Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside, in a marketplace, or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”

Nine years before Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson made this movie, which is not a drama but instead a documentary on the life of a dead porn star. This is all ragged charm without the crazy camera work, and yet it gets a lot of the same story beats, even if so much comes from the John Holmes documentary, Exhausted.

We learn the fact early: Dirk Diggler (Michael Stein) was born as Steven Samuel Adams on April 15, 1961, outside of Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father is a construction worker, and his mother is a boutique shop owner who attends church every Sunday.

Jack Horner (Robert Ridgely) discovers high school dropout Diggler at a falafel stand, and he soon meets his best friend, Reed Rothchild (Eddie Delcore), while working for the director. Then comes fame. Then comes drugs. Then comes the fall.

Anderson made this film when he was 17 years old and a senior at Montclair College Preparatory School. Anderson’s father, Ernie “Ghoulardi” Anderson, narrated the movie — he was the voice of ABC — and Robert Ridgely, a friend of his father, played Horner.

Shot on camcorder and edited with two VCRs, this is so close to Boogie Nights, even if in this, Dirk has a successful music career (and died after coming back to do gay porn, which is treated as the worst think ever, which is not PTA being homophobic; this feels like it was made by someone who was reading porn star interviews in Hustler regularly — ask me how I know that…)

You can watch this on YouTube.

Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

When I talked about King Frat a few years ago, I wrote that “a farting contest is announced and everyone battles to have the best farts in a scene that goes on longer than you’d expect, then goes about another seven minutes past that.”

This is an hour and thirty-one minutes of farting.

One of seventy-five movies that Ray Etheridge has made, this has eight writers, with Curly Smith and Ray Atherton (the writer of Meatcleaver Massacre and the producer of Death Scenes) working with Etheridge to finish the script. One wonders what the writer’s room smelled like.

Russell (Joel Weiss) thinks he loves Heather (Shannandoah Sorin). He is more certain that he enjoys watching TV and, yes, farts. He loves farts like I love Jess Franco movies. He loves flatulence like I like my dog. Maybe more. He’s obsessed with ass flapping, air biscuits, butt tubas and anal audio.

This has hundreds of people, real sets and feels like it was blown up from SOV to 16mm at certain points. I have no idea how they got the money and the people to stay involved to make this, because it’s a torture test to watch, and yet, I feel the pull of Stockholm Syndrome, and by the end, I was just trapped by it. It made me change my name to Tanya and rob banks.

Somehow, this has a thirty-day shooting and a $43,000.00 budget. When seeking crew for the film, Daily Variety refused to run ads until the word fart was replaced with wind-breaker.

Does it have an elevator fart sketch? You know it.

An extended New Year’s Eve party that nearly breaks up the couple? Yes. The Soup Nazi is also in that scene. He’s not the Fart Fuhrer, but imagine if he were.

There’s an Evening at the Improv looking show; a Sneak Previews moment; plenty of commercials; the voice of Lord Zedd shows up; a game show called Bong Show that has a very young Kesha show up, as her mom wrote the music for this film; Conrad Brooks from Plan 9 from Outer Space and dialogue like this:

Russell: Say it. Bomber. The real gazoo. Slice city, the little sneaker, the big…

Heather: As far as I’m concerned, I do not wish to discuss the subject any further. Case closed.

Russell: Fart. Fart, fart. Fart.

Heather: Are you coming with me tonight, or not?

Russell: When you say fart. Say it, fart, fart. Fart, fart, fart, fart, fart.

There’s also a long moment where Russell keeps trying to make the pizza he is eating create more farts.

The Farley brothers were in a movie called Big Wind on Campus that was also sold as F.A.R.T. the Movie. What do these acronyms stand for? Well, the F.A.R.T. started as a 30-minute VHS sold at Spencer’s Gifts before the full 90-minute version was shat upon us.

This is a movie where child Kesha farts on an old woman. Honestly, we are gonna die young.

The back of the box says: IT’S DEFINITE FART ART.

I’m never watching a movie after this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”

Moron Movies (1983): Len Cella started making his own movies after working in advertising and sports writing, then owning his own painting company. Then he bought a camera and started filming his own short movies. They could be about anything and often were; after showing them to family and friends, he started his own Philadephia theater. At first, only five people would show up, but as they became popular, his movies began to play on the Tonight Show and TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Len started sharing these movies on YouTube and Facebook until he died in 2023.

Carson showed nine episodes — Getting Rid of the Raisins, The Cheat, A Cook’s Punishment in Hell, How to Strike Out, The Chicken Comedian, Poor Man’s Remote Control, How to Discourage Pickpockets, How to Know if You’re Ugly and Rules Were Meant to Be Broken — and introduced them by saying “Before Buddy Hackett comes out, this might be a good place to do the Moron Movies because they’re a little off the wall also. They’re short, homemade, off-the-wall, bizarre little episodes.” Thanks to Frames Cinema Journal for that information.

This is SOV predating TikTok and the social media humor of today, just one man, staring at the camera. deadpanning, telling you that Jell-O isn’t a good doorstop, then proving it. You’re either going to love it or hate every second. It’s literally non-stop punchlines, with the sound of a projector, as Cella recorded these old-school clips from a projector to a VHS camera. It’s just a blitzkrieg of some things that don’t work, but then they work better because they don’t. Incredible.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

More Moron Movies (1986): How much money did Len Cella spend on the props for his movies? This is the same thing, over and over: title card, setup, punch line, repeat. Yet it feels like a secret language, one that gets stuck in your brain and you wonder questions like the one above. What motivated this man to make so many of these movies? There’s even a documentary, King Dong, which tries to make sense of Cella.

Is his work even work? Is it just dad jokes and gross-out humor? Or is it a commentary on television, on media, on what we expect from jokes? Can it be both?

Johnny Carson said, “We read an article about a man in Philadelphia who makes his own movies. Apparently, he would make these eight-millimeter home movies and have them transferred to tape. Then I understand he hired a theater, or started to show them in a theater in Philadelphia. These are not normal movies, you understand?”

On that theater, Cella says in King Dong, “I’d read a book about El Cordobés. El Cordobés was a matador, kind of a renegade matador. And he was having trouble getting to go in the ring. They wouldn’t let him in the ring to do his thing. So, he built his own bullring. I said, that’s it. I’ll get my own theater. Fuck ‘em. So I started shopping around for places to rent. And there was a second floor of the Lansdowne theater.”

I wouldn’t say this is good, but I will say that it’s great. This is the line between people wanting to claim cult movies for their own cred and people who remember something from the distant past and can’t explain it to anyone. Almost everyone who watches this will say, “This is a waste of time.”

For others, this will invite your own debate, as you wonder how it could be.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!

Named “Best Drive-In Movie of the Year” by Joe Bob Briggs, this was directed by Richard Cramer, who also made Highway Amazon — the story of bodybuilder Christine Fetzer, who made her money driving across the country wrestling men in hotel rooms — and painted, played guitar and created art installations. When you see this film, you’ll quickly realize that it’s about more than just exploitation, even though it is exploitation.

Marcus Templeton works as a security guard and when he isn’t obsessed about his physical appearance, he’s watching porn, hiring escorts or talking to phone sex operators. His father — a face on a TV screen — keeps yelling at him as he tries weight loss creams and contracts STDs from all the sex workers he’s frequenting. He starts audio and video taping them, which ends when one of them catches him and shoots him right in the head.

Andren Scott, the star of the film, is genuinely great in what is essentially a thankless role. He was shot in a convenience store robbery and wasn’t able to be in the sequel, The Hitler Tapes.

There’s definitely an influence — or outright theft — of Aggy Read’s Boobs A Lot — in the beginning. There’s constant nudity and women on display, yet you never get turned on, just like the narrator of this, who can’t get it up despite all of the women who have been in his bed. You don’t feel sexy; you feel filthy and worried and sad. None of it feels like a life you want; you’re glad that you can finally walk away at the end.

You can watch this on Tubi.