Wog Boys Forever (2022) - Movie Review

The original Wog Boy is one of my favourite Aussie films ever. It is everything I love about the self-deprecating Aussie sense of humour, used to highlight the multicultural patchwork that makes me appreciate the country I live in. It’s definitely a product of its time, and rather juvenile as such things go, but for a comedy that pokes at ethnic stereotypes while also taking the piss out of the social welfare system and local government at large, a lot of it is as accurate today as it was when it first came out.

Its sequel, Kings Of Mykonos, is a completely different story. An example of Adam Sandler-esque paid-vacationcore, it is so fucking dreadful as to be a fair bit worse than even the most dire examples in Sandler’s own filmography. When Kevin Sorbo is the most enjoyable part of your film, it might be time to reconsider what you’re doing with your life and who you’re inflicting it on.

And this is all without getting into writer/star Nick Giannopoulos going full Lou Interligi a few years ago and taking other comedians to court because he had patents on words like ‘Wog’. I may have a strange kind of respect for having the nards to take out a legal patent on an ethnic slur that is meant to target yourself, but using that to get all litigious on people who are also trying to reclaim it is pretty dicey.

With all this in mind, seeing posters crop up for this film had me going full rubberneck. I am willing to look past the legal shit (legal disputes between comedians is something I grew up hearing about, so I’m not as phased by it as I probably should be), but I’m really hoping that this returns to the first film, rather than continuing the sad display of KOM. And thankfully, that’s exactly what’s happened here.

Red Rocket (2021) - Movie Review

I got into this briefly when I looked at Bodied a few years ago, but Simon Rex has had an… interesting career. After his mainstream breakthrough as the lead in an extended 8 Mile spoof in Scary Movie 3, he then proceeded to embrace the meme and became a self-styled hip-hop artist. He’s done collabs with Mickey Avalon, the White Girl Mob, Riff Raff, Andy Milonakis, and other human-shaped memes from the late ‘00s and early ‘10s, and while he’s still been getting acting gigs during all this… the dude is always going to be Dirt Nasty to me. But then this came along and pulled a Best F(r)iends, bringing in an actor who has either been mildly ignored or laughed at instead of with up to this point, and giving him a role he could play perfectly.

The Hunt (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this film isn’t exactly shifting its place on my radar, and it’s not like there will ever be a good time to discuss it, so what the hell, let’s do a political meme movie. The kind of movie that gets tremendous word-of-mouth on the basis of it being a political statement, only that aspect is taken at face value, resulting in a lot of discussion about it from people who more than likely haven’t even seen it. As we’ll get into, that itself is weirdly in-sync with the film’s contents, but as we’ll also get into, that might be damning with faint praise on my part.

The Day Shall Come (2020) - Movie Review

Chris Morris. Pizza-faced satirist. One of the leading voices in British absurdism since Dr. Chapman joined the choir invisible. Collaborator of fellow politically-minded comedian Armando Iannucci. And as of this particular film, a sophomore feature-length director. And man oh man, did he come out as reliably all guns blazing as usual.

The Death Of Stalin (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: In 1953, Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), the leader of the Soviet union, has died. As his inner circle tries to deal with the power vacuum, Deputy General Secretary Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Moscow Party Head Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and head of the interior ministry Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) begin their plans to become the new leader. However, between those who wish to live up to Stalin's legacy and those who want to replace it with their own, things are about to get chaotic in Russia.

The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence (2015) - Movie Review

This review is something of a milestone for me, as this is where I officially come full circle. After all, the original Human Centipede was the first film I ever reviewed in any semi-semi-formal capacity. However, over the years, I’ve come to the realisation that my initial hatred for the thing was most likely a result of the reputation it had received. As such, I’ll set the record straight right now.

While I still maintain that the characters in the film were often thicker than a second coat of paint, Dr. Heiter’s performance along with the overall concept were enough to at least make it watchable. Then came the sequel, and it is here that I fear I will lose every one of my readers: The Human Centipede II, despite being a film that I predicted would happen when I first reviewed, is one of the best sequels ever made. Seriously, it does everything that a sequel should do right, with Tom Six looking back on the original idea and basically riffing on his own writing to create what I genuinely consider to be a great film… provided that your stomach can handle the gore, that is.

With this patently absurd opinion of the rest of the series, and my knowledge that Rotten Tomatoes can be incredibly misleading when it comes to what is better than what (Hypocrisy ho!), I’m looking at today’s film with probably the most optimism of any film I’ll look at this year. I think I broke at some point during The Green Inferno, but let’s see if this new perspective does me any favours anyway.

Accidental Love (2015) - Movie Review

Oh, how I have waited for this day… much like how I await the day I get castrated. Today is the day that I look at a film that has been disowned by its director. Not that this is anything new in Hollywood; google the name “Alan Smithee” and you’ll get an idea of how prevalent this is. However, what makes me so hesitant to look at this is for two big reasons: One of them being that disowning a project usually happens as a result of excessive interference/displeasure with said project, meaning that the end result more likely than not is going to suck. The other reason is that the disgruntled filmmaker in question today is David O. Russell, recent Oscar idol and a man who I wholeheartedly trust to deliver emotionally resonant, if sometimes incoherent, cinema. The man has a knack for delivering amazing work from rather unorthodox subject matter when left to his own devices. In other words, he’s pretty much one of the last people that should be brought under the fire of studio interference.