Tag Archives: 2015

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Derek Savage

FEATURING: Derek Savage, Erik Estrada, , several innocent children who don’t deserve to have their good names sullied by mentioning them here

PLOT: Cool Cat, a human-sized bipedal feline who loves you and himself in equal measure, spends his days learning important life lessons, watching Daddy Derek engage in various self-improvement pastimes, and creating rock songs about love, friendship, and the general awesomeness of being Cool Cat. 

COMMENTS: This is potentially the most perilous review I’ve ever written. After all, when the video blog “I Hate Everything” decided to share its assessment of Cool Cat Saves the Kids, the helpful feline’s caretaker, Derek Savage, launched an all-out assault on them, allegedly impersonating a lawyer to issue threats and soliciting a DMCA takedown order from YouTube. (Another YouTuber with whom Savage sparred, YMS, produced a follow-up video to explain copyright law and the Fair Use doctrine.) So while I’m hopeful that the passage of a decade will have softened Savage’s feelings toward critical opinions, one can never be sure.

So let’s tread carefully, because we rarely venture into the genre of children’s safety videos. As anyone who has had a child anytime in the past two decades knows, there is a massive market for peppy, carefully-worded productions that use some sort of animated or costumed character to import crucial lessons about staying alive in a dangerous world, covering topics from traffic safety to home safety to stranger danger. They are often amateurish, frequently unbearable to the adult mind, and sometimes very effective with their young audience. So if we’re being charitable, we could say that Savage spotted an opportunity to use his skills as a Hollywood extra and Playgirl model to advocate on behalf of the kids. If we’re less than charitable, we might say that he saw a marketing opportunity.

What gets Savage mentioned in the same sentence with legends like Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau are his deeply lo-fi moviemaking skills. Beginning with the goofy Comic Sans opening credits (which include a credit for Cool Cat himself as, of all things, associate producer), the whole production has big Vegas-suburb energy, with plenty of scenes located in someone’s guest bedroom that has been decorated with pictures of Cool Cat and signs reading “Cool Cat Loves You,” desperate improvisation that take the form of characters describing every action they take, some wonderfully melodramatic child acting, and a hero whose primary action is to holler “Yay!” at every opportunity. Cool Cat is happy about absolutely everything, and every dicey situation is resolved with Cool Cat’s commitment to just, you know, not do the bad thing and then launch into a green-screened musical interlude about being cool. So repetitive and unengaging is the film (which is actually a mashup of three separate Cool Cat shorts) that it Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS (2015) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DEATHGASM (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Jason Lei Howden

FEATURING: Milo Cawthorne, James Blake, Kimberley Crossman, Sam Berkley, Daniel Cresswell

PLOT: Brodie, a dopey New Zealand metalhead, finds magical sheet music that summons a dark demon and turns the populace of a small town into homicidal abominations.

Still from Deathgasm (2015)

COMMENTS: “No way!” protests Brodie when the girl he’s sweet on asks if heavy metal music isn’t just a bunch of guys screaming. And then he considers the question. “Well… apart from grindcore,” he admits, “and death metal is kind of like that.” Thinking further: “And deathcore, screamo, pornogrind, black metal, metalcore, thrash, and murdercore. But apart from those…”

Brodie has no apology to give, and neither does Deathgasm, which has two very simple and straightforward messages to deliver: gore is fun, and metal rocks. Those two credos are delivered very efficiently, with both glorious teenage doofiness and spectacularly gross carnage. 

The lines couldn’t be drawn more starkly: Brodie, the metalhead with a mentally-ill mom, finds himself dropped into a decidedly non-metal-appreciating small town, populated by his holy-roller aunt and uncle, his bullying cousin, and an indifferent community. Under these conditions, he finds solidarity in the few places he can, including a pair of role-playing nerds, a sympathetic record store owner, and the only other hard rocker in town, Zakk. Zakk’s many skills include thievery, wounding classmates, making napalm to carve the words “HAIL SATIN” (sic) into a field, and of course bass-playing, so the four outcasts form the eponymous band. (We get to see them film their video for “Intestinal Bungy Jump,” a release on Crowbar Abortion Records. Their bonafides must not be questioned.) It’s in pursuit of even harder stuff that they raid the ramshackle house of a forgotten metal legend, and that’s when the blood starts to flow.

Director Howden has a skillful visual sense of humor, deploying edits to great effect (such as when Zakk is revealed to be stealing fuel from an ambulance). He also has a adolescent’s love of fluids, as there seems to be no end to the blood, vomit, bile, feces, and other bodily effluvia that spews forth. To his credit, he is constantly coming up with more extreme ways to build upon the bloody mayhem, with a particular appreciation for the inappropriate. Sex toys, it turns out, make for excellent weapons, and genitals are just good a target to take out the undead as a bullet to the brain. The humor Deathgasm is going for seems to be a blend of the winking dryness of Shaun of the Dead, the outlandish grotesquerie of the Evil Dead series, and the go-for-broke gleefulness of fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson’s low-budget productions; on that level, it delivers the goods.

When it comes to that list of forebears, though, Deathgasm’s approach feels awfully mathematical, as though it was carefully measuring out portions of each of those inspirations. There’s plenty of shock, but not a whole lot of surprise. There are a couple interesting twists: the slick villain who appears to be our heroes’ greatest foe is amusingly usurped by a seemingly incidental character, and the fate of Brodie’s awful cousin is genuinely hilarious. But even the most successful elements are satisfying without necessarily being inspired. It’s great to see Medina, Brodie’s eventual love interest, start to give herself over to the open-hearted release of metal, culminating in the breakthrough moment where she first listens to the disc Brodie loans her and is immediately transported to a distant mountaintop with hot babes writhing at her feet. But while her additional transformation into a badass zombie fighter is delightful, it’s not really motivated by anything but our desire to see it. Deathgasm entertains, but it often feels like it’s checking boxes on a list of horror must-haves.

And it must be said that as much as Deathgasm carries the flag for metal music, metal does seem to be at the root of all the problems that ensue. The dedicated pursuit of “devil music” as a means to be transgressive leads our heroes to find literal devil music. And the more experienced and dedicated metalhead, Zakk, is quite the jerk. As much as this movie proudly thrusts devil horns into the air, you wouldn’t be wrong to think that it’s not entirely on the genre’s side.

Deathgasm has a blessedly simple and pure goal: it wants to rock. Let the record show that it does, playing all the hits, sometimes with a catchy sound. But it’s not too strange, not too far off a path traveled before. Think of it as comfort-horror, or maybe liquid metal.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Deathgasm combines the visual flair of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with the manic, gory energy of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2… Howden also fills Deathgasm with shockingly weird moments that catch you off guard… So many bizarre forms of murder and mutilation are up on the screen that it would be impossible to count them all.”–Mike McGranaghan, The Aisle Seat

(This movie was nominated for review by Lovecraft In Brooklyn, who described it as “Kinda Evil Dead ish.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNCLE KENT 2 (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Kent Osborne

PLOT: Defying advice from friends and professionals, Kent Osborne pursues his vision of making the unnecessary sequel to Uncle Kent.

Still from Uncle Kent 2 (2015)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: It’s alternately mumblecore, surreal, awkward, and spiked with one big shot of violence; all told, Kent’s journey through a San Diego convention is pretty strange. But its bed-rising, guest-star-studded 5 & 1/2 minute jack-off finale really took commitment.

COMMENTS: I became so intrigued that I very nearly looked up who the heck this “Kent Osborne” guy is. But no: I came to know him well enough through Todd Rohal’s Uncle Kent 2, with all his insouciant eagerness, playful eccentricity, and defiant self-satisfaction. The onscreen storytelling is low key madcap, with the inexplicable and impossible gelling with the mundane, like Walter Mitty’s daydream jaunts through banality. There are too few “fluffy” movies in the realm of weird cinema, and I am grateful for having met Kent Osborne in such an outing.

This Kent Osborne (Kent Osborne) faces difficulty only once, in facing down his one detractor: Joe Swanberg. Swanberg directed the little-seen microbudget mumblecore drama Uncle Kent, and sees no reason to revisit the premise (loose, indeed, though it was in the first place). He is an utter killjoy at the opening party scene. The following morning, Kent sees his physician on an unrelated matter (chronic ear-worm). After a very long “follow the finger” neural exercise, his physician advises strongly against his patient paneling at a convention in San Diego to promote his latest comic book, “Cat Agent.” But as Kent defied Swanberg’s downerism, so he defies medical advice. What ensues is a whimsical exploration of artistic living and convention culture that becomes increasingly masturbatory.

I will return to this “masturbation” in a moment, but first you should be grounded in an underlying premise behind Uncle Kent. The singularity is real, and it is coming. For those unfamiliar with “simulation theory,” in brief, it is very much as it sounds: we live in a simulation. All these developments toward computerized living are but a replay of something that has already occurred: mechanical intelligence, and humans confined to a Matrix-y way of living. The sweet thing about Kent in Uncle Kent 2 is, he doesn’t mind. He goes through motions, as we all do, with upbeat resignation. He revels in rewatching, and sharing, his own artistic output.

At the convention he makes the acquaintance of a “Cat Agent” cos-player, and the strangeness within his life and this movie accelerates. As he is about to have sex with her, the incarnation of his own mind’s work, she zaps out of existence. He gathers a post-Apocalyptic gaggle of citizens terrified by the rapture-style disappearances. In the middle of a pitch to a co-star of Uncle Kent, just after she requests he begin masturbating for her, she disappears as well. But, Kent masturbates anyway. He’s finished making a movie about himself and his work. Hotel staff, strangers, Swanberg, and even appear and interrupt but, the climax comes—as is its wont—and everything wraps up nicely. Rohal knows we’ve done this all before: mumbling, relationships, whimsy, low drama, mid-comedy, and you know what? That’s all right. We’ve got time to kill. Uncle Kent 2 is casually wacky ride (and unless you’re too close to the TV, it won’t make you go blind).

Uncle Kent 2 received a surprise Blu-ray release in 2023 from Factory 25.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the wtf movie of the year. Though it’s not likely to land with, or even screen to, a mainstream audience, Uncle Kent 2 is so thoroughly dedicated to messing with its viewers, the film deserves the very highest accolade at the piss-takers ball, if only such a thing existed.” -Zach Gayne, Screen Anarchy (contemporaneous)