Comedy + genre (Fantasy, Horror, and Science-fiction)

When it comes to making a hit movie, studios tend to stick to the formula they know works. It’s rare that an original film actually makes a mark, and when it happens, it’s usually an independent feature with the freedom to think outside the box. Take Repo Man, the 1984 independent film that is one of the most original movies ever.

Repo Man marked the directorial debut of Alex Cox, who crafted a narrative that defies easy categorization. The film is a captivating blend of dark sci-fi, crime, and comedy. It all comes together in an original mix that still manages to enthrall audiences decades after its release, cementing the feature as a cult classic worthy for any cinephile’s watchlist.

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With a 98 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, not only is Repo Man Certified Fresh, but it’s gone down in cinematic history as one of the best cult classics of all time.

Famed critic Roger Ebert rated the film 3 out of 4 stars (a high praise from the often cynical gentleman), and stated, “Most of those bad movies were so cynically constructed out of formula ideas and “commercial” ingredients that watching them was an ordeal. Repo Man comes out of left field, has no big stars, didn’t cost much, takes chances, dares to be unconventional, is funny, and works. There is a lesson here.”

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Pete, a washed-up veteran comedian, must find an opener for his upcoming comedy tour. Pete is introduced to Ethan by his girlfriend Stephanie, who convinces him to take this young comedian on tour as his opener. Things start to take a wacky turn when Pete finds out Ethan is a vampire, and their tour goes from cheap motels, morning DJs, dive bars, and dinners to opening up for the Russell Peters special in Vegas. All while Ethan and Pete attempt to bridge the gap between being real and exploiting his vampirism.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10368294

While England is undoubtedly the target of criticism when it comes to the many facets of its cultural offerings – say cuisine, for example – there’s no denying that the country provides some truly breathtaking natural scenery. It’s equally valid that English people possess offbeat humour and sometimes outright weirdness. In very few movies is this combination as succinctly married as in Ben Wheatley’s 2012 black comedy Sightseers.

Sightseers focuses on the journey of an admittedly odd couple, Chris and Tina, played by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, respectively, as they take a short holiday through the English countryside in a caravan. However, there’s a darkness to the pair that leads them to commit a series of violent murders, taking their inner turmoil out on a handful of unsuspecting victims.

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Throughout the film, Wheatley details the stranger side of life in rural England, beginning with the rather uncomfortable relationship between its protagonists. Weirdness drips throughout the runtime of Sightseers, whether it be in the sickening nostalgia of Tina’s needy mother or in the violent banality of Chris’ immoral actions, then made all the more bizarre by the pair’s aggressive lovemaking.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10284037

Shaun Of The Dead will return to cinemas later this year to mark the 20th anniversary of the iconic British comedy.

The iconic comedy – which starred Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as two no-hopers navigating a zombie apocalypse in Britain – arrived in cinemas 20 years ago today (April 9).

Now, it’s been confirmed that Universal will treat audiences to another slice of fried gold when the film returns to cinemas at an unconfirmed date later this week.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10233305

Via Gamesradar:

While it was uploaded on April 4, Catsuka, a Twitter account dedicated to anime news, delighted its followers by sharing the link to Sony-owned channel Throwback Toons two days later. The tweet explained that the hosting was entirely legal, too, which helped those thinking it might be too good to be true to enjoy it...

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The People's Joker is unlike any other superhero film (or any movie in general), and its strengths lie in its differences, dark humor, and intriguing and thoughtful character development. The superhero parody film is directed and co-written by Vera Drew, who also stars as the titular character — Joker the Harlequin — with Bri LeRose also co-writing. While on the outside it might look like another live-action version of the Joker (and Harley Quinn), The People's Joker is able to stand out from the rest.

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One of the best (and often overlooked) corners of Hollywood is the superhero parody genre. Given the apparent superhero movie fatigue in audiences in the 2020s, satire of these movies is warmly welcomed. As a result, The People's Joker is an exciting and fresh addition to the superhero parody genre that delivers numerous laughs by poking fun at various renditions of Batman, the Joker, Penguin, and other DC Comics characters that have plagued the media for decades.

While it rarely takes itself seriously, the dark comedy seamlessly weaves heartbreaking tales (like Joker the Harlequin's turbulent relationship with her mother and the abusive and toxic romance between Joker the Harlequin and Mr. J) throughout the movie. A viewer could be crying from laughter during one scene and tearing up due to Joker the Harlequin's harrowing journey in the next. Thankfully, The People's Joker has a (somewhat) hopeful and content ending.

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The People's Joker not only separates itself from other movies in the superhero genre but also from superhero parodies. It's not comparable to The Boys, Invincible, or Kick-Ass, due to its distinguished and important story revolving around a transgender woman in Gotham. It's hilarious, heartbreaking, distinctive, significant, and just what Hollywood needs after countless DC and Marvel projects (including the upcoming Joker sequel Joker: Folie à Deux). This superhero parody is just as good as Marvel and DC films (it may even be better than most of them).

Created and written by Ryan J. Brown, Wreck series two is set in the months after the events of series one’s shocking blood-soaked conclusion. We re-join Jamie, Vivian and their found family of survivors back on land, as they strike back against Velorum, the corporate murder machine that claimed Jamie’s sister. In a daring and desperate attempt to bring the Company down, the gang go undercover to infiltrate Velorum’s newest venture – an exclusive ‘wellness’ festival for millionaires in the remote Slovenian countryside. Relationships fray, blood pours, and not everyone will be making it out alive. It’s going to be a cleansing experience…

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We learned last week that iconic label Anchor Bay Entertainment is coming back to life here in 2024, and founders Thomas Zambeck and Brian Katz have announced this morning that they have acquired the North American rights to the horror/comedy Crust, which will have its release later this year.

Directed by Sean Whalen (The People Under The Stairs), who co-wrote the film with Jim Wald, Crust stars Whalen, Daniel Roebuck (Rob Zombie’s The Munsters), Rebekah Kennedy (Two Witches), Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp), and Ricky Dean Logan (Back to the Future II), with Shawntay Dalon (“Detroiters”) and Alan Ruck (“Succession”).

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In Crust, Vegas Winters, a depressed washed-up child actor, fled Tinseltown and now owns and lives in a rundown laundromat. He finds lost socks in the machines and uses them to soak up all his bodily fluids. One night his tears of anguish turn the pile into a loving sock monster named Crust who becomes his protector and friend.

Meanwhile he has a new girlfriend, a paranormal investigator poking around, and an old two-faced costar that is forcing him to join a reboot of their 90s sitcom. As Vegas’s life begins to spiral, Crust eliminates his enemies with deadly consequences.

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After a very long gestation period and extensive reshoots, Lionsgate’s “Borderlands,” an adaptation of the space Western science fantasy video game, finally arrives in theaters this summer.

Directed by Eli Roth (“Thanksgiving”), the star-studded cast includes Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Édgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bobby Lee. People revealed a first look today, Blanchett playing the infamous outlaw character Lilith and the rest of the gang playing its motley crew gang of characters.

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Here’s the synopsis from Lionsgate

Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous bounty hunter with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home, Pandora, the most chaotic planet in the galaxy. Her mission is to find the missing daughter of Atlas (Ramírez), the universe’s most powerful S.O.B. Lilith forms an unexpected alliance with a ragtag team of misfits – Roland (Hart), a seasoned mercenary on a mission; Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound protector; Tannis (Curtis), the oddball scientist who’s seen it all; and Claptrap (Black), a wiseass robot. Together, these unlikely heroes must battle an alien species and dangerous bandits to uncover one of Pandora’s most explosive secrets. The fate of the universe could be in their hands – but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other. Based on one of the best-selling videogame franchises of all time, welcome to BORDERLANDS.

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A pair of whacked-out cartoon-like exterminator/hitmen kill the owner of a burglar-alarm company, and stalk the partner who hired them, his wife, and a nerd framed for the murder, who tells the story in flashback from the electric chair.

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Out of seemingly nowhere, we have a trailer for Boy Kills World. And – oh, my – this looks absolutely barking! It stars Bill Skarsgard (IT) as Boy, a deaf mute with the inner voice of a videogame commentator, seeking revenge for the murder of his family. And that revenge seems to involve a lot of daft costumes, over the top violence, and breakfast cereal.

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It is increasingly weird to recall that for a while, French director Bruno Dumont was the kind of filmmaker who reminded you, often forcibly and somewhat against your will, that the word “auteur” contains most of the letters of “austere.” “The Empire,” another of the director’s proudly off-kilter comedies that pitches the bumbling denizens of a small French village into a vast, sinister conspiracy extending far beyond their foreshortened horizons, hovers several light years — and two janky light sabers — away from austerity. Unfortunately, though, the air out there is also a little thin on hilarity, with the film’s one-gag setup becoming stretched to the point that it doesn’t even matter that it’s a pretty good gag.

The humor, as ever with the Dumont of “Li’l Quinquin” and “Slack Bay,” derives largely from the collision of the grandiose with the drolly mundane. This time out, harking back to, but confusingly not quite reprising, the premise of his 2018 TV miniseries “Coincoin and the Extra-Humans” the same coastal village featured in “Quinquin” and “Coincoin” is the inexplicable locus for an alien invasion. In fact the alien race, known as the 0s (zeroes), whose mothership is an echoingly empty replication of the palace at Versailles (or perhaps Versailles is imagined to be its replica here) has been infiltrating the village for some time now, in a process sadly not as scatologically inspired as in “Coincoin” where possessed humans give birth to their own alien clones by farting them out through their rear ends. Indeed, one can’t help but feel we’ve been a little cheated by the comparatively tame and tasteful method (never directly visualized, or even clearly outlined) by which these alien entities colonize and eventually take over their human hosts.

IMDb for the film and the TV series, which sounds much more entertaining.

Despite its morally reprehensible content, the 80s sci-fi comedy flick Weird Science just got an upgrade being released on Blu-ray. If you’ve never seen the movie, it’s a cult classic of the decade for a reason, and now you can view it in the best resolution on disk.

Though much of the content of the film is not quite up to par in terms of general moral standards of today, when you watch the movie for what it is, it’s easy to see how it became such a John Hughes classic. To put it bluntly, it’s wrong but entertaining.

Out on Blu-Ray from Arrow.

A new wrestling related horror-comedy film is set to hit theaters, digital, and Screambox on February 9, 2024. The film, titled 'Here For Blood', is described as a "gory throwback to video store staples of the ’80s and ’90s.

'Here For Blood' is directed by Daniel Turres and written by James Roberts. The movie features stars like Shawn Roberts (Resident Evil), Maya Misaljevic (The Boys), Joelle Farrow (Under The Banner Of Heaven), and Tara Spencer-Nairn (Ghosts). Furthermore, wrestling stars such as Channing Decker and Marc Andre Boulanger will appear in the film as well.

The IMDb plot synopsis reads:

When his girlfriend, Phoebe, is swamped with college exams; Tom O'Bannon, a rowdy pro-wrestler struggling to make ends meet, agrees to fill in as a last-minute replacement for her well paying babysitting job. Tom arrives at an isolated family home where he meets the precocious 10-year-old Grace. What starts off as a quiet night of pizza and video games quickly spirals into bloody, violent chaos as Tom and Grace find themselves fighting for their lives when an otherworldly cult of masked intruders descend on the home.

Film and media company Buffalo 8 has acquired worldwide rights to “Invaders from Proxima B,” the science fiction comedy from writer-director-star Ward Roberts (“Westworld,” “Agents of SHIELD”).

The cast also includes Samantha Sloyan (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass”), Mike C. Nelson (“Shrinking,” “Black-ish”), Richard Riehle (“Office Space,” “Casino”), Jeremiah Birkett (“Black Cake,” “Euphoria”) and Sarah Lassez (“Nowhere,” “Lo”).

In the film, after a wise-cracking alien named Chuck (Roberts) crashes in the backyard, the Jankins family (Roberts, Sloyan) teams up with their new otherworldly friend to battle a dangerous array of pursuers.

Riley’s I’m a Virgo sticks out like its main character: a 13ft-tall Black teenager. The premise alone is outlandish enough; what Riley and his team do with it, and how they do it, make I’m a Virgo one of the most bracingly original things on our screens this year or any other. And one of the most revolutionary: the show culminates in a full-on, top to bottom critique of capitalism – in a show streaming on Amazon. How did he get away with it?

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The anti-establishment politics was one hurdle; another was how to actually make a show with a giant character, Riley admits. Cootie (played by Jharrel Jerome) is raised in seclusion by his regular-sized aunt and uncle, who fear how the outside world will respond to a supersized Black kid – with justification. The naive teen is welcomed by some local youths, but also prompts fear and hysteria, not least from the neighbourhood superhero: a hi-tech vigilante in an Iron Man vein with shades of Elon Musk (played by a hilariously sullen Walton Goggins), who flies around in a robotic suit, enforcing law and order.

This isn’t the half of it. Cootie’s love interest, Flora (Olivia Washington), lives at super-speed, so the entire world appears in slow motion to her – which makes for one of the weirdest love scenes ever filmed. There are also comic-book characters, cults and TV shows, not to mention cameos from the likes of Elijah Wood, Danny Glover and even the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (voicing a cartoon baby). Rather than glossy CGI, all of this is rendered with a charming old-school jankiness: using models, miniature and giant props, forced perspective, dolls, puppets, stop-motion animation. It’s a triumph of lo-fi craftsmanship.

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I’m a Virgo could really be seen as a subversive superhero show, and in that capacity it has proved uncannily prophetic, given the fortunes of the Marvel franchise and Musk this year. Goggins’s character, simply named Hero, is a self-absorbed entrepreneur who glorifies himself in his own comic books, and sets up Cootie as a monstrous adversary. But as Cootie’s politically aware colleague Jones explains, via a rousing sermon, Hero is part of the bigger problem of capital, labour, violence and law enforcement – he’s “a tool that helps capitalism run smoothly”.

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Will we see I’m a Virgo’s characters again, given the acclaim the series has received? Is there a season two on the horizon? “I definitely have other things in the pipeline,” says Riley. “Whether this is the last we’ll see of this world will be figured out very soon.” Either way, in a content-saturated landscape, I’m a Virgo found a way to distinguish itself, and proved that imagination and artistry are more important than budget. Hopefully, it has also shown other showrunners how bold and confrontational the small screen can be – especially when its goals go beyond simply entertainment.

One of my favourites.

Bill Goldberg plays the devil's son who lost a wager with an angel and was forced to spend 1000 years playing Santa, but now the wager of that time has run out, and good old Santa isn't so joyful anymore. He makes up for lost time and starts to kill people.

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Sasha is a young vampire with a serious problem: she's too sensitive to kill. When her exasperated parents cut off her blood supply, Sasha's life is in jeopardy. Luckily, she meets Paul, a lonely teenager with suicidal tendencies who is willing to give his life to save hers. But their friendly agreement soon becomes a nocturnal quest to fulfill Paul's last wishes before day breaks.

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Letterboxd's top horror of 2023

What would National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation look like if Clark and his family had to fight a bunch of killer elves? You can get a very, very close approximation in the new movie There’s Something in the Barn. It stars Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks, Silicon Valley) as a happy-go-lucky father who moves his family to Norway only to find that an actual elf lives in their barn. The elf is cool with the family being there... until they start breaking his rules. Then all hell breaks loose.

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And, as it seems we haven't yet mentioned the previously most recent Nic Cage Comedy +.genre film....

In this modern monster tale of Dracula's loyal servant, Renfield, the tortured aide to history's most narcissistic boss is forced to procure his master's prey and do his every bidding, no matter how debased. But now, after centuries of servitude, Renfield is ready to see if there's a life outside the shadow of The Prince of Darkness. If only he can figure out how to end his codependency.

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More Cage antics:

Dave Lizewski is an unnoticed high school student and comic book fan with a few friends and who lives alone with his father. His life is not very difficult and his personal trials not that overwhelming; however, one day he makes the simple decision to become a super-hero, even though he has no powers or training.

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More Nic Cage Comedy + genre outings:

A quiet drifter is tricked into a janitorial job at the now condemned Willy's Wonderland. The mundane tasks suddenly become an all-out fight for survival against wave after wave of demonic animatronics. Fists fly, kicks land, titans clash -- and only one side will make it out alive.

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The Nic Cage Comedy + genre "season" continues with Mom and Dad:

Something terrible is definitely happening in the a peaceful suburban community as, day by day, former caring parents mysteriously turn into ravenous carriers of an unfathomable pandemic that targets their offspring. Suddenly, like every son and daughter in the entire nation, teenage Carly and Josh Ryan must run for their lives, as the rage-filled murderous intent is as unstoppable as it is inexplicable. Before long, the Ryans' usual simmering familial tensions take on a completely different meaning. Kids, stop hiding. Mom and Dad love you so much.

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