Comedy

Strays (2023)

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On one hand, I can count the number of times a movie’s audience burst into applause at the climax:
• In 1981, when E.T. levitates the kids and their bicycles o’er the heads of authorities.
• Six years later, in Fatal Attraction, when Anne Archer shoots Glenn Close dead.
• And now, when four dogs — spoiler — rip Will Forte’s dick off.

Strays, ladies and gentlemen. Whereas singer Sarah MacLachlan famously tugged at your heartstrings in ASCAP commercials to get you to spend $18 a month to rescue dogs, Universal Pictures spent $30 million on a live-action comedy in which dogs’ mouths are animated to say “fuck” a lot. We’re talking Scorsese and Scarface level of “fuck”s. Add all the humping and the pooping — oh, do they ever hump and poop — and Strays is nothing if not filthy.

To be clear, that’s a plus, but only because the doers are adorable dogs instead of asshole adults. Will Ferrell voices Reggie, the canine so clueless he has no idea his ever-stoned, trailer-trash owner, Doug (Forte, MacGruber), has ditched him. Jamie Foxx’s Bug, a Boston Terrier, immediately befriends Reggie to share his street smarts. That includes an intro to his park-hanging pals, a pretty Shepherd (Isla Fisher, 2018’s Tag) and a cone-necked Great Dane (Randall Park, Office Christmas Party) who go all-in for a sausage string of episodic encounters — involving hungry eagles and hallucinogenic mushrooms — accompanying Reggie on his way back home to de-dick Doug.

Is there a normal child in America who wouldn’t laugh their ass off scene to scene? But Strays is hard-rated R on purpose, and that subversiveness often compensates for its narrow range of jokes, much like how Bug talks big to make up for his small size. And I don’t mean his penis, although the movie sure does. Several times.

Like Reggie, the film from director Josh Greenbaum (Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and screenwriter Dan Perrault (TV’s American Vandal) is cute, scruffy and just dumb enough you can’t resist giving it a little affection. Even if the CGI to animate the mutts’ mouths is often dodgy, like a paid version of your iPhone’s My Talking Pet app. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

Aesthetic Deviations: A Critical View of American Shot-on-Video Horror, 1984-1994

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To consider Vincent A. Albarano’s look at SOV horror movies, Aesthetic Deviations: A Critical View of American Shot-on-Video Horror, 1984-1994, knowing what it’s not is the best starting point. As he makes clear from the outset, the paperback is neither a review guide nor a work of reference; by no means is it complete, restricted to a 10-year period.

The book’s subtitle wasn’t assembled for SEO purposes; Albarano has written a work of true scholarship, conceived as a thesis, which accounts for the use of words like “pugnacity,” “egalitarian” and “simulacrum.” It just so happens to study, in part, a horny ventriloquist’s dummy that looks like Rick James. (If your reluctance needs further calming, remember this one unassailable fact: Guys, it’s published by Headpress, K?)

After a brief history lesson on SOV’s start with such slashers as Blood Cult and Sledgehammer, Albarano combs through an overlooked, often spurned subgenre of “cinematic undesirables” in which “subtext is removed from the equation,” he writes. “They stick with the viewer despite their every wrong move. As a fan of these films, I’ve been puzzled by their very existence as much as I’m transfixed by their unique operations.”

Works from such backyard-and-basement moguls as Charles Pinion, J.R. Bookwalter, Carl J. Sukenick, Todd Cook and occasional punching bag Todd Sheets are examined. Other than the sheer range of titles covered, from the obvious to the unexpected, what I like most about Aesthetic Deviations is the author’s honesty; while he’s a fan of SOV, that doesn’t translate to slavish hyperbole. Instead, he’s unafraid to highlight both the uniqueness and misogyny of Chester N. Turner’s Black Devil Doll From Hell, praise the bravery of the Polonia Brothers’ Splatter Farm as he questions its anal-trauma fixation, or call out Gary P. Cohen’s Video Violence for reveling in the very thing it purports to vilify.

Although I didn’t realize until a footnote mentioned it, I’d read earlier drafts of two chapters in 2020, through Albarano’s one-shot zine on the topic, When Renting Is Not Enough (worth tracking down if you’d rather dip your toe before taking the full plunge). I’ll admit being skeptical of such a serious look at movies that “gain points,” per Stephen Thrower, “for being truly incoherent.” Yet like that lone issue of Albarano’s zine, the book that’s grown out of it is intelligent, thorough and, if you’ll grant it patience to make its case, accessible. —Rod Lott

Get it at Headpress.

Horror

Birth/Rebirth (2023)

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Maternal instinct proves fertile ground for horror in Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth. On one hand, a socially awkward pathologist (Marin Ireland) goes to strange lengths to conceive, for even stranger reasons. On the other, a nurse at her hospital (Judy Reyes) has a 6-year-old daughter until, suddenly, she doesn’t. Even more stranger circumstances bring the women together — in a twisted approximation of the modern family.

The blinder you are going in to Birth/Rebirth, the better it plays. Let’s just call it a dead-serious take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, surrounding an ongoing experiment into cellular regeneration using fetal pig tissue. Fresh from this summer’s The Boogeyman, Ireland is an actress I’ll watch in anything, so that she excels with chameleon-like skills as the film’s Victor Frankenstein analogue is practically predestined.

Other than an unmannered performance from 8-year-old newcomer A.J. Lister, the real revelation is Reyes (2022’s Smile). Best known for nursing duties on eight seasons of the TV sitcom Scrubs, she not only scores equal billing as a co-lead, but emerges as Ireland’s equal, seizing the opportunity she’s rarely afforded. Reyes is terrific as the mother so stuck in the initial phase of grief, she soon submits to requests of Ireland’s morgue-dwelling “mad scientist princess bitch” after initially finding them so repulsive.

Although the ending is abrupt, Birth/Rebirth is absorbing for the whole and a near-stunning directorial debut for Moss (wonderfully notorious for their 2016 trilogy of Porn Without Sex shorts), operating with appropriately cold, clinical precision. Multiple scenes would cause David Cronenberg great delight and mainstream audiences great distress. You know where you fall. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Summoning the Spirit (2023)

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If you dig Bigfoot movies, but wish they contained more marital strife, good news: Jon Garcia, the director of an actual movie called Sex Weather, gives you Summoning the Spirit.

Seeking a new start post-miscarriage, spouses Dean (Ernesto Reyes, TV’s American Gods) and Carla (Krystal Millie Valdes) buy a cozy house amid 5 acres of forest. While he dictates chapters of Oregon Trail historical fiction into a handheld recorder, she gets to know the locals, a bunch of New Age woo-woos with names like River and Clear who say they were called here “by the spirit.”

Living on a farm, these neighbors call themselves The Mountain People. They worship “the giants in the forest.” They have a podcast. They conduct daytime orgies. Regarding the latter, Dean asks, “Did you do stuff? Like sexy stuff?” And despite all evidence within the previous 75 minutes, Dean is shocked — shocked, I tell you! — by the realization The Mountain People are a cult.

A markedly different slice of sasquatch cinema, Summoning the Spirit dips all its toes into arthouse folk horror while also delivering on the most exploitable part of the film: Bigfoot, of course. You see the beast in the first five minutes — and not in the usual fleeting-tease glimpses. Every time the cryptid shows up, hell is raised and the movie instantly becomes better.

While that’s not enough in the long run to merit a glowing recommendation, it’s enough for a mild one. Plus, the Bigfoot costume is great. Thank God Garcia couldn’t afford CGI. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Rub (2023)

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Seeking human connection, the balding, bullied Neal finds it in the hands of Perla, a sex worker. She plies her trade at the kind of massage parlor one speaks of with air quotes.

It’s also the kind of place that attracts gang robberies. During just that, Neal, dressed only in his tighty-whities, shifts into White Knight mode, rescuing Perla not just from the scene of the crime, but her dead-end career tugging at strangers’ junk. Circumstances force them to flee town with their lives and little else.

As the unlikely couple of Rub’s sympathetic but tragic heart, unknowns Micah Spayer and Jennifer Figuereo are terrific. Neither embody the movies’ idea of conventional leads, which is honestly half the film’s appeal. Pretty Woman, this ain’t.

While Spayer has the showier role as an incel with an uncontrollable temper, Figuereo’s is, I’d argue, the more difficult to pull off: making us believe she has feelings for Neal that go beyond convenience. I wish the supporting cast members operated at their skill level. Neal’s ruthless co-workers act like they’re in a comedy, and poorly.

Rub isn’t a joke, although the tagline of “Not all endings are happy” sure has a winking tastelessness not present in Christopher Fox’s first feature. Its initial half works well, but once Neal and Perla hit the road with no place to go, the movie doesn’t seem to have a destination locked down either. A dinner scene among a table of wayward souls breaking bread in particular grates with fabricated emotion; Rub does its best trafficking in the dark, like employing psychedelic animation to convey the drug-induced panic on Neal’s face. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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