Film Review: OBEX

A charming tribute to the early era of video gaming

During cicada season in 1980s Baltimore, computing enthusiast and ASCII artist Conor, a loner who avoids leaving his house and whose only friend is his rescue dog, buys a new video game that promises an advanced immersive experience. After what seems at first to be a disappointing test run, it gradually becomes clear that the type of immersion he’s getting is of a rather extreme kind: the game’s villain starts invading his TV screens, his printer, his backyard and his dreams. The plot of the game blends into his life, capturing his neighbor, his dog, his childhood memories and his secret fears. Maybe it no longer matters whether he can make it back to reality, as long as he gets a happy ending?

Albert Birney’s independent film OBEX is full of what video game reviewer Aidan Moher affectionately likes to call “hot CRT action.” Conor’s life is experienced through screens, from the morning variety/news show that presides over his breakfasts to his home office computer to the karaoke list he uses to sing himself to sleep. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, we’re shown what he does for a living: he turns people’s family photos into ASCII art that he painstakingly types by hand with fearsomely timed precision. He digitizes dozens of people every day, not unlike what the video game will do to him.

In fact, there’s an even cleverer form of foreshadowing in the first act. The events in the movie coincide with the periodic emergence of adult cicadas from their years-long undergroun hibernation, and Conor watches on the TV a chef who suggests ways to cook cicadas. Conor notes the cosmic joke that it must be to spend that many years in quiet solitude and end up eaten on screen. That description, it turns out, also applies to Conor, who has set for himself a simple and steady routine of working at home until he gets trapped by a video game.

I was too young to know what it was like to live through the first years of the home computer, but OBEX succeeds at giving me the feeling that it captures that era faithfully and lovingly. The retro computer graphics are made with admirable attention to detail. Also, it’s a genius choice of sound design that the mating call of cicadas is echoed by the noise of TV static and the screech of a dot matrix printer. Writer/director Birney gives an endearing performance as Conor, establishing the character’s effortless likeability as a harmless weirdo. The choice to film in black and white brings to mind elements of Pi, another story of obsessive computing, as well as Pleasantville, another inexplicable journey into audiovisual media.

Inside the game, the quest is straightforward: there’s a demon lord terrorizing the kingdom, and the player is the chosen hero who shall slay him. To make matters more personal, the demon kidnaps Conor’s dog (or so it would seem; the ending retroactively blurs the line between the real world and the game world). What began as a paranoid psychological thriller becomes a horror chase, with human-sized cicadas, murderous skeletons and lots of squirting blood. The final battle between Conor and the demon is exactly as adorably cheesy as one might expect.

Alas, I preferred the first half of the movie, when the scenes are restricted to Conor’s house, to the second half, when he’s thrown into the world of the game and has to walk through a forest to find the villain’s lair. Birney displays far more expertise in camera placement and shot composition when he has to film in a set than in exterior shots. The causal sequence of events is also more solid during the first half as opposed to the almost freeform plotting of the fantasy quest. After Conor enters the game, he gains a sidekick who has a TV screen instead of a head, which means we never see the actor’s expressions. This forces Birney to carry the emotional weight of those scenes all on his own, which strains the enjoyability of the second half of the story.

OBEX manages to both push the right nostalgic buttons and have something to say about present-day computing. We think nothing of watching screens, but recently it’s the screens that are watching us. Are you on camera right now? Don’t take any risks. Smile.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Obsession, Backrooms and the rise of the YouTube movie

Can saving Hollywood be as simple as this One Weird Trick?

Movies created by YouTubers are having a moment. A very, very lucrative moment.

In January of this year, video game YouTuber Markiplier released his self-financed, $3-million debut theatrical film, Iron Lung, which he mostly promoted by appealing directly to his 40 million YouTube subscribers. In its opening weekend, it looked like it might beat Send Help, legendary director Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre after his adventures in the MCU. The Walt Disney Company financed, produced, and marketed that movie, with an estimated budget of $40 million, and Oscar-nominee Rachel McAdams played the lead.

In May of this year, Curry Barker, an aspiring actor and director of popular YouTube horror shorts, released his theatrical writing and directorial debut, Obsession, produced for a reported $750,000. It finished third at the box office on its opening weekend, with $17 million. The following weekend, it made even more money, landing in second place with $24 million. On its third weekend, it made even more more money, finishing again in second place, with $27 million. As a rule, movies don’t improve on their opening weekend in their second weekend. And they certainly don’t improve on their second weekend in their third weekend. The last movie to do so was, I kid you not, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in friggin’ caveman days back in 1982 (editor’s note: this post’s author saw E.T. in the theater in the caveman days of 1982. Don’t even let him pretend like he didn’t.).

In Obsession’s third weekend, it finished second behind a new release, Backrooms, the theatrical directorial debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, based on his YouTube series of the same name. Produced on a budget of $10 million, it grossed over $80 million in its opening weekend, tying the previous weekend's haul for the debut of the latest Star Wars movie. By just its second weekend, Backrooms had already become distributor A24’s biggest release ever, beating the total domestic haul of last year’s Timothée Chalamet Oscar-vehicle Marty Supreme.

So… what’s going on? What does it mean?

Capsule Reviews

The Occam’s Razor answer to why these three movies are doing absolute gangbusters at the box office is, hey, maybe they're all just really good? Let's see.

Iron Lung: Based on a somewhat popular video game, the movie takes place almost entirely inside a small submarine, with only Simon (Markiplier) appearing onscreen. It is over 2 hours long. Markiplier is not an actor, and doesn’t know how to command the screen. But he's the only actor we get. There is a section of the film where we watch water drip. Later, something happens. We don’t know what. Maybe he’s hallucinating it. Maybe there are giant dead aliens outside the sub. It’s not clear. Then there is so much blood. So, so very much blood, and Simon's body begins to disintegrate. I don’t know why. From the blood maybe. This is a bad movie. But you know what? Markiplier stans went and saw it, they had a great time, and I have zero desire to take that away from them. It had a great opening, it made the folks who saw it happy, it made Markiplier a good return on investment, limped across a couple more weekends, and was gone. It’s not looking good for Occam’s Razor.

Obsession: Bear has a crush on his friend Nikki, but doesn’t have the nerve to tell her. She’s about to quit her job at the music store where they both work, alongside friends Ian and Sarah, so Bear buys her a going away present at a New Age store, a novelty toy called a One-Wish Willow. But Bear chickens out before he can give it to her, and makes his own wish on it—that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. He gets his wish. Inspired by the Monkey’s Paw vignette in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror anthology, it’s also the basic setup of a Twilight Zone episode, a million other things, and the aphorism “be careful what you wish for.” Sounds kinda derivative. But in execution, this movie is flawless. It’s not just that Inde Navarrette gives an all-time horror movie performance as Nikki, but the writing and the implications for things taking place just outside the frame of the movie’s point of view will stick with you for days after you leave the theater. It’s a phenomenal film.

Backrooms: This movie has a lot going for it. First, you’ve got a small cast led by magnetic Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve. Second, there is something primal and dreamlike in the basic premise of finding another room that somehow you’ve always missed before in a space you are intimately familiar with, maybe even living in. This is eerily similar to the closest thing I’ve ever had to a recurring dream. So when Ejiofor’s Clark finds a secret, permeable section of the basement wall in the furniture store he owns that opens into a seemingly never-ending network of (mostly) empty rooms, I for one felt a profound sense of uncanny recognition. But moments later, I realized that if this actually happened to me in real life, I would nope out of there so fast I’d leave vapor trails through the portal. So even though the direction is competent and the producers brought in a veteran TV writer to handle the screenplay, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the characters in this movie and believable human behavior. I think it’s a good movie, but it’s a good movie that feels like a talented young filmmaker with a lot of support trying to find their way. And, it must be said, once we do see the monster of the backrooms, it’s pretty derpy.

Despite a strong (for January) opening, Iron Lung wound up with only $50 million in worldwide grosses. Backrooms has, at the time of this writing, made over $300 million worldwide, but its week-over-week drop-offs have been massive. Obsession has made almost $400 million, and when I saw it last weekend on a Sunday at 5 pm, the theater was sold out. So with the exception of Obsession, I don’t think these are great movies where word of mouth is driving their success in theaters.

A Grand Theory

So not Occam’s Razor, then. What's the next simplest explanation? Probably that these creators were successful on YouTube and just brought their audiences out to the theaters. Let's check that one.

Markiplier is one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform, with nearly 40 million subscribers. He made multiple webseries for YouTube as his popularity expanded, and Iron Lung is a video game adaptation, which feels at home with his core content of the video game play-through. Massive YouTuber brings $17 million of ticket sales to the box office by hyping the movie on his channel throughout production, editing, behind-the-scenes, and as it neared release. Cool. Seems reasonable.

As of today, as I type this—even after the success of the movie—the Backrooms YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. Obsession’s Curry Barker‘s channel—again, even after the black swan success of the film—has a little over 1 million subscribers. It seems implausible that these creators ported their vastly smaller YouTube audiences over into the multiplex seats in the same way that Markiplier did to multiples of that success. So what gives?

I think it’s actually really simple. You know who has always gone to the movies? At least since the 1950s, anyway? Teenagers. Young people. You know whom studios have been trying to lure into the theaters for the last 20 or so years? Families. “Four-quadrant pictures” that appeal to everybody, where parents can take their kids. The conglomerate-owned studios justify $200-400 million investments in IP and sequel-driven four-quadrant pictures by wagering that these are safe bets. But you know who doesn’t want to sit with their parents at the movies? Teenagers. These massive tentpole pictures have spent 20 years teaching young people that going to theaters is boring and for old people or little kids.

These three directors have something in common that I think is much more powerful than their shared YouTube origins—they're young people. Markiplier is the oldest—he's in his thirties, but he's been on YouTube since 2012 (same year this blog started. James Wan, call me).

These are young people making movies for young people. Where have we heard that before?

A… ahem… New Hope?

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet got in trouble during his Oscars blitz because he said he was worried that the theatrical experience was moving toward niche entertainment, like the ballet or opera. I found his comments utterly unobjectionable, but lots of folks got Big Mad. Not that Timmy C needs me in his corner, but box office has been down for years, never bouncing back from the pandemic closures, and the rise of streaming has led to so much hand-wringing and so, so many op-eds about whether or not this is the End of Cinema.

It's not. It never is. But as I wrote at the end of last year, Hollywood will become something different. It has to, and it always does.

The studio system collapsed throughout the 1950s, and in the 1960s young people like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and other young filmmakers who either got their start or a significant boost from Roger Corman (my man, the GOAT, whom I interviewed in 2017). The thing that Corman gave them was an opportunity to get reps, to make things, to learn the ropes as storytellers, and to introduce themselves to other producers who could give them work on bigger platforms. It sure seems like YouTube gives today’s creative folks the same opportunities.

As the 1970s reached their back half, suddenly Stephen Spielberg gave us Jaws and George Lucas gave us Star Wars—both previously unimaginable box office and cultural successes. Lucas was 32 or 33 when he directed Star Wars, his third feature film. Spielberg was 29 when he made Jaws, his third theatrical feature and fifth or sixth overall including made-for-TV movies. These were all young guys. Spielberg and Lucas went on to be responsible for most of the top-10 highest grossing movies of the 1980s.

Moving forward in time, Spike Jonze was 30 when he made Being John Malkovich after a career in successful music videos. M. Night Shyamalan was 29 when he made The Sixth Sense. Quentin Tarantino was 31 when he made Pulp Fiction, which essentially invented an entire genre of 90s action movies by mashing up things Tarantino grew up with into a distinct package that appealed to young moviegoers and other young filmmakers.

So Hollywood will probably learn the wrong lesson from this year, because it usually does. Back in the early aughts, blogs and Twitter feeds were the new hotness, especially after blogger Diablo Cody’s script for Juno turned into such a beautiful movie. Hollywood signed everybody with a blog or a Twitter feed, resulting in utterly forgettable (or worse!) shows like Shit My Dad Says and movies like I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. So they'll probably sign folks who have big YouTube channels, regardless of their storytelling ability, and some of them will never make anything, and some creators behind breakout hits (remember The Blair Witch Project? Remember?) will fizzle.

But others will not. Other creators will go on to write and direct movies that we will talk about forever. The nice thing is that the success of this year’s smaller movies will create a permission structure for not only distributors like A24 and NEON, but also for studios to take chances on more and smaller movies. And if they’re made by young people for young people, in a way that excites young people, or scares them, or reflects back to them a world that they recognize or dream of, then that’s what movies do best, and that’s what brings people together to experience them together.

I know Toy Story 5 just made all the money in the world this weekend. But if you are rooting for the future of movies in theaters, go see Obsession. Or if you’re squeamish, go see Backrooms. Don’t dismiss them because their filmmakers came from YouTube. In the end, these particular movies might not be for you, exactly, but their success will open the door to more movies in theaters that don’t start with the word “Avengers” or end in a number.

Posted by Vance K - co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together, and Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer.

Let's hear it for The People's Joker

This is the rude shakeup that today's pathologically risk-averse studios need

It's often been said that superhero comics are this generation's mythology, to which it's often been replied that classical mythology wasn't constrained by copyright law and didn't have to obey corporate mandates. To fulfill the cultural function of myths, superhero comics would have to be freely usable by anyone. That's the approach that comedian Vera Drew has followed with the building blocks of the Batman mythos: to borrow a well-worn phrase, she's seized the means of narration, making them her own, resignifying them as milestones in her personal coming-of-age story and creating the first interesting live-action portrayal of the Joker since 2008.

Take note, Zaslav. You might learn something.

Drew's artistically and legally adventurous exploration of her life's journey, The People's Joker, is a nonstop riot of queer joy transmuted into queer pride sublimated into queer wrath. Via multiple formats (cartoon animation, action figures, glitch art, superposition of live actors onto handdrawn backgrounds, the occasional callback to actual DC movies), The People's Joker breathes new life into the plot of 2019's insufferably pretentious Joker movie.

In this version of Gotham City, Batman is a closeted child predator, the Daily Planet is a far-right conspiracist podcast, Arkham Asylum provides conversion therapy, and the deadly laughing gas that has for decades been the Joker's signature weapon is a common medication prescribed to suppress bad feelings. Our protagonist, an aspiring comedian who moves to Gotham City to escape her transphobic and outrageously narcissistic mother, founds a clandestine "anti-comedy" club with fellow members of Batman's rogue gallery to oppose the city's violent monopoly on comedy. While she strives to bring the power of laughter back to the people, she also has to navigate toxic romance, the surveillance state, institutional discrimination, overmedicalization, transgenerational trauma, and her own issues with self-acceptance.

It's hard to do justice to the explosion of art styles with which this movie is put together. Outdoor and action scenes feature material from dozens of artists, each with their unique take on character design, palette, and degree of detail. Yet somehow the incompatible parts build a harmonious pastiche where any search for uniformity matters less than playfulness, experimentation, and sincerity. Underneath the neverending mockery of Batman lore, a very personal truth can be perceived. This isn't the type of art that results from executive producers trimming the rough edges off a piece of soulless cashgrab. This is a scream from the depths of a generous heart that has been wounded and betrayed but still holds on to the promise of human goodness that can be found in comic book tales. Where official DC productions such as Aquaman 2 or Shazam 2 or Flash 1 flailed about in futile search of something genuine to say, The People's Joker lolsobs openly, with a vulnerable earnestness that authorized house style would never risk. Sure, there are tons of irony here, but the movie never wields it as a cushion against its own feelings.

The People's Joker looks at societal cruelty in the eyes and responds by baring its soul, making the incisive statements 2019's Joker wishes it had the audacity to attempt. Joker's facile edginess is left looking like the juvenile posturing it truly is next to Drew's carefree irreverence and raw intensity. In a year that has already given us pleasant surprises from independent queer SFF filmmakers, The People's Joker takes a wry look at a corporate media ecosystem saturated by too much content carrying too little meaning, and loudly, fearlessly, effortlessly gets the last laugh.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview: The Last Movie Ever Made

At the end of the world, art may not save us, but it will prove that our lives meant something

One morning, every human being on the planet hears a voice in their head. It's not a hallucination: it's a public service announcement. The simulation that hosts our universe will be shut down in a few weeks. Be sure to say your goodbyes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

To prevent mass chaos, the people running the simulation have dialed down our rebelliousness. They want none of that rage against the machine, thank you very much. We're expected to just go gentle into the night.

And yet, one man will spend his last days ensuring that his brief stay among the living will leave a mark. Our protagonist, Marshall, is a complete nobody. But in the face of eternal oblivion, that's what we all are. Regardless of his complete lack of talent, friends, or any redeeming qualities, he will stop at nothing to finally make the movie he left unfinished years ago. It's not a good movie, not even a good concept. But it's his movie. That it matters to him is enough. That hopeless scream against the void is the premise of the indie film The Last Movie Ever Made.

Now, to be clear, the fact that you're making sincere art doesn't automatically mark you as a good person. Marshall has learned the same narcissism he criticizes in his mother, and the way he gathers his moviemaking crew exposes the faults of character that have left his life stranded and directionless. He does acquire a more mature perspective about himself during the runtime of the film, but it's still an indictment of his person that it took the end of the world for him to begin that process.

Art is meant to be useless, if you go by Oscar Wilde's word. Nothing will change because of Marshall's movie existing. It won't convince the makers of the simulation to keep us alive. It won't buy our reality even one more day. When everything ends, so will art. So why bother?

The Last Movie Ever Made rejects that question. Its position is that it's precisely because we are limited and ephemeral that art is worth the effort. In fact, our finitude is what makes art valuable. It doesn't even matter that the beauty we create is doomed to fade away. It suffices to elevate the universe, to be a place where beauty once existed, as opposed to one that never had it.

It's a pity that the script doesn't maintain a firmer grasp of its own theme. The character of Marshall lacks consistency from one act to the next because the plot requires his immediate world to warp itself around his goals: one day, his ex-wife is angry at him for caring more about finishing his movie than about her recent family tragedy; a few days later, she happily stays for his sake and dismisses whatever her family supposedly meant to her. This muddles the film's earlier point about the lines that Marshall has crossed for his art. It's as if the fact that everyone will soon die rendered moot any consequences for repeated misbehavior on Marshall's part.

The film is made with almost the same simplicity with which Marshall makes his. The characters' situation already carries enough emotion without any need to punctuate it with fancy camera tricks, digital effects, or even a relevant soundtrack. This is a bare-bones production whose only ambition is to say what it means, and it succeeds at that.

In a possible parallel with the larger premise about a computer program coming to an end, the film's third act begins when Marshall's computer crashes and most of the scenes he's shot are lost. At that point in the story, it appears that his entire life's work has been for nothing. Even if he were to start again, he may not have enough time before the universe is shut down. There you have the human condition in a nutshell: We never know whether it makes sense to try, because none of us is promised there will be enough time.

So what does Marshall do? He tries again. Of course he tries again. Because that's what humans do when confronted with the absurd. Because, although no human effort can destroy death, art is the one human effort that death can't destroy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [film]: The Love Witch

There’s a lot to love

 

 

The Love Witch is a movie shot in 2016 that looks like it was shot in 1972. Supposedly, it was *the last* film shot on 35mm film and edited on a negative without using a digital intermediate. As a big film nerd, this all makes me way happy, but what writer and director Anna Biller did with this film far outpaces a simple stylistic exercise.

The eponymous love witch is Elaine, who is attempting to recover after the end of a marriage, and has — as she puts it — been reborn as a witch practicing love magick. But her magic is maybe a little too effective, as the dudes she sets her sights on never really seem to be able to move on from her. This failure to move on takes several forms throughout the movie, and Elaine seems both a little confused by this effect, but also ambivalent. It’s not really her concern if a romantic plaything can’t move on.

This is where gender dynamics come into play. I’m not the best reviewer to discuss this, but let me say that the gender dynamics in the film are complex and nuanced. Elaine articulates the notion that women should be subservient to men, and give them sex all, all, all the time. She tries to convince other female characters in the film of this. But Elaine doesn't really practice what she preaches. Instead, she seeks out men for *her own* sexual and relational gratification. We hear the abusive voices of her father and her ex-/late husband demanding greater physical perfection from her, and we watch her sexually engage with men only to come away still wanting, while the men collapse in weepy heaps in her wake.

For me, this is where the aesthetic beauty of the film comes into play. And please understand, this is a BEAUTIFUL movie. Anna Biller not only wrote and directed it, but also designed the sets and costumes. She and cinematographer M. David Mullen purportedly worked out blocking and lighting schemes from 1970s giallo movies in order to better mimic the look of those films. It’s one thing to mimic the look of old film with a plug-in, or even to shoot on the same medium, but to fully mimic it down to the nuts and bolts...well, something else happens there.

By perfectly copying the aesthetic of a bygone generation of films and doing so in the context of a new work that handles gender, narrative, and thematic content differently, Biller is setting her film up explicitly in dialogue with those earlier films. Giallo and independent Technicolor horror movies brought us a number of female heroines, but when fifty years later it’s plausible that a woman might yet be attacked in a bar because someone calls her “witch,” the narrative takes on an additional layer of meaning.

That is maybe too esoteric. At brass tacks, we have the following: Samantha Robinson as Elaine is probably as beautiful as any human has ever been in a movie; the production design is sumptuous and layered; there are evocative references to films like The Seventh Seal that make my film-nerd heart happy; and the narrative leaves room for ambivalence and competing interpretations of Elaine, her goals, and her accomplishments.

In the end, this is kind of everything you want from an independent film — a strong narrative voice, bold visual choices, and a thoughtful re-examination of genre conventions.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Samantha Robinson’s highly stylized performance; +1 for literally every single thing in front of the camera lens, because nothing is wasted

Penalties: -1 for a certain lack of narrative integrity that makes a couple of plot developments feel pretty mushy

Cult Film Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Vance K — Emmy Award-winning producer and director, cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together for lo these many years now.

The Roger Corman Interview

Roger Corman has been, arguably, the single most important voice in the history of independent cinema. It was an absolute honor to be able to sit down with him in his office to discuss his new film, Death Race 2050, and specifics from a career that spans seven decades.


For the uninitiated, Roger Corman began writing, directing, and producing in the mid-1950s. He launched the careers of actors like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, and revived or reinvigorated the careers of Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and others. As a producer, he gave directors like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and James Cameron their starts in filmmaking. He worked extensively with writers such as Twilight Zone alumni Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who were also seminal sci-fi and horror writers in their own right. His distribution company won foreign language Oscars for the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

But at the end of the day, this is a guy who just made a lot of great movies. From the 1950s beatnik satire A Bucket of Blood to the 1960s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, to the 1970s punk hallmark Rock n Roll High School and beyond, Roger Corman may have spent a career working with low- and medium-budget films, but he managed to create lasting art, documents of the times, and just goddamn fun movies, and he continues to do so.

If you haven't, check out Death Race 2050, streaming on Netflix and on DVD and VOD or watch the original, Death Race 2000, on DVD or streaming on FilmStruck. And enjoy the interview. I sure as hell did.

Posted by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musician and songwriter, and Emmy Award-winning producer.

ESSENTIALS: 24 Cult Films for Late, Late Nights

I feel like I should preface any list of "Best" cult films or "Most Important" cult films with the disclaimer that there is no list. The thing that makes cult films memorable is that they are a representation of a unique voice, and different voices appeal to different people. Plus, there are just so, so many movies out there, nobody can see them all. If you've got a film that you (or you and your friends) love and quote and everybody else thinks you're nuts, I think you're doing the thing right, and it doesn't matter if that movie's on a list anywhere or not.

The other key thing about cult films is that they are usually produced outside of the mainstream, so a lot of lists of "Best Cult Films" that I see online are rehashes of movies like The Big Lebowski or Office Space, which were box office flops, but gained a second life through word-of-mouth after their disappointing theatrical runs. I love both of those movies, and they certainly have cult followings — Office Space prompted Swingline to actually make a red stapler, and The Big Lebowski started a religion — but now they're so well-known I don't need to invoke them here.

Since I get to make this list, I wanted to focus on movies that didn't show up on the other lists. I also wanted to stay away from "The Worst Movie Ever" kinds of films (plus, I already covered that ground), and try to share movies that I think are legitimately good, or moving, or compelling, even if you can see their seams sometimes.

These are in no particular order, but they are all perfect for late nights or rainy days:

1. Carnival of Souls

After a traumatic accident, a woman becomes drawn to a mysterious abandoned carnival. - IMDb

Mistakenly thought to be in the public domain for decades and widely available in grainy, garbled versions, Carnival of Souls has a new blu-ray release from Criterion with restored picture and sound that really shows off this movie for what it is. It's a legitimately eerie movie, beautifully shot, full of evocative imagery and intelligent subtext. This movie also has special significance for me, because seeing the original Criterion Collection release of this movie alongside films by Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, and Bergman was the first time I really understood that cult films didn't have to be a guilty pleasure. That release made me realize that there were other people like me who loved both art house cinema and outsider cinema and took them equally seriously.

2. Chimes at Midnight

The career of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff as roistering companion to young Prince Hal, circa 1400-1413. - IMDb

For many years, the crown jewel of my DVD collection has been a DVD-R of this movie, which was only briefly released on VHS and was extremely difficult to find and even more difficult to own. But this is another movie that Criterion has recently rescued from the pit of abysmal picture and sound quality. And good thing, too. This movie and the never-completed Don Quixote were Orson Welles' dream projects. Constructed from texts pulled from four Shakespeare plays, Welles made John Falstaff, who has more lines than any other character in Shakespeare, the tragic hero of his own movie. The larger-than-life Welles plays the larger than life mentor to Prince Hal, later King Henry, and the thread of wasted talent and unbridled excess that runs through the film cannot help but reflect on the former boy-wonder of Welles himself. It is a movie that was financially and logistically hard to make and it shows, but it is full of stunning images, and a truly heart-rending conclusion.

3. A Bucket of Blood

A frustrated and talentless artist finds acclaim for a plaster covered dead cat that is mistaken as a skillful statuette. Soon the desire for more praise leads to an increasingly deadly series of works. - IMDb

I will go to the mat with anybody who says Roger Corman isn't a good director. He's certainly known as a producer of exploitation films and for launching the careers of people who went on to be iconic directors, but his directorial work (which he pretty much stopped doing in the late-1970s) was extremely sharp, both in terms of visual style and intelligence. A Bucket of Blood is one of the best satirical take-downs of the art scene I think I've ever watched, and it wraps it inside the costume of a schlocky horror movie. It's funny, full of gentle social commentary, and has just enough of an "ick" factor to create some intentionally cringe-worthy moments. If you've ever wanted to see the Beat Generation get some comeuppance, this one's for you.

4. Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill

Three go-go dancers holding a young girl hostage come across a crippled old man living with his two sons in the desert. After learning he's hiding a sum of cash around, the women start scheming on him. - IMDb

I'm much more of a Corman guy than a Russ Meyer guy, but when it comes to exploitation films, you have to give Russ Meyer his due. Meyer is most closely associated with busty women with quick tops, but there's actually no nudity in this, his best-known movie. Busty women, sure, and car races, and inexplicable danger aplenty. This movie is also notable for being the source of most of the movie dialogue samples used in White Zombie's breakout album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1. That's actually what got me to watch this movie in the first place.

5. Blacula

An ancient African prince, turned into a vampire by Dracula himself, finds himself in modern Los Angeles. - IMDb

There are a lot of 1970s blaxploitation movies you can watch and have a pretty great time with, but the thing I love about Blacula is how William Marshall's performance really elevates this movie way past what you think it would be from the amazingly schlocky title. He was primarily a Shakespearean actor, plays the character of Prince Mamuwalde totally straight, and sells it. This movie is at its heart a love story, and despite some *ahem* lines that ring out particularly jarringly to modern sensibilities, the performances in this movie should earn it far more prominence among horror fans than I think it currently has.

6. Killer of Sheep

Stan works in drudgery at a slaughterhouse. His personal life is drab. Dissatisfaction and ennui keep him unresponsive to the needs of his adoring wife, and he must struggle against influences which would dishonor and endanger him and his family. - IMDb

This underground film shot in south Los Angeles in the early 1970s is not to be confused with a blaxploitation film. This is a poetic and deeply touching movie that went unseen for over two decades because of rights clearance issues with the music in the film. The picture of daily life in Watts that it shows is both stifling but also affirming and moving. When it was added to the National Film Registry in 1990, that helped raise awareness for the movie, and ultimately led to a limited theatrical release in 2007. It is now available on DVD.

7. I Bury the Living

Cemetery director Robert Kraft discovers that by arbitrarily changing the status of plots from empty to occupied on the planogram causes the death of the plots' owners. - IMDb

I came across this one on a Public Domain movies site years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised. What the description here doesn't include is that the director doesn't want to be killing people, and begins thinking that he's descending into madness. As this starts to happen, there are a couple of visual effects sequences that are really striking, and take on the air of a twisted re-imagining of Fitzgerald's "eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg." The film suffers a little from a Scooby-Doo ending, but there are rumors that there was a different ending originally shot. That's going to have to be one for the angels, though, because in 1958 nobody was keeping alternate endings of B-pictures around for archivists to find later.

8. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula

Dracula travels to the American West, intent on making a beautiful ranch owner his next victim. Her fiance, outlaw Billy the Kid, finds out about it and rushes to save her. - IMDb

I reviewed this movie before, and you can read that at your leisure, but for our purposes here I will simply quote one line of that review: "At some point in 1965 or '66, some actual human being must have had this thought: 'Let's get John Carradine to play a vampire again, but this time we'll stick him in the Old West, name the movie after two characters not actually appearing in the movie, and shoot the thing for a nickel in, say, my back yard in Encino!'" The IMDb description is actually not correct: Carradine is never identified as Dracula because they didn't want Universal suing them, and "Billy" in the film did not have a previous career as a notorious outlaw. So if this sounds like it's up your alley, it probably is. If it doesn't, man, you've been warned.

9. Plan 9 from Outer Space

Aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop humanity from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb). - IMDb

This is also an objectively bad movie, but Edward D. Wood Jr. deserves a place on this list if for no other reason than that Ed Wood is maybe the greatest movie ever made about movies. Plan 9 is also, and I don't know anybody who would argue with me on this, the closest Ed Wood ever got to making a decent movie. The idea of a bomb made out of the sun's rays is not the worst sci-fi idea ever, and the story is more or less coherent. As opposed to, say, Glen, or Glenda?. Plus, the reach of this movie has been remarkable, from the Tim Burton biopic to the name of Glenn Danzig's record label, so it's worth watching if you haven't actually seen it. May I recommend watching Ed Wood and then Plan 9 as a double-feature?

10. Primer

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention. - IMDb

Of course, if you'd actually like to see a good sci-fi movie made for no money, you might want to skip ahead a few decades to Primer. This movie has a reputation for being quite a mind-bender of a time-travel movie, and it does not disappoint. I would argue that only with (many) multiple viewings and some graph paper could you actually untangle what's happening in all the different timelines, but at a certain point, it doesn't matter. The storytelling is dizzyingly complex, but you get the impression director Shane Carruth knows what's going on, and that he's going to take you somewhere worthwhile, so you go along. It's a tense and confusing ride, but I'm not aware of another movie like it. I actually prefer Carruth's poetic, disjointed follow-up Upstream Color, but start here.

11. It's Such a Beautiful Day

Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche, in this new feature film version of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film trilogy. - IMDb

As long as we're talking about bending minds, let's also dip our toes into the animation end of the pool. Don Hertzfeldt bends minds with the best of them, and I am truly at a loss as to how he is able to tell such elliptical stories with stick figures and still elicit powerful emotional responses from me. I am a big fan of Don Hertzfeldt, and this re-packaged collection of three of his related short films is a perfect example of why. Bill seems to be emotionally falling apart, but then it seems like he's actually mentally falling apart. His journey yo-yo'ing closer to and farther away from "sanity" and "reality" is both tremendously imaginative and tremendously moving. Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow short film was absolutely robbed of an Oscar, too, for whatever that's worth.

12. Sita Sings the Blues

An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. - IMDb

Animator Nina Paley made this animated feature film on her own. By herself. Alone. Feature film. Bill Plympton does the same kind of thing, and I am simply in awe of these artists. Paley's movie tells the story of Sita and her lover Rama from the Hindu epic Ramayana, and intertwines that tale with the story of the dissolution of Paley's own marriage. It's simply a beautiful, enthralling piece of work that not only explodes with imagination, but is full of beautiful visual design, too. It blurs the line between myth, fiction, and documentary, and is set entirely to torch songs. What's not to love?

13. The Beaver Trilogy

It begins in 1979 with the chance meeting in a Salt Lake City parking lot where filmmaker Trent Harris is approached by an earnest small-town dreamer from Beaver, Utah. - IMDb

And speaking of blurring lines...man, this one's something. As quick as I can tell it: Trent Harris was working at a TV station in Utah when they got their first video camera, and he was testing it in the parking lot when a guy called "Groovin' Gary" spotted him and came over.Gary always wanted to be on TV, and had his car adorned with images of Olivia Newton-John. He invited Harris back to Beaver for a talent show that Gary wanted recorded. In it, Gary dressed in drag and performed *as* Olivia Newton-John, to the befuddlement and ridicule of the small, conservative town. That really happened. A couple of years later, Harris moved to LA, and fictionalized the story a bit, and shot it as a short film with a pre-Fast Times Sean Penn. A couple of years later, while at USC film school, he made another go at the same story with a pre-Back to the Future Crispin Glover. If you can't find this amazing, unique gem, track down the new documentary The Beaver Trilogy, Part IV, which tells the whole story in stunning fashion.

14. The Sid Saga

Spurred by house guests Bob Sandstrom and Karlene Sandstrom leafing through his scrap book and asking about photographs in it, Sid Laverents begins to tell his life story. - IMDb

This is simply one of the crown jewels of amateur cinema. I don't know how to find it, except UCLA shows it sometimes and it occasionally airs as part of the sporadic TCM Underground series. But it is truly unforgettable, with Sid Laverents taking viewers through a stunning, three-part filmic biography that not only tells the story of Laverents, but of 20th Century America, too. It begins in poverty and vaudeville, goes through World War II, the 1950s and Cold War, the aerospace boom and introduction of the space program, and finally the rise of amateur film and videography that put storytelling tools into the hands of everyday people. And it's all told first-hand from Laverents, who lived it all. I reviewed this film a couple of years ago, and it is absolutely worth tracking down.

15. Head

The Monkees are tossed about in a psychedelic, surrealist, plotless, circular bit of fun fluff. - IMDb

Whoever wrote this IMDb summary can suck it. This is anything but "fan fluff." This is the weirdest damn thing, and as far from the Monkees TV show as I can really imagine. It's a smart, self-indulgent, self-reflexive piece of meta-storytelling made by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, who would immediately after this project go on to collaborate on Five Easy Pieces, with Nicholson exploding into the mainstream world in Easy Rider in between. The Monkees got a bad rap at the time, and I think it persists, that they were just a slapped-together attempt by a record company to make an American version of the Beatles. That may have been their genesis, but their songs are great, the guys were interested in things beyond the show, which came through in songs like "Randy Souse Git" and this film, which was reportedly the first time Americans had seen the now-famous footage of  the South Vietnamese Chief of Police executing a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner. Fan fluff, right? This was Tor Johnson's final film, and also, in a restroom, Peter Tork gives Davy Jones the advice that, "Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor."

16. The X from Outer Space

The spaceship AAB-Gamma is dispatched from FAFC headquarters in Japan to make a landing on the planet Mars and investigate reports of UFOs in the area. - IMDb

In the 1960s, the Shochiku studio in Japan, which was known for more serious, art-house films like those of Yashujiro Ozu, decided it wanted to get in on some of that sweet Godzilla money that Toho was pulling down, and this film was their attempt. In it, some swinging astronauts jet back and forth between Earth, the moon, and Mars for reasons that are clear, but don't make any logical sense. While exploring, they get some goo on the ship, which hatches into a giant space chicken called Guilala. The English dub of this movie is legitimately terrible, but the original Japanese version, subtitled, is wonderful. It is everything I love about silly, 1960s monster movies, and may even exceed some of the Godzilla movies with shady aliens in them.

17. Suspiria

A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders. - IMDb

This movie, by Italian horror icon Dario Argento (who also co-wrote the unmatched Once Upon a Time in the West), is the real deal. It's creepy, scary, grisly, bloody, mysterious, and atmospheric. It hits all of my favorite notes of horror movies, and has an ending that is serious nightmare fuel. Emerging from the giallo scene in Italy, it took things a step farther, and is really not for the faint of heart. But man, this is such a great horror movie. I've written before about the line that connects certain films between the 1950s and early 60s, ultimately resulting in Rosemary's Baby, and I think Rosemary in turn made Suspiria possible.

18. Bay of Blood

An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate. - IMDb

Staying in Italy with a giallo contemporary of Argento's, we have Mario Bava's Bay of Blood. Bava was making his mark a decade before Argento hit the scene, so a lot of what Argento would build on came from Bava. And it goes way beyond that. Because Bay of Blood is not a "proto-slasher" movie, it is a full-bore, perfect example of a slasher movie, made almost a decade before slasher movies were a thing. You could pretty much take the cliched rules laid out in Scream that govern slasher movies and apply them one-for-one to this movie, but if that's the case, that means this movie invented those rules. I don't know if American filmmakers in the early 1980s looked at this movie and drew inspiration, or if Bava was simply ahead of his time, but this movie is about as good as straight slashers get, and it accomplished that while creating the lexicon, so I think that's one hell of an achievement.

19. The Wicker Man

A police sergeant is sent to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl whom the townsfolk claim never existed. Stranger still are the rites that take place there. - IMDb

When I was in college and found 1) the Internet and 2) a pair of amazing video stores near my dorm, I spent some time combing a bunch of lists to find movies to rent. The Wicker Man consistently showed up on lists of "the scariest movies ever made" and that sort. So I rented it and I thought it was stupid. But I just sort of missed it — there's something sticky about this movie. Even though I didn't think I liked it, something made me want to revisit it, and when I did, a switch flipped and I fell in love with this movie about the collision of modern life, Christianity, and very, very old pagan beliefs that have still never really gone away. It's a movie with a lot going on under the surface, and which was also plagued for decades with a "the movie that could've been" legend that told the tale of how we never got to see the director's real vision of the movie. That has since been solved, despite the original camera negatives being used as fill underneath the M1 motorway connecting London to Leeds. And for what it's worth, my copy of The Wicker Man DVD actually came in a wicker box.

20. Equinox

Four friends are attacked by a demon while on a picnic, due to possession of a tome of mystic information. Told in flashbacks by the sole survivor. - IMDb

To be honest, this movie is mostly remarkable because of the people that worked on it. As a film on its own, it's only ok, and the present-day framing device of a police detective interviewing a survivor of all that went down is...clumsy at best. So you've really got to have some patience to get to where the movie begins to cook. This film was created by friends who met through Forest J. Ackerman (Uncle Forry), who founded Famous Monsters of Filmland in Los Angeles, and decided to make their own film. These friends, including Jack Woods and Dennis Muren, went on to become transformational figures in Hollywood through their contribution to sound and visual effects. It's truly remarkable to see their first film, knowing that they went on to redefine the modern cinematic language. No hyperbole. There are entire passages of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 that are cribbed directly from this film, and while the humans-talking-to-each-other portion of the movie is clunky, the finale, made from stop-motion, rotoscoping, and glass mattes, is legitimately badass.

21. Incubus

On a strange island inhabited by demons and spirits, a man battles the forces of evil. - IMDb

You notice how vague the plot summary for this movie is? That's about right. I mean, what I remember from this movie is William Shatner and some girl hiding in a barn, and then I think they ran for a bit...and maybe one of them was briefly possessed, but I couldn't swear to that. This movie is totally forgettable except for one kinda important thing: it was spoken entirely in Esperanto. You know what Esperanto is, right? It's an invented language that blends elements of the Romance languages, English, and probably a few other languages into what was hoped to be a universal language. Created in the 1880s, it took almost 100 years to make a movie in the language, and that was Incubus. So if you want to watch a movie where Bill Shatner speaks a made-up language, this is your only option, folks. Who gives a shit if it is entirely, and utterly, forgettable otherwise? But look: I have friends who have learned Swedish to watch Bergman movies in the native language, and friends who have learned Japanese to watch anime in its native language (I have undeniably awesome friends), so if you want to be able to turn the subtitles off in Incubus, you can currently learn Esperanto in the free language-learning app Duolingo on your phone.

22. Venus in Furs

A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death. - IMDb

This is definitely an outsider kind of film. I haven't seen any other of Jesus "Jess" Franco's films, but from what I know, a number of his films have veered into the more hardcore elements of mixing sex and cinema. Venus in Furs certainly has sex and nudity, but what it has more of, and in spades, is atmosphere and intrigue. The story is told through the eyes of Jimmy, a jazz musician, who sees a beautiful girl at a swanky party, then finds her merdered body on the beach, then sees her again, walking around. There's a wonderful current of I Spit on Your Grave-style cosmic retribution for sexual violence that runs through the movie, but mainly it's just sort of out-there and entrancing. Like the jazz musician at the center of the movie, you're never quite sure what's going on, and you're kind of ok with that because it's a unique ride you want to get to the end of.

23. The Masque of the Red Death

A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land. - IMDb

To be honest, I didn't realize this was my favorite of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe movies until I wrote songs about a bunch of horror movies, and the one I wrote for this one turned out to be my favorite. Like in Bucket of Blood above where Roger Corman is a good director, and in Blacula where performances can elevate an otherwise straight exploitation film, for me Hazel Court makes this movie. There are a number of wonderful things in this one, from the dwarf circus performer who murders a friend of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) to avenge an insult to a girl he loves, to the amazing set design that was the apotheosis of the Corman/Price/Poe look, that if I have to let this one movie stand in for all the wonderful films in this series of movies, I'm happy to do so. If you can only watch one Roger Corman movie this Halloween season, I recommend this one.

24. Perversion for Profit

This anti-porn short film shows a flood tide of filth engulfing the country in the form of newsstand obscenity. - IMDb

This is maybe a bit of a cheat. This isn't a narrative film or documentary, but I guess you could say it's a sort of outsider cinema. This instructional film was created in 1965 to warn America of the dangers of the secret filth hiding in the newsstands in the form of comics, men's, and women's magazines. This film is amazing in many ways. There's the slice-of-life sense of giving the modern-day viewer a picture of what life was like in the mid-1960s, and what people could see walking into the corner drug for a magazine, but mainly it's a totally un-self aware look at the hypocrisy of the morality police. The fact is that this movie is a half-hour of words talking about how terrible the "smut" problem is in America, while showing the "smut" in question in full detail. There are very tiny black bars over nipples or eyes, but it's clear to see that this film became, in a sense, exactly what it beheld. By damning pictures of nude women while showing pictures of nude women, today this seems like a way to get soft-core porn into the hands of moral crusaders who could only enjoy nude bodies if they felt they were also condemning them. This movie is a really interesting artifact that says a lot more about the people who made and watched it than it does about they people they were trying to denigrate. It's a fascinating time-capsule that conveys a very different message these days than it was originally meant to.

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning producer, folk musician, and cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Microreview [film]: Turbo Kid

Back to the future

Turbo Kid is another entry in the semiserious/semi-ironic '80s retro movement linking artists working across multiple media. This one, specifically, is a cinematic homage to the cheap Mad Max ripoffs that only ever seemed to play at the one surviving drive-in left in town, but took up significant real estate at your local video store. I remember, at a young age, holding the fat laminated boxes--marveling at the disfigured faces of post-apocalyptic mutants and foam spike armor of the inevitable raiders, wondering what thrills I might receive if my parents would just let me rent something with that much gore. But when that glorious day arrived, I would inevitably realize, as Peter Sobczynski notes, that these were films whose boxes "always promised more than they ever came close to delivering."

This is the story of the Kid (Munro Chambers), a teenager who rides his bike across the post-apocalyptic wasteland of 1997, scavenging junk to trade for water. While out in the field, he meets Apple (Laurence Lebouef), a very manic pixie dream girl who follows the Kid to his hideout and, through her irrepressible joie de vivre (this is a French-Canadian production, after all), wins over the initially suspect Kid.

Then shit starts to go south. Local badman Zeus (Michael Ironsides) first kidnaps the area protector, Kiwi cowboy and arm-wrestling champion Frederick (Aaron Jeffery), then Apple. All seems lost when, in the midst of trying to escape Apple's kidnappers, the Kid discovers an underground military vessel left over from humanity's catastrophic war with the robots (i.e. the apocalyptic event). Inside there is a jump suit complete with a Nintendo Power Glove, which--if fully charged--can instantly disintegrate a human being. He goes to save Apple (who it turns out can take care of herself quite ably), and in the process sets up a confrontation with Zeus and his gang of foam spike clad marauders.

Standard '80s B-movie fare, right? On the surface, yes--and Turbo Kid does a good job of reinterpreting its source material with a good balance of satire and appreciation for what makes grindhouse film fun to watch--not least of which the hilariously over-the-top gore, which gets more and more absurd as the film goes on. Oh, and it sports a phenomenal soundtrack by synthwave group Le Matos.

What makes Turbo Kid really stand out, though, is its emotional core--propelled by its central relationships, and especially the friendship between the Kid and Apple, which is surprisingly heartfelt and affecting. In the end, Turbo Kid isn't really about action or '80s nostalgia--it's about lonely people finding friendship, and here it doesn't play for laughs, winks or nudges. Sure, Apple starts off as your standard manic pixie dream girl (albeit extra manic), while the Kid doesn't even merit a name; still, by the end of the film I realized how deeply invested I'd become in what happens to them--in a way I rarely am with unserious films made after 1990.

I guess that's the thing about '80s culture that people in 2016 find so attractive, whether we're talking action schlock, John Hughes romances or the digital keyboard sounds used by Billy Ocean--there's a sincerity about all of it, even when that sincerity is corny as hell. And Turbo Kid does a fantastic job capturing that. It's funny and silly, but also distinctly bittersweet, and deeply romantic. Just as importantly, Turbo Kid is the kind of film you can't wait to watch again.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for the highly resonant emotional core of the film, which is what separates it from other attempts to pull of this kind of thing; +1 for the fantastic Le Matos soundtrack, which really accentuates everything the director is going for.

Penalties: -1 for the first 10-15 minutes of the film, which are a bit awkward relative to the rest. '

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. "Very high quality/standout in its category."

***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

Reference: Turbo Kid, directed by Simard, Whissell and Whissell [Epic Pictures, 2015]

Microreview [film] : The Machine

An intruiging yet flawed low-budget sci-fi.

The poster above suggests more of a Rise of The Machines copycat than the reality of what this curious and admirable film turns out to be. However, the top quote is taking things a liiiiittle far... I take issue also with Fangoria's claim that it is "massively" cool. Pretty cool, yes. Fairly cool, absolutely. Massively? No. However, I applaud the release of any ambitious British film, at a time when most productions never see the light of day and gems get lost in the fight for distribution. This was made reportedly for under $1.5 million with U.K. Lottery funding in Wales, and yet has garnered a relatively wide release and plenty of exposure, and none of that would happen if it wasn't at least a partial success.

To run through the relatively skeletal plot here would dampen the enjoyment I gained from only having heard a few things upon its limited release earlier this year, before spotting it on a screening service that rhymes with wet bricks, and giving it a shot. However, suffice to say that a scientist is working on A.I. for the government in an under-lit bunker in some near future where China is at war with the U.K. (assuming Scotland is still with us...) and its allies. Mourning the severe dementia of his young daughter and wounded physically and psychologically by the violent results of his tinkering with veterans' brains to create super soldiers, he enlists a brilliant young American (I know, I know, but it's sci-fi; take a leap here...) to help him perfect his experiments - and help his daughter on the sly.

It's good to see that despite robot soldiers and futuristic tech that they still haven't sorted out weird British plug sockets yet

We learn all this largely through Toby Stephens, as the lead, looking pained and intense in that slightly unconvincing way of his. He shares some of his mother Maggie Smith's presence yet lacks the total immersion she brings to a role, so here again is his proud yet nervy posh man act, shorn of the smirk that worked so well in the past for him (see his villain in the Bond film so bad I am training myself to forget). However, he holds the film together from start to finish, with a quiet strength that I realised I had become impressed by as the credits rolled. Adding to this feat is that there are really only two other full roles in the film to help him - Caity Lotz as the American scientist and Denis Lawson (Wedge or Ewan MacGregor's uncle, depending on your age) as the sinister military boss. Whilst Lawson flounders in a part that requires him to spout bad-guy cliches whilst sitting behind a desk with a whisky, Lotz is a revelation. Well, to be honest, I thought she was Melissa George for the whole film as I have seen neither Arrow nor the dance battle films she began in and she really looks like her in this. Involving enough at first, as we learn of the base and Stephen's work largely through her morally-righteous experience, she abruptly changes role as her likeness is used to create the ultimate robotic lifeform. I was briefly concerned about spoilers there until I realised she is on the poster with a big bloody robot eye so the cat is out of the bag really... The lurch in her role(s) is handled relatively well, yet it does rob us of our entry into this world, and we are swiftly asked to re-sympathise with Stephens just as we started to sense some villainy at work. It's one of many uncertain notes in the plot but recovers well enough, in no small part due to the magnetism Lotz brings to the artificial human character. 

"Look, Toby, I know there is a recession on but turn some more lights on, please. Who's your electrician, David Fincher?"

By this stage the magnificently-monikered director Caradog W. James has really pulled some amazing slights of hand. As the images here hint, most of the action occurs in darkened rooms, and this is, despite adding claustrophobic intensity and sombre mood, clearly due to a small budget. What he superbly manages to do is to make a merit out of this, using lighting both on set and in post to add value and sell the futuristic world-build subtly, obliquely, without the resources for giant cityscape sets to ram it down our throat. The special effects, in particular of the robots and the body-gore, are wonderful and reminded me of the video work of Chris Cunningham. Whilst I never for a second was convinced the lead character was actually a genius who was doing believable work, I bought the setting and the detail full and its one of the best-looking sci-fi's I've seen since at least Oblivion. In addition, James and his crew immerse the slight tale and tiny cast in an atmosphere of foreboding and secrecy that serves the tension very well. We don't really need to know how they build the Lotz-robot, as we can just marvel at the clever moment of her 'birth' and enjoy the largely-effective synth score (which is probably why the poster critic thought of Blade Runner). To do all that in what was certainly a wet month in Wales with little cash is very admirable.

That's got to hurt...

However, perhaps due to this Herculean effort of creativity in some areas, many moments on the journey failed for me, with some uncertain or amateur points in the editing and the acting, due perhaps to the restricted schedule (Stephens's response to his daughter's diagnosis is a particular failure which smacks of a talent left hanging rather than a director left wanting). There is also far too much that is familiar from so many films with a robot-human role, and a lazy decision to film her often as a nude silhouette cliche. When she is blank and tough, I saw Metropolis, Terminator, Blade Runner, etc etc, and when she is scared and human I saw The Fifth Element, Alien4, Edward Scissorhands, etc, etc. It's not really the debutant makers' fault there has been so much before, but a fresh vision would at least have hidden that familiarity. However, as Lawson's evil will takes its toll on Lotz's creature and on Stephen's conscience, the two leads begin to really shine, and the film finds its voice - a cynicism mixed with a hopeful faith in humanity, no matter the form it takes. Whilst some violence at the end seems to do little than to show off the robot's fighting skills, there are many striking moments and it takes us to a satisfying yet downbeat conclusion to a flawed yet engaging science fiction treat.

Excuse me, do you have any Nivea please?

The Math

Baseline Assessment : 7/10

Bonuses : +1 for superb photography, sound design and fx; +1 for a captivating performance by Lotz; +1 for daring to have a story more concerned with morals and emotions than action and exposition 

Penalties : -1 for several leaps in plot flow, as if they ran out of time on some scenes; -1 for the undeveloped and distracting sub-plot of the weird-voiced veterans lurking in the shadows; -1 for some poor acting worthy of a short not a feature that has so much effort and imagination in other areas

Nerd Coefficient :  7/10 "an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

Please observe, obey and respect our scoring rules 

Written by English Scribbler, contributor since 2013. If I were a robot, I'd be this one