Today instead of one regular-sized review I have two fun-sized looks at movies I saw in theaters last week. They are not making much money and might not last long, but I support the theatrical experience (please clap).

ASH is a low budget sci-fi movie produced by Shudder and directed by Flying Lotus, who I’m a little familiar with as a musician, but I have to confess I couldn’t make it very far into his previous cinematic effort, KUSO (2017). This doesn’t happen to me often but it was just too gross with its pervy opening segment about pustules and stuff. By comparison this one is normal and tolerable, but it still makes sense coming from the same director.

Eiza González (BLOODSHOT, CUT THROAT CITY, AMBULANCE) stars as Riya, a space traveler of some kind who wakes to find her ship in emergency mode, her entire crew dead (including one with a kitchen knife in his chest), not remembering what the fuck happened, or even who she is at first. She medicates herself to calm down (a patch that lights up when she puts it on her neck – nice future tech), wanders out onto the desolate planet where they’ve landed, looks up at cosmic mandalas in the sky, has little scary blips of flashbacks and begins to slowly remember some of the events leading up to this, including bonding with crew members Clarke (Kate Elliott, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT), Kevin (Beulah Koale, DUAL), Davis (Flying Lotus himself), and the captain, Adhi (oh shit, it’s Iko motherfuckin Uwais, MERANTAU, THE RAID, HEADSHOT, BEYOND SKYLINE, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US, TRIPLE THREAT, SNAKE EYES, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE).

Then somebody comes up behind her, and she punches him so hard she cracks his space helmet, but apparently this guy Brion (Aaron Paul, NEED FOR SPEED) was on the ship orbiting the planet, and received their distress call. He helps her try to remember what happened, and we try to decide which one of these people we should trust less. I mean, these seem to be the only two living people on the whole planet, so they’re the only suspects we have.

It’s pretty much FlyLo’s (I don’t know him well enough to call by his nickname, but just calling him “Lotus” seems weird) trippy psychedelic take on an ALIEN or DARK STAR type of space movie. I’m a sucker for space worker on the job movies, and this one has a cool look, strong cast (González is very good in her first lead) and great nightmare atmosphere, though its originality is only in the telling, not so much the story. You can mostly guess what kind of stuff will happen here – a weird discovery on the planet, a non-human threat, maybe a human one too, obviously lots of paranoia and delusion. Tried-and-true science fictional tropes, but it looks and feels very right-now, one of these slick 2020s movies where everybody’s lit so their faces have blue, red and purple light reflected on them. It’s become a cliche but that’s because it looks good. (Cinematographer: Richard Bluck, WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, THE MONKEY KING 3).

As with many sci-fi movies, much of the enjoyment comes from the little details of the future world, like the medical equipment that cheerfully narrates its progress in Japanese and has a little jingle like an ice cream truck as it digs its little robot hands under her skin. I bet that’s one of the reasons Lotus (okay I guess it’s not that bad) is credited with additional sound design. I also noticed his credit for additional visual FX and one or two other things.

I was, of course, excited to see Uwais. I will warn that he’s not in it much at all, but I don’t think he’s entirely wasted. At first you figure he’s just doing a tiny cameo, certainly as a non-combatant, but later he does get to do a small fight, and there’s even a POV shot giving you a glimpse at what it’s like to have his foot flying at you. (The fight coordinator: Mark Trotter, MORTAL ENGINES, KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES). When he has more dialogue later on I sense that he’s leveled up his English-language acting – not that I need him to. The west still doesn’t have what it takes to offer him roles matching his Indonesian classics.

Lotus works really well as an actor, a funny and kind presence on the ship. I imagine him making the cast feel comfortable the same we he does the crew, and I can see why he could get pretty good at this.

It’s not a given that a musician-turned-director will do his own score (Rob Zombie doesn’t, for example), but Lotus does, and I think it’s one of the things that makes it work for me. It’s very much in his style, synthy ambient waves washing over you, getting spooky sometimes, then the beats start dropping. Here’s one of the dancier tracks, so you know this isn’t just faux-Carpenter:

The main thing that’s not like ALIEN is that you don’t got an alien running around… at least not that much. When some creature effects do pop up, thankfully, they are pretty spectacular and bizarre. Reminded me of both THE THING and, I don’t know… some Adult Swim short or something. Some have compared ASH to EVENT HORIZON, but honestly I haven’t seen that since it came out, so I can’t do that with confidence. It actually reminded me a little bit of a different Paul Waterworld Soundtrack Anderson production, PANDORUM, to the point that I was thinking “wasn’t Aaron Paul in that too?” But that was Ben Foster. I didn’t think about it but that one also had a cool martial artist in a supporting role (Cung Le in that case).

I noticed Panos Cosmatos’ name in the special thanks, and he makes sense as an influence. I can see some BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW in here. It also made me think of BLOOD MACHINES, the Shudder-produced space ship movie made by Carpenter Brut. Maybe Shudder should have a whole division for making space movies with musicians.

I don’t think I would recommend ASH to most people just looking for sci-fi, but I enjoyed letting it wash over/drip slime over me, and the dark theater and sound system definitely pulled me in more than it would if I waited for it to pop up on Shudder. Flying Lotus is an interesting guy – grandnephew of Alice Coltrane, composer of Adult Swim bumper music, founder of the record label Brainfeeder (who put out Kamasi Washington and Thundercat records, among others), clearly a movie fan, and hands-on, DIY kind of guy who did much of the KUSO visual FX himself. I hope he keeps making movies as a natural extension of his other art, not as a normal director who gets hired for normal stuff, i.p. or whatever. Even then, though, I might end up buying the soundtrack.

THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE has made history as the very first non clip-show, non-basketball-themed or Brendan-Fraser-co-starring Looney Tunes feature film to receive a theatrical release. At a time when 2D animation is out of favor and Warner Brothers has shown a hostility toward these characters, it seems like something of an underdog victory that this was somehow greenlit and allowed to be released by Ketchup Entertainment*, the powerhouse distributor behind such defining cultural moments as Robert Rodriguez’s 2023 film HYPNOTIC starring Ben Affleck. But I found the movie a little disappointing, so I was hesitant to review it and potentially dampen your enthusiasm. Don’t let me scare you off. I seem to be in the minority here, and even I don’t regret seeing it.

You may not be aware – I know I wasn’t until sometime last year – that in 2020 there was a series on HBO Max called Looney Tunes Cartoons. Created by Peter Browngardt (Uncle Grandpa), it’s a series of new shorts that I think do the classic ones proud by following in their footsteps without rigidly imitating them, and being willing to inject the format with modern, irreverent humor. The writers include the cartoonist Johnny Ryan, so there’s kind of an underground comix sensibility. One thing I find really appealing about it is that unlike pretty much any other Looney Tunes revival of my lifetime they don’t try to just re-create exactly what these characters looked like in a previous version. The animators are allowed to put their stylistic mark on them, with models more inspired by the early shorts before they evolved into that official generic Looney Tunes look they would use for, like, a commercial or a segment on an anniversary special.

I was excited to see what they could do with a movie, but when I hear “A Looney Tunes Movie” I do sort of worry about the SPACE JAM issue that it’s pretty corny to put this collection of unrelated characters together. What the fuck story can possibly involve both Wile E. Coyote and Foghorn Legorn? Well, thankfully this is not that – the only Looney Tunes characters in the movie are Daffy, Porky, and Petunia. And it takes sort of a Muppet movie approach of explaining at the beginning that in this version Daffy and Porky were raised as brothers by a guy named Farmer Jim, who I’m hesitant to say much about because he’s in it pretty briefly but he’s by leaps and bounds the highlight. I’ll just say that he looks like Paul Bunyan and is fully painted and there are great visual gags about the ways they animate him.

Daffy and Porky inherited Farmer Jim’s house and still live in it together, but they don’t really keep it up to code (it’s falling apart, infested, moldy, has an unlicensed waterslide, etc.) and also the roof got hit by an asteroid. To earn money for repairs (and after many failed attempts at employment) they accept jobs at the Goodie Gum factory with flavor expert Petunia. Through a series of antics and etc. they find themselves trying to stop a plot by a large-brained alien invader to zombify the population by putting green space goo in the gum. And there are some pretty funny twists and turns after that.

My wife has a grudge against Looney Tunes because she had to watch them so much in daycare. I was glad she didn’t go to this with me because I don’t think it would’ve changed her mind. I believe I laughed out loud about three times, and I didn’t hear any of the other six or seven people (honestly a huge number for a 12:45 pm Wednesday show of a barely advertised cartoon) laugh much more than me. On the other hand, when I was recounting “the funny parts” to Mrs. Vern later I kept thinking of other ones and realized I was making it sound better than I was thinking it was.

I like that they made Petunia into a weirdo obsessed with flavor profiles. I like that Daffy has to lay a bunch of eggs as part of the plan to save the world and address until way later that male ducks don’t usually do that. I laughed really hard at a childhood flashback set to the Bryan Adams song from ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES. There’s a great joke that (NON-SPECIFIC SPOILER) they totally misunderstood what was going on, the alien was trying to stop an asteroid from hitting the earth, so after they foil his plan they have to come up with their own (partly inspired by ARMAGEDDON).

There are things that are funny because of the way they’re drawn, jokes about the methods of animation, and a section cleverly formatted as a short-within-a-feature, complete with different aspect ratio. That’s all great, that’s what you want to see in animation. But I’m afraid there’s not enough of that to prevent this from feeling not-ready-for-the-big-screen, and I think that may be inherent in both the project itself and the resources available.

These are characters who thrive in 6-7 minute scenarios. Here they had to come up with enough story to last more than ten times that length. I’m very glad they didn’t feel the need to give it some “serious” emotional aspect we were supposed to care about, but for my tastes they didn’t bring enough laughs to justify feature length. There are stretches where I have nothing to be invested in but the generic plot mechanics, and that can’t help but give it the scent of mediocre TV cartoon.

The other issue is the animation, which is very good at times but not excellent enough overall to overcome other deficiencies. The three Looney Tunes mostly look great, the main alien looks decent, Farmer Jim is always perfect and hilarious in his scenes, but all the other characters (the humans, basically) are, to my admittedly picky standards, inconsistent or mediocre. Passable in a normal TV cartoon, not appealing to look at like you want in a feature film. During the end credits they show lots of design sketches, and I’ve seen others online, and they are pretty much uniformly beautiful. So I think they just didn’t have the ability to carry that through into the animation.

Though I never saw a trailer for this movie and have only read about it in the context of “it’s a shame nobody is seeing this,” I’ve talked to three different friends who went to see it, and they all liked it much more than I did. Word seems to be spreading, but only enough for it to scratch its way to about 2/3 of its alleged budget. Nevertheless, Ketchup are reportedly in talks to distribute COYOTE VS. ACME, the supposedly very good live action/animated hybrid that WB was planning on destroying like they did with BATGIRL, as a tax write-off and/or piece of performance art about what kind of preposterous shit corporations can get away with. (Should I be doing that for my taxes? I’m sure I have what it takes to make an unreleasable movie.)

Whether or not you see THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP, I recommend animation fans check out Looney Tunes Cartoons – at least at the moment they’ve kept them on Max, despite dumping the rest of the Looney Tunes library.

*Movies distributed by Ketchup Entertainment that I’ve reviewed:

WOLVES
BUSHWICK
FERRARI
HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN