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.

Atop The Fourth Wall: The Movie (2015) - Movie Review

I’ve brought up the notion of sheer objectivity in film criticism before, and how for various reasons I just can’t apply myself to that school of thought, but this is one of those occasions where I kind of have to address something in the interest of objectivity. I am something of a regular producer for a large number of the shows that I have covered over the last month, which thanks to services like Patreon has been made a lot easier for laymen such as myself. Now, while there could have been arguments made about bias considering these are people I am actively putting money towards on a semi-regular basis, the fact that I’ve been mostly sticking to lists of their best work should already show that I have a rather biased approach to these shows already. This is something a bit different, as I along with a slew of other people contributed directly to the production’s Indiegogo campaign, meaning that my name (my birth name, at least) is attached to this feature-length production. Maybe if I saw any revenue as a result of my involvement with the thing, this would actually factor into things, but… yeah, this is pretty much just me admitting to being involved somewhat with the thing in keeping with how generally open I am about whatever stance I may already be in when going into a film. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started with this thing already.

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.