2024 Catch-Up: Saturday Night, Hell Hole, I Saw the TV Glow

Guess which two of these three descents into madness I liked.

One of the hardest things to do as a critic — especially one who more often writes professionally about TV — is to keep up with every cool-lookin' movie that comes out in a given year. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, a cold feeling hits my stomach: Best Of lists are forthcoming! Do I know where I stand? Have I seen enough films this year to have an opinion on the best among them? Every year, like clockwork, this happens to me.

Luckily, DoomRocket exists. If I want to write capsule reviews on a host of movies I'd missed out on until now, that's what it's there for!

So, with the holidays bearing down on us and general review coverage halted until the new year, that's what I'll be doing — catching up on all the festival darlings, off-the-beaten-path genre flicks, and VOD schlock-a-thons that have caught my eye since January 1, 2024. This is my road until this year's annual YEAR IN REVIEW, which drops in the last week of December, so stay tuned for that.

Now! What's been good this year? Or, failing that, what's been decent, bad (but secretly good), or just plain rotten? Let's take a look-see…

SATURDAY NIGHT

Like most sensible movie-watchers, I was willing to go along with the meandering rhythms of Jason Reitman's Saturday Night, which collides several famous anecdotes concerning the premiere of NBC's once foundational/now culturally inert sketch-comedy show into a 109-minute-long movie. When Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) pulled his dick out (a prosthetic, still embarrassing), I was appalled by how stupid and obvious the moment was, but at least it felt informative to the Chevy Chase character played by my MVP pick, Corey Michael Smith. No, it was when Reitman and his co-writer, Gil Kenan (of the Poltergeist remake and those disposable Ghostbusters sequels), decided to aim their derision at Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) that I finally rebelled against it. Whatever the Muppets did to the Reitman family, I'm sure I'll never know. Here's one thing I do know: Jim Henson never made anything as fawning and odious as Saturday Night.

There's no polite way to put it: this is rose-tinted horseshit that performs an impressive reach-around for show creator Lorne Michaels, an ingratiating soft-serve Uncut Gems for decrepit comedy fans starring a suite of today's Born For Prime Time Players that posits that the success of Saturday Night Live was already in the stars and any struggle Michaels endured during its inception, made up or otherwise, was merely a formality. Here's a movie so enamored by the legends who populate it that Reitman and Kenan can't help but spray sticky sentimentality all over the otherwise adequate Seventies detail. "You ever have nostalgia for a moment while you're still in it?" I don't care if Ella Hunt is wonderful as Gilda Radner — that line, and the obsequious goons who conjured it, sucks.

I have other gripes: Michaels, played in a minor key by Gabriel LaBelle (possibly because that's how Michaels behaves in life, maybe just to avoid sounding like Dr. Evil), coasts frictionlessly to the squishy finale as pieces of history (yes, even the made-up stuff) fall into a tidy pile of smiles and hugs. (The most emotionally consequential of his battles, aside from whether NBC will hit the kill button on his show, is whether or not his wife will use his surname in the credits.) Barring solid performances from Smith as Chevy Chase and Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, most of the cast resemble children playing Seventies dress-up. (Have grownups gotten smaller in the intervening fifty years?) Human traits seem to elude Reitman, save for smarm and panic, which explains why most of his cast run around aimlessly sniping at each other until the script requires that everyone hug it out. The laziest offense of Saturday Night, however, is when it does that idiotic thing all bad biopics do and foretells its subject's legacy during a moment of emotional duress, as someone does with John Belushi (Matt Wood). The line goes, "You're going to go down as one of the giants of character expression," as though any human being would say that, ever, to anyone. Unless, y'know, they were trying to piss them off.

2.5 / 10

Directed by Jason Reitman.
Written by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman.
Produced by Jason Blumenfeld, Peter Rice, Jason Reitman, and Gil Kenan.
Starring Gabriel LaBelle, Cory Michael Smith Ella Hunt, Dylan O'Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Cooper Hoffman, Rachel Sennott, Willem Dafoe, Matthew Rhys, and J. K. Simmons.

Rated R for profane expectorating, some dong, and a cancerous level of second-hand smoke.

HELL HOLE

Hellbender was my gateway into the freaky DIY world of the Adams Family: John, Toby Poser, Zelda, and Lulu, writers, directors, artists all. Every low-budget movie they make is indelibly their own, but they aren’t small-time. They specialize in hand-crafted genre fare, and it seems they rarely make the same thing twice. Think how much more interesting Robert Eggers would be had he followed up The Witch with, I dunno, a remake of Them! Eggers would never, but that’s what the Adamses have done here. Their anything-goes approach to filmmaking makes their output strange, experimental, personal, unique, and unafraid — in short, art.

Their follow-up, Hell Hole, is art. It won’t stick to my ribs or haunt my dreams like Hellbender (few movies do), but I did appreciate its basement punk riff on the crappy sci-fi monster movie. Think The Thing done on the cheap. The Creeping Terror with a potty mouth. Fiend Without a Face only with people bitching at each other in rooms for the duration. (Now that I’m thinking about it, Fiend did that a lot, too.) Here’s a movie that kicks off with none other than Subspecies’ Anders Hove screaming as a squiggly tentacle beast works its way up his ass. Later, at a present-day fracking site, the creature is released from its earthly prison, and we find out its form of symbiosis makes hosts smell just awful. A B-movie where the monster makes its victims smell like shit. The Adamses think this stuff is funny, and I do, too.

I understand that Hell Hole is imperfect, yet I love it all the same. Its edits are shocking, real indie music video chop. Yet its score is colossal, and I want to listen to it right now. They were done by the same person (John), so you take the good with the bad. The exposition is a slog, but I could listen to Olivera Perunicic, who plays a plucky researcher, recite it all day. Hell Hole was actively, aggressively pulling me in despite its shortcomings. Cheapie charms, thy name is Adams. Long may they reign.

5 / 10

Directed by John Adams and Toby Poser.
Written by John Adams, Lulu Adams, and Toby Poser.
Cinematography by Sean Dahlberg.
Starring Toby Poser, Maximum Portman, Aleksandar Trmcic, John Adams, Olivera Perunicic, Petar Arsic, and Anders Hove.
Produced by Miljan Gogic, Matt Manjourides, and Justin A. Martell.

Unrated. Rife with exploding flesh and intrusive tentacles.

I SAW THE TV GLOW

Jane Schoenbrun is going to be one of the more consequential filmmakers of this early century in time, and the foundation upon which they're already building this reputation — that ethereal one-two punch of We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow — will pave ground for all the nostalgic copycats yet to come. These budding filmmakers have likely absorbed both films and built interior monuments to Schoenbrun's work, inside-clubhouses with secret passwords they can share with other similarly media-addled folks. Like headspace-dwellers like Lynch, Schoenbrun is going to further shift the cadence of melodrama and horror; to where remains to be seen.

With this in mind, I interpret I Saw the TV Glow as an incisive bit of media commentary that explores (with an excruciating eye for period detail) the disaffection of the pre-millennium American youth who cloaked themselves in the fuzzy analog grain of VHS and never really stopped. Kids like Owen (first, Ian Foreman; later, Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who relate via an esoteric late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque, which, for them, is a disorienting, frightening, beautifully empowering Rosetta Stone that cracks through the confusion of living and suburban banality they experience. Maddy identifies with the show with every fiber of her being. Owen is similarly captivated but doesn't quite know how to articulate the feelings it stirs inside of him. In this film, they're both doomed, just for different reasons.

Schoenbrun uses this self-reflection (they like all that fuzzy weirdo stuff just like the rest of us) as a springboard to delve into concepts like the elusive nature of personal identity, not having the words or concepts already plugged into you to know how to explicate their life-altering meaning. How suffocating (Owen is asthmatic) and scary that must be. I had a telescopic view of I Saw the TV Glow's influences: SNICK, the works of David Lynch and Mark Frost, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy. As an elderly millennial myself (born in 1983), I appreciated Schoenbrun's application of the stuff I once loved so well to the interior horrors of their film, but I couldn't fully embrace them. Maybe that's because I Saw the TV Glow leaves itself too open to interpretation, like one of those gym parachutes filled with ideas that float around inside its wobbly casing. It's strange and exciting to be inside one of those things, but after a while, it inevitably loses the air that gives it shape.

6.5 / 10

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun.
Cinematography by Eric K. Yue.
Starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Ian Foreman, and Fred Durst (???).
Produced by Sam Intili, Sarah Winshall, Emma Stone, Dave McCary, and Ali Herting.

Rated PG-13 for forbidding video entities and other YA dangers.