Comedy

Riddle of Fire (2023)

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Fans of The Goonies, you’re never getting that sequel you so nakedly desire. (Also, the original movie is not as good as you remember it, but that’s neither here nor there.) So make do with Weston Razooli’s debut feature, Riddle of Fire. It may be as close as you’re going to get.

Wyoming-set, but Utah-shot, this “faerie” tale follows a trio of kids it dubs the Three Immortal Reptiles (Charlie Stover, Skyler Peters and Phoebe Ferro). With dogged determination — not to mention motorbikes, paintball guns and ski masks — they embark on a quest for a particular blueberry pie for the boys’ bedridden mother (Danielle Hoetmer). If they can bring her that, she’ll give them the TV password in exchange to play video games.

Easier said than done, of course, as the Reptiles run afoul of those “woodsy bastards” known as The Enchanted Blade Gang, led by a witch (Lio Tipton, 2016’s Viral) who’s up to some shit both criminal and mystical. Throw in a ragamuffin forest sprite (Lorelei Mote), a speckled egg, malt liquor, frozen crag legs, a ’76 Cadillac Delta and the theme from Cannibal Holocaust, and you have an unfailingly sunny-vibed adventure comedy steeped in folklore and shining in 16 mm splendor.

Riddle of Fire’s success hinges most on its casting of the kids, the small pints with big imagination. Razooli struck something akin to gold, particularly with Ferro and even with Peters’ slight speech impediment gaining subtitles. As a whole, the kids are as rambunctious as they are charming, giving audiences a glimpse of what The Little Rascals might look like, had it dabbled in the occult, with a smidge of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” spread on top.

For the film’s last quarter or so, Riddle loses its way. A dance sequence teed up as an intended showstopper (à la Little Miss Sunshine) instead pushes the cuteness too far without allowing the off-kilter material to keep pace — and in cloyingly slow motion, no less. That deflates a balloon that heretofore avoided such Stevia-sweetened manipulation.

Helping Riddle of Fire cast its freshman-film spell of amusement is a killer “dungeon synth” soundtrack featuring Fog Crag Records, Lost Cascades, Hole Dweller, et al. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

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Writer-director Rose Glass’ previous film, Saint Maud, made waves among those who saw it, though it remains criminally underseen and underappreciated to this day. Fortunately, she has a new movie out, Love Lies Bleeding, featuring a more well-known cast and a more rounded advertising campaign, allowing (hopefully) more people to experience this filmmaker’s idiosyncratic visions of human interaction. 

The film, co-written with Weronika Tofilska, stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, the manager of gym in 1980s New Mexico. There she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder from a small town in Oklahoma, who is on her way to Las Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding tournament. The two hit it off immediately and begin a passionate relationship, with Lou not realizing Jackie had sex with her brother-in-law, J.J. (Dave Franco), the night she rolled into town — a tit-for-tat tryst Jackie only agreed to in order to get a job at the gun range J.J. works at.

The range happens to be owned by Lou’s father (Ed Harris, sporting a particularly hideous “skullet” — bald up top with long hair on the sides), a dangerous criminal who keeps various bugs and worms as pets. Lou doesn’t like Jackie working for her dad, with whom she has no more contact, but she’s forced into the same hospital room with him after J.J. beats Lou’s sister (Jena Malone) within an inch of her life. This act of domestic violence sets off a bloody chain reaction that puts both Lou and Jackie in danger, jeopardizing not just their lives but also their love for one another. 

Steamy, funny, gory and ultimately weirder than you can imagine, Love Lies Bleeding feels like the unholy spawn of David Lynch, David Cronenberg and the early works of the Coen Brothers (particularly Blood Simple), but with a distinct queer-feminine perspective. Glass gloriously turns the neo-noir crime thriller on its head, much as she did with Saint Maud and the religious horror film, proving once again her prowess as a filmmaker and a unique cinematic voice. —Christopher Shultz

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Reading Material

Reading Material: Short Ends 3/18/24

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Damn you, Scream Queen filmmaker Brad Sykes. Damn you to hell! Do you expect anyone to ever get through your new book, Neon Nightmares: L.A. Thrillers of the 1980s? You’ve made so many of the movies sound so intriguing, one has to stop reading immediately to hunt down and watch the film under discussion before proceeding. Was this part of some master plan all along? Are you receiving a cut of royalties for every VOD stream of Richard Gere’s Breathless remake? Judd Nelson in Relentless? The computer-dating oddity Dangerous Love? Because this took me a month to finish reading, rather than my usual weekend. Do you not realize what that much lunch-hour viewing does to an iPhone battery in a day? A laptop battery? A marriage? I hope you and your addicting BearManor Media paperback, richly illustrated as it is, are happy for hijacking so much of my free time. Highly, highly recommended.

For Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film, the venerable Library of America rounds up the late S.J. Perelman’s 22 New Yorker articles in which the literary rapscallion casts his adult eyes and poisoned pen on the pulpy paperbacks — and their flicker adaptations — of his boyhood. More often than not, the results allow Perelman to exercise — and exorcise — his considerable, even intimidating wit. The more familiar I was with the topic at hand, like Tarzan and Dr. Fu Manchu, the funnier the pieces struck. That said, I also drew heavy amusement from his discussions of then-“spicy” works, today as tame as Perelman is revered, after “greasing my face with butter to protect it from the burning prose.” One caveat: These pieces were written as early as 1937, when a learned vocabulary wasn’t an obstacle to readers; prepare yourself for “fantods,” “sachem,” “gravid” and more words Google’s ready to tackle. 

You may not believe me, kids, but before your fancy internet rolled around, we got information about new and upcoming movies from artifacts called “magazines” and “newspapers.” On-set articles and interviews for more than two dozen beloved genre movies are collected in companion volumes The Dreamweavers: Fantasy Filmmaking in the 1980s and Science Fiction Filmmaking in the 1980s: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Producers and Writers. To read them is to be transported back to the days of thumbing through issues of Starlog, Twilight Zone and Fangoria at the magazine rack while your mom shopped for groceries. As with 2022’s The Joy of Sets, both trade paperbacks come from Lee Goldberg‘s Cutting Edge imprint; unlike The Joy of Sets, Goldberg shares space with William Rabkin and spouses Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier. Whether a movie qualifies as fantasy or sci-fi sometimes seems arbitrary, yet it hardly matters. In Dreamweavers‘ lineup, you’ll meet Buckaroo Banzai, James Bond and a few guys who ain’t ’fraid of no ghosts; in the other, Mad Max, RoboCop and the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Half the fun is seeing how prescient these journalists were. Case in point: Of Howard the Duck, Rabkin predicts, “There’s a chance that American audiences simply don’t want to see a duck starring in anything besides a plate of orange sauce.” —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Mad Props (2024)

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Aside from the script, performers and digital effects, movies are an amalgam of stuff we find lying around. The alien from John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s Dark Star was just a painted beach ball with rubber feet attached. The crew of James Cameron’s Aliens double-dipped into their gear and used Steadicam arms to create the Colonial Marines’ M56 Smartguns. And the walls of the Nostromo from Ridley Scott’s original Alien featured a coffee grinder. (Granted, the space truckers probably just need a decent cup of joe every few million miles.)

Props — regardless of what they’re made of — give movies life. Tulsa banker Tom Biolchini, the subject of Juan Pablo Reinoso’s documentary Mad Props, seeks to preserve that life and celebrate props for what they ultimately are: art.

Though it doesn’t seem like this were ever in question, you probably don’t hear much appreciation for visual and technical designers not named Tom Savini, Phil Tippett or Ray Harryhausen. We love their work, true, but maybe we tend to give directors like Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson credit that’s at least partially due to their prop artists.

That compulsion to find and recognize those masters makes Mad Props more endearing than it otherwise could be. Because let’s be real: Watching a hugely successful banker drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade isn’t exactly relatable. (Especially when you consider the didactic of that flick was how you shouldn’t obsess over one-of-a-kind treasures — Indy’s dad even shed a tear over it!)

If a wildly prohibitive hobby were all there was to Mad Props, it would frankly be a detached, insufferable trudge of a doc. Fortunately, the film makes a point to profile not just those who collect props, but the people who make and curate them, too. Biolchini has an infectious enthusiasm about this craft.

And while you could make the argument someone who collects a certain thing would want said thing to be recognized as art because that would likely inflate its value, that’s not quite how it would work since these items already command such a steep price. It seems Biolchini genuinely wants to preserve them in an era when less props are taking a physical form at all.

The behind-the-scenes stories Mad Props covers, like the nightmare that was the Goro suit from 1995’s Mortal Kombat, perfectly captures how much effort special effects demand even for just a few minutes’ worth of footage. A giddy Robert Englund recounting the many gloves of Freddy Krueger helps, too.

Mad Props really only wanes with the auction coverage. It just isn’t very interesting and does little to convey appreciation for film. In fact, the documentary finds meaning the further it drifts from the hobby and more into curation and prop production. It also helps that the doc is incredibly easy to watch. At its heart, it’s a light profile of movies and fans who love them. Like, a lot. —Daniel Bokemper

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Comedy

Good-Bye Cruel World (1982)

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Most people only know this obscure comedy for its VHS box art, depicting an arm jutting from a toilet bowl to flush itself. Befitting of that porcelain throne, Good-Bye Cruel World is an unqualified stinker. 

Comedian Dick Shawn (1967’s The Producers) plays Rodney Pointsetter, an evening news anchor who melts down on air after his divorce. He resolves to blow his brains out — ho-ho-HO! — but goes to visit some family members first. One of those is his obese brother-in-law, essayed by Chuck “Porky” Mitchell; that’s how the credits list him, which may be the saddest thing imaginable. 

In between these reunion scenes, brief sketches and parodies play, as if broadcast from Pointsetter’s employer’s channel. Most were outdated by the time Cruel World hit video store shelves, like a hemorrhoid ad featuring “Jimmy Carter,” a spoof of Brooke Shields’ Calvin Klein jeans spot (but with a naked woman and a brand called Joy Crotch) and a commercial for Psycho Soap, with co-writer Alan Spencer (creator of TV’s Sledge Hammer!) doing a better-than-decent Norman Bates impersonation. 

The only amusing portion is a faux trailer for An Officer and an Elephant Man, which is just like it sounds. Novelty value seeps from this bad-taste bit as future Daily Show correspondent Larry Wilmore makes his screen debut making light of Louis Gossett Jr.’s drill sergeant role.

Although not truly interactive, Good-Bye Cruel World comes presented in “Choice-A-Rama,” allowing for a recurring gag of a host asking the audience to vote on what they’d like to see next. The results are never funny, but at least you get Angelique Pettyjohn (The Lost Empire) as a stripping nun. 

Ultimately, Rodney decides life’s worth living because sexy journalist Cynthia Sikes (Arthur 2: On the Rocks) wants to get in his pants. Too bad she and Rodney perish in a tragic accident of slapstick proportions in a finale so “wacky,” it includes a marching band. From a cloud in heaven, Rodney sings a song about life being “a mammy-jammer.” These are the jokes, folks. —Rod Lott

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