Chat with some critics and you soon realize that most set visits are anything but a marquee event. That is not exactly the case for Fangoria’s latest production, VFW. In the latest by filmmaker Joe Begos, Hollywood legends Stephen Lang and William Sadler take on an army of mutant drug addicts as they defend their local Veterans of Foreign Wars building. And the press that is gathered for their on-location shoot is here to witness one of the biggest scenes of the movie, an all-out brawl between the surviving VFW members and the gang from across the street.

Over the next 24 hours, we’ll watch the cast and crew run through a handful of complicated stunts before gathering outside for a few brief interviews. It’s a cool April day in Dallas, Texas, and most everyone is grateful for the opportunity to spend a little time outside. On the inside, the VFW looks every bit the slaughterhouse you’ll see on the screen, but the outside looks more or less the same, minus the occasional makeup tent and pile of special effects. It’s no wonder members of the VFW keep popping in to check out the film production as they work.

The room is split in two. On one side stands Fred (Lang) and the remaining survivors. Across the room stands Boz and his army of mutants. The scene begins with an ultimatum: return the bag of the highly contagious hylophedrine at once, and Boz will let the survivors die quick deaths. Moments later, all hell breaks loose.

There’s a pretty simple idea at the heart of VFW. Most of the movie takes place within a single, worn-down location. Like an old Western — or, perhaps more accurately, a John Carpenter remake of an old Western — almost all of the action is either setting up barricades or fighting for your life as the barricades come tumbling down. The VFW that the crew found in Dallas is perfect, but what really makes it a movie and not just a single solid location is the lighting.

“I like dark, murky colors and really brightly lit neon — but still dark — kind of colors,” explains director Joe Begos. Together with actor-producer-editor-sound designer Josh Ethier, we’ve found ourselves indoors and sitting at the corner of the actual VFW bar. Even with the cosmetic damage and the strategic splatters of blood, it’s still not the worst place I’ve ever gotten a drink. But look up and you cannot help but see bunches of lights twisty-tied together across the ceiling, shattering the dive bar mirage. This is what gives the film its distinctive Begos look.

Under normal circumstances, the pressure of making a feature film would be enough. In this situation, though, Begos and Ethier have effectively been tasked with launching a new production company. Thankfully, Fangoria’s foray into filmmaking dovetails neatly with their filmmaking ethos. “I never worry about what people are going to think about movies anyways,” Ethier suggests, “but with this one specifically, I feel like if they grew up the way that we did reading that stuff and watching that stuff, that they will be excited about this movie.”

If you’ve seen Almost Human or Mind’s Eye, the previous two films by Begos, you’ll see a lot of similarities in the VFW look and feel. The choice of Begos as director was no accident; his personal style incorporates elements of ’80s nostalgia as well as a DIY ethos that will feel right at home for the Fangoria audience. “It’s almost like there’s no difference between making a movie when we make a movie,” Begos adds. “Just they deal with all the crap that we don’t want to deal with and then let us do our thing.”

If there was anything about this film that made the director nervous, it was the caliber of the cast. “I was worried, Begos admits. “Lang came from Avatar, and then he’s going back to Avatar. Sadler just did The Highwaymen and does TV all the time.” Instead of defensiveness, however, the men quickly realized their cast was driven by a willingness to try new things. “There was a punch with Sadler,” Ethier recalls, “which in any script, on any page, in any movie it’s just a punch. And he did four different variations using different weapons and prompts on this punch. It’s just incredible to see.”

Shortly thereafter, I get a tap on the shoulder. It’s time to move on. “We got some heads to blow up today,” Begos concludes with a smile.

Fred throws a bag of hypo into the air and the powder explodes, coating the addicts in their favorite form of poison. When the powder hits the air, so does Abe’s (Fred Williamson) cherished cutlass. The first person he kills is almost a gimmie — he slides up behind them and quickly slices their throat. After that, things get a bit messier. Abe sidesteps one attacker before pinning another to the wall, scalp first, with his cutlass. It takes a little extra effort for Abe to pull the blade back out.

“I got the Eastwood audience, I got the Bronson audience, now I got the Fangoria fans. It’s going to work out all right altogether.”

You’re fooling yourself if you think you can ask Fred Williamson a question he hasn’t yet heard in his career. With a resume that includes professional football, multiple black belts, and five-plus decades as a leading man, I’d like to think I’m smart enough not to try. We sit on bar stools along the side of the building, and as I juggle a recording device on each knee, I sit back and let him explain what it means to have one Fred Williamson in your movie.

“My three rules of Hollywood: I have to win the fight, you can’t kill me in a movie, and I have to get the girl in the movie,” Williamson begins. “They have to do two of the three.” It’s not a surprise, then, that this longevity has made him care about the types of characters he portrays onscreen. “I don’t sell performances, I sell images. I’ve been in enough films now to create an image that’s consistent. You know the characters that I play.”

Abe certainly fits the Williamson archetype. He is a man of action, willing to roll up his sleeves and get violent when the shit hits the fan. Williamson prides himself on his lack of body doubles — “I don’t do stuntmen, he says” — and for as much control as he may exert over his own image, once the cameras start rolling, he trusts the director to put him in a position to succeed. “I don’t evaluate people that I work with,” he adds. “I only evaluate my contribution to the scene. If it feels right to me and it feels good to me, that’s fine.”

In the end, though, Williamson’s very presence is a promise that Abe will have a chance to get his. “Sooner or later, the Hammer is going to rise to the occasion,” he concludes. “I might get beat up, stepped on, or thrown through the wall or something, but I’m coming back, and I’m going to take out a few more before I go. If I go. That’s what I sell.”

As Boz’s men scuttle with a new dose of hypo in their system, Fred carves his way around the pool table. One man takes an ax to the throat; another to the shoulder. When one junkie tries to climb onto Fred’s back, he spins him off and plunges his weapon deep into their head. Fred smiles as the bodies fall around him. 

One of these kills is giving Stephen Lang a headache.

Even on a tiny monitor, you can feel the actor’s frustration. He tries once, twice, three times to stop the ax just-so, letting it rest against the extra’s head and selling one of the bloodier kills in the scene. He barks at himself, frustrated that he can’t get it quite right, then decides to ramp up his own intensity. “I think I’ll smile,” he announces to no one in particular. When he finally nails the moment — much to the excitement of the cast and crew — his over-stretched smile makes everything just that much more grotesque.

Later, I’ll ask the actor if there’s a time-honored technique for how to kill someone with a rubber ax on film. Lang laughs. “I think it’s a duet between the camera and the actor, and maybe the person who’s receiving the blow,” Lang explains. The two of us have staked out chairs in a small playground just outside the VFW’s side entrance. The actor is stretched out, clearly enjoying the opportunity to take in some sunshine after hours in the blacked-out building. “If you get one out of three real pure, it’s real good. Because you don’t want to pull the blow.”

If anyone knows a thing or two about action movies, it’s Lang. From the big (Avatar) to the small (Band of Robbers), he is Hollywood’s go-to guy for intimidating figures. And while the rest of the cast may have standout moments around him, Lang remains at the center of everything that happens in the feature. It’s Fred’s birthday. It’s Fred’s film. “You’re talking about a guy who is in a very opaque and stolid way, facing a very uncertain future,” he explains. “The fundamental issue here, one of them, certainly, is facing death on your own terms.”

Our conversation about the experience of the cast takes a more practical turn. “Each one of these guys on this thing is a director in their own right,” Lang explains. “And by that I mean there are actors who have learned from experience, from long years of experience, to direct themselves when necessary.” This makes the cast of VFW the film’s secret weapon on both sides of the camera. The actors are able to block some of their own fight sequences, sell some of the film’s smaller moments and move quickly through an ambitious shoot that requires “five, six, seven scenes a day.”

And as for killing folks with a rubber ax? “You’d think I’d be really good at it now, since I’ve killed about 40 people with it, so far,” Lang says with a chuckle. “But I’m getting there. Possibly by the time we wrap, I’ll become a master of the rubber ax.”

Meanwhile, Walter (Sadler) is attacked from behind the bar. He swings his weapon of choice — a baseball bat dotted with nails — into the stomach, and then the neck, of one man, spinning and swinging as the next person attacks. Later, Walter will pop up, grinning, with a chainsaw in his hand. “Look what I found!” he cackles as he shuffles towards the exit.

“He’s not the brightest bulb in the sign, and his heart’s in the right place, and he’s really trying.” 

This is how William Sadler explains the character of Walter Reed. The interviews are running a little behind schedule — in fact, Sadler is cutting into borrowed time to chat with me — but he’s all smiles as we find a picnic table and discuss the film. In a few minutes, Sadler will ask me to explain the name behind Film School Rejects, and then hand me his phone and ensure that he follows the publication on Twitter. For now, though, he’s happy for a chance to talk about his rare chance to play the comic relief.

“I’ve sort of leaned into that he’s one step behind everybody,” he continues. “Anytime you can give the audience a second to laugh, for just a minute, at the outrageousness of the situation, or anything, I think it’s a good thing. I think it helps them come along.” This makes Walter the primary source of humor in VFW, sure, but it also puts Sadler in the enviable position of giving the most well-rounded performance in the film. He’s the closest thing we have to an audience surrogate: confused, scared, and angry, all rolled into one Bill Sadler-shaped ball.

When you spend your career making action movies, you develop a set of skills that is never too far from the surface. “I guess I shouldn’t be, but I’m surprised at how easily we’ve all slid back into these roles,” the actor admits. For him, it was like “riding a bike,” utilizing a set of physical skills he has honed since the 1970s. “You never forget how to throw the punch or take the punch or clobber somebody with a big mouth.”

We chat for a moment about the on-set reminiscing the cast indulges in — the Hollywood version of old war stories — before the conversation turns to Demon Knight. Much like VFW, Demon Knight features a ragtag group of heroes holding out against a group of violent invaders. “We didn’t know we were making a classic when we did it,” Sadler explains. “It was just made with a lot of humor, and a lot of the same energy. Almost exactly the same. ‘They’re coming through the door! Quick, get to the barricades! Shit, they’re coming through the window!’” 

Sadler pauses for a moment. “Yeah, history repeats itself. It’s fun.” 

Lizard (Sierra McCormick) punches her way through a crowd of bodies and makes it to the side door. In a moment, after the first wave of killing is done, she’ll slide back inside to recover the remaining hypo. This will put her right in the crosshairs of Boz, who drags her kicking and screaming from the VFW as the remaining hypos descend on the soldiers. Fred is hobbled, but he quickly turns around and gives chase.

Someone should probably give Sierra McCormick a moment to eat. That someone won’t turn out to be me, as I’m plopped down next to the actress as she politely juggles eating her meal and starts working her way through my questions.

“I pride myself on variety. That’s kind of my thing,” she says by way of an opener. Not many actors at the age of 22 can claim credits as diverse as a Disney Channel television show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and VFW, but McCormick holds her own in the star-studded cast as Lizard, whose snap decision to steal a bag of drugs kicks off 90 minutes’ worth of grindhouse classics. It turns out that VFW is less an outlier than you may think. “I’m a big horror fan from the get-go, when I was a kid. That’s exclusively what I watched.”

Before she was overcome by the biker-mutant apocalypse, McCormick was one of the stars of A.N.T. Farm, a Disney Channel series about a school for gifted teenagers. If VFW sounds a bit removed from that kind of role, well, that’s kind of the point. McCormick has spent years playing a certain type of teenage girl, and that has not exactly given her the challenges she wants as an actress. “That’s what is out there for teen girl roles,” she explains. “Very flat, very girl-next-door, boring.” Lizard, of course, is anything but. Her role in the VFW is never questioned; she proves herself capable of holding her own from the film’s first moments.

Lizard also gave McCormick an opportunity to try her hand at fight choreography for the first time. “This was my first foray into stunt work and heavy action sequences,” she adds between bites, “and getting to kind of fight as my character. I’ve been around that before but it’s never me doing it.” What better crash course for someone performing their stunts for the first time than in the midst of all these action stars? “What I learned was, one, the safety is very important, if you don’t feel good about it, you shouldn’t do it,” McCormick notes. 

There’s one more lesson, one that ties neatly to the very ethos of filmmaking itself. While everything needs to be safe, you also have to be willing to push yourself if you’re going to sell the action on the screen. If you allow yourself to be scared on set, you’ll appear scared on the screen. “I had to take the leap physically and mentally and trust myself to do some of these things. And I did and I’m proud of myself for doing it.”

Welcome to The Prime Sublime, a weekly column dedicated to the underseen and underloved films buried beneath page after page of far more popular fare on Amazon’s Prime Video collection. We’re not just cherry-picking obscure titles, though, as these are movies that we find beautiful in their own, often unique ways. You might even say we think they’re sublime…

“Sublime /səˈblīm/: of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe”

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of the most romantic and tragic tales in Greek mythology. In the lore, Eurydice dies after being bitten by a snake, and Orpheus enters the Underworld to bring his beloved back from the dead. That’s the general cusp of the story anyway, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

Meanwhile, Highway to Hell is a fun reimagining of the story that combines elements of the Greek fable with comedy, action, adventure, and its own wacky ideas. The movie was directed by Ate De Jong from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland, who are best known for popular movies like Drop Dead Fred and L.A. Confidential, respectively. Given this, it’s quite surprising that this gem isn’t more well-known. Of course, one of the great things about movies is that it’s never too late to discover them.

What’s it about?

Highway to Hell is loosely inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but it doesn’t authentically adhere to the same template. For a start, the couple in question here, Charlie (Chad Lowe) and Rachel (Kristy Swanson), are on their way to Las Vegas to elope until the bride-to-be gets kidnapped by a demonic police officer, Hell Cop (C.J. Graham), and taken to the realm of the damned to be turned into a dishonest woman.

As it turns out, Satan is looking for a new virgin bride to add to his collection. But Charlie isn’t willing to let the Dark Lord steal his significant other, so he gets a better vehicle, grabs a gun, and heads into Hell with his trusty dog in an effort to save Rachel and bring her back to the land of the living. Before he can rescue her, however, he must contend with evil chefs, biker gangs, car troubles, temptation, and the Devil himself.

What makes it sublime?

More than anything, Highway to Hell is a lot of fun. Despite the inherently horrific nature of the premise, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously, and fans of De Jong’s Drop Dead Fred will likely enjoy its quirky sense of humor. But it also works as an action-adventure movie with some stakes involved, as Charlie must navigate Hell’s sandy terrains and overcome some interesting obstacles before time runs out for Rachel.

This version of Hell also just happens to be one of the most entertaining in the pop culture lexicon. It’s essentially a Mad Max-esque desert highway that’s also seen its fair share of car chases. But the doomed population can also stop at a diner for a snack of the human flesh variety and enjoy a coffee that’s hotter than lava. Naturally, there are also nightclubs and casinos, because gambling and partying is sinful behavior.

The movie has a lot of fun with its hellish ideas, and that’s where most of the laughs come from. For example, there’s a scene where Hitler, Attila the Hun, and Cleopatra sit around a table, arguing and telling bad jokes. Elsewhere, there are mechanics whose sole purpose is to mock people with car troubles as opposed to helping them out. And in what is one of the most on-the-nose references in the movie, there’s a paving company called “Good Intentions.” That said, the movie is littered with little nods to mythology and pop culture.

Highway to Hell is a short, sweet, and focused movie, but it does a great job at world-building and taking viewers on a tour through this realm’s bizarre corners. You’ll want to spend more time in this oddball universe when the end credits roll, and it’s a damn shame that a sequel never got made. Still, sometimes it’s better to leave viewers wanting more and let their imaginations fill in the blanks.

Fans of practical effects and good monster make-up will also have a ball with Highway to Hell. Hell Cop is an outstanding villain whose scarred face is like a cross between Freddy Krueger and a monstrosity from a Clive Barker story. Steve Johnson — whose monster movie credits include A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Mystery and Blade II — was tasked with making Hell Cop look scary, and he knocked it out of the park.

If that’s not enough to sell you, the movie also features cameos from the entire Stiller family who were around in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Ben is a particular highlight as a roadside chef, mindlessly roaming around trying to convince people to eat his meat.

And in conclusion…

Highway to Hell is a triumph of modest charms that will entertain fans of genre hybrids, as well as those who enjoy films with a weird sense of humor. The film’s mishmash qualities blend together more than efficiently, and while it’s a comedy first and foremost, the movie isn’t without an ample amount of thrills either. The final showdown will have you on the edge of your seat, and some of you might even find the movie romantic.

Want more sublime Prime finds? Of course you do.

fTo Netflix: thank you for another adaptation of the YA novels of Jenny Han. With To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, the sequel to 2018’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, we have another movie that does right by Lana Condor, a charming young actress whose talent has been squandered in blockbuster fare, notably X-Men: Apocalypse and the otherwise impressive Alita: Battle Angel. Not that she’s only a good fit for teen rom-coms, but at least this franchise puts her front and center. We also get to see more of the enjoyable Anna Cathcart in something slightly more mature than Disney’s Descendants sequels.

Fans and critics might find the P.S. I Still Love You adaptation to be a messier work than the first movie, which helped put Netflix on the map as a savior of the rom-com genre — maybe the sequel should have also been directed by Susan Johnson rather than the first installment’s cinematographer, Michael Fimognari — but the cast keeps us interested and smiling. I’ll definitely be back for the third and final part of the trilogy, To All the Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean. And while we wait for that sequel, I’ve got a curation of movies inspired by my viewing of the middle installment.

This week’s Movies to Watch After… recognizes the direct and indirect roots of To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You as I recommend fans go back and learn some film history, become more well-rounded viewers, and enjoy likeminded works of the past, even if it’s the fairly recent past. As always, I try to point you in the easiest direction of where to find each of these highlighted titles.

Charlie’s Angels (2019)

The first To All the Boys movie cemented Noah Centineo as both the internet’s boyfriend and Netflix’s go-to rom-com heartthrob. Unfortunately, the streaming service’s other recent entries in the genre featuring the actor and model — Sierra Burgess is a Loser and The Perfect Date — have been disappointing follow-ups. Thank goodness there are two more To All the Boys movies in which he plays lacrosse-playing jock love interest Peter Kavinsky to remind us that he’s a star to watch on the way to his eventual leading role as He-Man in the possibly ever happening Master of the Universe reboot.

Centineo got his first taste of major Hollywood action franchises last year with the latest incarnation of Charlie’s Angels. The IP-rebooting sequel, unfortunately, failed at the box office, which was fair since it is fairly bland plot-wise and hardly memorable character-wise outside of the performances from Naomi Scott and Centineo. But the latter, contrary to what the trailers make it seem, is barely part of the ensemble. He’s such a delight, though, playing a “handsome nerd” in contrast to his popular guy role as Peter Kavinsky, that you’ll come away thinking — and/or wishing — he was in it more.

Rent or buy Charlie’s Angels (beginning February 18, 2020) from Amazon

Rent: Live (2019)

While technically not a “movie,” nor the best production of Rent, this live-broadcast staging of the hit musical is one of the better showcases for Jordan Fisher, who plays John Ambrose McClaren (replacing Jordan Burtchett, who portrays the character in the sequel-teasing stinger in the first movie). Like Cathcart, Fisher comes out of a Disney musical franchise, his being the Teen Beach movies, and he’s also been a pop singer, a winning contestant on Dancing with the Stars, and a member of the cast of Hamilton on Broadway. Before Rent: Live, he co-starred in Fox’s Grease: Live.

In Rent: Live, Fisher is front and center in the lead role that Anthony Rapp famously originated on the stage. His vocals might have you wishing the To All the Boys movies were also musicals and his performance will make you believe playing John Ambrose McClaren is — like the respective characters for much of the winning cast of the Netflix franchise — a stepping stone for bigger and brighter roles in the future. Fisher isn’t expected to be a part of the Always and Forever, Lara Jean adaptation, so hopefully, we’ll be seeing him advance in his career to other worthier projects sooner than later.

Rent Rent: Live from Amazon

Blockers (2018)

There’s a casting connection between To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You and Blockers in Sarayu Blue, who is introduced in the sequel as neighbor Trina Rothschild. She’s a squeezed-in love interest for Lara Jean’s dad (played by John Corbett), and hopefully, fans like her enough in the part because her subplot is increased in the final chapter of the trilogy (at least in the books). In Blockers, she’s a relatively minor character as the mother of one of the main teens and wife to John Cena’s character. In both movies, despite her brief screentime, she’s a memorable presence in every scene she’s in.

But I’m not just recommending Blockers as another place to see Sarayu Blue playing a regular character rather than a bit part as a doctor (she’s also in the upcoming Clea Duvall lesbian rom-com Happiest Season and hopefully has a good role there, too). This comedy, which like To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You wishes to offer some balance between the kids and the adults storywise, is similarly sex-positive for young women in the rom-com genre. The scene in which Lara Jean (Condor) is told to become familiar with her body and its needs before sharing it with a boy would fit well with the sex-pact plot of Blockers.

Stream Blockers on MAX GO

Only the Young (2012)

For the better part of the last decade, the romantic comedy and especially the teen rom-com subgenre was floundering. Only the Young came about at just the right time to show that nonfiction cinema might be the best alternative to Hollywood’s failure in that arena. The documentary observes the true experiences in love and life of a trio of young adults in Southern California. Romance isn’t a typical focus for nonfiction films given the difficulty of being there for the most important moments of such stories, but filmmakers Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet capture enough, even if part of that is through vividly candid interviews.

Only the Young is primarily focused on two boys, best friends Garrison and Kevin, who also happen to be evangelical Christian skate punks. But there’s also a lot of room for Skye, who partly comes between them as both a romantic interest and just another very close friend, especially for Garrison. The “plot” is not as easily explained as the fictional love-triangle narrative that would be written for such characters because real life is not that simple. And while the love story element of Only the Young is a marketable angle, the doc is really just a very human character study of a few teens in recession-era America. Perfectly so.

Stream Only the Young on Amazon Prime Video

Flipped (2010)

The first of two movies on this list starring the late great John Mahoney, Flipped marked Rob Reiner’s return to period-set coming-of-age movies, and while it’s nowhere near as memorable as his iconic classic Stand By Me, it’s passably entertaining enough on a level akin to that of the To All the Boys movies (if Stand By Me didn’t exist for comparison, at least not as an earlier film by the same director Flipped might have received better reviews). As with a lot of Reiner’s work, and similar to To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, the casting elevates the material and makes it watchable in spite of any flaws.

Also based on a YA novel, Flipped follows a story of young love as narrated by both main characters in a “he said, she said” manner. Skewing younger than the teen movie environment of To All the Boys, the movie begins with the couple meeting in second grade before picking back up in junior high in the early 1960s, when they’re close friends who obviously are meant to become boyfriend and girlfriend but just don’t as early as they should. It’s a plot that comes to mind with the backstory between Lara Jean and John Ambrose in To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You. There’s even a large tree, minus the treehouse, involved.

Rent or buy Flipped from Amazon

Welcome to 4:3 & Forgotten — a column where Kieran Fisher and I get to look back at TV terrors that scared adults (and the kids they let watch) across the limited airwaves of the 70s. This week’s entry heads to the skies for an intercontinental flight through hell itself! Okay, it’s just a trip across the Atlantic ocean, but for the ten passengers, five crew members, and one unfortunate pupsicle aboard, it’s a flight filled with danger, death, and other devilish tomfoolery.

Now join me as we take a trip back to the 1970s with a TV movie about the dangers of flying in coach. And in first class. And at all. It’s time we look skyward towards… The Horror at 37,000 Feet!

Where: CBS
When: February 13th, 1973

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the departures gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of love and kindness, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that evil is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there — fathers killing their sons, mothers sucker punching their daughters, husbands and wives doing each other dirty over their boyfriends and girlfriends, old friends subscribing to terrible magazines in each other’s names. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that evil actually is all around. And on this particular night at Heathrow, some of it is boarding a flight bound for New York City.

Alan O’Neill (Roy Thinnes) is a renowned architect — he can’t tell you he’s a necessarily good one, but he’s definitely successful — and he’s chartered this off-schedule flight for the sole purpose of carrying an old altar back to NY to use as the centerpiece in a cool new bar he’s designing. His wife Sheila’s (Jane Merrow) along for the ride, as is a woman named Mrs. Pinder (Tammy Grimes) whose distaste and hatred for O’Neill has led her to book a ticket on the same flight. The remainder of the sparse passenger manifest includes a bitter ex-preacher (William Shatner) prone to angry poetry, his guitar-playing lady friend (Darleen Carr), a boastful businessman (Buddy Ebsen), a wannabe Rick Dalton (Will Hutchins), a model (France Nuyen), an unnecessarily British Paul Winfield, and a little blond girl inexplicably flying alone. Rounding out the human occupants are a pair of flight attendants and a three-man cockpit which includes Chuck Connors and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island. The cargo hold is where the action’s at, though, as in addition to a fur baby named Damon there’s an angry demon fighting its way out from an altar that once played host to human sacrifices.

They’re barely out over the ocean when the plane seems to freeze in place. “We’re caught in a wind like none there ever was,” says the fairly eloquent captain, and he’s not kidding. Except this wind? It’s coming from inside the plane! It reeks of evil and patchouli, its touch can freeze flesh solid, and its slow move through the plane’s cabin comes paired with bubbly mud and voices only Sheila can hear. Most of these people are seemingly intelligent and modern, but when the evidence suggests that something wicked is afoot they quickly panic and turn to superstition and fear to guide their next move. You guessed it… the demon must be sated with a human sacrifice.

In case the presence of Shatner as a rebellious and lecherous ex-priest in a tasteful jacket/sweater combo didn’t give it away, yes, The Horror at 37,000 Feet has some cheesy fun up its otherwise fairly mundane sleeves. Director David Lowell Rich had a nearly forty year career on television with some of his better known efforts including 1973’s Satan’s School for Girls — Rich helmed a whopping eight TV movies in 1973 — and episodes of The Twilight Zone, Route 66, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Writers Ronald Austin and James D. Buchanan were equally busy on the boob tube with one of their previous efforts, 1971’s Paper Man, being the very first film covered in this column. A better variation of this tale hit US shores nine months later with the arrival of Horror Express, a feature film that traps a bunch of name talents on a train carrying something ancient and evil that subsequently gets loose and hungry for homicide, but this spooky plane ride still finds ways to entertain on the small screen.

And by “ways” I do mostly mean William freaking Shatner who presumably hasn’t flown again since that time ten years prior when he had a nightmare at 20,000 feet.

70s TV movie budgets being what they were, the effects here are kept to a real minimum. Exterior shots of the plane are clearly a model, the demon is never glimpsed in any form beyond ice, mud, and a dude in a robe — we’ll get to him shortly — and it’s instead probable that most of that meager budget went to attracting this cast. I kid, but both Shatner and Connors are big guns delivering the big performances you expect. The former shifts moods constantly but never wavers in intensity meaning lines like “The grotesque practices of a primitive cult that was stamped out by the coming of Christ” and “You don’t want a priest Mr. Farlee, you want a parachute” are delivered with equal gusto.

There’s definite fun to be had with dialogue and facial expressions, and yes, Shatner wins on that second count with a real doozy at the end. It’s ultimately an entertaining 73 minute watch, but its biggest issue is that even with a small cast the death toll is ridiculously low. As in two dead people. Two! I’d say this demon is just pretty bad at its job, but it’s more likely the fault of the script that spends so much time setting up false threats before finally deciding to go the route of “crazy mob fueled by religious fear” that something like The Mist (2007) handles so much better. Not enough time is given to it before Ebsen’s cranky businessman and the young western actor decide their only option is to toss someone to the devil sludge. They take a practice stab with the little girl’s doll by dressing it up whore-like (?) and securing Sheila’s hair and fingernail clippings to it, but the demon isn’t having it obviously.

Instead of offing various characters like it should have, the script teases relevance that never comes. The creepy dog owner — who also happens to be the one furious that the altar is on board — asks the Captain to go down and talk to her dog Damon, and as he walks away she smiles even more creepily. What’s up with that? Winfield and his British accent suggests something mysterious with his brief contributions to conversation, but that goes nowhere fast too. What’s Shatner’s beef with the church that turned him into such a booze-hungry, sanctimonious prick (who tells his girlfriend that he’s thinking of becoming a doctor because of the “power they have over women”)? Why is Sheila the only one hearing voices? If it’s a demon in the stone altar why does an actual Druid show up in the end to give Shatner a case of the hilarious heebie jeebies? Hell, why don’t we ever even see the damn altar?!

The Horror at 37,000 Feet would have been greatly improved by either paying some of those questions off or by killing more people. Seriously, two deaths? Shameful. (Hell, I would have even settled with Shatner whispering that he saw something on the wing…) Still, as it stands this is a fun little watch for fans of what 70s TV horror often did best — collecting familiar TV faces in a single location and then unleashing budget appropriate hell.

Turn the dial (okay fine just click here) for more 4:3 & Forgotten.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came, but it doesn’t hurt if they’re also ready to maim… That’s the predicament Fred (Stephen Lang) finds himself in as another night tending bar at his local VFW establishment takes a sudden turn towards darkness. One minute he and his war buds — Walter (William Sadler), Abe (Fred Williamson), Lou (Martin Kove), Doug (David Patrick Kelly), and Thomas (George Wendt) — are welcoming home a young man (Tom Williamson) returning from duty in the Middle East with talk of pubic hair and used cars, and the next they’re fighting for their lives against a horde of nameless psychos hopped up on goofballs who dare to interrupt the evening with violence, carnage, and drug-fueled frenzy.

That’s the gist of Joe Begos‘ fourth (and so far best) feature film, VFW, and while there are a scant few more details at play the combination of urban siege film and that glorious cast is more than enough reason to give it a spin. Think The Expendables but with actual bad-asses instead of movie stars, and then slice several zeroes off the budget, and you’ll be in the mind set for what VFW is cooking up. It’s a fun, bloody affair pitting your favorite over the hill character actor tough guys against rude punks in need of an ass-whooping, and while that budget hurts at times the film still delivers the gritty, neon-splashed goods.

It seems obvious to say any modern siege film is indebted to some degree to John Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) — which itself owed an admitted debt to Howard Hawks’ own classic Rio Bravo (1959) — but Begos’ movie goes the extra blood-soaked mile of wanting to be Assault on Precinct 13. That’s not a knock as every filmmaker should aim high, but in aping so many beats it leaves open more room for comparison. An intro showing our lead driving to work through a blighted urban landscape, a stranger who wanders in and triggers all of the trouble, a dangerous community where cops don’t respond to the sound of gunfire, a scrappy crew coming together to face the faceless, and a killer synth score too (this time courtesy of the always fantastic Steve Moore). Begos introduces enough alternations to make it his own, although at least one change actually hurts the film in that the stranger, a young woman named Lizard (Sierra McCormick), doesn’t immediately go catatonic and instead sticks around delivering rough dialogue and a tonally iffy performance.

The leads, though, are aces and remind viewers why they’ve been so beloved as action genre icons for so many years. Okay, Wendt hasn’t done much ass-kicking, but the dude feels so at home on a bar stool that his presence makes this place immediately feel like home. The rest have been popping up in action movies for decades in classics like Hammer (1972), Death Race 2000 (1975), The Warriors (1979), Vigilante (1982), Commando (1985), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Manhunter (1986), Die Hard 2 (1990), Trespass (1992), Tombstone (1993), and more. Their collective presence here creates its own thrill, and when the shit hits the fan you can’t help but cheer on these old ass warriors.

The resulting deaths are often of the bloody and gory variety, and while some of them are lost to limited lighting — a possible fault of that even more limited budget — others are visible in their intended glory with exploding heads, broken bones, and bloody spurts painting the walls. Begos and editor Josh Ethier find real energy in their action scenes, and they work to give the film a rising momentum pausing only briefly for compelling character beats within the bar and less necessary ones beyond its walls. Boz (Travis Hammer), the lead baddie, is too dramatic and showy for a film this intentionally minimal, but at least his sidekick Gutter (Dora Madison) is capable of delivering real menace with little more than a glare.

VFW is a tight little throwback to grim and gritty VHS fare of generations past, and like 1983’s under-seen Canadian gem Self Defense it takes the right lessons from the classics while delivering just enough thrills of its own. Fans of Begos’ earlier films will find his love of all things gory and grainy remain intact, and this stellar cast makes it all go down easy.

Sometimes a film’s title is the lure that draws you in, and sometimes it’s an obstacle that you might not get past without a gentle push. Well consider this the push you might need to seek out the new South Korean supernatural thriller, The Closet. The film features ghosts, an exorcist, dead kids, and some truly creepy sequences, but it’s at its most powerful as a commentary on the ways we fail our children. Indifference and abuse is already horrifying, but what if something even worse awaits them?

Sang-won (Ha Jung-woo) is an architect and single parent struggling to move past the recent death of his wife. He loves his daughter Ina (Heo Yool), but the combination of grief, debilitating panic attacks, and the risk of losing his job see him moving her further and further to the periphery of his life. A move to a new house in the country doesn’t help as she grows more bitter in response to his distance, and then one day she disappears. Weeks pass with no hope, and as the general consensus shifts to suspecting Sang-won of having killed his own daughter a man arrives claiming to know the truth. Kyeong-hoon (Kim Nam-gil) is an exorcist with a business card, and he believes Ina is trapped in the spirit world mere days away from being lost forever.

Writer/director Kim Kwang-bin makes his feature debut here and delivers a spooky, well-crafted supernatural mystery that ultimately becomes a story about consequences. The details are best left discovered with the film itself, but don’t be surprised if the film’s third act moves you from thrills and chills to heart break and tears.

Ha is well known from fantastic films as diverse as The Yellow Sea (2010) and The Handmaiden (2016), and he convinces here as a man torn by trauma into focusing on the wrong thing. His affection for his daughter is clear, but she’s also a reminder of the wife he’s already lost and the career he might still lose. Once she disappears, though, his heartache becomes are own. Kim, meanwhile, brings a degree of levity to a film otherwise populated with fear and heaviness, and his enthusiasm as an exorcist — a career choice in honor of his mother — sees him balancing playfulness and sincerity with a perfect touch. As with Korean cinema in general, the child actors here are equally as talented delivering range, conviction, and emotion that puts far too many Western kids to shame.

Director Kim moves smoothly from the ghostly mystery surrounding the wardrobe-like closet in little Ina’s room to the more full blown “ghost hunter” setup that comes with Kyeong-hoon’s arrival. The high tech gear doesn’t dampen the horror, though, and instead allows from some chilling beats including an extended sequence that finds Sang-won trapped in Ina’s room with his eyes closed — while surrounded by bad news. A later shift even deeper into the unfolding nightmare gives the film a certain Ray Bradbury-esque feeling that captures well the ideas of guilt and innocence lost.

There are some minor CG elements that miss the mark, but the majority of the film’s effects work effectively blurs the line between the real and supernatural worlds. Sharp cinematography goes a long way too moving viewers from the airy confines of a large, rural house to miserable shacks to a man-made forest funhouse and beyond. The score plays an equally strong role without over exerting itself, and jump scares are kept at an effective minimum. The horror here builds from devastating revelations into an atmospheric reminder that while actions have consequences so too does inaction.

The biggest issue with The Closet is that title — it underwhelms, it confuses with connotations, and worst of all, it’s dull. Don’t let that deter you, though, as the film is a rare combination of horror beats and emotionally affecting turns. The world is scary, and it’s our job every day to make it less so for those who depend on us, both because it’s the right thing to do and because the alternative might just be even more frightening.

Paramount’s gamble paid off. Following negative buzz from the first trailer, they delayed the release of Sonic the Hedgehog, spent millions to rework the title character’s look, and in the end, the movie is a success. Sonic drew in an estimated 6.2 million people to see the video game adaptation in North American theaters over the weekend, which is impressive for any release of its kind, let alone one with production woes. Following the similar opening last year for Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, Hollywood can be optimistic about movies based on at least cartoony video games now. The industry can also trust that bad buzz can be overturned with enough time and money.

Despite what some are saying about its opening, Sonic is not the video game movie champion. Yes, its debut domestic gross is the highest without considering inflation. But the record for most ticket sales still belongs to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which hit theaters in June 2001. Even so, Sonic is way up there in the ranks, and its domination over recent examples such as Detective Pikachu and the recent Tomb Raider reboot is a big deal. Those are both getting sequels, so don’t be surprised if Paramount quickly announces a follow-up for Sonic. What a relief since the new movie has two end-credits stingers teasing what we can expect in a Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Here’s where Sonic fits with other video game movie openings in terms of audience size:

1. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001): 8.4 million
2. Pokemon: The First Movie (1998): 6.6 million
3. Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): 6.2 million
4. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu (2019): 5.9 million
5. Mortal Kombat (1995): 5.4 million
6. The Angry Birds Movie (2016): 4.4 million
7. Rampage (2018): 3.9 million
8. Pokemon: The Movie 2000 (1999): 3.85 million
9. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010): 3.8 million
10. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004): 3.7 million
11. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997): 3.65 million
12. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003): 3.6 million
13. Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010): 3.4 million
14. Silent Hill (2007): 3.08 million
15. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007): 3.06 million
16. Resident Evil (2002): 3 million
17. Warcraft (2016): 2.8
18. Resident Evil: Retribution (2012): 2.65
19. Tomb Raider (2018): 2.6 million
20. Max Payne (2008): 2.5 million
21. Doom (2005): 2.4 million
22. Need for Speed (2017): 2.2 million
23. Super Mario Bros. (1993): 2.1 million
24. Hitman (2007): 1.9 million
25. Street Fighter (1994): 1.6 million

Back in December, more than a month after Paramount was originally set to release Sonic with the old character design and more than a month after the studio revealed the revamped look with a new trailer, Box Office Pro reported its forecast opening weekend figure at $26 million with a possible over and under range of $20-30 million. That’s less than half of the $58 million the movie did gross in its domestic debut. Last week, the site released its final prediction for just $48.5 million, which is still $8.5 million short of the reality, with an over and under range of $45-55 million. Box Office Pro also provided a holiday weekend range of $55-66 million, which it will definitely surpass.

As is more often the case than not, quality speaks, and Sonic boasted mostly positive reviews going into its opening weekend. The movie’s score on Rotten Tomatoes is currently at 63%, which isn’t amazing but it’s relatively high for a video game movie. In fact, of the 47 titles Rotten Tomatoes features in its Tomatometer-based ranking (not yet updated with Sonic), only two other video game adaptations have fresh scores, Detective Pikachu (69%) and The Angry Birds Movie 2 (73%), the latter of which tanked at the box office despite the good critical buzz. Sonic currently has a better audience score on the site, too, with a 95. And its A grade from moviegoers polled on opening night by Cinemascore is also better than those and any other ever.

In other box office news, Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (now also retitled Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey) is still struggling compared to most DC Comics adaptations with a second-weekend ticket sales figure of only 1.8 million (fewer than such duds as Constantine and Green Lantern, but its decrease from its disappointing opening is also one of the smallest for its brand. The DC Extended Universe spinoff dropped just 47.6 percent, which is only worse than, in order, Aquaman (23.2 percent), Joker (41.9 percent), Wonder Woman (43.3 percent), and Batman Begins (43.4 percent). So it started off slow but it might have okay legs. Maybe the new name has helped, or maybe word of mouth has finally kicked in.

Then there’s Downhill, which didn’t quite prove to be an essential production. Sure, it made more in its opening weekend than Force Majeure, the Scandinavian film it remade, did in its entire North American run, but it barely debuted in the top 10. The comedy, which was confusingly marketed and poorly reviewed, gave Will Ferrell his lowest opening ever for a starring role in wide release ($4.6 million), and we don’t even have to adjust for inflation to make such a determination. The issue isn’t just that the audience didn’t show up, either. Downhill earned a D grade from opening-night moviegoers via Cinemascore polling, which is uncommon and terrible. The Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes is 12%, and that’s voted on by confirmed ticket buyers. Wipeout.

There are two kinds of adaptations: the suffocatingly reverential (Sin City, 300); and the loosey-goosey that hope to capture the spirit of the piece if not the actual piece (Coraline, Apocalypse Now). Sonic the Hedgehog, with its introduction of parental owl guardians and a bright, beaming James Marsden smile, falls into the latter. You either roll with it or you don’t. The choice is yours, and whatever your response, I won’t argue with you.

Personally, I went with it.

Ben Schwartz, wearing the body of the blue speedball, delivers the rapid, practically uncontainable enthusiasm of the character I’ve come to know from the games, cartoons, and comics, and I was delighted to see him tearing up the roads of our planet. Jim Carrey falling back into a mode we haven’t seen him in since the mid-90s gave me a nostalgic little ping as well, and it was enough to mask the fact that his Dr. Robotnik/Eggman bears very little resemblance to his source material counterpart.

Besides, in the final moments of the film, we’re given a glimmer of hope, suggesting that a sequel (all but guaranteed by its box office success) could delve deeper into the recognizable mythology of the games and comics.

First, we get a proper display of the Mushroom Hill Zone that Sonic once thought he would be forced to retreat upon but eventually banished Dr. Robotnik to when he tossed the chump’s behind through a ring portal. The mad scientist has gone full-Colonel Kurtz, shaving his scalp to its skin and growing his mustache to utterly cartoonish lengths. Still wrapped in the scraps of his flight suit, Robotnik finally looks like the demented creature we know and love.

Presumably, while Sonic is living his best life as the adopted son of Tom (Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter), Robotnik is chopping up the mushroom forests, squirreling away the best fungi for his nefarious purposes. Talking to his only companion, a lifeless rock, Robotnik explains how he’ll be off this planet by Christmas. He’s still in possession of an electric blue quill torn from Sonic’s back, and in combination with the mushrooms he’s foraging, he’ll be able to plot his escape.

Doctor Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik was created as a Sega company mascot before he was ever placed opposite Sonic the Hedgehog in the games. He’s a fairly basic kooky scientist type hellbent on universal domination with only one blue speck of fuzz standing in his way. He uses his 300 IQ to craft diabolical robotic drones called badniks (several of which we get to see in play within the film) to thwart his archnemesis, but like all good bad guys, he can never seem to be smart enough to win the day.

How he carves a path back to Earth using Sonic’s magic quill and a bag of mushrooms, I have no idea, but the hows are not really important at this point. What’s exciting is that the goofy, bald, mustachioed demon will be back, and he’ll be crazier than ever. If you thought Jim Carrey was already cranked to 11 in his performance in this first movie, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Prepare yourselves.

Don’t worry. Sonic won’t be alone in this fight. Not only will he have Tom and Maddie by his side, but the sequel will also pair him with a familiar furry face.

During the mid-credits sequence, on a high Montana mountaintop, a ring portal opens. Hopping from another space and time is a flighty two-tailed fox carrying some kind of tracking device. If you were in a theater crowded with children, you heard the entire audience erupt in delight. This rascal is Tails, the classic Robin to Sonic’s Batman.

The kid appears panicked. He needs to find Sonic fast. Everything he knows and loves is in terrible danger. From what? He doesn’t say. Instead, his twin-tails get to spinning, and the little fox flies off the mountain in search of his pal.

Although, they’re not really pals at this point in the movie. As we saw at the start of the film, Sonic was barely a toddler when Longclaw the Owl was slaughtered by a pack of ravaging Enchidas. Tails is significantly younger than Sonic, so they could not have been boyhood friends. More likely, Tails has heard tales of Sonic, and like Ms. Marvel with Captain Marvel, he’s developed passionate hero worship for the legendary hedgehog. With his world in peril, naturally, he’s going to go looking for the object of his obsession.

What could the great danger be? Well, if you look closely at his tracking device, at the bottom corner, you can see a little gem notification. That little icon could represent one of the Chaos Emeralds, which are similar to the Infinity Gems from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the rings from Lord of the Rings.

Each emerald contains a mystical power — the ability to warp time, transform thoughts into physical attacks, revitalize the injured, etc. The seven emeralds can also be controlled by one Master Emerald, guarded by the great warrior Knuckles.

Oh yeah, that’s right, if we get a Sonic the Hedgehog sequel, not only do we demand more Tails and Robotnik, we demand Knuckles.

Introduced in the third Sonic the Hedgehog video game, Knuckles is an Enchida (those jerks who murdered Longclaw). Where Sonic can run fast, and Tails can fly, Knuckles comes equipped with a set of spiked fists that allow him to climb up any surface. He began life as an antagonist for Sonic, but through the course of the game, he comes to recognize Dr. Robotnik as the true villain of the piece and flips sides.

We expect nothing less from the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel.

Paramount Pictures has a hit on their hands. People showed up. They’re hungry for hedgehog, and the first film established a comfy cinematic live-action understanding for a weird cartoon world. Now, like the best sequels have done, the time to get nuts is here. Give us Eggman. Give us Tails. Give us Knuckles. We’ll wait on Bunnie Rabbot, Rotor the Walrus, and Scourge the Hedgehog, but not long. I’m already primed for the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy.

Fish out of water stories are a cornerstone of fiction, applicable to all kinds of genres including romantic comedies and superhero blockbusters. They’re especially a staple of science fiction and fantasy, with depictions of aliens among us, human explorations of other worlds, and more scenarios involving strangers in a strange land. On occasion, there are visitors to Earth from not just another planet but a different universe entirely, perhaps an alternate dimension. Many of those movies involve familiar characters who leave their familiar fictional worlds for ours by way of a portal. Here’s a listicle as history lesson explaining why.

Hercules in New York (1970)

Stories of mythological heroes visiting the mortal world are as old as stories themselves, so it only made sense for someone to make a movie about a god or demigod arriving on Earth in the present day. But it wasn’t one of the major studios that had the idea, so Hercules in New York wasn’t a big hit. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the titular character — credited as Arnold Strong “Mr. Universe” and his dialogue dubbed by someone without his now-iconic accent — as the ancient hero visits the Big Apple and gets mixed up with gangsters. Hilarity ensues. Or is supposed to.

Howard the Duck (1986)

Not quite an example of a fish out of his universe movie so much as something that may have inspired the specific trope, Howard the Duck is based on a Marvel Comics character who is already a displaced creature residing on Earth. So the feature film adaptation is faithful to its origins. However, that comic book basically does, on the page, what these other movies will do because its premise imagines an anthropomorphic cartoon duck, a la Disney’s Donald but with a hard-boiled attitude, transplanted from his all-duck alternate-universe type planet to the city of Cleveland, Ohio.

Masters of the Universe (1987)

In 1982, MGM/UA coincidentally, unintentionally made the best He-Man movie possible even before He-Man toys and cartoons existed. It was called The Beastmaster. Five years later, Cannon made an official He-Man movie with Masters of the Universe, and it turned out less faithful. To cut costs (and probably to make it more appealing to teens), the studio set most of the movie on Earth rather than Castle Greyskull and the realm of Eternia. He-Man, his nemesis Skeletor, and other characters from the action figure line (plus new additions) traveled through a portal to New Jersey to interact with a young Courtney Cox.

Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (1991)

Oddly enough, when Republic Pictures produced a sequel to The Beastmaster, the plot was basically lifted from the failed Masters of the Universe movie. But instead of there being an evil sorceress following the hero through a portal to modern-day America, here Dar, the titular warrior, follows an evil sorceress through a portal to modern-day America. And instead of the hero meeting MTV music video star Courtney Cox, he encounters MTV game show star Kari Wuhrer. Leaving behind most of what fans loved in the original Beastmaster movie, Beastmaster 2 made even less money than the He-Man flop.

Fat Albert (2004)

There’s another trope that focuses on characters literally from television and movies entering our world through the screen. Called Refugee from TV Land at TV Tropes, it includes The Purple Rose of Cairo, Last Action Hero, The Icicle Thief, and the last act of Blazing Saddles (but not Sherlock Jr., which is a reversal of the idea) with characters stepping out of their screens. None of them were famous characters prior to their movies, though. Fat Albert is part of that trope but in adapting the old cartoon as a movie, it forces the fish out of universe premise in order to make it a cultural clash comedy set in our world.

Enchanted (2007)

Disney’s Enchanted does not focus on a pre-existing character, but its heroine, Giselle, is at least an amalgamation inspired by various iconic Disney Princesses from the studio’s animated features. She starts out as animated here and then travels through a portal to present-day real-world New York City. Similar to general fish out of water stories, it’s not uncommon for the transplanted characters in these to wind up staying in our world. At the end of Enchanted, we also see a real-world human choose to enter the cartoon fantasy realm, giving Idina Menzel her first Disney Princess role years before voicing Frozen‘s Elsa. Enchanted is the first successful example in terms of reviews and box office. It’s also the first of these to star James Marsden.

Thor (2011)

Marvel Studios finally made a hit out of the premise behind Hercules in New York, Masters of the Universe, and Beastmaster 2 as well as the Marvel-based Howard the Duck with the fourth entry in their cinematic universe. Thor was also the movie that made me realize superhero movies are now the go-to genre for fish out of water stories in general. Sure, the Asgardian Avenger is known to visit Earth on the regular in the comics, but having him banished to our world in his first big movie was due to the franchise’s big plans plus the fact that the MCU hadn’t yet risked venturing into the cosmic too much at this point.

The Smurfs (2011) and The Smurfs 2 (2013)

Hollywood has long loved pairing cartoon characters with humans, and now with CG effects what they are, there’s a desire to make those cartoon characters more three-dimensional and as realistically rendered as they can. That would have been enough to pit the Smurfs against Gargamel in a live-action movie, but like the problem of Eternia 33 years ago, the characters’ homeworld would be very expensive to create in full for the length of a feature, so that’s a reason to have the Smurfs transplanted via portal to modern-day New York City (making it feel like an Enchanted remake) and interact with more regular human folk and situations. It’s also, clearly, a good way for something like The Smurfs to add in a ton of product placement.

Christopher Robin (2018)

This example from Disney, which also falls under their live-action reimagining trend, is special for having a main human character who is already familiar with the other-world creatures. The titular Christopher Robin had interacted with Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and the rest by visiting their realm as a child. Now he’s grown up and they miss him, so they find their way through the portal from the Hundred Acre Wood and eventually wind up in 20th century London. To the rest of the real world, they don’t seem like alien visitors so much as sentient plush animals that can talk.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

When you look back at the history of movies in which familiar characters are transplanted to Earth, it’s a wonder Hollywood keeps doing them. Few of them are successful, but it’s also less of a risk to produce video game adaptations, which tend to perform poorly themselves, that are set in the real world rather than a wholly CG-created fantasy universe. Paramount could, a la Masters of the Universe, show those other worlds as bookends and then bring the popular Sega character to modern-day America. Ironically, the studio wound up having to spend a lot more money than they’d intended because of the backlash against their attempt at a “more realistic” main character. They delayed the release and changed Sonic to a more faithful cartoon look for what would otherwise have been a rather inexpensive road trip buddy comedy pairing the character with James Marsden.

Taika Waititi has yet to experience the pitfalls of commercial or artistic failure. The Thor: Ragnarok director’s output has been profitable and critically acclaimed, with his latest hit, Jojo Rabbit, even earning him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. And with the Marvel sequel Thor: Love and Thunder on the horizon, that success is destined to continue. But his lack of experience with professional defeat isn’t keeping him from making a TV series about a filmmaker who has hit rock bottom.

According to Variety, The Auteur will see Waititi team up with Jude Law for a Showtime limited series based on Rick Spears and James Callahan’s Oni Press comic book series of the same name. The story, which is being described as a Hollywood satire, follows an eccentric filmmaker (played by Law) as he tries to get his career back on track following a string of flops, and he’s willing to go to extreme lengths to make it happen.

The comics follow a struggling movie producer called Rex who enters a downward spiral after he finds himself behind schedule and over budget on an Abe Lincoln-themed slasher movie. His reputation is in the gutter after coming off the biggest financial disaster in Hollywood history, and he badly needs a hit. This prompts him to go off the rails and hire a real serial killer to be the film’s murder consultant, and it doesn’t take long before things get bloody.

The comics also revel in all of Hollywood’s seedy stereotypes, such as drug use, sexism, lust, and people willing to do anything to get ahead. They’re also completely unrestrained and grotesque in their approach to these ideas. Throw in some over the top violence and a willingness to offend readers, and what you have is a story that’s for acquired taste buds. Enter at your own risk.

At the same time, there’s a point to its madness, and anyone who’s ever pursued a creative endeavor will likely relate to Rex to some degree. He’s unlikable, but he’s not without his empathetic qualities. According to Spears, the character is an exaggerated version of himself, as he’s an artist who worries about being viewed as a fraud in his industry, despite his best efforts to create work that people respond to.

The comics also poke fun at Hollywood’s lack of originality. The first issue opens with Rex going for a drug-induced hallucinogenic swim, searching for new ideas in a pool that’s polluted with gimmicks, gags, and recycled concepts. Eventually, though, an epiphany appears in the form of a naked and homicidal Abe Lincoln, who gets Rex’s creative juices flowing.

While Waititi has hardly struggled to come up with his own interesting stories, his views on the mainstream American movie business are quite similar to Rex’s at times. The director once said that Hollywood is “scrambling for ideas and stories,” so this element of The Auteur probably appealed to his own sensibilities.

The Auteur explores the low points of the creative process and the desperation that can arise from that. But it’s also critical of the industry and the public, both of whom are prone to turning on artists they once hailed as great as soon as they experience some bad luck. Of course, these complex themes are balanced with a healthy dose of gore, surreal adventures, and speeches about genitalia.

More than anything, The Auteur is weird, silly, gruesome fun. If the show leans into the crazier elements of the comics, it will be Waititi’s crudest and most puerile project to date. That said, he recently skewered Adolf Hitler with Jojo Rabbit, so it’s not like he hasn’t been edgy before. But even that movie boasts some childhood innocence and naivety. The Auteur probably won’t.

Furthermore, as entertaining as the comics are, they are quite rough around the edges from a storytelling perspective. Waititi will polish the core concept and probably bring some of his own oddball ideas to the table, while simultaneously making a show that’s more accessible to mainstream sensibilities than the comics.

Still, since it’s a television series, he’ll also have more opportunities to be weird and experimental, which all shows featuring drug trips and murder should be. Let’s just hope he gets around to making The Auteur eventually, as he has other projects planned beforehand.

Welcome to this week in home video!

Taika Waititi entered the big leagues a few years back with his first blockbuster, Thor: Ragnarok (2017), and he followed it up in 2019 with his sixth feature film, Jojo Rabbit, which went on to be nominated for six Academy Awards and win for Best Adapted Screenplay. (But yes, his best film remains 2015’s utterly hilarious and eminently rewatchable What We Do In The Shadows.) The World War II-set comedy is beloved by millions and recently came home to Blu-ray/DVD.

The good news is that the film is accompanied by special features including interviews, outtakes, and a commentary track. The bad news? Waititi’s commentary track is among the least informative, entertaining, and essential I’ve ever heard.

So, uh, keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Commentator: Taika Waititi (writer/director/actor)

1. “Hi everyone, I’m Taika Waititi, your favorite New Zealander other than Sam Neill and Cliff Curtis and Peter Jackson.” His failure to mention Melanie Lynskey is duly noted.

2. He correctly points out that a disc’s commentary track is “usually something that people don’t even know exists in the extra features.” Unfortunately, he then proceeds to treat his commentary as if literally no one is listening.

3. The Beatles spent several years in Hamburg, Germany and recorded German versions of their popular songs while they were there, “as did Johnny Cash, as did David Bowie, as did Roy Orbison.”

4. The forest scenes were filmed in the Czech Republic, and it “was full of weird European bugs, and I was in a fat suit for the entire shoot.”

5. He calls Stephen Merchant (who plays Deertz), and when the actor asks what kind of insight he’s looking for Waititi responds “as you know, no one listens to these, so whatever you want to say. Feel free to say it cuz this will be the only time it’s heard.” I’m listening Waititi, I’m listening.

6. Merchant struggles to get Waititi to actually give good commentary, but he seems to get nowhere with his questions until he praises Michael Bay’s commentary track on The Rock (1996). “What Bay gave me, unlike you, was Bay gave me a genuine insight into the filmmaking process.” Waititi responds that no one cares, but Merchant persists. (Thank you Stephen Merchant!)

7. Waititi uses storyboards sporadically. “It really depends. If there’s quite a few actors then I will start boarding everything and figuring it out beforehand, and then if not, if it’s something that’s relatively simple I’ll make it up on the day.”

8. Regarding the visual style, Waititi wanted something bright and colorful as most films covering this period are often desaturated with dull tones. “I wanted to show something that was actually a bit more authentic to the colors of the time. Germany was the height of fashion and design and textiles.”

9. He doesn’t like to give a lot of direction to actors. “I don’t feel it’s necessary if someone knows the words and can say them relatively fast and not maybe feel like they’re ‘acting’.”

10. Merchant had never done accents before as an actor, so he worked with a voice coach until he was confident with his effort. He was still nervous performing, though, until day two of filming when he grew more comfortable with the cast around him.

11. “I don’t like the idea of seeing people hang,” says Waititi, and that’s what led in part to the reveal of Rosie’s (Scarlett Johansson) death without showing her face. He adds that seeing your dead loved one is an intimate thing, and that we didn’t “have permission” to see what Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) saw.

12. Waititi has known Thomasin McKenzie (she plays Elsa) since she was “very, very little” as he’s friends with her parents from New Zealand’s theater scene. He tasked her with watching Heathers (1989) to give her the vibe he was looking for with the character. She’ll next be seen in this year’s Lost Girls and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho.

13. The film is based on Christine Leunens‘ novel Caging Skies, a book that Waititi’s mom loved before turning him onto it as well. “Imaginary Hitler is not in the book,” he adds, although the rest of the story’s main characters are.

14. Early drafts showed Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell) as being too proud during his introductory speech, and Waititi changed it as he felt the man should be more disillusioned. He was also originally written to be hung in the end, but Waititi changed it seeing as we had already seen Jojo’s mother hung.

15. Waititi does a pretty enjoyable imitation of Eddie Murphy’s laugh.

16. “There was a lot of time, just me chilling in Prague,” says Rebel Wilson (she plays Fraulein Rahm) who was in the city for a month but only shot for seven days.

17. Wilson suggests that anyone listening to the commentary both loves the film and is excited to hear all the juicy behind the scenes production details. “I’ve basically given no information about anything so far,” adds Waititi, telling no lies.

18. Wilson was driving in Beverly Hills and heading to the Fox studio lot when Waititi called, and as that’s where he’s recording she actually joins him in the recording room for the next 20 minutes of the commentary… all of which they remain silent for.

19. Waititi originally planned on doing the stunt himself when Hitler is kicked through the window, but he instead went with a professional stunt person. We’re one hundred minutes into the movie so it’s probably too late for him to get a professional to do the commentary in his place as well.

20. David Bowie’s “Heroes” was in the script’s ending from the very beginning. “It just felt like an appropriate song to end the film on,” he says adding that in addition to its themes the song also feels right due to it being recorded in Berlin. Elsa’s hiding place in the house was one of the last remnants of Nazi Germany for the film, so her leaving the house signifies her escape, and the song compliments that journey.

21. One of his reasons for making the film was the realization that after World War II people cried that “we should never forget,” but given the behavior of “certain people in certain parts of the world” it feel to him like we are forgetting.

22. Maybe listen to Michael Bay’s commentary on The Rock instead.

Best in Context-Free Commentary

“This is my feel-good movie.”

“What can I say about what you’re looking at. There’s a kid. He’s white. He’s got blue eyes.”

“New Zealanders aren’t good at taking compliments, but I’m starting to learn because I live in America, and it’s all they live on over here.”

“A lot of people always say they want to rehearse but then they don’t ever really have time to rehearse.”

“We’ll always have the goulash.”

“If you’re not a little bit smart you probably won’t like this movie.”

“Maybe I’ve run out of things to say.”

Final Thoughts

Look, Waititi is a funny guy and a talented filmmaker, but good gravy is this commentary track a major disappointment. It’s quite possibly the worst I’ve ever sat through, and that’s due more to his disinterest than to the actual lack of content. Other tracks are boring, but hearing him comically complain that no one listens to commentaries only to then deliver an extremely lackluster one himself is just obnoxious. “Let’s watch this next bit together,” he says repeatedly before disappearing for anywhere from five to ten minutes at a time. This is not how you get people to listen to commentaries Waititi!

It’s most frustrating because he’s shown himself capable of far better — his solo one for Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and his shared one with Jemaine Clement for What We Do in the Shadows (2015) are fantastic listens — but here he’s either too uninterested or too tired to make even the slightest effort. It’s unclear when he recorded it, so maybe it was immediately after production and he was exhausted? Maybe it was far more recently and he was simply tired of talking about his movie? Either way, it’s a damn shame for those of us who dig the peek behind the filmmaking curtain in the form of production details and anecdotes. There are still plenty of people who enjoy listening to commentary tracks, and to all of you, I say you can most definitely and most unfortunately skip this one.

Read more Commentary Commentary from the archives.

After hanging up her telephone, Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) unplugs her phone, checks her watch, and sits quietly in her hotel room for a moment. Jane then bursts into chesty, heaving sobs. Her phone conversation wasn’t distressing, she was just checking in with her colleague and close friend Aaron (Albert Brooks). Jane just needed to cry for a moment, then she plugs the phone back in. This is our first real introduction to Jane in the 1987 masterwork Broadcast News. Directed by James L. Brooks, Broadcast News chronicles the lives of Jane, Aaron, and Tom (William Hurt) revolving around their work at a television news station.

Jane is an up-and-coming producer and has a reputation for being a hard-ass about the integrity of television news, with Aaron as a reporter fighting alongside her. Tom, however, is a rising anchor, who cannot stop falling upwards despite feeling severely underqualified for his position. The dynamic between the three characters is crackling and almost traumatic. Jane and Tom have palpable, super-hot chemistry, despite being at intellectually opposite poles. Aaron is desperately in love with Jane, but it manifests itself mostly as him being an asshole to her and everyone else. It’s a love triangle played to the rafters, grounded in questions of journalistic principle and intense, consuming jealousy. Rife with lines that should sound deranged, and exquisite, fence-swinging character choices, Broadcast News is a workplace comedy that plays like a Michael Bay movie. It’s also one of the most carefully constructed, emotionally scabbing films out there.

Jane breaking down this early is integral to the film. It gives Hunter such an immediate moment to get her claws into our sympathies. The shot feels so private and personal, with her facing the camera straight-on. Hunter acts the breakdown with all the wound-up fury of a workaholic and the emotional stupidity of a child. Throughout the film, you can see the emotion bubble up inside of her to the point where she can’t do anything else but expel it, with all the drama she claims she wants to avoid. She is hyper-intellectual at work, believing that news should be information only, and touchy-feely spectacle never. Jane thinks she can compartmentalize her emotional needs like she does everything else in her life, she assumes if she blocks off cry-time then she doesn’t need to feel for the rest of the day. So when she meets Tom and is hit by a wave of emotional and sexual desire, she literally doesn’t know what to do.

The crying introduction further breaks down potentially frustrating tropes that “career women” characters often fall into. Jane immediately inhabits capability and professional talent, but these emotional expulsions give background to her character. She is certainly grating at times, and she is aggressively self-assured, but she never becomes the workplace harpy dealing exclusively in internalized misogyny. Her self-assuredness is backed up by her hard work and striving proficiency, while her private emotional baggage supplies context. These crying moments also highlight her process-based brain, she’s methodical in the way she unplugs her phone and checks her watch. These scenes don’t feel like an aberration because her core traits don’t change.

About halfway through the film, the crying spells stop. As Jane and Tom become closer and start dancing around the possibility of dating, or fucking, or something, she becomes tapped into her emotional reserve. The compartmentalization begins to break down. Tom’s lack of intellectual appeal to her – including their absolute disagreement about journalistic integrity – situates her in an unknown, affective territory. She no longer needs to cathartically purge, because she lets emotion permeate her life. This is not to say that Tom enters her life and “fixes” her, but that the characters slightly change each other’s perspective. She inflicts a lot of fury onto Tom over his lack of qualification, and in turn, he learns to acknowledge his own failings and take greater accountability.

When Tom decides to co-produce his own story, without help from Jane, he chooses to focus on the idea of date-rape, a new term in the 1980s. Jane is already highly skeptical, worried that the story could become sensationalized and therefore not newsworthy. Tom continues anyway, and during a highly emotional interview with a victim, he includes an insert shot of himself crying in the final news broadcast. This choice gets mixed reviews in the office, Aaron detests the choice, but others appreciate Tom’s obvious emotional investment in the story. Jane simply claims that she was moved by the shot, but it would not have been her choice. She isn’t lying to spare Tom’s feelings; this moment is a genuine change in perspective for her. As a person who knows the power of tears, she can connect to Tom in an emotional register, even eventually admitting that she loves him.

What ruins this entire situation is when Jane finds out Tom faked his tears. He only had one camera at the shoot, meaning he had to film the insert shot after the interview had finished. Tom’s tears-on-cue is a lunge over the line for Jane, it infuriates her and goes against everything she’s ever stood for as a journalist. This is the final conflict the two have, punctuated by a gutting fight at the airport.

Tears on cue introduce us to Jane and also bring about the end of her relationship with Tom. The moving boundaries of emotion from private to public life are difficult for these characters to handle, and the constant debates over emotion vs principle seem to exhaust each one of them. For Jane, emotion had a time and a place, and now it bleeds out around the edges. Tom leads with his feelings, and their chemistry created constant conflict between warring ideals and irrational attraction. Broadcast News doesn’t leave us with a fully formed thought, just a resort back to some status quo that might be for the better or for the worse. All the fury and humor and knuckle-clenching the film whips up just sort of stops. It’s almost like James L. Brooks decided to plug the phone back in.

Good news: Martin McDonagh is reteaming with his In Bruges cohorts Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell for a brand new movie. According to Deadline, The Banshees of Inisheer will start shooting this summer, with Searchlight Pictures securing the worldwide rights to the director’s fourth feature. He’s been working on it for quite a while.

Little is known about the story, but it’s set on a remote Irish island. Gleeson and Farrell’s characters play lifelong friends whose relationship is tested when one of them abruptly cuts ties with the other. In true McDonagh fashion, however, there will be dark — and hilarious — consequences for the decision.

A new McDonagh movie is always exciting, but this one is particularly interesting as he’s been working on the story since his early days as a playwright. For some reason, he’s remained attached to the project over the years. It’s clear that he’s passionate about it, even though he’s always dismissed its quality in the past.

Originally, The Banshees of Inisheer was supposed to be the third installment in a series of plays McDonagh dubbed the “Aran Islands Trilogy,” which began with The Cripple of Inishmaan and was followed years later by The Lieutenant of Inishmore. These plays are loosely connected due to their close-knit Irish archipelago settings, but they also contain McDonagh’s penchant for sordid humor, violence, and provocation.

The Cripple of Inishmaan is a coming-of-age story about a disabled boy who dreams of making it big in Hollywood, only to be exploited by a documentary crew. The Lieutenant of Inishmore, meanwhile, is about an Irish terrorist who returns home to take care of his cat. During the latter play’s release in 2001, there were protests by animal rights groups and fears that the Irish Republican Army might react to it. If this movie is the spiritual successor to those plays, it’s going to be bold.

The idea for The Banshees of Inisheer was conceived in 1994, before any of his other plays had even hit the stage. During a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, McDonagh revealed that he wrote seven plays that year, all of which were produced, apart from the one he’s now adapting for the film. Why? According to McDonagh, it wasn’t “any good.”

Still, it’s understandable why he’s held onto this particular project. As the New Yorker article highlights, McDonagh has always been fascinated with the Aran Islands. He used to spend his summers there as a child and found the empty sky and water terrifying. At the same time, he was also fascinated by the isolation, the wildness, and the lunar qualities of the region.

Now that he’s making a movie set in Aran, McDonagh will also be able to fully realize the dreary landscapes and scenery that used to terrify and inspire him as a child. Expect this to be a Wild West interpretation of Ireland’s islands, but it won’t be without its moments of salt-of-the-earth honesty, either.

Like the other Irish-set stories to come from McDonagh’s imagination, The Banshees of Inisheer will explore the day-to-day life of a rural community and the types of characters who inhabit it. The story will take some dark and unexpected turns, but the director will also be out to make a movie that’s quintessentially Irish, much like he did with the plays that predate this movie.

It will be interesting to see if the film will be a throwback to McDonagh’s old style, or if it will reflect the more restrained sensibilities he’s showcased since becoming a filmmaker. His early Irish plays are full of local banter and cruelty, and while he hasn’t lost his knack for dark comedy and grotesque thrills since then, he has reigned in those elements quite a bit.

For now, what the movie will entail is a mystery. But it’s great to know that McDonagh is continuing to focus on bringing his own stories to life because they are always interesting and unlike anything else being produced. However, he’s spent decades making sure this one is up to scratch, so it’s probably going to be brilliant.

Twenty days. No, scratch that. Eighteen Days. Two were lost to rain. VFW was a blitz of a shoot. Joe Begos practically walked off the set of his last feature, Bliss, and right onto the set of this raging, bloodbath of a siege film. With little time to think and even less time to cast, the director charged into the project with total confidence of self because to waver was to invite defeat across the threshold. Hell no, there would be none of that.

VFW is a movie maniac’s dream. A group of crotchety old tough bastards put their backs against their favorite bar and make their stand against a horde of vicious, soulless, drug-addled drones foaming to the command of Travis Hammer. The melee beats to a John Carpenter beat courtesy of Steve Moore. The odds are forever never in our heroes favor, but with Stephen Lang calling the shots, and cats like William Sadler, Martin Kove, Fred Williamson, David Patrick Kelly, and George Wendt taking orders, there is little doubt they will grind plenty of meat before the runtime hits its wall. Where’s the beef? All over.

Begos was jacked to make this flick, but he’s always jacked to make any flick. “You’re always trying to make movies,” he says. “Fangoria was going to do this whole slate, this and that. I was like, ‘All right, whatever. I need to go make this other movie. I wrote this really tiny one, Bliss, and I just got financing for it. I’m going to go shoot it. If VFW comes together, I’ll put it on the side and I’ll go cut it up later.'”

Fangoria publisher Dallas Sonnier wanted a gore-engorged film to live up to their brand, and based on Begos’ previous efforts, they knew he was their guy. They were willing to wait, but not too long.

“So, I’m racing through Bliss because I know that something with VFW could happen at any time,” explains Begos. “Then, just as we finished the edit, Dallas is like, ‘All right, we got to start casting.’ I was working on them back-to-back, and we were able to get Bliss close enough where I could then go to Texas and start VFW. I was remotely finishing Bliss when we were shooting VFW. It’s been a fucking whirlwind.”

The whirlwind is half the attraction for the cast. Shooting at a run-and-gun pace, the production strips the process of hangups. There simply is not enough time to worry about the choices an actor is making. They’re done. That’s what we got. Move on and get the next bit of madness in the can.

For William Sadler, the easiest part was forming the bonds between actors. “The characters are confronting this threat from the outside,” he says, “but the actors are also in a trench fighting for their lives. Trying to remember lines, trying to figure out what’s the block, because the way Joe works is so fast!”

“Joe thinks we move as fast as the camera,” adds Martin Kove. “You had to fill in a lot for your character. You had to just go for it in certain places, and then if you couldn’t get to that place about whatever the line was about, you’d play off the actor. We were so free playing off each other and because everybody could throw the ball, and the other guy could catch it.”

“There are directors who will rehearse,” continues Sadler. “They’ll set marks, you hit your marks. If you don’t, you’re not in focus and blah blah blah. And Joe’s set is just like a free-for-all in the midst of which you’ve got to keep track of all the relationships and what you’re doing as actors without the structure from the outside.”

Joining the pack was a no-brainer for Stephen Lang. The actor read the script; he saw The Wild Bunch in his mind. As one of his favorite films, that’s all the convincing he needed.

“The thrust of it was terrific,” says Lang. “Some of the dialogue was not terrific, but that didn’t matter to me because I really felt there was going to be opportunities — and I’m glad I was right — to massage it and to do things with it. Joe creates an atmosphere where that can happen.”

Lang has been a part of a whole swath of films. He delights in all manner of genres, tones, and quality. The trick is to figure out what you want the film to be and then lean hard into it. Go big or cry yourself home.

“The is clearly a genre picture,” he continues. “But there’s some other stuff going on in here just by nature of the fact that it deals with veterans. I think that’s important. If it was a B-movie, by the time we were done with it, it was a B-plus.”

The input is why Begos makes movies. If he wanted to sit in a basement and solely scream his twisted thoughts to an audience, he could direct them to a printed page. He’s here to make movies, and to do that required the bloody musings of a devilish group.

“This is what filmmaking is about, we’re all here for the common goal,” says Begos. “We all trust each other because we’re here. Let’s figure it out. Every time we’re able to work together with no ego, and nobody had any ego, we found the best fucking conclusion and the best way to present the scene.”

And remember, this movie had to move fast. Eighteen days. Performance bombardment. Drop your payload and on to the next target.

“With the speed involved there’s no time for diplomacy,” says Lang. “These guys are such old pros, the shorthand comes immediately. I felt very comfortable saying to Sadler, ‘Billy, do you think you could just shut up there for a second, just shut the fuck up while we do this and then fucking do that?’ That would be accepted with absolute perfect grace and understanding.”

VFW is a metal AF movie that moves, not at the speed of thought, but at the speed of passion. The wheels are greased with skill and ten thousand hours of practice. Everyone involved was there to have a good time and deliver a kickass adrenaline rush, and the trust experienced amongst them got the job done.

Begos armored himself with a cadre of badasses who take no shit, and the line between character and performer was blurred. You’d stand with these guys if anyone dared threaten their best juke joint. If they ever gathered again to make a movie, they’d shoot that beast in 15 days. Two of which would be lost to rain. No biggie.

The one-two punch of the Romulan supernova and the Synthetic attack on Mars did more than damage Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart)’s ego and transform Starfleet into a xenophobic pack of provincials. The two cataclysms cut a nearly incomprehensible wound across all of space, tearing into myriads of beings whether they are aware of it or not. With each passing episode of Star Trek: Picard, we catch another sector of sentience scarred by those disasters and their poisonous effect on the characters we adore.

Episode 5, entitled “Stardust City Rag,” seemingly features Picard’s crew all under one roof, but by the end, we may be facing yet another roster shakeup as a result of the fear bubbling beneath the surface of every character. In creating artificial life, we initiated our doomsday. All kids replace their parents.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The meeting of Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) and Jean-Luc Picard is epic, and the stuff usually reserved for awkward fanfic or inevitably disappointing expanded universe content. Never before have they shared a screen, and as a long-time fan of both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, it’s an incredible thrill to see these two Ex-Borgs interacting with each other.

We tend not to think about Picard as an Ex-Borg. He did his therapy in Star Trek: First Contact, and with his thrashing of the Borg Queen, we thought the Captain of the Enterprise had put his time under their rule behind him. As we see here, in his conversation with Seven, Picard is still quite tormented by the memory of Locutus, and the Federation lives lost under their collective instruction.

In a moment of reflection between the two, Seven asks Picard, “After they brought you back from your time in the Collective, did you honestly feel that you regained your humanity?” He responds, “Yes.” She pushes further, “All of it?” He responds, “No, but we’re both working on it, aren’t we?”

We hate to see our heroes struggling with themselves. Seven and Picard are broken vessels, valiantly attempting to pick up the pieces and glue themselves back together in some shape resembling their glorified past. When the Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant, Seven probably imagined a happy ending where she would reconnect to her child self stolen by the Borg, but there are no endings, happy or otherwise.

Like Picard, what she has are those that need her. She threw herself into protecting the similarily inflicted. Icheb (Casey King, replacing Manu Intiraymi from the original series), the ex-Borg rescued by Voyager during its seventh season, became her adopted child. In the role of mother, she found peace, but when that was also robbed from her through treachery and Icheb’s vicious vivisection, Seven found her despair.

While Picard was sulking on his vineyard these past fourteen, un-televised years, Seven of Nine was also experimenting on a life away from Starfleet. The destruction of Romulus lead to the disabling of the Neutral Zone, and with it arose a vast space of lawlessness. Seven took up with the Fenris Rangers, a group of self-appointed space cowboys who act as judge, jury, and executioner against those deemed villainous.

Seven tells Picard that she’s sworn to defend the weak and the defenseless, and she doesn’t have the luxury of quibbling over morality. There is good, and there is bad. The bad gotta go.

Picard is operating in shades of gray. Shades even he was uncomfortable with when in the chair of Enterprise. The big two differences between their two characters is that Picard is only recently starting to pull himself out of his pit of despair. The knowledge that Data’s daughter Soji (Iso Briones) is somewhere out there has reinvigorated his spirit and got him back in into space. Picard will rekindle his faith in humanity – sorry, I mean sentient life – to honor the friend who was always chasing his.

Seven never left space, she simply charged herself upon its many paths of revenge. To honor her lost loved one, she is determined to eradicate the one who killed him. This quest brings her and Picard together on Freecloud, which is like Las Vegas minus the subtlety.

Picard is on the hunt for Bruce Maddox (John Ales, replacing Brian Brophy), the disgraced scientist blamed for the atrocities on Mars, and the only one who knows Soji’s location. He’s being held captive by Bjayzl (Necar Zadegan), a pleasure madam looking to make a quick buck by selling the drunk doctor to the Romulan Tal Shiar. She’s also the individual responsible for gutting Icheb for his pricey Borg pieces.

A series of comical shenanigans involving goofy pimp disguises, an eye-patched Picard, and a sharp-shooting Seven of Nine secures Maddox on the side of the angels. There is one dicey moment where it appears Seven will obliterate Bjayzl on-site, but Picard talks her down so they can return safely aboard their La Sirena. This is when Picard and Seven have their chat about their humanity, and Picard walks away, thinking they have come to an understanding.

Seven lets Picard have his belief. She doesn’t have it in her to philosophically spit in his face. However, she returns to Freecloud, points two phaser rifles at Bjayzl, and pops her body into a cloud of blood. Satisfaction? Doubtful. We know how these stories go. Seven will be back, but like every character in this new world order of Star Trek, her journey out of apathy and anger will be a long one.

Wounded, the final frontier and its inhabitants are numb from the pain. The ideals upheld by previous Star Trek shows are in shreds barely held together by equally tattered individuals. Picard is barely recognizable, and he’s the most well put together soul. Seven is hemorrhaging rage, Raffi (Michelle Hurd) is lost to weed, Captain Rios (Santiago Cabrera) is literally adrift, and poor, sweet Dr. Juarti (Alison Pill) ends this episode a murderer.

Juarti’s meeting with the suspect Commadore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita) in episode three apparently concluded with instructions to assassinate Bruce Maddox at her first available opportunity. As he chokes to death before her, Juarti is apologetic, claiming she wishes she didn’t know what Oh had told her. We can infer it went something along the lines of “Blah, blah, blah, Soji is the Destroyer, and you are responsible.” Her actions are too little too late, as Picard already uncovered Soji’s location aboard the Romulan Reclamation Site.

We must wait until next week to see how Picard will react to Juarti’s betrayal (nevermind Seven’s murder of Bjayzl that will most likely never come to his attention). His crew is a wreck. They’re ugly, pathetic creatures unfit for uniform…but are those currently wearing the uniform fit for theirs? Not at all.

“Stardust City Rag” reaffirms a Star Trek unlike any other. The universe is in a state of doubt. What was once sacred is no longer. Only in the heart of one man remains a belief that sentient life is inherently good and worth saving. The needs of the many cries out, Picard will answer, and in his answer, he will encourage others to join.

The wounds inflicted by the Romulan supernova and the Synthetic rebellion on Mars can not be mended in an episode. One-and-done Star Trek is over, and one-and-season may not cut it. Star Trek: Picard is proving to be a saga. Old Trek fans are deeply uncomfortable in this arena. Kirk’ing the computer or a double-fist chop to the plexus won’t solve anything. Only time will.

A tiny flame of altruism burns inside Picard. As grief has spread across the cosmos, the hope is that a similar fire will wash over all he surveys. He’s gotta bring his hope to the people. It begins with him, then his crew, and then we, his audience, will follow.

This essay is part of our new series Episodes, a bi-weekly column in which senior contributor Valerie Ettenhofer digs into the singular chapters of television that make the medium great.

Television is a medium that requires your attention. Sure, it’ll never ask you to sit in the dark for two hours and silence your cell phones, and it forgives the occasional multitasking half-watch or drifting-to-sleep rerun. TV, by virtue of its relative accessibility, can’t ask us for too much. But the best TV, the kind you talk about at parties and think about in your quietest moments — that kind of television demands our full attention. Eyes on the screen. Or even better: eyes on the screen, jaw on the floor, hair raised on the back of the neck.

The best episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of which there are dozens, do all three and then some. Across its seven-season run, the series pulled off considerable emotional risks (“The Body”), narrative risks (“The Gift”), and format-bending risks (“Once More, With Feeling”) to tell a story that was by turns relatable, funny, heartbreaking, and empowering. But no episode asked us to sit up and pay attention quite like “Hush.”

Joss Whedon’s largely silent horror story often feels, in the best way possible, like an exercise in writing with one hand behind one’s back. Around the show’s midway point, and in the midst of a polarizing fourth season, Whedon took away the voices of everyone in Sunnydale, purposely leaving us without the clever quips and well-written monologues on which the series so strongly built its foundation. He and the team behind Buffy bet on a gambit that in retrospect seems impossible to pull off — our attention is infinitely more fractured now than it was in 1999, but even then, a half-hour of prime-time near-silence was likely a hard sell — and gifted us with almost 30 straight minutes of brilliant, bold, genuinely scary visual storytelling sans language.

“He’s old, bone white, bald — Nosferatu meets Hellraiser by way of the Joker,” Whedon’s shooting draft episode script from November 5, 1999, says of one of The Gentlemens’ first appearances. With go-to monster actor Doug Jones (The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth) bringing the freaky, perma-smiling lead Gentleman to life, the group of hovering, suit-wearing fairytale creatures quickly became some of Buffy’s most unique and genuinely frightening villains. The Gentlemen stand out for a number of reasons; they’re poised and charismatic, even in silence, giving each other golf claps and “aw, shucks” gestures as they show off the hearts they’ve cut out of Sunnydale teens. They have frightening henchmen called The Footmen who rush forward in jerky, animalistic motions and wear outfits that look like busted-up straight-jackets. They’re like something out of a horror video game, their brutish erraticism a sharp contrast to The Gentlemens’ delicate personas.

The terror of “Hush” feels more imminent and high-stakes than Buffy’s average monster of the week case, in part because it impacts the entire town. When The Gentlemen come, they steal the voices of everyone in Sunnydale, leaving chaotic silence in their wake. At one point in the shooting draft script, Whedon proposes a shot that shows all of Sunnydale, then notes “or possibly much less than all of it, but I can hope.” These nods to the realistic limitations of the show’s budget come up more than once in his script, making it clear that “Hush” was a singularly ambitious outing from the start. We do see a lot of Sunnydale in the final product, and it’s end-of-days chaos. There’s a businessman, briefcase in hand, sitting pitifully in the middle of the street. There’s a preacher speaking on the book of Revelation, and across the street from him is a man selling whiteboards at 10 bucks a pop. “Hush” is a fast-paced episode, but it also manages to world-build swiftly, establishing a version of Sunnydale that’s startlingly broken down and dystopic in just a few scenes.

“Hush” may be one of Buffy’s only forays into pure horror, but it also manages to keep its signature comedic streak alive, even as it goes mute. The early scenes of the episode are jam-packed with jokes (“Tonight you have crude oil?” Marc Blucas’ Riley asks skeptically when Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy insists she’s “petroleum” that evening, not “patrolling”), as if making up for any dead space that might exist later on, yet there’s also palpable comedic energy in the silence. Immediately after losing his voice, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) tries to call Buffy, only to realize the futility of the task once they’ve both shrugged into the phone. Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) confidently gives a slideshow presentation on The Gentlemen that’s punctuated by his crudely drawn doodles and Buffy’s own crudely misinterpreted gesture. In silence, acting really is reacting, and each of the core members of the Scooby gang reacts with as much subtlety as they normally would, never going overboard in their wordless performances, delivering perfectly on beats and expressions instead of lines.

“Hush” should be remembered as a narrative highwire act, an acrobatic feat of high concept and precise execution. Yet it also, like the best Buffy one-offs, connects boldly into the overarching plot, incorporating vital information into a non-traditional format in a way that both foiled weekly viewers’ attempt to imagine ahead to pivotal moments, and solidified these major moments in our collective memory by associating them with a novel format. In a later high-concept episode, for example, the beloved musical “Once More, With Feeling,” Giles leaves the group, Willow (Alyson Hannigan) begins lying about magic, Buffy admits a major secret, and she and Spike (James Marsters) share their first real kiss.

“Hush” is a suitable sister episode, with Riley and Buffy finding out about one another’s professions, Willow meeting and forming an instant connection with Tara (Amber Benson), and foreshadowing both Willow’s eventual power hunger and Buffy’s prophetic dreams. At its best, season four is highly exploratory, highlighting the ways in which group dynamics have changed now that the gang is officially grown up. “Hush” pulls that off too, with the presence of Giles’ friend-with-benefits Olivia (Phina Oruche), Buffy’s inappropriate dream, Anya and Xander’s problems connecting, Willow’s search for a Wicca group, and Spike’s couch-surfing status all indicating the very real growing pains and awkward moments of young adulthood. Each of the chapter’s key themes is communicated gracefully and authentically despite the obstacle of wordlessness. “Hush” was the only episode of Buffy ever to be nominated for a writing Emmy, and it’s a testament to the show’s underdog spirit that the series — which featured great writing throughout and should have been an Emmy contender each year — was only recognized when Whedon made its excellence so specific as to be unignorable.

Tara’s entrance, more than any other moment in the hour, would become a touchstone for fans and still serves as the episode’s greatest narrative accomplishment. The moment the two women’s’ hands intertwine — fingers laced, breathless from the magic coursing through them — holds all the sensuality and intimacy of a love scene, without so much as a kiss. Shifting facets of queer identity are sadly often deemed too complicated for TV, even in 2020, so Buffy had its work cut out for it when it came to explaining how Willow, previously only interested in men, would fall for a woman. Yet in this first magical encounter, as the two pair up to fight off The Gentlemen, we immediately understand that their connection goes beyond friendship. Their curiosity, chemistry, and partnership are conveyed by the actors’ eyes, by camerawork from episode DP Michael Gershman (Whedon also directed), and by music from composer Christophe Beck, whose superb score forms the true narrative backbone of the episode. As Willow would later sum up, “Hello, gay now!”

When we think of “Hush” more than 20 years later, indelible images come to mind. There are Tara and Willow’s interlaced fingers or the frozen grin of The Gentlemen gliding by an open window. There’s Buffy’s inappropriate staking gesture or even Giles’ goofily blocky drawings. But there’s one other, too: the fairytale moment at episode’s end, as Buffy, from the floor of a shadowy clock-tower, breathes in her voice and breaks the spell of The Gentlemen with a clear, piercing scream. It’s a moment that punctuates the long-held silence and brings to end an impressively maintained streak of tension. She does it without hesitation, bravely, but also with real fear and desperation. Only the princess can save the town in the fairytale, so of course Buffy can save Sunnydale: she’s our Chosen One. At that moment, we realize that our attention has been magically arrested this whole time, our own voices stolen by an episode of television that asked for our attentive silence. The spell is broken, and as the end credits roll, we too can finally speak again.

They Said What?! is a biweekly column in which we explore the highs and lows of film criticism through history. How did critics feel about it at the time, and do we see it differently now? Chris Coffel explores.

Paul Verhoeven is a beloved favorite for genre enthusiasts. The Dutch director has a unique ability to fuse blood-soaked, over-the-top violence with explicit sexual content that on the surface feels like your basic trash cinema, but the slightest peak under the curtain will often reveal biting satire. And his social jabs are just as in-your-face, if not more so, than the graphic assault on display. 

Not all movies can be a RoboCop or Starship Troopers, however. Sometimes you get a Hollow Man.

In 2000, Verhoeven took the reigns on the Andrew W. Marlowe penned script about a group of scientists that attempt to crack the code of invisibility only to be met with disastrous results. Armed with an H.G. Wells-inspired story, a young cast of Hollywood stars – Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Shue, and Josh Brolin – and an uber-talented effects crew the makings of a Verhoeven classic were there. Were these elements able to combine for positive results, or did they cause an explosion in the lab?

With Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, based off the same Wells’ novel, nearing a release, we look back at the critical response to Hollow Man.

“Hollow Man deserves a niche in the Underachievement Hall of Fame,” Roger Ebert wrote in his 2-star review, where he compared the movie negatively to Michael Keaton’s Jack Frost. Ebert didn’t hate the film but felt disappointed that it decided to devolve into a mindless slasher rather than say or do anything interesting. Ultimately, Ebert expected more from a director that had displayed “imagination and wit” on past films.

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott was too let down by a concept that should have churned out an interesting movie but instead delivered “a labored, implausible piece of action-movie hack work.” Perhaps most damming of all, Scott wrote that Hollow Man “even lacks the howling shamelessness that has turned Showgirls into a cult favorite among connoisseurs of guilty video pleasure.”

In his review for Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman carried on the theme of missed opportunity. Gleiberman’s biggest complaint is that the film “sets up and then fails to deliver lavish satirical ways of having fun with invisibility.” Confused by the film’s lack of deeper meaning, Gleiberman questioned who the titular hollow man is. Is it the mad scientist that turns himself invisible and goes on a killing spree, or is it Verhoeven, a director “who seems to have reduced filmmaking to a matter of sheer molten energy and special effects, with any suggestive levels of imagination blocked out?”

Writing for the Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov compared the movie to the mind of a 15-year-old boy. Savlov felt that even when the film hinted at going somewhere, it was “weighed down by an increasingly juvenile sense of humor that makes the whole shebang that much more difficult to take seriously.” Like others, Savlov struggled to comprehend how this was from the same director that gave us titles like The Fourth Man, ultimately deciding this to be nothing more than a “boisterous, gooey miscue.”

The script’s failures may have absorbed the brunt of the film’s criticism, but the acting wasn’t let off the hook. Lou Lumenick of the New York Post described it as “lousy” and “really appalling,” focusing on the performance of Shue.

J. Hoberman of The Village Voice referred to Brolin as the film’s resident pretty boy, saying, “Verhoeven has never met a bad actor he couldn’t use.” A bit harsh, but there is no denying Brolin’s prettiness. 

Hollow Man wasn’t entirely panned. Serena Donadoni of the Detroit Metro Times enjoyed the film’s big-budget B-movie premise, stating that “Verhoeven pumps up the action in several over-the-top sequences.”

The Houston Chronicle’s Eric Harrison was also a fan, highlighting that he was impressed by the acting. “Bacon is terrifically venal,” Harrison wrote. “He gives the kind of performance that people would praise as courageous if he were Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford.” He was arguably more impressed by Shue, comparing her command to that of Wonder Woman. At the film’s start, Shue is more of a secondary character to Bacon. Still, by the time the final act kicks into gear, she forces her way to the forefront, leaving Harrison to conclude, “we’d watch her even if Bacon weren’t invisible.”

All critics were able to agree on one thing – Hollow Man’s special effects are stunning.

“The transformation scenes, featuring Sebastian as well as the lab’s prize gorilla, are shivery and spectacular,” Gleiberman wrote. 

Ebert called the film’s special effects “astonishing,” and was particularly smitten with the clever tactics the film took to make the invisible visible once more. “They spray him with firefighting chemicals, turn on the sprinkler system, splash blood around.”

“The special effects here really are special,” Harrison wrote as he described an early scene in the film in which an invisible gorilla is made visible again, and we see it happen right before our eyes. 

The overwhelming consensus from its release is that Hollow Man is at best an enjoyable enough B-movie with dazzling special effects, but one that fails to capitalize on its great premise. Instead of offering up the strong social commentary that Verhoeven is known for, the film blends in with other paint-by-the-numbers horror films released in the late ’90s, early 2000s. At the end of the day, it doesn’t film like a Paul Verhoeven film.

In 2013, Verhoeven let it be known he agreed with this position. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the director bemoaned ever making the movie. “I decided after Hollow Man, this is a movie, the first movie that I made that I thought I should not have made,” he said in the interview. “It made money and this and that, but it really is not me anymore. I think many other people could have done that. I don’t think many people could have made Robocop that way or either Starship Troopers. But Hollow Man, I thought there might have been 20 directors in Hollywood who could have done that. I felt depressed with myself after 2002.”

As a fan of the film, I can’t say I don’t agree. I enjoy its B-movie nature, but it’s flawed and lacks the director’s signature flare. Deep dives into loneliness and/or voyeurism seemed like the obvious options, and they were right there on the table, yet the film chose to tiptoe around then. That being said, Hollow Man may have hit the nail on the head in a way we just didn’t realize.

In Scott’s New York Times review, he touches base on how mad scientists have greatly changed in films over the years. Gone are the days of lab coats, whacky hair, and glasses. Now they’re hip, good-looking young people. “Sebastian drives a sleek silver Porsche and wears a half-length black leather coat that would make Shaft jealous,” Scott wrote. “Your tax dollars at work, folks.” 

And maybe that’s it. Perhaps Hollow Man is a film about how the government wastes our tax dollars. And it was so on-the-nose that critics didn’t even realize it.

Too many things are compared to John Hughes’s movies. Does your high school flick have young people with real desires and opinions in it? Let’s slap a John Hughes label on it. Does your teen show have a detention subplot? That’s Hughes, baby.

Not everything in life is like a John Hughes movie: we all must figure this out eventually.

That being said, Netflix’s new series I Am Not Okay With This forges a path in the spirit of the often-invoked master of teen movies in the best way. It’s Hughesian in the way that each of the major characters is almost too weird and prickly to love, or exactly weird and prickly enough to love to pieces. They’re a little bit reactionary or a little bit practiced in that rarely-pinpointed, realistic way that teens are. Plus, it helps that redheaded young star Sophia Lillis looks like she’s one eye roll away from the Molly Ringwald flip-off bit in The Breakfast Club.

The powers-that-be at Netflix would like you to know, thanks to a buzzy trailer drop, that I Am Not Okay With This also involves the producers of Stranger Things and the director of The End Of The F***ing World, two other hits on the streaming giant. While some responses to the trailer were positive, many viewers across social media indicated that IANOWT looks like a tired mash-up of the two cited series, an unnecessary algorithmic response to the type of content consumers already like. Luckily, that initial response couldn’t be further from the truth.

The series follows a closed-off teen girl named Sydney (Lillis) who’s given a diary in which she angrily processes both outsized emotions and the emergence of new superpowers. IANOWT is based on a graphic novel by Charles Forsman (who also authored The End of The F***ing World) and co-created and executive produced by Jonathan Entwistle (who directed the adaptation of TEOTFW) and Christy Hall, but the two darkly comedic shows share aesthetic sensibilities more than anything else. Sydney exists in an anachronistic version of Pennsylvania that seems unstuck from time, all VHS tapes and wood paneling and gorgeously retro soundtrack choices. The series is directed by Entwistle for maximum intensity like its predecessor, and it’s preoccupied with outsiders, too. Still, it’s sweeter and more accessible than TEOTFW from the start thanks in part to an excellent cast.

Lillis and costar Wyatt Oleff, real-life pals who previously shared the screen in both the IT reboot series and a Sia Christmas music video, convey a near-constant undercurrent of warmth and wry humor below their characters’ angsty exteriors. Oleff’s Stanley is a barefoot stoner who works at a bowling alley, shows up to parties in powder blue suits, and is somehow cool in a way that’s diametrically opposed to any traditional measurement of high school coolness. Lillis’ Sydney is a tomboyish working-class kid who looks like she’s perpetually on the verge of a shrug. She’s a ball of grief, anxiety, rage, and lots of softer feelings that she covers up with the sharper ones. Both teen actors are better than ever before, putting in subtle and hugely endearing work that already feels as if it’ll land in a career retrospective montage someday.

Charismatic newcomer Sofia Bryant rounds out the main cast as Dina, Sydney’s best and only friend who sets off a chain of unpredictable events when she starts dating jock Brad Lewis (Richard Ellis). Rites of passage ensue, against a backdrop of football games, house parties, and homecoming dances, but IANOWT never falls into predictable teen territory. The series opens with Sydney running down the street in a blood-covered-dress (Carrie is another source the story obviously pays homage to without ever copying), and from that moment on, it deftly alternates between classic coming-of-age moments and intense, often startling sequences like that one–displays of Sydney’s apparent emerging powers that surprise both her and the audience.

Sci-fi and coming-of-age fantasy stories have become a major subgenre for Netflix Originals, but I Am Not Okay With This may be the first to take an approach that’s couched in intimacy, not spectacle. It’s a small-scale story about a small town, which makes it infinitely more relatable than the world-saving escapades of shows like Stranger Things. Sydney’s powers aren’t a simple puberty metaphor, but an impressive attempt to capture that raw, strained, personalized feeling of adolescence–of being a rough draft of oneself that’s undiagnosed and unlabeled, confused and distant and lacking both the community and the language to understand what the hell is going on.

There’s one more thing that I Am Not Okay With This has that very few other Netflix Originals do: room to grow. With only seven short episodes in its first season, the series leaves you wanting more. You’ll want answers to its biggest questions, yes, but also more time with these well-built characters and their weird, thrilling version of the world.

War! We’re right in the thick of it for the seventh, resurrected, and final season of The Clone Wars. Knowledge of Emperor Palpatine’s traitorous machinations remains in shadow, as does Anakin Skywalker’s torrid love affair with Senator Amidala. The stench of the Sith emanates around everything, but the Jedi are confident they’ll push them back to their dark corners of obscurity.

Blah. None of that matters for the grunts in the trenches. They are the cannon fodder. This is their story.

Six years may have passed since we last saw an episode of The Clone Wars, but you wouldn’t know it based on what this new chapter delivers. Directed by Kyle Dunlevy and written by Matt Michnovetz and Brent Friedman, “The Bad Batch” puts its focus on the soldiers following the orders of the Jedi sitting safely back at camp. These are the Star Wars stories so many of you have clamored to witness. The universe is massive, and the kooky space religion need not be at the forefront of every saga.

With The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars, Disney+ is now the open-world sandbox for all to explore the ever-expanding Star Wars universe properly. Whatever your thoughts on the last film are, let’s just say that Abrams put a capper on the name Skywalker and move on. We all have our favorite action figures, now let’s give them stories to match their rad designs.

Besides, at twenty-four minutes, “The Bad Batch” doesn’t have time to get into anything else beyond its mission statement. The Republic is desperate to regain control of a shipyard stationed on the planet of Anaxes, but the droid army seemingly knows their every move before they strike. Our faithful Captain Rex has a theory about that, and he proposes a behind-enemy-lines infiltration to obliterate the communications hub directing battle droid traffic. Rex secretly believes that his old clone pal Echo, thought to have been killed in the season three episode “Counterattack,” is alive and using the plans they cooked up together against their comrades. Say it isn’t so, Echo.

Mace Windu agrees to allow Rex to take a small squad out into the field. Rex and Commander Cody join the titular team of goons, also known as Clone Force 99. These are a motley collection of defected clones featuring mutations that visibly set them apart from their brothers. There’s a tall one (Wrecker), a skinny one (Tech), a mean one (Crosshairs), and a long-haired one (Hunter). Being the dirty quartet who do the jobs that the Republic wouldn’t waste a pristine clone upon, they’ve got a bit of a chip on their soldier.

Most of “The Bad Batch” is consumed with action. There’s a sense of “been there, done that” to its plotting. It’s the inclusion of the mutants that makes things interesting.

The clones have always struggled with individuality. They’re born from the DNA of Jango Fett. They were created to fight for those that did not. They’re slaves.

In past seasons, we’ve seen clones differentiate themselves through body modification, tattoos, and military brands on their uniforms. Rex and Commander Cody were our gateways into the incredibly strange lives these lowly fellows were forced into, and the best episodes were usually the ones that focused on their very unique point of view.

Confronted with genetic aberrations, there is an initial unease from Rex and his fellow roughnecks. Such anxiety stemmed from self-doubt cannot last on the battlefield. When they’re shot out of the sky and crash into the middle of a melee, the Bad Batch and the rest of the clones have to work together to get their butts out of the fire. What Rex sees is a team of hardheaded bastards tearing their way through the Separatist’s squadron of junk soldiers. Meat through the grinder. It’s perfection.

The tall one, the skinny one, the mean one, and the long-haired one all offer talents unavailable to Rex and his men. Diversity is the key to a successful operation, and that’s the driving philosophy of the episode. As the opening title card states, “Embrace others for their differences, for that makes you whole.”

The Bad Batch make the clones a better army. Without their aid, Rex and Cody would not have made it out of their suicide mission alive. Not only that, Rex would not have had his theory proven correct. Echo is alive. His voice is uncovered at the communications hub, and the first episode of the final season concludes dreadfully.

If we never hear from a Skywalker again, and we’re stuck with these hardcases for the rest of the season, The Clone Wars would be absolute appointment television for any Star Wars fan. Of course, the series will venture back to Anakin, Obi-Wan, Darth Maul, Ahsoka Tano, and the rest. No doubt it will be solid storytelling, but The Clone Wars feels the most on point when it’s detailing the tales of those in the trenches. Twelve years after The Clone Wars film premiered, and kicked off this particular branch of the canon, the series cements itself with those that give it its title.