Where my Lady Wish heads at?

My wife and I, we watch a lot of reality competition shows. I mean, a lot of them. We’re not just watching your Great British Bake Offs or your Projects Runway. We’ve watched Top Shot (the Top Chef for marksmen), America’s Next Top Hooker (a fishing competition where the first event was catching guppies with their mouths), and Wizard Wars (the stage magician’s Chopped). If there’s a field of human endeavor, from steampunk design to balloon sculpting to slime artistry, we’ve watched four people competing for three rounds to win a cash prize of $10,000 doing it.

Frankly, in my opinion, it’s a great genre for television. The stakes and personalities of the contestants keep you invested in the proceedings, all the while you get to learn just enough about whatever it is they’re doing to get judgy about it. Next thing you know, you’re a defacto expert, yelling at your TV, “you have to let the white out dry before adding the contents of your canister damascus, dumbass!” despite the fact that you’ve never done anything like that before in your life. Forged in Fire has taught you how to watch it, and now you know, only a dumbass would add white out to their canister and not let it dry out when they’re making canister damascus.

For the most part, these shows are fairly formulaic, which is part of the joy. You don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen; it’s got contestants doing something, they get judged, somebody gets eliminated, eventually someone is declared the winner. If that’s too complicated to intuit, don’t worry, a host will normally tell you exactly what’s going to happen as soon as the show starts and repeatedly as the show progresses. The solid bones of the format allow you to focus up on the task at hand, be it moonshining (Moonshiners: Master Distiller) or chainsaw carving (A Cut Above), instead of getting lost in the weeds of the competition itself.

As you might have noticed, you can squeeze a wide variety of activities into a reality competition format. Basically, any activity can work in the format if a) it can be judged and ranked from best to worst and b) fits within the budget and time constraints of the production (and even the time issue can get fudged a little, see Game of Wool: Britain’s Best Knitter).

Or so I thought. We recently stumbled on a new one that is changing my whole perspective on the issue. It’s called Battle of Fates and it’s a Korean reality competition show for fortune tellers. They assembled just shy of 50 fortune tellers to determine who is the best in a televised competition that you can stream on Hulu and Disney+.

Now, before I get too deep into this, I should clarify that the majority of these fortune tellers are practitioners of Korean folk religion (or Musok). I don’t know anything about Korean folk religion and I don’t want to disrespect anyone’s religious practices. If you, dear reader, are consulting a shaman for advice in your life, for spiritual guidance, for reassurance that the future will not be so bad, I respect that and I think that’s beautiful.

That said, I think every single thing that happens on this show is extremely fake. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, but this all seems extremely fake. What’s really interesting about it, for me, though, is that the show still works.

I mean, it’s not that surprising: the majority of shows on television are fiction, but most of them do not claim to be reality competition shows. I would say the viewing experience is closer to wrestling; that there’s some amount of kayfabe going on around here, and part of the fun of watching Battle of the Fates is determining how many layers they want you to peel off the onion. How exactly are you supposed to read Battle of Fates?

The unpeeled onion is, of course, this is all real. The sages are communicating with their deities, the foot reader is interpreting the lines on people’s feet, the business shaman is running the data through his proprietary numerology spreadsheets, and they’re all getting answers with varying levels of accuracy, dependent on the strengths of their individual disciplines, their own personal spiritual connectedness, etc. This option is kind of off the table once the first challenge of the series is issued.

The first task the fate readers are assigned is to determine a woman’s cause of death, given only a picture, a name, a birth date and a death date. They’re given ten minutes to figure out how she died and then they buzz in with their answers. The first few that buzz in get to read their answers, the one of those that is most accurate advances to the next round. The ten minutes pass and, boom, everybody answers, and every answer we hear is relatively right. The lady fell while mountain climbing in Tibet. Every single person they spoke to said things that might not be that specific, but did make committed choices (she died overseas, somewhere cold, an injury, she fell, etc).

Now, if we are to accept the unpeeled onion of this story, all of this is real. Sages, Shamans, numerology, guardian deities, tarot cards; all are equally real, effective, and valid because we see all of them work in the first few episodes. To accept that Battle of Fates is real is to accept that every fortune teller is real and tapped into the invisible forces of the universe. All the contestants show respect for and curiosity about each other’s schools of divination and consider them a different room in God’s house. Surely, they could use their sage powers to detect a phony amongst them, so the unpeeled onion reading says that we accept all of them.

This is a big ask for me, and maybe for you, too, reader. Maybe you don’t think we are living in the world of John Lennon’s Imagine, where all religions are true. Let’s peel off the outer layer of the onion.

Peeling back that first layer, we reveal a reading where all these people truly believe they can predict the future, but are in fact, highly intuitive, using their divinatory practices and fetishes as Rorschach tests onto which their subconscious can project insight. This is certainly how I tend to read it when my friends are engaged in astrology or tarot, it’s a reading that allows an old skeptic like me to get in on the fun.

Let’s say that reading doesn’t work for you for Battle of Fates. Their predictions are too accurate to be the result of pure intuition, and as often as not, they’re asked to predict something with too little information to go off of for that to be what’s going on. So you peel off another layer of the onion.

With two layers of onion gone, you now read these fortune tellers as fakes and charlatans. The innocent producers of this show have been tricked by a cadre of mountebanks from across the Korean peninsula and they’re using their time-honed tricks to make a run at the grand prize. Some of these fortune tellers are quite famous, after all, doing readings for celebrities, CEO’s, and politicians. Surely they could pull the wool over the eyes of a few television producers and celebrity judges.

We see twenty of them advance past the first round by answering questions they had no rational way of knowing. The idea that all twenty of them managed to independently (or, for no apparent reason, collectively) cheat at this game and none of them get caught also strains credulity. Did they all have inside men? Was there one inside man selling info to all twenty competitors? If they were all cheating, just how, exactly, and to what end?

So maybe the cheating reading doesn’t work for you, so you peel back another layer. Maybe the whole show is fake. Maybe the producers and the hosts are all in on it. Maybe the whole thing is scripted, made by Korean atheists who would have no qualms about using the trappings of religion to entertain a gullible Korean public.

You peel back another layer, because, if the whole thing is set up, then it’s probably not a competition show at all. It could very well even be a completely scripted drama! Every single line of dialog could have been written and rehearsed, who can say? These might not even be real fortune tellers, they could just be Korean TV actors. I wouldn’t know!

But, then you peel another layer! How do I even know what I’m seeing is even the real show? After all, most of the information I’m gleaning here is coming from the dialog (fortune telling is not a particularly visual activity) and the dialog has all been dubbed! The original Korean show could be something completely different. Different names, different predictions, different outcomes. It could even have been re-edited.

And then another layer: what if the show isn’t even really Korean? What if this is an American show capitalizing on America’s growing love affair with Korean culture? What if some out of work Korean American actors were hired to dress as sages and be on a fully scripted faux reality competition show?

And then, there’s no onion left. I mean, unless you want to start questioning whether or not the show actually exists or I’m just making it up for this essay. That would really bake your noodle, I bet. Battle of Fates is all too real, though, and pretty fun.

The fact is, you can read Battle of Fates any way you want. You can even read it multiple ways at once. Like professional wrestling or Schroedinger’s Cat, Battle of Fates exists as both real and unreal, simultaneously. Battle of Fates is the perfect entertainment for our post-truth era. Nothing is real, but everything is entertaining.

Some things don’t need to be seen

My brother has warned me that my niece wants to talk to me about the movie Human Centipede when I come to visit. She wants to know if I’ve seen it. I haven’t, and I’m going to be honest, I don’t want to. That doesn’t mean I can’t have a meaningful discussion about art with my niece using Human Centipede as a jumping off point, however. At the very least, I can write a little essay to try to collect my thoughts on the matter. I’ll send this to my niece, and if they want to read it, they can, or we can talk about it, whatever. I’m cool. I’m cool uncle.

In 1965, Andy Warhol released the film Empire, which is an 8 hour long film composed solely of a single shot of the Empire State Building at night. Some critics out there will tell you that this allows you to meditate on things like the nature of film, the texture of it, even time itself. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I think they’re missing the forest for the trees. To me, the point of Empire is that it’s eight hours long and nothing happens. Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s cool, I think that’s awesome, in fact. But I do think you’d have to be a psycho to actually watch it.

At Empire’s premiere, 80 people bought tickets for $2 a piece. Only 10 made it to the end, but they all fell asleep, talked to each other, and in general spent a not insignificant portion of the runtime not actually watching the movie. This is fine. In my opinion, most people are not going to get much more out of watching eight hours of Empire than they would get out of watching ten minutes of Empire (beyond a stiff back and an overwhelming sense of elation at being able to finally stop watching Empire).

In fact, I would argue that you don’t really need to watch Empire for a single minute to “get” Empire. In my opinion, it’s more useful to examine Empire through the lens of conceptual art than that of film. The idea is the central generator of the aesthetic experience rather than the film itself, (or even the images the film projects onto a screen). To read or hear about Empire is the purest expression of Empire as a work, in my opinion, and to write or tell other people about it is to become a part of the work itself. You and I are now both part of the empire of Empire. We are gathered around the campfire, telling the legend of eight hour movie about a building.

I think Human Centipede is doing the exact same thing. I don’t need to see a doctor sew a person’s mouth to another person’s asshole, and that person has already had their mouth sewn to yet another person’s asshole. It’s redundant. It’s an idea so evocative that I can’t imagine the actual film having a greater impact than the concept, and if it is more impactful, I don’t think I want to see it. Instead, we can all speak in hushed tones about how Human Centipede is the most shocking, deranged film ever made, and the word will spread, memetically, throughout the land about this freaky movie.

Now, if the actual capital A “Art” in Empire and Human Centipede exists in the realm of ideas, the natural follow up question is: do the films have to exist at all? Can they JUST be ideas? Not in my opinion.

The biggest part of what surprises and delights about Empire and Human Centipede is that they actually exist. Human beings went to the effort to create films that are, by all appearances, actively hostile to the viewing audience. Andy Warhol had Jonas Mekas set up a camera and shoot the Empire State Building all night. Tom Six actually made Ashley Williams crawl around on all fours with her face up Ashlynn Yennie’s butt who was on all fours with her face up Akihiro Kitamura’s butt. All films are documentaries of their own making, and the existence of these films documents that someone actually made them. In another way, though, the films themselves are like candybar wrappers; they play an essential role in delivering the candy to me, but I would find consuming them to be overwhelmingly unpleasant.

If I just have an idea, that’s not anything. While the beauty of Conceptual Art is in the ideas, the substance, the heft of it, comes from the effort of actually constructing it and its existence in the physical world. Its physical existence serves as an anchor, making sure that the idea has a solid hold in reality and isn’t just forgotten. The effort gives these conceptual art its rarity and value. Clearing the bar of “putting effort into making it actually exist” tells the audience that a work of conceptual art had value to its creator; that they thought it was worth the effort. Though the concepts of Empire and Human Centipede might be the actual art, the films are what differentiate Conceptual Art from goofing around with your buddy (“Oh, bro, what if we made a movie that was just an 8 hour shot of a building? That would be craaaazy!”)

This is, of course, one of the main problems of AI art. “Creating” AI art will always smack of low effort because the defining characteristic of making AI art is that it is easier than actually doing it. It is a medium defined by laziness and the slopiness that comes with it. No matter what, your audience will always feel that it’s the result of typing some stuff into a computer that then spits out what would have otherwise taken a lot of work. It’s one step above goofing with your buddy at the bar, but it’s several steps below getting three actors to crawl around with their heads up each other’s assholes. Without the actual effort, without the care for all the details that the effort yields, no matter how much the results improve, it can’t match human art. It will always feel like a lesser imitation.

If the conceptual art of Empire and Human Centipede are anchored in reality by the effort put into making the films of the same name, AI art is inherently adrift. AI evangelists will tell you that it’s all inevitable, it’s the future, but without that anchor of effort, AI art will always be disposable and thereby condemned to exist in an eternal now. No one will remember it, not even the people who make it, because no one cared enough to put in the work.

The work is the art.

“You mean you don’t want to play with me? Nugget? I can change into a small rock!”

In the 80’s, if you were a toy, you weren’t shit if you didn’t have an animated series, and your animated series wasn’t shit if it didn’t have a feature length film adaptation. Kids loved having their imaginations primed by these stories, and toy manufacturers loved that parents would buy tickets to take their kids to a 90 minute commercial. Everybody wins, except for people who don’t want to spend money, I guess. The inherently commercial nature of these movies makes it easy to dismiss them as artistic endeavors, but I think there’s more to them…than meets the eye.

The high watermark for the 80’s Toy Movie genre has doubtlessly got to be Transformers: the Movie. By far, it has the strongest cultural legacy of any of these films, and it’s easy to see why. All of these movies make the same plays when making the jump from TV to the big screen, and Transformers: the Movie did them better than any of them. They all shelled out the money for higher quality animation. They all introduce new characters (aka new toys), and Transformers’ new toys were sick as hell. They all have a few celebrities added to the voice cast; Transformers has Judd Nelson, Robert Stack, Eric Idle, Leonard Nimoy, and (in his final role) Orson Welles. They all have new, original music; Transformers has both Dare and The Touch by Stan Bush. Transformers: the Movie also has the guts to do what none of the others did: kill off at least a dozen legacy characters, on screen, right before your eyes in the first act, both upping the stakes from the regular series (where no one ever died) and clearing out room for new toys to take central roles in the series as it progressed, post-movie.

I really can’t recommend Transformers: the Movie enough. Fantastic film.

On the other side of the coin, of course, is the worst Toy to TV to Film adaptation. Worse than G.I. Joe: the Movie, worse than Rainbow Bright and the Star Stealer, worse than either Care Bears Movie, or any others you could care to name is GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords. If Transformers: the Movie is unjustly dismissed as crass commercialism, it’s because people imagine it to be GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords. It really is fucking terrible.

The first problem is that the GoBots themselves kind of just suck. It would be easy to dismiss the GoBots as knock off Transformers (they are both robots that can transform back and forth into vehicles, after all) but the GoBots actually predate the Transformers. Their designs are, comparatively, much simpler, uglier, and worse. When a GoBot transforms from a car to a humanoid robot, they merely stand up on their back bumper, which becomes the soles of their feet, and their face is just part of the bottom of the car. This sounds like a minor gripe, but compared to the imagination put into the transformation and design of a Transformer, it really looks lazy. The transformation is an opportunity for spectacle and wonderment and GoBots squander that opportunity at every opportunity they get.

Even their names are absurdly uninspired. The leader of the good GoBots is named Leader-1. His best friend is a robot that can transform into a scooter; his name is Scooter. The leader of the evil GoBots is a psychotic motorcycle named Cy-Kill. Everything about GoBots reeks of an executive saying, “yeah, sure, whatever”.

Of course, the movie does give us the opportunity to correct that with the introduction of new characters, the titular Rock Lords. The Rock Lords, as you might have guessed, transform into rocks. They have names like Granite, Boulder, and Nugget, their transformation involves them just sort of curling up into rocks. While I have seen plenty of kids play with toy robots and plenty of kids play with vehicles, I very rarely see kids playing with rocks. It’s a baffling decision, reminiscent of the building-to-robot toys Tom Hanks plays with in Big. It reveals a lack of understanding of how one would use a toy.

In the film, of course, they are largely impervious in rock form and can roll into things. If you wanted to roll around your little Nugget toy on the ground until all the gold paint scraped off, you could easily have minutes of fun, of course, but on screen, I would not describe the Rock Lords as inherently cinematic.

Your celebrity voice cast is equally uninspiring. Margot Kidder as Solitaire, the diamond Rock Lord with the only good name? Telly Savalas as Magmar? Roddy McDowell (who has done so much voice work he hardly counts) as Nugget? That’s a weak brew. I mean, I might watch that line up in a Brian DePalma movie about a woman who is stalking herself or something, but for an animated adventure film, this ensemble does not inspire confidence, let alone excitement.

As for the plot, well, you could probably guess. The GoBots fight each other on Planet Gobotron, then the Rock Lords show up and ask for help fighting the other Rock Lords back on planet Rock Lord. They all shoot laser beams out of their fists until someone is declared the winner and the movie ends. When compared to Hot Rod’s hero’s journey through Transformers: the Movie, it’s incredibly anemic. The whole dang thing is anemic. Hanna-Barbera were way past their prime at the point, and it shows.

As my fellow millennials and I continue our march towards the grave, it’s only natural for us to turn towards the comfort given to us by familiar art from what we perceive as a simpler time. You will know it’s dark times if you see us supping on the thin gruel that is GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords. I’m sure there are fans and defenders (I saw a reddit post about someone working on a 4K restoration (not worth it, ugly film)) and I say to you GoBots die-hards: you are getting lost in the nostalgia sauce. You deserve better. You deserve at least Transformers: the Movie.

This woman is watching a nurse burn to death

Alfred Hitchcock famously said that if you put a bomb under a table, everybody will freak out. I’m just kidding. He said something to the effect of, if you have two characters talking at a table and then a bomb under the table blows them up, that’s very surprising. If you show the bomb under the table and then you have the two characters at the table having their conversation, this generates suspense, because the whole time they’re talking, you’re thinking about when that bomb is going to go off. He said it better than I did, of course. He’s Alfred Hitchcock.

The question I always wanted to ask Hitchcock was, “What if you don’t show the bomb under the table? What if you just titled the movie ‘There’s a Bomb Under the Table’? Would audiences process that sort of metadata the same way?”

Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 22 minute safety film Hospitals Don’t Burn Down answers that question with a resounding “Yes”. From the very first frame, you’re thinking, “Jesus. This fucking hospital is going to burn down, isn’t it?”. Trenchard-Smith spends a good three minutes (15% of his run time) taking us on a full tour of this Sydney hospital in 1978. We see sick and injured children being ushered off to bed by friendly and caring nurses, ICU patients hooked up to all manners of machinery, and just average joes hoping to recover from whatever is currently ailing them, all packed into maybe 8 floors of hospital. Every new character you meet reminds you of that title, and you think to yourself, “it’s going to be REALLY bad when this hospital burns down.”

Then, you see one of the patients with a minor ailment, clandestinely puffing on a smoke in the hallway. Relatable; anyone who’s spent a night or two in the hospital knows what it’s like to crave the indulgences you could enjoy at home. Surely, a venal sin. When he gets spotted by a nurse down the hall, he sneakily throws the half-smoked smoke down an adjacent laundry chute, you can feel that the rollercoaster has ratcheted its way to the top of that first hill and the ride is about to start. For a moment, the cigarette rolls to a stop in a curve in the chute and you think, “Phshew! Maybe what they say is true? Maybe hospitals DON’T burn down!”. But then another nurse tosses a load of dirty sheets down there which sweep up the lit cigarette, planting it firmly in the middle of the pile of laundry in the basement. That pile of laundry quickly catches fire, that fire starts rapidly spreading throughout the hospital.

For the next 19 minutes, you are trapped in a hospital in 1978 Sydney Australia as it burns to the ground. It is intense, to say the least. There are no sprinklers, I don’t think they even really have a fire alarm. Word about the fire spreads through the hospital by word of mouth. A nurse will pop in and say, “Did you hear? The building is on fire and it’s spreading.”

Someone will respond with something to the effect of, “Crikey! I guess we better get these patients out of here!” and they start trying their best to wheel patients out of the hospital. No matter how sick or injured they are, their situation will not be improved by being set on fire. Unfortunately, this particular medical facility does not have particularly robust evacuation plans or fire safety training. Several groups of nurses decide the play is to bring their patients up to the roof of the hospital. As they see the flames continue to rise, one of them says, titularly, “Don’t worry, mate. Hospitals don’t burn down!”

Brian Trenchard-Smith had a real love of setting stuntmen on fire during this era of his career (see Stunt Rock), but here it is not used for fun and excitement, purely for horror. Children are imperiled and not all of them make it. He makes sure that you know that a hospital fire is as bad, if not worse, than you’ve ever imagined. Hospitals Don’t Burn Down is relentless, and you feel every one of those 22 minutes.

In fact, you feel even more than those 22 minutes, because the tension starts as soon as you become aware of the title. As soon as you hear the phrase, “Hospitals Don’t Burn Down” the film starts worming its way into you. As soon as you start typing “Hospitals Don’t” into YouTube’s search engine, you’re already thinking about it (there’s a cleaner copy on archive dot org, watch that one instead). The title has already planted the bomb under the table for you, before your very eyes, and the movie hasn’t even started.

That’s right, I banged ‘em all out.

For most of my life, I never bothered to watch an Ernest movie. I’m from New England and so I have had a long-standing natural aversion towards anything associated with the South which I have only recently begun to unpack. Ernest was clearly both stupid and Southern, which implied to me that the intended audience was both stupid and Southern. There’s only so many hours in the day to watch movies, so why would I spend them watching a movie that was made for someone else?

That said, when Greg selected Ernest Saves Christmas for last year’s Christmas episodes of the podcast, I knew I would want to watch as many Ernest movies as I could. I hated the idea of a real Ernest fan listening to the show and thinking, “this motherfucker doesn’t know shit about Ernest and now he’s trying to tell me about Ernest?”. I would have to get Ernest-pilled or risk the scorn and condemnation of Ernest-heads everywhere.

Luckily, they were all pretty readily available, so I was able to dive right in. I didn’t watch all of them in time for the show, but I’ve now seen every canonical Ernest movie, plus a few debatably canonical ones. In any case, I would hate for all that time to be spent on solely my own personal enjoyment and enrichment, so I am here to present to you, from worst to best, my definitive list of every single Ernest movie.

#12. Ernest Goes To Africa (1997)

If you looked at all the titles and, sight unseen, you wanted to guess which Ernest movie was the most racist, you would pick Ernest Goes To Africa, every single time. You would be right, every single time. This is what you are assuming an Ernest movie is if you are from New England, a Southern-fried clown trying his hardest to sell undercooked gags that are racist way more often than you would like. When I saw cannibal tribesmen pulling out a giant stewpot to cook Ernest in, I had to wonder why they shot this in South Africa. It doesn’t seem worth putting in that kind of effort into an authentic location into a racist caricature. It’s a shame this was his penultimate effort, it really is not good.

#11. Ernest in the Army (1998)

Also, solidly in the “not good” zone is Ernest’s final appearance, Ernest in the Army. It’s no coincidence that it is also squarely in the “more than a little racist” zone. Ernest gets talked into joining an army reserve unit that then gets sent to some sort of fictional, oil-rich country in the middle east…it was the 90’s. At least the military setting did give Ernest some fresh material to work with. It was reminiscent of one of the lesser WWII Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs throws around a bunch of slurs, but without any slurs.

#10. Ernest Rides Again (1993)

I don’t remember anything that happens in this movie. I think there’s a cannon with the crown jewels hidden inside? I know that they filmed this one in British Columbia, and with the last two being filmed in South Africa, I’m going to say that taking Ernest away from the south is like taking Superman away from the yellow sun.

#9. Slam Dunk Ernest (1995)

While Slam Dunk doesn’t have the same quantity of racism as Africa or Army, it’s not without its issues. This is the first movie where we see Ernest interact with several Black people in multiple scenes throughout the film, and by an odd coincidence, they’re all on a basketball team he wants to join. There’s some basketball based gags in here and a guest appearance from Kareem Abdul Jabar (Airplane), but I’m not a basketball guy, so I didn’t really care that much. I mean, I’m not made of stone, I love to see Jim Varney flying around a basketball court, imbued with some crazy basketball powers by some sort of beam or a goo, maybe magical spell or artifact, but that took up a surprisingly small amount of the film.

#8. Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam (1985)

I was really surprised to learn that Jim Varney’s first big screen turn as Ernest was not in an Ernest movie, though Ernest does appear in the movie, (sort of). Instead, Varney plays a mad scientist, so you do get some nice, broad character work, at least, and some fun wacky inventions. Still, it’s harder than you might think to build a story with the villain as your main character, and you only get to see Ernest as a disguise Dr. Otto dons at the end of the film. While I do like the implication that Ernest is actually Dr. Otto incognito in every other movie, I do think Dr. Otto is just a less compelling character than Ernest. This one did have a good soundtrack, though. It was just clearly an early experiment from Varney and director John Cherry III, still sharpening their blades.

#7. Knowhutimean? Hey Vern, It’s My Family Album (1983)

Before any of the Ernest films hit the big screen, Varney and Cherry made this direct to VHS sketch comedy special where Ernest introduces viewers to members of his extended family. They had huge success together putting Ernest into commercials for local auto dealerships, dairies, and small southern theme parks, but it just didn’t occur to them yet that they could just make a whole movie out of Ernest. Or maybe they didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Either way, there’s some good character work here, and a bunch of those characters would appear later in the Extended Ernest Universe (including, the GOAT, Auntie Nelda). It’s all a little rough and ready, probably only for the hardcore Ernest-heads, but at least it’s largely unobjectionable.

#6. Ernest Goes to School (1994)

This is the only Ernest movie not directed by John Cherry III (instead, his old collaborator from his days in advertising, Coke Sams, takes the helm). Still, this is probably the first entry on our list that I would qualify as a proper Ernest Movie. One good sign is that you have Bill Byrge in a supporting role as Bobby. While we don’t have Bobby’s regular scene partner, Gailard Sartain’s Chuck, Bobby does anchor us solidly in the Southern milieu, and speaks to a certain comedic sensibility that bodes well for an Ernest movie. Ernest films work much better in a “we laugh at ourselves” type of way, and Chuck and Bobby keep the targets on the back of good ol’ boys, as opposed to, say, African tribesmen or Middle Eastern dictators. Anyway, in this movie, Ernest is a janitor who has to re-enroll in high school to get his GED so he can keep his job, but when he starts failing, a scientist shoots him with a smart beam. That’s just great stuff. Well, it’s OK stuff. It’s proper Ernest stuff, at least.

#5. Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)

This was the first theatrically released Ernest movie, and they hit the ground running. Ernest is the maintenance man at a summer camp and he dreams of being a counselor. Dreaming of being a summer camp counselor was a big thing back in the day; summer camp movies always made being a counselor seem like the best of both worlds of being a kid and a grown up. It makes sense that Ernest would want that, as he too exists in the world of both kid and adult like a PeeWee Herman in dungarees. There’s some good gags here, Chuck and Bobby are here. While this obviously is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, we have now officially entered the “You Don’t Have to Be a Sicko to Enjoy This” zone.

#4. The Ernest Film Festival (1986)

OK, one quick dip back into the Sicko zone. The Ernest Film Festival is a direct to VHS compilation of early Ernest commercials. Obviously, a lot of people do not want to watch that, I get it. Still, I think it has its charms. Ernest started off as a pitchman, and watching all these commercials, you can see why he broke out. Varney’s goofy likability and self-effacing humor hit pretty consistently. It’s just him addressing you, the viewer, as his neighbor, Vern, and asking if you heard about a great new service, product, event, or savings opportunity, and then a quick gag to put a button on it. Then, boom, on to the next. If you want to understand why Ernest fever swept the nation, The Ernest Film Festival is your Rosetta Stone, and it’s also not the least pleasant way you could spend 80 minutes. There’s even some outtakes at the end!

#3. Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)

Now, we’re talking. Not only does this one have special effects from the Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space) but it also has Ernest in top form. Tons of great visual gags, the rubber face is going hard. They did try to handle bringing in other Varney characters in a strange way; it would just cut and all of a sudden Ernest would be Auntie Nelda for exactly one shot and then cut back and he was Ernest again. It was like he was the genie from Aladdin turning into William F Buckley for one line. It didn’t quite work for me. Still, this is a solid outing and will definitely be your favorite goth’s favorite Ernest movie.

#2. Ernest Goes to Jail (1990)

There’s a lot to love about Ernest Goes to Jail. First up, it’s the only Ernest movie in the top three that isn’t tied to a holiday; it’s always Ernest Goes to Jail Season. It also features just a ton of great comedic set pieces (Ernest battling a runaway floor buffer inside a bank at the top is a real highlight). Varney gets a rare dual role in this one, playing a criminal who swaps places with Ernest to escape from prison as well as the titular Ernest. There are many who say that his turn as the villainous Felix Nash is Varney’s sexiest on screen role and I won’t argue! Varney really could do it all.

#1. Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)

Ernest Saves Christmas really feels like the perfect application of Ernest. Ernest is, as stated previously, a man-child, and his childlike innocence is perfect for a family friendly Christmas film. Douglas Seale, though skinny for a Santa, is a perfect counterpoint for Ernest. Despite their very different circumstances (a cab driver from Florida who has a small brain and a big heart and a toy maker from Prussia who took Santa Claus’s place 100 years ago and is now looking for a replacement for himself) they have a lot in common. They’re both Christmas loving naifs who are too pure for this world. I also gotta say, really smart to not have Ernest take Santa’s place at the end of the movie. That would have just been crass. In any case, we need Ernest here much more than the North Pole does. Here he can spread joy all year long!

Of course, this list is just one man talking. If any of you reading this have watched every one of these twelve Ernest movies and take umbrage with my ranking, please sound off in the comments! It takes all types!

Chuck Norris once taught me to climb a rope so good that I now own the rope company

Chuck Norris died. For an eighty-something year old B movie actor who had his biggest hit over 40 years ago with Missing in Action, he’s retained a surprising level of cultural relevance, through some odd alignment of the stars. His low budget cop TV show, Walker Texas Ranger, kept him in the public eye throughout the 90’s; playing clips of Walker Texas Ranger became a recurring gag with Conan O’Brien kept him in our consciousness for a little while longer, until those inspired the rise of Chuck Norris jokes. Chuck Norris jokes were one of the earliest internet memes and if you think they aren’t still going strong, then you need to check out some episodes of Guys: A Podcast About Guys with Bryan Quinby.

Now, I have to make a confession. The only Chuck Norris movie I’ve ever seen is Sidekicks. For those that haven’t seen Sidekicks, this is kind of like if the only Arnold Schwarzenegger movie I had ever seen was The Last Action Hero. I was (and am) only familiar with the signifier, but I had only the vaguest notion of what was being signified.

That said, I remember having a soft spot for Sidekicks as a boy. Much like Jonathan Brandis’s Barry, I was an awkward child who had a fascination with martial arts (though mine came to me via the Ninja Turtles instead of Big Chuck), and so the tale of a kid whose karate fantasies become reality hit home. The plot is, essentially, The Karate Kid if Daniel Larusso was obsessed with Chuck Norris. Barry is an asthmatic, friendless high school student who repeatedly gets lost in day dreams of adventure as Chuck Norris’s titular sidekick. Everyone bullies him for it. He has a hard time making friends or meeting girls. Eventually, his history teacher sets him up with her uncle, an unconventional martial arts master (from Asia!) who teaches him the real stuff. He goes to a karate tournament where his team is one entrant short, but by an odd coincidence, Chuck Norris is there, too, and they’re able to convince him to join the team.

As much as I love a good cinematic karate tournament, the outcome of the tournament does feel like kind of a forgone conclusion once Chuck Norris signs up with The Frying Dragon (Barry’s team is named after his sensei’s restaurant). The real joy of the film comes before Chuck even shows up (diegetically). The best parts of Sidekicks are when he appears in a series of fantasy sequences. Throughout Sidekicks, Barry routinely gets lost in day dreams that resemble, but are legally distinct from Chuck Norris films.

Now, as I say, I’ve never seen any of these other Chuck films. I don’t think you have to, and I think the movie benefits from not having seen them. They don’t really evoke any specific characters or moments of these films, near as I can tell. You just get a setting and you get Chuck in costume and I think that’s pretty much supposed to cover it. If Chuck was supposed to be playing different characters in these films or these fantasy sequences is unclear. Each little mini-movie does do a fantastic job of making me feel like they are evoking something specific, though. I don’t need to watch whatever movie it is where Chuck Norris has a mullet, wears a trench coat, and beats up drug dealers to get what that sequence is gesturing towards. I’m sure it exists and I’m sure it holds very few surprises for me. Sidekicks allows me to speedrun Chuck’s entire oeuvre.

Of course, Barry’s daydreams do make some tweaks. None of the films feature Chuck Norris having a fourteen year old sidekick blowing away drug dealers with a shotgun, I imagine. I’d wager that Missing In Action doesn’t feature Joe Piscopo in yellow face. I guess you could call these sequences parodies of Chuck Norris films, but they feel more like tributes. To me, that’s a big part of what makes Sidekicks so charming. It’s a love letter to the movies. Maybe not to movies that you or I love, maybe not to movies you or I have even seen but Sidekicks is a love letter to the movies. If you’re a Chuck Norris fan, maybe you feel like Sidekicks is somewhere between a cash-in and a clip show, I don’t know. For me, Sidekicks is about a weird lonely kid that’s obsessed with movies that nobody else on Earth likes who ends up kicking ass and kissing Danica “Winnie Cooper” McKellar. Of course I’m gonna love it.

I drew Mitchell Goosen as a cardinal, because when he rollerblades, he is as beautiful as a bird. I probably should have done a goose, in retrospect.

There’s a type of movie that I am going to call an Endeavor Movie. An Endeavor Movie can be of any genre, made anywhere in the world, but it will always have one defining trait. An Endeavor Movie will always make one field of human endeavor seem like the coolest thing in the world. It can be a job, a hobby, a skill, a sport; anything that a person can strive to be good at, an Endeavor Movie will make that endeavor seem important, exciting, and awesome. Think bartending in Cocktail, lawyering in Michael Clayton, capoeira in Only the Strong, or hacking in Hackers.

Endeavor Films at their best offer us an insider’s view of all these endeavors. You’ll hear jargon, you’ll learn the cultural signifiers, and you will leave the film with a sense that, perhaps, you could run with the big dogs in whatever field of human endeavor this film has taken place in. And if the film is about something that you yourself actually do? Whether it gets all the details right or gets all the details wrong, you’ll be in hog heaven noticing all those details.

One of my absolutely favorite Endeavor Movies has got to be Airborne. The human endeavor in question is rollerblading. Rollerblading was the skateboarding of the 90’s, but while I can easily name half a dozen skateboarding movies, I can only think of one rollerblading movie; and so, to me, Airborne is the definitive rollerblading movie, even if it’s just by default. That said, I do think, if there were other rollerblading movies, Airborne would blow them out of the water.

It’s a classic fish out of water tale. Our hero, Mitchell, is a California surfer who is sent to live with his Aunt and Uncle in Ohio while his parents go to Australia on a work trip. It turns out that this California surfer does have one thing in common with the hockey loving teens of Cleveland, though: they both love rollerblading. He eventually earns the respect of the locals and agrees to join them for a team race against the local prep school preppies. This race is the final set piece of the film; it takes up easily the last fifteen minutes and it will make you believe that rollerblading is life. Mitchell and his boys jockey for position, jump over obstacles, grind down stair rails, while making their way down the hill they call The Devil’s Backbone (they say no one has ever skated down it and lived!).

The skaters on the preppie team are all played by members of Team Rollerblade, a team of skating professionals hired by Rollerblade to serve as brand ambassadors, and their skills with a pair of inline skates serve them well here, even though it’s light on the skating tricks that I’m sure are their bread and butter. This sequence focuses on speed and maneuverability. Some of the kids get hit by cars, careen out of control, fly into walls, but those out in front fly down that hill with the grace of ballet dancers and the speed of F1 racers.

Somehow, this light-hearted fish out of water teen comedy turns into The French Connection on rollerblades for this final sequence and it is exactly what the movie needs. I really can’t emphasize enough how impressed I was by this sequence. It also has the brains to end exactly when it should, immediately after the race. This is the crescendo, and the movie goes out on its highest note.

The movie has other pleasures as well, of course. You’ve got a very young Jack Black as one of the hockey players that busts Mitchell’s balls. You’ve also got a very young Seth Green as Mitchell’s wacky cousin Wiley, who even gets a fun pre-double date outfit montage set to Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy.

The absolute high water mark, though, is this race. The race does what every great Endeavor Movie does: it shows why everyone in the movie is drawn to this endeavor. Of course the preps and the public school kids are settling their differences by rollerblading. It’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s dangerous, it’s beautiful, and in the world of Airborne, rollerblading is the only thing that matters. When you’re watching Airborne, you get it.

Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return, run away with me.

It used to be, if you were no longer a boy but not yet a man, and you wanted to see a naked lady, you’d have to work for it. For me and many men my age, the work we put in would involve checking our TV listings to see what was scheduled on HBO after midnight on Friday and Saturday night. Of course, at around 13 years old, I wouldn’t be familiar with most of the films being scheduled, but the TV listings would have, in addition to brief descriptions of the plot, little codes to indicate why a film had gotten whatever rating it had gotten from the MPAA. The codes that I was looking for were N and AS; Nudity and Adult Situations. BN (Brief Nudity) would also pique my interest if paired with AS, but I also knew not to get my hopes up. BN, in my mind, would come to stand for Butt Nudity, because nine times out of ten you would end up seeing butt for less than three seconds, and it would be a dude’s butt, at that. Still, it was worth a shot.

I’ve long since forgotten most of the movies I watched this way; bleary-eyed after watching HBO Boxing After Dark, a couple of re-runs of Arli$$, and/or who knows what else while waiting for the main event of my evening. One that definitely stuck with me, though, was Point of No Return starring Bridget Fonda. Bridget Fonda also starred in Single White Female, which also was in heavy rotation in this late night cable time slot and also stamped a very deep imprint into my pubescent brain, but we can talk Single White Female another day. All I’ll say is Single White Female was (for me) about how you shouldn’t fall in love with a sexy crazy lady and Point of No Return is about how you should fall in love with a sexy crazy lady. If you look at the entirety of my life, you can see how both these messages resonated with me.

When the film starts with Bridget Fonda’s Maggie at her lowest. She’s a strung out junkie, almost feral. In the very first scene, while holding up a drugstore with a couple of her fellow travellers, she grabs a cop’s gun right off his belt and shoots him in the face (heart-eyes emoji, heart-eyes emoji, heart-eyes emoji). Soon, she is pissing herself and crying out for mommy as she is executed by lethal injection. Or is she?

Anyone who has seen Point of No Return (or the film it is remaking, La Femme Nikita) knows that this is just the beginning of Maggie’s journey. She’s been recruited to be trained as a government assassin, her execution was fake. She’s going to be trained by Gabriel Byrne, she eventually does well, but when she falls in love and wants to quit assassinating, it turns out she already passed the Point of No Return. You get the idea.

It’s important to note that Bridget Fonda, for those that aren’t in the know, is transcendantly beautiful in this film. Fonda rarely gets her flowers when it comes to being one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood in the 90’s, and even less so for being a reliably charming actor. Her performance here is, I think, more vulnerable than one might expect from the lead of a sexy lady assassin movie, and that vulnerability is a big part of what makes this performance so memorable. She shows surprising range, as well, never leaning too heavily on her million dollar smile or her steely glare. Her range really helps Maggie resonate as a real emotional being, in spite of the fact that she’s also a gun-wielding hottie with a body.

Now, I’m sure that I saw a lot of different, talented, beautiful women on late night cable back then. I’m sure I saw a lot more of them, too; Point of No Return was definitely a BN situation. I think the reason Point of No Return made such a deep impression on me was that it was the first film I ever saw (that I remember, anyway) where a woman was notably horny.

Maggie wanted to have sex, enjoyed having sex, was having fun when she had sex, and was frustrated when she was not able to have sex. The idea that this was even possible was revelatory to me, as a thirteen year old. As far as I could tell, none of the girls at school wanted to have sex. (I also, realistically, did not want to actually have sex, but I would have loved to get a lot closer to it than I was). When she finally gets to have sex with her boyfriend, Dermot Mulroney, it is joyful, playful, fun. She feeds him a canned ravioli in the style of the egg from Tampopo before collapsing on top of him. She is the initiator, she is the aggressor, and she will not wait until they’ve finished their Chef Boyardee.

As a kid that could not even imagine how to interact with someone I was sexually attracted to in any kind of normal way, the idea that a woman could initiate sex, perhaps even in the middle of a pasta dinner, well, that would solve all my problems. I could be as shy, as cautious, as inactive as I was naturally inclined to be; all I had to do is find this fabled Horny Woman.

As revelatory as this ravioli scene was, the one that stuck with me happened much earlier. It was not a sex scene, but a scene from before Maggie even meets Dermot Mulroney. She’s stuck at the training facility. She’s overcome her initial recalcitrance and has settled in to doing the bare minimum amount of work necessary to keep Gabriel Byrne off her back. In her journey from feral evil druggie to badass killer in a cocktail dress to manic pixie dream sexpot, she is still at the halfway point between step one and step two. Gabriel Byrne pops into her dorm room/prison cell to try to motivate her as she lounges on her bed in grey cotton panties and a matching ribbed tank top. She’s blasting Nina Simone’s “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” on the stereo Gabriel Byrne’s Bob bought her (this was also how I first heard Nina Simone). Bob asks her, “She wants sugar in her bowl?” and Maggie, amused by his squareness, responds with a purr, “No, she’s saying ‘Ooh, baby, just stick it in me twice a day, and I’ll do anything for you. I’ll lick the ground you walk on.’”

As someone desperate for affection, at this point in my life I probably would have shot the president if a girl asked me to. Here was a beautiful woman that was as overwhelmed with desire as I, a pubescent teenage boy was. I had never seen anything like it, not in a year of Friday and Saturday nights watching HBO at one in the morning.

Maggie offered me a fantasy that revealed a larger truth. The fantasy was that there could be a lady living next door that could be a manifestation of any one half a dozen dream girls on any given day and she wants to have sex with me. The truth was that there are women who actually do want to have sex, and that, maybe we weren’t so different after all.

The Wrights in their natural habitat: a movie

When you think about whether or not a movie is good, to some extent, you have to think about what movie it’s trying to be. If your romantic leads don’t have chemistry, that’s a problem if the movie is trying to be a romantic comedy, but less so for an action movie. If your special effects look a little chintzy, that’s a problem for a summer blockbuster, but it can be part of the charm of a low budget genre picture. We calibrate our opinions based on the context created by our expectations.

I recently watched a movie called The Badge, The Bible and Bigfoot, based solely on the title and the poster. The only expectations I had were that it was going to be Christian, pro-cop, somehow involve the cryptid known as Bigfoot, and it was cheap as hell. It clocks in at sub 70 minutes, so even if it was absolute garbage, at least it wasn’t a lot of garbage.

For the record, it was garbage.

I could make some reasonable assumptions based on this little information, but for the most part, I came in as a complete tabula rasa. I had never seen a trailer or a single frame of this film, I had never read anything about it, no one had ever mentioned it to me. The title and the poster alone had done their duties and drawn me in as a potential audience member.

The first thing I noticed in the opening credits is that everyone has the same last name. The poster with the phrase “Wright Family Films Presents” emblazoned across the top should have tipped me off, in retrospect. Turns out, this movie was made by a homeschool family; somehow, I had been tricked into watching their home movie. Perhaps this was part of a school project, but the children play such a small role, perhaps not.

I just now, as I’m writing this, looked up director Ashley Hays Wright and learned that she has sixty-one directing credits on imdb. I don’t know how to process this. My context for this film has once again changed completely, and I’m going to need to consider how to integrate this into my conceptual gestalt of The Badge, The Bible, and Bigfoot. My god, the implications are staggering. This is just her second feature, and she has directed thirty-seven feature length films in the seven years since. I’m going to need some time to process this to a point of understandingness.

* * *

OK. I took a day (I had food poisoning, I actually took two days). I’ve recalibrated and I now understand The B, The B, and B as the work of an artist at the beginning of her journey. I’m not sure if I would call it “promising” but it must be acknowledged that making a feature film is quite difficult; a lot of people talk about it, but not everyone can be about it. She’s been about it at least 30-something times, and for that, you simply have to tip your cap.

Thinking back on it now, you could see Wright developing a style, and I’m curious to see how that style will evolve as her career continues. Does she still tilt the camera up towards the sky in establishing shots to evoke the omniscience of God? Does she still shoot her husband’s forearms the same way Quentin Tarantino shoots Uma Thurman’s feet? Will her husband still be triple cast for no discernible reason?

Let’s talk about her husband for a second. David Owen Wright isn’t just her husband, he’s also her star, playing Harrison, the chief of a police department that gets defunded at the beginning of the film, leaving this small town vulnerable to the predations of this big foot. He also plays the chief’s rival, the Sheriff, but with a cowboy hat pulled low over his face and his voice dubbed over by Ronald Wright (I’m guessing David’s father?). On top of that, he’s also the guy in the Bigfoot costume, which does make their climactic confrontation a little tricky.

To add to this complication, it appears that the Wrights will also serve as camera operators for their scenes, working handheld, and so they are almost never in a shot together. While I’m sure this decision was a big help to their budget, having one actor deliver their line and then take the camera and shoot the other actor delivering their line does not do a lot to help their performances. Both Wrights (and as well as the three Wright daughters, but I don’t want to talk about kids too much) deliver very flat, stilted performances. Mr Wright has a permanent tough-guy glower and seems better suited to playing an evil cop than a good guy cop. He seems like the kind of cop that uses a lot of slurs. Mrs. Wright’s Mayor Claire feels strangely ethereal; I half expected her to turn out to be a ghost.

Have their performances improved in the years since? Do they look back at this early effort with amused embarrassment? Or have they been too forward-thinking for the type of self-reflection that would require? Their blistering production schedule would offer little time for introspection, you know, on top raising three daughters and paying the bills and whatever else they have going on. Still, I’m so curious to know where they are at now. (Watch this space, True Believers! Eyes Front!)

Of course, nobody expects the next Sir John Gielgud to pop up in a $4,000 movie about Bigfoot. I suppose I could say the performances feel of a piece with the rest of the film. In the course of writing this, I’ve softened my views on the whole affair. I first thought it was the work of a dilettante, but Ashley Hays Wright’s proflicacy and longevity prove that she is something different. This wasn’t just a fun family project for a month of weekends, but a genuine attempt at something, and her artistic drive must be commended. Once again, context is everything.

I hate this fish so much

I hated the movie The Day of the Dolphin. I hated the experience of watching it. I hated that I really wanted to like it and I couldn’t. More than anything, I hated the talking dolphins.

I didn’t know I was going to hate the talking dolphins when I started the movie. The tagline of the film (“Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the president of the United States.”) led me to believe I would be watching a film about a dolphin killing the president of the United States, perhaps unwittingly. The attempted assassination of the president does take up most of the third act, but a surprisingly large chunk of the film involves teaching a dolphin to talk, talking to a dolphin, convincing a recalcitrant dolphin that has stopped talking to start talking again, and convincing the guys that fund the dolphin academy that this is worthwhile use of their hard-earned dollars.

Now, hypothetically, there’s nothing wrong with a talking dolphin movie, that could be a fun 96 minutes, but The Day of the Dolphin does everything possible to ensure that we, in the audience, know that a talking dolphin would be an abomination and that teaching a dolphin to speak is spitting in the face of God. The near constant blasphemy really takes the fun out of it.

We only get to talk to two dolphins, Bea and Fa, short for Beta and Alpha. Both can understand English, but only Fa can speak it. Fa speaks in a slow, high-pitched nasal voice that feels strained, like it pains him. His voice sounds partly like a child on his deathbed, and partly like a bully mocking that child. It also sounds like he’s mocking us.

Also, and I hate to be this kind of person, but Bea and Fa are really bad names for dolphins, because both a “b-” sound and a “f-” sound require you to use your lips to make them. Try and make a “buh” of a “fuh” sound right now without using your lips and I think you will find it quite impossible. Dolphins don’t have lips; they are as physically incapable of making these sounds as they are putting on bowling shoes. I hope somebody got fired for that blunder (the blunder being “the premise of the movie”)!

We also learn that dolphins are incapable of deception, do not understand metaphors, and can not grasp hypotheticals. Everything that any human says to them is taken as literal truth. We learn this when one of the money men comes out to the dolphin school and lies to Bea and Fa, which really confuses them. Not only do we introduce these underwater innocents to language, we now have taught them the concept of deceit. The blasphemy continues.

The money men don’t seem particularly perturbed at the prospect of acting as the snake in Bea and Fa’s Garden of Eden. After all, they are hoping to trick them into planting a bomb on the president’s yacht. They might even prefer working with morally compromised dolphins. Afterall, this was going to be a suicide mission. Unfortunately, the president lives and Bea and Fa escape to the freedom of the open ocean. We do not get a shot of them swimming up to a dock and Fa saying, “BoAt…gO…bOoOoOm…Fa…GeT…fIsH???” before an assassin sends him to the briny deep, courtesy of two shots from a silenced pistol. Instead, the film ends with them returning to the wild, perhaps to spread humanity’s mimetic evil amongst their fellow dolphins.

At the end of the day, this is what I hated most about The Day of the Dolphin. The talking dolphins felt unnatural and evil to me, but that evil is the evil we brought to them. The humans engage in a form of psychic colonialism on these animals, foisting our language, our culture, and our very conception of reality upon them, and in so doing have made them spiritually diseased. The evil that I see in these dolphins is the evil in us.

The Day of the Dolphin is fucking disgusting, dude.

Dennis Wirth as Unnamed Superhero

Writers will sometimes employ a technique called an Unreliable Narrator, where the reader is made aware that the text is not being written from an objective point of view. We can see that the narrator is lying to us or themselves, and these lies reveal greater truths.

What would this technique look like in film? Would it require a literal narrator, or is there a way that the very text of the film itself could make itself known as unreliable? I think there is a way it could work, and I think it would look something like The World Needs a New Superhero.

The World Needs a New Superhero is a microbudget comedy written by and starring stand-up comedian Dennis Wirth. (Wirth did not direct, but director Adam Griswold appears to have put little to no authorial stamp on this picture; I’m comfortable calling Wirth the auteur of The World Needs a New Superhero). If Dennis Wirth isn’t yet a household name, that’s only because he never will be. In the film, he plays Dennis, a father, going through a divorce and being screwed out of custody of his child by a system that stacks the deck against fathers. Dennis decides that what he needs to do is become a superhero that fights for the rights of divorced dads, and so he does.

Now, you might be saying, “that doesn’t make any sense” and you would be correct. This is a comedy, so it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, it just has to be funny. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can quite call it funny. I don’t think you can call it much of anything.

Throughout the film, Wirth positions himself as a victim of circumstance. Courts favor the mother, the IRS won’t let you claim your kid as a dependent if they don’t live with you, and your ex-wife won’t even talk to you like a reasonable human being. He’s just an honest man, trying to be a part of his child’s life. Or so the film would have us believe, but even in a world manufactured by Dennis Wirth, Dennis Wirth’s story does not hold up. In a thousand different little ways, The World Needs a New Superhero, tells us that the film is lying to us, and the truth shines through the cracks in its facade.

First is the complete lack of interiority of any of the film’s three antagonists. Between the judge that consistently rules against him, the accountant that refuses to violate tax laws to help him, and the ex-wife that refuses to give an inch to any of his polite requests to see his child more often, Wirth is beset on all sides by unmitigated, unmotivated evil. Now, the judge is cursed by an evil gavel and the accountant drinks a magical potion that does something (not clear what, probably makes him evil), but the ex-wife is just evil by her nature. There’s just a darkness in their souls (placed there by cursed objet or naturally occurring) that drives them to torture this perfectly innocent divorced dad. Wirth’s lack of theory of the mind for those that oppose him in this film makes a viewer wonder if he’s bringing a similar lack of nuance and understanding to his marriage and subsequent divorce.

There’s no footage in the film of pre-divorce Dennis. We do not know what their marriage was like, we do not know why they got divorced. We also do not get any scenes of Dennis with his child. The film asks us to take him at his word that he’s a good father and only wants what’s best, but it never occurs to the real Dennis Wirth that the film Dennis should have a pet-the-dog scene where we get to see him being a loving father to his kid. We just get to hear him defensively say, “hey, I’m a good father!”

At no point in the film does he say his child’s name. I’m not sure if they even have a name.

He also never says his own superhero name. This is the only superhero movie I’ve ever seen where the superhero is not given a superhero name. It’s really a slap in the face of the genre. The closest he gets to a name is during his theme song, where the singer refers to him as a “child support superhero.” Once again, the truth shines through the cracks. As much as Dennis says that his sole interest is in what’s best for his child, the soundtrack does not refer to him as “best for the child superhero,” “shared custody superhero”, or “not all dads superhero”. This song knows what Dennis’s complaint is, even if Dennis never admits it, and consequently, we know, too. It’s as plain as the dollar sign Child Support Superhero wears as the insignia on his chest.

Though we regularly see Dennis complaining about how he is broke, we never see him working. We do, at one point, learn that he has wracked up a $500 bar tab this month, but Dennis never connects these financial dots. There’s never a question of how much money his child actually needs, there’s only a question of how much Dennis can afford to pay.

Now, I don’t know if the real Dennis has a $500 outstanding bar tab, but the number I’ve seen for the budget for The World Needs a New Superhero is $4,000. This is obviously chump change when it comes to film budgets, but that’s a good amount of money when it comes to supporting a kid, and I have a feeling that most of it came out of Dennis Wirth’s pocket. When you write and star in a movie and you name your character after yourself and put them in a situation that’s similar to your life, the audience is naturally going to muddle up reality and your movie a little bit. We know that Dennis the character has an axe to grind by dressing up as a nameless superhero, and we can tell that Dennis the writer/actor does, too. We also know that Dennis the writer/actor, instead of spending his money on food and clothing for his kid, spent $4,000 on a movie where he calls the mother of his child a bitch and complains that he can’t afford child support. While it’s tough to discern the truth of either Dennis’s situation when it’s clearly coming from such an unreliable source, the one thing you can really be sure of is that both Dennis and Dennis are kind of assholes.

But I think it’s James Lew

If you asked me to name the perfect weapon, I would probably say a gun that shoots golden shuriken. According to the movie The Perfect Weapon, it’s a guy named Jeff, played by a guy named Jeff. Jeff Speakman, to be specific.

Speakman was the definitive also-ran of 90’s action stars. He could have been another Stephen Seagal, except he lacked his bizarre intensity. He could have been another JCVD, but he lacked his Belgian charm. He might have at least been a Mark Dacascos, but he lacked his million dollar smile. He also didn’t have that dog in him that would let him sign on to any kind of deranged direct-to-video dogshit like a Billy Blanks or a Don “The Dragon” Wilson. When you come right down to it, he didn’t have any kind of hook to elevate beyond being a kind of jacked dude named Jeff that’s good at karate.

Now, when I say Jeff is good at karate, I do mean it. He is currently a 10th degree black belt in American Kenpo Karate. I’m not an expert in this kind of thing, but it looks like there are less than 50 10th degree black belts in the world. So, like, you could make an argument that he is one of the top 50 living karate practitioners on Earth. Watching him fight, watching him practice, I bought that he was a legitimate martial artist. Which is not to say that he is a good stunt performer. There is a difference between practicing a martial art in a dojo, fighting in a ring, and performing for a camera. They’re each separate, if related skills and I believe Speakman’s skillset lies more in the former two than the latter.

He is not helped by the fight choreography of Ricky Avery, which is best described as “workmanlike”. Avery has a very long career of stunt coordination and stunt work in some very impressive pictures like The Dark Knight and Bumblebee, as well as things that you don’t think of as having stunts like The Drew Carrey Show and Fat Albert: The Movie. (He was also the helicopter pilot for several episodes of Hell’s Kitchen). Needless to say, not a martial arts fight choreography specialist. More of a solid, jack of all trades professional but perhaps not the guy for a film designed to launch the career of a martial arts film star.

In my opinion, another hurdle Speakman has to overcome is that American Kenpo Karate is a fairly straight forward fighting style. Karate emphasizes strikes, straight kicks, and counterstrikes.; it’s very linear. It lacks the artistic flourishes of an animal style kung fu or a capoeria. Van Damme’s kickboxing gave him an arsenal of flashy kicks. Even Seagal’s mastery of aikido gave him this hypnotic ability to have his enemies melt to the floor in front of him. Karate’s advantage as a cinematic martial art is that it’s legible and credible, but, much like Speakman, it lacks flare (once again, just one man talking (but there’s a reason that kung fu movies are more popular than karate movies, I’m just saying)).

Now, all this sounds like it would add up to a fairly forgettable film for fight fans. There is one thing that might salvage The Perfect Weapon, though. It has a murderers row of Asian and Asian-American character actors and stunt performers. Every fight scene features another face, where you might not know the name, but you sure are happy to see them. Like seeing that one nice cashier at the grocery store; every time they pop up, you know you’ll be in good hands for the next few minutes. Viewers will delight in the more familiar names like Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Mako, Clyde Kusatsu, Dante Basco, Toru Tanaka, and the legendary James Hong filling out the various heroes and villains of Koreatown, but real heavy hitters are the stunt performers that hit people, heavily.

You might not know their names, but all of them have resumes that show what position players they were for the movies. Obviously, you’re going to have the GOAT henchmen, Al Leong (Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Big Trouble in Little China), but you’ve also got Will Leong (The Matrix Reloaded, Charlie’s Angels, Blade), Philip Tan (Inception, Minority Report, Demolition Man), Leo Lee (Escape from L.A., Mortal Kombat (1995), Showdown in Little Tokyo), Roger Yuan (John Wick - Chapter 3, Spawn, Black Dynamite), John Koyama (Crank 2: High Voltage, Spider-Man, The Replacement Killers), Craig Ng (Everything Everywhere All at Once, On Deadly Ground, Road House (2024)), and many more. The assorted thugs, heavies, and ne’er-do-wells in The Perfect Weapon have fought more heroes than Dr. Doom, and every time they’re on screen, you feel like you’re finally watching a proper movie.

These stunt performers are part of a long cinematic tradition of Asian dudes getting their asses beat by a white guy that learned martial arts, a tradition that dates back James Cagney in Blood On the Sun (1945). I’d be fascinated to hear their takes on the racial politics of these films. I imagine that they are complicated. It is certainly not my place to judge what a working actor has to do to put food on the table. It has long been the case in Hollywood that, if you are an Asian actor, you are just straight up going to get more work if you shell out for a few kung fu classes. If nothing else, these actors played the cards that they were dealt, and they played them well. As lackluster as Speakman was as a hero, it was not the fault of the not-quite-anonymous foes he had to fight. They, as always, were electric. In professional wrestling, they would be called jobbers, playing heels that convincingly lose to the new babyface and sell him to the crowd. Jeff Speakman didn’t quite make it over, but I don’t think you can blame them. They were a tentpole, holding up a generation’s worth of action cinema. These stuntmen, they were the perfect weapon.

See what I did there? Wrapped this whole thing up in a neat little bow.

Back in college, I had a professor that said that all films are documentaries about their own making. When you see a crane shot, you know they had a crane on set that day. When an actor flubs a line and it gets left in, you can tell they didn’t do enough takes where they could use another one. When you see a boom mic in a shot, you know both the camera operator and the boom operator were asleep on the job. That sort of thing.

If all films are documentaries about their own making, then a filmmaker making an autodocumentary about their own filmmaking process would be doubly so. Neil Breen’s “Neil Breen 5 Film Retrospective” allows us to take this way of watching a film to its furthest limits. It’s a Bad film by and about America’s foremost active Bad filmmaker and how he makes his Bad films badly. It is a cup that overflows with opportunities for insight into the man and his works; a matryoshka of meaning.

That said, it’s no easy watch. The first thing astute viewers will notice about Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective is that it clocks in at just over five and a half hours. (The total runtime of the five films covered in the retrospective is only seven and a half hours.) Now, I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who see a five and a half hour runtime on a movie and laugh. “It’s no Empire or The Clock”, they’ll say. Me, I’m a notorious runtime ho. Still, I was able to make it through, all in one go (I strongly recommend starting it shortly before breakfast after you’ve had a good night’s sleep).

I do believe that Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective should be watched in its entirety in one go. I don’t think there’s another way you can truly experience how punishing it is. Somewhere around the two and a half hour mark, when you realize that you are, somehow, impossibly not halfway through it, that will be a low moment. But at three and a half, you’ll hit that runner’s high. By four and a half, you’ll be euphoric, because you know you’re going to win and the movie is going to lose. By the time it’s done, you’ll feel transformed.

I’ve heard people say that runtime is inconsequential; that it doesn’t matter how long a movie is, what matters is how long a movie feels. Those people should know that you feel every single one of Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective’s three-hundred and forty-five minutes. Breen has always had a distinctly flat affect and soft voice, almost everything he says is incredibly boring, and he says almost all of it at least three times over the course of the film. While I think it would destroy the art of Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective, you could easily cut it down to a tight twenty minutes without losing any textual insights into Breen’s methodology.

The keenest insights into Breen come from reading Retrospective as a documentary of its own making. The film itself is footage of Breen in either his living room or his editing suite. There are only two camera set ups and this is the only original footage shot for Retrospective, and they use up roughly 30% of the screentime. The rest of the film is scenes from the five previous films he had made (Double Down, I Am Here….Now, Fateful Findings, Pass Thru, and Twisted Pair). There is maybe five minutes of behind the scenes footage and photographs. At no point is there any input from any of Breen’s collaborators or co-stars, who I imagine have a much clearer-eyed view of Breen and his work than the man himself. It appears to not even have occurred to him. Breen talks about them as if they were somewhere between props and employees. They are not fellow artists so much as they are means to an end.

Breen divides the film into chapters, chapters with titles like “Production Values” and “Character Images”. He will then roll footage from his films to illustrate the subject at hand. Strangely, he rolls the same footage for each segment. The first time he does it, you will feel crazy. By the fourth time he does it, you will be crazy. For one iteration of this process, somewhere in hour three, he does not speak at all, preferring to let the footage do the talking. This part is especially rough.

Most tellingly, at another point he says, “here I am picking up the equipment, I think I’ve shown this before.” Which raises the question, why didn’t he cut it out? This one statement makes me feel like the whole film was created extemporaneously over a long weekend. Like he sat in his editing studio, and said to himself, “well, next I’ve got Character Images. I’ll just pop this same montage in the timeline and riff on that for about twenty minutes, and then it’s on to the next.” Rinse and repeat.

To be clear, at no point does Breen seem to be aware that what he is creating is mind numbingly boring. People are always wary of outsider artists like Breen, afraid that they’ll be duped by a conman pretending to make a bad movie and tricked into enjoying themselves. I would say that Breen is incapable of the type of introspection necessary for this type of trickery. To put on an effective disguise, one must look in the mirror, and if there’s one thing that Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective makes incredibly clear, it’s that Neil Breen is incapable of truly seeing his own work. This is especially ironic since the explicit promise of the premise of this movie is that you will be seeing Breen on Breen.

At no point does he say, “oh, that was silly” or “in retrospect, I don’t think this quite worked.” Instead we get, “I shot this at the University of Nevada Las Vegas at night” or “I always pay my actors, but they aren’t in the union, so I don’t pay them very much.” For Breen, I think, making a film is less “creating a work of art” and more “doing a series of discrete actions that cause a film to exist”.

I think this is the secret to Breen’s success, however. While a director’s job is to make art, it is a producer’s job to ensure that a series of discrete actions cause a film to exist. While Breen might be a terrible writer/director/actor/all-the-other-things-he-does, Retrospective does make it clear that he is a fairly savvy and resourceful film producer. Hell, he’s so good at producing movies, he can even turn a profit on a Neil Breen film. You simply must tip your cap. To paraphrase Florence Foster Jenkins, you might say he can’t make films, but you certainly can’t say he doesn’t make films.

Looking back on it now, I don’t think Breen sat down and watched Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective before he released it. If he did watch it, he didn’t see it. There’s no way you could watch a movie this long and this relentlessly, aggressively boring without thinking, “maybe I could trim this down a little bit.” If Breen could not see that one, single, glaringly obvious thing about this one film, then that explains all his other films. If he cannot see that Retrospective is too long and too boring, then there’s no way that he can see all the hundreds of bizarre and off putting decisions that make all his other films so unique. He is incapable of interrogating his own work. He has face blindness, but for how bad his own movies are.

In the final chapter of the film, the one that features the most original footage of the film, he basks in the applause of the crowd that attends a screening of one of his films. It fuels him, and he seems more excited than ever to keep making films for this crowd of people that do seem to largely think that he is a deranged freak. Late at night, when your imposter syndrome comes for you, or you say to yourself, “what if all my friends secretly hate me and think everything I do is stupid” this is because you are imagining yourself as Neil Breen. Throughout the entirety of Neil Breen 5 Feature Film Retrospective, Neil Breen never once imagines that he is Neil Breen. I’m sure he could not create the way that he does if he did. His superpower is that he is living every artist’s worst nightmare and doesn’t even know it.

at one point, Pat dresses as a mail carrier

The oldest known “[blank] walks into a bar” joke is from 1700 BCE Sumeria, and it translates to something like, “A dog entered a tavern and said, ‘I cannot see anything. I shall open this’”. We don’t know, exactly, what was supposed to be funny about the joke, but we know it was a joke. Maybe it was the absurdity of the talking dog? Maybe it was a play on words or a reference to some cultural aspect of Sumerian living that has not yet made itself apparent? We just don’t know. But it’s just so joke shaped that it must be a joke. By the year 2026, the SNL sketch film It’s Pat feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Sumerian dog-walks-into-a-bar joke. It’s clearly a comedy, because it has so many joke shaped things in it, but these jokes are all based on an understanding of gender that feels so dated, the humor of it is no longer intuitive. We must become archaeologists to understand it.

Julia Sweeney is one of only two women to lead a feature-length adaptation of a Saturday Night Live sketch (the other being Molly Shannon when she starred in Superstar). You could argue that there should be an asterisk on Sweeney being the first, as she could not smash through that glass ceiling playing a female character. Instead had to play a character whose gender is unknowable. Pat’s gender is so unknowable, in fact, that it is their defining quality.

Pat the character debuted on the December 1st, 1990 episode of Saturday Night Live. Your host was John Goodman. Your musical guest was Faith No More. Maybe buoyed by the strength of the host, maybe because this was the era when Rob Schneider’s “Making Copies” character Richie was considered a near bottomless well of comedic inspiration, but Pat instantly became a staple on SNL. For the next four years, viewers could expect to turn on NBC on Saturday night and see a guest star grow increasingly befuddled at the mystery of Pat’s genitals.

For any that aren’t familiar, the central conceit of Pat is that people cannot determine their gender. The more they try to figure it out, the more the answer eludes them. Questions asked yield only ambiguous answers. The classic example is someone asking Pat if the name Pat is short for something, and Pat responds, “Yes. Paaaaaaaaat. (Hold for laughter). That’s my little joke.” Pat’s co-workers, acquaintances, or neighbors grow increasingly frustrated by this mystery until they storm off and Pat turns to camera to say, “what a weird-o!” and then we’re off to our commercial break. It’s a fresh take in gender panic humor. This is not a manly lady or an effeminate man, played for laughs, but something entirely other. Perhaps, Pat’s rise to fame could be credited to the fact that they offered a fresh new way to reinforce an entire spectrum of gender norms all at once.

While the Pat-vestigators’ gender paranoia makes them the butt of the joke of the sketch as often as not, they are also our viewpoint characters. Make no mistake, the popularity of Pat can also be credited to the implicit invitation to the audience to do a little Pat-vestigating themselves. Julia Sweeney bragged that she used to receive fan letters from viewers, claiming to have determined the True Gender of the famously canonically agender fictional character.

It’s Pat uses this Pat-vestigator storyline for either its A or B plot, depending on how you read it. The B or A plot (up to you, really) is a love story between Pat and the equally androgynous Chris, played by Kids in the Hall alum, Dave Foley. Dave Foley was always KitH’s most beautiful cross dresser, but both Chris and Pat are uniquely unappealing creatures. These are not glamorous, Ziggie Stardust style androgynes. Chris and Pat are meant to be sexually repellent. (They are also very uncool, and Pat’s defining personality trait is “self-involved”)

Of course, Charles Rocket’s character, Kyle the Pat-vestigator, would disagree. Pat’s androgyny drives Kyle insane, and he begins stalking them. He steals Pat’s diary and starts dressing like them. That sort of thing. He clearly finds Pat alluring, but he does not have the emotional tools to understand what that might say about himself. In a voice over during the closing credits, Kyle confesses to Kathy Griffin that he is now a “transvestite”. It appears Pat has cracked Kyle’s egg, and hopefully, now, she will be all the better for it. Tough to say, since it’s just a cheap laugh in a poorly written comedy.

At no point does anybody theorize that Pat might be nonbinary or agender. At no point does anybody say, “why do you care about Pat’s genitals so much?”. Every single character wonders whether or not Pat has a dick or a pussy and no one ever says, “stop speculating about Pat’s genitals, it’s weird.” Several people refer to Pat as “it,” but no one uses a singular “they”.

As someone who has been married to a nonbinary person for over a decade, it was weird to see all this. Every character behaved in a way that felt completely alien to me. Pat is mostly just a mildly unpleasant little person of indeterminate gender. Why is everyone acting like this?

Because it’s the past, I suppose. A classic case of not aging well. Not even in a way that makes It’s Pat feel bigoted (though, it is), but in a way that makes it feel primitive. Watching It’s Pat fumble its way through gender from a 2026 perspective feels like watching a four year old try to assemble a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.

Maybe, I’m asking too much of It’s Pat. Maybe, It’s Pat laid necessary groundwork for where we are today? Maybe, when we gaze out towards the horizons of our understanding of gender, we don’t understand that we are standing on the shoulders of an androgynous giant?

I don’t think so, though.

I recently had an experience that compelled me to dig deeper, to get a reservation for that chef’s table. Every December, my wife (who I LOVE) and I will watch as many cheap-o Christmas movies as our schedule allows. This past weekend, we chucked on one I had my eye on called A Karate Christmas Miracle. With a title like that, how could I resist? It started off predictably, if not promisingly. A not especially talented child actor in a karate gi, an indifferently lit and shot single mother trying to survive her first holiday season without her husband. Something about the film was off-putting, but that’s something I’m accustomed to. The flat acting of our leads meant we were probably in for a rough ride, though.

(Amateur actors of the world, I’m begging you, get crazy! No one is going to watch this anyway!)

I decided I would need a cup of tea for this one, and wandered off to the kitchen to put the kettle on. When I got back, what I saw truly set me back on my heels. Gone was our precious karate boy and his mother (who had just conscripted a psychic law professor to help determine the ultimate fate of her missing husband, last I checked). Instead, on the screen, was Eric Roberts delivering some sort of rambling but menacing monologue. He’s projected on a movie theater screen, and he’s being watched by a frightened woman. The look and tone of this film is now completely different from what it was when I went to the kitchen. The film’s title, A Karate Christmas Miracle, seemed to have gotten even less relevant than it was when I left.

It took me a moment, but I quickly recognized this footage. It was from another film I had watched several months ago, a movie called Joker’s Poltergeist.

Now, Joker’s Poltergeist is one of the worst movies I have seen in a while. It was at least partially inspired by a mass shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight in Aurora, Colorado (the tag line is The Aurora Massacre (the main character is named Aurora, that is how this is textually justified)). It is not as much about the shooting itself as it is (like so many modern horror movies) about trauma, the trauma a mass shooting inflicts on its survivors. It is also one of the few movies I’ve seen that were made about a mass shooting that is also staunchly pro-gun. Early in the film, Aurora has a stress nightmare about the mass shooting, but instead of seeing her father (Martin Kove) getting gunned down in the movie theater he owned by a man in a clown mask, she sees a crowd of people pointing fingers at her and chanting “YOU SHOULDN’T LIKE GUNS! YOU SHOULDN’T LIKE GUNS!”

Needless to say, that was very strange (unfortunately, as strange as Joker’s Poltergeist is, it’s also paced like a coma, so it’s a little hard to recommend). Even more strange was seeing footage from it in the middle of A Karate Christmas Miracle. If I had stared at the poster for A Karate Christmas Miracle for a million years straight, at no point would it ever had occurred to me that it would be in any way related to Joker’s Poltergeist. As the film progressed, it became clear that A Karate Christmas Miracle was, in fact, a sequel to Joker’s Poltergeist, that the karate boy’s father went missing during the same shooting where Aurora’s father was killed. The karate boy was trying to earn his black belt before Christmas in order to bring his father back. Look, I don’t know how children’s brains work. Whatever. Sure.

Obviously, I had to figure out how this happened. This was a thread I had to pull, a scab I had to pick. I was initially thrown off to see the two films had different directors. Bad movies often force us to throw down the crutch auteur theory and stumble awkwardly towards the truth, however. I saw that the films had the same writer/producer; the same man that plays the karate boy’s missing father, Ken Del Vecchio. (He is also his real life father)

Del Vecchio was the link between these two films and the driving force behind their creation. He’s also a prolific film maker with a deep bench of what appear to be incredibly bad films for the bad film scholar to study and the bad film enthusiast to enjoy.

Scrolling through his imdb and reading the plot descriptions of the films he has written and produced, I found films starring former Hollywood icons now swirling the drain; Charles Durning two years before his death, Robert Loggia three years before his, Dustin Diamond five years before his. He produced a film called Cries of the Unborn in 2017 about pregnant women being kidnapped from an abortion clinic, where the kidnapper is brought to trial and successfully argues that there was no crime in holding these women hostage for seven months since it saved the lives of their babies. He produced another called O.B.A.M. Nude where he cast himself in the lead role as an Obama surrogate who makes a deal with the devil to become president (Del Vecchio, I really must mention, is white). He also produced a docu-drama about himself, naturally, called Renaissance Man. It’s 40 minutes long and you can watch it on Vimeo if you hate yourself and hate being alive.

His official website, as you might imagine, has fallen into disrepair, but is no less revealing. Well, maybe not so much revealing as confirming. Just go to justiceforallproductions.com and you will be one-hundred percent certain of the type of guy Del Vecchio is. He’s the type of guy that sets up a website for himself to brag about all the books he’s self published and all the films he’s self produced; his experience as a part time municipal judge and his bench pressing records. He’s a self-promotion machine without a self. He’s the type of guy that would make a film franchise comprised of both Joker’s Poltergeist and A Karate Christmas Miracle. He also made something called A Wrestling Christmas Miracle. Whether or not it’s in any way related, who can say?

I’m not sure I can stomach actually watching any more Ken Del Vecchio movies. Unlike the best bad movies, the Del Vecchio films have a distinctly “unpleasant to watch” quality that I, frankly, found to be quite unpleasant. But I do love that they’re out there, and that the ones I saw made me curious about who made them. I love that I lifted up that rock and found a bunch of creepy crawlies wriggling about underneath. A hater’s delight. In this day and age, what other delights do we have left?