Disco (2018) - Movie Review

Most people get their friends together to watch movies. Brad Jones is the guy who gets his friends together to make them, and to his credit, it usually results in product that is watchable outside of his inner circle. With as equal a love for the glory days of exploitation cinema as he does all things 70’s, his homebrew style of filmmaking may not be the most technically polished stuff around but the real-life comradery between him and those around him can be reasonably relied on for something fun. And his latest, Disco, is no exception.

Jesus, Bro! (2017) - Movie Review

In the year of some people’s Lord 2014, something happened. A film by the name of God’s Not Dead was released by PureFlix Entertainment. After seeing the rather intense reactions to it online, I checked it out for myself. I didn’t like it. At all. Here’s my review on just how much wrong is contained within. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: It’s a bad movie, something we get a lot of year-in and year-out. However, this was decidedly different because God’s Not Dead apparently stuck such a chord with both its defenders and its detractors that it spawned, as put aptly by critic and filmmaker Brad Jones, “a golden age of a different kind of exploitation film”.

 

Over the next three years, a slew of similar Christian-oriented cinema began to spring up, from the hardcore apologetics of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas to the seemingly unaware sexism of War Room right down to the furthering of dangerous narrative of God’s Not Dead 2. Brad himself has covered several of these films on video, either in character as the Cinema Snob or just giving his immediate post-watching thoughts for his Midnight Screenings series. However, it seems that his interest in the subject still can’t be sated so he went all-out and made a feature-length production to mock the hell out of this sub-genre. But how did it turn out?

Meta Month: Catch-Up Part 2: The Cinema Snob and Kyle Kallgren (2017)

Over the last few months, I’ve been noticing certain… issues cropping up in the Cinema Snob’s recent output. Ribbing on other critics and even his own audience has been part of his character gimmick since the beginning, but recently it’s been starting to turn down some very bitter corners. From Actual Lee and Tobe Fair to Jordan B. Matthews, the ribbing has been getting considerably more mean-spirited and, honestly, kind of pointless. Again, I don’t find annoyance to be funny but it doesn’t really do much for me, but even still, it’s starting to sour me on the guy’s work. And the worst part of all this? I am legitimately scared of even admitting to any of this because last time I did (in a now-deleted comment thread on his Glen Or Glenda review), I nearly became a gag in one of his videos myself. Thankfully, another series of comments landed in the crossfire instead, but still, that definitely shook me for a while.

Kickassia (2010) - Movie Review

As I mentioned previously, the reason why Meta Month is set during April is because it was this month six years ago that I first watched an Internet video review which lead me down the long, winding path to this spot. Well, April 2010 also served as another important point for certain Internet critics. Cross-overs between reviewers is nothing new; hell, Siskel & Ebert was very much a cross-over and that existed long before YouTube was even a concept in the back of some guy’s head. However, in terms of the online video realm, the Nostalgia Critic had been toying with the concept ever since he started, pretty much. From his feud with the Angry Video Game Nerd to his review of FernGully with the Nostalgia Chick, there’s been a collaborative air to his work for a long while now.

So, after the success of the big TGWTG team-up brawl as the capstone to the AVGN beef, Doug and co. got a bunch of the then-current site talent together for the start of what would be a yearly tradition for quite a while afterwards: The massive cross-over film. This was where the whole DIY aesthetic of the Internet video reviewer got turned its head a little, as not only were a large number of them congregating into a single piece but they were going for a feature-length production, when most of their work would usually range in the 5-25 minute market. But, with all the years of retrospect and advances made to the format as a whole, does this film still hold up? In fact, did this ever hold up? Let’s take a look as we close out Meta Month at a look at the TGWTG 2 Year Anniversary film. This is Kickassia.

Freak Out (2003) - Movie Review

While the semi-recent phenomenon brought up by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse project, complete with fake trailers that for some reason show some of the best of their respective directors’ work (seriously, I want to see a full-length version of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving), modern-day exploitation is far from a new thing. And long before he’d end up making a career out of mocking old-school cinema involving nuns, Nazis and cannibals, Brad Jones was doing much the same. From his snuff film thriller Cheap to his more recent efforts like the Italian giallo homages in The Cinema Snob Movie, you get a definite impression that the man has a clear admiration for this style of filmmaking. So, in what I’m sure is going to be me playing the long game, let’s take a look at his (available) filmography starting with one of the earliest productions to come out of Stoned Gremlin.

Top 20 Cinema Snob Episodes

The entire show is a big extended joke on how ridiculously smug and wrong-headed some of the more popular film critics can get. A joke that was apparently so funny that, especially nowadays, he constantly feels the need to wink at the audience to tell them that it’s just a joke… time after time after bloody time. Look, I get that Internet fandoms don’t exactly spawn the most rational creatures (case in point: this entire bleeding month) but it’s rather unsettling that he would become so jaded by comments to take this course of action. That, and he dares to mock my Lord and Saviour, but we’ll get to that later in the month. In the meantime, I’m counting down the 20 best episodes of The Cinema Snob.