Overration Nation: Take Dump 4/30/26

I can see what people liked about Assassination Nation. Released in 2018, movie centers on a posse of four teenage girls who don’t quite slot into any niche. They’re stylish, but not “mean girls.” Hip, but not nerds. One is trans, and it’s a complete non-issue except where the anxieties of horny boys are concerned. Most of the movie concerns a mysterious hacker who’s revealing all the Peyton Place secrets you’d expect to see in a suburban melodrama. The tone is fairly maudlin and familiar, with a “Sir Rapes-A-Lot” zing I coincidently heard right before, when rewatching This Is The End. But the actors are charismatic, particularly Coleman Domingo as the defiant, unjustly demonized principal, as well as Hari Nef and Odessa Young among the teens.

Still, Nelson Muntz could find two things wrong with the title. Thanks to a bold-text, trailer-like introduction promising Gaspar Noe-level sex & violence, I spent the first hour wondering when this would get more surreal than soapy. Perversely, it happens during a jump-cut, where the townsfolk go from gasping at their phones to dressing up for The Purge. One girl’s IP address is tied to the leaks, and all hell descends on them during a sleepover. Fortunately, they chose to wear matching raincoats when watching a Japanese “pinky violence” movie, and - after some extended torture porn at their expense - our heroines grab guns in slow motion, taking revenge on the boys and men who tormented them. It’s a clunky journey, but again, I can see the appeal. 

At least, I can see it before writer/director Sam Levinson went on to create HBO’s Euphoria and The Idol, the superficiality of his “feminist” sensibility now pretty damn obvious. The son of Barry may eavesdrop on women (he said it!) to create a conversational, Bedchel test-passing script, but his camera work betrays any allegiance to the leads. An extended crane-heavy, one-shot set piece of the women being attacked is framed from the perspective of the intruders, asking us to gawk at the military-like ambush rather than feel ambushed. And the third act’s retribution is no more subversive than the gun-toting babes Kevin Smith brought out in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Too witless to succeed as comedy, Nation doesn’t even succeed as trash - Joel McHale had a wilder knife fight in Deliver Us From Evil. Maybe the film was edgy excitement enough in 2018, but everyone cool on screen and at home deserves better today. THREE BAGS OF POPCORN.

At the very least, Maps To The Stars succeeds as trash. The 2014 movie (written by the guy who did Wild Palms! If you know, you know!) is a “satire” of Hollywood decadence, neurosis and narcissism, an easy target that everyone from David Lynch to Ryan Murphy has had fun with. Julianne Moore plays a meltdown-prone actress traumatized by her famous mother and hoping to turn that into an Oscar. John Cusack is the popular psychologist-slash-masseuse whose teenage celeb son is already in and out of rehab. Robert Pattinson’s limo driver wants in the biz, and Mia Wasikowsa is an ominous, always-gloved X factor connecting them all. The only novelty is that David Cronenberg’s behind the camera, his amusement a little less yocky, a little more cold-blooded, than the norm. Though even he can’t deny himself a wide-shot of Moore screaming on the toilet. Stars eventually turns gross, and not in the fun way Cronenberg movies did before he turned classy. But any movie where Carrie Fisher plays herself… FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

It’s fair if you thought of The Fly or Videodrome when I referred to “fun gross” Cronenberg. But if you love those, make sure you go further back, and further north, than that. A real winner from his Canadian Film Fund days is 1977’s Rabid. Two young lovers suffer a motorcycle crash in rural Quebec, the woman (played by Marilyn Chambers of Behind The Green Door fame) badly burnt and comatose. A plastic surgeon wilds out when grafting skin and - when she awakens - the heroine now has a little fanged penis in her armpit that craves blood. Understandably, she tries to keep it on the DL, aided by her victims blacking out. But those victims eventually turn into zombies, and Montreal descends into brutal, martial law. Despite the best efforts of her boyfriend and some old dudes, this becomes the rare Chambers film without a happy ending. POPCORN CLASSIC.

I promise to discuss more John Carpenter movies I like someday, but - thanks to Criterion - I’m not done reporting my lack of enthusiasm for Carpenter's lesser cult favorites. You’d think a movie where Sam Neill slowly goes insane while investigating a mysterious novelist’s disappearance would be a slam dunk, but In The Mouth Of Madness suffers from a subject meant to cross the popularity of Stephen King with the mind-melting otherworldliness of H.P. Lovecraft, but winds up less interesting than either. Maybe the satire of King’s popularity worked better when he was less established as an American institution, but it plays like alarmist concern trolling by people who’ve never read Stephen King. Though Jurgen Prochnow certainly looks like a demented storyteller, you’re forced to take on faith that his work would shatter your concept of reality more than, say, Needful Things did. It also doesn’t help that Neill made Event Horizon, a more inspired and effective descent into hellscape, soon after. On the flip, Charlton Heston’s brief appearances seem like what Wayne’s World 2 was making fun of, except that came first. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

You know who else fucked up Stephen King? Stanley Kubrick. I’m slightly kidding, but true heads know King hated Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Jack Torrance was meant to be a well-intentioned dad under the spell of alcoholism/ghosts, but Kubrick has Jack Nicholson play him like he might drive his family off a cliff during the opening credits. King hated that Kubrick created all those terrifying set pieces at the expense of his story, even writing a TV miniseries remake in the ‘90s, with Steven Weber’s Torrance clearly possessed rather than devolving. Despite good ratings and reviews, it failed to unseat the movie with the elevator full of blood in the public imagination, which is why Mike Flanagan’s film of King’s sequel Doctor Sleep tried to split the difference, putting the kinder, more faithful Jack Torrance (played by Henry Thomas!) inside Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. If you didn’t know who Flanagan was trying to appease (he also adapted King’s Gerald’s Game and The Life of Chuck), it must have seemed real random. 

While I respect King’s frustration, I like artful, supernatural dread enough that you'd think I’d enjoy Kubrick’s take anyway. But my latest rewatch confirmed that ain't the case. Maybe too many people have improved on the concept in the decades since. After Aster and Peele and all horror elevated, it’s even harder to for me to pretend Kubrick’s intimations of timeless evil are potently ambiguous rather than slipshod. With Torrance transparently contemptuous of his sniveling wife and disassociating kid before we even get to the bed & bludgeon, all the ballroom music and cans of baking powder and dramatic title cards have nothing to do with anything. Then there’s the Dick Hallorann sequences, which seem downright parodistic of a B plot used mostly for cutaways. 

I know many film lovers will eat up anything from a stylist as self-certain as Kubrick, and there’s a spectral gloom to the film that, if not unprecedented, must have been dang fresh for a horror movie in 1980. I won’t pretend I don’t have most of it memorized. But when I’m the process of watching The Shining, it’s like a not-bad domestic thriller (the best sequence is when Nicholson and Shelley Duvall finally drop the niceties and grab the bat) trapped in a pretentious haunted house movie. One that’s either deeply conservative (the bear suit, omg) or about the allure of conservatism. Or evil. Whatever. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

Mike Flanagan was an executive producer for last year’s Shelby Oaks, and boy, has that dude lost his reliability as a brand. Hush, Oculus, the two Haunting miniseries…the resolutions could be weirdly sentimental, but these were uniformly outstanding thrillers with nuanced characters and exciting, unpredictable set pieces. I wrote off Doctor Sleep as a failed experiment in franchise arbitration, and figured the overwrought, interminable gabbing of Midnight Mass was a “passion project”/COVID production issue. And The Midnight Club was fun! But The Fall Of The House Of Usher was another underwhelming yakfest, and I ain’t watching The Life Of Chuck, both based on Stephen King and an apocalyptic rumination on the meaning of life. 

Now he’s co-signed Oaks, a real piece of shit that clumsily jumps from faux-documentary to a standard narrative and back again, using the former to provide exposition between the scenes where a woman looks scared at a wolf. This Rosemary’s Baby II: Backwoods Beelzebub perks up a bit when Keith David, seated behind a desk, blames a bloody prison riot on a creepy dude who didn’t partake in it. So you might as well watch that meme from Tales From The Hood 2, where David yells “welcome to hell.” Or Community season 6! He’s great in that. THREE BAGS OF POPCORN.

To prove I’m not a hater, but a lover with high standards, let’s end this on a high note. I was too drunk or too tired to appreciate Phantasm the last time someone put it on for me in the ‘00s, but I sure appreciate it now. Writer-director-cinematographer-editor Don Coscarelli makes it all look so easy. First, think up a charming set of leads, like an orphaned twenty-something torn between wanting to take care of his restless teenage brother, and wanting to go see the world while he’s still young and handsome. Then invent some weird images, like a Lurch-like mortician who can turn into a sexy lady, and releases tiny silver spheres that float around and stab you in the eyes when they get close. Have the brothers be friends with a goofy, but well-intentioned ice cream vendor. Have “The Tall Man” employ hooded trolls. Then have the heroes circle the villains, and vice versa, until it’s time to reveal a portal to hell. Cast resourceful actors as the leads, and make sure your evil looks legitimately weird. If you play all this to the top of your intelligence, without getting distracted by metaphor or commentary, the rest will take care of itself. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

The popcorn ratings are explained here. If you got through this and think there's a cult classic I better make sure I've seen, feel free to alert me at anthonyisright at gmail dot com. Don't say Room 237, though. I saw at least a good part of that, and "a lack of theories" is not my issue with The Shining, OK?