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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If you consider yourself any of the below, chances are I hate you:
• influencer
• thought leader
• public figure
• storyteller

All are narcissistic labels for that most 21st-century of phenomena: the “internet celebrity,” famous for being famous. Fewer targets mark themselves more ripe for skewering, which is why something like the mockumentary The Social Ones holds delicious appeal. I say “something like” because for all its potential, the movie is toothless where it should be ruthless.

The Social Ones is written, directed and produced by tyro Laura Kosann. She and her sister, Danielle Kosann, also star as the sane ones in this ensemble comedy. Working at the thankfully fictional magazine The National Influencer, they feverishly prep for — and stress-puke over — the following month’s fifth-anniversary cover shoot, which will showcase such superstars of social media as a teen-dream Snapchat king (Colton Ryan), a demanding Instagram fashion model (Amanda Giobbi), a high-strung YouTube chef (Desi Domo, The Conjuring), an insecure vlogger (Nicole Kang, TV’s Batwoman) and “meme god” Kap Phat Jawacki (Setareki Wainiqolo). For the sake of story, the stakes could not be any lower.

Although the film is clearly modeled from the Christopher Guest template, it is difficult to tell whether the jokes are driven by the script or improv. Either way, with few exceptions, they’re simply not funny, no matter how hard the actors try; unfortunately, most of them do so by cranking their exaggeration dials three or four notches further than the illusory nature of the mockumentary subgenre recommends, if not demands.

If Kosann had trimmed her scenes to align with the short attention span of the digital generation, the film could settle into a more natural comedic rhythm. As is, the bits drag on and on, with the most glaring offender being Kap Phat creating a meme in real time from disparate elements on a huge bulletin board — the kind you see on every obsessive-detective crime show, full of clippings and pushpins and string connecting them. The sequence is painful.

The movie is not a complete #fail, even if each occasional plus gets canceled out. Domo’s Holly Hunter lilt is endearing, as opposed to Giobbi’s annoying Judy Garland. Peter Scolari delivers an amusing-enough cameo, whereas Richard Kind grates. I enjoyed the magazine intern (Nicky Maindiratta) harboring a stalker-like same-sex crush on Ryan’s Snapchat kid, but we’re ghosted by a payoff. Kosann nails several aspects of the characters, from the minor (the mangling of “important” as “impor’ant”) to the major (vacuous self-importance), so she obviously knows her subjects well. I simply wish she had followed through on the setup by satirizing them instead of celebrating them. —Rod Lott

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In many sports, a “hot dog” is typically a nickname for a skillful show-off, but, in context of the ski-slope sex comedy Hot Dog … the Movie, I’m pretty sure it means penis … the movie!

It’s the loose story of Harkin (Patrick Houser), a farm boy with high hopes to win an international skiing competition, coached by an American horndog in Tahoe, Dan (An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton). While learning the ins and outs of the slopes, Harkin also takes time for some ins and outs with the female clientele, most namely Shannon Tweed (Possessed by the Night) in a scene that really should have been included as one of the AFI’s 100 Masturbatory Moments.

In between the skillfully shot sequences of downhill racing and snowbound ballet, there’s also less-skillfully shot wet T-shirt contests, sexual spa antics and a ski-lift blowie or two — I guess for the nonsporty dudes who can’t get off on every twisting helicopter or spread eagle attempted on that fresh powder.

Speaking of powder, I really hope everyone involved was on some primo cocaine during the filming of this, most notably writer Mike Marvin and director Peter Markle. By the grace of God, they took about 15 minutes of actual film and stretched it into an overlong 99 minutes, just by adding plenty of softcore sex, slalom six-packs and a few somewhat rocking songs about love being at the top of a mountain — something I’m sure we all can identify with. —Louis Fowler

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