"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Don’t Look Back (1996)

July 13, 1996

DON’T LOOK BACK is a straight-to-HBO movie, but I thought it might be worth watching because it’s directed by Geoff Murphy (THE QUIET EARTH) between his two great sequels, UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY and FORTRESS 2, and it’s written by Tom Epperson & Billy Bob Thornton & William Petrowitch. The latter doesn’t have any other credits, but the first two of course wrote ONE FALSE MOVE (and later THE GIFT, CAMOUFLAGE and JAYNE MANSFIELD’S CAR). Thornton (DEAD MAN) is also in the movie as one of the villains, and this was his last movie before making SLING BLADE and becoming famous and shit.

Jesse Parish (Eric Stoltz, THE FLY II) is an L.A. deadbeat and heroin enthusiast who carries around a guitar case and occasionally strums. One night while broke and in withdrawal he witnesses a drug deal going sour in a parked car. Skipper (Dwight Yoakam, RED ROCK WEST) shoots at a guy and then chases after him, leaving a flung-open briefcase spewing money unattended. Jesse sneaks over, scoops it up, runs off. I like how Skipper yells “Hey! What the fuck are you doing?” like he caught somebody keying his car or something. Jesse escapes using Donkey Kong tactics (rolling garbage cans down a hill at him), but Skipper hears somebody yell his name. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 23rd, 2026 | 7 Comments »

Jackass: Best and Last

JACKASS: BEST AND LAST is the name of this year’s JACKASS motion picture event (currently leaving theaters), because it’s a reunion mixed with a “best of” compilation as a finale to the series. New sequences are mixed with highlights and previously unseen footage from more than a quarter century of Johnny Knoxville and pals doing stupid and dangerous shit for laughs.

As usual there is a lot of stuff where things are stuck up butts or shit comes out of butts. I am personally not a fan of those aspects of butts, but these guys are made different, and I can accept that. It’s funny that they can be accurately described as stunt men (they get fired on rockets, punched in the face, butted by an angry ram, launched on slingshots, electrocuted, etc.) but the most horrifying stuff is usually poop related. At long last there is an escape room where someone has to reach into a hole not knowing that they are also reaching into their colleague’s butthole.

The two most memorable new sequences are inspired by the original cast’s present status as men over 50. One has them playing Twister in transparent jumpsuits after downing colonoscopy prep. It doesn’t take long for one of them to spring a diarrhea leak and get everyone on set puking. The entertainment value is multi-layered: being too grossed out to keep my eyes on what the camera is pointed at, marveling at the ludicrousness of coming up and going through with an idea like this, and most of all enjoying the enthusiasm by the boys (or, in many cases, the amusement of the boys at one of their co-stars being very unenthused). (read the rest of this shit…)

July 22nd, 2026 | 10 Comments »

Courage Under Fire

July 12, 1996

I know why I didn’t watch COURAGE UNDER FIRE in ’96. I was very anti-war, in a country that had generally accepted the Gulf War as a good thing, and I didn’t want to sit through more bullshit about how proud we should all be about it. And also, let’s be honest, I wasn’t exactly looking for Serious Adult Drama unless it was from filmmakers I was already into. I was not into director Ed Zwick (GLORY, LEAVING NORMAL) or writer Patrick Sheane Duncan (84C MOPIC, MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS), so it didn’t really matter that it was shot by Roger Deakins (between FARGO and KUNDUN), edited by Steven Rosenblum (STEELE JUSTICE, BRAVEHEART), with music by James Horner (BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, UNCOMMON VALOR, COMMANDO).

Watching it now, sitting through the opening news montage about the war, it doesn’t feel like we’re supposed to question any of it. Then we go into a tank battle that’s very visually connected to the way we experienced the war on CNN: night skies, burning oil wells, explosions in the distance, cuts to green, pixelated night vision, “enemies” virtually invisible, barely given faces, never voices. And they’re mostly referred to by slurs.

If that was commentary I would guess most viewers didn’t notice. It feels more like a continuation of how the war was seen at the time. However, there is something to be said for Lieutenant Colonel Nat Serling (Denzel Washington between DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS and THE PREACHER’S WIFE) having his troops pray and then immediately saying, Let’s kill ‘em all!”

And I do suspect it’s intentional that the fight is almost uncomfortably one-sided. They’re just driving along firing machine guns through rows and rows of human beings. The only tragedy, in their eyes, is when they mistakenly blow up one of their own tanks, killing their friend Boylar (Tim Ransom, OUTBREAK). The tank operator who fired, Patella (Sean Astin, ENCINO MAN), is racked with guilt, but Serling takes the blame. It was his orders. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 20th, 2026 | 19 Comments »

Harriet the Spy

“You’re an individual, and you know something? That makes people nervous. And it’s gonna keep makin’ people nervous your whole life.”

July 10, 1996

HARRIET THE SPY is a theatrical motion picture offering from Nickelodeon, television’s foremost purveyors of double dares and super-sloppiness. It does in fact include green slime splashing on the face of an outraged mother, plus its heroine being covered in blue paint. But what you may not guess about this movie is that it’s extremely artful. The slime is a brief instance, not a set piece, and the paint is striking imagery in a heartbreaking sequence when the titular Harriet M. Welsch (Michelle Trachtenberg, The Adventures of Pete & Pete) tries to hold her head high while the entire sixth grade turns against her.

This is a really special movie that balances on overall feeling of quirkiness with an impressively naturalistic performance from the young lead. It paints a beautiful portrait of a city inhabited by different cultures and eccentrics and artists, while treating messy childhood emotions seriously. It’s about kids (and people in general) being curious about the world, following their passions, being their authentic selves, but trying not to mess up their friendships. I think it’s one of the great children’s movies of the era, though nobody else seemed to think so at the time. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 16th, 2026 | 24 Comments »

Evil Dead Burn

You know me – I Iove Sam Raimi, I love THE EVIL DEAD. Nobody will ever make an EVIL DEAD the same as Raimi did, but as far as horror franchising goes I think he’s got a good set up here. We have his original classic trilogy (1981-1993), which he was able to legacy-sequelize surprisingly well with a decades later tv series (2015-2018). That’s gonna be it for Bruce Campbell’s character Ash, and I think that’s fine. More than enough. Instead Raimi has turned to recruiting younger up-and-coming filmmakers to put their spin on movies in the same universe. They have some sort of Book of the Dead that summons some sort of Deadites, but they aren’t necessarily serialized, they’re mostly different incidents that stand on their own.

It didn’t seem like a popular opinion at the time, but I loved Fede Álvarez’s vicious remake EVIL DEAD (2013), and that has only solidified over the years. Lee Cronin’s EVIL DEAD RISE (2023) didn’t hit me as hard, but it’s a fun time and it’s nice to see somebody capture some of the EVIL DEAD spirit (or even try to define what that is, exactly) while telling a different story in a different setting (an apartment building).

That one having done well, producers Raimi, Campbell and Rob Tapert got the ball rolling for some more, and I’m very impressed by their choice of the French director Sébastien Vaniček. Like them I loved his debut INFESTED (2023), which is about a black market shoe salesman and rare animal enthusiast who causes his housing project to be overrun by deadly fast-growing spiders. It’s both smarter and more serious than that probly sounds, and it’s on Shudder.

Vaniček has reteamed with his INFESTED co-writer Florent Bernard for this one, and according to Fangoria they were given complete freedom. There are a few connections to the last installment, and mentions of things that could be setting up some future storyline, but for the most part this feels like its own standalone story. And thankfully RISES burned all the obvious callbacks, so Vaniček can just get down to business. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 13th, 2026 | 36 Comments »

Phenomenon

Big Willie Weekend, 1996

I was hesitant to watch PHENOMENON again, but it’s fine. It’s a corny but harmless drama/romance with sci-fi elements, directed by Jon Turteltaub (3 NINJAS, COOL RUNNINGS, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING) from a script by Gerald Di Pego (SHARKY’S MACHINE).

It stars John Travolta in his post-PULP-FICTION I’m Back period. GET SHORTY made the comeback seem permanent, but then nobody saw/liked WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, and it was followed by the middle-of-the-road sappiness double whammy of the angel movie MICHAEL and this. So it took doing his first John Woo movie to put a little more gas in the tank, at least for those of us wanting him to do movies we perceived as cool. PHENOMENON was a pretty big hit, though, and I didn’t hate it.

It’s set in a vast land of aged white farm houses with big porches, and with rusty pickup trucks parked nearby. This is what we learn from the opening credits montage and the very sentimental but not painful score by Thomas Newman (THE PLAYER) telling us how majestic and shit it is. Good ol’ wholesome small town utopia.

Travolta plays George Malley, a humble mechanic who enjoys gardening and has lots of friends who will hang out with him at the bar on his birthday. Unfortunately they do not include the furniture-making single mother he keeps asking out, Lace (Kyra Sedgwick, SINGLES). Maybe next time. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 10th, 2026 | 10 Comments »

All You Need Is Kill

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL is a 2025 anime movie that just came to blu-ray. Do I know what the title means? I do not. But if it sounds familiar and you can’t place it, it might be because EDGE OF TOMORROW was based on the same 2004 novel by Hiroshi Sakurzaka. Director Ken’ichirô Akimoto is a first-timer, but he’s been a cgi and animation visual effects artist for about 15 years and art director for POUPELLE OF CHIMNEY TOWN (2020). That was from this same studio, Studio 4°C, who pushed boundaries with MIND GAME and TEKKONKINKREET, and you might’ve seen their work on THE ANIMATRIX and BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHT.

The animation is definitely the first aspect of ALL YOU NEED IS KILL that jumped out at me. These days doing a whole animated movie with an unusual style is an act of rebellion. It has distinct character design, great camera movements, 3D effects within what appears to be drawings, nice use of film grain in flashbacks, some really cool POV shots, odd angles, the illusion of using particular lenses…

And if you remember EDGE OF TOMORROW you know this is a time loop movie, so I quickly realized how smart it was to make these early shots so interesting, because we’re going to see some of them repeated many times in different variations as she relives this day over and over. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 9th, 2026 | 2 Comments »

Theodore Rex

July 2, 1996 (in video stores)

Until now I had never seen THEODORE REX. Obviously I always intended to see it – I’m not a heathen. But I took my time, and also I always got it confused with TAMMY AND THE T-REX. Thankfully this Slam Evil Summer series gave me motivation to finally see it, so now I know what it’s all about, at least to the extent that one can know that just from watching it.

I need to come up with a name for this type of movie. It’s most similar to SUPER MARIO BROS., which also has dinosaurs and cyperpunky stuff, so I’m kinda thinking DinoPunk, Dino Noir, something like that. But they’re fantasy world-building movies, usually set in a dystopian future or alternate world, they’re usually sold as kids movies and have some aggressively juvenile humor (often perpetrated by buffoonish henchmen with wacky voices) but otherwise don’t really seem like they’re made that much for kids (like, this one has a murder investigation complete with dinosaur autopsy). Also for some reason they tend to feature souped-up garbage trucks. But the most distinguishing feature is that they’re a big mess that seems full of the sort of colorful gimmicks and special effects I love (matte paintings and huge soundstage sets depicting stylized cities, animatronic creatures) but none of it really coheres and the whole thing is a slog. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 8th, 2026 | 12 Comments »

The Nutty Professor (1996)

June 28, 1996

While the recently-minted superstar Jim Carrey was challenging himself (and getting paid well) with THE CABLE GUY, his ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE director was remaking Jerry Lewis’s 1963 movie THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. A challenge of a different sort, I guess, because it’s a big special effects movie. It was a huge hit (biggest comedy of 1996, and #5 movie overall), a comeback for Eddie Murphy, and even won an Oscar (best makeup for the legendary Rick Baker). Murphy is quite good in it. I always hated it though.

Sherman Klump (Murphy between VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN and MULAN) is a professor at Wellman College who is also heading the lab’s groundbreaking DNA experiments on hamsters. He happens to be quite obese, but he gets by, and he’s very good natured. I think people like him, with the exception of his less-than-one-dimensionally uptight boss, Dean Richmond (Larry Miller, RADIOLAND MURDERS), who hates his fucking guts and always stands around and/or hides in his classroom, making various outraged expressions at his activities.

The first joke in the movie (if you’re charitable enough to count it as a joke) is about Richard Simmons. In 1996 you couldn’t really address the topic of weight loss without the observation “Can you believe that Richard Simmons!?” So Murphy plays “Lance Perkins,” not so much a parody as an imitation of Simmons. That makeup is a disturbing image to open on.

I think a joke in the next scene will give you a better idea of the strength and quality of wackiness in this picture. A couple are sitting on the grass at the college when a hamster somehow crawls up the leg of the man’s pants. The woman sees the bulge it creates, apparently believes he has a large boner wagging back and forth, and is very pleased by this. This is only the first of many hijinks involving the unlikely number of hamsters roaming free on campus due to Sherman not noticing that his ass bumped the “for some reason this lever opens all of the cages at the same time” lever on the way out of the lab. Whoops. When he goes into the dean’s office to be dressed down for it he notices, but is stopped from pointing out, that a hamster dangling from the light fixture takes a shit right into the dean’s coffee.

Friends, welcome to COMEDY! Comedy is illegal today, but in 1996 it was a way of life! (read the rest of this shit…)

July 6th, 2026 | 23 Comments »

Striptease

June 28, 1996

STRIPTEASE was one of the most derided movies of 1996, and the winner of six Razzies including Worst Picture. There is no question in my mind that that particular distinction can be attributed to the Razzie’s usual misogynistic and puritanical hatred of sexuality. The winners of the previous three years were INDECENT PROPOSAL, COLOR OF NIGHT and SHOWGIRLS. Hollywood could have listened to them, but instead here was Demi Moore briefly nude and showing off her body in tame but sexually provocative dances – this could not stand. She had to be punished. That’s what those fuckers were like back then, and much of society went along with it. (In fact, it also won top honors at the competing “Stinkers Bad Movie Awards.”)

I think when you look at Moore’s performance with today’s eyes it’s impressive: she clearly put alot of work into getting into ridiculous shape and learning to dance, similar to the dedication she would show a year later for a very different but also physically challenging role in G.I. JANE. (which the Razzies would also give her Worst Actress for, the absolute clowns). And she makes the character grounded and sincere. I like her in it. Unfortunately, the worst guy you know sometimes makes a good point, and I have to concede that STRIPTEASE is not a good movie.

Moore plays Erin Grant, who started working as an exotic dancer at the Eager Beaver in Miami after she was fired from her job as a secretary at the FBI. She’s trying to save up the money to appeal her child custody case because her ex Darrell (Robert Patrick, DOUBLE DRAGON) has their 7-year-old Angela (Rumer Willis in her second movie) and uses her as bait for his scam of stealing and reselling wheelchairs. But then some unrelated trouble falls into Erin’s lap. (I would make some kind of lapdance reference here, but I’m too proud. So forget it.) (read the rest of this shit…)

July 3rd, 2026 | 13 Comments »

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