Zach Weintraub is known for hyper-realistic, slice-of-life character studies (The International Sign for Choking, Slackjaw). Assets & Liabilities marks a fascinating pivot where he injects genre-thriller DNA directly into his usual mumblecore-adjacent aesthetics. He plays Zach, who wonders how he went from skating DIY parks and staying up until 4 AM listening to minor-chord punk rock to worrying about mortgage rates, property taxes and the resale value of a suburban investment property. He’s also a dad suffocating under the weight of bourgeois expectation. He’s got the wife, the kid, the house and a piece of real estate he’s desperately trying to flip. He is the definition of a guy who made all the grown-up choices but lost his soul in the process.

When his family packs up for a short weekend trip, Zach doesn’t use the empty house to catch up on sleep or finish chores. Instead, the silence drives him crazy, and he decides to resurrect his ghost. He grabs his old skateboard, hits the pavement and tries to manifest the carefree, middle-finger-to-the-world attitude of his youth.

For a minute, it works. He crosses paths with a younger skater (Arsenio Salvante), and the camaraderie feels like a time machine. Zach is flying high on nostalgia and a cheap sense of victory. But this isn’t a feel-good indie dramedy. An unsettling connection between Zach and this kid comes to light, shattering the illusion of his rebel-without-a-cause afternoon. What started as a desperate grab for youth spirals rapidly into a tense, claustrophobic confrontation with his own class standing, his choices and a pitch-black reality he can’t skate away from.

That’s because this teen is the tenant Zach has been wanting to evict so he can make money off that real estate I wrote about a few paragraphs ago. One curse, and everything bad that can happen seems to happen. Then again, as a protagonist who starts the movie dealing with the massive turds of his cute little baby girl and who only has a moment of affection in this — other than an awkward kiss with his wife, he’s lying in bed watching a JOI ruined orgasm video — and then, basically, eats shit.

Maybe don’t do bong hits with someone you consider your enemy.

See, we all learned some lessons.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

If you ever wondered what happens when the theater world’s hyper-progressive cancel culture collides head-on with MAGA counter-culture in the middle of the Georgia woods, American Theater is the answer. Directed by Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick, this 2025 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize winner plays out like a real-world, bizarro-universe Waiting for Guffman.

The film is a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Brian Clowdus, a real-life, openly gay conservative director who once possessed a massive regional reputation for staging over-the-top, immersive outdoor musicals. After being heavily ousted from the mainstream Atlanta theater circuit in 2020 following a flood of accusations regarding toxic leadership, unsafe sets and bigotry, Clowdus doesn’t apologize. He rebrands.

He retreats to an isolated, weathered cabin in rural Georgia and rounds up a dedicated troupe of right-leaning, conservative actors. His grand scheme for artistic vengeance? Staging an original, allegorical, fiercely political musical retelling of the 1692 Salem witch trials, casting himself and his cast as the true victims of a modern-day ideological witch hunt. As if the rehearsals aren’t high-stakes enough, the cameras capture Clowdus simultaneously running a chaotic, real-world campaign for the Florida House of Representatives.

Because this is a slice-of-life verité documentary rather than a scripted production, the actors are real-life historical figures from this specific theater subculture. I couldn’t believe this was real, but there you go. This article — thanks for sharing, Alexei Toliopoulos — goes quite deep into just how wild the star of this movie is. 

Clowdus is the larger-than-life center of gravity around which this movie spirals. Sporting a thick Southern drawl and endless energy, he treats his rehearsals like military operations and religious revivals rolled into one. He fills the screen with the kind of intense, unedited eccentric charisma usually reserved for cult leaders or grindhouse exploitation villains as he leads a collection of conservative-leaning actors who feel completely alienated by the mainstream arts community. The documentary captures them oscillating between intense vulnerability, fierce ideological conviction and genuine panic as they are subjected to Clowdus’s trademark dangerous theatrical choices. These include frighteningly close pyrotechnics, unpadded physical stunts and increasingly unhinged staging demands.

Directors Clark and Frederick use no talking-head interviews or voiceovers to guide your opinion. The camera just sits in the corner of the cabin and lets the madness unfold naturally, all in a literal cabin in the woods, as unsafe stage combat missed cues and show tunes tell the tale. And when the show gets canceled, everyone gets drunk and decides to test out being lynched, well… seriously, this was a real thing, not a script?

Watching this virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival, I wished I had seen it live with an audience, because it’s one of the most uncomfortable movies I’ve seen. It goes from being funny at times to being frankly terrifying, as we’ve all built such walls around ourselves and have chosen such strange bedfellows in these most horrible of times. 

What a movie.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

I should not have seen this movie at nine or ten years of age, nor should I have read the magazine. I should have been blissfully ignorant of the mindblowing nature of what I was about to see and waited until I was ready, but here we are, literally forty years later, and not a day goes by that this movie doesn’t cross my mind.

Directed by animator Gerald Potterton and produced by Ivan Reitman and publisher Leonard Mogel, this movie takes on the near-impossible task of taking the stories of an unwieldy adult science fiction magazine and making them into a coherent story about, well, evil? Or something? Honestly, who cares? There’s animated Roger Corben and zombie bombers and half-nude warrior women riding dinosaurs and stabbing people.

Based on the comic book tale, “Soft Landing” starts the film. Created by Dan O’Bannon and Thomas Warkentin, it has a man flying a car from space to Earth. He’s an astronaut home to see his daughter, but in the next sequence, “Grimaldi,” what he brings back kills him, and his daughter soon learns of a galaxy- and time-spanning evil called the Loc-Nar. That entity is present in every story throughout the film and actually works really well.

Moebius’ “The Long Tomorrow” has become “Harry Canyon,” the story of a film noir detective in a 2031 New York City that looks and feels a lot like Blade Runner, because, well, Blade Runner looked a lot like Moebius. In this installment, the Loc-Nar is a Maltese Falcon-ish McGuffin.

In “Den,” based on the Richard Corben comic of the same name, that ultimate evil is the magical element that everyone in the world of Den wants. Our hero is a nerdy kid who has been transported to another world and has become a superheroic character that everyone wants either in their bed or in the dirt. For me, this is the center of the movie, and, aside from the closing section, it stands hands, shoulders and various nude parts above the other segments. Plus, that’s John Candy as Den.

Bernie Wrightson’s “Captain Sternn” follows, with Eugene Levy as the Sternn and a court trial that shows just how dirty a future spaceman its hero can be. A section called “Neverwhere Land” was deleted from the film, which would have connected these segments and formed a loop set to either Pink Floyd’s “Time” or Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Magnificat: Passacaglia.”

The zombie segment with the haunted “B-17” is next, followed by an adaptation of Angus McKie’s “So Beautiful, So Dangerous,” a tale of alien pilots, Earthwomen and lines of Plutonian Nyborg.

In the last story, based on “Arzach” by Moebius, “Taarna” and her reptile bird battle mutants and the Loc-Nar itself, sacrificing herself to save the world before she is reborn as a young girl in the framing device that began the story. As she walks outside, the reptile bird returns, and the adventure begins all over again.

The soundtrack to this movie — which kept it from being legally released for years — is amazing. There’s everything from Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” and “Prefabricated” by Trust to the theme song by Don Felder and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Veterans of Psychic Wars.” The band originally wrote the song “Vengeance (The Pact),” but the film’s makers thought it told the segment’s story too closely.  Both songs appeared on BÖC’s Fire of Unknown Origin.

For years, there had been talk of a reboot. Whatever ended up airing on Netflix as the series Love, Death & Robots.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

After the absolute mess of a psychological fake-out that was Part V: A New Beginning, the fans were ready to riot. Paramount originally wanted to transition the franchise into a new trilogy with a completely different killer, hinting that a traumatized Tommy Jarvis would inherit the hockey mask. Thankfully, audiences hated that idea so much that the studio had to do a hard pivot.

Directed by Tom McLoughlin, a veteran of plenty of made-for-TV movies and Sometimes They Come Back, as well as playing the robot S.T.A.R. in The Black Hole and Katahdin in Prophecy, did his best to right the ship. This is the film where Jason fully became supernatural, and it’s also one of the few films in the series to get good reviews, probably due to the humor throughout.

The original plan was for Tommy Jarvis to become Jason, but audiences were pretty unhappy with that hint at the end of the last film. So this one begins with Tommy (Thom Matthews, Return of the Living Dead) heading to Jason’s grave to destroy his body so that he can never come back. But of course, as soon as he stabs the murderer with a metal fence post, lightning strikes him, and he’s back from the dead — and kills Tommy’s friend Alan (Ron Palillo, Horshack from TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter) right away.

Tommy loses his mind, sprints to the local police station, and meets Sheriff Garris (David Kagen). Of course, the lawman thinks Tommy is just a lunatic off his meds and locks him up. Meanwhile, the town of Crystal Lake has rebranded itself as “Forest Green” to distance itself from the body count, and actual kids are finally back at the camp. Tommy escapes with the help of the Sheriff’s rebellious daughter, Megan (Jennifer Cooke from V: The Original Series), but they’re fighting an uphill battle. To the new crop of camp counselors, Jason Voorhees is just an urban legend.

By the time the climax rolls around, Jason is an unstoppable juggernaut, cutting through deputies and counselors alike. Tommy finally lures the monster out to the center of the lake, wraps a heavy chain around its neck, and anchors it to a massive boulder at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Megan finishes the job by chewing up Jason’s face with an outboard motor propeller. But as the camera drifts underwater at the final frame, those dead eyes pop wide open. He’s home, and he’s waiting.

Again, this movie was a major big deal in my teenage years, particularly because it had a music video! “He’s Back (the Man Behind the Mask)” by Alice Cooper announced that Jason had survived the final chapter.

The working title for this installment was Aladdin Sane. I really enjoyed this installment, which even has a nod to James Bond in the beginning. In our movie basement, we have several versions of the poster for this one, which speaks to my love of this film.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

I’ve been thinking about that song “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe” by Whale a lot. The song is pretty crazy, best described as a dancy punky ditty about, well, who the fuck knows what it’s about. The video is even stranger, highlighted by lead singer Cia Berg cavorting about with red frizzy hair and braces. The whole album is pretty decent, with Tricky producing a lot of it.

I’m telling you that so I can tell you that the video for the song won the first MTV Europe award for Best Video. And its director, Mark Pellington, was the person who helped create today’s film (he also directed the video for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” and the movie Arlington Road).

As a Pittsburgher, this movie is somewhat important, as it was filmed here and in nearby Kittanning, PA. Which is somewhat humorous, as Point Pleasant, WV, isn’t far at all. They could have just filmed it there. There’s a mothman statue, after all.

A lot of the script was changed, as this movie is based on the work of John Keel, the paranormal researcher who wrote the book The Mothman Prophecies. Pellington rejected numerous screenplays that were literal takes on Keel’s work, instead wanting to explore the psychological damage that UFO witnesses endure.  In the book, Keel went into the deepest, darkest West Virginia to interview folks who had seen the huge, winged beast called Mothman. At the same time, he began receiving strange phone calls, reports of mutilated pets, visits from men in black (in fact, Keel coined the term!), and it all ended with the collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River.

Whereas the movie posits that the collapse was never solved, experts determined that an eye bar in the suspension chain caused the collapse. And in reality, 46 people died, not 36.

The movie is therefore fictionalized, sharing the story of Washington Post columnist John Klein (Richard Gere) and his wife Mary (Debra Messing) being involved in a car wreck that leads to her dying of a brain tumor. Before she passes, he finds a notebook filled with pictures of a strange beast.

Between time distortions and loops, strange phone calls, visitations from his dead wife and premonitions, this film does a good job of conveying the terror and confusion that the paranormal can unleash.

My theory has always been that nuclear waste near Point Pleasant created holes in the time/space continuum, and the mothman, a fifth-dimensional creature, was unleashed into our 3D space — bringing weirdness in its wake.

There’s a great shot at the end of this film, where the cars drift to the bottom of the river and holiday gifts float, and headlights stretch out into nothing. It’s probably the eeriest scene I’ve seen in a while. According to IMDB, Gene Warren III and five other model-makers, along with two production assistants, spent three full months fabricating every piece of the bridge set from scratch. He estimates that 20,000 individual pieces of steel went into the construction, so the ultra-photo-realistic 1/6th-scale model suspension bridge could support all the model vehicles and ultimately collapse like a full-scale steel bridge into the water. It really shows — this practical effect looks perfect.

I usually don’t enjoy big-budget films, much less ones that take so many liberties with their source material, but this one always wins me over. It’s worth a watch.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.

In 1982, you could not read a comic book without seeing the ad for Megaforce. It’s the first hype I can truly remember, save for the similar ad strategy for 1977’s Orca. As a ten-year-old chubby geek, I needed to know all about Ace Hunter and his crew of super soldiers.

I wondered, “As a small child living in a small town, could I truly be ready to join Megaforce?” The answer was no. I was too small for the bikes, too rotund for the jumpsuits. But it was a dream. A dream I have refused to give up on.

The Republic of Sardun is peaceful. Gambia, a neighboring country, is not. So they send General Byrne-White (Edward Mulhare from TV’s Knight Rider and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) and Major Zara (Persis Khambatta, Star Trek: The Motion Picture) to ask Megaforce for help. The conflict will bring their leader, Commander Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), into conflict with his former friend and now rival, Duke Guerrera (Henry Silva, Killer Kane from 1979’s Buck Rodgers, Chained Heat, Fists of Steel, Amazon Women on the Moon).

That’s alright, though. Megaforce has incredible motorcycles, dune buggies and a big RV. Things will all work out.

Zara decides to try out, and Hunter falls in love with her. She passes, but he cannot allow her to join them in combat — she’d throw off the rest of the guys. That’s right — an empowered woman succeeds against the odds but can’t make it to the team because these guys wear spandex and headbands and need to just be guys, alright? It was 1982. The glass ceiling for Megaforce was ankle level.

Megaforce attacks Gamibia and blows up the base, then has some trouble getting out of the country. Seems that all these tanks are in the way. No worries — the boys all make multicolored smoke come out of their vehicles, which self-destruct, and they leave on foot, except for Hunter, who flies his into the cargo plane. Even then, he gives Guerrera the thumbs up, which the bad guy returns. Again, this was 1982. America was back, baby, and if we wanted to blow up all the vehicles instead of saving them, no matter how great and unique they were, we were going to do it. Who the fuck are you to deny Ace Hunter? Does he come down on the corner and knock the dicks out of your mouth? Don’t presume to tell this bandana-clad gentleman how to lead Megaforce.

Barry Bostwick was all in on this movie. And why not—he had a three-picture deal in case things picked up. His interviews at the time are so wonderful, like when he said the Pentagon tried to stop the movie because of how close Megaforce was to covert CIA strike teams (one can only wonder if they all had flags on their bikes and crazy collared dress uniforms, too). Or when he opined that the world needed a real-life Megaforce.

Megaforce came to us from Hal Needham, a former stuntman who went on to direct Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper, The Cannonball Run, Stroker Ace and 80’s BMX megafilm (seriously, it ruled the video stores of my teenage years) Rad. He even had his own toy — the Hal Needham Western Movie Stunt Set! You don’t even have to guess if I had it as a kid.

Barry Bostwick and Hal Needham weren’t alone, though. There were other members of the team, like Dallas (Michael Beck from The Warriors and Xanadu), who had a Confederate flag on his uniform, because we didn’t understand racism in 1982. Other team members have one name and are one note, like Ivan, Suki, Sixkiller, Anton and Lopez. All of their clothes were designed by Mattel, who saw big toy potential in the film, but only ended up making a playset and some Hot Wheels. My brother and I had them, even if he would not allow anyone else to play with his Megafighter dune buggy. There was even an Atari game!

That said — the film flopped hard. It’s been forgotten by nearly everyone, save the ridiculous folks like me who kiss their thumb and give people the “Megaforce salute.”

In fact, two of those people were Matt Stone and Trey Parker. There is no way to watch  Team America: World Police without seeing echoes of Ace Hunter’s hard work.

And the government itself got really interested. After the military refused to aid the production, they asked Needham for the plans for the Megaforce vehicles. He happily handed them over and claimed that Desert Storm’s hardware came directly from this film.

I cannot stress how completely dumb this film is. No one is ever in danger. No one ever appears to be a real human being. Therefore, it is wonderful, and I also recommend that you seek it out. Deeds not words!

Bonus: I talked about this movie on my podcast.

You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.