Running with the Devil ***1/2

Slightly reminiscent of Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), but less self-important and with more of a sense of humor, Running with the Devil stars Laurence Fishburne as sleazy street-level coke dealer “The Man”, who decides to widen his margin of profit by experimentally cutting his product with what turns out to be a lethal cocktail of other drugs, and Nicolas Cage as “The Cook”, the restauranteur-trafficker tasked by “The Boss” (Barry Pepper) with ferreting out the fuckup in the supply chain. At times the movie feels like a bit of a joke, with a big-name actor like Fishburne, for instance, reduced to jerking off in a peep show booth and later indicating a prostitute’s strap-on and telling her, “I’m not payin’ extra for that.” With vignettes spanning all social strata and various geographical theaters of the drug trade, Running with the Devil does appear to want to bestow viewers with a somewhat nuanced picture of global implications, however – and it isn’t all that bad for an afternoon’s throwaway entertainment, either.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Running with the Devil is:

[WARNING: SPOILERS!]

Philanthropy-skeptical. Seemingly big-hearted, community-invested entrepreneur “The Cook” only uses a show of magnanimity as cover for his illegal activity.

Anti-capitalistic, with “The Cook” and “The Boss” standing for the dog-eat-dog nihilism of the big business mentality. Cage’s character, for example, speaks in bland terms of “administrative issues” while discussing his racket and is depicted reading a book about corporate leadership. In another scene, a credit card is used to chop lines of cocaine, equating usury and consumerism with coke addiction as America’s drugs of choice.

Anti-drug. Though the film features a somewhat sympathetic portrait of a Colombian coca farmer (Clifton Collins, Jr.) who only wants to provide for his family, Running with the Devil also emphasizes the street-level human toll of drug addiction, with Leslie Bibb’s DEA investigator character losing family members. “The Man” also suffers the loss of his family’s respect when his drugging and irresponsibility cause him to neglect them. The trade is ultimately destructive of the dealers and middle managers who perpetuate it.

Anti-Semitic! There is an undeniable racial charge to the scene in which the blonde “Agent in Charge” (Bibb) interrogates shifty Jew “The Snitch” (Adam Goldberg) who nervously asks to talk to his lawyer. For being uncooperative, he is taken to a black site for more thorough questioning.

Pro-vigilante, endorsing extrajudicial measures as the only way to conclude the drug war. Frustrated with the ineffectual and Sisyphean routine of law enforcement by the book, the “Agent in Charge” finally confronts the seemingly prosecution-proof “Cook” in his kitchen, telling him, “You know what’s funny? […] As long as we’ve been fighting it, nothing has changed. God knows I’ve tried. I lost my sister. I never had time for a relationship. And all for what? You can still get any drug you want, 24/7. There are still guys like you running around. You’re never gonna get caught, you know? Never. It’s like one giant, never-ending, self-licking ice cream cone,” she says before finally shooting him.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Piercing *

Don’t watch this movie. It opens with Christopher Abbott hesitatingly holding an icepick inches above an infant’s face – and then, as if that sight isn’t already off-putting enough – offers a possible justification for this contemplation of infanticide by revealing that the baby is a super-intelligent psycho directing the father to go out and murder prostitutes. Everything about Piercing is stupid and pointless – from the Tarantino-derivative and thematically irrelevant 70s-style opening credits to the would-be shock of seeing people in full-body S&M suits screwing in a bathroom. Nonchalantly rehearsing a murder to the tune of “The Girl from Ipanema”? Whoa, bro – that’s a pretty edgy soundtrack flex! I won’t bother recounting any more of the plot because frankly none of this idiocy matters. I’m sorry to break the news to writer-director Nicolas Pesce, but your movie is as boring and hollow as you. Get your garbage off my planet.

One star. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Piercing is:

4. Anti-family. Don’t ask.

3. Feminist. Piercing reverses audience expectations by having hooker Mia Wasikowska turn the tables on reluctant predator Abbott. (Yawn.) The argument could be made that the movie is anti-whoredom for depicting the risks incurred by both prostitutes and johns who meet as strangers, knowing nothing about the other person’s mental state – but somehow I doubt that this much thought even went into planning Piercing.

2. Pro-pedophilia, featuring an eroticized shot of blood oozing onto a little girl’s lap.

1.Antinatalist. Hopefully no one connected with this movie ever procreates.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of the books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Dragged Across Concrete ****1/2

S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk) is back with a solid and satisfyingly rough follow-up to the jaw-dropping Brawl in Cell Block 99, reuniting with Vince Vaughn and teaming him up with Mel Gibson in a literally gut-ripping, downbeat buddy cop brutalizer. Seasoned detective Brett Ridgeman (Gibson) and partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vaughn) are caught on video using excessive force in the apprehension of a Hispanic drug dealer, creating a scandal for their police department, and get suspended without pay by their superior (Don Johnson). Both men need money – Lurasetti because he plans to propose marriage to his girlfriend, and Ridgeman because his daughter is no longer safe in their ghettoized neighborhood and the family needs to get out. At the extent of his tether, Ridgeman hatches a half-baked plan to rip off a heroin dealer that winds up with him and his partner pitted against a gang of formidable paramilitary bank heisters. A career highlight for Gibson equal to his over-the-hill hero roles in Edge of Darkness and Blood Father, and yet another impressive entry in Vaughn’s growing résumé of scary tough guy characters after True Detective and Brawl in Cell Block 99.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Dragged Across Concrete is:

8. Anti-drug. Tory Kittles plays ex-con Henry Johns, whose stint in prison illustrates a very possible outcome for a dealer. His mother, a heroin addict, has turned to prostitution. It is also mentioned that the dealer Ridgeman mistreats has been selling drugs to children, undermining any potential audience sympathy for the criminal.

7. Ableist! Lurasetti compares a hearing-impaired woman’s speech to a dolphin’s.

6. Anti-Semitic! Writer-director Zahler, as Soiled Sinema’s Ty E. puts it, is an artist who seems to have “transcended his Jewishness”, which may account for the brief and harmless but stereotype-oozing portrayal of the friendly jeweler Feinbaum, who says his wife has two brothers who are therapists and three sisters who are lawyers.

5. Homophobic! Henry dismisses his “cocksuckin’ father” as “a yesterday who ain’t worth words.” Disapprovingly, Ridgeman fails to see “much of a difference these days” between men and women, and also mocks Lurasetti’s “gay hair shit” disguise.

4. Media-critical. Chief Lieutenant Calvert (Johnson) derides the anti-police bias of “the entertainment industry formally known as ‘the news’”, which “needs villains” and fabricates them if necessary.

3. Natalist, i.e., sexist! Unexpectedly, the movie features a tender (albeit offbeat) portrait of a new mother, Kelly Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), desperately trying to avoid going back to work after using up her maternity leave. The necessity of keeping a job seems cruel and absurd now that she has a baby. Her proper place, she realizes, is at home with her child, and her boss, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) describes her as a “radiant vision of maternity”. The section of Dragged Across Concrete that follows Kelly is even more affecting on a second viewing.

2. Class-conscious. “My job [in a bank] is so stupid,” Kelly laments. “I go there and I sell chunks of my life for a paycheck so that rich people I’ve never even met can put money in places I’ve never even seen.” Henry’s little brother Ethan, meanwhile, sees big game hunting as “rich white people shit”. There is also the suggestion that those with wealth have the means to elude the law, as Ridgeman at some point in the past allowed the son of businessman Friedrich (Udo Kier) to escape punishment for an unnamed crime in exchange for a future favor from the well-connected father. Ridgeman no longer believes in a meritocratic American dream. “I don’t politick and I don’t change with the times and turns that that shit’s more important than good, honest work,” he tells his partner, determining: “We have the skills and the right to acquire proper compensation” for thankless years of public service.

1.Race-realist – with exceptions. “They’re so cute before they get big,” says Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) – ostensibly with reference to lion cubs, but subtextually referring to the black boys who harass her when she walks home from school. “This fucking neighborhood, it just keeps getting worse and worse,” frets Mrs. Ridgeman (Laurie Holden). “You know I never thought I was a racist before living in this area. I’m about as liberal as any ex-cop could ever be, but now,” she demands, “we really need to move” or else, “someday, you and me,” she tells her husband, “we are in a hospital room with our daughter talking to a rape counselor.”

Ridgeman and his partner are both depicted as casual racists. “I’m not racist,” Lurasetti jokes: “Every Martin Luther King Day I order a cup of dark roast.” In a twenty-first century world in which “digital eyes are everywhere”, however, old-school law-and-order enforcers like Ridgeman and Lurasetti are living on borrowed time. “Like cell phones, and just as annoying, politics are everywhere,” Calvert observes. “Being branded a racist in today’s public forum is like being accused of communism in the fifties. Whether it’s a possibly offensive remark made in a private phone call or the indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children […] It’s bullshit – but it’s reality.”

Softening Dragged Across Concrete’s racial edge is the presence of Henry, the conspicuous specimen of Africanus cinematicus played by Tory Kittles. This ghetto thug with the soul of a poet is given to saying things like, “Before I consider that kind of vocation, I need to get myself acclimated” and is at all times depicted as being more astute than those around him. His little brother Ethan, too, is portrayed as an underprivileged but bright lad of great potential. The case can be made that Dragged Across Concrete makes examples of its most prominent bigots by punishing them while rewarding Henry in the end. Ridgeman, who has refused to change with the times, is taught the important lesson that he “should have trusted a nigger.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

White Girl ***1/2

Just when you thought the movie industry had hit rock bottom, along lumbers White Girl with its Jewish jackhammer to get at the rock beneath the rock. Following on the heels of American Honey (2016), White Girl exemplifies a long tradition of cinema that seeks to shock the sensibilities with its exposure of the wild rites of the rising generation – a genre that stretches from the earliest juvenile delinquent pictures up through the likes of Over the Edge (1979), River’s Edge (1986), Kids (1995), Bully (2001), Spring Breakers (2012), and Heaven Knows What (2014).

White Girl is yet another foray into the demimonde of ugly people in ugly clothes engaging in ugly, loveless dances and lewd acts to ugly, afro-degenerated soundtracks – with the difference that this entry makes its anti-white agenda totally explicit. Purporting to tell the true-life experiences of some lowlife named Elizabeth Wood, the story follows an Oklahoma City slut (Morgan Saylor) after she moves to New York – ostensibly in order to “study” – but instead uses her parents’ money to buy drugs and get into trouble.

Gazing longingly out the window of her apartment at a group of loitering mongrels, White Girl announces, “I’m gonna go get some” and so sets out on an odyssey of debauchery that will occupy the next eighty minutes or so. White Girl falls hard for hat-backwards barrio banger Blue (Brian Marc), who tenderly screws her against a wall. After Blue gets arrested, he trusts her to get his supply of dope back into the hands of his ruthless supplier; but, being the stupid White Girl that she is, she instead hopes to raise money for his legal defense by trying to move the powdered product herself – with inevitably catastrophic results.

Not worth watching more than once, White Girl is a nihilistic film that thrives on shocks and not much else.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that writer-director Elizabeth Wood should be institutionalized for her own protection and that White Girl is:

3. Media-skeptical. At the very least, White Girl presents a sobering picture of the species of undesirables who seek employment in the media. The idiot protagonist, the sort of lout produced by a lifetime’s ingestion of mainstream media poison, has gone off to New York to study writing and the “liberal arts”. White Girl’s sleazy magazine editor boss (Jewish actor Justin Bartha, playing a character with the distinctly goyische moniker Kelly), meanwhile, hopes to inflate the value of some worthless artwork he bought by spotlighting the artist (“Rambo”) with a special profile.

2. Pro-drug. The script halfheartedly makes a distinction between marijuana and harder drugs – “We just smoke weed every day, all day,” explains one of the mutts – but all drugs are inextricably linked with sex in the film. The title character falls in love at first sight with a street pusher, and plying women with cocaine or alcohol comes across as an expeditious means to satisfaction. Kelly gains instant access to White Girl’s orifices when he lays out some lines of cocaine and essentially rapes her with little resistance and no consequences. The movie appears to want to dissimulate about its intentions and provides a couple of scenes of morning-after horror and vomit for plausible deniability; but the association of sex with drugs is undeniable in the face of such moments as a young woman snorting a line of cocaine from a man’s penis.

1. Anti-white. Whatever claim White Girl might have to being a cautionary tale is forfeited by the flippant choice of celebratory ape music about pimping white flesh to play during the closing credits. A Jewish triumphalist proclamation of victory in the face of ubiquitous European degeneracy, White Girl is nothing if not an expression of ethnosadism. Zio-prostitute Chris Noth of Sex and the City infamy puts a gentile face on the sleazy lawyer archetype in his role of George, the unscrupulous attorney White Girl hires to represent Blue. In one telling moment, a drop of wine trickles like blood from the corner of George’s mouth – a projection to the effect that whites, not Jews, are the vampires that prey on America. “It’s a really fucked up system,” this character explains. “You could have a white kid stab someone to death and he’ll get less time than a black kid caught with a miniscule amount of drugs. This is the way it is.” One of the movie’s objectives is to get across the propaganda meme of “white privilege”, with White Girl seen to escape unharmed, suffering no repercussions after precipitating what is likely the end of Blue’s career. He goes to prison while she, unperturbed, is accepted back into the fold of the “college” life. White Girl, unsurprisingly, was produced by a rats’ nest of ethnics including Ariel Schulman, Orlee-Rose Strauss, and Gabriel Nussbaum – all of whom, one can only imagine, are deeply concerned about the plight of white girls worldwide. Another producer, Christine Vachon, made The New York Observer’s list of “The New Power Gays” – homosexuals being Jews in spirit and politics.

Was this movie made for the Jewish community and all our Gastrointestinal issues? I'm going to say, yes. http://t.co/qXdu6EAd5D

— Orlee-Rose Strauss (@orleerose) March 19, 2013

Thanks, Ms. Strauss, for acknowledging that you view the consumers of your sickening anti-white "mooooovies" as cattle. pic.twitter.com/JCufHcsJZs

— R. Chlodwig von K. (@icareviews) June 18, 2017

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Office Christmas Party ****1/2

Jason Bateman plays straight man to a cast of corporate crazies in Office Hanukkah Party, Hollywood’s latest assault on every decent thing left in this maggoty world. The movie does manage to lampoon the self-negating neuroses bred by workplace compliance with inclusivity policies and political correctness, but ultimately embraces the same sort of idiocy, only spicing it up with vice and obscenity in order to make the New World Order seem somehow appealing. Viewed in isolation from any moral considerations or greater societal impact, Office Hanukkah Party is an admittedly fun film buoyed by a talented cast of comedic actors including Jennifer Aniston and T.J. Miller as feuding tech executive siblings Carol and Clay. Kate McKinnon insults Christians everywhere in the role of the rigid but flatulent “Mary”, while Vanessa Bayer and Randall Park reprise their interracial flirtation from the similarly depraved Trainwreck.

4.5 out of 5 stars – and, to be absolutely clear, this rating reflects not the film’s sociological value but its likely appeal to its intended audience of unredeemed degenerates. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Office Hanukkah Party is:

9. Disingenuously anti-corporate, disapproving of impersonal business cultures, profit-prioritizing layoffs, and the like, but fully endorsing the atomized hedonism favored by the neoliberal establishment. (I find a pleasing irony in the fact that the film’s initials, O.C.P., are also those of Omni Consumer Products, the evil military-industrial megacorporation from RoboCop.)

Just look at this sinister foreign face with its corporate sponsor looming in the background. The nice guy nerd from Office Hanukkah Party. pic.twitter.com/6v8DkxHy2M

— R. Chlodwig von K. (@icareviews) June 5, 2017

8. Russophobic, with Russians depicted as gangsters. One of them, a thug named Alexei (Michael Tourek), gets nightsticked for calling a liberated American woman “bitch”.

7. Jewish supremacist. Indicating priorities in the opening moments of the movie, a menorah occupies the center of the frame in a shot of a holiday snack table. Aniston also demonstrates the superior merits of Krav Maga. In a possible insult to Arabs, a foreign-looking fellow is seen literally fucking a camel statue in the back of a truck.

6. Feminist. Carol, in addition to being able to hold her own in a fight against her brother, refers to God as “Her”. “Suck my dick,” a woman tells her male supervisor.

5. Anti-Christian. The entire movie constitutes a denigration of Christians’ celebration of the birth of Christ, as symbolized when Clay sleds down a staircase and demolishes a Nativity scene.

4. Anti-family. Learning that Allison (Bayer) is a single mother, Fred (Park) replies, “That’s great. I was raised by a single mom.” Children are bothers and fit primarily for corruption, as in the end credits image of two women who appear to be snorting cocaine in the presence of a minor. Asked what is most annoying about the internet, Jeremy (Rob Corddry) replies, “Pictures of people’s kids.” A youthful caroler thrusts his middle finger at the protagonist, while the inappropriately named Carol tells another child, “Fuck you” – continuing Hollywood’s use of foul language referencing sex acts with children (cf. Cooties).

3. Pro-gay. “I’m talkin’ ‘bout take your pee-pees out and put ‘em in some booties,” proclaims DJ Calvis (Sam Richardson). Clay, meanwhile, is “straight – except for that one time.” Viewers are also treated to a guy-guy dancefloor kiss and the sight of Jason Bateman simulating fellatio with an ice sculpture. Then, too, there is mention of a “Human Centipede situation in the men’s room.”

2. Pro-miscegenation. Josh (Bateman) finds himself attracted to icy Eurasian cutie Tracey (Munn). Allison, meanwhile, after being grossed out by Fred’s mommy fetish, winds up smooching with Indian nerd Nate (Karan Soni). There is also a briefly glimpsed interracial toilet stall orgy.

1. Pro-drug. Drug humor in Office Christmas Party runs the gamut of cocaine, booze, and the abuse of prescription medications. One employee remarks that it is “boring as shit” that no one gets inebriated before noon. It is only after a bag of cocaine is accidentally dropped into a snow machine that the party really comes alive. Straight-laced black executive Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance, the indispensable negro sonar genius from The Hunt for Red October) gets particularly loose after taking a blast of powder in the face and later declares that this has been “the best night of my life” even after being hospitalized following a brutal fall. Clay, too, snorts a quantity of cocaine and gets into a wreck which serendipitously corrects a previous fracture.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Road to the Well ****1/2

Laurence Fuller plays a frustrated beta male desk jockey, Frank, who discovers that his girlfriend has been having an affair with his boss. Serendipitously, an old friend of his, handsome drifter Jack (Micah Parker), breezes into town and convinces his buddy to meet him for a few drinks at a night spot, where he also goads Frank to approach a woman (Rosalie McIntire) who catches his eye at the bar. From here, Frank’s life takes a left turn down a darker avenue than he ever knew existed, with Road to the Well developing into a fantastic, albeit eccentric, little thriller sustained by painful tensions and moments of unexpected strangeness. Only one superfluous scene broadly and condescendingly characterizing conservatives as “bigoted trash” taints what is otherwise a recommendable film, and writer-director Jon Cvack is to be commended. Barak Hardley is also worthy of mention for his portrayal of spoiled millennial man-child Chris, while Marshall Teague, glaring out of the screen from the other end of the masculinity spectrum, is also highly effective. For those interested, Road to the Well was recently released on DVD and VOD.

Four-and-a-half out of five stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Road to the Well is:

8. Anti-capitalistic, with prostitution furnishing the film’s model of free enterprise. Undignified Frank continues to work for his company (in order to “build a cushion,” he says) even after learning his boss has cuckolded him. He despises his erstwhile friend Chris, however, as a “hoity-toity yuppie” – but it is possible also to read the envy hiding behind Frank’s feigned contempt for Chris’s material security. Jack is utterly dismissive of regular employment, and encourages Frank to call in sick. “I don’t work anymore,” he says.

7. Anti-war. An implicit parallelism emerges during a scene between a murderer and a military man. One character understands something about the other’s experience.

6. Judgmentally anti-slut. The wages of sin is death!

5. Pro-gay. A corny anecdote is told about a homosexual adolescent who shot himself after being bullied. A homophobic redneck landlord who makes light of his own son’s participation in the bullying is intended to represent the low standard of sophistication prevailing among opponents of sodomy. Frank’s exaggerated reaction to this insensitivity is, one assumes, meant to establish his character’s moral credentials.

4. Manospherean. Frank, over the course of the film, is taught by his experiences to man up and assert himself. “Everything is fine as long as you got some money and a nice piece of pussy” is Jack’s philosophy.

3. Anti-Christian. A chaplain (Teague) has lost his faith and become suicidal. “My faith? What the hell is that?”

2. Anti-marriage. “It’s like marriage is this weird construct we’ve made up for ourselves and handed down from generation to generation,” moans Chris, who is soon to be married. “It’s meaningless, right?” A committed relationship is “not exciting”.

1. Antinatalist. “It’s like they’re these tiny little animals and I’m responsible for ‘em,” Chris frets, imagining the prospect of fatherhood. “If I don’t change their diaper, then they just, what, sit in their shit all day? Or, like, if you touch their fontanelle, you’re like, touching their brain, and you got a dead baby. […] No thank you.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Deadpool ****1/2

Marvel antihero Deadpool’s leap to the big screen manages to be highly entertaining in spite of having one of the most unnecessarily filthy and anally fixated scripts this reviewer has ever encountered. Ryan Reynolds is frivolous but funny as the frenetic special forces fighter turned mercenary – “a bad guy who gets paid to fuck up worse guys” – in what may be the most successful incarnation yet of the wisecracking hipster-as-superhero genre. Fast-paced and guaranteed diversion for devotees of the cult of hyperviolence and slow-motion bullets.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis only recommends seeing Deadpool for free, if possible, and indicates that it is:

9. Pro-brony. The hero masturbates while amusing himself with a stuffed animal.

8. Gun-ambivalent. Deadpool owns a number of guns, but forgets to bring these to the final battle. He proceeds to demonstrate how an accomplished action hero does not need an arsenal to dispatch a heavily armed pack of henchmen.

7. Disingenuously anti-torture. Supervillain Ajax (Ed Skrein) subjects Deadpool to atrocities reminiscent of War on Terror interrogations and Abu Ghraib indignities in his efforts to activate Deadpool’s recessive mutant genes, but Deadpool himself also employs torture to get information out of opponents. “I may be super, but I am no hero,” he says by way of a disclaimer – a distinction that will be lost on all of the adolescent boys who watch Deadpool. “And, yeah, technically this is murder,” he says, flippantly dismissing his impalement of a bad guy, “but some of the best love stories start with a murder and that’s exactly what this is – a love story.”

6. War-ambivalent. War, it is suggested, is an evil enterprise, but the film makes light of wartime experiences that allowed Deadpool to travel to “exotic places – Baghdad, Mogadishu, Jacksonville – meeting new and exciting people.” The general incendiary bombast of the movie makes combat seem like a blast.

5. Anti-South. The South, as the above quotation demonstrates, is equated with the Third World.

4. Pro-drug. “God, I miss cocaine,” gripes Deadpool’s roommate Blind Al (Leslie Uggams). Learning a stash of cocaine is nearby, Deadpool’s friend Weasel (T.J. Miller) asks her, “Wanna get fucked up?”

3. Misandrist. A slap on the ass warrants vengeful crotch-clenching. Even gentlemanly behavior meets with genital abuse. Both Deadpool and Colossus must be rescued by women, and National Women’s Day occasions an unreasonable sexual favor from the protagonist.

2. Anti-family. Deadpool, a “sexy motherfucker”, exchanges dysfunctional family stories with a prostitute (Morena Baccarin). “Daddy left before I was born,” etc. Deadpool claims to have been molested by his uncle, to which she replies that more than one uncle raped her. “They took turns.” It is also suggested that Deadpool has carnal knowledge of his father when he reaches behind himself, feels Colossus’s cock, and asks, “Dad?” The film furthers the process of pedophilia normalization by trivializing child abuse.

1. Pro-gay. “Oh, hello. I know, right? Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my very own movie? I can’t tell you, but it does rhyme with ‘Polverine’. And let me tell you, he’s got a nice pair o’ smooth criminals down unda.” One of the most butt-centric movies in some time, Deadpool makes more than one reference to the hero’s anus as a sexual organ. His “on switch” is next to his prostate, he hints, and the viewer is even treated to the sight of his girlfriend (Morena Baccarin) screwing him in the posterior with a strap-on. It is also insinuated that he has been hiding her engagement ring in his rectum. Then, too, he takes a bullet right between the cheeks and threatens an adversary with a reference to his “hard spots”. “That came out wrong – or did it?” he asks, kissing him. Deadpool is “pretty sure Robin loves Batman, too.” An animated version of the protagonist sports an extensive erection when Ed Skrein’s credit comes up at the end.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Wild Card ****

Revenge for a raped prostitute might sound like less-than-thrilling motivation for an action hero, but it works nevertheless to propel this uncharacteristically character-driven Jason Statham vehicle. The Expendables star here plays Nick Wild, a skid row Las Vegas “security consultant” in Simon West’s quality realization of a thirty-year-old William Goldman screenplay. A British special forces veteran who can take care of himself, Nick is also a self-destructive compulsive gambler and drinker who has to grapple with his own shortcomings as well as the gangsters who want him dead. Something of an odd couple dynamic comes into play when Nick is befriended by a nerdy software millionaire (Michael Angarano) looking to be initiated into the world of danger and excitement. Some of the exchanges between these two have a rather phony and forced cleverness; but the script, on the whole, is highly engaging and full of fun and surprises. The cast of familiar faces includes Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Anne Heche, and Jason Alexander in minor roles.

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Wild Card is:

6. Misandrist. An abused woman (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) threatens to sever the penis of a cocky misogynist (Milo Ventimiglia).

5. Corporate. A big-titted Latina (Sofia Vergara) squeezes in a quality plug for the junk food complex when she orders a Diet Pepsi. Putting in a good word for the usury industry, Statham’s credit card comes in handy when he uses it put a gash on a bad guy’s head. He also mentions eating Wheaties as a source of energy.

4. Anti-Christian. Set against the tacky blinking backdrop of one of America’s sleaziest, most Judaically resonant metropolises, Christmas is a hollow observance with no meaning. Simon West, in his commentary, relates that “the Christmas theme in the movie meant that I wanted to get some actual Vegas at Christmas footage, but […] unfortunately Vegas doesn’t seem to celebrate Christmas that much.”

3. Anti-Semitic! “You’re not supposed to like Vegas,” Nick explains of the city that Bugsy Siegel built. “It’s just this creeping virus people catch sometimes.”

2. Anti-gun. Nick rejects firearms, demonstrating instead how simple objects like silverware and ashtrays can be used to debilitate armed assailants.

1. Pro-miscegenation and anti-white. Most appallingly, Wild Card contains a scene of flirtation between Nick and an unappealing black hotel maid (Davenia McFadden). “Too bad you got all that British blood in you,” she teases him. “If you was black, I’d bed you good and fast.” “You can make believe,” Nick encourages her. “Nah,” she replies. “Don’t think this is racial or anything, but I never feel like you people are clean. This is a housekeeper you’re talking to, remember? I can tell if a Brit’s been in a room [snaps] just like that.” This dialogue suggesting that Brits are unclean makes little sense until one listens to Simon West’s commentary. “In the original script, the [Nick] character was actually Hispanic,” he reveals, “so we had to change the racial stereotyping.” Mexicans can no longer conscionably be depicted as dirtbags, but Englishmen are apparently still fair game. Three decades ago, when the screenplay was written, the occasional spot of political incorrectness was still permissible at the multiplex; but, fortunately for public morals, Wild Card was filmed in the current year, so to speak.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Black Mass ****1/2

A decidedly drab and unglamorous but still magnetic Johnny Depp appears as South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in Black Mass, a true crime film from Scott Cooper, the director of the excellent Out of the Furnace. As much as it constitutes a crime saga, however, Black Mass is also a cautionary study of ethnonationalism. The film’s handling of the material is mostly sober, but veers dangerously close to the glorification of violence in more than one sequence – with, for instance, dance floor booty intercut with the discovery of a body in the trunk of a car. Depp maintains a controlled burn throughout, and the other players – Joel Edgerton, Rory Cochrane, and Dakota Johnson among them – are also commendably strong. Definitely worthwhile for crime film fans.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Black Mass is:

6. Pro-miscegenation. Joel Edgerton enjoys a lewd dance with a black woman.

5. Anti-Christian, but not as vociferously so as one might be led to expect by the film’s title and the promotional trailer. Christian paraphernalia loses its meaning in the context of remorseless murderer Bulger’s participation in empty rituals.

4. Anti-drug. Aspirin doses debilitate Bulger’s son (Luke Ryan) with Reye’s Syndrome, which leaves him braindead. Bulger, while heartbroken by this, shows no concern for the neighborhood kids who buy his drugs. Learning that Bulger participated in government LSD experiments, the viewer is left to speculate that this might have exacerbated his madness and criminal inclinations.

3. Euthanasist. Bulger’s wife (Johnson) prefers to take their son off life support rather than see him continue as a vegetable. “He’s never gonna be our little boy again, ever. […] He’s braindead. He’s on life support. He can’t move, and I don’t want him like that. I can’t have my little boy be like that. I’ll pull the plug myself. I will.” Clashing with the mother’s reasonable assessment of the situation is Bulger’s irrational anger as he curses his wife, kicks over a chair, and knocks a table on its side, with the heavy irony here being that a gangster and murderer, of all people, has become the advocate for the sanctity of human life.

2. State-skeptical. Government is only as worthy as the men who fill the responsible posts. The Winter Hill Gang bribes “local street cops, feds, whatever” in exchange for the cooperation of authorities.

1. Anti-white. Black Mass opens with an interrogation conducted by a federal agent resembling Eric Holder. James “Whitey” Bulger’s nickname is highly significant, as well, as is brought to the fore in a brief scene in which a black man tells him, “This ain’t your neighborhood, Whitey,” and receives a brutal beating in reply. Bulger is an Irish nationalist determined to retake territory from Boston’s “oppressor” Italians, and he and his gang have nothing but contempt for an Irish-American “turncoat motherfucker” like Officer Flynn (David Conley), who works for the other side. Bulger, as his empire grows with the help of childhood acquaintance and FBI investigator John Connolly (Edgerton), who sees to it that the Bureau overlooks his activities, even assists the IRA with shipments of arms. “What is written on a piece of paper [i.e., law] is less important than blood,” Connolly excuses his actions.

“The only time he ever seemed happy was when he was talking about the IRA,” one of Bulger’s associates remembers – the implication being that European ethnic exclusiveness holds a special attraction for gloomy people with unsatisfying lives. The name of the boat, the “Valhalla”, used to transport the weapons, carries associations with Nordicism and Nazism, and that Black Mass should be largely concerned with discrediting ethnonationalism is hardly surprising when Hollywood Zionist sleazoid Brett Ratner’s name shows up in the end credits as an executive producer. Ethnic solidarity is framed as a hollow ideology providing protection for white crime and terrorism. Bulger’s “code of honor”, furthermore, does not prevent him from introducing drugs into his own neighborhood. A Jewish actor, Corey Stoll, plays the upstanding FBI investigator who finally brings “Whitey” Bulger to justice.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

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Bad Jew-Jew: Bordello of Blood

Between gigs as the smirkingly hip host of the “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live in the eighties and his present occupation as a soullessly carnage-enthused neocon radio maniac, Dennis Miller appeared in a handful of movies, one of which is the entertaining Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996), which followed Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995). Miller plays sleazy Jewish private dick Rafe Guttman, who is hired by prim Christian career woman Katherine Verdoux (Erika Eleniak) to find her brother Caleb (Corey Feldman), who has gone missing after visiting a whorehouse that doubles as a funeral home.

Vampires, as this writer has discussed in further detail elsewhere, are symbolic stand-ins for the Jews; and Bordello of Blood, written by A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler, who also directs, evinces a definite knowledge of this traditional understanding. Before being enticed into the vampires’ den of immortal vice, the mischievous Caleb is already doomed to a horrible fate. He does not share his sister’s Christian values, and wears a little Star of David patch on the back of his leather jacket. It seems to indicate that Caleb has been marked for death and foreshadows his later conversion into a happy-go-lucky parasite.

A further indication of the Jewishness of the vampire plague in Bordello of Blood is the choice of giving the name Lilith to the vampires’ queen (Angie Everhart). Lilith, in Hebrew mythology, is Adam’s rebellious first wife, the world’s earliest feminist, who told her husband, “I will not lie below” (i.e., with a man on top of her). In later elaborations of the Lilith myth, she has vampiric traits, and superstitious Jews feared her as a demon who preyed upon boys. In Bordello of Blood, a midget explorer (Phil Fondacaro) in the tradition of Indiana Jones restores Lilith to life, and hopes to keep her under control by means of a charm or “key” decorated with Stars of David. This prop, appropriately enough, is the key to understanding the film.

When Guttman goes to the whorehouse, posing as a horny customer so as to pick up some first-hand intelligence, he finds himself face to face with a vampire in dominatrix Tamara (Kiara Hunter), who of course intends to suck his blood. As Guttman begins to remove his shirt, she is horrified by what she at first mistakes for a crucifix, but is relieved to discover is only a Star of David pendant, to which vampires are clearly immune – another of the film’s indications of the affinity between Jews and vampires. Guttman, however, has no patience for Tamara’s sexual pushiness and succeeds in turning the tables on her and making his escape. During a later adventure, Guttman tracks the gore-gobblers to an abandoned factory, where he remarks, “I’m gettin’ some really bad juju off this place” – which is, of course, to say “Jew-Jew”.

The “key” to Bordello of Blood

Another interesting feature of Bordello of Blood is Lilith’s relationship with a sleazy televangelist, Reverend Current, played by Fright Night’s Chris Sarandon. (The casting of an actor most closely associated with a vampire role as a Christian minister is itself highly provocative and intentionally insulting to Christians.) “You know, I can’t decide what to do with you,” the bloodsucking super-Jewess tells him in words that seem to resonate with a broader relevance to Jewish attitudes toward Christianity. “Should I kill you or let you live, make you my dog?” – by which she presumably means turning him into a John Hagee type of groveling Christian Zionist Shabbos goy. Lilith settles on the latter. “I want this sanctimonious shit to watch what happens now that I’m free,” she declares, referring to the sadistic, vampiric pleasure her kind derives from watching Christians squirm under the onslaught of the cultural rot inflicted upon them by the very ethno-parasites they revere as “God’s Chosen People”.

Current, though a corrupted man, is reluctant to acquiesce to such evil, and decides to stage a last-ditch effort to stop the vampires in their lair. “I, uh, I know I can’t fight you all, so I’ve come to join you,” he says – but just as no Jew can trust a Christian, no matter his protestations of good will, the vampires see through him and so the battle of the bordello commences, with Current and Guttman dispatching the Judaic creatures with holy water. The preacher, after containing his anti-Semitism for so many years, seems to experience a cathartic thrill in setting the vampire sluts ablaze, consigning them to the flames of a veritable whore-Holocaust. This sequence, significantly, plays out to the tune of the Sweet’s glam rock song “Ballroom Blitz” – the word “blitz” carrying a strong association with a certain European anti-Semitic initiative.

During the final confrontation with Lilith, which takes place in the TV studio where Current does his Christian crusade program, Guttman uses a laser to scorch a cross into the vampire bitch’s back, after which Katherine impales the hag with a populist pitchfork. A rabbi (Robert Rozen) then “consecrates” Lilith’s remains – this mumbo jumbo, one assumes, is some sort of “good Jew-Jew” – after which Guttman and Katherine are free to commence interfaith miscegenation – one of Bordello of Blood’s obligatory concessions to cultural Marxist expectations. A further surprise awaits the viewer, but this writer does not intend to spoil it.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.