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Salem Horror Fest 2024 Week 1, Day 2: It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This (2023) and Livescreamers (2023)

The second night of the Salem Horror Fest was where the real horror movies came out, and they had a theme: found footage. The similarities ended there, though. The first film of the night was a lo-fi, no-budget film that felt evocative of The Blair Witch Project with its distinctly freeform style, while the second one was a hyper-modern one set in a Twitch stream gone horribly wrong. How were they? Read on...

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/04/salem-horror-fest-2024-week-1-day-2-it.html>

It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This (2023)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, the writers, directors, and stars of It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This, are among the rare found footage filmmakers who understand the things that only this style of filmmaking can do, and exploit this to the fullest. This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it means that this film can often be fairly slow and plodding, the camera capturing as many mundane moments as it does big scares and the flow of the film not readily conforming to a traditional structure. On the other, this means that it also had a very particular organic energy to it reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, another film that understood this, lending credibility to the basic premise that this is supposed to actually be footage recovered by a young couple who were hunting for ghosts in their house. It's a meandering film that takes its sweet time getting to where it wants to go, but one where I appreciated the ultimate destination, and over the course of its run, the found footage/mockumentary style got me into the headspace of its protagonists and helped me grow more attached to them as characters. It's a tiny little film with a lot of heart, and while Kempf and Toti's insistence on only showing it at live screenings for the time being (you can schedule one on their website) will undoubtedly ensure that it doesn't become more than a cult classic, I did not regret watching it.

The basic premise is found footage boilerplate: Rachel and Nick are a married couple who, the both of them being horror/paranormal enthusiasts and (alongside Rachel's friend Christian in the city) amateur filmmakers, decide to buy a dirt-cheap, run-down house in their small town in order to shoot a horror movie -- and maybe spot some real ghosts. The place they bought was reputed to be haunted, and sure enough, at night they spot random people standing outside staring unflinchingly at the house, the beginning of a series of paranormal events that come paired with indications that their little film set may be having some kind of psychic effect on them.

The first half of the film or so is devoted to Rachel, Nick, and Christian's relationship and the mundane, day-to-day activities of their lives and the film project they're working on, and these scenes proved critical. I got a sense that these were real people whose lives were caught on camera as opposed to characters in a movie, giving the film a real, lived-in texture that lent authenticity to everything that happened next. The small-town Missouri setting where this was filmed also did wonders in this department, the protagonists explicitly pointing out that the reason they were able to get the house for so cheap was because their hometown was an out-of-the-way dump, a feeling that definitely came through. The film's attempts to be scary, on the other hand, were often its weakest parts, perhaps most visible in one of its first big horror set pieces, which consists of Rachel and Christian silently sitting together in front of a flickering candle for several uninterrupted minutes until we get a huge jump scare. I get what this scene was trying to go for, but after about a minute or so, it crossed the line and just had me saying "enough is enough, get to the point." It was when the scares tied into the character work that they worked best, especially with the growing hints in the back half of the film that Rachel in particular is slowly losing her mind in her obsession with the house. I would've liked to see more of a focus on this side of the story, a more psychological horror film about Rachel's spiral into madness indicating that she may not be as immune to the house's malignant psychic influence as she thinks she is, and that it's just manifesting differently for her compared to the various people who gather outside to stare at it, especially considering the film's ending, which wrapped it up on a suitably creepy note that managed to pull off a lot considering the low budget.

The Bottom Line

It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This was a rough and imperfect film, but one whose low-budget qualities ultimately won me over and played a major role in what I liked most about it. If this ever comes to your area, give it a look.

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Second film of the night stood at the exact opposite end of the found-footage spectrum, going for internet modernity instead of small-town grit.

Livescreamers (2023)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

At once a love letter to horror gaming and a vicious takedown of everything toxic about the increasingly commercial world of video game streaming, Livescreamers is a film that combines the "set on a computer screen" conceit of Unfriended with a modernized version of the basic premise of the crappy 2000s horror flick Stay Alive: a group of livestreamers employed by a Rooster Teeth-like company called Janus Gaming decide to play a new multiplayer horror game called House of Souls together for a livestream, only for it to turn out that the game is haunted, knows a lot of their personal secrets, and makes it clear that if they die in the game, they die for real, leading them to start tearing each other apart as all their behind-the-scenes drama starts spilling out into the open. It's undoubtedly a better film than Stay Alive, too, buoyed by creative writing, some good scares, an authentic understanding of gamer/livestreamer culture, and not least of all the actual game itself, which were enough to make up for some hokey acting throughout. This was a very fun ride that I would highly recommend.

I didn't bring up Rooster Teeth back there for no reason, either. Anybody who has one foot in geek culture knows about the behind-the-scenes chaos that destroyed that company, once a pioneer of online media made for and by nerds, in the last few years, from casual bigotry to pedophilia to overwork of its employees, and while writer/director Michelle Iannantuono was in large part drawing from her own experiences in media when writing these characters, the interview she gave afterwards indicated that elements of Rooster Teeth's downfall also informed her writing, complete with some of the dialogue being direct quotes from leaked chat logs. Janus Gaming, like Rooster Teeth, is a company that loves to put forward an image of positivity and inclusion for its fans, but behind the scenes, it's an absolute shitshow where everybody has beef with one another and the leadership is as two-faced as the company's namesake. Taylor is grooming his underage female fans behind his wife Gwen's back, and their boss Mitch knew about it but covered it up to save face. Nemo had a frightening encounter with a mentally unhinged fan that caused him to close his DMs and stop interacting with the fans. Jon and Davey, a pair of very attractive young men, blatantly queerbait female viewers for ratings in ways that Dice, who is actually queer, finds distasteful. Dice finds themself overworked, tokenized, and underappreciated by everyone at Janus, especially with their health problems and Mitch's refusal to cover his employees' health insurance. The game knows all this and ruthlessly exploits it, throwing the characters into situations where they have incentive to leave one another to die if they want to progress, and when that happens, the knives come out. While I wasn't fully sold on the cast's performances, which often veered between overly histrionic and stilted once they left their clean-cut streamer personas, I did buy their characters as the kind of personalities you often encounter in the world of online fame, both the kinds who exploit their power over others and the normal people who find themselves slowly ground down by the industry.

And it was all helped by House of Souls, the elaborate tech demo that Iannantuono made for the film, evocative of all manner of horror games both classic and modern ranging from Resident Evil to Outlast to Until Dawn. Even beyond the more personal touches that the game serves up for the protagonists indicating that there's something else going on with it, this is a game I could see people not only actually playing, but eagerly watching others play, filled with creative environments, set pieces, lots of Easter eggs and deep-cut references that don't feel forced, and a very cool-looking "boss" monster who regularly accosts the protagonists throughout their playthrough. Movies about video games often have a habit of not understanding what games are actually like, or at least having a very old-fashioned understanding of such from back when the middle-aged screenwriters were kids with Super Nintendos, often throwing in the most surface-level references to more modern games to show that they're Still With It. With this, it's clear that Iannantuono is somebody who is fully immersed in modern games and gaming culture, and replicated on screen the kind of game you could imagine coming out on Steam today, or at least at the height of the 2010s boom in indie horror gaming.

The Bottom Line

Livescreamers is already one of the highlights of the Salem Horror Fest for me. Its video game references and satire of gamer culture mean that geeks in particular will get a lot out of it, but even if the only time you've ever picked up a controller is because you were buying one for your kids, this is still a very good horror flick that I highly recommend when it hits home video and streaming.

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Review: The People's Joker (2022)

Just because I left Fort Lauderdale, and with it Popcorn Frights, behind when I moved to Boston last year doesn't mean I have to give up on horror festivals. And just as I managed to sneak in a trip to the Telluride Horror Show amidst my adventures in Utah back in 2022, so too did I find that -- where else? -- Salem, Massachusetts hosted the annual Salem Horror Show in April and May. Tonight was the first night, and they screened one of the festival's token non-horror films in The People's Joker, a queer Batman spoof made without any official approval from DC Comics or Warner Bros. (They originally had a screening of Hocus Pocus planned with Kathy Najimy as a special guest, but Najimy had to cancel at the last minute.) How was it?

The People's Joker (2022)

Not rated

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/04/salem-horror-fest-week-1-day-1-peoples.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

The People's Joker exists in a place very similar to that enjoyed by Escape from Tomorrow. In both cases, you have independent filmmakers making unlicensed, unauthorized use of American pop iconography, Disney in the case of Escape from Tomorrow and DC Comics in the case of this film, as a way of satirizing and critiquing it with a particular focus on its corporate ownership and its role in the modern economy. Unlike Disney, which permitted the release of Escape from Tomorrow, DC Comics and Warner Bros. actively tried to clamp down on this film, which was ultimately saved by fair use laws protecting parodies like this. And of the two, I'd argue that this film pulls off what it was trying to do a lot better. While both films are elevated by a particular psychedelic edge and punk-rock attitude, Escape from Tomorrow was too incoherent to really stick the landing or even really convey what it was trying to say, while The People's Joker manages to successfully pull off being not only a dark parody of Batman in which the Joker is the hero, but also a hilarious comedy in its own right, a queer coming-out story, a satire of the entertainment industry (especially stand-up and sketch comedy), and a film that manages to get its message across loud and clear. For obvious reasons, I don't expect this to be more than a cult classic, but it's one I enjoyed and do not regret watching.

In this take on Batman's most iconic villain, one that's most obviously based on the movie Joker but draws on many versions of the character (as well as elements of Harley Quinn), the Joker is now a trans woman who leaves her disapproving mother in Smallville, Kansas for Gotham City in the hopes of becoming a comedian like her idol, UCB Live star Ra's al Ghul. There, upon being exposed to the gatekeeping and hypocrisy of the world of mainstream standup comedy, which here serves largely to prop up a corporate-run dystopia even as it still claims the legacy of those who once spoke truth to power, she starts her own underground "anti-comedy" troupe in an abandoned carnival that comes to be comprised of many of Batman's traditional baddies from the comics. (Her trademark gag is inviting people onstage to tell the world their saddest experiences and then huffing Smilex and laughing her ass off at their misery, because after all, this is still the Joker we're talking about.) This eventually puts her on a collision course with Batman himself, who's depicted as not only the jackbooted thug that more cynical deconstructions of superhero comics have framed him as, but also a perverted closet case on top of it. (Let's just say, this film gets a lot of mileage out of all those jokes you've heard about his relationship with his sidekick Robin.)

The film ain't exactly subtle in what it's saying. UCB Live is a clear-cut parody of Saturday Night Live, right down to the fact that Lorne Michaels is a character in the film, and moreover, its initialism is lifted straight from the famed Chicago comedy troupe the Upright Citizens Brigade that played such a major role in the development of standup and sketch comedy in the '90s and '00s, including producing multiple SNL stars. And while the film never names him so directly, you also get the sense that its writer, director, and star Vera Drew really isn't a fan of Joe Rogan or the standup circle he's built around himself, either. The Joker's introduction to UCB Live's casting has her body being scanned and her being deemed a potential comedy superstar because she has a small penis and is therefore mistaken for the kind of insecure man who the industry is built upon. Her comic idol Ra's starred in a Borat-like film whose main joke was making fun of foreigners. The whole reason Batman, an avatar of the elite if ever there was one (being the CEO of Wayne Enterprises and all), comes after her is because she directly criticizes and threatens the ruling class in a way that the corporate, sanitized world of UCB Live merely pretends to. Drew is somebody who clearly has experience with comedy and the people who inhabit it, and is very much writing that experience into the meat of the story, a metaphorical representation of an entertainment industry that, in her view, only cloaks itself in populism and progressive language enough that it can fend off criticism without actually making any meaningful changes.

Much of this is told through a mix of a riotous and raunchy comedy and the Joker's romance with her fellow comic Jason Todd, aka "Mr. J", a trans man who's envisioned here as a mix of Robin and the edgelord Jared Leto version of the Joker from the DC Extended Universe. The gags came flying at a mile a minute, and often had me busting my gut in laughter. The whole cast is game for the material, with Drew making the Joker a compelling anti-hero not just as a comic presence but also as somebody whose journey from a Midwestern girl-trapped-in-a-boy's-body to a flamboyant Clown Princess of Crime was one that I found myself genuinely invested in. Kane Distler as Mr. J was also an interesting presence, somebody whose relationship with the Joker starts promisingly only for him to turn emotionally abusive and self-centered (complete with a "gaslighting" pun that had me cracking up), indicating that, when he transitioned, he wound up embracing the most noxious forms of hypermasculinity. And as for the style of the film, Drew goes for an exaggerated feel that combines live-action filmmaking, highly stylized CGI, what appears to be a mannequin representing Poison Ivy, and very crude animation both 2D and 3D to create a feeling that reminded me of watching Adult Swim or surfing Newgrounds back in the 2000s. There clearly wasn't much of a budget here, so Drew instead leaned on creativity, both her own and the dozens of artists worldwide who each contributed to the film. It was as unique a film to watch as it was an entertaining comedy, one that demonstrated a lot of talent and commitment on the part of everybody involved.

The Bottom Line

There's no way in hell that The People's Joker is ever getting a wide release, but if it plays near you, I highly recommend seeking it out, as a twisted, countercultural sendup of everything from superheroes to mainstream comedy to who gets to call themselves "the counterculture".

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Review: Abigail (2024)

Abigail (2024)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/04/review-abigail-2024.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

The trailers for Abigail, the latest from the Radio Silence team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, promised a simple, straightforward horror/comedy that inverted the premise of their prior film Ready or Not (a lone female character faces off against a group of people inside a mansion, but this time, she's the villain), and that's exactly what the film delivered. Probably the biggest problem I had with this movie is that the trailers spoiled way too many of its wild plot turns, not least of all the central hook that the little girl at the center of the film is actually a vampire, which the film itself doesn't reveal until nearly halfway in -- but then again, I was having way too good a time with this movie to really care all that much. I came for blood and some grim laughs, and I got them, courtesy of some standout performances and filmmakers who know exactly how to take really gory violence and make it more fun than gross. If you like your horror movies bloody, this is certainly one to check out.

Our protagonists are a group of criminals who have been recruited by a man named Lambert to kidnap Abigail, the 12-year-old daughter of a very wealthy man, after she gets home from ballet practice and hold her ransom for $50 million. However, once they've taken her to their safehouse, a rustic mansion deep in the woods, strange occurrences start happening around them, and one by one, they start turning up brutally murdered. Before long, they learn two things. First, Abigail's rich father is actually Kristof Lazar, a notorious crime boss who has a brutal and fearsome assassin named Valdez on his payroll who may well have been sent to take out these hoodlums. Second, and more importantly, Abigail is herself Valdez -- and a vampire. A very pissed-off vampire who quickly gets loose and goes to war against her captors, using all her vampiric powers against them.

In a manner not unlike From Dusk Till Dawn, the film starts as a slow-burn crime thriller with few hints as to what Abigail truly is, instead focusing on fleshing out our main characters, a motley crew of entertaining crooks who have no idea what they're getting into. Our protagonists may not be a particularly sympathetic bunch (being kidnappers and all), but all of them are great characters who are very fun to watch, reacting as many of us would to seeing what happens in the latter half of the film and anchoring the mayhem in something human. Melissa Barrera makes for a likable and compelling lead as the token good one/telegraphed final girl Joey (not her real name; they all use codenames taken from members of the Rat Pack), Kathryn Newton was hilarious and got some of the biggest moments in the film as the rich kid hacker Sammy, and Giancarlo Esposito made the most of his limited screen time as their mysterious leader Lambert, but the real standout among the protagonists was Dan Stevens as Frank, a corrupt ex-cop who becomes the de facto leader of the group and takes charge once the carnage begins only to turn out to have some skeletons in his closet. This was a group of people who all felt like fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters who I wanted to see either succeed or, in some cases, get what they had coming to them, even if the words "let's split up" were used a bit too often during the third act.

The true MVP among the cast, though, was Alisha Weir as Abigail. In the first act, she's excellent at playing an innocent-seeming little girl -- with emphasis on "playing", as every so often she lets her precocious mask slip just enough to let both her caretaker Joey and the audience know that she knows a lot more than she's letting on. After the reveal, she turns into a hell of a villain, a potty-mouthed psycho who's absolutely relishing getting to murder her captors, operating with glee as she fights them and continuing to them even when they think they have the upper hand. The film makes great use of the fact that Abigail is also a ballerina, not just in her outfit but also in how the action and chase sequences give Weir (who has a background in musical theater) ample opportunity to show off her dance skills, which has the effect of framing Abigail as the antithesis of her captors: violent as hell, but also elegant and graceful in a way that lets you know that she's probably been doing this for a very long time. I can see Weir going places in the future, if her performance here is any indication.

When it comes to scares, this film is a mess of gore, inflicted on both Abigail and her captors. The first act keeps us in the dark as to what's really going on, and did a good job building tension as Abigail lurks in the shadows and the characters find the dead and mutilated bodies of her victims, not knowing what's really happening. There are decapitations, a man having half his face torn off, lots of bites, and more than one instance of somebody exploding into a mess of gore (a gag that, going by how they used it in Ready or Not, Radio Silence seem to be pretty big fans of). There's a creepy sequence of somebody getting psychically possessed by Abigail that spices up the proceedings with a different kind of horror, especially as the performance of the actor playing the victim shifts. The climax was action-packed and filled with vampire mayhem, and while I thought the story was kinda spinning its wheels at this point, the film was still too much fun for me to really fault it too much. At this point, Radio Silence has become a brand I trust when it comes to delivering popcorn horror experiences that aren't that deep, but are still very fun, enjoyable times at either the multiplex or in front of your TV.

The Bottom Line

I came to see a ballerina vampire kick people's asses for nearly two hours, and that's exactly what I got. Abigail is a rock-solid, rock-em-sock-em good time of a horror/comedy buoyed by a great cast and directors who know how to entertain. If you don't mind lots of blood, check it out.

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Review: Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

Not rated

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/04/review-hundreds-of-beavers-2022.html>

Score: 5 out of 5

Hundreds of Beavers is one of the funniest damn movies I've seen in a long time. A mix of Looney Tunes cartoons, wilderness epics, video games, and old-time silent comedy, it's 108 minutes of non-stop, rapid-fire slapstick with barely any dialogue that gets going in the first five minutes and never lets up until the very end, constantly escalating its jokes into the ridiculous in ways that never failed to put a smile on my face. It's the kind of movie where, at nearly two hours, I should've gotten bored given my distaste for comedies that run overly long, but just as John Wick: Chapter 4 managed to pull off the feat of maintaining non-stop action movie energy for nearly three hours, this movie had me laughing out of my seat constantly. If this movie is playing anywhere near you, be it in theaters or on VOD, you owe it to yourself to seek it out.

The plot is simple. In the rugged forests of 19th century northern North America, applejack maker Jean Kayak loses his farm in a comic mishap and now has to survive in the winter wilderness with his limited wits, whereupon he eventually crosses paths with an army of beavers building... something a bit more elaborate than a dam. The only outpost of civilization for miles around is a fur trading post, where Jean both trades pelts for equipment and sets out to win the heart of the owner's beautiful daughter, who's also the trading post's furrier who skins all the beavers he brings them. From that setup, we get a constantly escalating series of comic mishaps and set pieces as Jean sets out to trap rabbits, beavers, and other woodland critters while they in turn try to outwit him -- not a difficult feat, as it turns out. This is a film that runs on cartoon logic where realism takes a backseat, with holes in the ground serving almost as a portal network in the forest and both Jean and the beavers building increasingly outlandish contraptions to kill each other with. This film doesn't have an MPAA rating, but if I had to give it one, I'd probably give it a PG-13, with some light sex jokes (specifically one involving the trader's daughter) but nothing explicit and all the beaver death presented in an extremely slapstick manner that's more Wile E. Coyote than Red Dead Redemption.

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, the film's co-writer alongside its director Mike Cheslik, plays Jean, and he is an immediately larger-than-life figure, a parody of a 19th-century outdoorsman and hunter-trapper who starts the film cocky and dimwitted and eventually turns into a cackling madman as it goes on. Working entirely without dialogue, he delivers a phenomenal comic performance purely through his expressions as Jean is subjected to every indignity under the sun in his quest. The entire cast understood the assignment, but this was the guy who had to carry the whole film on his shoulders, and after this, I'd happily pay to see him in other films. No less important, however, were the titular beavers, all of them, together with most of the other animals in the film, played by humans in furry animal suits. If Jean is like Wile E. Coyote or Elmer Fudd in live-action, then they're like Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner, their obviously human proportions adding to the sense of these creatures as mischievous little critters who seem to be enjoying the torment they put Jean through. The overall aesthetic of the film, shot in black and white with gleeful disregard for realism in its special effects, not only makes the painful slapstick that Jean is constantly subjected to feel, well, more slapstick even as it touched on some surprisingly dark areas (including the funniest scene of an animal getting skinned you'll ever see), it also creates the feel of watching a live-action video game, specifically a mix of an open-world RPG with Jean's quest and accumulation of gear and a Super Nintendo side-scroller with the fantastical environments he goes through in that quest. This was a longer-than-usual comedy, but it was one that, between its non-stop onslaught of jokes and the constant progression of its story, never got old or felt like it was spinning its wheels.

The Bottom Line

Great comedies are hard for me to review without giving away the best parts, and this was a great one. I expect everyone involved with this movie to get a lot of attention going forward, such was the great time I had watching it. This is probably gonna be on my personal "best of 2024" list when the year is up, and I'm telling you now: go see it.

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Review Double Feature: Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024)

 Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material (Part One)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some suggestive material and brief strong language (Part Two)

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/03/review-double-feature-dune-2021-and.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Yep, we're doing the Kill Bill thing again and grading two movies together as one singular whole. And that's because, much like Kill Bill, this is no ordinary pair of movies. Rather, they're a two-part adaptation of the absolute monster of a novel that is Frank Herbert's Dune. A landmark of science fiction, it is no pulpy airport paperback, clocking in at 896 pages and covering everything from the ecology of a desert world to the use of religion as a tool of control to the fall of empires to the nature of power to a deconstruction of "chosen one" mythologies and everything in between. It's a novel that typically comes up on shortlists of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, one that's been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy in fantasy in the canon of modern speculative fiction. (Ironically, Tolkien disliked Dune, though he didn't really say why in the interest of remaining diplomatic.)

It's not a book you take lightly, is what I'm saying.

What's more, the very things that have made it so tempting to adapt to the screen are the same things that have long given it a reputation as "unfilmable". Attempts to make a movie out of it have bedeviled nearly every filmmaker who's tried, including some of the greatest of the modern age. David Lean was offered the film, but turned it down. Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to adapt it in the '70s and failed. David Lynch actually managed to get his movie made back in 1984, producing a film that's widely remembered, not least of all by Lynch himself, as a psychedelic mess. The Sci Fi Channel produced a miniseries in 2000 that faithfully adapted the text of the book and, despite a very large budget for a TV show at the time and a huge marketing push, proved to be just as divisive among sci-fi fans. Its influence wound up coming less through its own adaptations and more from other authors and filmmakers inspired by it to make their own, less categorically weird stories, including a number of films that emerged directly from the ashes of Jodorowsky's abortive production. (You might've heard of a few of them, like Alien, The Fifth Element, Warhammer 40,000, and even Star Wars.)

So when Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve decided that he wanted to adapt Dune, many critics, film journalists, and fans predicted it would be his Waterloo. Sure, he's a modern wunderkind who's never made a bad movie, up there with Christopher Nolan as a darling of today's film buffs (and, in my opinion, one who has a better track record). Sure, he'd already done the impossible by making a sequel to Blade Runner, one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, that was just as good as the original. But if Jodorowsky and Lynch couldn't do it, then how in the world was Villeneuve, somebody whose background was chiefly in gritty, spectacle-light thrillers like Prisoners and Sicario, going to pull off adapting a novel as famously trippy as Dune?

What Villeneuve did was largely stick to the text of Herbert's novel as the miniseries did, cut a lot of the backstory and many of the psychedelic elements, and instead focus heavily on both the ecological themes of the story and the events of its present, especially its political subtext and its commentary on "chosen one" narratives. What emerges is a film duology that feels like a dark retelling of Star Wars (or at least A New Hope) in which the story of Luke Skywalker, instead of a tale of a straightforward hero saving the day, is instead a tale of the rise of the Antichrist -- and, incidentally, a far better take on the idea of "what if the chosen one turned out to be the bad guy?" than the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It's not a perfect adaptation, and honestly, I'm still not sure if a "perfect" adaptation of a novel like Dune is even possible outside of a miniseries. (Jodorowsky's version would've been ten to fourteen hours long.) But whether I was watching it at home on a big-screen TV (as I did with Part One to get caught up) or in a packed movie theater (as I did with Part Two), I got a gorgeous, compelling, slow-burn sci-fi epic filled with a rich cast of complicated characters that sets up even bigger things to come but still ends in just the right way, without a doubt the best adaptation of Herbert's novel so far and one that I expect to endure in the canon of science fiction classics just like the novel.

Our story starts over eight thousand years into the future, with humanity ruled by the Imperium, an empire in classic medieval fashion where power is divided between the Emperor and the various Great Houses of the nobility. Arrakis, a harsh desert planet that is strategically vital for its supply of spice, a drug that is necessary for faster-than-light travel to be possible, has just been transferred by the Emperor from the control of House Harkonnen, which ruled it for decades, to House Atreides. The Atreides patriarch Duke Leto knows that this is a power play by the Emperor to thwart the growing power of his family, as control of Arrakis paints a giant target on their backs for other families to go after, not least of all a bitter House Harkonnen, but he also knows that he can't openly defy the Emperor's wishes and turn down this white elephant of a gift. Sure enough, exactly what he feared comes to pass. However, when House Harkonnen took back the planet, they didn't count on one man: Paul Atreides, Leto's teenage son, who survives the initial attack with his mother Lady Jessica and runs off into the desert to live with the Fremen, the tribal native people of Arrakis who have always resented the power of outsiders over their world, and plots revenge. Unbeknownst to Paul, however, a secretive religious order called the Bene Gesserit, one that includes his mother, has plans for him, and has set in motion events that will lead to his rise as a mythical savior of humankind called the Kwisatz Haderach... but unbeknownst to the Bene Gesserit, Paul, who's been having visions of himself causing a galaxy-scale spree of death and destruction, has his own ideas as to what kind of man and leader he's going to be.

The first film opens with Chani giving a vivid description of the beauty of the desert ecosystem of Arrakis, and it's clear that the environmental themes of the story were where a lot of Villeneuve's attention lay. He keeps the exposition indirect in order to fit as much of the book into five-plus hours as he can, instead preferring to show us how the world functions: a mouse-like alien creature wiping the sweat off its ear and drinking it again, the fact that nearly all of Arrakis' human development is either underground or otherwise shielded from the brutal sun, the human population being consequently nocturnal, the status of mountains and large rocks as islands of safety amidst the sea of dunes and its terrifying sandworms, fresh water being a resource as precious as gold. This short of "show, don't tell" exposition extends throughout the story. We don't need to be told that the proliferation of personal protective force fields that only slow-moving objects can get through has made guns obsolete in industrial warfare and led to a revival of melee infantry weapons like swords, pikes, and daggers, nor do we need to be told that, against the Fremen who don't have those fancy shields, guns are still very useful. We can figure that much out just by watching how these devices function and figuring out the implications, and then doing the same with all the other neat stuff about the worldbuilding. In the book, Herbert explained the setting's retrofuturism and lack of computer technology with a lengthy backstory about a war between humans and AI called the Butlerian Jihad in which humanity's victory was followed by a thorough backlash against "thinking machines". None of that makes it into the movies, but it didn't really need to, not when the films do an expert job of crafting a society that thinks it's too good for computers, and not when it's resting on the visual shorthand of countless past space opera flicks like Star Wars. A rare case where the fact that the source material has inspired countless great movies actually works in the favor of its own adaptation, letting it spend less time on the parts of the worldbuilding that we've all seen before and instead focusing on the parts that stand out from the pack.

And the part here that stands out is a big one. Over a decade before George Lucas played a "chosen one" sci-fi story pretty much straight (and over three decades before he made the prequels as a deconstruction of such), Herbert wrote a story that portrayed prophecies, Great Man narratives, and organized religion as tools that could be easily exploited by a tyrant. Paul Atreides may have meant well, hoping to liberate the Fremen from tyranny, but by inserting himself into their struggle (with help from shadowy figures who had their own agenda in paving the way for his reign), he built something terrible, and the psychic visions he has throughout the story make it clear that his accomplishments will end in tragedy. Timothée Chalamet plays Paul initially as a rich kid struggling with the pressure placed on his shoulders, one who takes to Arrakis astoundingly well to the point that, when he's forced to leave his safe and secure life at the palace, he winds up comfortably integrating right into the Fremen's society. Throughout the films, we get hints of darkness within him, especially in Part Two once he starts delivering bombastic speeches to enraptured crowds that at some point start to sound uncomfortably like the speeches that the villains normally give in these sorts of movies. Even more than the psychic visions he has of the death and destruction to come, it was in these moments when I was both captivated by Paul's power and, more importantly, scared of the kind of leader he was growing into: a harsh, unforgiving warlord who's willing to resort to extreme measures to secure the independence of the Fremen. He's an easy guy to root for, but there's always a pit in your stomach as he slowly but surely pushes the boundaries right up to the breaking point. It's here where Chani, her role considerably expanded from the books, emerges as the film's voice of reason, serving as Paul's lover but also somebody who realizes that the Fremen are trading slavery at the hands of a colonial overlord for slavery at the hands of a cult leader, even without knowing the behind-the-scenes machinations that put Paul in his position.

That said, if it wanted to completely stick the landing here, there was one final shoe that needed to drop but didn't. Paul's psychic visions merely show him ominously as a leader with Hitler-esque undertones, as well as him in battle. The book went a lot further when it came to having Paul's visions showing him with far more than just undertones, sketching vivid displays of the misery that he is fated to cause: famine, genocide, the apocalypse on a galactic scale. What the films show us is designed to make us uneasy about Paul, while letting Chalamet's performance do the rest in making him look like a budding villain, but there's a point where "show, don't tell" can be taken too far, and that's when you're talking about prophecies of disasters to come that you can't linger on for too long in the film itself and can only tell us will happen. I was only a bit freaked out by Paul, when I should've been picturing myself in Germany in 1933. I was getting all the cool and badass parts of a great villain, but the things that actually make him a villain are still to come, and that, I think, undercut some of the menace and unease I was supposed to get from Paul. It wasn't a huge problem, but it was still a not-insignificant blotch on what's otherwise a great pair of films.

Fortunately, once you're past the plot, as a sci-fi epic this duology is gorgeous to behold. Villeneuve has always been a guy who, like Christopher Nolan, has an affection for gritty realism even when he's working with big blockbuster epics, and he made the most of the desert environments that give the story its name. He does a great job in particular imagining what big melee fantasy battles would look like augmented with futuristic technology, in which the pikemen and knights charging their enemies in the field are supported with artillery lasers. The cast is absolutely stacked and excellent all around, with Chalamet shining in the central role but everybody around him also doing great work, from Zendaya as the skeptic Chani to Rebecca Ferguson as Paul's mother with her own agenda to Austin Butler stealing the show in a surprisingly brief amount of screen time as the Emperor's depraved nephew who gets sent in in Part Two to stop Paul. It was perhaps a bit overstuffed; Florence Pugh wound up getting lost in the shuffle, not an easy feat with an actor of her caliber. I understand why Villeneuve decided to split this movie in half, because there is no real way this story could've been effectively told otherwise.

The Bottom Line

Villeneuve accomplished an impossible task here, crafting with two movies an adaptation of a legendarily dense novel that does it justice. This one has its faults, and there are things that the otherwise inferior Lynch version does better (especially with regards to its psychedelic elements), but even so, it is gonna go down in the ranks of all-time sci-fi classics. I give it a solid recommendation if  you have even the slightest interest in science fiction.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

I wish that game designers making games that aren't supposed to be cutting-edge tech demos would use the mid-range laptops of four years ago as a baseline.

But that would require game designers to stop trying to make every game a cutting-edge tech demo at the expense of gameplay.

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/03/review-eight-legged-freaks-2002.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

Eight Legged Freaks is a self-conscious throwback to '50s monster movies that does the job it sets out to do perhaps a little too well. It's the kind of movie you'd imagine American International Pictures themselves (the Blumhouse of the '50s and '60s) would've made back then if they had a big budget and modern CGI technology to spare, a film that gets right up in your face with all manner of icky arachnid goodness that it takes every opportunity it can to throw at the screen, and even though the effects may be dated now, it still works in the context of the lighthearted B-movie that this movie is trying to be. It's a movie where, as gross as it often is, going for an R rating probably would've hurt the campy tone it was going for. Its throwback to old monster movie tropes is a warts-and-all one, admittedly, especially where its paper-thin characters are concerned, such that it starts to wear out its welcome by the end and could've stood to be a bit shorter. That said, it's never not a fun movie, especially if you're not normally into horror, and it's the kind of film that I can easily throw on in the background to improve my mood.

Set in the struggling mining town of Perfection, Arizona, the film opens with an accident involving a truck carrying toxic waste accidentally dumping a barrel of the stuff into a pond that happens to be located right next to the home of a man named Joshua who runs an exotic spider farm. He starts feeding his spiders insects that he sourced from the pond, and before long the spiders start growing to enormous size, eating Joshua and eventually threatening the town, forcing its residents to start banding together for survival. I could go into more detail on the characters, but most of them fall into stock, one-note archetypes and exist mainly to supply the jokes and the yucks, elevated chiefly by the film's surprisingly solid cast. David Arquette's oddly disaffected performance as Chris, the drifter whose father owned the now-shuttered mines and returns to town in order to reopen them, manages to work with the tone the movie is going for, feeling like he doesn't wanna be in this town to begin with and wondering what the hell he got himself into by returning to the dump he grew up in. Kari Wuhrer makes for a compelling action hero as Sam, the hot sheriff who instructs her teenage daughter Ashley (played by a young Scarlett Johansson) how to deal with pervy boys and looks like a badass slaughtering giant spiders throughout the film. Doug E. Doug got some of the funniest moments in the movie as Harlan, a conspiracy radio host who believes that aliens are invading the town. Every one of the actors here knew that they were in a comedy first and a horror movie second, and so they played it broad and had fun with the roles. There are various subplots concerning things like the town's corrupt mayor and his financial schemes, the mayor's douchebag son Bret, and Sam's nerdy son Mike whose interest in spiders winds up saving the day, and they all go in exactly the directions you think, none of them really having much impact on the story but all of them doing their part to make me laugh.

The movie was perhaps a bit too long for its own good, especially in the third act. Normally, this is the part where a movie like this is supposed to "get good" as we have giant monsters running around terrorizing the town, and to the film's credit, the effects still hold up in their own weird way. You can easily tell what's CGI at a glance, but in a movie where the spiders are played as much for a laugh as anything else, especially with the chattering sound they constantly make that makes it sound like they're constantly giggling, it only added to the "live-action cartoon" feel of the movie. The problem is, there are only so many ways you can show people getting merked by giant spiders before they all start to blend together, and the third act is thoroughly devoted to throwing non-stop monster mayhem at the screen even after it started to run out of ideas on that front. There are admittedly a lot of cool spider scenes in this movie, from giant leaping spiders snatching young punks off of dirt bikes to people getting spun up in webs to a tarantula the size of a truck flipping a trailer to a hilarious, Looney Tunes-style fight between a spider and a cat, and the humans themselves also get some good licks in, but towards the end, the film seemed to settle into a routine of just spiders jumping onto people. It was here where the threadbare characters really started to hurt the film. If I had more investment in the people getting killed and fighting to survive, I might have cared more, but eventually, I was just watching a special effects showcase. The poster prominently advertises that this movie is from Dean Devlin, one of the producers and writers of Independence Day and the 1998 American Godzilla adaptation, and while he otherwise had no creative involvement, I did feel that influence in a way that the marketing team probably didn't intend.

The Bottom Line

Eight Legged Freaks is a great movie with which to introduce somebody young or squeamish to horror, especially monster movies. It's shallow and doesn't have much to offer beyond a good cast, a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of CGI spider mayhem without a lot of graphic violence. Overall, it's a fun throwback to old-school monster movies.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

As much as I see this meme on tumblrdotcom, it feels like there should be a Tumblr memorial devoted to Carl Weathers

Rest well, King 🫡

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: The Last Boy Scout (1991)

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Rated R for graphic violence and very strong language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-last-boy-scout-1991.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

The Last Boy Scout is a wild, unwieldy, and immensely entertaining buddy-cop action flick cut from the same cloth as Lethal Weapon, not much of a surprise given that Shane Black wrote both movies. It's a movie that opens with an over-the-top song that would make for a legitimately good intro to an NFL broadcast, followed by a prologue of a football player (played by Billy Blanks in a cameo) shooting three members of the opposing team on the field before killing himself. The plot of the film is one that has only become sadly relevant in the years since 1991, especially as sports betting has been legalized and normalized as just a regular part of the professional sports landscape. It's got Bruce Willis at the height of his glory post-Die Hard playing a salty private eye, a young Damon Wayans in a role that, while more dramatic than anything on In Living Color, still supplies a lot of funny moments in his interactions with Willis, and director Tony Scott delivering a ton of exciting, spectacular action scenes. It's a shallow film that's mostly an excuse to have Willis and Wayans do their thing, but that alone is enough to make it practically obligatory viewing during football season.

Our protagonists are both disgraced men. Joe Hallenbeck is a private detective and former Secret Service agent who lost his last job after he punched out a senator he caught raping a woman. Jimmy Dix is a former star quarterback for the Los Angeles Stallions (because like hell the NFL would let them use real team names in a movie like this) who was fired and banned from the league as the chronic pain caused by his injuries on the field led to drug addiction and, from there, involvement in gambling. Together, They Fight Crime -- specifically by uncovering a gambling ring within the league that's scheming to get sports betting legalized in order to make it a more exciting experience for viewers, damn the consequences (gambling addiction, game-fixing), and is willing to kill in order to do it. It's the kind of suspicion of authority and rich fat cats that, almost as much as witty buddy-cop banter, I've noticed is something of a trend in Shane Black's screenplays, and while it's an altogether shallow treatment of sports betting that serves largely as background flavor, it's a story that predicted, decades before the rise of DraftKings and FanDuel, just how corrosive it would be to sports in general. (One change, though: I would've had the shadowy hitman in the opening threatening to kill the running back if he wins instead of loses, since throwing matches and point-shaving are how a lot of sports betting scandals go down in real life.)

The heart and soul of the film is Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans as Joe and Jimmy, both deeply troubled men who mean well but are otherwise plagued by all manner of demons. Joe's strong moral code gets him compared to a Boy Scout (hence the title), but it also ruined his career once it put him on a collision course with the powerful crooks who run everything, while Jimmy was chewed up and spit out by a corrupt sports league that wore down his body and then blamed him for the resulting drug addiction. They're both bitter, cynical assholes, but they have damn good reason to be. Willis was always a master of action movie snark, and his talent for such is on full display here as he has to put up with indignities from everyone around him, not least of all his estranged wife and his rebellious daughter. Wayans, meanwhile, gets the more serious role as a guy who's pissed at the world and jumped head-first into hedonism as his life fell apart, but one who's not all that different from Joe except that his vices aren't as socially acceptable as alcoholism. Two guys who look like polar opposites, especially in the contrast between Joe's blue-collar status and Jimmy's fame and fortune (highlighted in a great exchange involving Jimmy's $650 leather pants), but turn out to have a lot more in common than they think is ripe material for a buddy comedy, and Willis and Wayans have great buddy chemistry together. The supporting cast, too, is filled with character actors giving fun performances, whether it's Noble Willingham as the villainous team owner Marcone, Taylor Negron as the terrifying hitman Milo, a young Halle Berry as Jimmy's stripper girlfriend Corey, or a young Danielle Harris stealing the show as Joe's daughter Darian, feeling almost like a prototype for Angourie Rice's character in The Nice Guys in terms of being what happens if you gave Nancy Drew the mouth of a sailor. (And now I wanna see Shane Black write a Nancy Drew movie.)

When it comes to action, this is a Tony Scott movie, and if you know the first thing about Tony Scott, you know what you're getting: flashy action, glamorous vistas, and a lot of visual flair. This movie looks damn good in that peculiar '80s/early '90s studio way, a movie that knows exactly how big and dumb it is and leans right into it. The opening scene of an ill-fated running back at the end of his rope giving a whole new meaning to "pistol offense" sets the tone and lets you know what you're in for straight away, a film big on splashy visuals and moments designed to set a mood. The plot is fairly boilerplate and easy to figure out, existing largely to drive the action and the characters' banter and get you to the real reason this movie exists, which is the car chases, shootouts, and explosions that are all handled with aplomb. From start to finish, this movie is incredibly entertaining, the kind of flick that invites you to turn off your brain and have a great time watching a pair of very charismatic actors run around Los Angeles with guns.

The Bottom Line

The Last Boy Scout is a kick-ass, no-nonsense buddy action/comedy anchored by a pair of great lead performances, a witty script, and director Tony Scott doing what he does best. This was perfect viewing just before the Super Bowl, and honestly at any other time of year.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, sexual material, language, sexual assault, teen drinking and drug content

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-lisa-frankenstein-2024.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

Lisa Frankenstein is a vibes movie. Despite having been heavily marketed on the fact that it was written by Diablo Cody, the writer of Jennifer's Body (who has said that the two films take place in the same universe), her screenplay is actually one of the film's weak links, falling apart in the third act as the plot starts to get weird and disjointed in a way that left me wondering just how many scenes got rewritten or left on the cutting room floor. No, it's the cast and director Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin) who put this movie over the top, crafting a film that feels like if a young Tim Burton directed Weird Science in the best possible way. (In the interview with Cody that the Alamo Drafthouse showed before the film, she cited both Weird Science and Edward Scissorhands as inspirations, alongside Bride of Frankenstein and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and I'm not surprised.) It's at its best as a pure comedy, one that sends up its nostalgic '80s setting to the point of farce and pushes the PG-13 rating as far as it can go. I'm not surprised that, much like Jennifer's Body did in its initial run, this movie failed to find its audience in theaters (though releasing it on Super Bowl weekend probably didn't help), but while I don't think it'll be treated as an outright classic in ten years' time, I do believe it'll follow a very similar trajectory of being rediscovered on home video and streaming.

Set in suburban Illinois in 1989, our protagonist is Lisa Swallows, a teenage girl who's been moody and morose ever since her mom was killed by an axe murderer two years ago, followed by her father Dale remarrying the obnoxious jackass Janet and thus gaining a stepsister in the cheerleader Taffy. She likes to hang out at the old cemetery, where, one night after going to a party where she accidentally takes hallucinogens and subsequently gets sexually harassed, she runs off and tells one of the men buried there that she wishes she was "with him" (i.e. dead). Something must've been miscommunicated, because that night, that grave is struck by lightning and its occupant rises from the dead, trying to find Lisa and be with her. Lisa is initially horrified, but soon realizes that, beneath this creature's rotten exterior, there's actually a romantic soul who longs to be human again. And after tragedy strikes, Lisa decides to find a way to make her new boyfriend's dream a reality... no matter who gets in her way.

The first two acts of this film felt like they were building to something very interesting. The thing about the best takes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, not least of all the 1931 Universal classic, is that they recognize that the real "monster" is in fact Dr. Frankenstein himself, the creature's creator, and this film leans heavily in that direction with its depiction of Lisa. She eagerly starts killing people in order to build the perfect boyfriend, getting sucked into darkness as she's blinded by love, and Kathryn Newton completely steals the show playing her, starting the film as a dowdy, depressed dweeb but eventually developing a gothic fashion sense and, with it, a catty diva-like attitude while channeling a young Winona Ryder in both Beetlejuice and Heathers. There were many places that this film could've gone, most of them involving Lisa becoming a full-bore villain while Taffy suddenly finds herself in her stepsister's path, with the creature either serving as Lisa's partner in crime from start to finish or perhaps slowly gaining a sense of morality as he becomes more "human" and realizing that Lisa is evil. All the while, the Frankenstein metaphor becomes one about somebody who'd do anything for love, including that, and loses herself in the process. And at times, it seemed to be going in that direction, especially as Taffy grows increasingly traumatized over the course of the film.

Unfortunately, whether it was the PG-13 rating or a desire to make Lisa more sympathetic (and Taffy less so), the film won't commit to the bit. Lisa's characterization does a near-total 180 in the third act as the film asks us to side with her as, at the very least, a sympathetic anti-villain with good intentions. Lisa should've been the bad guy that the film was building her up as, no ifs, ands, or buts -- a sympathetic and compelling one like Jennifer Check, but still somebody who crossed the line miles ago and never looked back. It would've given Liza Soberano, who plays Taffy and will probably be the breakout star of this film, more to do instead of making her a supporting player in Lisa's story who plays only a minor role in the third act. Instead, it felt like I was watching a whole new character entirely that just so happened to share Lisa's name and face. I highly suspect that there's a lot of alternate material here, either in earlier drafts of the screenplay or deleted scenes, because the sudden tonal shift in the third act feels like a product of a completely different movie.

What saved this film in the end were the style and the humor. Much like Karyn Kusama on Jennifer's Body, Zelda Williams imbues this film with a ton of gothic flair, Lisa's outfits being just the start of it, inspired by Tim Burton and, by extension, the German expressionism that he in turn drew from. The bright pink suburban house that Lisa and her family live in is almost cartoonish, and draws a sharp contrast to the world around it. The moment we're introduced to Carla Gugino as Lisa's stepmother, a hilariously over-the-top parody of an '80s suburban mom who needlessly antagonizes Lisa every chance she gets, and Joe Chrest as her spectacularly inattentive father who looks the part of a wholesome suburban dad but otherwise can't be bothered to look up from his newspaper, we see exactly the kind of people who'd happily live in a house like that. There are multiple animated sequences that liven up the film throughout, most notably the prologue/opening credits showing us the creature's backstory in life. The soundtrack is filled with great retro '80s needle drops, especially once the creature regains the use of his hands and can play the piano again. Cole Sprouse as the creature had no dialogue barring grunts, moans, and screams, but he still made for a compelling presence on screen as the other half of the film's central romance, proving that seven years on Riverdale was a waste of a lot of young actors' talents. This was Williams' first feature film, and if this is indicative of her skill behind the camera, I can see her going far. And most importantly, this movie is hysterical. The entire theater was laughing throughout, and I was right there with them. There are jokes about everything from "back massagers" to the creature's physical decay, and more broadly, its campy gothic tone is played far more for laughs than frights, most notably in one death scene that would be the most brutal in the film on the face of it but is instead one of the most hilarious scenes in it as the film shows us just enough to let us know exactly what happened and wince while still remaining PG-13. Cody's grasp of storytelling may have been shaky here, but her knack for getting me to laugh my ass off remains fully intact.

The Bottom Line

Lisa Frankenstein should've had more care put into its screenplay, especially once act three comes around, but it's still a very funny and watchable movie that, much like Jennifer's Body, I can see enduring as a cult classic. If you're not into the Big Game, check it out.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

I worry about the decline of casual PC use, not because I fear times changing and my preferred platform fading from relevance (I also find mobile devices to be more convenient at times, even),

But because it's NOT fading from relevance in the professional world, ESPECIALLY in tech, and I'm not a fan of watching PC skills turn into a potential class divider to arguably a greater extent than they've ever been before

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Don't Look Up (2021)

Don't Look Up (2021)

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-dont-look-up-2021.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Don't Look Up is a movie that wants to be Dr. Strangelove for global warming, and whether or not it pulls it off depends on your tolerance for very heavy-handed satire. Adam McKay, the film's director and co-writer (together with former Bernie Sanders speechwriter/advisor David Sirota -- i.e. a man literally paid to write stump speeches for a politician) who had previously made The Big Short and a whole bunch of 2000s Will Ferrell comedies, wasn't shy about the movie he was making. He said point-blank that he went out of his way to write the most heavy-handed, blunt-force metaphor for global warming he could possibly think of, a comet destroying Earth that we have the ability to deflect but for some reason aren't, and the result is a pure sadist show filled with unlikable people who you're waiting to see receive their comeuppance, while the only ones who get anything resembling a happy ending are the beleaguered scientists and bureaucrats who serve as mouthpieces for the writers.

I felt it more or less succeeded at doing that, but I also felt that it, almost accidentally, stumbled into something I've rarely seen: a Lovecraftian comedy, specifically one that still goes all-in on his brand of cosmic horror rather than soften it. The central conceit of many of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, that of humanity being small and meaningless in the grand scheme of a universe far bigger than them that doesn't care about any of their puny accomplishments, is one that's usually played for horror, most notably by Lovecraft himself and the many artists influenced by him. When that kind of material is given a lighthearted touch, it's usually in the context of stories that borrow the aesthetics of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (doomsday cults, grotesquely visceral monsters with lots of tentacles, alien gods with unpronounceable names) but give humanity the chance to effectively fight back. This movie takes the opposite track. It's a movie about a comet that's coming to hit Earth and destroy everything. It doesn't give a flying fuck about any of us; it's a comet, an inanimate ball of rock and ice randomly drifting through our solar system that just so happens to be on a collision course with Earth. The protagonists, the graduate student Kate Dibiasky who discovers the comet and her astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy who does the numbers and realizes that it's going to impact Earth, are framed as the kind of heroes Lovecraft would write, people who slowly but surely go mad from the revelation of just how meaningless their existence is in the face of looming extinction. In fact, the basic premise is not unlike that of Junji Ito's manga Remina, which plays a very similar scenario for some truly fucked-up horror, complete with both stories having satire of celebrity culture as a running theme.

But this movie takes that premise and, instead of using it to try and scare the viewer, uses it to mine the darkest possible laughs it can think of. Kate's breakdown on a talk show as she tries to warn the world about the comet goes memetic and is treated like Britney Spears' meltdown in the late '00s. Dr. Mindy's reaction is to dive head-first into wine, women, and song, exploiting his new status as a rock star scientist to have an affair with a morning show host and bask in the fame and adulation of the world because he knows, deep down, that anything else is pointless and he may as well enjoy his last few months on Earth. And most importantly, the film's main satirical thrust is that humanity probably does have the ability to deflect the comet and save itself, but is just too goddamn stupid and greedy to do so. The President is a vain, corrupt, bullying, media-obsessed idiot whose administration is rife with nepotism, cronyism, and graft (guess who was President when this movie was written), the "visionary geniuses" of the tech industry are more concerned with a mix of pie-in-the-sky utopianism and getting rich than in the actual, practical, day-to-day problems that most people face, and the media is chiefly concerned with celebrity gossip and other frivolous stories and buries serious issues that might hurt their ratings. Humanity as a whole doesn't go mad from the revelation of the comet, at least not at first, but that's because, as far as this movie is concerned, we're already living in a world gone mad.

These two angles -- McKay and Sirota's intended one of a satire of the world's (lack of) response to global warming, and a film that takes a lot of the tropes of cosmic horror and plays them for comedy -- feed into each other and produce a pitch-black satire reminiscent of an Armando Iannucci story, a good episode of South Park, or the background worldbuilding of a Grand Theft Auto game. This movie ain't subtle. The comet is a plain-as-day metaphor for the climate crisis that practically screams the message into your face, most notably when Dr. Mindy goes on a furious rant on a talk show that, barring the specific subject matter of the comet, may as well have come from the unshackled id of any climate scientist, meteorologist, or environmentalist who decided to one day say "fuck it" and let everyone know what they really think of all the bullshit they have to put up with. The entire 138-minute runtime of this movie is an escalating exercise in cringe comedy as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the underpaid civil servants and bureaucrats who take them and the crisis seriously find themselves stonewalled, tripped up, and belittled by the vapid, selfish, ignorant dumbasses who actually run the show. Its sense of humor is mean-spirited and often insulting, but it saves its bile for very specific and deserving targets while still affording enough humanity to its protagonists to make me actually care about them, especially as the film rolls towards its conclusion.

Make no mistake, though, this is a very funny metaphor for global warming, much of it sold by an excellent all-star cast. Meryl Streep plays President Janie Orlean as a combination of every terrible thing that's ever been said about Donald Trump and every terrible thing that's ever been said about Hillary Clinton (again, you can tell that a Bernie Sanders advisor co-wrote this), the kind of mediagenic, charismatic politician who looks good in front of the cameras but whose administration is a pit of slime. Streep is clearly relishing the chance to play someone who'd be an unrepentant villain if not for the fact that she's also a complete fucking moron. Mark Rylance plays the President's partner-in-crime Peter Isherwell as a mix of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs who gives off the sense that he's not just a greedy robber baron but someone who genuinely seems to believe his own bullshit, that his sci-fi scheme to save the day would not only work but elevate human civilization into a utopian golden age, and that he's spent too long marinating in the stew of hare-brained Silicon Valley techno-dreamers to think about any practical problems. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the talk show hosts Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer are playing clear parodies of Kelly Ripa and Al Roker, and perfectly capture everything obnoxious and saccharine about morning talk shows and daytime news. The supporting cast is a non-stop parade of both rising stars and "hey, it's that guy!" actors, including Jonah Hill as Janie's Jared Kushner-esque son/Chief of Staff who serves as a symbol of the White House's corruption, Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi as a pair of pop stars putting on a benefit concert who contribute a hilarious song to the soundtrack, Ron Perlman as a war hero with a few screws loose who leads the initial mission to try and deflect the comet, and Timothée Chalamet as a punkish slacker whose response to the comet is to get right with God. Finally Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Rob Morgan get the "straight man" roles as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the government scientist Dr. Oglethorpe, all of them offering up welcome reminders of why they're all considered some of the best actors of their respective generations (and, in Lawrence's case, reminding us why she was an A-lister before she did Passengers) as they have to navigate the sick, sad world around them in their long-shot effort to save it. Even here, though, they're not immune from the film's satirical barbs, each of them (especially Dr. Mindy) shown to not quite be as above-it-all as they assume they are.

The Bottom Line

It's so in-your-face with its politics and message that it risks feeling insufferable even if you agree with it. But me? I found it to be a hilarious, pitch-black, and frequently on-point satire that pulls no punches and manages to somehow combine big laughs with existential dread. I recommend giving it a watch.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Piranha 3D (2010)

 Piranha 3D (2010)

Rated R for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-piranha-3d-2010.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

There's really no way to describe Piranha 3D as anything other than a guilty pleasure. A loose remake of the shameless 1978 Jaws ripoff Piranha, it is an 88-minute parade of sleaze and excess that not only got the Eli Roth stamp of approval (he has a cameo as the host of a wet T-shirt contest) but was directed by one of his "Splat Pack" contemporaries, Alexandre Aja, and is filled with so much gore and nudity that merely having the Blu-ray in the same room as a child is enough to get you put on some kind of registry. In case you couldn't tell by the title, it was a 3D movie originally, and it throws that in your face constantly with all manner of objects jumping out at the screen. It's a movie where a man gets his dick bitten off, two piranha fight over it, and then the winner of that fight coughs up the tattered pieces of that dick right into your face. It knows exactly what it is, and like the spring breakers getting devoured on screen, it says "fuck it, YOLO" and delivers the most ridiculous, over-the-top version of itself it can possibly think of, this time without the constraints of budget or good taste that held back its '70s predecessor. It's a frankly superior film to the original, and the kind of splatterfest that never once takes itself seriously, and likely would never have worked if it even tried to. But work it does, and while its faults are plainly visible, the vibes here are just right for it to overcome them.

Moving the setting to the resort town of Lake Victoria, Arizona (a fictionalized version of Lake Havasu City where this was filmed), the film starts with an earthquake opening a fissure at the bottom of the town's namesake lake, where a horde of prehistoric piranha from a species thought extinct turn out to have survived, millennia of cannibalism and natural selection having turned them into the ultimate aquatic predators. Those piranha escape and become a threat to every living thing in the lake -- and unfortunately, it just so happens that Lake Victoria is a massive spring break destination whose beaches are currently awash in thousands upon thousands of debauched, drunken college kids and the gross, lecherous sleazeballs there to exploit that sea of fine, moist pussy.

And this movie's already turned me into one of them with the way I'm now talking. There's no (pardon the pun) beating around the bush here. The sex and nudity in this movie are copious and gratuitous, whether we're on the beach surrounded by women in various states of undress or on the boat of the softcore porn producer Derrick Jones. One of the highlights of the film is a lengthy, nude, underwater erotic dance between Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele that leaves nothing to the imagination and has no illusions about being anything other than the gleefully shameless exploitation it is. It's 2000s Ed Hardy/Von Dutch bro culture at its most lurid and trashy, and while the film is undoubtedly a parody of that culture where a lot of the entertainment comes from watching these idiots get slaughtered, it's the kind of parody that's chiefly interested in broad farce rather than deeper satire, jacking up the most extreme elements of it to their logical conclusion and letting them run wild from there.

And you know what? I loved it. It was a version of that culture that had just enough self-awareness to feel like it was in on its own joke instead of serving it all up completely straight. The protagonists, tellingly, aren't douchebro jackasses and their airheaded eye candy girlfriends cut from that cloth, but people who have to put up with all that nonsense in their backyards because it makes them money, and are the only ones afforded much dignity once the piranha reach the beach. The sheriff Julie and her deputy Fallon, Julie's teenage son Jake and her little kids Zane and Laura, Jake's girlfriend Kelly, the scientists Novak, Paula, and Sam studying the earthquake, these characters are all treated mostly seriously even if they're all pretty two-dimensional. The main representative of the spring breakers, Derrick, is the most antagonistic human character in the film, somebody with no redeeming qualities who melts down and turns into a petty tyrant aboard his boat as everything starts to go wrong for him and his production. Others among that crowd wind up getting themselves and others killed with their own dumb decisions, whether it's refusing to listen to the warnings of impending doom, climbing over each other to get out of the water, flipping over a massive floating stage that wasn't designed to hold so many people, or stealing a boat and running over numerous people in an attempt to escape. The deleted scenes and unused storyboards get even more vicious. This feels like a movie that hates spring break culture and everything it represents, one that I can easily picture proving quite popular among locals in places that get lots of rowdy tourists, a graphic depiction of what they'd love to see happen one day.

"Graphic" is the operative word here, too. If the first half of this film is a parade of T&A, then the second half is devoted to watching all those choice cuts of meat get served up and torn to shreds. This is an absolute gorefest, and Alexandre Aja is a master of the craft. Everything you can picture piranha doing to somebody gets done, and probably some other stuff you never dreamed of. The big, brutal attack on the beach is one that this movie builds to for half its runtime, and when it arrives, it is one for the ages, a carnival of carnage that lasts for several minutes and keeps coming up with creative new ways to kill people. Boobs and blood are combined with reckless abandon, such as in the paragliding scene, a gag involving breast implants, and one highlight moment involving a high-tension wire. While the piranha themselves were created with CGI, the actual gore was almost entirely done practically by the KNB EFX Group, and it is the kind of gross shit that they've made their name with, a vividly detailed anatomy lesson as you get to see all the ways a human body can come apart. At times, it felt like the only thing keeping the film from an instant NC-17 rating was that the water was too clouded by blood (roughly 80,000 gallons of fake blood were used on set) to see the worst of it. Even though this movie isn't particularly scary and never really tries to be, the sheer scale of the bloodbath is harrowing in its own way, like watching a terrorist attack, accident, or other mass-casualty event and its aftermath. The film's darkly comedic tone was the only thing keeping it from turning outright grim, and it was not through lack of effort from Aja or the effects team.

The humans aren't the only ones who get torn up, either, as the protagonists give as good as they get. Ving Rhames as Fallon has a great scene where he goes to town on a swarm of piranha with a boat propeller, and Elisabeth Shue makes for a likable action heroine as Julie, one who manages to say a lot with just the look on her face and the tone of her voice, especially when she realizes how badly her son Jake fucked up in more ways than one. When they reunite, there's a sense that she's gonna fuckin' kill him for what he did long before she outright says it. Christopher Lloyd steals the show as the marine biologist on land, one whose only role is to deliver an infodump on the piranha but does it so well that he felt like he had a much larger role than he did. The actors playing the kids and the teenagers were mostly alright, but their section of the film is seriously livened up by the presence of Jerry O'Connell as Derrick, a parody of the infamous Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis. O'Connell plays him as a guy approaching middle age who peaked in high school and college and has spent the rest of his life reliving and trying to recapture his youth, an absolute scumbag who doesn't seem to know or care about the definitions of words like "consent" or "age of consent". He was like a more comedic version of Wayne in X, a pervert who represents everything wrong with "adult entertainment", but whereas that film was a gritty and grounded one about how mainstream beauty standards and the porn industry fetishize youth and objectify people, this is a Grand Guignol orgy of mayhem where depicting him as a bastard who constantly causes problems throughout the film chiefly means setting him up to die painfully in a way designed to make the crowd roar.

It was that tone that really carried this movie through rough spots that would've sank other, more serious films. There's a minor character, Derrick's cameraman/boat pilot Andrew, who disappears without explanation, implied to have been killed but his death scene cut from the film (it appears in the deleted scenes). The actors are good, but barring Derrick, their characters are all pretty shallow archetypes. Some of the CGI, especially during Richard Dreyfuss' cameo/death in the opening scene, could be pretty dire. I'm not surprised to learn that work on the CGI for this was, by all accounts, an absolute shitshow to the point that Aja threatened to have his name taken off the credits unless Dimension Films ponied up some more money to finish the effects work. It may be parodying the Four Loko spring break culture of the time, but it also feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too with how much the first half lingers on nudity. Christopher Lloyd really should've been in it more. But I was able to put all of that aside for one simple reason: I was just having too much goddamn fucking fun watching this.

The Bottom Line

This is a "hell yeah!" movie, one you throw on when your friends are over, there are no kids around, and you just wanna spend an hour and a half goofing off and having a blast with a sick, mean-spirited, yet incredibly fun horror/comedy.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

When absolutely 0 of Biden’s accomplishments have made any kind of news, and we’ve been fed a steady diet of fear and panic for 3 years, no one gets to be shocked when he loses the next election to Donald 2.0.

Posting anything positive about the president here will get you called a capitalist bootlicker.

What do we expect to happen?

Anger sells better. Anger feels better, it feels righteous.

It’s easier to protest against a president you don’t like then to actually remain in charge and keep pushing ahead, even if small, consistent accomplishments are all you receive.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Jennifer's Body (2009)

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Rated R for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use (unrated version reviewed)

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-jennifers-body-2009.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

At this stage, pointing out that critics and moviegoers in 2009 were completely wrong about Jennifer's Body is about as much of a hot take as saying that they were completely wrong about The Thing back in 1982. The story of how 20th Century Fox's short-lived youth-focused genre label Fox Atomic screwed over this movie's marketing because they had no idea what to do with it, and how their strategy of selling a very queer, very feminist horror-comedy as trashy softcore erotica aimed at the Spike TV fratbro set (as seen with the poster above) predictably backfired, is a long and sordid one that doesn't bear much repeating at this point. It's a movie that bombed badly when it came out and did lasting damage to the careers of both its lead actress Megan Fox and its screenwriter Diablo Cody, but went on to build its reputation on home video and streaming such that it's now talked about as one of the greatest horror movies of its time, and one of the greatest teen horror movies ever made. Lisa Frankenstein, a new horror-comedy written by Cody that comes out next month, is currently being explicitly marketed as "from Diablo Cody, acclaimed writer of Jennifer's Body," whereas if it had been made ten years ago, the trailers would not have even dared to mention her name.

I was one of the people who did see it when it came out, and even back then, I recall enjoying it and wondering why so much hatred was being hurled at a movie that was, at worst, pretty decent. Watching it again now, in 2024? It's a movie that it feels like it predicted every anxiety of young Americans, and especially teenage girls and young women, in the fifteen years to come, an incredibly smart, dark, gothic, stylish, and twisted movie whose comedic streak does little to take away from its scares and which is buoyed by a standout performance from Amanda Seyfried. Yes, it has its flaws. The jokes about Cody's too-cool-for-school dialogue at times becoming downright cringeworthy have been long since run into the ground (even if I think the problem is a bit overstated), and Fox was always a fairly limited actress even if this movie plays to her strengths. But on the whole, its problems, while real, are minor and not debilitating, and I had a blast watching it as both a straightforward teen fright flick and as a movie with more on its mind.

The plot is broadly similar to Ginger Snaps, a film with which this makes a great double feature, on a bigger Hollywood budget. Two teenage girls, Jennifer Check and Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, in the small podunk town of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota have been best friends since childhood, but while Jennifer has grown up into a beautiful cheerleader and the most popular girl in school, Needy has grown up into a dorky outsider who it seems is only still friends with Jennifer because they've always been friends (and perhaps... something more). One night, while heading down to a local bar to see an emo band called Low Shoulder, a fire breaks out and kills scores of people, with Needy and Jennifer escaping and Jennifer accepting an offer from the band to head home in their totally sweet, not-at-all-creepy van. Later that night, Jennifer comes to Needy's house looking like a bloody mess, eating rotisserie chicken straight out of her fridge, vomiting up black bile, and attacking her... only for her to suddenly come to school the next day looking no worse for wear and, if anything, both more beautiful than ever and an even bigger asshole than she was before. Needy suspects that something is up, and as it turns out, she's right: that night after the concert fire, Low Shoulder took the classic route to rock & roll superstardom and sacrificed Jennifer to Satan. Unfortunately, their victim wasn't a virgin like they believed she was, and so Jennifer came back from the dead possessed by a succubus who seduces her male classmates before eating them.

Both then and now, most of the discourse around this film has concerned its literal poster girl, Megan Fox. Having seen her in quite a few movies over the years, I've come to have a mixed opinion of Fox's acting. Hollywood did do her dirty for bluntly calling out the problems she encountered working in the film industry as an "it girl", but at the same time, she doesn't have much range, and even without the backlash, her career trajectory likely would've been less Margot Robbie or Scarlett Johansson than Jessica Alba (minus the business career that made her far more money than she ever did as an actress) or Bo Derek: a sex symbol whose roles would've slowly but surely dried up once she turned 30. However, while she is a fairly limited instrument as an actor, she isn't wholly untalented, and this film makes the absolute best use of those talents. It doesn't really ask much of her except to play a villainous version of her stock screen persona, a gorgeous, kinda haughty young woman who uses her body to get ahead in (un)life, and occasionally mug for the camera, and she absolutely nails it. Jennifer is a creative twist on the standard possession movie plot, one where the demonic shift in the possession victim's personality manifests in the form of her turning into a grotesque caricature of a high school "queen bee" like Regina George in Mean Girls, an utter shitheel who laughs at the suffering of her classmates even as they grieve the deaths of their friends. She may literally eat teenage boys alive, but the actions of hers that best reveal the depths of her monstrosity are those that feel all too human. Fox owns the part and makes it her own, such that I'm not surprised at how many of her scenes in this have been immortalized as gifs on Tumblr and clips on TikTok.

And it was watching the effects of that monstrosity flow through the lives of the people who knew Jennifer's victims that something clicked. One of the big things that retrospective analyses of this movie have focused on is its treatment of rape culture, especially as represented in Nikolai Wolf, the frontman of Low Shoulder. But watching the film again in 2024, I noticed something else. It's the feeling of helplessness that slowly but surely comes over the school, with everybody growing numb and fatigued to tragedy as the "cannibal serial killer" claims more victims right on the heels of the massive concert disaster while the adults are unable to stop any of it -- everyone, that is, except the one who treats it as one big joke and relishes in it like a troll. This may have been a movie made in 2009 about children of the 2000s, but even with its extremely MySpace-era emo aesthetics, it felt like a movie about children of the 2010s raised in a world of rampant mass shootings, religious extremism, resurgent bigotry, raging sexism, shrinking economic opportunity, and countless other social ills while nobody seemed to know how to fix it. Jennifer may be an iconic, catty, and sexy villain who gets many (though not all) of the best lines and scenes, but if you ask me, it's Needy, the one who finally says "no" and resolves to do what nobody else will no matter what it costs her, who's the reason this movie endures. Watching her fight Jennifer was like watching somebody throw down with every wiseass troll who thinks that school shootings, beheading videos, and tiki torch rallies are awesome as their sick way of telling the world that it's "cringe" to care about anything. Yes, it's clear watching this that Cody doesn't really know how teenagers speak, but she managed to capture how they think remarkably well.

When it came to Needy, this movie needed a world-class actress, and fortunately, it found one in Amanda Seyfried. The film practically acknowledges the ridiculousness of trying to frame her as "unattractive", but she manages to pull it off anyway. Watching the intro flashing forward to her locked up in a psychiatric hospital (letting us know early on that this is not going to end well), then jumping back to two months prior when we see her as a meek, bespectacled nerd looking longingly at a still-living Jennifer during a pep rally to the point that one of her classmates thinks she's a closeted lesbian (which, as we later see, may very well be the case), it's hard to believe that they're the same person, but Seyfried manages to make Needy's transformation from a cute girl next door who looks awkward in "alternative" clothes when heading to the concert to a hardened, shell-shocked survivor feel genuine. With Jennifer serving mainly as a monster and a symbol more than a character after she dies and comes back, it's largely on Needy to carry the film's emotional core, her heartbreak at watching one of her closest friendships turn toxic, and I bought every minute of it. This, as much as Mamma Mia!, was the movie that should've indicated that Seyfried was going places as a gifted and genuinely fearless actress, and I'm not surprised that her career would ultimately outlast the hype she first received in her youth.

Most of this film's comedy comes from its supporting cast, a who's who of both contemporary teen stars and older comedy actors. J. K. Simmons plays the science teacher Mr. Wroblewski about as far from his iconic J. Jonah Jameson performance as he can but still managed to make his dry, stern authority figure amusing. The clique of goth kids led by Kyle Gallner's Colin is a hilarious parody of the "edgy" youth counterculture of the era, a group of kids whose obsession with the aesthetics of death and misery seemingly makes them better suited than anyone else to live in the hostile world Jennifer creates with her murders, only for it to create some serious blind spots not just in their interactions with Jennifer but also in their sense of good taste. In the unrated cut that I watched, Bill Fagerbakke steals the show playing the father of one of Jennifer's victims, utterly devouring the one scene he's in where he mourns his son's death and swears vengeance on his killer in one of the most creatively graphic ways I've ever heard -- all while using the same voice he uses when playing Patrick Star on SpongeBob SquarePants. Johnny Simmons (no relation to J. K.) makes for a likable romantic partner to Needy as her boyfriend Chip, enough to make up for a fairly underwritten part, less like a character and more like a gender-flipped version of the stock "girlfriend" characters you see in movies with male heroes. Chip and Needy get what may just be the cutest and most awkward sex scene I've ever watched, one where neither of them really knows what they're doing but each of them wants to make sure that the other is having as much fun doing it as they are. There's definitely a sense of idealization in his character, like Cody was writing the kind of boyfriend she wished she had in high school.

Finally, we come to Adam Brody as Nikolai, the film's secondary villain and the man responsible for everything that goes wrong. In hindsight, the idea of a sappy emo musician who, behind the scenes, is as much a depraved rock star as any classic metal god, which originally came off as a joke, is one that turned out to be shockingly prescient of what a lot of Warped Tour emo, pop-punk, and scene bands were actually like behind the scenes. Not only do he and his band kill Jennifer after they're initially presented as "merely" rapists (and even after, the metaphors aren't exactly subtle), he ruthlessly exploits the aftermath of the concert fire to ever-greater heights of fame and fortune, implicitly the work of the Devil holding up his end of the bargain, all while casually insulting the town where it happened and, by extension, the memories of the victims. Low Shoulder's hit song "Through the Trees" is heard throughout the film to the point where it feels like it's taunting Needy, the one person who knows the truth about their "heroism" during the fire, how they in fact left dozens of people to die instead of trying to save them and how it's implied that the fire was, in fact, their fault (whether it was negligence or malice, it's never stated). Jennifer may have been evil, but the things that had been done to her to turn her into a monster made her a tragic villain nonetheless. I felt no such pity for Nikolai, with Brody playing him as a swaggering and spiteful bastard who I wanted to see suffer.

Karyn Kusama's direction, when paired with the visual design and the 2000s aesthetics dripping off this film, gives it a tone that I could perhaps best describe as gothic. Not just in the fashion sense of certain characters, but also in the heightened, old-school approach it takes to staging many of its scenes. It felt like she had been very informed by classic horror in a manner almost akin to Tim Burton at times, albeit with his brand of whimsy swapped out for black comedy. This is an incredibly moody film even in its funnier moments, serving to underline the grim nature of a lot of the humor here and lend it a dark edge. It feels sexy without feeling sleazy, perhaps best evidenced by the famous lesbian kiss scene, which puts the focus squarely on the characters' faces and plays the situation as something disturbing. Yes, you're watching Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried passionately making out for a good solid minute or so, but you're also watching Jennifer manipulate Needy and exploit the feelings she has for her in order to torment her that much further. At every step of the way, this is a film that knows what it's doing, and it does it well.

The Bottom Line

It does have its minor annoyances, but this is still a movie that deserved the reevaluation it's received, and one that stands the test of time as a classic of teen horror, queer horror, and feminist horror even if its fashions and soundtrack are carbon-dated to 2009.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

In the words of Commander James Stephanie Fucking Sterling (son!), companies these days don't just want to make money. They want to make all the money. The tech industry's years of hypergrowth, takeover of the entertainment industry, and ethos of valuing market share over profits got it in their heads that, if you're not Conquering the World, you're a dinosaur to be left in the dust.

You can't even call it capitalism anymore. At least capitalists care about turning a profit. This is megalomania, an obsession with being the BIGGEST there is as an end in and of itself out of a belief that sheer size can create a reality distortion field around a company.

it's fucking me up how tv shows, movies, and even video games can't be "niche" content anymore

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Mean Girls (2024)

Mean Girls (2024)

Rated PG-13 for strong language, sexual material, and teen drinking

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-mean-girls-2024.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

The new film in theaters titled Mean Girls is a movie with an identity crisis. Is it a remake? A musical? Yes. Specifically, it's an adaptation of the 2018 Broadway musical that was itself adapted from the 2004 teen comedy classic just in time for its 20th anniversary, with Tina Fey, writer of both the original film and the book for the musical, returning to not only write the screenplay for this but also reprise her role as Miss Norbury. It's a film that tries to do two things at once, both faithfully adapt the musical and offer a straightforward remake of the movie, and while it does both pretty well, it often felt at war with itself in the process, like pieces of two good movies awkwardly thrown into the same bag. Don't get me wrong, I liked this movie. The musical numbers were extremely fun, and the cast, particularly Reneé Rapp as Regina (reprising her role from Broadway) and Auli'i Cravalho as Janis, was awesome. Whether you're a fan of the original or not, I still recommend giving this a go. (It's certainly better than Mean Girls 2.) But as I watched it, whenever it wasn't focused on the musical numbers, I found myself nodding my head thinking "y'know, the original is still such a great movie."

The plot is virtually identical to the original, with no major adjustments. The beautiful but naive new girl Cady, raised in Africa (specified in this version as Kenya) by her zoologist parents, gets caught up with a clique of popular girls called the Plastics comprised of the queen bee Regina, her neurotic second-in-command Gretchen, and the airhead Karen. After Regina steals the boy she's interested in, Cady, with help from the outcasts Janis and Damian, sets out to destroy Regina's life and popularity, but turns into a bitchy brat along the way. There's more focus on social media now, there are references to Spotify, Janis is now explicitly stated to be a lesbian after it was merely implied in the original (Regina said she was, but she was presented as an unreliable narrator), and a lot of the edgier jokes from the original (including the subplot of the coach sleeping with a student) are gone, but outside the singing, this is 90% the same movie.

And that right there is the biggest problem it has. The music is the entire reason the Broadway show and, by extension, this movie exist given how closely they hew to the original film's story. And yet, this film removed about half the songs from the Broadway show's soundtrack and shortened several others, ostensibly to make the film feel less "stagey" and keep a more consistent tone. It was a decision that did not serve the film well at all, as it meant that long stretches went by with no musical numbers, leaving only a remake of a better film to stand largely on its own. It's a competent remake, don't get me wrong, albeit one that feels sanitized compared to the original. Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Auli'i Cravalho, and Jaquel Spivey were all very charismatic and did great impressions of Rachel McAdams, Lindsay Lohan, Lizzy Caplan, and Daniel Franzese, while Bebe Wood added a nice touch of neuroticism to her take on Gretchen and Avantika Vandanapu had a lot of fun playing up Karen's sex appeal to make her not just an idiot, but an outright bimbo. I would not be surprised to see a lot of this movie's teenage cast go on to bigger and better things in the future, just as the stars of the original did.

But it's largely just that: impressions. There's nothing here that really adds to anything. Social media is heavily referenced and featured throughout in a way that it wasn't in the original, but in such a manner that you can tell that Tina Fey is now in her fifties. What's worse, while classic scenes and quotes are faithfully replicated, the comic timing just felt off. I laughed pretty consistently throughout, but not as much as I did watching the original. I'm not normally the kind of person who insists that every movie needs to justify its existence, but at times, this movie treads close to Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in how it approaches the source material. The trailers may have seemed almost ashamed of admitting that this was a musical, but sitting down to watch it, they turned out to be pretty indicative of how the movie itself approached its changes from the source material.

The one big difference, and the one thing that kept this movie from getting a 2 out of 5 (and honestly, it was close), was the musical numbers. While many of them have been cut, the ones they kept were still extremely enjoyable, and a lot of it came down, once again, to the cast. Rapp knows these songs like the back of her hand, and every time she got the chance to sing, it was like watching a great concert performance or music video by a pop star at the top of her game. Karen and Gretchen each only get one big musical number (not counting the Plastics' ensemble performance at the Christmas show), but Wood and Vandanapu each stole the show during them, such that I wish the film kept in more of the songs they had in the Broadway show. Cravalho and Spivey were exactly how I pictured Janis and Damian if they burst into song in the middle of the original movie, with Cravalho in particular having a very pop-punk edge to her songs while Spivey gets one of the funniest "new" songs in the film in the form of a cover of the iCarly theme song that must be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, where the music was concerned, the main weak link in the cast was a big one. Don't get me wrong, Angourie Rice is a good actress who plays Cady well when she doesn't have to sing, and in a straightforward remake of Mean Girls she would've made for a great Cady. But as much as they may have downplayed the songs, this is still a musical, and as a singer... well, she's a good actress. I would not be surprised to hear that the real reason they cut so much of the music from this musical is because they heard Rice's singing and realized that she wouldn't be able to carry a musical. Rice reminds me here of Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera or Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia!, an otherwise talented actor who probably shouldn't do musicals.

The Bottom Line

This musical adaptation of Mean Girls exists very much in the shadow of the original film. For better or worse, the most I could say about it is that it's light, harmless fluff that doesn't overstay its welcome and whose good moments are very enjoyable. Come for some great songs, then go home and rewatch the original.