Let’s get the biggest letdown out of the way: Unfortunately, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 doesn’t feature the 1981 pop hit “Mickey” by Toni Basil. The flick does, however, have Toni Collette (Hereditary) obsessing over various sauces. I guess that’s a decent enough consolation.

Beyond the sauce, Mickey 17 is a compelling, yet quite a bit weaker satire from South Korea’s best-known director. While it certainly won’t receive the same critical celebration as 2018’s Parasite, it still holds a comfortable place among a stellar filmography. That said, if you’d sooner watch Mother or Memories of Murder over Okja or Snowpiercer, this one might not be the Joon Ho joint you’d hope for.

Mickey 17 is a fairly close adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey7 (minus the 10 extra Mickeys, of course). On the run from a powerful mobster with a chainsaw fetish, Mickey (Robert Pattinson, The Batman) and his “friend” Timo (Steven Yeun, Nope) get jobs with a commercial space cruiser bound to colonize a mysterious ice planet. While Timo negotiates for a position as a pilot, Mickey becomes the ship’s only “expendable.” Possibly the worst gig imaginable, Mickey is employed to die and get reprinted so he can effectively gauge the dangers of space travel and colonization.

More so than Joon Ho’s other sci-fi satires, Mickey 17 excels in its casting. Pattinson channels his inner John C. Reilly to deliver a hilarious and endearing performance. His attention to physical comedy also excels, appropriately matching the energy of his character’s existential (and interplanetary) nightmare. Plus, Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things) and Collette carry the antagonism as the colony ship’s insufferable, corporate power couple.

That said, the film’s attempt at satire also works against it. Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) obviously pulls from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but unfortunately, Joon Ho doesn’t say anything interesting about that. Sure, Marshall is a bumbling idiot who has more power than he should have ever been granted, but the film fails to actualize the consequences of that in a meaningful way. As entertainment, the character operates fine. As something genuinely interesting and resonating, on the other hand, he fails miserably.

While that miss eclipses most of Mickey 17’s commentary that lands, it doesn’t completely ruin it. The film’s critique on automating and replicating human capability to extinction works. And though the monstrous centipede-buffalo stand-in for Indigenous societies feels a bit gross, at least where the film’s heart lands doesn’t. In other words, it flounders as a modern, pointed satire, but saves itself as a dystopian black comedy.

Certain sequences thankfully save the film when awkward flashbacks and hallucinations cause it to stumble. It isn’t that those achronological scenes should’ve been removed outright. Rather, their presentation makes the film noticeably stumble toward its crescendo. Which feels bizarre, given the montages and dialogue push the movie forward so well.

To be clear, Mickey 17 is an entertaining, worthwhile ride. It just winds up among Joon Ho’s weaker works, fighting for a knife in the slush with Snowpiercer. Ultimately, that’s still pretty high praise. —Daniel Bokemper

Get it at Amazon.

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.

When a new species of spider — your guess to its level of bloodthirstiness — is discovered in Chinese mountain caves, the news piques the interest of college student Qiumu (Zheng Zefei) who’s obsessed with exactly two things: spiders and boobs. He’s only seen one of those things, strictly judging from the Party City closeout web above Qiumu’s dorm room bed. 

Enlisting the help of a documentary filmmaker of the opposite sex (Zhangzhen), he quickly devises a mission: “Let’s go to find the spider.” (sic) They do go, and they do find. The latter is quite easy, on account of it being so large, the thing’s impervious to their swinging knapsacks. It’s also hairy, stabby-legged, big-bootied and, of course, computer-generated. 

As if an eight-legged freak of nature mutated by industrial toxic waste weren’t enough of an antagonist, the movie offers a human villain, too: Mr. Wang. Hey, someone needed to be the literal butt of the diarrhea jokes. Speaking of, as he’s grunting and grimacing on the toilet, the subtitles read, “Why is it so sticky?”

At minute 64, Bloodthirsty Crazy Spider calls it a day with a hard stop. No climax, no ending. Just a harsh rebuke that this is all your fault. You — yes, you — caused the massive creepy crawler by carelessly allowing your can of Juiced Monster Khaotic^® to sink to the ocean floor, asshole. 

The creature feature makes good use of abandoned factories and poor use of everything else, particularly whatever program the Youku production company booted up to animate the arachnid. The software’s free trial period appears to have expired since said spider hardly looks fully rendered. When it skitters, viewers titter. —Rod Lott

Hedges Capers sounds like two items on a country club Karen’s list of things to complain to the help about. In actuality, Hedges Capers is the obscure folksinger who somehow scored the lead role of the weirdo backwoods fantasy The Legend of Hillbilly John. There’s a reason you’ve never seen him onscreen before or since: He’s no actor. Yet out of many, many songs he sings here, the best is the one Capers doesn’t warble, with vocal duties outsourced to Hoyt Axton, whose throat kicks ass.  

In the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Hillbilly John is a balladeer. That’s just a nice way of saying “guy who never stops playing his guitar, even in public.” After Grandpappy (Denver Pyle, TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard) is smote by the devil, John vows vengeance with the only weapon he has: vicious halitosis bluegrass tunes strummed-de-dummed on guitar strings made of pure silver. 

Who knew 100% silver was Satan’s green Kryptonite? Heck, who knew Satan resided in the Appalachians? (Insert Hillbilly Elegy joke here.) 

Originally (mis)titled Who Fears the Devil, the flick draws from a pair of Manly Wade Wellman short stories — and sure feels like it. From meeting a witch (Susan Strasberg, The Delta Force) to fighting a giant prehistoric bird (animated via stop-motion) whose feathers sizzle like acid, our hero and his hound dog saunter from one self-contained adventure to the next. The script by Melvin Levy (The Cry Baby Killer) neglects connective tissue, except for the common denominator of “goddamn mountain superstition” (as Murder at 1600’s Harris Yulin puts it). 

Too bad so little of Legend is fun. Getting acquainted with the movie’s world — one of “salt pork” and “tarnation” — teases viewers into thinking they’re in for a barn-buster, only to drag. Best known as host of TV’s One Step Beyond anthology, John Newland manages to pull off a couple of interesting touches from his director’s chair. One is questionable: tinting a voodoo sequence entirely in yellow. The other is inarguably terrific: having the film violently leap off its sprockets as the devil kills Grandpappy. The whole of Legend cries for such ingenuity, primarily when elongated spells of the film prompt snores. 

The final shot isn’t quite Planet of the Apes, but it’s something of a surprise — and more Billy Jack than Hillbilly John. If you watch this movie, you’re in for a unique experience; just remember that uniqueness does not guarantee success. If you’re allergic to banjos and/or action verbs with dropped Gs, take your Benadryl beforehand, lest ye break out in hives. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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.