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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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Bizarro: Year None #1
DC / $4.99
Written by Eric Carrasco & Kevin Smith.
Art by Nick Pitarra.
Colors by Michael Garland.
Letters by Dave Sharpe.

Far be it from me to suggest DC editors rein in the famously loquacious Kevin Smith — or his co-writer, Eric Carrasco, for that matter — but good grief, is there a lot of chatting before this issue lands its hook. I cracked this hoping to see prime-time Nick Pitarra mayhem, and was not disappointed. Enjoying it can be a challenge, especially in the first half of this issue, which wallows in overlapping (and, yes, thematic) banter between Perry White (in Jackie Cooper mode) and Jimmy Olsen (depicted here as a fresh-faced news-fluencer) about the decline of news media set at Metropolis’s top paper. There is so much dialogue, in fact, that in order to let Pitarra’s detail-heavy work show, letterer Dave Sharpe crams a lot of it in with ever-shifting font sizes. Sweaty business. Still, Pitarra keeps these pages alive: I enjoy that most of this faintly amusing/mostly grating yammering occurs in a press room skewered by a skyscraper-sized toy soldier; that’s fun. Future issues will doubtless find a way to marry its cosmic strangeness to Smith’s many indulgences. I love Bizarro, and I was up for an updated, modern-minded retelling of his origin — but I’m not up for another bout of this to see how his story shakes out. I’m saying goodbye to this book, and no — I don’t mean the opposite.

4.5 / 10

Bizarro: Year None #1 is in shops now.

Daredevil #1
Marvel Comics / $5.99
Written by Stephanie Phillips.
Art by Lee Garbett.
Colors by Frank Martin.
Letters by VC’s Ariana Maher.

Daredevil: Born Again is in the midst of a new season, and savvy comics fans will notice Marvel has met the moment with a new Daredevil #1 featuring a fresh creative team. I won’t get into why their practice of promoting new series that turn out to be glorified minis sucks — that speaks for itself. But I bring it up because the way they publish comics nowadays lowered my expectations for the latest Daredevil #1; I expected it to function like a corpo-comic dropping in tandem with its latest live-action iteration — reverent to the past, vague about the previous character-redefining era, all sizzle, little steak. Yet that’s what we have here. Phillips enters this latest era clear-eyed and diligent, sanding down continuity with a “bold new direction” that ought to please Wednesday Warriors without spooking the Disney+-watching curious. Matt Murdock teaches law now and bumps against the Gen-Z student body. There’s a hostile instructor with hot tattoos who is practically preordained to be his new adversarial love interest. A generic-lookin’ bad guy simmers in the periphery. Nothing especially revelatory to report here — just foundation-setting with some splash page DD action so folks feel they got their money’s worth. Garbett’s art falls in line with the issue’s core mission: it’s clean, readable, does the trick with very little flourish. I’d ask why none of this feels new or even daring, but I already know the answer: as is the case with all modern Marvel launches, we’re not keeping up with characters, just the brand. Of its 20+ variants, I went with the A cover.

5.5 / 10

Daredevil #1 is in shops now.

MAD About DC! #1
DC / $7.99
Written by Some Funny Folks, Some Not-So Funny Folks.
Art by Everyone Is Awesome.
Colors by Also Crazy Talented People.
Letters by Folks Who Use MAD Lettering Boxes — And Those Who Don’t!

Had a nice time with this one. Passing thoughts as I read it (maybe spoilers?):

• What, no magazine format?

• “DC Comics proudly presents a very special issue[…] of comic creators trying to lose their jobs.” I’m sure.

• Ty Templeton!

• Kagen McLeod does good faces. First strip so far that feels like MAD.

• I think Absolute Batman is funny enough on its own, guys. You’re all telling variations of the same joke! Blecch!

• Todd Klein wrote a great post about MAD lettering, if you ain’t read it already.

• Hey! Gerry Duggan! Superman has never had a mullet. He coiffed like a hunky Daniel Day-Lewis circa In the Name of the Father. I’m right! Ask Dan Jurgens!

• A gentle ribbing of comic creator personalities. It’s like a roast hosted by a polite therapist.

• The Gail Simone/Collen Doran strip is marvelous. Love the layout/design.

• (I can’t with Zdarsky. Sorry, folks.)

• About as many poop jokes as I expected!

• Jeff Parker/Lukas Ketner strip might be MVP. I’m probably biased — Ketner is a personal favorite (read Count Crowley!) — but this is still really good/funny. The “sex-positive event” gag got me good!

• Awriiight, Aragonés!

• Celebrity writer. ☹️

• This Batman “Bored” game is really good. I wish I had friends to play it with.

• Celebrity writer x2. At least they’re comedians who mesh well with all this con humor.

• I wish Al Ewing would write a Spectre book for real. That’d probably rule.

• McLeod is back, and this time, it’s for another great strip. I love it when that happens!

• Soule/Brown Fold-In does not disappoint. I creased — and chortled!

• $7.99 cheap!! (??)

7.5 / 10

MAD About DC! #1 is in shops now.

Read any good comics lately? Share in the comments.

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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.

Braving the gauntlet of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that’s bad for you is DoomRocket’s HOT PRESS. This week: criticizing A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre #1.

Sorry for the pause in new posts last week. Work, work, work. I’m also currently preparing coverage for this week’s Slamdance Film Festival, which you’ll be reading quite a lot about very soon. But first, hey — let’s catch up.

As I see it, the role of a TV critic is to make your personal feelings understandable to a complete stranger who has just watched the show you’re criticizing. If you’ve done your job well, your insights will have value to this stranger, even if their opinions align or contrast with yours. You needn’t bicker with readers over minor details — just present your case and give them space to share theirs. You’ve fulfilled your role as a critic, and if the reader responds to your work honestly and in good faith, they've done their part, too. Harmony.

When recapping a high-profile series, the difficulty increases. You’re speaking to a broad segment of the population who come to the series from a multitude of angles. In the case of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — in my opinion, the best series on TV right now by a significant margin — the readers who respond to my recaps at The A.V. Club are thoughtful, engaging, and, in keeping with AVC tradition, funny. Their participation makes my job a pleasure. Sometimes they agree with my points; other times, they disagree. Both responses are fair and valid. But when the critic’s opinion slightly diverges from popular sentiment, as mine seems to have done this week, you can only hope that the comments are responding to the words you’ve written, not the grade that’s been pasted definitively on the top of the piece.  

I was only slightly less enthusiastic about this week’s episode of AKot7K, not because of where the story of Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) was headed — his, and the six knights who backed him during Dunk’s fateful Trial of Seven at Ashford Meadow — but because of the unexpected narrative swing it ultimately took. In keeping with all controversial creative choices, critics and readers alike are split on it. Spoilers ahead.

[Again, SPOILERS! I’ll be touching on future story developments for both AKot7K and the books in A Song of Ice and Fire.]

Just as the Trial of Seven between Ser Dunk and Prince Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett) reaches its dramatic apex, Dunk takes a lump to the head and promptly powers down. From there, the viewer is transported far from the churned mud at Ashford to King’s Landing — specifically, to Flea Bottom, a sinkhole of poverty and despair where smallfolk are fodder for thieves, murderers, and the City Watch — some thirteen years before the events of AKot7K. I wrote that this flashback, featuring a younger Dunk (Bamber Todd) and his equally discouraged companion Rafe (Chloe Lea), felt like padding — well-written and produced padding, but padding nonetheless. It will either beguile viewers who want every excruciating detail in Ser Dunk’s biography or irritate those who feel the episode downshifts its hard-won momentum to underscore in thick, red lines the aspects of his upbringing that were already plainly evident.

I have explored these aspects of Dunk’s life in depth over the course of my recap assignment, and it has been a pleasure. That’s because this series has proven just as curious as we are about this unlikely hero who ultimately rose so high in a world dubious of heroes. Who is he? Why is he? AKot7K wants to know, and so do we. Dunk’s big flashback didn’t work for me, but not because I’m some bloodthirsty dunce champing at the bit to watch him thrash Aerion in a muddy, bloody brawl — as satisfying and mortifying as that was to see in the ten minutes of warfare this week’s episode provided. The flashback didn’t land for two reasons. First, it leans on that tired device of killing off a character we’ve just met only to advance the hero’s arc: Rafe goes from a lore footnote to joining Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend in one of pop media’s lousiest clubs.

Second, Rafe’s death and everything leading up to it tell us little about Dunk that we didn’t already know. He’s broke, protective of his own (his mentor Ser Arlan’s memory; his wee squire Egg), and stubbornly decent when decency is so often a liability. We understood all this before Rafe. Learning the why of Dunk’s world philosophy reminded me of that bit in Solo: A Star Wars Story where Woody Harrelson tossed Han Solo his blaster — it’s there because fantasy can’t have a character running around without revealing every aspect of their being, right down to the origin of their underpants. (See also: the origin of Tony Soprano’s Madonna complex in HBO’s The Many Saints of Newark.)

In the penultimate episode of a show so steadfastly committed to character over spectacle, I’m not shocked that it pulled away from the chaos of the Trial of Seven for more interiority, necessary or not. Show creator and episode co-writer Ira Parker said that he and his team “had to” throw it in, though his post-mortem interview with Entertainment Weekly didn’t exactly present his case as to why. He notes that the flashback was present in the early stages of production, which is obvious enough — Flea Bottom is realized here with more horror and claustrophobia than ever before, and the realization of this sequence doesn’t feel like an afterthought. This raises the awkward possibility that the flashback is here simply because it was too costly to kill, that too much money was sunk into casting, costuming, set-building, and shooting to frivolously toss it all out this early in Parker’s tenure as showrunner. “I hate that I’ve had to do a flashback at this point when everybody just wants the battle,” Parker tells EW. “But we had to.”

In all fairness, Rafe’s story does have a structural benefit to AKot7K’s future storytelling ambitions. When George R.R. Martin was writing The Hedge Knight — the novella on which this season is based — the idea of the Blackfyre Rebellion was but a smoldering ember in his mind. Readers now know it as a conflagration whose ramifications, born of King Aegon “The Unworthy” Targaryen’s ruinous reign, are still felt in the known world to this day. (Its ultimate consequences are still forthcoming in The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.) Parker and Martin are well-positioned to seed the many Blackfyre Rebellions yet to come, setting up future seasons of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for success as they introduce critical figures in this seemingly endless war between House Targaryen and Aegon’s upstart bastards.

In that respect, they’re off to a fine start. We see the end results of the battle of the Redgrass Field, where Daemon I Blackfyre’s forces were shattered by pertinent Targaryens Baelor (Bertie Carvel), Maekar (Sam Spruell), and a certain Three-Eyed Crow (or “Raven” if you’re a show purist) named Brynden Rivers. There, Dunk and Rafe are seen pilfering armor and leather from the battlefield to finance a trip to the Free Cities. “We’ll all be plundering that tomb for a dragon’s age,” a man notes to the kids — here, Parker establishes that the rebellion has been squashed, and the realm has entered a brittle period of peace. Useful information for a certainty, and destined to matter beyond Ashford Meadow. Which makes me wonder why the Rafe detour wasn’t shelved for season two, where the story of Dunk and Egg (Dextor Sol Ansell) adapts The Sworn Sword, where veterans of the first Blackfyre Rebellion begin to present themselves.

Still and all, this flashback didn’t work for me the way the rest of this season has. It’s hardly a show-ruining offense — after all, I gave “In the Name of the Mother” a B+, matching the series’ premiere, which I liked quite a bit! But when I see comments complaining about the grade perched over an AVC review instead of the argument its critics provide just below it, it shows me that ratings and scores matter more than the substance behind it to a large contingent of people. Like a dummy, I still refuse to believe that’s true. After all, disagreeing with a review or recap solely based on its score is reflexive, empty stuff; disagreeing with someone’s opinion based on its merits demonstrates a willingness to grapple in the mud a bit. As a certain hedge knight will tell you, that’s where disagreements become interesting.

It’s hard not to walk away satisfied after cracking The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre #1 because it delivers exactly what it promises on the cover. Its story is as boisterous as its title: absurd, loud, and in a constant state of agitation — comic excess at full tilt. Yet none of it feels “sweaty”; I found it delightful rather than annoying, no easy feat when you’re operating with your entire ass out as “Fearless” Fred Kennedy and James “Edward” Clark [sic] are in this debut. When a creator attempts satire, as Kennedy and Clark do here with great zeal, the social commentary has to be calibrated just so. Any miscalculation lands you either in Didactic Land (my least favorite theme park) or Dullsville, where so-obvious-it-ain’t-funny comedies go to die. Here? We’re in Florida, baby — keep up.

After a brisk intro from the book’s resident Cryptkeeper — the castigating, Nancy Reagan–coded First Lady Mandy Laser — FHCM #1 drops us into “Disco-Hippo Wonderland,” the hip-piest place on Earth. Families line up to watch hippos float around (or whatever they do) while the theme park’s drug-kingpin owner, Jans M’jor “Disco” Discau, interrogates a traitor in his midst: Det. Tico Senecoza of the Flamingo City Police Department, whose undercover assignment has gone bust. Unbeknownst to Tico or his captor, Discau’s secret cache of Coke-45 is seconds from a sting by Laser Drug Force’s buxom Agent Clarke Nebraska — and, more dramatically, a rescue courtesy of Tico’s swaggering older brother, Miquel. What follows is bananas.

There’s a specificity to Kennedy and Clark’s jokes that luxuriates in American hyper-excess while nimbly establishing character and mise-en-scène. Clever stuff for a comic with a ridiculous title. From the girl emcee in a thong bikini at the family theme park where most of the issue unfolds to the economy of purpose behind a flicked Zippo that heralds the arrival of the book’s anarchic hero, there’s a presence of mind in the design and structure of The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre that makes it at least 0.01% smarter than the metric tonnage of “manic social satires” polluting comics, film, and TV these days. It swaggers with purpose.

The issue’s comedy is proven through science: yuks-per-minute (YPM) clocks in at a minimum of four successful gags per page. Kennedy drafts a lot of business for Clark to render, yet the breeziness of reading from panel to panel belies a justified comedic confidence rare to see in modern comics. Clark’s figures and faces are recognizably human yet elastic enough to hit the issue’s high notes —the daft faces firing off from the peanut gallery remind me of Jack Davis’s MAD work — and wigglier still to convey the manic action sequences that give the issue its electric charge. Clark’s cartooning shows conviction and consistency. I think he might be my new favorite artist.

If you told me Kennedy and Clark weren’t pals, I’d call you a liar. Their shared instinct for lampoon, the kind born of a truly simpatico sense of humor, bodes well for what’s to come. A steady hand wielding blunt-trauma goofs, a plethora of coked-out hippos, and Sonya Blade anti-drug agents vamping about. Wild stuff. Despite all this show-off bluster, The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre knows exactly what it is and aspires to no more than that — that kind of confidence deserves some in return from its reader.

8 / 10

The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre #1 hits stores on February 18. For more info, click this.

Mad Cave Studios / $4.99
Written by Fred Kennedy.
Art by James Edward Clark

32 pgs. / Mature. Lots of ‘splosions and some cheesecake.

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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If you were to clock the YPM, or “yuks-per-minute,” in Celeste Hughey’s reimagining of Joe Dante’s 1989 suburban horror-comedy The ‘Burbs, you’d land at roughly three jokes per minute. On paper, that makes the show a success. In execution? I’m a tough laugh, so I tried not to dwell too much on the series’s withering, ceaselessly chatty, deeply affected sense of humor. Instead, I tried to invest in the mystery it set before me. How’d that go? I’ll pull a page out of The ‘Burbs 2026’s book and stash that for later on.

But if you’re in a rush and need a takeaway on the show, which drops all eight episodes on Peacock this Sunday, I’ll make it quick: for folks who unironically use “life, laugh, love” as their mantra, who take their black comedy with heaping spoonfulls of sugar, and who enjoy a glass of chardonnay or three with TV night — no judgment — The ‘Burbs should prove diverting enough. Those hoping for a dementedly good time as Keke Palmer (chipper, terrific, absolutely boosting the material) navigates a conspiracy in her suburban cul-de-sac with the same soft-as-cashmere energy as Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, I’d suggest tempering expectations. The ‘Burbs presents as a murder mystery-comedy but lacks the feisty, darkly ironic, EC Comics energy Dante brought to his film, often playing like a young Millennial riff on Scooby-Doo that’s less interested in exhuming a fresh take on its Tales From the Crypt elements than idling comfortably within its comic inoffensiveness.

A darkness descends over the sangria parties and wine nights of Ashford Place with the arrival of Gary (Justin Kirk), a grim fellow who buys the block’s creepiest old house and spends his days filling it with axes and bags of lime. Naturally, he doesn’t make a great first impression with Samira (Palmer), who brings him baked goodies as his fellow new neighbor and has the cops called on her for her trouble. “People are [racist] assholes everywhere,” she’s told by her exhaustingly agreeable hubby Rob (Jack Whitehall, a stale piece of toast if there ever was one). True enough; racism, even the casual, sinister brand that hangs in the air of this neighborhood, is often countered with an even hand. Samira is generally more forgiving than assertive when it rears its head—a strange fit for her litigator character and for Palmer herself, though she inflects these moments with a curious glimmer of mirth, like she’s enjoying some private joke.

Only a small handful of characters can match Palmer’s energy, and when they share the screen, The ‘Burbs succeeds in its warm comic ambitions. Thanks to the support of her new neighbors — widowed Lynn (Julia Duffy), retired soldier Dana (Paula Pell, blurring the film’s Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun roles), and the android-like Tod (Mark Proksch) — Samira finds a safe space to unwind and later commiserate on Gary’s seemingly nefarious doings. Peripherally, other neighbors, like Agnes, their domineering HOA honcho (Danielle Kennedy), drop microaggressions and jokes about Samira’s mixed-race baby. These moments make light commentary on the Black experience in white suburbia, but add little thematic heft to the mystery — at least until the season already has one foot out the door.

Despite the light social static, Samira eventually settles into her new life as a mom and wife. The days are long, though, and she keeps catching Gary doing shady shit from her windows. What’s he up to in that house that sticks out from the cul-de-sac like a zit at prom night? There’s a lot of chardonnay to drink before that reveal, though the agonizing wait contributes one unintentionally funny line from Samira in episode six: “I feel like we’re getting somewhere!”

Along with the extra space largely occupied by sweetly rendered character beats, The ‘Burbs also keeps busy with its multiple plot threads. The most pertinent is a missing figure from Rob’s past, a girl named Alison who once lived in the house Gary now occupies. As the season progresses and Samira and her nosy coterie dig up dirt on both Alison, Gary, and (oops) themselves, more secrets squirm to the surface. Why does Dana’s knee keep acting up at inconvenient moments? Why is Rob in possession of a keepsake that belonged to Alison? Where did Agnes’s dog dig up that huge bone — or, rather, to whom did it once belong? (Less fascinating is the emerging arc of Rob’s childhood friend Naveen, played by Kapil Talwalkar, who begins the series in divorced-guy mode and self-actualizes alongside the mystery’s big reveals. While Talwalkar is fine in the role, his character’s contributions grate something awful.)

Formally, the series’s aesthetic is competent and lacks expression: a dolly zoom here, some shadow play in Gary’s unpleasant basement there, all of it reaching for the cracked Americana of Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies but can only muster a fraction of its visual playfulness. When it bothers with a creative flourish, its underwhelming results denote the series’s lack of genre curiosity. The ‘Burbs is missing the mischievousness Dante brought to his film, and with it, that film’s indelible knack for letting us feel like we were in on a really good joke. (Dante was not included in the production; credit goes to the film’s screenwriter, Dana Olsen.)

What all this amounts to is the basic brunch revival of The ‘Burbs, a pleasant, protracted, faintly anesthetizing time-sink that I’m sure Peacock hopes will keep folks tethered to its streaming app. It’s just the latest in an odious trend we’re seeing in streaming: the TV show based on a movie, not an expansion or legacy sequel or even a prequel (like Ted, another Seth MacFarlane production), but a “reimagining” that stretches a movie people like to the length of a good night’s sleep. Still on the way is Apple TV’s Cape Fear series with Javier Bardem and Amy Adams, and A24 is currently prepping a Texas Chainsaw Massacre series for some damn reason. To Hughey’s credit, the expanse of this adaptation gives her plenty of space to play with suburban tropes just as Dante did thirty-seven years ago, from the neighbor who lets their dog poop on other folks’ lawns to utopian picket fences and immaculate front yards. Only here, it all serves to idealize suburbia, not deconstruct or even lampoon it; that’s for future seasons. Why so sluggish to disrupt the status quo, The ‘Burbs? Must be all that wine.

BEST LINE(s):

“Don’t you dare touch that woman’s pie!” - Agnes, to her poor husband.

“Yeah, there are things that keep me up at night… the odd sound… th-the dark.” - Tod.

BEST MOMENT: Going to have to call it a wash. I enjoyed the wine nights between Samira, Lynn, Dana, and Tod — they share lively banter, truly — but there was never a moment that popped for me during these eight episodes, nothing to take with me once it ended.

SERIES’ MVP: Tod Mann. Strange, almost alien, seemingly asexual yet not without warmth and affection for his friends, Mark Proksch was a much-welcome source of the peculiar energy that The ‘Burbs otherwise lacked.

PICKET FENCES:

• I won’t spoil whether or not any surviving cast members from ‘89 Burbs show up, though I will say that if they do, you may wish they hadn’t.

• If you need another example of how The ‘Burbs stretches over five hours of TV, let me direct you to episode three, “Sardines.” An excruciating amount of the episode is spent with Samira and her fellow neighbors making small talk with a spoilery character in the hopes of pulling information about the mysterious house and its shady new owner. Its b-plot is spent with Rob and Naveen sipping craft brews at the town’s sensibly refurbished watering hole. Gripping, new-Burbs is not.

• Another thing from that episode: Sardines on pretzels actually sound amazing. Why is this show trying to tell me sardines are gross?

• “Who wants to be Watson?” - Naveen, who’s clearly never read the Sherlock Holmes stories.

5 / 10 

The ‘Burbs premieres with all eight episodes on Peacock Sunday, February 8.

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Braving the gauntlet of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that’s bad for you is DoomRocket’s HOT PRESS. This week: a Wonder Man season review, and a look at Image Comics’ Death Fight Forever #1.

There’s a fun prompt going around X-Twitter right now: post “Comics 10/10” with four comics you believe are perfect, unimpeachable, essential to the canon.

I got stuck on this prompt last night and finally came up with four choices this morning, but I still feel weird about participating in the post. If you’re a long-time reader of DoomRocket, you know we very rarely slap a 10/10 on our reviews. My philosophy is that few things in this world are perfect, and refraining from calling something precisely that forces the critic to put more thought into its overall value. I stand by my picks — I chose not to include Love and Rockets because that’s the most obvious work I could choose, and wanted to really ponder what 10/10 means to me at this moment — but would gladly engage in a discussion over each comic’s individual merits with someone who disagreed with me. Because this stuff is, after all, subjective; one person’s yum is another’s yuck.

But what makes me uncomfortable about slapping a “10/10” on anything — look at my Letterboxd; out of the thousands of movies I’ve seen, only 71 have five stars — is that it takes an authoritative stance, and I’ve yet to meet any critic, in any medium, who I’d call the ultimate authority on anything. Yet click over to ComicBookRoundup.com, and you’ll see a bunch of 10s for, say, Marvel’s latest Iron Man #1. Is that a perfect example of the modern comic book — or, failing that, a perfect debut issue? Anyone who puts enough thought into this dorky shit will find cracks in that argument instantly. Anyone claiming that Iron Man #1 (2026) is a perfect 10/10 is put in the position of having to defend that view; however, few of these reviews bother digging too deeply into their reasoning.

Which begs the question: should single issues of comics be reviewed like a movie, TV series, or album? I’ve wrestled with this question for years. Capsule reviews work fine for this format, as long as you use the limited real estate to explore what the issue in question is attempting to do. But single issues are often either a trivial part of a superhero’s never-ending battle or Act II in a movie pitch/comic clearly meant to be read after it’s been collected in a trade or hardcover — the pretentious “graphic novel” in all but presentation.

Another point. I think there’s long been a default impulse in comics criticism to overpraise work. 10/10 is treated as the baseline of quality, and to review anything beneath, say, a 5, is to be either unfair or downright mean. It’s the squishification of comics crit that yanked me out of the game for a long time. Aside from a precious few notable exceptions, like The Comics Journal or Comics Beat, most outlets treat reviews like glorified press releases. I frequently find myself reading reviews and interviews with all the substance of a brochure. Maybe I’m no better at this reviewing gig than anyone else, but I’m self-aware enough to curb my enthusiasm.

Heck, now I’m in the mood to review a comic.

Death Fight Forever might be a blatant nostalgia job, but at least it’s got energy to burn. Here’s an action comic that pulls from very specific influences, Contra and G.I. Joe, and, judging from the cover to its second issue, a smidge of RoboCop thrown in for good measure. I don’t know who’s living the bigger lie: people who say the Eighties are dead or people who refuse to let it die. Either way, Death Fight Forever is here, coated in Saturday morning sugar, and unsurprisingly, it’s fun.

The story: Bandana-sporting renegades, Crash and Bash Biggle, wage side-scrolling war against Lord Slyther, a drug cartel maniac that happens to be a coke-sniffing snake man. In this issue, they team up with a talking tiger named Commander Thunderfang to fight Slyther, and there are many explosions and profane expectorations. The issue is all set up, as debut issues tend to be for some damn reason, but I liked what I saw. One promising bit involves a leather-bound cop-babe named Marla Mendoza who becomes a wild card in the fracas for reasons I’m forbidden from revealing. She and the energy Alexis Ziritt puts into his pages compel me to keep reading for at least one more month. (He returns for issue #2, and Al Gofa, Sam McKenzie, and Erwin Papa jump on future issues.) It also helps that the issue ends with a maniac flourish that I admire.

The story is written by Andrew MacLean, who made Head Lopper, one of my favorite fantasy comics from the last decade. I hope he’ll whip up something similarly mythic for this; with its blistering violence and action figure characters, there’s an opportunity here to press his concept into heady, genre-bending territory. As it stands, there’s an unshakable sense of pent-up nerd rage going on here — a creative logjam that’s finally been loosed on the page. You can see it in Ziritt’s colors, the way he renders his panels like Apocalypse Now if it were an episode of Thundercats, or the cosmic tease of apotheosis that opens the issue. It’s all quite a lot, and while I hope MacLean keeps it that way, the single-issue floppy presentation suggests ongoing investment — I enjoy flipping through a colorful arcade-style comic like anyone else, but I’m finally gray enough to realize that any comic worth its ink needs more of a hook than just a tiger-man dual-wielding Uzis. Though I do admit that’s not a bad place to start.

6.5 / 10

Death Fight Forever #1 hits stores on February 18. To snag a copy, click this.

Written by Andrew MacLean.
Art by Alexis Ziritt.
Letters by Lyndon Radchenka.

Marvel Television’s Wonder Man has a terrific premise that suits its movie-star Avenger incredibly well: An inside baseball look at the demoralizing lows and exhilarating highs of a struggling actor set against the backdrop of Hollywood as it exists in the capes-and-calamaties world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Its pedigree is a perfect match for the material, too — its creators are Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton and 30 Rock producer/writer Andrew Guest. When Wonder Man is operating at peak powers, this union of creator and character makes the series crackle with a sense of life uncommon in this late-phase era of the MCU.

The peak moments in Wonder Man are fleeting. Barring very few exceptions, brand management emanates from every MCU-TV show, and Wonder Man is no different. Even when Marvel breaks from its heavily curated megastructure to satirize itself, it feels like defensiveness. Take that Kevin Feige algorithm joke from She-Hulk: Attorney at Law; it’s safe to make because it’s based on anodyne observation — hey, Feige does run the MCU! — rather than self-criticism. Stories like Wonder Man, which aim to comment on contemporary pop media, can’t rock the boat too much because stories like Wonder Man are Marvel products first and art second. Art is explorative and illuminating; product is stiff and unyielding. Wonder Man is all of these things at once and is, as such, a mixed bag.

Now that I’ve sat with these eight episodes, dumped all at once on Disney+, I can safely say Wonder Man was exactly what I thought it was going to be: a low-calorie experimental indulgence left over from the studios’ post-Endgame expansion. It feels like it could have been an okay movie, and instead was stretched into a streaming time-sink. But it was also more than what I was expecting, too, a throwback to those early 90s Hollywood-insider whine-a-thons that might star Frank Whaley or Michelle Forbes that populated the Sundance lineup and the IFC channel back in the day. The plight of struggling actor Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) fits this bill immaculately.

When we first meet Simon, he’s a mess. He’s blown a minor speaking role on American Horror Story with unsolicited creative notes; upon returning to his tiny apartment, his long-suffering girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) dumps him. Emotionally and professionally adrift, he hassles his agent (X Mayo) for work when news hits that the Herzog-coded auteur Von Kovak (Zlatko Burić) is casting an ambitious remake of Wonder Man — a role that Simon believes he was born to play. As he embarks on this journey to fame, terrific location photography abounds: L.A. is often shot from the middle of the street (appropriately, there’s a lot of driving in this show), which gives the city’s vibrant storefronts and restaurants a peripheral framing that makes Simon appear small among his grandiose Hollywood dreams.

One element of Wonder Man I worried would be the most distracting of the series turned out to be its salvation: phony Mandarin/disgraced actor Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley). He returns to L.A. from magical Ta Lo in Shang-Chi just in time to be picked up by the Department of Damage Control (for superpowered types, they’re the MCU version of ICE). DODC compels Trevor to spy on Simon — he’s suspected of having abilities far beyond those of mortal men — or else spend the rest of his life in an off-the-books prison. From here, Wonder Man coasts on its premise, with the “a new friendship is predicated on a lie, only our hero doesn’t know it yet” trope treated like high drama. Kingsley, tasked with playing both comic relief and straight man, keeps things livelier than Abdul-Mateen, whose unwavering sullenness makes the entire production feel drowsier than it should. (It’s rare to see a leading man in a major TV series mutter through every line he’s given.) It doesn’t help that Simon’s superpowered repression is kept surface-level, omitting any nuance from his character — or intriguing ugliness, which is only hinted at during the premiere and “Pacoima,” the series’s strongest episode.

Cretton and Guest are more interested in the fickleness of fame, as seen in the showy but dramatically malnourishing detour episode “Doorman,” and once again when Simon scores his coveted superhero role. This angle invites a lot of lazy jokes about the entertainment industry — Mario Lopez cameos as a pop commentator, and Josh Gad plays a presumably more unscrupulous version of himself — but where does that place their story? Is this a comedy, a drama, or a half-hearted fusion of the two? It makes sense for Wonder Man to be at odds with itself (Simon’s repression of his powers is, after all, the series’ core conflict), but being multiple things at once makes it difficult to find a foothold sturdy enough to support investment. (To boil it down: Wonder Man is an offbeat non-superhero character drama/buddy comedy.)

So, in Wonder Man, is Simon Williams an actor, a hero, both, or neither? I point to a meme that has become useful critical shorthand for the streaming era: the “Surf Dracula.” Before streaming, a high-concept TV show would have its hero doing their freaky thing front and center every week; now, that same premise is reimagined as a mopey, protracted origin story where the lead doesn’t do much of anything until the last five minutes. Why would Marvel Television, custodian of some of fiction’s most vivid characters, turn Simon Wiliams into a Surf Dracula now, when Daredevil is back to its Netflix roots as a rooftop-leaping Man Without Fear? Why make a TV show that is essentially “The Player in the MCU” that offers only a gentle ribbing of Hollywood and an apology for superhero bloat in 2026?

BEST LINE(s):

“But I can’t act.” “Who cares? I can’t act. It’s never stopped me from being an actor.” - The Doorman (Byron Bowers) and Josh Gad (“as Himself”).

BEST MOMENT: Mom’s island. Birthdays have a tendency to open old wounds. (What is it about them? The punch? It can’t be the cake.) Simon and his brother Eric (Demetrius Grosse) have it out over Simon’s seeming inability to grow up — Eric ridicules the gift he brought their mother, using money she gave him that Eric, in turn, gave her — diminishing Simon at a moment when he’s at his lowest. Simon has more control over his ionic powers than his emotions, so when Eric pushes things too far, he goes berserk, destroying his mother’s cherished kitchen island. Suddenly, Wonder Man springs to dramatic life. It’s the one scene where I felt I was finally getting to know Simon beyond the surface-level sads the series and Abdul-Mateen had already presented me. The moment doesn’t last.

SERIES’ MVP: It’s hardly a contest, but Sir Benjamin Kingsley walks away with Wonder Man. I’d have broken him out of jail for more adventures, too; Simon made the right call.

ROSE-TINTED SHADES:

• Simon’s brother Eric is the supervillain Grim Reaper in the comics. I wish the MCU was as wild and strange as the comics.

• Speaking of which, I knew I remembered Demetrius Grosse’s face from somewhere: among many other roles, he played hustler Jermaine Jones in L.A. Noire.

• Personally, I would never want to be a part of a club that would have Josh Gad as a member.

• “I’m no Wonder Man.” And what is Wonder Man, again? Have we seen or heard anything about what the hero is, beyond a very brief clip at the beginning of the series and some light exposition? What is it about him that Simon clings to, beyond his connection to Simon’s dear, departed dad?

• Joe Pantoliano keeps a Baby’s Day Out poster framed over his toilet. A sorry state for poor Baby Bink! He also keeps one in his office, which blunts the joke somewhat.

• I have finally seen shitty AI art in a multi-million-dollar TV series, and I have to say, it sucks. Couldn’t Mr. Feige hire one of the many willing artists at his company’s comics division to contribute a piece? Or is this him toe testing the waters to see if people actually care about the decline of human-made art for mass entertainment? Grim times.

5.5 / 10

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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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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Braving the gauntlet of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that’s bad for you is DoomRocket’s HOT PRESS. This week: thoughts on the possible plotline for Man of Tomorrow, Troma’s rerelease of Luther the Geek, and select TV-watching.

I can usually ignore that firehose of rumors that sprays hearsay all over socials every single day of our short lives, especially when they’re about superhero movies. There’s an ironclad rule here: if there’s news about Warner Bros’ still very early-days DC Universe and DCU honcho James Gunn ain’t confirmed it, it ain’t news. Maybe it’s because this particular rumor hit me before I had coffee this morning, but I’m going to indulge it just a bit. Because, as media types used to snark back in the day, this would be “big if true.” Or, at least, big for me.

According to some damn bot account or another, Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow, which we know will feature Lars Eidinger’s Brainiac as its main villain, could be pulling plot points from the 1993 comic event Panic in the Sky!, a personal favorite storyline of mine from the Superman line’s vaunted Triangle Era. It’s the post-Crisis story where Superman finally becomes a leader in the DC Universe, uniting its disparate heroes against Brainiac, whose Warworld threatens Earth. Among Brainiac’s running crew: Draaga (a Warworld gladiator who gets his ass handed to him by Superman and develops a grudge), Supergirl (in the comics at this point, a protoplasmic alien called Matrix), and a certain warrior queen Man of Tomorrow is casting — someone many eager beavers hoped would be Wonder Woman, but who, if the rumors are to be believed, will instead be Maxima, Warrior Queen of Almerac.

Why I’ll be stoked if the rumor proves true: Maxima rules. Co-created by Roger Stern and George Pérez in Action Comics #645 (already fetching $26 on eBay, which says it all about the comic book secondary market), she’s a lusty warrior queen who comes to Earth seeking a worthy mate and chooses Superman as her new consort. She’s fun. Dig up some of her earliest appearances (you can read her first appearance for free over on DC Infinite), or check out the “Warrior Queen” episode of Superman: The Animated Series (season two), where NYPD Blue’s Sharon Lawrence voices the character. It’s on HBO Max right now, and it’s great. Bonus: the episode also features the late Miguel Ferrer as a sinister Almeracian.

Second, it’s just a great DC crisis event. It escalates its stakes while keeping them character-focused, so the reader actually feels the plot twists because they hit these characters so profoundly. It pulls from nearly every corner of its core universe, from Metron and the New Gods to Max Lord’s offbeat Justice League to its human-level coterie of heroes like Blue Beetle, Gangbuster, Thorn, Nightwing, and Batman, a visually eclectic roster that looks like comic candy. It also scales up the level of threats Superman faces and tests him in new and provocative ways — for DC, a proving ground for future events like The Death of Superman and a perfect story for Gunn’s Superman, who, as Superman presents him, is still relatively new to this world-saving business.

Tempering my expectations because: well, a lot of reasons. First, Gunn ain’t said it’s so. But also, there’s just not enough to pull from the DCU as it exists today to make it an honest-to-goodness adaptation. Gunn’s said that most of the main DC characters who will appear in the film have already been introduced — we can safely assume he means David Corenswet’s Superman and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, the latter of whom Gunn has said will loom largest in the story, along with Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane and Milly Alcock’s Supergirl. After that, the roster gets murky really fast. A DCU Batman is a long way off, and Gunn isn’t going to squander that debut in a team-up jamboree like this.

So it’s more likely we’ll see Mr. Terrific, Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, Max Lord, and, hell, I dunno, Peacemaker? Who else is there? The Creature Commandos? Clayface? Hal Jordan? Guy Gardner? (Actually, Guy’s a safe bet; he’s a pain in Superman’s tush for the duration of the comic event.) One other thing that makes me iffy about Panic as Man of Tomorrow’s baseline is Supergirl. If Gunn skews close to the comics, she could end up allied with Brainiac for a portion of the film, which is hard to square with the DCU version of the character. From what we can glean from the Supergirl trailer, Kara Zor-El witnesses Brainiac bottle her home city during or just after Krypton’s destruction. If Panic is the adaptive blueprint and Kara teams up with Brainiac, what does that mean for the ending of Supergirl, which adapts from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Woman of Tomorrow? Distressing stuff, if it’s true.

Too many ifs! Almost like it’s not worth our energy to entertain every rumor that comes our way. Imagine this being your job, writing about what-ifs all day long. I tried that early in my career at outlets that will remain nameless, and I did not have a good time. Why am I doing it now? You can’t see it, but I pulled my copy of Superman: The Triangle Era Omnibus Volume 2 this morning, flipped through the Panic pages, and accidentally let my immature brain run wild with the possibility of seeing this thing on the big screen. I’m a fool for hope. Or a sucker.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The first episode dropped on Sunday, and, gods be good, I liked it. A smart, small-scale approach to Westeros, as it is presented in the novellas. No frills, loads of irreverent humor, and, so far, pretty immaculate casting choices. (MVP thus far? Peter Claffey’s Dunk! He’s great!) I’m recapping this season weekly for The A.V. Club; here’s this week’s offering. I’ll do my best not to think about what happens when this series runs out of book to adapt for now. Dunk & Egg is on TV, and it’s freaking me out!

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials. Clockwork storytelling from Broadchurch/Doctor Who’s Chris Chibnall: lots of style, and unengaging on a story level. That’s possibly due to this being adapted from one of Christie’s lesser works, or, just as likely, indicative of the present state of factory-made streaming production that gussies up an old bauble for immediate consumption. No time to polish the facets.

However, I do enjoy the way candlelight bounces off of rich woodwork, and I enjoy that twitchy nose thing that Martin Freeman does, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I enjoyed large portions of Netflix’s three-part miniseries, which deals in international intrigue (not one of Christie’s strong suits), conspiracy masks, and, more engagingly, a plucky detective-in-the-making in Mia McKenna-Bruce’s Bundle. Her perspicacity is infectious. In the end, plucky, diverting fluff bolstered by game performances; if Chibnall can figure out how to execute mystery as successfully as his dynamite production design, I’d happily show up for another season.

THE MOVIE: Luther the Geek

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1989.

NEW FORMAT: Vinegar Syndrome’s 2K transfer from 2016 is represented with the film’s original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and DTS-HD MA mono track. A “Tromatic Special Edition” from Troma Entertainment.

RE/PLAYING: And now, the latest Blu-ray release from Troma Entertainment: a 1989 home-invasion thriller about a boy fascinated by the carnival geek — that unfortunate soul who bites the heads from chickens for drinking money — who grows up into an ersatz vampire, chomping chunks from his victims’ necks with his filed-sharp steel dentures. Edward Terry is Luther, and plays him with the wild-eyed cadence of a farmhand gone feral: he eyeballs his female victims like Lennie from Of Mice and Men and, between bites, clucks like a chicken. His first kill, an old lady sitting politely on a public bench, is handled ridiculously: gore dumps out of her neck like spaghetti noodles. It’s bona fide Troma schlock of the highest order.

It’s hardly peak unpleasantness. Later, Luther busts into the home of Hilary (Joan Roth) and ties her to a bed; her daughter, Beth (Stacey Haiduk), gets her breasts soaped up by her biker boyfriend, only for both to soon be terrorized by this clucking maniac; a state trooper (Jerry Clarke) gets chickens tossed at him during a barn standoff. Given the material, the film doesn’t push these odious scenarios to their most awful extremes so much as mine them for tension, punctuating things with bursts of violence to maintain a sense of danger. It’s a softer Troma offering, more smartly made than you may expect, yet yucky enough to earn its unsavory reputation.

I wish its dim-bulb politics were at least interesting. Luther’s parole hearing creates the obvious bifurcation between fire-and-brimstone conservatism and kind-hearted liberalism that champions rehabilitation over incarceration. Here, that conversation is boiled down to a human being looking at a clucking maniac like Luther and believing he should be free as a bird. “Luther Watts has earned a second chance,” a hairsprayed prison psychologist says, to derisive cackling from a silver-haired parole boardmember, who fires back, “Up yers, ya bleedin’-heart bitch!” What is writer/director Carlton J. Albright saying? The answer comes quickly: Luther’s first act as a free man is opening the jugular of that nice old lady. Whatever rehabilitation he achieved is pure background noise — we don’t see it, can’t infer it, and aren’t given reason to believe he wasn’t just fooling his shrinks — so the film’s “throw away the key” stance can’t be taken seriously.

I don’t think it’s meant to. After all, with his steel chompers and yokel gait, Luther is presented as a backwoods vampire, a fictional weirdo stalking the Illinois farmlands looking for fresh blood. There’s also a pathology to Luther’s whole deal that presses into fantasy that Albright actually thinks through. At one point, he knocks poor Stacy Haiduk out and dances with her from behind, licking and kissing her neck as though he were caught in some kind of romantic reverie. Later, someone puts on a hen act to stall their imminent death, and he’s thunderstruck by love. It’s the kind of twisted shit you expect from a movie like this; in its darker moments, Luther the Geek overachieves.

ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: There’s not much to report on its latest home video release. It’s essentially a repackaging of Vinegar Syndrome’s 2K remaster from 2016, with all its supplemental material tossed in for good measure (director’s commentary and interviews). Troma even reuses supplements that Syndrome borrowed from the film’s original 2005 DVD, including “Fowl Takes,” a smattering of behind-the-scenes segments that elucidate the methods behind the film’s practical effects, including an extended version/thin explanation of Haiduk’s shower scene.

RE/PLAY VALUE: There’s only so much polish that needs to be applied to a nightmare clucker like Luther the Geek — so Troma’s easy-does-it approach turns out to be a benefit, a cheap zip-up of all the film’s prior home video releases into one handy-dandy Blu-ray package. If you ever felt you needed to own a copy of this particular movie, you likely already have the Vinegar Syndrome disc, and you won’t find much new to discover here. For the uninitiated looking to ruin a pleasant afternoon with this nasty bit of business, the transfer remains as solid as they come and worth the cheap purchase; man/chicken peril has rarely looked so crispy.

6 / 10

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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Pilot Movie — “Spider-Man”

CBS’s 1977 live-action series The Amazing Spider-Man was so short-lived that many die-hard Marvel zombies don’t even know it exists. Including this feature-length backdoor pilot, only fourteen episodes were ever produced. Meanwhile, The Incredible Hulk debuted the same year, on the same network, and ran for five beloved seasons. The disparity isn’t hard to understand. The Hulk could be reimagined as a loner who becomes embroiled in the troubles of ordinary people, but the Wall Crawler is a superhero through and through, and television didn’t have the budget to pull off his brand of pyrotechnics. Worse, they were unwilling to commit to the nigh-Salingerian pathos at Spider-Man’s core.

Spider-Man begins when a doctor walks out of his office in the middle of an appointment to commit a robbery. A lawyer strolls out of court for similarly felonious reasons. (Nobody notices they’re wearing identical pins on their jackets.) Soon, an anonymous blackmailer takes responsibility for mind-controlling these upstanding citizens, demanding the city pay him an exorbitant ransom. While that’s a decent enough setup, it’s far from original, and distinctly lacking in supervillainous flair. It feels less like a spectacular Spider-Man adventure and more like an idea leftover from another show — like this one.

When we meet Peter Parker (The Sound of Music’s Nicholas Hammond), he’s a science graduate student trying to sell his artsy photographs to Daily Bugle Editor-in-Chief J. Jonah Jameson (played far too nicely by Bewitched’s David White). Anyone who’s read classic 70s Spidey comics will get a kick out of seeing Pete in a V-neck sweater and sports jacket, film camera slung over his shoulder, walking around a messy, realistic newsroom. White’s uncommitted performance aside, it momentarily feels like a portal has been opened into Marvel’s New York City, especially with Hilly Hicks (Roots) turning in a vibrant take on Robbie Robertson. Seeing a collegiate Spidey is refreshing, if rare; it’s a status quo from the comics that’s frequently overshadowed by his seemingly more popular high school era (considering Marvel’s bullying tendency to keep Parker stuffed in a locker).

But it’s odd that he’s trying to sell news photos before becoming Spider-Man. Sure, he’s broke, as lore dictates, and there’s a great running gag that he needs exactly $46 for a piece of lab equipment. But why photojournalism? His lack of clear motivation only worsens after routine lab work results in that fateful radioactive bite.

Back to the plot. Another mind-control victim drives straight at a wall, with Pete caught in its path, and he saves himself thanks to some horribly unconvincing crawling effects. So far, this modest adventure aligns enough with his classic origin story. But later, taking his new powers for a test drive, Pete spots a purse-snatching in progress and immediately puts a stop to it. There’s no hesitation, no selfish arrogance, and no dead Uncle Ben to compel him to action — and so, with no great tension comes no great reason for the audience to care.

Another break from lore: rather than being an outcast, unable to connect with his peers and oppressed by an overbearing sense of responsibility, this Peter Parker becomes blandly cheerful, with Hammond throwing in a dash of smugness into the bargain. Sometimes he’s charming, but his smarminess chafes. The only friend we see him briefly interact with is another science student — the movie works around classic frenemies like Harry Osborn and Flash Thompson — so we never get to see how his interests set him apart from typical Seventies youth culture. Aunt May briefly pops by, and Uncle Ben seemingly doesn’t exist. And so, with no real personal life for his crime-fighting to disrupt, and no tragic guilt to drive him, the character comes across as a bit of a blank.

He does make himself a snazzy costume, though, to photograph his exploits for the Bugle. Unlike every big-screen Spider-Man, usually decked out in a combination of latex and CGI, this one sports spandex (booties included), and it succeeds through its sole virtue of simplicity. He appears the way Spider-Man ought to — like a weirdo in a brightly colored full-body stocking. Between the homemade threads and low-budget cinematography, and Hammond’s stunt double’s gangly body language, it’s conceivable why people would be freaked out seeing this guy crawling up a high-rise.

Investigating the mind-control scheme, Pete crosses paths with the put-upon police Captain Barbera, played by Michael Pataki, a veteran character actor who chews scenery as viciously as his cigars. (The mind boggles that Pataki wasn’t cast as Jameson.) Pete also encounters Judy Tyler (Lisa Eilbacher, Beverly Hills Cop), a fellow student whose father has fallen prey to the mind-controlling blackmailer. He immediately inserts himself into her life, and she lets him for no other reason than the plot demands it, leading Pete to the self-help group her father had joined. There, he finally encounters the film’s heavy, Edward Byron (Dark Shadows’ Thayer David). When not brainwashing his clients with a low-grade lightshow, Byron offers anti-inspirational blather like ”You’ll never be happy by trying to be happy.” David’s performance is suitably villainous, but it’s an empty role. This ain’t Kraven’s Last Hunt. Hell, it’s not even The Coming of the Kangaroo.

It may have been impossible for Seventies television to give us a convincing Doctor Octopus or Green Goblin, but without a proper supervillain to fight, Spider-Man isn’t given much to do. Spidey’s original cartoon theme song claimed action as his reward; by that metric, this movie is a complete failure. A fight against three brainwashed martial artists is laughable, featuring sped-up film, stiff choreography, and Spidey repeatedly running from the fray. Spider-Man doesn’t look cool shuffling around like an ordinary person — he looks cool spinning, flipping, and crouching, but his film doesn’t have the budget for gymnastics. When Judy’s father nearly throws himself off a building, Spider-Man rescues him not by dramatically swinging in on a webline, but by simply picking him up. And that webline? A length of rope. Even more perplexing, Spidey does all this in silence, not cracking a single wiseass remark. The budget can’t explain that one away.

In the end, there’s no climactic showdown. The story simply concludes with Spider-Man winning mostly by chance. He doesn’t even confront Byron before yanking down the satellites he was using to beam out his commands. Most of the story leading up to this confrontation feels just as listless — scenes follow one after another with no sense of purpose or momentum. And in the final seconds, as though CBS was out to prove how little they understood the character, Peter Parker, the poster child for girl trouble, the original sad sack, just strolls off cheerfully with a pretty woman on his arm, like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Never before has a happy ending been so maddening.

BEST LINE: “People shouldn’t interfere with the law. Let the police do that.” - Captain Barbera.

BEST MOMENT: Limping away from a fight with the martial arts goons, Spider-Man tries to get a taxi home. When the cabbie realizes that spandex super-suits don’t have pockets for cash, he drives away, leaving Spidey to hitch a ride in a garbage truck. It’s sublimely pathetic.

EPISODE’S MVP: No surprise here, folks — it’s the amazing Spider-Man, no matter how flawed this portrayal is.

COLLECTING COBWEBS:

• Spidey’s spider-sense is portrayed as him seeing flashes of events that are about to occur or already occurred. In the following episodes, Pete’s eyes and the images he sees flash blue and red. It’s a fun, reasonably inventive twist on a power that’s difficult to visualize in live action.

• The other Spider-actor Hammond reminds me most of is Tom Holland, who also plays the part too cheerfully. I could totally see Hammond sucking up to Iron Man.

• The mind control device works by “resonating alpha waves.” I don’t know what that is, but it sounds neat!

• Later episodes recast Robert F. Simon as a gruffer J.J.J. They also replaced Robbie with Rita Conway, played by Chip Fields, who is essentially Glory Grant with a different name. She’s delightful.

• Stan Lee once said, in Marvel’s Pizzazz magazine no less, that the series was “too juvenile.” Stan was right.

• Pete ignores May’s reminder to take his allergy pills and then drops the doohickey he made to trace the mind control signal because of a sneeze. Hee hee!

• If you think Uncle Ben being excised from the story is bad, in another episode, May refers to her departed husband as Uncle Max. Who the #*@$ is Uncle Max?!

3.5 / 10

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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.