Everyone wants to be in the record books. John Penney’sZyzzyx Road is in them for the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history.
How low? We’re talking thirty dollars.
If we’re being honest and subtracting the ten bucks that producer/star Leo Grillo refunded to the film’s own makeup artist, the actual theatrical run of this movie netted a crisp twenty-dollar bill. That’s not a box office return; that’s lunch at a diner.
But behind the trivia is a sun-baked noir that feels like it was cursed from the jump. Shot in 18 days in the Mojave Desert, the production was a gauntlet. You’ve got Tom Sizemore, acting his heart out while being arrested mid-production for failing drug tests. You’ve got Katherine Heigl, right as Grey’s Anatomy was making her a household name, stuck in the sand with a shovel. And you’ve got Leo Grillo as Grant, an accountant who makes the classic mistake of thinking a Vegas tryst with a girl named Marissa won’t end with a dead body in his trunk.
The plot is pure desert-noir fever dream: Grant and Marissa (Heigl) kill her jealous ex, Joey (Sizemore), or at least they think they do. They head out to Zyzzyx Road to bury the evidence, but the trunk ends up empty, and the desert starts playing tricks on Grant’s head. Is Joey a ghost? Is Marissa a succubus? Is the heat just melting Grant’s brain?
Zyzzyx Roadisn’t actually the bottom-of-the-barrel trash its reputation suggests. It’s a gritty, sweaty little thriller that suffered from a bizarre distribution loophole. Because of the Screen Actors Guild rules for low-budget films, the producers had to give it a domestic theatrical run before they could sell it overseas. So, they rented one screen in Dallas, Texas, for a week, played it once a day at noon and hoped nobody would show up.
Mission accomplished.
Sizemore is predictably great as the menacing Joey. He always excelled at playing guys you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley or an abandoned mine. Heigl does the femme fatale-in-over-her-head bit well enough, and the Mojave scenery provides enough natural production value to keep things from looking too cheap.
It’s a movie that exists in the shadow of its own zero-dollar mythos, but if you look past the $30 price tag, it’s a solid piece of independent filmmaking that captures the feeling of a bad weekend in Vegas that just won’t end.
April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end of the world disaster movie with us. You can also take care of the planet while you’re writing.
Los Angeles has finally had the “Big One,” but it’s not the San Andreas Fault. It’s a series of dirty bombs that have turned the city of angels into a gray, ashen purgatory. Brad (Rory Cochrane) is a struggling musician who stays home while his wife Lexi (Mary McCormack) heads to work. When the clouds of toxic dust start rolling through the suburbs, Brad does exactly what the radio tells him to do: seal the house.
When Lexi returns covered in the very dust that the radio says will kill everyone, the movie stops being a thriller and becomes a gut-wrenching moral play. Do you open the door for the person you love if it means you both die?
Without spoiling the ending for the uninitiated, let’s just say Gorak pulls the rug out from under you in a way that feels like a punch to the solar plexus. Brad thinks he’s saving himself, but the very safety he’s built becomes a petri dish for something much worse.
Directed by Chris Gorak (who spent years as an art director for guys like Fincher and the Gilliam brothers), this flick takes the post-9/11 duct-tape-and-plastic-sheeting paranoia and turns it into a nihilistic nightmare. This was a good movie, but not a fun watch.
Directed, written, and featuring Joe Schimmel, as well as David Jeremiah, this explains the idea that all Hollywood films are based on Gnosticism, a syncretic religious movement centered on dualism. They believed in two forms of God: one a transcendent, true God, and the other a lower Demiurge responsible for the material world. In this framework, salvation is redefined as the intellectual and spiritual recovery of the divine spark within the individual.
This breaks down The Matrix, The Truman Show, Donnie Darko, Pleasantville, V for Vendetta, Vanilla Sky and more. I mean, The Matrix has a ship called the Gnosis, Neo becoming the one after his mind is opened to forbidden knowledge, cities and people named after Biblical figures, and so much more.
Also: The Architect in The Matrix or Christof in The Truman Show are totally the Demiurge. The Pleasantville allusions in this are pretty spot on as well.
This wants you to understand Luciferian inversion, which is when Satan becomes the good guy and the religious world is the villain. That’s because they’re often cast as the enforcers of the Demiurge’s rules. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the faithful act like the moral police, they fit the Gnostic villain archetype perfectly.
A good way to stop doing that would be for most Christians to stop being assholes, but I digress.
Will this mention Crowley and Helena Blavatsky? You know it.
People can believe whatever they want, but wow, this is quite the movie. They should add commentary tracks to films so I can hear their views while I’m watching the actual film.
Directed and co-written by Douglas Buck, this remake of Sisters starts with developmental psychologist Dr. Philip Lacan (Stephen Rea) performing magic at a children’s party being thrown at his work, the Zurvan Institute. His ex-wife — and former patient — Angelique (Lou Doillon) — is his assistant, but the party gets weird when Grace Collier (Chloë Sevigny), a reporter, is found and kicked out.
Dr. Dylan Wallace (Dallas Roberts) ends up having a one-night stand with Angelique, learning that it’s her birthday, as well as the birthday of her roommate and twin sister, Annabel. He goes to get them a birthday cake, just in time to be stabbed with knitting needles by Annabel, which Grace sees on Phillip’s computer as she snoops on him.
Grace is against Phillip, as her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She’s sure that he’s using psychotropic drugs on both Angelique and Annabel, as well as covering up their crimes. A former assistant, Dr. Mercedes Kent (Gabrielle Rose), reveals that Angelique and Annabel were conjoined twins who were taken by their mother from Canada to France, where they worked in a sideshow. Angelique was the quiet one; Annabel was murderous; they were separated, and it’s thought that Annabel died of lung failure and Angelique lives alone under Philip’s supervision.
As she sneaks into the institute, Grace is captured by Phillip, who drugs her, and the revelations of what really happened appear as if they were dreams. Philip started a sexual affair with Angelique when she still had a twin, so he said that Annabel was a parasite. He performed the separation so he could be with her, but after Annabel died, Angeliqiue took on her need to kill. Grace is so drugged out that she stabs the doctor, then Angelique kills Grace’s co-worker Larry (JR Bourne) before giving Grace a matching scar and making her her new sister.
Buck said, “In the original film, which I love, De Palma chose style over substance. I’m interested in exploring all the other stuff that’s there — the perversity, the tragedy, the sadness. All those character traits make it, to me, more interesting. I want to make the characters more alive.” I think that he did a great job here, as this can stand on its own.
Back when people thought the internet was a positive thing, this movie generated so much online buzz that New Line Cinema used web feedback to reshoot for 5 days, most of which was spent feeding Samuel Jackson lines with the f-word.
It was also the first movie where Hollywood learned that memes and online chatter do not equal box office, and then, like people getting that Men In Black light to the eyes, they forgot and did it again. And then again. And then some more.
After seeing a gang slaying, there’s no way Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) is making it to Los Angeles alive. I mean, the guy he’s narcin on, Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson), just set a whole bunch of pheromone-sprayed venomous snakes loose on a plane and then marked everyone with a Hawaii lei to be killed.
FBI agents Neville Flynn and John Sanders (Jackson and Mark Houghton) are going to try and protected everyone on the plane, from flight attendant Claire Miller (Julianna Margulies) and rapper Clarence “Three Gs” Dewey to Mercedes Harbont (Rachel Blanchard), her dog Mary-Kate, senior light attendant Grace (Lin Shaye) and, well, everybody on this plane once those snakes come on our and start biting faces.
David Dalessandro is a University of Pittsburgh associate vice chancellor of university development who found the time to write this script back in 1992 based on an article he read about Indonesian brown tree snakes climbing into planes during World War II.
Initially, this was going to be directed by Ronny Yu before David R. Ellis (Final Destination 2, Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco) took over.
Even though the movie features 450 snakes from 30 different species, most of the ones in principal moments are either animatronic or CGI. That’s because real snakes don’t move around that much and aren’t that fast.
The best part? If you watch this on basic cable, Samuel Jackson yells, “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!” And here you thought it would be the on-the-nose use of Cobra Starship for this movie’s theme.
The Arrow 4K UHD releaseof this film has a new 4K restoration by Arrow Films; new audio commentary by critics Max Evry and Bryan Reesman; an archival cast and crew audio commentary, featuring director David R. Ellis, actor Samuel L. Jackson, producer Craig Berenson, associate producer Tawny Ellis, VFX supervisor Eric Henry and second unit director Freddie Hice; Snakes on a Page, a brand new mini-documentary exploring the movie tie-in novelization phenomenon, featuring publisher Mark Miller, historian David Spencer and Christa Faust, author of the Snakes on a Plane novelization; archival features; a music video; a gag reel and easter eggs; trailers and TV ads; an image gallery; a South Pacific Airlines safety instruction card; a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by Daniel Burnett and Charlie Brigden.
The fourth of nine anime movies produced by the Japanese religious organization Happy Science, this is based on Ryuho Okawa’s third book, The Nine Dimensions: Unveiling the Laws of Eternity.
Happy Science is a Japanese religious organization founded in 1986 by Ryuho Okawa, who went from being a stock trader to the present incarnation of a supreme deity named El Cantare. He can also speak with the dead. They’ve produced 11 anime and 16 live-action movies.
What do they believe? On their site, they say, “Human beings are spiritual beings. We are souls residing in physical bodies. The center of it is our mind. We reincarnate many times between this world and the other world, gaining different life experiences and growing infinitely as individual souls.
God (Buddha) exists and has continued to lead (guide) Humanity – past, present and future. These are the spiritual Truths that Happy Science works to spread. Our mission and purpose are to explore what true happiness is based on these eternal Truths and make this world a more peaceful and prosperous place.
Our work takes us beyond traditional religious realms into politics, education, movies, music, and more. We strive to put the teachings of love, enlightenment, and creation of utopia into practice in every area of life.”
According to Wikipedia, “…the organization’s political wing, the Happiness Realization Party, promotes political views that include support for Japanese military expansion, support for the use of nuclear deterrence and denial of historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre in China and the comfort women issue in South Korea. Some other stances include support of infrastructure spending, natural disaster prevention, urban development and dam construction. They also advocate fiscal conservatism, strengthening the US-Japan alliance and a virtue-based leadership.”
Let’s talk about this movie.
Ryuta, Patrick, and Roberto have traveled from Japan to New York City, where they visit a museum exhibit on Thomas Edison. They see a spirit phone, which allows people to talk to the dead. You may think Edison never invented this, but in an interview with American Magazine, he claimed that “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” This device would not use “…any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so–called “mediums”, but by scientific methods. I am engaged in the construction of one such apparatus now, and I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass.”
The guys then meet a shaman, God Eagle, who has a message from Edison that gives Ryuta the knowledge needed to make his own spirit phone. After meeting Yuko, a religious girl, they can finally go to the next world, where Ryuta and Yuko discover they were married many years ago in Atlantis, and they battle enemies like Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler, who has his own evil elephant. The good news? Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, and Mother Theresa all appear as angels sent to our reality to guide us. Yes, Helen Keller can see, speak and hear now; she’s also blonde with blue eyes, like all of the angels in this religion.
This is probably where I should get into the fact that cat aliens came to our planet first, but after they founded Atlantis and Mu — All bound for Mu Mu Land — because of Satan.
Lord El Cantare shows up — he was also La Mu, Thoth, Rient Arl Croud, Ophealis, Hermes and Buddha — along with Moses, Jesus and Confucius. You should also know that the ninth dimension of Heaven is filled with centaurs. Also: humans are reincarnations of immortal spirits, angels and demigods who have lost their memories after leaving the Spirit World.
And Florence Nightingale informs us, “A lot of people on Earth panic when they pass away and become a spirit. Some don’t believe in their death and cling to the place they’ve died, or their families, and cause a lot of trouble.”
This is a very capitalist religion, as Thomas Edison is not the man who destroyed Tesla, but instead someone who used his inventions to help mankind. He was also Johannes Gutenberg. Other angels include Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita and the boss of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda, who are angels sent to give Japan a strong yen.
There’s also a movie theater in Heaven that shows your life to everyone you knew when you die. It also reveals your thoughts to everyone you know, and they vote on whether you go to Heaven or Hell. It’s a good thing angels will go to Hell to save you, because my relatives are going to watch me onanistically savoring the films of Madison, Belladonna and CJ Laing so many times that they’ll wonder what the plot of my life was.
Well, there are three Hells, and it looks like mine will be The Hell of the Bloody Pond, which looks like Amsterdam, and I’ll be trapped in a bloody pool, unable to fulfill my lust, as if I were Ms. Jones at the end of the first movie. If you got that, you’ll be there with me.
In this religion, you can make the sign of the cross twice, then draw a pentagram to destroy a demon. Spoiler: You get the Heaven or Hell you wanted most, so if you were a salaryman, you’ll be working in an office for demons for all eternity.
But the best news of all? Every religion and myth is true! Whether you believe in God, Jesus, Odin, Osiris, Hermes or Buddha, they are all El Cantare. Don’t be cynical. Cynical people go to Hell.
Man, I loved this. What an all-over-the-place bit of magic. Some people may get bored — or frightened — by it. Not me. Sign me up.
Wolfgang Petersen made Das Boot and The Perfect Storm, so he was the best person to probably direct the sequel to The Poseidon Adventure. It was filmed on large-scale sets and soundstages and had practical effects and stunts to go with the digitally-enhanced water effects.
Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) is a NYC firefighter on vacation with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel). They’re on board the Poseidon with gambler Dylan Jones (Josh Lucas), Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Conor (Jimmy Bennett), architect Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), waiter Marco Valentine (Freddy Rodriguez), singer Gloria (people in the place, it’s Fergie), Captain Michael Bradford (Andre Braugher), Lucky larry (Kevin Dillon) and a girl who snuck on, Elena Morales (Mía Maestro).
What follows is wholesale movie star destruction and no one is safe. Seriously, an air conditioning unit falls smack dab on Turtle’s head. Fergie drowns. A rogue wave kills almost everyone else before that. This movie doesn’t give two shits if you’re famous. In fact, it demands that. People you don’t expect to get nuked? Watch out.
Roger Ebert said, “Wolfgang Petersen’s heart isn’t in it. He is too wise a director to think this is first-rate material and too good a director to turn it into enjoyable trash.”
The 70s were the best time for disaster movies. This is good enough, but as you would figure, the original is better.
Extras on this Arrow Video release include interviews with director of photography John Seale, production designer William Sandell, visual effects supervisor Boyd Shermis and make-up effects on-set supervisor Michael Deak; a retrospective on the film by Heath Holland; featurettes on at the film’s production, featuring interviews with cast and crew, the set design and production assistant Malona Voigt. There’s a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jacey and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Priscilla Page. You can order it from MVD.
Aug 4-10 Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefer anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!
Ever since the 2023 Australia incident, where Tenacious D went on hiatus — and seemingly Jack Black buried his friend Kyle Gass — thinking of the D makes me sad. It was hard to watch this movie, made in a time when things were better.
The plot of this film — well, the origin of the band — isn’t far from the truth. Jack Black and Kyle Gass met in Los Angeles as part of a theater company, and Gass felt threatened by Black, as he was the only musician before. Yet the chance to go to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival — and to climb the volcano, Arthur’s Seat — bonded them. Gass would teach Black to play guitar in return for food, just like this movie. After a three-episode HBO series and a successful album, they went from being a comedy band to being a real band that does comedy. Initially, this was going to be about Tenacious D playing coffee shops and Black becoming fascinated by Atlantis. Black and Gass both fall in love with a girl called Simmeon, who has written books about the fictional island. They later meet Ronnie James Dio, and are sent on a road trip to Miami.” That movie never made it.
This one didn’t do well in theaters. Cult movies rarely do. Black said, “A lot of enthusiastic stoners were like, ‘Yeah, du-u-u-de! Just saw it.” I was like, “Where were you when the movie came out?” “Sorry, dude, I was hi-i-i-gh!””
Meat Loaf is Black’s dad. Dave Grohl is Satan. Dio is Dio. All is right in this. I mean, any movie that ends with the heroes smoking out of a bong made from Satan’s horn is one I’m going to love.
Their next album, Rize of the Phoenix, starts with the words, “When The Pick Of Destiny was released, it was a bomb. And all the critics said that the D was done. The sun had set, and the chapter had closed. But one thing no one thought about was that the D would rise again.” That album is about Gass losing his mind as Black becomes a Hollywood star.
Aug 4-10 Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefer anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!
Written in 1977 by Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darklyis based on Dick’s life. Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife, Nancy, left him) and mid-1972, Dick opened his house up to teenage drug users as his amphetamine addiction went out of control. How else do you write 68 pages of books a day? To escape, while in Canada, he went to X-Kalay, a Synanon recovery program. That’s why the book — and the movie — ends with a dedication to the people — including Dick himself — who died or had their lives ruined by drugs, saying that they were “some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did” and informing the audience that “drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to move out in front of a moving car.” It took him two weeks to write and three years to rewrite, a time that his fifth wife, Tes, said that she would find him crying, as the book was so hard to write. As a result, Dick wrote a contract giving Tessa half of all the rights to the novel, as she “participated to a great extent in writing the outline and novel A Scanner Darkly with me, and I owe her one half of all income derived from it.”
Richard Linklater wanted to make Ubik, but couldn’t figure out how to film it, a problem that most people who made Philip K. Dick movies solved by just doing their own thing and just using the title (see Paycheck, The Adjustment Bureau, Next — which is based on “The Golden Man” — as well as Minority Report, Total Recall and nearly every movie made from his books). His daughters, Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett, started looking closely at the scripts and learned that while they didn’t want a cartoon made of their father’s most personal work, Linklater got it.
The process of making this movie involved the actors being involved in the writing process, then making the movie, then 18 months of animating everything, which was way more than the studio thought it would take. The rotoscope process gives this a look beyond anything I’ve seen outside of Waking Life. This is the next level of what Linklater did in that film.
20% of the country is addicted to Substance D. Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover cop living in a house of addicts reporting back to the government agents that police the war on drugs, who all wear scramblesuits so that they have no idea who they are, undercover and masked even to one another, maybe to themselves. He’s in love with Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), from whom he buys the drugs, and wants to get closer to the supplier. But she is also Hank, his boss, and this has all been a trap to make James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) get overly paranoid. Or maybe she’s Audrey. Also: Who are the people that Bob has a suburban life with? Is he addicted to Substance D? Whichever, whatever, because Substance D was created by New-Path, a drug abuse clinic, to make money for themselves by creating and curing the supply and demand. Is Bob in the clinic to get help or is he there undercover to stop them?
None of it matters, but it all does in the end. Nothing is everything. Or, as Dick said, “There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be “My phone is spying on me.””
A prequel to 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this movie reminds me that when a franchise has run out of ideas, they always go backward. Back to the well or, in this instance, back in time for a prequel.
Back in 1939, a woman gave birth in a slaughterhouse and died, at which point the manager threw her infant into a dumpster, where it was rescued by Luda Mae Hewitt, who raised the baby as her son Thomas.
Fast forward to 1969,, and Thomas works in the same slaughterhouseunderr the exact manage. When the plants are shut down by the health department, he refuses to leave. So when the manager pushes him, he gets killed by a chainsaw and his adopted brother Charlie (R. Lee Ermey) kills the arresting officer that comes to their home — Sheriff Hoyt — and takes on his identity.
Thomas eventually becomes Leatherface — are you surprised? — but not before wiping out an entirely different set of teens years before the original movie, including Jordana Brewster from The Fast and the Furious series.
This comes from the days when Platinum Dunes were the Blumhouse of the 2000s, reinventing horror film series like The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher,Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street to varying degrees of box office success. Director Jonathan Liebesman was also behind their reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
At this point, even a fan of the character like me — I dressed as Leatherface for more Halloweens than I can count on a severed hand — checked out.
The Arrow Video release of this film has a 4K (2160p) Ultra HD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) of both the Theatrical Version and the Uncut Version. Extras include a new audio commentary on the Uncut Version with Dread Central co-founder Steve “Uncle Creepy” Barton and co-host of The Spooky Picture Show podcast Chris MacGibbon and an audio commentary on the Uncut Version with director Jonathan Liebesman and producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller; interviews with Lew Temple; special effects makeup artist Jake Garber and special effects makeup technician Kevin Wasner and director of photography Lukas Ettlin; a making-of doc; deleted and extended scenes with optional commentary from director Jonathan Liebesman and producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller and a trailer, all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Aaron Lea with a double-sided foldout poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Aaron Lea and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michael Gingold.
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