All posts by Louis Fowler

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Demolition Man (1993)

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Most of Southern California being on fire reminds me Demolition Man, but, of course, with different results. The movie begins with the Hollywood Hills on fire, a dire prophecy that has come to pass, sadly — especially since Sylvester Stallone is now an “emissary” to Hollywood by Donald Trump. (Truthfully, I didn’t see that coming, palling around with other has-beens like Mel Gibson and Jon Voight. Yeccccch!)

With hits like Rocky, Rambo, and Rhinestone, Stallone was one of the biggest actors in the world. However, Demolition Man is Stallone’s absolute triumph: a somewhat smart, pretty inventive sci-fi-action film with enough explosives and unmatched machismo to create a spandex-clad gumbo — in other words, one of 1993’s most underrated and unappreciated films!

In an alternate 1996, L.A. is a total war zone. Beefy cop Sgt. John Spartan (the beefy Stallone) goes into the inner city to take down terrorist mastermind Simon Phoenix (the fully engaging Wesley Snipes) and is penalized for his trouble: He is cryogenically frozen. Wowza!

In a future 2032, L.A. is renamed San Angeles, a utopian megalopolis with no violence, hunger or, apparently, working toilets. That all changes when Phoenix and Spartan are revived and compete in the world’s biggest dick contest. Of course, the peaceful members of society get murdered, killed and executed, all at the same time.

In between exhibitions at the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, artist Marco Brambilla directed the film. His swerves on the well-paved road between precise critiques of pop culture and disparate art culture serve the purpose to entertain.

And, really, it’s not that dumb. I can’t stress this enough!

The movie also casts the charming Sandra Bullock and the grating Denis Leary, and they serve their comical purposes. But, once again, the penile swagger of Stallone and Snipes create a dream team of ethical counterpoints, trading stereotypical non-PC lines and acts of brutality in a two-hour time frame.

In other words, it was a smart movie from stupid people. Right?

Demolition Man, with its end credits song by Sting — always a banger — is a fully satisfying film and one of Stallone’s last major works. Two years later, all that goodwill was tossed in the trash can with Judge Dredd and, well, we all know how that turned out. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Shape of Water (2017)

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When Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water came out to rave reviews in 2017, I was so completely transfixed with the simple language of lush storytelling and dramatic fantasy about a mute, lovelorn woman who impossibly falls in love with a semi-magical gill-man.
 
Sadly, most of my then-colleagues called it — and, frankly, still call it — “the fish-fucking movie.” From that moment on, I realized my tastes probably will differ from others’. But The Criterion Collection ’s new disc willfully transcends all the insults and barbs the film was given; The Shape of Water goes beyond monster-movie milieu, invigorating and reenergizing the creature feature for the new-ish millennium.
 
And, of course, it’s just a damn good movie.
 
With the sheer eroticism of the Creature from the Black Lagoon grasping at Julie Adams’ legs, The Shape of Water distills the essence with the voiceless Elisa (the lithe Sally Hawkins) in Cold War-era 1962. Trudging through life as a janitor in a secret government laboratory, she comes upon the lab’s new capture: a South American amphibian man (the emotive Doug Jones).

Trapped in the lab, the gill-man is put through tests and brutal exercises to determine his usefulness as a weapon, mostly administered by the sadistic Strickland (a wholly affecting performance from Michael Shannon). During this horrific tribulation, Elisa falls in love with the Gill-man — it’s a fish out of water story, literally.
 
With help from her working-class friends, Elisa breaks him out and tries to hide him until the tide comes in. As their passion intensifies, the gill-man gets sicker without the ocean to revive him, only to learn their love is more than natural and, in the end, supernatural.
 
Without a doubt, this movie took del Toro from the horror-film loving character behind Hellboy and Pacific Rim, as well as the Mexican-lensed The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, into the realm of fantastic world cinema. The success of The Shape of Water led to four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture Oscars. For once, I was right!
 
The film captures not only the weighty, yet weightless feeling of dangerously falling in love, but how to deal with the mindless automatons who automatically try to dissuade you. From the homophobic clerk at lunch to the buttoned-down brownshirt who craves cruelty, the problem is them, not you.
 
As The Shape of Water literally and metaphorically challenges conventions, it creates a beautiful world where love always wins out — even in the deep dark sea. At least that’s what I believe. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Frankie Freako (2024)

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I loved the idea of Garbage Pail Kids and desperately wanted to collect them, trade them and engage in their anti-social behavior. Especially their anti-social behavior.

Sadly, my mother hated them. I wasn’t allowed to collect them, manhandle them, even give a look at the disgusting, fetid, stomach-churning cards. Of course, it made me the odd man out in 1985. Thinking about it, I do wonder how my life would have turned out if I got to take part with the snotty crowd …

Either way, when The Garbage Pail Kids Movie came out in 1987, it ostracized the GPK into nostalgic oblivion — until now, that is, with Frankie Freako coming upon the scene and wiping its butt with it, making me remember that wave of mutilation.

Frankie Freako is the movie that Garbage Pail Kids should have been and, as you can tell, wasn’t. A mixture of gross-out humor and full-on Pop Art sensibilities, it’s all played in a mockingly daft tribute. Frankie Freako provides both a spot-on parody of the “of their time” shock products and a snot-riddled love letter to the terrible fictionalized characters and their very freaky situations.

Freakout!

In the movie’s self-referential, low-rent 1980s universe, utterly boring Conor (Conor Sweeney) leads a sterile life of compressed stability with his British wife. Acting on a TV ad for a 1-800 number, he invites the ultimate party animal, Frankie Freako, and his soft-foam diminutive compatriots to the ultimate freak-out.

Understandably, things get very freaky.

As Frankie and friends tear up his place, Conor winces in discomfort. Eventually, they all come to an understanding that it’s okay to be freaky. But when they’re transported to the planet of the freak, they try to get home in the freakiest way possible, which usually means farting, boogers and other bodily distractions.

Although its budget is moderately low and puppet-rigging is quite lax, it completely works. The limited money makes it work, giving Frankie and friends a ribald, sleazy, grotesque personality that is infectious. The live-action actors, really, are secondary to the Freakos, but it really lets them be their whole slobbish personalities and all their affections and it truly works.

With knowing, mocking direction from Sweeney’s fellow Astron-6 member Steven Kostanski, it’s got a rocking attitude with sheer comic depravity. Besides GPK, Frankie wears its stop-motion inspiration on its sleeve, including Ghoulies, Critters and The Gate. It’s a near-perfect distillation of the wack pack of pint-sized monsters on the loose, making everything in its path disgusting, rotten and, of course, totally freaky. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

Gummo (1997)

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WTF

A white-trash travelogue through the scabies-infested underwear of the crusty underworld of destitute hell, Gummo is the overpriced souvenir photo you get the world’s worst gift shop.

Featuring budding sociopaths, disabled sex fiends and freshly killed pets, the rancid smell of this movie is a combination of rotting trash, decayed carcasses and dirty jean shorts. Filmed in a cinéma vérité-style anti-style somewhat within the boundless boundaries of the supposed Dogme 95 movement, it’s an art film for the perpetually artless.

In the ruins of Xenia, Ohio, a traumatic tornado has decimated the mostly white population and their malformed brethren in a drastic cycle of abject poverty, serious non-education and, for the most part, death metal. Gummo starts with an emaciated boy in dingy bunny ears, spitting and urinating from an overpass. From this first minute, things get progressively worse with the mostly amateur cast of jobless ne’er-do-wells excreting the most anti-social behavior.

In small, disparate sections, a kid feeds glass-riddled food to stray cats, platinum blondes with puffy nipples dance on a bed, skinhead brothers engage in bareknuckle horseplay, a pair of foulmouthed youngsters shoot cap guns, director Harmony Korine sexually assaults a gay little person, and, in the most suitable section of the film, the world championship of chair wrestling goes down.

Even with all that, Gummo has a through line of two junior delinquents like to huff glue, score with an underage prostitute, murder a comatose granny, drown numerous kittens and, worst of all, take baths in the foulest green water while eating sparse spaghetti.

Known for his shock-based indie features like Spring Breakers, Korine has assembled a stellar cast of the worst possible losers, users and in the case of Chloe Sevigny, poseurs. It’s a remarkably pathetic time at the movies — and one that is infinitely watchable.

It’s a totally class-based scare film about that one house on the block whose residents drunkenly play their music too loud at 3 a.m. and then pistol-whip you for complaining. You know the one!

Some people think Gummo is truly destitute outsider art — actually, most of Korine’s work is like that, but that’s a whole other thing — leading me to wonder if this is an actual narrative film or a documentary of the most homeless order.

Or both?

Either way, it’s that type of movie that will make you claw deeper into your white-bread Christian worldview of opioid-addicted sinners or expand your holy subconscious into venereal medicines usually administered though the penis. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

Slade in Flame (1975)

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WTF

Mistakenly thinking they were the glam-rock band Sweet (the passionate ones, oh yeah!, according to “Ballroom Blitz”), I now realize the musically similar band Slade is, of course, the glam-rock band Slade. (But no disrespect to Sweet!)

Known for their kinda-sorta bottom-tier glam-slams in the ’70s, Slade had a few hits like “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” “Cum on Feel the Noize” and that one festive Christmas song that everyone in Britain seems to like. In America, they are incorrectly known as a Quiet Riot cover band.

In 1975, at the height of polyester-uniform infamy, the band was an overseas hit machine that somehow starred in the rabble-rousing, rags-to-riches fable Slade in Flame. They play the fictional band Flame, a working-class combo that starts from the bottom and, in a drastic move, stays there.

The movie, with the benefit of hindsight, goes nowhere but down, down, down.

After being the backing musicians for a tepid wedding singer with a lounge act that really is terrible, the guys — Dave Hill, Jim Lee, Don Powell and Noddy Holder — drop all their pretensions and precognitions and become the band Flame, a very popular (I guess) but volatile musical act.

But this is no A Hard Day’s Night, as Flame burns out with stuffy money men, wanton groupies and a seemingly terrorist organization that takes down pirate radio stations of the middle of an estuary — the brightest spot in the movie, referencing Radio Caroline — as they all tire of fame and stardom, disbanding after a (pretty good) show.

As expected, the members of Slade are semi-passable as working-class musicians and real ne’er-do-wells. With footage of the screaming audience passing around Flame merchandise, banners and signs, I was led to feel that the act was truly real.

And that’s great, but the one thing that should work here is the soundtrack. Sadly, it’s ho-hum, reworking Slade’s already formulaic music that already doesn’t do much, except go in one ear and out the other. A band with their own movie should have some real rippers, but instead they had to concentrate on their acting. And scene!

Though Slade in Flame has been rediscovered by a minute cult audience over the past decade, there are so many other gems in the rock era to cover. While the real Slade is a serviceable band that can rest on their laurels; much like the wholly fictional Flame, they should go their separate ways with no reunion tour. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.