Tag Archives: 2025

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CAPSULE: THE NAPA BOYS (2025)

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AKA Napa Boys Present: Napa Boys 4: The Sommelier’s Amulet

DIRECTED BY: Nick Corirossi

FEATURING: Armen Weitzman, Nick Corirossi, Sarah Ramos, Jamar Neighbors, Nelson Franklin, Mike Mitchell, , Paul Rust, Vanessa Chester

PLOT: The Napa Boys and a slew of friends and hangers-on assemble for one last wine country adventure in this fourth installment of a franchise whose first three movies were never made.

Still from "The Napa Boys" (2025)
Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman in THE NAPA BOYS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

COMMENTS: The Napa Boys are, as near as I can tell—having, like everyone else, missed the first three movies—Miles Jr., Jack Jr., and Kevin. And maybe, once upon a time, Stifler? Miles Jr. is a neurotic virgin in his 30s with a dead wife and son (just roll with it). Jack Jr. is a lecherous jackass. Kevin is… well, so forgettable that he disappears without explanation for most of the movie. They are joined in their wine country adventures by fill-in Boy Stifler’s Brother and stowaway Puck, a female fan with a Napa Boys podcast. There’s also affable ally Mitch, owner of Mitch’s Winery, and fascistic enemy Squirm, owner of Squirm’s Winery. Three of the characters acquire love interests, a female drug dealer and a pair of waitresses. Adding to the crowd are unexpected cameos by Jay and Silent Bob and . Not to mention the Milfonator.

All of that sounds like fertile ground for a wacky comedy, but that’s not what’s on the filmmakers’ minds. The high concept here implies that, as the fourth film in a franchise, the blush is fading off the rosé. Thus, the in-universe movie script is desperate for new twists and turns, while continuing to work the formula and deliver bits the in-universe fans have come to expect. That means a lot of apparent references to past events that Napa Boys fans would know about, but we don’t. Corirossi and company are going for clever rather than funny, with the “joke” being ultra-meta. The cast act badly on purpose, delivering their lines in an anti-comedy game of coming as close to a joke as they can possibly get without actually making one. (For example, when Mitch spills wine down his chin, Puck observes that he’s dribbling, and the vintner explains no, he just prefers wine filtered through his beard.) There were about three jokes in the whole thing that made me giggle. I’m sure they were included by accident; no anti-comic can bat a thousand.

A surprising number of critics misdiagnosed the film’s humor because they hadn’t encountered the concept of anti-comedy before. And if professionals are missing the point, you can be sure 99% of the film’s potential audience is, too. (It’s a shame that Rex Reed never lived to see this; the film’s writers would have treasured his dismissive takedown). The Napa Boys was designed to alienate and encourage walkouts; not only is the anti-humor off-putting until (and maybe even after) you get what they’re up to, but they also put the grossest of gross-out scenes relatively early in the first act. Anyone who makes it through Jack Jr.’s desperate encounter with a wine barrel without heading for the exits is in for the long haul.

There are three possible reactions to Napa Boys: you either don’t get it, or you get it, or you get it but conclude it wasn’t worth getting. I vacillate between the last two options. But what kept me watching was the unpredictability. The plot seems road-movie random, but is more structured than it first appears: subplots that appear to have been dropped reappear at unexpected moments. And even after all the plot threads seem to have been wrapped up, the movie keeps going on in a long epilogue, introducing new characters intended to set up the in-universe sequel or a spin-off. And the stop-motion moose surprised me, too. The Merlot may have been foul at times, but I can’t say my trip to wine country was entirely wasted. If you want to go, just be sure to pack a lot of patience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the most surreal comedies in recent memory… this movie tells our nature to eff off, challenging us to flow with its exquisitely honed stupidity and simply laugh at the gross, awkward, un-PC and just-plain-weird moments it presents… The film has the cheery look and tone of a dumbass comedy…. Now cross that with the bizarre disassociation from reality you feel while watching a David Lynch film, and you’ve bullseyed The Napa Boys…”–John Serba, Decider (contemporaneous)

The Napa Boys

The Napa Boys

  • Wine
  • Napa Valley
  • wine-sloshed journey

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366 UNDERGROUND: BRAINSTARE (2025)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Fake AI actors

PLOT: An employee of the futuristic Malos megacorporation submits himself to a mandatory scanning of his deepest and most profound memories.

Still from Brainstare (2025)

COMMENTS: Made a few months prior to the release of ‘s Incorporeal Man (2025), Brainstare was another attempt at creating a human- written script exclusively using  AI technology. While Incorporeal Man reveled in the unnaturalism of the final product, seeking a so-bad-is-weird cult status, Brainstare is determined to go for a more “decent” look and production quality. Some serious problems, though—especially in terms of pacing—make it an even more challenging viewing experience.

Brainstare is divided into two acts, chamber dramas played in two different interior locations. The plot, set in a dystopian future, follows Anthony, an empolyee of the Malos Corporation, who has to submit himself to a scanning of his deepest memories or risk being fired and ostracized. The first act—with an exhausting duration of about one hour and twenty minutes—observes our protagonist in his home with his partner and colleague Sheba, as she tries to persuade him to proceed with the necessary tests. Their conversation develops gradually into the portrait of a one-sided relationship where Sheba seems to play the role of a reward for an obedient worker rather than a real love-partner.

What an excruciatingly slow development that is! The AI does an acceptable job visualizing people and environments, with an uncanny aesthetic recalling rotoscope animation. The audio also presents no difficulties: both the characters’ voices and sound effects do their job. But the only aspect of the production real humans worked on —the script—-proves to be the worst element. Outrageously repetitive dialogues and an extensive use of the thesaurus make a telenovela seem brilliant in comparison.

The second act, mercifully shorter than the first, shouldn’t be discussed too much to avoid possible spoilers. Not that the story has tremendous reveals and twists; let’s just say that the debates regarding the moral implications of a scanning of our most profound memories and thoughts continues, with new commentary on our relationship with the unconscious.

There is material for a good “Black Mirror”-esque narrative here, but the execution is underwhelming, to say the least. Slow plot advancement and dialogue straight out of a soap opera make The Room, or even Incorporeal Man, preferable viewing options.

Baldersion has made Brainstare available for free viewing on YouTube.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No independent reviews found at the time of publication.

Capsules

CAPSULE: STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Linus O’Brien

FEATURING: Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, ,  , Peter Hinwood, ,

PLOT: Most of the cast and crew of The Rocky Horror Picture Show gather to re-tell their experiences making the landmark cult classic that became the ultimate midnight movie.

Still from "strange journey: the story of rocky horror"

COMMENTS: It isn’t enough just to call The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) a “cult movie,” because it is the first movie to attract a cult at all. As fan after fan raves, it’s not just a movie, it’s an event, a lifestyle, an anthem uniting all us rainbow freaks into the collection of beautiful cosmic blueberries we are. For the 50th anniversary of this phenomenon, Strange Journey (2025) reunites most of the major cast and production team to tell how this movie came to be.

The documentary is everything you’d expect. The producers spared no effort in tracking down everybody for a chat. Although sadly missing rock legend Meatloaf (RIP 2022), we still get sit-down interviews with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Bary Bostwick, Patricia Quinn, and even the rarely-appearing Peter Hinwood. Most prominently, we get Rocky creator and Riff-Raff himself, Richard O’Brien, giving us the complete story of how the story came to be: from its inception as a stage play to creation of the film, its initial flop release, and its subsequent discovery as a cult hit. We even get O’Brien on acoustic guitar singing the hits from the show as he originally composed them.

The documentary is well-produced, with a nice flow alternating interviews and voice-overs with montages of photos and theater review clippings. The fandom gets its say as well, including veteran “shadow cast” performers speaking about how the cult around Rocky allowed them to live out their dreams as their out-of-the-closet selves. Jack Black provides cultural commentary. I don’t even question Jack Black appearing in anything anymore; he’s a free-range media personality who’s attracted to the smell of any camera.

Your humble author was a tad young to catch The Rocky Horror Picture Show when it first came out, but I still heard about it. Over the years, a steady trickle of friends and acquaintances turned up saying they’d caught the show at some midnight campus event. I ended up with a cassette tape of the soundtrack before I ever saw the movie. As soon as I saw it, I got it immediately. The 1970s were a decade of hard-fought social issues, and a time when Americans were maddeningly obsessed with everybody else’s peepees and what they were doing with them. Rocky hit at the exact crest of a wave of social change, throwing off the persecution of alternate lifestyles and expression and wrapping sexual rebellion up in a tribute to rock ‘n’ roll and vintage horror. It was destined to be a hit, because this movie urgently needed to be made at that time.

Naturally, any Rocky fan worth their feather boa needs to run right out and see this doc. So should cultural historians, and for that matter, rock music fans, because Rocky is the singularity around which all things cool revolve.

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror can now be rented on Plex, Apple TV, or Google Play, and a Blu-ray release drops on July 7, 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I reminisced, I learned a few new things, and I walked away with an even greater appreciation for this wonderfully weird phenomenon.”–Louisa Moore, Screen Zealots

 

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CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Josh Johnson, Grayson Tyler Johnson

FEATURING: Hope Stansbury, Gerald Jacuzzo, John Borske, Jimmy McDonough, Alex DiSanto, Stephen Thrower

PLOT: The Degenerate recounts the life and film career of “gutter auteur” Andy Milligan through the reminiscences of his collaborators and friends, and insights from film historians.

Still from The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025)

COMMENTS: The Degenerate aims to answer the question: how did a man with a promising career as a television actor in the 1950s, who then played a pivotal role in New York’s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, end up directing low budget exploitation and horror films for the rest of his life? The short answer seems to be a lack of business acumen and a difficult personality, but the long answer provides a genuinely fascinating and entertaining dive into ‘s uniquely nihilistic world.

Milligan has been dubbed “the Fassbinder of 42nd Street.” This documentary explores just how he earned that dubious distinction. Born in 1929, Milligan’s life spanned all the major innovations in the American media landscape of the 20th century. He acted in live television in the early ’50s when the medium was brand new, appearing in Kraft Theater and Armstrong Circle Theater productions that also featured Leslie Nielsen and James Dean. He was an instrumental part of the theater community centered around the off-Broadway institutions Caffe Cino and La Mama, writing, directing, and acting in plays, as well as designing stage sets, lighting, and costuming. He would make at least twenty-nine low-budget feature-length films until his death in 1991.

His creative life changed in the mid-1960s, when he bought a portable Auricon motion picture camera, a model mostly used by news reporters, which records poor quality sound. But Milligan was determined to try his hand at filmmaking, even with second rate equipment. His second film, Vapors, directed in 1965 and originally written as a stage play by friend and fellow Caffe Cino member Hope Stansbury, remains a groundbreaking work of queer cinema.

Though Vapors portrays the gay bathhouse culture of New York in a sympathetic light, given the subject matter (and a very brief shot of full-frontal male nudity) it also became Milligan’s first exploitation film, playing in the burgeoning grindhouses of NYC and LA. Since most of these theaters were open all night, they were desperate for films to fill the hours and would screen anything considered even remotely racy. This debut was both Milligan’s triumph and tragedy. He would go on to make grindhouse fare for the next twenty years.

The Degenerate provides a mostly positive view of Milligan’s determination, his creativity, and his sheer chutzpah, while never shying away from the difficulties he faced—many arising from his own surly personality. He developed a method of cranking out elaborate films quickly and on the cheap. With an average budget of ten thousand Continue reading CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEADS OR TAILS? (2025)

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Testa o croce?

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Heads or Tails? is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis

FEATURING: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Alessandro Borghi,

PLOT: An Italian cowboy and the wife of a brutal army captain flee into the wilderness after an incident during a bronco-riding contest between Italians and Buffalo Bill’s traveling wild west show, and the captain’s father hires Buffalo Bill himself to track down the refugees.

Still from Heads or Tails? (2025)

COMMENTS: If you’re excited to see a Western with beloved character actor John C. Reilly portraying Buffalo Bill Cody—which is how Heads or Tails? pitches itself—prepare for some mild disappointment. Cody does feature in the story, which takes its impetus from a real-life incident where local Italian cowboys (butteri) trounced Bill’s wild west show in an impromptu rodeo. But soon after the results are in, Bill nearly disappears from the story, which instead follows blue-eyed buttero Santino and the intensely-freckled French Rosa as they flee into the wilderness, accused of a terrible crime. Eventually tracked by Bill and others, the pair have mildly diverting adventures that include meeting up with a band of anarchists who want to make Santino into a revolutionary hero.

More Buffalo Bill would have been great, because the two leads, while attractive (both have piercing blue eyes), lack the chemistry and passion needed to get us invested in their outlaw escapades. The plot moves slowly, with too many scenes involving nothing more than the pair hiking through a swamp or camping out, and contains few true surprises. Their lovemaking looks like they know the camera is watching. Even a jailbreak offers little thrill. About all that we know about Rosa is that wants to move to America to rebuild her life, and stoic Santino has little character at all. Bill, played by Reilly with a showman’s panache, is far too interesting a character to sit on the sidelines for most of the movie while we watch these dull lovebirds instead.

Stylistically, the film is an appropriate recreation of a 60s-70s Italian western, complete with melodramatic acting (Bill, in particular, seems like he’s always performing even when he’s not on stage) and some humorously obvious dubbing. The Tuscan locations—which include a cool seaside grotto—don’t recreate the American west, but do look appropriately primal on their own. The “surreal” twist hinted at in some reviews is misleading; it’s more of a brief magical-realist bit, attributable to the heroine’s traumatized psyche (although it does suggest an even more feverish take on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—more of this, and we might really have had something here). Heads or Tails? also includes a few jabs at colonialism (the expressions on the Indians’ faces as the genocidal Bill brags about their noble culture are priceless) and nods to feminism (Rosa is the central figure and the toughest hombre in the film). But it’s not self-consciously revisionist so much as dedicated to the setting’s historical accuracy. Heads or Tails? comes up as a spaghetti western retread with modest art-house ambitions. But it never really decides which way it wants to go: full-throttle homage or sly postmodern parody. It probably should have settled on either heads or tails, and left out the question mark.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…sometimes failure is more interesting than success, and Heads or Tails? is a beautiful, beautifully acted, weird, sharply funny revisionist western taking on two cinematic traditions with the kind of knives-out bravura that contemporary cinema needs more of.”–Sarah Marrs, Lainey Gossip (contemporaneous)