The Shed ****

Stan (Jay Jay Warren) is a troubled teenager whose parents are dead and who consequently has to stay with his hard-drinking and emotionally abusive grandfather (Timothy Bottoms). Seeing his best friend Dommer (Cody Kostro) get bullied every day at school doesn’t make it any easier for Stan to stay out of trouble, and the fact that that the biggest and most handsome jerk of them all, Marble (Chris Petrovski), deflowered the girl Stan loves certainly doesn’t improve his mood. Meanwhile, the sheriff’s department also has an eye on him – and on top of all that, there’s a vampire hiding in the shed behind his house! When bodies start to pile up, Stan just wants all the chaos to stop, but vengeful Dommer gets some dangerous ideas about how a vampire might come in handy in evening up the score with his tormenters at school. Marred by some painfully generic dialogue, The Shed is nonetheless a successfully tense and sometimes humorous echo of the teen horror heyday of the 1980s. I give the drama a passing C but the scares definitely earn an A.

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Shed is:

[WARNING: SPOILERS!]

Drug-ambivalent. The grandfather stands as a cautionary depiction of an alcoholic, but Stan and Dommer get together and drink with no repercussions for either character apart from the grandfather griping about his grandson stealing his beer.

Anti-gun, guns appearing ineffective as a means of defense and mainly posing an offensive threat.

Anti-military, offering a degrading depiction of a Vietnam veteran in the grandfather, who brags about his service overseas while complaining that young people have no sense of duty.

Family-ambivalent. The characterization of the cruel grandfather is simplistically over-the-top, and parental figures and figures of authority generally are given negative depictions. Stan’s father selfishly committed suicide, and love interest Roxy (Sofia Happonen) mentions that her stepfather abused her mother. In each case, the character suffers from the absence of the real father. “We all hate our parents,” she claims. In one of The Shed’s lamest moments, young rebel Stan imagines the indignity of living in a “shitty suburban town, hating your neighbor, hating your wife, hating your parents for the way you turned out.” Militating against the anti-family content of the story, however, is the “In Loving Memory of Dad” dedication in the end credits.

Anti-Antifa. When, toward the end of the film, Dommer has decided to turn to murder, he appears in a T-shirt bearing an anarchist circle-A, anarchism being the ideology of choice of unhinged adolescent losers brimming with resentment and out for revenge.

Racist! The mixed-race Pitt (Francisco Burgos) is a second-tier bully and also a weak link when, after having joined forces with the protagonists, he shows himself a coward and falls prey to the vampire, becoming one himself.

Anti-Semitic! Probably not, actually; but with any vampire film there is always the question of the extent to which the filmmakers are conscious of and engage with the Judaic dimension of the European bloodsucker tradition. The case to be made for The Shed is flimsy, but it may be worth mentioning in this connection that Stan, hardly an archetypal Aryan hero, does have posters in his bedroom that feature runic writing. That the vampire is able to subvert mystery-meat Pitt and deploy him against Stan and Roxy could be read as reflecting Jewish manipulation of minority populations in majority-white societies, as well. As with many classic horror movies, the action in The Shed concludes with a purifying fire – which is, of course, to say a holocaust. The vampire might just as easily and perhaps more justifiably be interpreted as an expression of contagious and potentially homicidal or self-destructive teen angst, however. This reading would complement the movie’s doubly meaningful tagline: “Beware the evil within.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

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

Booksmart ***

Booksmart is, on the one hand, an involving study of two brainy teenage girls’ unique friendship, and, on the other, a comedy death-fart that did not make me laugh even once. Directed by Olivia Wilde and penned by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman – it apparently takes the combined creative resources of four women to put together a screenplay this unfunny – Booksmart is nothing if not a hoarse and harrowing howl of girl-power intransigence into the maelstrom of Trumpian apocalypse. Unsmiling lesbian Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and smug, RBG-venerating Jewish fatty Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are academic all-stars who reach the end of their senior year with a sudden sense of regret at not having done any partying like their cooler peers during their time in high school. With one last night in which to revel before their graduation, Amy and Molly determine to cut loose and go buck wild whatever the cost. No one can fault the ensemble cast for the energetic, fully invested maniac performances on display; one only wishes the script had given the actors something a little more dignified to do with their talents. Booksmart is fast-paced and never exactly boring, but the accidental-finger-up-the-butt hijinks, microphone fellation, and scoldings about the difference between sexual orientation and “gender performance”, etc., failed to turn the engine in my inner gay pride parade float. This is a movie that does not so much attempt to tickle audiences’ funny bone as thrust its hand down its pants Don Lemon style before rubbing its malodorous fingers under the viewer’s nose in a botched, mentally ill attempt at seduction.

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Booksmart is:

Multicultural and pro-miscegenation. The almost uniformly brilliant student body of the girls’ Los Angeles high school seems to be comprised entirely of homosexuals and diversity. Molly’s secret crush, as it turns out, is mystery meat jock Nick (Mason Gooding). Hip black teacher Miss Fine (Jessica Williams), meanwhile, has an end-of-year fling with a Mexican student.

Anti-white. “Straight white man, your time is [over],” proclaims a graduation speaker. In one of the more grotesque expressions of the dumb blonde archetype ever to hit the screen, an athletic but spastic girl named Ryan (Victoria Ruesga) appears to be borderline retarded.

Anti-Trump. The girls’ car displays “Resist” and “Warren 2020” stickers. So brave!

Pro-drug. A dose of psychedelic strawberries has the girls hallucinating and finding themselves in the bodies of Barbie-like dolls, precipitating the obligatory exploration of the objectification of women. Talk to the hand, W.C. Fields. This feminist comedy steamroller can’t be stopped!

Gay. “Amy, do you know how many girls are gonna be up your vagina at Columbia next year? Are you aware of it? ‘Cause I’m aware of it,” the heterosexual Molly assures her best friend. “Every time I come to visit you, you’re just gonna be scissoring a different girl.” Putting in what I suppose is intended as an endorsement of gender-neutral bathrooms, male and female students converge on the same facilities where they gossip, draw dicks, and write obscene messages on the walls. In addition, Booksmart truly puts the Globo in Globohomo by giving a shout-out to increasingly gay-friendly Botswana even as Amy laments the fact that she would be murdered in heterofascist Uganda.

Feminist. Molly aspires to be the next Ruth Bader Ginsberg, while Amy rejects male value altogether. “My Body My Choice,” booms a poster on her wall. “Honestly, ‘pushy’ is a compliment,” Molly observes. “You know who else was pushy? Diane Sawyer. Joan of Arc. Queen Noor of Jordan.” Tediously, one of the movie’s running gags is that Molly and Amy will periodically pause to give each other sassy pep talks and tell each other how hot, fabulous, and empowered they are – almost as if neither one is convinced.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

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

 

The Miseducation of Cameron Post ***

Chloe Grace Moretz, who began her career in a skintight superhero costume as a sexually exploited child in the disposable Kick-Ass films, embraces her prostitution to the cultural Marxist establishment in her role as a teenage lesbian cruelly condemned to be treated at a totalitarian Christian conversion therapy camp. There, she is insensitively disciplined by a suspiciously cold and masculine Christian psychologist (Jennifer Ehle) and mentored by a friendly reverend (John Gallagher, Jr.) who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a recovered homosexual himself. The Miseducation of Cameron Post has little point apart from further demolishing western civilization and tediously depicting Christians as stupid, corny, boring, mean, and hatefully judgmental.

The other major objective of the film is to tempt young women into lesbian relationships. The unsightliness of male-male physicality is prudently kept off-screen, but more than one sultry scene of hot, quick lesbian seduction is featured. A key meta moment occurs in the sequence depicting Moretz’s first girl-girl experience. She and a friend (Quinn Shephard) are hanging out and watching Donna Deitch’s 1985 film Desert Hearts and find themselves overcome with lust during one of the movie’s lesbian scenes. This, of course, is how The Miseducation of Cameron Post is intended to function. With its much greater reach than this obscure eighties predecessor, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is designed to get mentally malleable adolescent girls to question their own pedestrian sexuality and wonder if it might not be more rewarding to luxuriate in a childless life of unending slumber parties and digitally induced, guy-free orgasms.

I find a great irony in this movie’s contrived shock moment of homo horror, when gay boy Owen Campbell, tortured by the contradiction between his Christian ardor and his burning desire to gobble a cock, freaks out and mutilates his genitals, leaving a pool of blood on the floor of a bathroom for Chloe Grace Moretz to find. Are Bible-thumpers really the ones bullying young men into cutting off their penises, though, or is that messaging emanating from some other quadrant of our cultural landscape?

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Miseducation of Cameron Post is:

5. Democratic. When Moretz and two of her pals at last escape from Sobibor, they hitch a ride in a pickup truck that boasts a Clinton Gore sticker – the Democratic Party being the vehicle that will carry Americans forward into a more enlightened future.

4. Multiculturalist. Moretz’s buddies at camp include American Honey’s mystery-meat dreadlocks vixen Sasha Lane and fellow pothead Forrest Goodluck, a laid-back Native American lad with “two spirits”.

3. Pro-drug. Dope enhances the thrill of an intense backseat lesbian encounter, and Moretz also bonds with her new gay camp companions over weed.

2. Anti-Christian. Yes, apparently Christianity isn’t quite dead yet – or, at any rate, Hollywood wants to make absolutely sure, and so continues to flog its carcass. “How is programming people to hate themselves,” the screenplay poses, “not emotional abuse?” (I wonder if the buffoon who wrote this line has, in this same spirit of fairness, taken an honest look at the ways in which whites are typically depicted in Hollywood fare.)

1.Anti-family, antinatalist, and pro-gay (i.e., pro-AIDS). Gay as the U.S.A. is these days, it still isn’t proactively putrescent enough to satisfy the ass venerators in Hollywood. Movies have given us gay teens, gay parents, gay artists, gay cowboys, gay scientists, gay singers, gay strippers, gay soldiers, gay superheroes, gay angels, gay Holocaust victims, and even gay Nazis – and yet, as The Miseducation of Cameron Post capably demonstrates, there remain still-ungay filmic frontiers to be reamed in trailblazing explorations. As long as there are virgin goyish bloodstreams yet to be blessed by the gift of a full-flowered autoimmune disease, and homophobic churchgoing bigots yet to be epically BTFO’d on the big screen with feels and thotness, Hollywood can hardly afford to flag in its valiant venereal efforts.

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!

Yoga Hosers **

Kevin Smith, confirming his place as one of the twenty-first century’s most daring movie makers, shoots where few have previously dared to film and mounts a shocking, full-frontal assault on the undying evil of Nazi ideology in the staggering opus Yoga Hosers. Either that, or the tiresome tub of ethnomasochistic nihilism pledges his fealty to his Jewish masters by gifting the planet with yet another boring hipster anti-racist time-waster. The has-been Clerks schmoteur casts his daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, along with Johnny Depp’s daughter, Lily-Rose Depp, as two Canadian high school girls who work as (what else?) clerks at a convenience store, the Eh 2 Zed. Their lives are a round of mundane teenage troubles until they arrange to party with a couple of Satanist schoolmates and their store is invaded by a little army of miniature Bratzis, sausage soldiers who all have Kevin Smith’s facial features. Charles Band must be kicking himself that he never came up with this one. Because the movie is set in Canada, too, every actor is obligated to say “boot” or “a boot” instead of “about”, and “oot” instead of “out”. This is about as sophisticated as the toilety humor gets. Smith, however, apparently finds himself fairly hilarious, and self-congratulatorily giggles over the closing credits, proud of having written such inspiring lines as, “I’m so sorry, ladies, but I seem to have dropped my book on your wiener.”

2 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Yoga Hosers is:

5. Corporate, featuring ample product placement for Slim Jims and especially Beanitos.

4. Y-ambivalent and quasi-Luddite. The only halfway worthwhile social content in the film is the suggestion that Generation Y is a spoiled, self-pitying lot all suffering from smartphone dependency. The girls’ gym teacher, Ms. Wicklund (Genesis Rodriguez), calls them “Generation Y Me?” “You live on your phones,” she tells them. “You have no idea how to function like normal people in the real world.” “Our phones are who we are,” one of the pair frets when their phones are confiscated. Old-school technology like the microwave oven is, however, depicted as useful.

3. Anti-white, perpetuating the lie of white “privilege” and the stereotype of the dumb blonde. The girls’ black principal (Sasheer Zamata) objects to their entitled whining, mocking their “sad tale of heartwrenching woe” when they have to go for a day without their phones. “I mean, it could win an Oscar, really. You could write it up, sell it, and win an Oscar. Seriously, you could call it, um, 12 Years a Private School Student. See what I did there? I compared your privileged lives to slaves – and that’s weird. I’m black.” Then, when the girls laugh, she deadpans “That’s not funny” and tells them they’re “stupid”. Smith, like his fellow puddle of race-traitorous 90s residue Quentin Tarantino, adores the idea of aggressive blacks asserting themselves over helpless whites. “Principal Invincible” is right about one thing: “That’s not funny.” Nothing in Yoga Hosers is funny.

2. Feminist/Misandrist. The two girls manage to save the day by weaponizing their yoga skills. One of the girls is advised to carry a “date knife”, which comes in handy when her handsome, blond party date (Austin Butler) turns violent. The only good men in the movie are wimpy eccentrics like whimpering dad Bob Collette (Tony Hale); ugly doofus Guy Lapointe (Johnny Depp); and yoga instructor Yogi Bayer (Justin Long), whose “dinky” is now “vestigial”.

1. Jewish supremacist. The movie opens with a stupid rap metal song that kicks off with a few notes borrowed from “Hava Nagila” – Smith’s way of acknowledging who holds the purse strings in the movie industry. Producers on Yoga Hosers include a Greenblatt, a Kessler, a Rogin, a Reifenberg, and even a Monsanto – appropriate, given the junk food plugs. Ms. Maurice (Vanessa Paradis), the protagonists’ history teacher, gives them a boring lecture about “Fascism, genocide – the worst thing that has ever happened to mankind” – you know, just in case the audience has never heard of the “Holocaust”. She then proceeds to detail Canada’s history of evil anti-Semitism, including the Parti National Social Chrétien’s nasty plan to murder all of Canada’s poor, innocent Jews. Illustrating the lecture is a flashback sequence featuring Adrien Arcand (bloated former child actor Haley Joel Osment) “offering up anti-Semitic rabble about deporting Canadian Jews to the Hudson Bay” and then sinking their boats with cannons. (Smith clearly did his research … into the effects of Jewish money, senility, and LSD on filmmaking.) Dastardly Nazi revivalist Andronicus Arcane (Ralph Garman) finally unleashes the Hitlerites’ ultimate weapon in the present day: a monstrous “goalie golem”, which has to be the most insipid instance of Jew-projection ever committed to film. Garman is one of Smith’s “SModcast” collaborators, with the Urban Dictionary defining “SMod” as “Any vulgar conversation containing dick and fart jokes or commentary referring repeatedly to Jewish suffering during the holocaust while occasionally dropping some insight into the personal lives of either Kevin Smith or Scott Mosier and/or their friends and family […]”

 

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

The Space Between Us *****

The appropriately odd-looking Asa Butterfield is cast as Gardner Elliot, the first human being born on Mars, in an ultimate emo romance fantasy that might just as well have been titled The Perks of Being a Mars Baby. The loneliest teen in the universe, Gardner, orphaned when his astronaut mother (Janet Montgomery) dies giving birth to him, is restricted to the planet of his birth because his heart and bones, having developed in the gravity of Mars, are unsuited to life on Earth. Consequently, he lives and mopes among the scientists living on Mars but strikes up a touching internet correspondence with Tulsa (Britt Robertson), an alienated high school girl living back in the States. Eventually, after surgical modifications allow Gardner to make to journey to Earth, he of course rejects being grounded by NASA and hatches a plan to escape, meet Tulsa, and track down his father, about whom he knows nothing. Robertson is too attractive to be convincing as a high school outcast, but does create a tear-jerkingly irresistible chemistry with Mr. Butterfield, who is perfect as the quintessential socially awkward Gen-Z outcast hothouse flower. Gary Oldman, too, is commendably present as the complicated elder statesman of the Mars program. A sweet film, and heartily recommended to angst-ridden teens of all ages.

5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Space Between Us is:

5. Class-conscious. Blue-collar Tulsa steals a BMW, confident that the presumably wealthy owner can afford the loss.

4. Family-ambivalent. The horror of Sarah Elliot’s childbirth scene is arguably antinatalist; but the film is largely concerned with the hole left in young people’s lives by the absence of conventional family structures.

3. Green. The exposition suggests that the likelihood ecological catastrophe on Earth could serve as a motivator for colonization of other planets. Wind turbines, meanwhile, illustrate the availability of alternative energy sources.

2. Capital-ambivalent. Sam’s Club, Tulsa explains, is like shopping a million stores at once with a trillion dollars to spend. In other words, she appreciates the cheap goods that neoliberalism has made available to the consumer. Gardner becomes ill during a visit to Las Vegas, however, when he is confronted with the dark side of globalization. Gaudy imitations of world cities thrown together in one neon hodge-podge disorient him and prompt him to observe that these things are not supposed to exist side-by-side. During this same sequence, Gardner appears to be horrified at the sight of a mulatto child.

1. Sexist! The Space Between Us seems at first glance to be promoting feminism with its depiction of a valiant female astronaut leading a trailblazing Mars expedition. It quickly undermines this deception, however, by having her turn out to be secretly pregnant, demonstrating that men and women bring different liabilities to the workplace.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Men, Women and Children ****

This ensemble film follows the interrelated lives of a set of high school students and their parents in the context of twenty-first century connectedness that paradoxically has resulted in a profound disconnect for them all. Jennifer Garner plays a paranoid mother obsessed with controlling and filtering her daughter’s online activities. The daughter, Kaitlyn Dever, strikes up a friendship-cum-romance with Ansel Elgort, a sensitive, gloomy boy who quits the school football team after realizing that sports are meaningless. Meanwhile Elgort’s gruff football enthusiast father, played by Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris, attempts to cope with his wife’s abandonment of the family. Norris thinks he may have found a new love with Judy Greer, whose trampy daughter, played by Olivia Crocicchia, aspires to become an actress and promotes herself online with risqué photographs. Adam Sandler, meanwhile, adds another “serious” role to his résumé as a dull accountant whose marriage to Rosemarie DeWitt has lost its magic, with both seeking sexual satisfaction on an extramarital basis.

On the whole, Men, Women and Children makes for an engrossing and mildly artsy Hollywood social commentary, but some threads of the story are definitely more rewarding than others. The insights about the debilitating effects of online pornography are welcome, and the portions of the film concerning young lovers Dever and Elgort are touching and nicely played; but the story about the straying spouses takes Men, Women and Children into regions of moral repugnancy too extreme to qualify as entertainment – a circumstance that militates against what otherwise might have been this critic’s unmitigated recommendation. The film does, however, have much to say about the consequences of living in a deracinated, nihilistic, high-tech society centered on empty civic nationalism and in which “football served as a common language for which they [i.e., father and son] had no substitute.”

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Men, Women and Children is:

6. Anti-Christian. The actions of Jesus Christ mean “absolutely nothing”.

5. State-skeptical. Garner’s surveillance of her daughter’s devices, while attacking the “helicopter parent” phenomenon as a sort of irrational paranoia, also serves as an allegory about the post-9/11 regime of domestic spying as the norm. The flaw in the analogy, of course, is that it suggests domestic surveillance is motivated by a misguided maternal devotion rather than a hostile mania for control.

4. Anti-porn. Sandler’s imagination has been vitiated by the instant gratification of online pornography. His computer, as a result, is also riddled with malware. His son, played by Travis Tope, has been rendered sexually dysfunctional by his own pornography habit. “By age 15,” narrator Emma Thompson informs the viewer, “Chris found it difficult to achieve an erection without viewing a level of deviance that fell well outside societal norms.” Now only the idea of female sexual domination arouses him, and he is incapable of performing with an actual girl. One wonders if Hollywood’s anti-porn stance as articulated in this film and in Don Jon (2013) is motivated by genuine concern for the public health or by worry about online pornography’s competing share of its target audience’s disposable time and income.

3. Slut-ambivalent. Elena Kampouris plays a girl who gets pregnant and has a miscarriage after losing her virginity in a sordid episode in the home of a friend. The audience is invited to hold blonde “bitch” Crocicchia in contempt when she says, “It’s a new era for women, okay? Just because I’m comfortable with my body and enjoy hooking up doesn’t make me a slut.” The film’s anti-slut credentials are, however, undermined by its comparatively casual treatment of marital infidelity.

2. Anti-marriage, pro-miscegenation, and anti-white. Sleazebag Sandler seeks and finds sexual gratification with a prostitute while his shiksa wife, Rosemarie DeWitt, signs up for an account with the Jewish homewrecking site AshleyMadison.com and takes the Allstate congoid, Dennis Haysbert, for her lover. DeWitt is eventually embarrassed to be found out by Sandler when he catches the witch in a bar with still another man, so that the film ostensibly shows that cheating carries risks; but Sandler’s response is tolerance, and his wife evinces embarrassment rather than actual regret. She clearly enjoys what she is doing, and Men, Women and Children makes a great to-do of eroticizing her first encounter with Haysbert. “I’m excited,” she says as she straddles the hulking, gorilla-faced lothario. “I want it […] in my mouth. I want that big penis of yours. I want it. I want your dick. I want you to destroy me with your big fucking cock.” The film, furthermore, could be argued to constitute de facto product placement for AshleyMadison.com’s AIDS-procurement service, suggesting as it does that women of Rosemarie DeWitt’s level of physical attractiveness can actually be met through the site. The viewer is left to assume, too, that, had Sandler’s wife not been caught in her infidelities, she blithely would have continued enjoying her shameless escapades.

1. Luddite. Technology has profoundly complicated the human condition, disrupting male-female relations and isolating individuals in a lonely cacophony. Like the Voyager outer space probe featured more than once in the movie, humanity has now entered treacherous “uncharted territories” thanks to technology.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

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Ouija ***1/2

The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY TWELVE

Kevin Tenney’s Witchboard (1986) remains for this reviewer the definitive horror treatment of the Ouija board phenomenon; but those wanting more in the same vein could do worse than last year’s Ouija, especially considering that Ouija board movies have never constituted a particularly robust or prolific genre. There is nothing very original in Ouija, but that is not necessarily bad. The first elegant hour or so of this spooker conforms to teen horror expectations well enough and is comfortably suspenseful in its attention to the conventions, with star Olivia Cooke and her friends finding themselves visited by an unknown force after attempting to contact recently deceased pal Shelley Hennig through the titular spirit-conjuring game.

The last half hour suffers from too much onscreen revelation, with CGI frights taking the place of the great unseen – the bane of far too many Hollywood horrors in this age of digital effects – but the relative strength of the first portion still makes Ouija marginally recommendable for less-than-demanding admirers of the genre. Cooke looks good and is tolerable in the lead, but cute and creepy character actress Lin Shaye, who also energized a memorable scene in the same year’s The Signal, is more worthy of mention for a puny but pivotal role as an insane asylum patient with some inside information.

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Ouija is:

3. Insensitive! The idea that evil can and ought to be destroyed in a furnace may offend Chosen viewers of delicate sensibilities.

2. Multiculturalist. Bianca Santos plays the token Latina friend. Black mourners at blonde bimbo Hennig’s wake demonstrate that she was a decent person. Nona (Vivis Colombetti), meanwhile, puts in a good word for supernatural Mexican folk wisdom.

1. Ambiguously anti-family. Hennig’s house is haunted by the spirits of a little girl (Sierra Heuermann) and the spiritualist mother (Claudia Katz) who tortured her by stitching her mouth shut. It turns out the little girl was even more monstrous than her mother, who apparently was justified in performing this highly irregular surgery, while the mother’s other daughter, played by Shaye, is also a devilish lunatic. The biggest mystery about this family, which lived in the house in the forties and fifties, is why there was no father in the home. Was he a casualty of the war or did he abandon his wife and children? Is the mother’s frightful grotesquerie a commentary on the plague of single motherhood, or on the uncaring men who abuse them? The meaning of Ouija’s portrayal of the family hinges to a large extent on these unanswered questions; but Ouija with no uncertainty seeks to cast doubt on the idea of the perfect atomic age family as glimpsed in the vision of Norman Rockwell and various television sitcoms. This is a pathological past, in comparison with which the multicultural and erotically permissive present is normal and salutary.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

80s Oddities Month: Rockin’ in the Freak World

Human Highway (1982) ****

Co-scripted and directed by eccentric rocker Neil Young (using the pseudonym Bernard Shakey), Human Highway is the weirdo sort of movie destined from its inception to become an item of cult interest. Young stars as lamebrained mechanic Lionel, who dreams of rock stardom while making a mess of his duties at Dean Stockwell’s roadside gas station and diner, where coworkers include Sally Kirkland, Russ Tamblyn, and Dennis Hopper. The diner is situated near a nuclear power plant where the boys from Devo work and are exposed to so much radiation that they actually glow with red light. Stockwell, who has inherited the diner from his father and finds it in financial disarray, gets the idea to torch his unprofitable business and be rid of it; but will he be able to hatch his plot before toxic waste, radiation poisoning, or a full-blown nuclear holocaust throws a monkey wrench into his plans?

More of a gratuitously bizarre curiosity than a genuinely admirable film, Human Highway remains a valuable document of the prevailing new wave musical sensibility of the day as applied to cinema, and also conveys the anxieties of the eighties about the possibility of nuclear holocaust and the threat to man and the environment posed by toxic waste. This black comedy’s script, unfortunately, too often aims for the random and leaves most of the ideas and characters underdeveloped, while the production values are on the order of a typical episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse – which, depending upon the viewer’s individual taste, could be a blessing or a curse. The film really starts to fall apart from a narrative standpoint during the second half, with (for some reason) a montage of Native Americans dancing around a bonfire of wooden Indians and Lionel dreaming after being knocked unconscious of rock-and-roll stardom and excess, and letting a groupie suck milk off of him with a straw. The high point of Human Highway is an extended bout of down-and-dirty, feedback-fried riffing and jamming between Neil Young and Devo, with the team totally freaking out and looking like a bunch of psychos.

4 out of 5 glass parking lots.

Incident at Channel Q (1986) *****

Al Corley headlines this trash heap treasure as Rick Van Ryan, a smug, sarcastic, rebel-rousing VJ at regional television station Q 23. The teenagers love him, but stick-in-the-mud suburbanite parents and Christian conservatives are all in a tizzy and picketing Rick’s unwholesome influence, demanding that his program, Heavy Metal Heaven, be taken off the air in order to save young people’s souls. Corporate sponsors are getting nervous, the old guard at Q 23 hates his guts, and the Tipper Gore ticket is getting unruly, with two right-wing brutes ambushing Rick in an alley and beating him up, after which the young radical moves to bring the cultural crisis to a head, barricading himself inside the TV station and calling on his followers to lend him support. 

What passes for a story line in Incident at Channel Q is primarily a pretext for exhibiting a series of then-recent music videos in their entirety, these videos – ranging from Rush to Rainbow, KISS, Iron Maiden, and all points in between – taking up half or more of the movie and simulating the experience of watching 80 minutes or so of MTV on a typical day in the 1980s. The music, for the most part, is fantastic stuff for 80s rock buffs, with a trio of videos – Lita Ford’s “Gotta Let Go”, the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane”, and Motley Crue’s vicious “Looks That Kill”  – constituting some of the greatest, most outlandishly photogenic material ever committed to film. Poofy hair, horror lighting, whore makeup, chintzy sets, studded leather wristbands, tight pants, and other depravity abound, with KISS’s “All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose” being another fun and action-packed video, while others – Rush’s “Body Electric” and Deep Purple’s “Knocking at Your Back Door” – showcase the post-apocalyptic imagery that was popular in those years.

5 pentagrams for the rock and the morally righteous camp value. VHS copies of Incident at Channel Q are inexpensive, so readers who see one languishing on a used bookstore shelf or in a moldy box in a basement are advised to redeem it or suffer the vengeful disfavor of Satan. 

Odd Thomas ***1/2

Anton Yelchin stars as Odd Thomas – which, the hero informs the audience, is actually the name on his birth certificate – a pleasant young man with an unfortunately morbid paranormal vocation. An “undercover detective for dead people”, he is able to see and receive communications from the deceased, who look to Odd for otherwise unforthcoming justice. Thus, Odd is able not only to assist Police Chief Porter (Willem Defoe) with the occasional murder investigation, but to attempt to prevent violent crimes from ever occurring. Odd alone is able to perceive the otherdimensional demons, called Bodachs, which congregate like tasteless tourists among the living just prior to a murder or some other evil event or catastrophe.

Odd knows something horrible is about to happen in his town of Pico Mundo, California, when swarms of Bodachs appear in conjunction with the arrival of Robert Robertson (Shuler Hensley), or “Fungus Bob”, or “Fungus Man”, as Odd alternately nicknames him. Odd is certain Robertson is up to no good, but he and Chief Porter are limited in what they can legally accomplish until more of Robertson’s plan materializes.

While the film’s computer-generated visual effects, including a bit of that irksome Blade-style speed-up/slow-down action, only range from good to tolerable, the central mystery confronting Odd is sufficiently interesting to sustain the 100-minute run time. The Bodach concept is exploited to taut effect in more than one suspenseful sequence, and the combination of the protagonist’s wholesomeness with the general unsavoriness of the subject matter makes for a winningly offbeat formula. Yelchin is amiable as Odd, while Addison Timlin, too, adds appeal as his bedroom-eyed companion Stormy.

3.5 stars. Worth a rental.

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Odd Thomas is:

8. Class-conscious. The psychotic Robertson “inherited a shitload” from his mother.

7. Multiculturalist (i.e., pro-yawn).

6. Sexist! “I’m a woman. We all have issues,” Stormy explains. Later, loading a gun, she objects, “I don’t need protecting” – a pretense given the lie when she dies at the end.

5. Christian-ish. Odd believes in “a higher power” and picnics in a church’s bell tower. This church provides only the most tentative sanctuary, however, when someone or something invades its peace with malevolent intentions. Materialism is frowned upon (“It’s too bad a car can’t love you back”), as are the prevailing pop culture vanities of the age (“fame is the altar at which most people worship”).

4. Anti-family. Odd has the typical dysfunctional background, his mother having gone insane. Odd Thomas endorses the single mother in the character of Viola (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

3. Gun-ambivalent. The Robertson plot keeps the bogeyman of the crazed mass shooter phenomenon alive, but any anti-gun sentiment indicated here is undercut by the fact that Odd defensively takes down one threat with a pistol. The additional development that the police force turns out to have been infiltrated by satanists points to the danger of giving the state a monopoly on firearm ownership.

2. Police-ambivalent and generally state-skeptical. Apart from Odd’s reliable collaborator Chief Porter, police are depicted in a derogatory light. Early in the film an officer slams a culprit’s head into a car door and quips that this is “one of the perks of the job.” By the end of the film, the force has no credibility whatsoever, with false flag theories even receiving a boost. Whether Odd is more properly viewed as a vigilante or as an extra-legal police auxiliary and black-bag man for the state is open to interpretation.

1. Anti-Semitic! Principal villain Robertson, a serial killer aficionado and aspirant, has exotic hair that “looks like a yellow yarmulke”. And could this character’s nickname, “Fungus Man”, be a derogatory comment on the Jewish people’s pattern of parasitic attachment to established cultures of the West? Odd, after discovering Robertson’s corpse in a tub, chooses to hide it in a disused gas chamber. Why? Is this supposed to be funny? Let Odd Thomas author Dean Koontz, writer-director Stephen Sommers, and all other perpetrators of this hateful celluloid libel know that the Holocaust will not be mocked!

Teen Beach Movie **1/2

Teenage surf enthusiasts Brady (Ross Lynch) and Mack (Maia Mitchell) find themselves transported into a 1962 movie musical called Wet Side Story after they catch a bogus wave and wipe out via a magical time warp, thus setting into motion Teen Beach Movie, a weak Disney Channel send-up of the classic beach party vehicles of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The two modern protagonists naturally set about infecting their more picturesque forebears with cultural Marxism, all while singing several songs, and also succeed in halting the dastardly plot of villainous real estate developer Les Camembert (Steve Valentine), who of course has no other aim in life than to rain on the fun of young, freewheeling surfers and bikers.

The songs, all fairly generic, are too obviously lip-synced, and an inescapable air of the plastic prevails for Teen Beach Movie‘s grinding duration. The principals in the cast, however, are uniformly photogenic, bright, and enthusiastic, doing whatever they can with such substandard material. Top-billed Ross Lynch and super-suave Garrett Clayton, who resembles young George Hamilton in Where in the Boys Are and may have been cast as “Tanner” for that reason, definitely have the look of ascendant stars, while fathers goaded into subjecting themselves to this wacky butt-wipeout of a flick may at least console themselves that the girls on display, from Mitchell to Grace Phipps and Chrissie Fit (who does a trampy Fran Drescher impression throughout), are all pretty easy on the eyes. Barry Bostwick – who, against all odds, has managed to add to his resume a movie even gayer than The Rocky Horror Picture Show – has a minor supporting role as Big Poppa, Mack’s grandfather.

ICA’s advice: gather the family around the tube for a wholesome screening of Point Break instead.

2.5 of 5 possible stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Teen Beach Movie is:

9. Pro-gay. The aerial view of a Busby Berkeley-style surfboards-and-beach-balls dance number is vaguely homoerotic.

8. Christ-ambivalent. Big Momma (LaVon Fisher-Wilson) is given to exclamations like “Hallelujah!”, but Big Poppa’s pendant resembles an inverted crucifix.

7. Antiwar. “All fighting ever did for us was stop us from seeing what we all have in common.”

6. Pro-immigration. Territoriality and tribalism are hangups to be overcome. Mack and Brady, when they first wash up on shore, are given a chilly reception as “ho-dads” or outsiders, but the bikers and surfers all come to accept them. “You guys are strange. I like that.”

5. Multiculturalist/pro-miscegenation. The 1960s “gangs” are retroactively integrated, with whites, blacks, and browns intermixing in dance.

4. Green. Camembert threatens to cause party-pooping climate change with his secret weapon.

3. Anti-capitalistic. Bad guy Camembert is described as an “evil real estate mogul”. Private schools, in this case the ominously monickered “Dunwich Preparatory Academy”, are characterized derogatorily. Riot and industrial sabotage win the day.

2. Pro-castration. Brady dyes his hair. Butchy (John DeLuca), the leader of biker gang the Rodents, cries with emotion and is revealed at the end to have an irrational fear of lighthouses.

1. Feminist. That protagonist MacKenzie goes by the mannish-sounding “Mack” for short is significant, as her abrasive feminism rears its nasty snout at every turn. Mack hates Wet Side Story, objecting to all of the motivationless singing and the fact that “the girls never surf as well as the boys.” Showing her stuff, she easily out-surfs the arrogant Tanner. “Why does she need a boy to be happy?” Mack asks Brady about one of the girls. “Because it’s 1962,” he explains. “Why should a boy influence what you choose to wear? Or anything you do?” Mack exhorts her still-feminine early 60s counterparts. “We can do anything a guy can do.” She encourages them to become more sexually aggressive and generally more assertive as well as less appealing in their apparel.