A couple of years ago, director Kevin Smith had a heart attack that nearly killed him. Around that same time, I had a hemorrhagic stroke that nearly killed me. Since then, we both have attempted to get healthier to varying degrees, both physically and creatively.

Even though we don’t know each other and probably never will, I’ve felt a tenuous connection, creatively at least, to the man for over 20 years now. But while my creative wins and losses were kept mostly close to the chest, Smith’s highs and lows have been judiciously celebrated and gratuitously mocked by the same fair-weather fans who grew up with him.

But, as his latest flick, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, and the subsequent roadshow tour proves, many longtime patrons still support his comedic arts and other ventures — especially the over-40 crowd, of which I am dutifully a part of — and still appreciate a thoroughly entertaining Kevin Smith film. They do exist.

As funny and fresh as the spiritual prequel, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, was back in 2001, Smith ably mocks the current trends of Hollywood while defiantly taking part in them; having grown much older and forced to face life, Reboot finds a much older Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) still hanging out in front of the Quick Stop and, even among them, it’s obvious the man-child bit is getting a bit tiresome.

While retracing the steps of Strike Back by having the duo shut down a reboot of the Bluntman and Chronic franchise, Smith throws a spanner in the works by introducing Jay’s daughter, Milly (Harley Quinn Smith, Holidays). As foul-mouthed as her dad, she and a few troubled friends tag along to California to Chronic-Con, with various pitfalls along the way, such as vengeful Uber drivers, the Ku Klux Klan and the American legal system.

Mewes carries most of the film on his back, delivering a performance that delicately teeters from pornographically hilarious to philosophically heartfelt. And I know that people like to give Smith shit for casting his own daughter, but as a proud father, it’s the same thing that any of us do if we had the capabilities and, to be honest, she not that bad as Jay’s child.

Of course, the fan-friendly film ties into a world of meta-criticism as Smith also stars as himself, jorts and all, poking fun at his persona, as well as the View Askewniverse he created and, thankfully, never forgotten about. It allows him — and me, too, honestly — a chance to look back in absolute appreciation while acknowledging the fact that sometimes we all have to grow up or die trying.  —Louis Fowler

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Record City pays tribute to a time when Americans bought recorded music — on vinyl, cassettes and eight-track tapes — from national chains with food-based names like Peaches, Coconuts and the scalp-scratching Licorice Pizza. The store in the lone film from TV director Dennis Steinmetz (he of the notorious The World of Sid & Marty Krofft at the Hollywood Bowl special), however, is simply Record City, fittingly generic.

Despite a then-all-star cast of dozens, Record City has no plot, being nothing more than a snapshot of a single day inside those poster-covered walls. As with the same year’s lamentable Skatetown U.S.A., which shares a cast member in comedy vacuum Ruth Buzzi, it abstains from story to present a loosely strung collection of low-stakes bits. Jumping from character to character with barely an arc in its way, it resembles one of those “A Mad Peek Behind the Scenes of” two-page spreads Mad magazine used to do, in which the totality of the place in question was presented in a single image from a God’s-eye view; no matter where you looked, something was happening.

Here, that includes:
• the greasy store manager (Michael Callan, 1988’s Freeway) sexually harassing employees and forcing himself on customers
• the nice-guy employee (Dennis Bowen, Van Nuys Blvd.) pining for the attention of the good-girl employee (Wendy Schaal, Munchies)
• a cop (Sorrell Booke, Boss Hogg of TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard) standing on a toilet in hopes of catching a serial shoplifter called The Chameleon (Frank Gorshin, Hollywood Vice Squad) while a hick goober named Pokey (Ed Begley Jr., Amazon Women on the Moon) plots a robbery
• F Troop second banana Larry Storch as a deaf customer and Alan Oppenheimer (1973’s Westworld) as a blind customer
• L.A. DJ Rick Dees wearing a gorilla arm while hosting a parking-lot talent contest featuring the likes of Gallagher, the Chicken Lady, Razzie Pee Willie and other Gong Show-level acts
• singer-songwriter Kinky Friedman playing himself and copping a feel
• Ted Lange, aka Your Bartender of TV’s The Love Boat, doing a robot dance
• Harold Sakata, aka Goldfinger’s Oddjob, basically playing Oddjob again, but as a homosexual

I don’t even have room to mention the skateboarders, the hookers, the Nazi engineer or Tim Thomerson’s testicular trauma. There’s a lot going on, and yet nothing going on. It’s the kind of movie whose screenplay (by Ron Friedman, Murder Can Hurt You!) ends by asking the ensemble cast to run in single file and yell, which, mood depending, is not necessarily a negative. —Rod Lott

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To watch VHYes is to watch what happens when a boy named Ralph is gifted with a VHS camera for Christmas ’87 and proceeds to use his parents’ wedding video to record his harmless household pranks, all whoopee cushions and watermelons. Then he learns you can hook the camera up to record live TV, and the clips he captures as he channel-surfs is what we see.

That includes an aerobics exercise show, a crime procedural, a cowboy-themed kids’ series, a local newscast, a cloning sitcom titled Ten of the Same and the QVC-esque Goods Channel (complete with Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich’s Thomas Lennon playing pitchman). The standouts are the Antiques Roadshow-style What You Think This Might Be? (“This was a receptacle for hearts …”) and the Bob Ross parody Painting with Joan, with Role Models’ Kerri Kenney as an unhinged artist.

Not everything Ralph (Mason McNulty, Assimilate) lands on is worth a flip; Interludes with Lou, a public access broadcast of an awkward teen (Charlyne Yi, Knocked Up) interviewing punk bands, goes on too long. That goes double for Blood Files, spoofing the true-crime documentary with the story of a supposedly haunted sorority house. More than making up for the dip are SFW scenes from a pair of porno movies, Sexy Swedish Illegal Aliens from Space: XXX and the global warming-themed Hot Winter, both expertly played to the deadpan hilt.

From a hair-growth product to a home security system, commercials appear here and there, none more notable than the Susan Sarandon-narrated spot for the Soundwall 2000, which shields your lover’s ears from hearing you poop. You get all of this and more — psychotic break included — in an über-economical 72 minutes! Director and co-writer Jack Henry Robbins (son of Sarandon and Tim Robbins, unrecognizable in his cameo) may not know how to end his cathode-ray circus — and I didn’t want him to — but up until then, he expertly orchestrates the anarchy in which anything goes … as long as everything takes a dark turn. Fans of modern absurdist humor like The State, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and, well, anything on Adult Swim will take to it like metal fillings to a magnet. It’s like Amazon Women on the Moon with injections and/or ingestions of AFV, ADD, LSD, OMG and WTF. —Rod Lott

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You know what the Academy Award-winning film Rain Man was missing? A sneak peek at the upcoming Super Mario Bros. 3 video game!

Thankfully, this was generously rectified in The Wizard, the 1989 cult film starring then teen dream Fred Savage and current indie queen Jenny Lewis as two kids taking possibly autistic little brother Jimmy (Luke Edwards) to the Nintendo-sponsored gaming competition Video Armageddon at Universal Studios.

While many proto-nerds were pumped for Batman that summer, most of the kids I knew were eager to see this quasi-promotional flick because it featured not only a glimpse of the then-unreleased new Super Mario game, but what was possibly the coolest gaming device ever … until you actually used it: the Power Glove.

I wasn’t that excited for it, though, mostly because my brother and I lost out on getting a Nintendo the previous year; while my parents were out shopping one Saturday afternoon, we decided to coat the entire side of our farmhouse in thick, red-staining mud. (Honestly, I think they just didn’t want to spend the hundred bucks on the now-ancient console and used the wet dirt as an excuse. Bastards!)

Still, The Wizard mostly holds up if you lived in that era. It’s pretty amazing, cinematically, to remember there was an internet-free period when trios of youths traveled across the country, got viciously beaten up, chased by skunky private investigators, entered national 8-bit gaming competitions and, in the case of Lewis, falsely accused men of touching her prepubescent breasts. What a time to have been alive! —Louis Fowler

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Circa 2000, Troma’s Terror Firmer was one of a handful of discs I purchased when I picked up my first DVD player and man, what a high point that was. I must had watched the film a hundred times that summer and, even worse, tried to show it to every single person who dared set foot in my then-hovel.

As impressionable as I was back then, true to form, I firmly believed Terror Firmer to be more than just another Troma flick; I believed it to be director Lloyd Kaufman’s testament to his life in independent cinema, straight from the fart heart.

Twenty years later, while much of the offensive humor is now, admittedly, “of the time,” the spirit of the film and what it stands for is still more important than ever, an idealized and wholly personal take on the now long-dead sentiment of art for art’s sake, something this generation has forgotten in the search for easy cash and easier fame.

On the set of blind director Larry Benjamin’s (a meta-Kaufman) latest Toxic Avenger flick, the cast and crew of the film are graphically murdered by a long cool woman (?) in a black dress, seemingly with an ax to grind (literally) against independent film. But even that’s a minor quibble when compared to the constant trouble that goes on behind the scenes.

Besides the ample nudity that is more questionable than erotic, there are plenty of gross-out gags and gag-out grossness, such as busty actor Joe Fleishaker chewing on his own guts as he’s mutilated by an escalator; caged monster Ron Jeremy singing “Amazing Grace” as his appendages are hacked off; and, most famously, Yaniv Sharon as a P.A. with a tiny pecker who goes on an all-nude tour of NYC before having his head crushed by a piece of Troma’s best stock footage.

And while all of that still works in goo-covered spades, the oft-repeated rallying cry of “Let’s make some art!” is the message of this medium; if you have a vision, you’ll do anything to get it up on the screen, even if it means capturing random acts of tractor-truck maiming, dill-pickle coitus or transsexual immolation. It’s something that Troma’s been doing it for well over 40 years, dollar signs be damned. —Louis Fowler

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