children, Kevin and his older sister Kaylee, wake up in the middle of the night to find their parents gone and all of the windows and doors to their house sealed up. Skinamarink is a work that pushes liminal horror into provocative new directions. While the geography of their home never changes (apart from the sheer drywall in place of all the doors and windows), the house itself becomes a kind of no-place for the two children. With no view of the sun or contact with the outside world, time loses meaning. The events of the film could take place over a single weekend or a decade; nothing in the house ever changes. In place of the Minotaur, a tragic creature of inchoate rage, there reigns a darker presence, something intelligent, all-powerful, and sadistic — a malevolent god. Curiously, the film has a found footage texture, bathed in artificial film grain and noise, but there is no indication that what we are seeing is footage of any kind. It instead evokes a sort of curdled millennial nostalgia, memories filtered and remembered through an analog haze. Skinamarink is a polarizing work, but one that traces the outer limits of the horror genre in the 21st century.

But the most obvious inheritor to House of Leaves’s brand of liminal horror is the pop culture phenomenon that is The Backrooms. The Backrooms originated as a 2019 post on 4Chan:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

The unfathomable dimensions and haphazard construction of this space evoke House’s Hallway, but unlike the Hallway, the Backrooms’ architecture reflects a specific era, that of a late 20th-century/present-day corporate office environment. This collision of uncanny horror with the mundane trappings of a contemporary workplace taps into the lurking alienation we feel towards these non-places where we spend many of our waking hours. They are not simply inhuman, but anti-human.

The most famous iteration of The Backrooms has been Kane Parsons’s viral web series, beginning with the 2022 “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” Here, a young filmmaker slips beneath the surface of reality and is trapped within this space, pursued by a furious, extradimensional monster. The short succinctly distills what’s intriguing about this concept. At one point, the protagonist runs through a large enclosure filled with row upon row of corner door frames extending as far as we can see, like a forest of thresholds. It looks like a homemade Doom .wad where the creator was just fucking around with the builder to learn how to operate it. Everything about its design and symmetry suggests the guidance of a human hand, but who could have possibly constructed it? The trappings of an antiseptic office — a space designed for cold, utilitarian purposes — are arranged with no hint of reason or teleology. Artifice and nature converge with human-made structures behaving like organic matter.

Subsequent entries in the web series dig deeper into the “lore” of The Backrooms, and therefore, predictably, let a lot of the air out of the concept. Nonetheless, the short was enough of a phenomenon to secure Parsons a deal with A24 for a feature-length film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. Whether the film will maintain the confounding mystery of the original short or adopt a more prosaic approach, we will have to wait and see.

Like the labyrinthine halls of the house on Ash Tree Lane, we cannot predict the path that the horror genre will take in the future. As the 21st century gradually reveals its true face, our cinematic nightmares will continue to twist and reform in response. Yet I feel confident that House of Leaves will continue to serve as a crucial text for understanding how we got to where we are. Despite the most fervent wishes of its fictional author, Zampano, The Navidson Record appears poised to stand with us for many years to come.

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Can I talk shop with you for a minute? Solvent is the kind of movie that is a dream to review and a nightmare to rate. Austrian filmmaker Johannes Grenzfurthner has tossed a cinematic nailbomb into the discourse, and the wild spray of shrapnel affords critics plenty of grist. We have a motion picture full of deliberately idiosyncratic stylistic choices, wild tonal swings, and an oppressive sense of relevance and urgency. We have a work that walks a fine line between art and exploitation and that flirts with some morally questionable sentiment (more on that later). All of this ensures I’m not going to have any difficulty reaching my word count. But… does it work? Do its pieces come together to form a final project worthy of the ambition that spurred its creation? Did I like this?

Solvent is a found footage horror centering around Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries, Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite), a veteran of the first Gulf War now leading a small team of contractors who appear to specialize in searching for historical artifacts. Holbrook, along with Polish academic and on-again/off-again romantic partner, Krystyna (Aleksandra Cwen), and her colleague, Cornelia (Jasmin Hagendorfer), is tasked with searching a home in rural Austria that belonged to Wolfgang Zinggl, a presumed-deceased farmer and former SS officer. The group has been assembled as a sort of PR stunt by Zinggl’s grandson, Ernst (Grenzfurthner himself), with the intention of locating any documentation pertaining to the Holocaust that Zinggl may have kept from the war. This seemingly straightforward job falls apart, however, when the group discovers a hidden alcove where a pipe juts from deep beneath the earth. From there, tragedy ensues. The events leave Krystyna in a state of nervous breakdown and Holbrook obssessed with understanding what happened.

Grenzfurthner’s earlier film, Masking Threshold, provides a sort of template for Solvent. Both works are shot and edited like YouTube video essays. Solvent is explicitly framed as Holbrook’s video diary, shot almost entirely from his perspective (Gries’s face is rarely visible on camera). Scenes are often interrupted by smash cuts to documents, home video recordings, and, increasingly as the film wears on, stock footage from World War II and the Holocaust. Editor Anton Paievski floods the screen with the detritus of a century of mechanized brutality in an effort to simulate Holbrook’s deteriorating grip on his sense of self. Also carried over from Masking Threshold is Grenzfurthner’s affection for dick trauma and his ability to craft stomach-churning imagery while keeping the most explicit violence off-screen. But Masking Threshold was an insular, claustrophobic portrait of a rational mind coming unmoored from reality, whereas Solvent examines that epistemological decay writ large on a societal scale.

I don’t want to get too deep into spoiler territory, but suffice to say that Grenzfurthner conceptualizes fascism and white supremacy as a kind of pollution or contaminant — a corrupting influence upon the elemental forces that circumscribe our existence. Something that infects us from without. I appreciate, also, that he broadens his critique of imperialism beyond the soft target of Nazi Germany to include the United States. Holbrook is the discarded veteran of a foreign war fueled by US Imperialism and the son of another. Vietnam left Holbrook’s father emotionally crippled, just as Holbrook’s own experiences in Kuwait drove him into mercenary conflicts that were even more brutal and lawless. State-sanctioned violence, both at home and abroad, is a suffocating miasma.

Grenzfurthner’s grasp on the scope of political atrocity in the 20th and 21st centuries is what makes it so disappointing that he seems unwilling to apply that insight to the ongoing situation in Gaza. Solvent makes two references to contemporary Palestine, both from the mouth of Zinggl, and both implying some symmetry between the German National Socialist movement and the current efforts to end the Palestinian genocide. A charitable reading of these remarks is that antisemites can Trojan Horse their bigotry inside legitimate critiques of the state of Israel (see: Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene). A much easier conclusion to draw, however, would be that support for Palestine itself is a bad-faith rhetorical trap set by Nazis. I’m curious how Grenzfurthner’s perspective on these matters has changed in the year-plus since Solvent was completed, since the enforced starvation in the Gaza Strip, the assassinations of so many reporters and aid workers, and the criminalizing of protest and dissent in allied states like the US and UK. It nevertheless remains disappointing that a film that so deeply engages with the persistence of fascism and genocidal violence into the 21st century handles the most blatant genocide of my lifetime in such a careless manner.

Leaving aside the moral dimensions, the more practical elements of the film present some highs and lows. Aleksandra Cwen’s performance as Krystyna was a clear standout for me. Her voicework freak-outs during phone calls with Holbrook are bone-chilling. I thought I was going to have problems with Gries’s Holbrook. He comes across in the film’s first act as a kind of cheerful bully, such that I was dreading the prospect of spending the next 90 minutes in his head, but he emerges from the film’s early turning point considerably humbled. Gries does an excellent job conveying Holbrook’s haunted bravado with just line readings and gestures. The only actor I struggled with was Grenzfurthner as Ernst, Zinggl’s wormy descendant. His performance has a comedic, tonally dissonant broadness that never fully became funny to me. Additionally, despite the editing maintaining a sense of momentum, the film sometimes struggles to externalize its conflict. The primary conflict of Solvent unfolds inside Holbrook himself, where a more conventional film might depict this through hallucinations or other terrors seen from the main character’s perspective. The restrictions of this found footage format limit us to only what the camera can perceive, leaving us with a climax that largely consists of Holbrook talking to himself.

Despite my criticisms, I do like Solvent quite a bit. I like that Grenzfurthner is a filmmaker preoccupied with the most urgent questions of our time and that he approaches them via the strange visual vernacular of the extremely online. Grenzfurthner places himself among an emerging breed of lo-fi horror maestros who craft new nightmares from our digitally mediated experiences, including figures like Jane Schoenbrun, Kyle Edward Ball, and Robbie Banfitch (with the latter two explicitly referenced in Holbrook’s crew as “Kyle Edward Boll” and “Richie Fichvogt”). I can only hope his future work continues to wade dick-deep into the epistemic cesspool of our age.

7 / 10

Solvent hit VOD and Digital platforms on October 10. For more info or to learn where to watch, click this.

Directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner.
Written Johannes Grenzfurthner and Ben Roberts.
Starring Jon Gries, Aleksandra Cwen, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Roland Gratzer, Jasmin Hagendorfer, and Ronald von den Sternen.

94 mins. / Unrated. Get ready for smatterings of gore and sailor talk, plenty of nazi stuff, and just so, so much dick trauma.