Movies

Geek Punditry #150: The Year-End Cinema Scramble

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Towards the end of last year, as my most stalwart of followers certainly remember, I wrote a column about all of the movies that had come out in 2024 that I hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. To no one’s surprise, I still haven’t gotten to see most of them. There are just so many things to watch, so many movies and shows that are pulling at my attention, and I’ve got a kid running around that not only limits what I can watch while he’s awake and paying attention, but also means that there are a LOT of sports on TV in our house. Not to mention the fact that I’ve been doing my “Year of Superman” thing since January, so a not-inconsiderable amount of my viewing time has been devoted to that in one way or another.

To date, I have seen 50 percent of these films.

2025 has not been different from 2024: there are dozens of movies that hit the box office (or streaming services) this year that I sincerely intend to watch, but simply haven’t gotten around to yet. Before I delve into those, though, let’s do a quick list of those movies I DID watch from last year’s list and, ultimately, what I thought of them:

  • Venom: The Last Dance-Not bad, but probably the least impressive of the trilogy.
  • Deadpool and Wolverine-Funny and full of the kind of delicious meta-commentary that only Deadpool can make work. 
  • Red One-Cute, unremarkable, but not deserving of some of the hate it gets on the internet.
  • Despicable Me 4-Better than 3, but I still probably wouldn’t bother with these movies if my son didn’t like them.
  • Flow-Technologically and visually, a masterpiece, although I thought the story was weak.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3-Make it make sense that this series keeps being entertaining.
  • MoviePass, MovieCrash-Intriguing look at how a system that was always doomed to failure wound up failing.
  • Music By John Williams-Nothing particularly revelatory in this documentary, but still a lovely watch.
  • Godzilla/Kong: The New Empire-Much as I love giant monster movies, this one felt like more of the same.
  • Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!-Not as good as the original, but as far as legacy sequels go, it’s a pretty good one.
  • A Quiet Place Day One-Probably the most character-driven film in this series so far, and that’s a plus.
  • The Substance-Incredible and absolutely worth every bit of praise it’s gotten.
  • The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare-Made me want to read the book, which you can imagine, is high praise.
  • Alien: Romulus-If you’re going to keep making Alien movies you gotta find something new to do with them. I haven’t watched the new Hulu series, but I suspect that it was better than this film.
  • The 4:30 Movie-Tender, sweet, without being saccharine. When Kevin Smith really speaks from the heart, there are few that do it better.
  • Madame Web-The internet told me this was the worst movie ever made. They were wrong. It’s really more bland and generic than actively bad. 
  • Joker: Folie a Deux-This was a thing that happened.

You know, looking back, I actually got around to more of last year’s list than I would have expected, which is a nice feeling. Of course, while I was busy watching the movies that came out LAST year, movies from THIS year just started piling up on me. Most of the reasons I don’t go to the movies as much as I used to haven’t changed: price, time, availability, and so forth. One thing, however, HAS changed. My son is eight years old now, and he’s gotten better about making it through a movie, especially a movie he’s excited about. This year my wife and I managed to take him to both Superman (naturally) and Fantastic Four: First Steps, in addition to the usual assortment of kids’ animated movies. 

I consider it a legitimate moral failure that I haven’t seen this movie yet.

One such movie we did NOT get around to, though, was The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. Much as I wanted to support it in theaters, time was not on my side, and it’s still on my list of end-of-year films I haven’t gotten to yet. As is Pixar’s newest, Elio, a movie that seemed to come and go with no notice whatsoever. But I’ve heard from a few people who actually saw it that they liked it, and I’m hoping I can get Eddie to join me for a viewing before the year runs out. He’s also excited about Zootopia 2, so we may make a movie date out of that one. I would also like to show him director Steve Hudson’s Stitch Head, which looks to be kind of a kids’ take on Frankenstein. And although it doesn’t really seem like my kind of movie, everybody on the planet except for me seems to have gone wild over K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix, and I feel almost obligated to watch it out of curiosity, if nothing else. 

Stop trying to tell me this was a bad movie. You didn’t see this movie. NOBODY saw this movie.

This year also brought – as years tend to do – a bunch of sequels. And if it’s a sequel to a movie I actually like, I’ll watch it. But I’m also the kind of nerd who prefers to re-watch the previous film (or films) in a series BEFORE watching the sequel, especially if it’s been a long time. So that, in addition to the usual problems of availability and time, are the reason I have yet to get to the “requel” of I Know What You Did Last Summer or the more direct sequels like 28 Years Later, Black Phone 2, Nobody 2, the Disney hit Freakier Friday, or the Disney flop Tron: Ares. A brief note about Tron: I love the original and I greatly enjoyed Tron: Legacy. I know Ares crashed and burned at the box office, but this has absolutely no impact on my desire to watch it. I don’t despise Jared Leto just because the Internet tells me to and, once this movie lands on Disney+, I fully intend to watch and evaluate it on its own merits. And you can’t stop me. Nyeah. 

There’s also Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Movie, which hasn’t dropped on Netflix yet, but is on my list. The first Knives Out was absolutely astounding, one of the best mysteries I’ve seen in ages (and perhaps THE best mystery/comedy I’ve ever seen). Glass Onion, the second Benoit Blanc mystery, still entertained me, but I didn’t quite find it up to the level of the original. I’m hoping that Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig bounce back with this third installment. 

Netflix, as a studio, has absolutely loaded me with mystery movies this year that I just haven’t gotten to yet. In addition to Wake Up Dead Man, I’ve also got my eye on The Woman in Cabin 10. This one stars Keira Knightley as a journalist who sees a passenger go overboard on a cruise ship, then gets caught up in the question of what’s going on. Chris Columbus directed The Thursday Murder Club, a crime comedy about a group of senior mystery enthusiasts who get swept into a real life murder. The cast is incredible – Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Naomi Ackie – why the hell haven’t I watched this yet?

It’s Netflix’s fault I haven’t watched this yet, not mine.

I can tell you exactly why I haven’t watched Netflix’s Frankenstein yet: because they dropped it in NOVEMBER. What a dumb move. I couldn’t be more excited to watch Guillermo del Toro’s take on my favorite monster of all time, but I’ve had my hands full the last few weeks. Why on Earth wouldn’t they put this out in October and play up the Halloween angle? Granted, they’re the ones running a billion-dollar streaming service and I’m the guy writing blogs about it for free, but I think we can all agree that I am far wiser than they are.

Speaking of horror, Frankenstein isn’t the only movie that slipped past me this year. Good Boy, the horror film told from the point of view of a loyal dog, has been on my radar for a few years now, ever since I heard the premise. It’s gotten rave reviews, and with a runtime of only 73 minutes, I’ll be kind of mad with myself if I don’t sneak it in before the end of the year. Similarly, I’m interested in the slasher throwback Marshmallow, the Shudder film Night of the Reaper, and the survival horror video game adaptation Until Dawn. 

I’m saving this one for a day where I want to reduce myself to a mewling infant.

And the documentaries! I haven’t even GOTTEN to the documentaries yet! Prime Video has given us John Candy: I Like Me, a movie that seems to have left everybody who has watched it so far in tears. I’m probably going to wait until school lets out for Thanksgiving and then do a double feature of this one with the movie that gave us the title quote, the brilliant Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. 

I’ve got no such excuse, though, for sleeping on Jaws at 50, a documentary about one of the greatest movies ever made, or George A. Romero’s Resident Evil, which is a documentary about a movie that was NEVER made. That’s a relatively small subgenre of entertainment documentaries, but it’s one I’ve always enjoyed. Prime Video has also given us When We Went MAD!, a documentary about the history of the magazine that we all thought was hilarious when we were nine years old. I’ll be honest, I fell out of love with Mad Magazine ages ago (and re-reading some of their stories this summer during my Year of Superman did not reignite the love affair), but a documentary about comics is always going to get a view from me.

Saying that this one “aged like milk” may actually be considered a compliment.

Speaking of comics, I did a lot better this year at watching the superhero movies that came out…well, either that or there just weren’t as many of them. But looking at my list of movies that I missed this year, there are only three superhero movies I didn’t get around too, two of which are animated Batman movies. Batman Ninja Vs. Yakuza League and Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires are both “Elseworlds”-style takes on the character, plucking him out of Gotham City and putting him into feudal Japan and the time of the Spanish conquistadors, respectively. The concept of Batman, in and of itself, is flexible enough that these things are usually at least interesting. Then there’s the long-awaited remake of The Toxic Avenger, which has finally been taken off the shelf and released after two or three years of languishing. I’m very curious to see if the legendarily cheesy Troma Studios hero will hold up to a larger budget.

OOOOH, because if you take the “e” out of the parentheses the title is — NOW I get it!

As for low budgets, there are several indie movies that got my attention this year, movies I read about online or heard discussed in podcasts, that I haven’t watched. Jonathan L. Bowen’s The Comic Shop, for example, or the British comedy Bad Apples about a teacher who accidentally abducts her worst student and then finds that suddenly her class is more manageable. Dropout comedian Isabella Roland wrote and starred in the comedy D(e)AD, about a woman whose family is haunted by her father’s ghost – everyone except for her. There’s also Hamnet, a drama about the tragedy BEHIND William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and John-Michael Powell’s crime drama Violent Ends. I can’t tell you too much about any of these because I don’t KNOW much, except that I heard enough about them to have my curiosity piqued and put them on my watchlist. 

Whatever bastard designed this did the human equivalent of putting a dog on the poster. You know what you’re in for.

Finally, in case you didn’t know, I’m kind of a fan of Stephen King. And this year has been awash in King content, with the new It TV prequel Welcome to Derry now running on HBO Max and no less than FOUR big-screen adaptations of his work, of which I have seen exactly one. The Monkey. Which I liked, but which was VERY different from the short story it’s based on. That means I still need to get to The Life of Chuck, based on a novella that I thought was pretty good, but the film is directed by Mike Flanagan, which means it’s probably brilliant. Francis Lawrence directed The Long Walk, an adaptation of one of King’s bleakest stories (originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym), and I look forward to seeing Mark Hamill playing the bad guy again – because despite most people thinking of him as Luke Skywalker, real ones know he’s actually the best Joker. And lest I forget Edgar Wright directed a remake of another Bachman book, The Running Man, a sci-fi action film rather than horror, but with trailers that look like an awful lot of fun.

The point is, I DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO WATCH ALL OF THE MOVIES.

As always, I’m going to do my best to get through as many of these (and the two dozen or so other movies that are on my list that I didn’t mention) between now and the time my Christmas vacation ends in early January, but who knows how many I’ll actually get to? In the meantime, if there are any particularly good movies that came out this year that I didn’t mention that you think I haven’t seen yet, let me know. What’s adding a few more films to a list I’m never going to reach the end of anyway?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He needs to go to the opposite of that planet from Interstellar, some place where he can be there for five minutes and have time to watch 12 month’s worth of movies. He hears Detroit feels like that sometimes. 

Geek Punditry #147: It’s Not Halloween (But Who Cares?)

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The whole “What Qualifies as a Christmas Movie” debate has been at a fever pitch for several years now. Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Iron Man 3 – each of these has defenders ranging from people who genuinely appreciate their holiday content for what it is to edgelords who think they’re somehow better than other people by picking Riggs and Murtaugh over Rudolph and Frosty. Strangely, though, Halloween has never really fallen victim to this sort of heated, brutal, occasionally family-schisming battle royale. People are eager to accept certain movies as part of their standard Halloween fare even if nothing in the film has any direct ties to the holiday. And I think we should embrace that philosophy.

Art.

Some of my favorite movies fall into this category. As anyone who has seen the posters in my living room knows, one of my favorite movies of all time is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I love the Universal Monsters, I love Bud and Lou, and this film fused those two brands at their respective heights into a hilarious film that nevertheless holds up the Universal Monsters as icons that they are. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula! Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman! Glenn Strange’s Frankenstein Monster! (Okay, it stinks that they couldn’t get Boris Karloff to come back to the play the monster one last time, but of all the actors who wore the makeup for Universal, Strange was #2 after Karloff.) And I watch this movie at LEAST once every October as part of my Halloween wind-up. There’s a masquerade party in the third act, but it’s not specifically noted as being a Halloween party, and the film doesn’t seem to have any indication of what time of year it takes place. But the gestalt of having the finest incarnations of the Universal Monsters is enough to place it on my list.

That’s one of the great things about Halloween – the inclusivity of the concept. You can get away with almost anything as a Halloween costume, even if what you’re dressing as has no Halloween link. You can be a superhero or a princess, you can make a costume based on a pun, you can be a character from your favorite TV show or you can dress up as your friend who you know is going to be at the same party and watch them stew about it as you imitate their mannerisms flawlessly. All of it counts. And because of that, it’s much easier for a character or a movie to be elevated to iconic Halloween status even if there’s nothing strictly Halloweenish about them.

My other top two movie franchises that fall into this category are, of course, Ghostbusters and Scream. None of the Ghostbusters films take place at Halloween, and Scream didn’t touch upon the holiday until the sixth installment, but both of them are eagerly accepted as standard Halloween costumes now, much like any other Universal Monster, 80s slasher, or Beetlejuice. And, in fact, I try to work them into my Halloween viewing rotation almost every year. (If I don’t get around to Ghostbusters I’ll save it for December – Ghostbusters II is a New Year’s movie, after all.)

Halloween movies are like pumpkin spice. Pumpkin spice doesn’t actually taste like pumpkin, it tastes like cinnamon and the other assorted ingredients you add to a squash to make it taste like a pie instead of…well…a squash. Similarly, there are a lot of great movies that may not have any Halloween ingredients to them, but nevertheless, deliver hard on the Halloween flavor. 

The Stuff (1985)

Still can’t get enough.

I remember seeing the poster for this in the video store every time my parents took us there to pick out a few movies when I was a kid. I knew my mom would never let me rent stuff like this, but it never stopped me from looking at the poster and wondering what it was all about. Once I was old enough to seek out the movies I wanted myself, I found that this Larry Cohen film was ridiculous and delightful at the same time. “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarity) is hired by a dairy company to investigate a new product called “The Stuff,” a creamy substance that is obliterating sales of ice cream and other traditional desserts. Nobody knows what’s in it or what it’s made of, and when Mo learns the truth, the answers are horrifying. The Stuff has the feel of a 50s sci-fi alien invasion movie, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed with The Blob mixed with a Baskin-Robbins commercial. The tone is perfectly appropriate to blend in with your Halloween viewing – silly and over-the-top with an antagonist that is absurd on the face of it. As far as Halloween costume potential goes, there’s not really an iconic character for you to dress up as, but if you were to whip up a costume that looks like a “Stuff” carton, you’ll immediately figure out who the cool kids at your Halloween party are. If nothing else, this movie is the quintessential argument for food nutrition labels.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988)

Pictured: 2016.

True story: Last year on November 1st, after Spirit Halloween put everything at 50 percent off, my wife picked up the 12-foot inflatable Jumbo the Clown from this, one of her favorite cheesy movies. Jumbo sat in his box in the closet until this September, when I told her it was time to test out our Halloween decorations to make sure they still worked and she remembered buying this thing. It wasn’t until he was plugged in for the first time that we realized just how tall 12 feet actually is.

Eddie for scale.

Totally worth it, though, because this movie is a delight. In Killer Klowns, alien clowns come to Earth and begin abducting people in cotton candy traps and taking them to their ship, which happens to resemble a circus tent. The story is ostensibly about a bunch of young people who band together to fight them off, but nobody is watching the movie for the humans. The clowns are the stars, lovingly created by the Chiodo Brothers in a fashion that evokes the finest puppet work of the Jim Henson company. The Chiodos actually repainted and reused some of the clowns a few years later for the trolls in a legit Halloween classic, Ernest Scared Stupid.

It may not be a Halloween movie per se, but there are few things in the world that feel more Halloweenish than a good ol’ creepy clown, and the ones from this movie are some of the best. The iconic looks make for great costumes, and the movie itself is a ton of fun.

It (All versions)

Georgie for scale.

Similar to the Killer Klowns, Stephen King’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown is one of those characters that feels as perfectly suited to Halloween as Ebenezer Scrooge does to Christmas. The Creepy Clown Coefficient is in full effect here, whether you’re looking at Tim Curry from the 1990 TV miniseries or Bill Skarsgard from the 2017 and 2019 films and the new Welcome to Derry streaming series. Pennywise isn’t silly like the Killer Klowns, of course. He’s a much darker threat and can be legitimately frightening, whereas it’s hard to imagine anyone being anything but charmed by the Chiodos’ creations. The movies lean on the darker side of Halloween, but that’s okay. The darker side is more pronounced here than in any other holiday, and that’s kind of what we love about it. 

The Addams Family (All Versions)

If Taylor Swift had referenced Gomez and Morticia in her songs instead of Romeo and Juliet, maybe she would have made something of herself.

I wonder what Charles Addams would think if he could see the cultural phenomenon his little one-panel gag comics have become. The original Addams family came from a series of comic strips that mixed comedy with macabre elements of a monster movie, and although some of the characters became regulars, they didn’t have names or distinct personalities until they were adapted into a TV series in 1964. While it was a popular enough show, and fondly remembered, Addams died before the property really exploded with the 1991 film starring Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci. Since then we’ve had multiple cartoons, three live action films, two animated movies, a Broadway musical, and a new streaming series focusing on the Addams’ daughter Wednesday. But although Wednesday may be the breakout star, virtually every member of the family has become iconic. Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Cousin It, even Pugsley all have a distinct, unique look to them, and you can throw on any of the movies or any of the assorted TV shows and get a beautiful blend of creepy and comedy that is a perfect fit for the season. 

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Because this is what it feels like going to WORK, amirite?

Edgar Wright’s comedic send-up of zombie movies has the perfect sense of scary and silly that you’re looking for. Shaun (Simon Pegg) is a retail jockey struggling with a girlfriend who wants more out of life than he seems willing to give, a mother whose husband he constantly clashes with, and a best friend who is enabling his arrested development more than anything else. He’s ALREADY living like a zombie even before the dead start to rise. Like a lot of the all-time great horror/comedies, Shaun works because the zombies themselves are played absolutely straight – nothing silly or goofy about them. The human characters, however, are funny and highly relatable. One could make an argument for virtually any zombie movie as being part of your Halloween rotation, but I’ve always felt that the more comedic ones fit in more with the fun of the holiday. And although there are plenty of zombie comedies out there, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this is probably the best. It’s definitely the most iconic. Zombie costumes are easy, but cosplaying as the HERO of a zombie movie is often tough – they are, by the standards of the genre, usually kind of dull, generic, everyman types. But you can cosplay Shaun easily – a white shirt, crimson tie, a nametag, and a cricket bat are all you need. And make sure to get a little red on you.

Labyrinth (1986)

Where the hell is Fozzie?

Jim Henson’s fantasy film from 1986 may have flopped at the box office, but today the fans are devoted, dedicated, and legion. A young Jennifer Connelly plays Sarah, a teenage girl whose frustration at babysitting her infant brother inadvertently leads to his abduction by Jareth, the Goblin King (David Bowie). But Jareth offers her a chance to get him back – make her way to the Goblin City at the center of his remarkable Labyrinth before time runs out and she can take him home. The film is lavish and gorgeous. The characters, too, are memorable and loveable, with some of the finest work Jim Henson’s creature shop ever did. Even the bad guys have distinct personalities and witticisms that make them a joy to watch. And as the movie, technically, is all about monsters, it gives off those Halloween vibes any time of year.

There you have it, friends, a few non-Halloween flicks that you can throw into your rotation and feel perfectly seasonal. What are some of your favorites?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He didn’t mention the Munsters because lord knows he doesn’t feel like stirring up THAT can of worms yet again. The scars still haven’t healed from the last time. 

Geek Punditry #146: Scary Starters

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If you read last week’s column – and obviously you should have, because it was a masterpiece – you may remember me mentioning that my 11-year-old nephew is planning to be Ghostface for Halloween this year. This is amusing to me because his mom, my sister, is very much NOT a horror movie fan, and I know for certain my nephew has never seen any of those films. It’s just evidence of how pervasive the Ghostface icon has become. But a few days later I got another nice surprise when my sister asked me if I thought her daughter, who turns 15 this weekend, was old enough to watch the Scream movies.

When I tell you I wanted to squeal with delight…

I smiled bigger than this.

I get questions like this a lot. I suppose that my multiple qualifications as a teacher, father, writer, and geek pundit all make people confident that I have a good idea of what media is appropriate for what age group, and I’m flattered by the faith they have in me. On the other hand, the question isn’t always that simple. Age-based ratings like your PG, PG-13, and R from the MPAA are a decent enough guide, but that’s all they are: a GUIDE. The truth is that every kid is different. There are 13-year-olds who can handle the same scary movies that would give their same-aged classmates nightmares for a week. So when I’m given these questions, I always give a general opinion, but I couch it in the caveat that “You know your kids better than anybody else, so use your best judgment.” 

But in this case, I know my niece really well. She’s grown up to be a fan of the morbid and macabre, she is slightly obsessed with all permutations of Five Nights at Freddy’s, and she’s smart enough to separate fiction from reality. When I got hit with this question, I had no doubt that she could handle it. The bigger question, honestly, was whether my sister would be okay with it.

“As far as the Scream movies go,” I told her, “There’s not any nudity. There IS violence, but compared to a lot of other franchises it’s relatively tame. There’s language, but she goes to a public high school, so I guarantee there’s nothing she hasn’t heard before. They’re all streaming on Paramount+, so yeah, I think it’s okay.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Scream is – as I’ve stated many times – my favorite horror movie franchise, mainly because I think the writing and characterization are heads and shoulders above most of the other ones. But I still wouldn’t suggest that my niece be allowed to watch them if I didn’t think she was ready for it.

A few days later, I happened across a link to an article from Letterboxd that listed 20 PG-13 horror movies, films that were suggested as sort of “starters” for people who are just getting into the genre and didn’t want anything TOO intense. I’ve seen most of the films on that list and I agree that many of them are good choices – The Sixth Sense, for example, or Night of the Comet. And I was surprised at just how tonally diverse the list was, including things as chilling as The Ring and as family-friendly as Monster Squad.

I forwarded the link to both my niece and her mom, and my niece replied that she’s already seen Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and now she has an excuse to watch the others on the list. I love this kid.

For the kids.

All this is to say, I’m really looking forward to helping usher her into the world of horror movie fandom, because I find that by and large horror movie fans are some of the nicest, kindest, most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met. Compared to certain other fandoms I could mention, like those from a galaxy far, far away, horror fans are usually very respectful of differing opinions and eager to listen, able to have conversations about their favorites and least favorites without devolving into name-calling or anger, and are extremely generous and supportive of the movies and creators that they enjoy. I know my niece would be positively embraced by this community, and it’s really important to find your tribe. I’m not saying that everybody in the world should be a horror fan, but I AM saying that if more people BEHAVED like horror fans, the world would be a much better place.

So if you’re into horror, or if you’ve got a teenager in your life that’s drifting in that direction, check out that Letterboxd list I linked to above. It’s a good starting place. And here are a few more suggestions for movies that didn’t quite make the Letterboxd cut, as well as other non-movie media sources that a burgeoning horror fan could start getting into this spooky season.

This is why dads mow the lawn every other morning.

The most glaring omission from the Letterboxd list – and my wife pointed this out almost immediately – is Little Shop of Horrors. It’s the chilling tale of a little New York flower shop where a young man finds and cultivates a new breed of plant that turns out to be an alien invader that thirsts for human flesh. Fun for the whole family! The Roger Corman original from 1960 is a cheesy schlockfest – it’s fun to watch, but only if you’re really into “good bad movies.” However, the 1986 musical version directed by Frank Oz is a masterpiece. The music is phenomenal, the performances are fantastic, and it’s just one more reason to love Rick Moranis. The puppetry by Jim Henson Studios holds up brilliantly today, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone walking away from this movie without having a new favorite song. My niece is already a geek for musicals, so I know this would be right up her alley. I just hope my sister is ready for weeks and weeks of her kid casually singing “Dentist!” and “Suddenly, Seymour.”

“Do you think you’ve got the CHOPS for this one, kiddies?”

Although it’s more intense than the stuff on the Letterboxd list, I have to give a strong recommendation to the legendary HBO TV series Tales From the Crypt. Based on the classic EC Comics (which themselves are well worth reading), this anthology series presented a half-hour morality tale each week, a different story with a different twist that usually involved a bad person doing bad things and getting a karmically appropriate comeuppance. The show adapted stories from the original comic book as well as some of its sister series, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and others. It also gave us one of the all time great horror icons in the Cryptkeeper, the John Kassir-voiced puppet who served as the host of the show with a ghoulishly gleeful sense of humor at the beginning and end of each episode. The general content level is a step up from Scream – there was sex sometimes, and the violence was kicked up a notch. At the same time, though, the violence was often treated very nonchalantly, brought up to an almost cartoonish level and hard to take seriously, which is part of the charm. 

HBO treated this series very well, bringing in big-name guest-stars and directors like Martin Sheen, Brooke Shields, Catherine O’Hara, Christopher Reeve, Steve Buscemi, Tim Curry, and tons of others. The show gave us seven seasons with 93 episodes, as well as three theatrical films and a more kid-centric animated spinoff, Tales From the Cryptkeeper. There’s fun to be had in all of them.

“I know I look like the Cryptkeeper, but I don’t really talk. I’m animated beautifully, though.”

I also have to give a recommendation to its spiritual successor, Creepshow. In the original Creepshow movie from 1982, director George Romero (of Night of the Living Dead fame) teamed up with Stephen King for a film that was inspired by and tonally reminiscent of the original Tales From the Crypt comics years before the TV show brought it back to the public consciousness. The first Creepshow was written entirely by King, and he even starred in one of the anthology segments himself. The first sequel also adapted King stories, although both he and George Romero were absent entirely from the third installment. The legacy of the film persevered, though, and in 2019 the Shudder streaming service brought it back as an anthology TV series that lasted for four seasons and a few specials (including a Halloween special and an animated Christmas special). What’s more, the TV shows spawned a new comic book anthology series from Skybound (the company owned by Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead), bringing the whole style of tongue-in-cheek horror with a dash of dark comedy back to its original format. All of these are worth indulging and, as they’re anthologies, can be picked up one episode or installment at a time without requiring a huge binge to get through an entire story like some TV shows, comics, or film series.

The Ditko version was a lot cleaner.

Finally, if you’re looking for a horror tinged-take on characters you already know and love, there are several options available. Marvel fans may be aware of the recent Marvel Zombies animated series, but they may not know that it’s based on a line of comic books, which themselves were started by Robert Kirkman before he left Marvel and devoted himself entirely to his own company. In the original Marvel Zombies, an old-fashioned zombie virus struck the Fantastic Four, turning them into flesh-eaters. It spread out from there, and once it hit the super-speedster Quicksilver, any chance of stopping it from being a global pandemic was lost. In the Marvel Zombies universe, the undead retain their human intelligence, although their zombie hunger overtakes their former heroic morality. It’s a fun series that has had many permutations. The hard part for a newbie would likely be just keeping track of which order to read the many assorted graphic novels in and figuring out which ones are part of the main continuity or standalone.

Well, the end of everything until next issue.

DC Comics has also given us two horror-themed worlds to explore in recent years. First was DCEased, a book that I have to believe was given the greenlight primarily on the strength of the pun in the title. In the main DC Universe, Darkseid has spent 50 years or so trying to find the “Anti-Life Equation,” a formula that would give him control over all life. In DCEased, the equation is cut loose, transforming anyone it touches into a mindless killing machine. It’s not TECHNICALLY a zombie story, but it uses many zombie tropes to tell what turns out to be a generational tale of broken heroes desperate to find a way to save their world.

“Okay, but that’s just a placeholder title, right? We’re gonna come up with something more clever before it’s published, right? Right? Guys?”

Finally, there’s DC Vs. Vampires where – once again – some of DC’s best and brightest are turned into creepy-crawlies. This time, we wind up with a world where Batgirl becomes queen of the vampires and the heroes are divided into dead and undead and are embroiled in a civil war that engulfs their entire world. The most recent (and possibly final) volume of this series just ended, and the paperback edition should be coming soon. Like Marvel Zombies and DCEased, it works as a fun horror take on some familiar characters.

So there you are, friends – a few gateways into the world of the macabre. I’m sure you have suggestions of your own, and I’d love to hear them in the comments. With two weeks left until Halloween, it’s time for the Creepy Content to completely take over.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He skipped over recommending Plants Vs. Zombies. They know what they did. 

Geek Punditry #141: Comedy in Crisis

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It’s not something I ever thought I would say, but comedy is in danger of becoming a dying art. In movies, at least, it’s become harder and harder to sell a comedy to the theater crowd, mainly because in a world where movie theater attendance has never really recovered from the Covid shutdowns, people are far more discriminating about what they choose when they go out to a movie theater. The prevailing notion is that if you’re only going to see a movie in a theater a few times a year, it’s best to spend those chits on the big-budget special effects spectaculars, the things that really demand that IMAX treatment on the big screen. I know I’m guilty of that – my wife and I only get out to see a movie without our son a few times a year at best, so we’ve got to make sure it “counts.” After all, a comedy that’s funny in the theater will be just as funny at home, right?

Of course, some comedies aren’t funny no matter WHERE you are.

No, that’s not right at all, actually.

I’ve written before about that ever-so-thin line between comedy and horror, and about how both art forms are built on a similar formula of tension, buildup, and release, with the primary difference being that horror releases tension through screams whereas comedy releases it through laughter. It’s the reason, in fact, that horror/comedy hybrids can be so effective. But there’s another similarity that people don’t realize. Most horror movies are scarier in movie theaters than at home, where you can feed on the energy of the people around you, hear them gasp and shout with each scare, where you can see the girl a row ahead of you grab onto her boyfriend when the monster leaps at the screen. It makes watching a horror movie a communal experience that’s more enjoyable than watching the same movie alone. (There are exceptions, of course. Certain small, claustrophobic films like Buried or home invasion movies like Hush probably work better in a darkened living room with the curtains drawn and as few people as possible with you. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.)

Similarly, there’s something about comedy that’s funnier when you’re with an audience. There’s an emotional charge in the air that is infectious, spreading from one person to another. Even ONE person can be enough to trigger this. I’ll watch episodes of RiffTrax or Mystery Science Theater 3000 a dozen times by myself and chuckle with the riffs. But if I watch that same episode with my wife, those quiet laughs to myself become full-belly guffaws. Laughter, like terror, is contagious. One person’s laughter eases the path for others – it’s almost like hearing someone else laughing gives you PERMISSION to laugh, a permission that you don’t actually NEED, but that your psyche is waiting for anyway. 

Crow: I guess this is what he gets for making Green Lantern.

Unfortunately we didn’t make it to the theaters for this one, but the reboot of The Naked Gun is available digitally now, and my wife Erin and I watched it earlier this week. I’ve heard from many people whose opinions I respect that it was the funniest movie of the year, which sadly isn’t as bold a statement as it used to be. I grew up on the original Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun movies, as well as the Police Squad series that preceded it. I dearly loved that style of slapstick comedy, the kind we got from Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles or Spaceballs, and that the same Abrahams and Zucker Brothers combo that gave us Police Squad would refine in their disaster spoof Airplane! And I mourned – oh, HOW I mourned – the death of that kind of comedy when it was replaced by Friedberg/Seltzer stinkers like Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, and The Starving Games. 

So much high art it should be in a museum.

Someone watching a trailer for these movies might not be able to tell what the difference is on the surface. They’re all goofy movies built on absurd, surrealistic comedy that’s almost like a cartoon brought to life. But the difference is that Brooks, Abrahams, and the Zuckers understand how parody works. Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, and The Naked Gun are spoofs of westerns, science fiction, and cop dramas (respectively). They mock the tropes of those films ruthlessly, while at the same time telling their own stories. Date Movie and similar films lack that kind of imagination or creativity. They replace actual gags with straight references to other films, and seem to think that simply acknowledging the existence of a (usually superior) movie somehow counts as a joke, but they have no identity or voice of their own. 

Airplane!, incidentally, is the oddball in this group. Whereas the others weren’t parodies of SPECIFIC movies (although Spaceballs leaned harder on Star Wars than most other sci-fi), Airplane! was almost a beat-for-beat remake of a lesser-known and much-forgotten disaster movie called Zero Hour, even borrowing some of the dialogue from the earlier film. They simply took the existing plot and characters and amplified them to absurd levels and created a comedy classic. 

But that kind of comedy had died out, as I said, replaced by the Reference Fests that slapstick has become in the last two decades. So when I heard they were rebooting The Naked Gun I was highly skeptical. When I heard that Liam Neeson had been cast as Frank Drebbin Jr., my optimism increased slightly – Neeson is a great actor and I believed he may have the comedy chops to pull it off. But it wasn’t until I saw the trailer, where they included a joke that addressed the elephant in the room – a certain cast member of the original trilogy who became infamous after the series ended – that I realized that this movie might just be self-aware enough to work.

And it really did.

And they get bonus points for mocking AI. Everybody gets bonus points for mocking AI.

Erin and I watched this movie and, from the first scene, I found myself laughing out loud at the antics on the screen. Liam Neeson has reinvented his career before – after a long period as a profound dramatic actor he took a left turn into action hero starting with the Taken franchise. Now it seems like he’s ready to reinvent himself again. He doesn’t play Frank Drebbin Jr. as completely stone-faced as his “father,” Leslie Nielsen, played the original. Instead, he’s got his own sort of blend of faux seriousness mixed with just enough winking at the camera to indicate that he recognizes just how ridiculous the movie is, and he’s cool with it. 

The real revelation here, though, was casting Pamela Anderson as the femme fatale of the movie. It’s been quite a while since Anderson was really in the public eye, and when she WAS making movies more frequently she wasn’t usually being sought out for her comedic skills. But she nailed it in this movie, with the same kind of goofy sensibility that Neeson brought to the screen. Word has it that she and Liam Neeson have actually begun a romantic relationship in real life after working together on this movie. That wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025, but after seeing them together I absolutely believe it, because the chemistry is flawless.

Get a guy who looks at you like that even with that hair.

Most importantly, though, the writing is sharp and clever. The jokes are about the tropes of a police procedural, not about the EXISTENCE of it. The screenwriters rarely make reference to any specific movie or TV show, and when they DO it’s actually done well (such as an extended joke where Neeson’s character is distraught that his Tivo has accidentally lost season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – the joke here being that a hardboiled cop at his age KNOWS so much about Buffy, not that it EXISTS). 

The Naked Gun (“the new version,” Neeson says in his first of many fourth wall-leaning moments) is the kind of comedy we don’t get anymore, and it’s the kind of comedy we need. Honestly, when is the last time you went to a movie theater to watch a comedy? I went back and looked at my Letterboxd diary to find the last time I saw a new movie in a theater that was an actual comedy and not just a superhero movie with comedic elements or a cartoon I was taking Eddie to watch. I made it back to 2017 when Erin and I saw The Big Sick, which is really more of a dramedy. Before that I’ve gotta go back to the action/comedy The Nice Guys in 2016. Both of those, by the way, are movies that deserve a lot more love than they get. 

The Naked Gun didn’t set the box office on fire, but it was highly lauded by critics and by those audiences that actually DID show up. I’m hoping that’s enough to justify Paramount moving forward with a sequel. Neeson and Anderson are such a great on-screen duo that it would be a crime not to pair them up again. This wouldn’t be the first time a movie – especially a comedy – found its audience after the lights dimmed in the movie theater, so I’m giving this my recommendation. Buy or rent it digitally. Stream it when it eventually shows up on Paramount+. Buy the Blu-Ray or DVD when it hits stores. I want more movies like this, and so should you. I didn’t get to see this one with a tub of popcorn in my lap and a huge screen in front of me, so I’m hoping I’ll get that shot for part two. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. You know what other movie didn’t get enough love? The Rocketeer. Just saying.

Geek Punditry #137: Teeny Tiny Terrors

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Grady Hendrix’s novel How to Sell a Haunted House has been optioned for a motion picture. This is not new information, by the way – the deal was signed with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House studio about two years ago, but today is the first time I’ve heard about it, and it’s got me very interested. I like Hendrix’s work quite a bit. I’ve only read three of his books so far (the aforementioned Haunted House, Final Girls Support Group, and the very cool nonfiction book Paperbacks From Hell, about the history of horror novels and cover art in the 70s and 80s), but every one of them has encouraged me to read more. I don’t know if it’s fair to classify myself as a “fan,” having only really dipped my toes into his work thus far, but perhaps “fan-in-training” would be accurate. Regardless, having read How to Sell a Haunted House, I am immediately struck by the cinematic possibilities of the story, while at the same time, left very curious about exactly what tone they’re going to strike with a horror movie where the villains are – drumroll please – puppets.

You don’t even want to know what going through escrow is like.

I apologize if that feels like a spoiler to anyone, but it’s part of the synopsis of the book and, when the movie is made, it most likely will be in the trailer, so I don’t feel TOO bad. It’s kinda like if you hear that there’s a new slasher movie coming out and someone tells you that the killer wears a mask. In the novel, single mom Louise Joyner has to go back to her home town after her parents are killed in a car crash. Once home, she’s forced to go about the task of closing up her childhood home for sale with the help of her estranged brother. As they go through the house, they find that there may be more to their mother’s massive collection of puppets and dolls than they ever suspected.

Once the movie is completed, How to Sell a Haunted House will join the echelon of horror flicks that I like to think of as “Teeny Tiny Terrors.” Horror, as a genre, has dozens (if not hundreds) of categories and subcategories, most of which can overlap at some intersection or another. How to Sell a Haunted House will fit into a few categories – haunted house movies, obviously, but also the narrower but quite popular category of killer toys, home of such classic films as Child’s Play, Puppet Master, and the last segment in Trilogy of Terror. The Joyner puppets will join a pretty fabulous collection of creatures.

Sorry if that gives you nightmares.

Not all Teeny Tiny Terrors are toys, of course. I’d also place things like Leprechaun, Gremlins, Ghoulies, Munchies, Critters, Hobgoblins, and even Sam from Trick ‘r Treat into this category: all monsters or aliens or some sort of supernatural threat that are embodied in what is – to an adult human, of course – a package that seems small and harmless until the teeth are bared. Because of this, almost all Teeny Tiny Terrors fall into one of my OTHER favorite horror subcategories: horror comedies. I wrote about this extensively last year, specifically about how common it is for horror to have elements of comedy, and how some lean harder on the funny parts and others lean harder on the terror. I even described a spectrum with varying levels of horror/comedies depending on which side they lean towards (a Type 1 is the lightest, funniest of the group, while 5 is the scariest). Almost any Teeny Tiny Terror will land on the spectrum somewhere. The first Child’s Play movie, I think, was a solid 4, although as is often the case the series lightened up with subsequent installments to 3s and even occasionally to 2s. 

With a Teeny Tiny Terror of any type, at least part of the humor is going to come from the concept of something that’s supposed to be innocent and harmless suddenly turning psychotic. The idea of the dolls in Puppet Master turning out to be possessed by the spirits of dead Nazis, for example, is so patently absurd that it’s hard to take it too seriously even as the likes of the Tunneler doll are drilling into somebody’s skull. There’s a macabre comedy to this. It’s similar to the psychotic clown craze from a few years back, although not exactly the same. With killer toys, you’ve got something that’s supposed to be harmless turning bad. 

Teeny Tiny Terrors are nothing new. They showed up in John Christopher’s baffling 1966 novel The Little People, were used to disturbing effect in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, and have showed up in folklore about as far back as you can imagine. Today we’re even retroactively applying it to full-grown terrors. Just a few days ago I got an email from Spirit Halloween announcing their new line of Horror Movie Babies, figures and decorations starring infantilized versions of Michael Myers, Chucky, Ghostface, the Frankenstein Monster and others. And even THAT is a spinoff of their long-running Zombie Babies line. There aren’t enough Teeny Tiny Terrors already, now we’re taking full-grown terrors and giving them the Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies treatment! 

Remember that episode where Leatherface gutted Camilla like a fish?

There are other subcategories related to the Teeny Tiny Terrors in different ways, such as the aforementioned Killer Klowns. Like deadly toys, the reason clowns can be scary is that you’re taking something that’s supposed to be innocent and perverting it. Dolls are inanimate, though, and supposed to be used to fuel a child’s imagination, but have no agency of their own. They exist only as a reflection of a child’s innocence. Clowns, on the other hand, are people, and we know that (unlike a doll) a person can easily hide their true nature. They commit their atrocities beneath makeup that was originally intended to induce laughter only amplifies the terror. Whether we’re talking about Pennywise, Art the Clown, or the Joker, killer clowns can be a hell of a lot scarier than killer toys.

There’s also the related category of Creepy Kids, like we see in films such as Children of the Corn or Village of the Damned. Again, here’s something that should be innocent that’s turned bad, but in this case it’s far less likely to be funny. A demonic child is something of a perversion of innocence, it’s taking a human being in the period of their life where they are supposed to have the least darkness and transforming them into something ghastly. There are SOME Creepy Kids on the horror/comedy spectrum, but I think they’re far less likely to go there than Teeny Tiny Terror or Killer Klowns.

The good news is that modern cameras don’t create redeye, so there’s no chance of remaking this one.

But back to Grady Hendrix: I’m not surprised that an adaptation of his work would go into the horror/comedy territory, because pretty much everything of his that I’ve read seems tailor-made for it. Aside from Haunted House, he gave us Final Girl Support Group, a novel about women who survived attacks from slasher-type killers (most of whom are obvious copyright-friendly substitutes for the likes of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers) and what happens when an unknown threat starts gunning for them. Hendrix plays with meta humor here, digging into the tropes and expectations of the slasher genre in a way that’s reminiscent of Wes Craven’s Scream movies (and, in fact, one of the Final Girls is a clear replacement for Sidney Prescott). Even his nonfiction book, Paperbacks From Hell, shows a deep love and understanding of all the tropes of horror fiction. Writers like that often enjoy playing with those tropes in an amusing way.

Art.

Assuming the movie adapts the tone of the book faithfully, I think it would also land in type 4. It’s not a laugh riot, and in fact, some of the stuff at the end could be downright grotesque depending on how the director chooses to film it. But as I said, the very concept of Teeny Tiny Terrors has an inherent humor to it that, even in the darkest moments, lends itself well to tongue-in-cheek references and black comedy. Hendrix is one of the modern greats in that regard. I hope that the movie does it justice. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Despite what you may have expected, “Teeny Tiny Terrors” does not refer to what happens when your son realizes we’re out of cheese sticks. 

Geek Punditry #134: Three Wishes For the DC Universe

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I’m sitting here two weeks after the debut of James Gunn’s Superman movie and I’m quite happy. As of the time I write this, it’s sitting at almost $260 million domestically and nearly $433 million worldwide, which in this post-COVID era is nothing to sneeze at. It’s already the top-grossing superhero movie of the year so far, and most importantly, it’s been embraced by the public. The critics love it, the fans love it, and people are still talking about it two weeks later, something you can’t really say for some of the other summer movies like Jurassic World: Rebirth. Lines like “Maybe being kind is the real punk rock” have achieved meme status, and not in a mocking way like that CEO at the Coldplay concert. Most importantly, it has gotten people reenergized. Sure, there are some people who don’t like it, and it’s fair to not like something, but if the REASON you don’t like something is because Superman believes in goodness, has a sense of humor, or wants to protect the life of even the smallest creature, then I’ll be frank: your opinion does not matter to me.

My face when I think about the bit with the squirrel.

With this movie doing well, eyes are now turning to the rest of James Gunn’s new DC Universe. When he and producer Peter Safran took over as co-heads of DC Studios a few years ago, they announced a slew of projects, but Gunn has also been very clear that he’s not going to move forward with anything until the script is ready, so several of those projects are on the back burner. The ones that are definitely on the schedule are – in order of release – season two of the Peacemaker TV series next month, the Lanterns series for early next year, the new Supergirl movie next summer, and a Clayface movie next fall. (Clayface, by the way, is the most indicative of the fact that Gunn is not married to a roadmap – it was not part of the initial announcement and Gunn said the character wasn’t even on the radar for a solo film, but writer Mike Flanagan pitched him a story that was so good they put it on the fast track.)

The hero we didn’t know we needed.

Movies in the works but not yet on the schedule are a Brave and the Bold movie (featuring Batman and the Damian Wayne Robin), The Authority, Swamp Thing, and Sgt. Rock. On TV, they’re working on live-action shows including Paradise Island, Waller, and Booster Gold, and in animation, they’re working on Blue Beetle, Mr. Miracle, and a second season of Creature Commandos. Other things have been tossed around, including a movie featuring Bane and Deathstroke, and Supergirl screenwriter Ana Nogueira has reportedly turned in a script for a Teen Titans movie AND has been hired to do a script for Wonder Woman. Following the success of Superman, rumors are flying about shows starring Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific and Skyler Gisando as Jimmy Olsen. There are other series and films in the works as well, but the ones I haven’t mentioned thus far (such as the sequel to Matt Reeves’ The Batman or an animated Starfire series for children) are mostly intended to be part of DC Studios’ “Elseworlds” imprint and not part of the DCU proper. 

So obviously, there’s a LOT to look forward to in the next several years. But what is it I always say about fans? What do fans want above all else?

That’s right. Fans want MORE.

So today I want to talk about my Three Wishes for the new DCU. What are three projects that I would love to see? If I had a chance to sit down with James Gunn and convince him to add three of my dream projects to the schedule, what would they be? Let’s do one live-action series, one animated series, and one movie, just to cover all the bases that this DCU is touching. I’m also going to try to incorporate some themes or genres that the other projects haven’t gotten around to yet. 

Live action series: Legion of Super-Heroes

Call the casting department and tell them to put a pot of coffee on.

My love for the Legion of Super-Heroes is no secret. I think it’s one of DC’s greatest franchises: the heroes of the 31st century, who have modeled themselves after the greatest heroes of our time. Dozens of heroes from different worlds, cultures, and species, allowing for any number of different characters and character dynamics. The series presents an opportunity to do science fiction and superheroes at the same time, and as Gunn has made it clear that he wants the different DC projects to each have a different feeling, this would fill a niche that isn’t there yet. (Okay, technically I suppose the Lanterns TV series will have a science fiction element to it, but from all the descriptions it seems like that show is going to be more of a military mystery/drama. That’s great, but I want a real space opera.) 

But this would have to be a TV series. The Legion of Super-Heroes is, frankly, just too big for a movie. There are literally dozens of characters in the group, and even if you were to narrow down the focus to a core group of, say, seven or eight, you need time to explore who each of them are and how they relate to one another. You couldn’t do justice to the Legion in two hours. 

The next thing is that I believe that the Legion is strongest as a spin-off of Superman. It’s how the characters were first introduced back in 1958, as kids who loved the legend of Clark Kent and travelled back in time to recruit him to join their club when he was just a teenager. It creates something of a stable time loop: the Legion models itself after Superman, but the Legion also taught Clark Kent to be a superhero in the first place. So I would use the early 2000s Legion of Super-Heroes animated series as my inspiration, casting someone to play a teenage Clark Kent and having him as a regular member of the cast. This would also open the door to have David Corenswet do a cameo as adult Clark at some point, probably in the last episode. 

I don’t know if Corenswet is a jewelry guy, but I think this ring would look pretty good on him.

What’s more, although the Legion is set 1000 years in the future, that doesn’t mean that it can’t still be used to establish things for the contemporary stories. Alien races like the Khund or the Dominators, who could easily show up in other DC projects, could be introduced there. And the series could be used to give sneak peaks as to what will happen in the other movies and shows. (“Hey, why does the woman in this old photo have a golden lasso?” “Don’t worry, Clark, you’ll find out soon enough.”) 

Is the reason I’m suggesting this series just because I love the Legion and I want other people to love it too? I’m not gonna lie, that’s probably at least 75 percent of my reasoning here. But that doesn’t make it a bad idea. I think this show could be great. 

Animated Series: Deadman

With Clayface playing in the realm of body horror (it has been compared, tonally, to David Cronenberg’s The Fly), the supernatural corner of the DC Universe is waiting for some exploration. Deadman is the answer. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, Boston Brand was a circus performer who was murdered in the middle of his act. Rather than going to the great beyond, though, he was sent back to Earth as a ghost to solve his own murder. With the ability to possess the bodies of other people, Deadman has had a long and bizarre career as a superhero that most people (even in the DC Universe) don’t even know exists. 

And you thought YOUR Monday sucked.

By the very nature of who the character is, Deadman has been used plenty of times to delve into the world of horror stories. He is, of course, a literal ghost, so haunted houses and poltergeists and all manner of demonic foes are par for the course for him. And he also regularly runs across other DC characters who are mired in this world of magic and the supernatural, like the Spectre, the Phantom Stranger, and Zatanna, giving a series of this nature an opportunity to open up the world even further.

As for why it would be best as an animated project – there’s a certain creative freedom in animation. It allows you to do things that would stretch credulity in live action, even with the best special effects. Have you ever noticed that the animated Star Trek series are far more likely to bring in characters who are not, strictly, humanoid? Creatures with three arms or body types that you could never fit a human actor into? That’s because in animation you don’t have to pay for huge animatronics, make actors spend days in the makeup chair applying heavy or even painful prosthetics, or worry about sketchy CGI that just doesn’t mesh against the human actors standing in front of a green screen. Animation would give them the freedom to really explore the afterlife, plunge into the depths of Hell, or put Deadman through extreme transformations like the nearly-skeletal Kelley Jones version of the character without having to torture the performers. 

Very few actresses would be willing to have their torso removed to do this scene justice.

It could be groundbreaking in another sense as well. Animation is finally starting to crack free from the decades-old bias that it’s only intended for children, but it’s still rare to see adult-oriented animated projects that aren’t comedies. Even Creature Commandos, which was basically an action movie with monsters, leaned heavily on dark humor. Any humor in Deadman would likely come from Boston himself cracking wise, as the situations he plunges into would be deadly serious…no pun intended. 

Movie: Firestorm

With page-rippin’ power!

Firestorm is one of DC’s perennial B-listers. The character inspires incredible amounts of devotion from his fans, but the NUMBER of fans just isn’t big enough to crack him into the mainstream. This could finally be a chance to fix that. Although several characters over the years have shared the name and the powers, the crux is usually that two people (originally scientist Martin Stein and high school student Ronnie Raymond) are fused into a single super-powerful being as the result of a nuclear accident. One of the two – Stein in the original – is dormant in the fused Firestorm persona, only able to offer advice to the one who’s steering the ship. This allows for a sort of “odd couple” dynamic, putting together two characters who don’t necessarily belong together and forcing them to literally work as one for the greater good. 

Writer Gerry Conway, who co-created the character, had done a long run on Marvel’s Spider-Man and was attempting to recreate the dynamic of a younger hero, which DC didn’t really have at the time. Their heroes were all older, the younger ones were all sidekicks, so putting a teenager in the driver’s seat was different for them, and the character quickly became beloved, even becoming the youngest person to ever join the Justice League (at the time at least). But after 100 issues of his solo series, the doors were shuttered way back in 1990 and, despite several strong attempts to give him a resurgence, he’s struggled to really become big again ever since.

For the movie, I would make Martin Stein sort of the “man in the chair,” the person inadvertently responsible for Firestorm, but not part of Firestorm himself. I’d keep the part of Ronnie’s origin where he gets suckered into joining a group of “protestors” to impress a girl, only to find out that they’re actually eco-terrorists. But when the accident happens, rather than fuse with Stein, I’d have him fuse with the second Firestorm, Jason Rusch, who I would make Stein’s lab assistant. 

“Fusion Confusion” was my nickname when I worked at that restaurant making sushi burritos.

The dynamic we’d have here would be Jason believing Ronnie’s a dumb jock while Ronnie sees Jason as a stuck-up egghead, and the two would slowly and begrudgingly learn to respect each other – the old “together we are more than the sum of our parts” routine. The eco-terrorists would be linked to a bigger bad, of course, who is targeting different scientific institutions in the DCU such as S.T.A.R.Labs, and giving us an opportunity to include other science-based heroes such as Captain Atom, Hourman, Stargirl, or the Flash – who has been oddly absent from all official conversation about the current DCU. There’d even be a clear opportunity to bring in Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific again, because when you have a science problem, who better to call than the smartest man in the world? I kind of like the idea of Stein being one of Mr. Terrific’s former professors who now finds himself running to his old student for help. 

Okay, James Gunn, the ball is in your court now. You’re doing a great job so far, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always room to bring in even more goodness. Here are my suggestions. 

Now I’ve got to get back to finishing up season one of Peacemaker before season two drops. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Come back to him in a month, he’ll probably have three totally different suggestions. 

Geek Punditry #133: Summer Movie Triple Feature

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , , , , , ,

A local swimming pool in my area allows its members to host movie nights during the summer – special events after the sun goes down where you can choose a movie and watch it while you splash around and swat at mosquitos because, let’s be honest, we’re still in Louisiana. But it sounds like a fun time, and recently my brother and sister’s respective families – both of which are members – decided to co-host a movie night. The stipulations were simple: pick a movie rated PG-13 or lower, preferably one that you have on physical media because the streaming capabilities at the pool aren’t exactly state-of-the-art, and Jaws is already taken. Because of course it is. 

Even scary in chlorinated water.

If you’re scheduling an outdoor summer movie, Jaws is probably the most obvious choice there is. It is – as I’m sure you’ve heard me mention before – a virtually flawless movie, and with it being the 50th anniversary this year, interest is at maximum. The story is also a summertime classic – a shark attacks the beaches of Amity Island in the peak of the summer tourism season. After several attacks, including one that ruins the Fourth of July even worse than your cousin who can’t stop talking about politics, the chief of police teams up with an oceanographer and a sailor to hunt down the murderous beast. There’s not a wasted frame in this movie, the music is perfect, and it is absolutely scandalous that Robert Shaw didn’t get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

But some other family had already taken it. Since that wasn’t an option, my family started to toss around alternatives. My brother was stuck between Goonies and The Sandlot, both of which are classic films, but they ultimately went with the latter. I get it. As much as I love Goonies, if you’re going for a movie with a summer feel it’s pretty hard to argue against The Sandlot. It’s your timeless coming-of-age story about a new kid in town who finds friends with a ragtag bunch who spends their days playing baseball in a local…well…sandlot. Again, it’s a movie that’s perfectly in keeping with the theme and gives you a summertime feel like few other movies can accomplish. Perfect – they texted the pool’s organizer to tell him they’d settled on their movie and my sister jumped on Oriental Trading and started ordering baseball-themed decorations for the event.

I think one of these kids grew up to be the ambassador to Uganda or something.

Right after she got her shipping notification, the organizer texted back to tell them that some other family had already chosen The Sandlot for THEIR movie night.

And so it was back to the drawing board. Goonies was briefly reconsidered, then someone suggested doing a “Christmas in July” theme and showing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation or Home Alone, both of which I thought would be a really fun idea. Christmas Vacation was ultimately vetoed due to that one moment of profanity Chevy Chase drops during his legendary meltdown scene at the end of the film, which I can respect. There are gonna be a lot of kids in the pool, after all, and you don’t want to have to cover their ears lest you be forced to explain who Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye were. Other ideas rattled around until finally, they decided to go with a recent hit that was freshly available on Blu-Ray: The Minecraft Movie.

I’ve never played Minecraft myself, nor have I seen the movie. I don’t really know anything about it, other than it apparently has something to do with a chicken wearing jockeys, but it made a ton of money and I’m sure it’s going to be a big success with the families at the pool. But is it really a summer movie? 

As so often happens when I think about stuff like this, I started to compile a list. If I was scheduling an outdoor summer movie film festival, what are some of the movies I would program? What are movies that both capture the feel of summertime in various ways AND are family-friendly enough that I could put them on a big screen in the out of doors and not have to answer uncomfortable questions from pearl-clutching parents? (Obviously, the other Vacation movies are automatically disqualified.) So here is how I’d program a summer film triple feature that’s fun for everyone. I want three movies that encapsulate three of the most iconic summertime activities: a road trip, summer camp, and going to the beach. Each activity gets one film. 

First up, for the earliest movie you need something for the kids that’s also fun for the adults. When I hear someone dismiss a terrible movie because “it’s just for kids,” that feels like a slap in the face to the likes of Up, Wall-E, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, or hundreds of other great movies that are aimed at children but still have the kind of depth and heart that endears grown-ups to them. If you think it’s okay to make an awful movie just because you think only kids are going to watch it, I’m telling you right now, you’ve got to do better. 

The greatest comedic mind of his era in his first feature-length movie!

So I’m going to kick it off with a road trip movie that kids and parents alike love: A Goofy Movie from 1995. Goofy’s son Max is out of school for the summer, and Goofy decides to take his son on the ultimate fishing trip. But unbeknownst to him, Max has bragged to a girl he’s got a crush on that he’s going to a rock concert, and he has to devise a way to get his dad to change his plans. 

This is one of those movies that you can watch as a kid and enjoy it on one level, then as an adult, get an entirely different message. As a kid, this is the story of Max trying to have the greatest summer of his life and win the girl of his dreams. You get that. You understand it. And you absolutely understand how his father – literally Goofy – can be somewhat embarrassing for an adolescent, especially when genetics seem to have determined that you’re doomed to follow in his footsteps and become a Goof in your own right. 

As an adult, you see this movie as the story of a father whose son is on the verge of growing up and who is desperately attempting to forge memories together before it’s too late. As an adult, you know that the stuff that Max is worried about is teenage stuff, stuff that quickly loses its relevance when you’re out of high school, but Goofy’s desires are all about a life long bond that he’s afraid of losing, something that hits the gut of any parent. 

Plus, the music slaps.

It’s not part of the “Disney Animated Canon,” as it wasn’t produced by the Walt Disney Animation Studios arm of the many-tentacled monster that is Disney, but I think it rates up there with Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aladdin as one of the finest, most heartfelt films of the Disney Renaissance era. And it’s funnier than any of them. 

For the second film in my summer film fest, I’m going to step back a decade from the adventures of the Goof clan and bring in the late, great Jim Varney in Ernest Goes to Camp. Here’s a movie that’s maybe a bit more for the adults who grew up with Ernest, but the kids will love it too. Summer amp is such a traditional activity that it absolutely HAS to be included in our triple feature. And since we’re going for a family-friendly festival, we have to automatically disqualify any summer camp movie which features counselors being brutally murdered. Which is about 95 percent of them.

I mentioned how Ernest is totally worth of holding Mjolnir, right?

But that’s cool! Because Ernest Goes to Camp is actually better than any of those. American Hero Jim Varney plays the kindhearted (but dimwitted) Ernest P. Worrel, handyman at Kamp Kikakee, who has aspirations of one day becoming a camp counselor. He gets a shot at his dream when a group of boys from a reform school are sent to him as part of the camp’s “Second Chance” program and Ernest is put in charge. The kids turn out to be rougher than Ernest expected, and things get even worse when he’s conned into getting the owner of the camp to sign the land over to a developer. 

From there, as always, it’s Ernest to the rescue.

Jim Varney’s Ernest is one of those things that I’ve never hidden my love for, and it actually feels great to see how kindly he’s regarded now. There was a heart and a warmth to the Ernest movies, a sincerity to them, a…dare I pun? An earnestness to the character that few others have matched. Ernest is the kind of hero who succeeds because he’s too simple to understand that victory is impossible. Honestly, I think if more of us had that kind of simplicity in our hearts, the world would be a better place. 

Then comes movie #3. Now for the third chapter of a triple feature, you’re allowed to be a little less kid-friendly, since a lot of the parents with littles will have taken them home by now, leaving mostly grown-ups and older kids left in the audience. I’m going to close things off, then with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates. Sandler has made some stinkers, I won’t lie, but I’ve always enjoyed the sweetness of this movie. 

If nothing else, you’ve got to respect this movie for not being Little Nicky.

Set in Hawaii, so there’s a constant beach backdrop, Sandler plays Henry Roth, an employee at a Sea World-style park who meets and immediately falls in love with an art teacher named Lucy. After an amazing first date, he tries to see her again, only to learn that she has no idea who she is. Lucy, it seems, suffered brain damage in a car accident and has lost the ability to make long-term memories – every day she wakes up and has forgotten everything that has happened since the day of the accident. If Henry wants to be with the girl of his dreams, he has to make her fall in love with him all over again. Every. Single. Day.

Sandler’s movies, especially from this era, could often rely on gross-out or prurient humor that doesn’t work for me. And to be fair, there’s a little of that in 50 First Dates. But there’s also a heart to this film that a lot of Sandler’s movies don’t have. A lot of guys in Henry’s situation would bail out, but the notion that he cares enough about Lucy to go through with starting over day after day after day is pretty wholesome and encouraging. 

There you have it, friends – a summertime triple feature that I think would make for a fine night out at the movies. Go ahead and inflate your portable screens, fire up the grill, and set up the lawn chairs. You can have this one for free.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He’ll be back with a perfect Halloween campfire triple feature in October if he remembers, which he almost certainly won’t. 

Superman (2025): The Review

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I never had any real doubt that James Gunn would make a good movie. After three Guardians of the Galaxy films, plus the holiday special, The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, and even the little-remembered (but worth watching) film Super with Rainn Wilson, he’s proven he knows how to tell a superhero story. But the question, when it came to SuperMAN, is whether he truly understood the character and what we wanted from him.

James Gunn, I am thrilled to say, understood the assignment.

You might want to go get a snack before you read this review. We’re gonna be here a minute.

The launch film for the new DC Universe is everything I could have hoped for – exciting, thrilling, fun to watch, full of humor, full of heart, and – most importantly – carries its overt optimism like a torch leading the rest of the superhero universe in its direction. It’s like a calling card: superheroes can be fun and still mean something. And Superman, more than any other hero, should be the primary example of that.

This new DCU, we are told in the opening seconds of the film, is a world where metahumans have existed for three centuries. Superman has been active as a hero for about three years, and although he has garnered a great deal of goodwill in that time, a recent incursion into a hostile territory in Europe is causing international furor as some people question whether an alien should involve himself in human affairs. Lex Luthor, of course, leaps at the opportunity to use Superman’s actions to foment trouble, and it is the conflict between these two (who, at the beginning of the film, have yet to meet in person) that forms the core of the movie. It’s a solid foundation from which to explore the themes most important to Superman, specifically what it actually means to be human. 

The main plot also leaves room for exploration in the relationships that Superman and Clark Kent enjoy – with Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, the three members of the “Justice Gang,” and of course, with Lex Luthor himself. Each of these characters has an important role to play in the movie, nobody feels superfluous and all of them feel like they’ve been served incredibly well by James Gunn’s script. 

Krypto, of course, steals the show.

I want to talk in more detail about the characters and the actors who portray them, and I don’t know that I can do that without lapsing into spoiler territory, so consider this your warning. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop here, secure in the knowledge that I loved every moment of this movie and I can’t wait to see it again and again. This is the best Lois Lane we’ve ever had on screen. The best Jimmy Olsen. The best Lex Luthor. The best…

…damn, I love Christopher Reeve so much. Can I REALLY declare David Corenswet the best?

He’s definitely in the top two.

Spoilers begin after the graphic.

I’m going to go through this a character at a time, starting, of course, with David Corenswet as Clark Kent and Superman. Prior to this film, the only thing I’ve ever seen him in was Pearl, a violent slasher film in which he played a philandering movie projectionist – not exactly the sort of thing that automatically makes you think of Superman. (Thanks to Rachael Pearce for correcting me — I originally said Corenswet was in X, the film Pearl is a prequel to.) But from the first moment clips of this film started come out, he won me over. As Superman, he carries himself with strength and power, but not at the expense of his inherent humanity. He has moments as Superman where he feels weakened, and it never feels false. He expresses pain after being beaten by the Hammer of Boravia, moaning as his robots use solar rays to knit his broken bones. He crumbles in agony when exposed to Kryptonite. He takes punches during the climactic battle that you believe COULD kill him if they aren’t stopped. But far more importantly, he shows the kind of emotional vulnerability that we need in a role model. When public perception begins to go against him, his face shows the weight that comes with that. When Luthor murders an innocent man for the crime of believing in Superman, we see every ounce of the pain on Superman’s face.

That face.

And when he’s not doing that, he has a sweetness and a kindness to him. It’s no mistake that this movie goes out of its way to show us Superman saving lives even in the midst of chaos. When a kaiju is on a rampage, we see him protecting a little girl from a shockwave. He pauses in front of a series of shattered windows to make sure the people inside are okay. We even see him swoop down and rescue a squirrel – a moment that easily could have come across as silly, but in the context of the Superman we’re watching, feels perfectly in keeping with the kind of hero he is. His priority is life – all life – and he’ll not sacrifice a single one if he can help it.

Of the few faults I can find with this movie, most of them are in the category of wanting MORE. When it comes to Corenswet, I wish we had gotten a little more of him as Clark interacting with people who don’t know his dual identity. We get a few short scenes of him at the Planet office, scenes typically full of innuendo-laden conversation that only a fool would fail to pick up on (more on that later), but the rest of the time he’s either Superman or he’s around people who know his secret, such as Lois and his parents. In the few scenes where Corenswet puts on the glasses he’s so good at crafting his second identity that I wish we’d seen more of it.

The last journalist in America who remembers what integrity is.

I’d never watched anything with Rachel Brosnahan until I heard she’d been cast in this movie, at which point I decided to check out her TV series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. By the end of the first episode, I was sold. Miriam Maisel is a force to be reckoned with in a time and place when women weren’t necessarily welcome, and the grit she showed in that series was exactly what I wanted in a Lois Lane. When this movie started, she carried all of that fire with her. 

Brosnahan’s Lois Lane is tough and fearless, never backing down from anything except, perhaps, the potential of a relationship she doesn’t believe she’s capable of having. The full version of the interview scene (the one from the trailer) is perhaps the single best scene of Lois as a reporter in the entire canon of live-action Superman media. Despite the fact that she’s interviewing her (kinda) boyfriend and, even more impressively, Superman, she doesn’t blink for a second. She hammers him with the kind of questions a reporter should use in a situation like this, and when the inevitable conflict between Lois and Clark comes up as a result, it doesn’t feel forced. Clark is upset because to him it is SO OBVIOUS that he’s done the right thing, and it frustrates him that others don’t see it that way. Lois has a reporter’s point of view – more nuanced, less black and white, thus the two of them come to a verbal sparring match that serves their relationship well. When they eventually reconcile, it comes about because he realizes she was doing her job correctly, but at the same time, Lois can appreciate the fact that sometimes right is simply right, and understands why Clark did what he did.

Llllllllllllllllllllladies.

Jimmy Olsen, as a character, has rarely been served well – and I don’t just mean in movies. Nothing against Marc McClure, who did his best in the 70s and 80s, but how many stories actually give Jimmy something to DO? Even when he had his own long-running comic book series in the Silver Age, the stories often involved him needing Superman’s help or doing something ridiculous that happened to work out in the end. Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy, on the other hand, is funny and capable. He’s a legitimate reporter, and while he may not have the gravitas around the Planet office that Lois and Clark have, he’s good at what he does. There’s also a great running gag about Jimmy being, inexplicably, kind of a ladies’ man. We see several moments of girls checking him out and his desk is ornamented with photographs of him with women who, let’s be honest here, seem way out of his league. (No offense, Skyler Gisondo.) This joke gets a tremendous payoff when we find out that Eve Teschmacher, Lex Luthor’s girlfriend, is actually Jimmy’s EX and she wants him back.

Honestly, I give them all the credit in the world for avoiding duckface in this poster.

Speaking of doing more with a character, let’s talk about Eve. Sara Sampaio plays Eve Teschmacher as a ditzy, selfie-obsessed product of a social media society. But the story completely redeems her when we learn that the avalanche of selfies she’s taken have been carefully done to capture evidence against Lex in the background – maps and charts that document his scheme and can be used to bring him down. The portrayal we get of the character fits well – she IS kind of ditzy and a little oblivious to the fact that Jimmy isn’t as into her as she is into him, but she is nowhere near as stupid as she pretends to be. That trope, of a character hiding their true intelligence until just the right moment, is one that I always enjoy, and Sampaio sells it hard.

STILL don’t call him “chief.”

Back to the Daily Planet for a minute – we also don’t get as much Perry White as I’d like, but from what we do see, Wendell Pierce nails the role. He’s got a sort of fatherly air to him, but also a dedication to doing his job. The best bit with him, though, comes right after the final battle, when Lois goes off to “interview” Superman. Perry just looks at Jimmy and asks “How long have they been hooking up?” I love the ambiguity of this scene and how it plays to the intelligence of the characters. Just before this, Perry was on a wild ride in the T-Craft with Lois and Jimmy, who broke the Luthor story. Then he brings along Cat Grant (the gossip columnist), Steve Lombard (the sports guy) and Ron Troupe (who I assume is a reporter but, as far as I can tell, never got an actual line in the movie). But at NO point does he look around and say “Where the hell is KENT?”

The only way this works is if you read that final scene the way I do: Jimmy and Perry not only know that Lois is hooking up with Superman, but they’ve figured out that Superman is Clark Kent. Hypno-glasses or not, they’re too smart not to have pieced it together. Plus, as we see elsewhere, this Clark is perhaps a little too loosey-goosey with guarding his secret – not only does he share it with Guy Gardner, of all people, but as I mentioned before, Lois and Clark keep having conversations that REALLY seem to hint at the fact that they’re hiding something. She may chastise him for not hiding his identity well enough, but if we’re being fair, she isn’t helping matters. If that is, in fact, what James Gunn intended, I love this shade for the characters. I love seeing them played to the height of their intelligence. 

So bald…so evil…

Let’s move on to the villain of the piece here: Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. We’ve seen a lot of Lexes over the years, from Gene Hackman’s long-suffering rogue surrounded by incompetents to Jesse Eisenberg’s thinly-disguised Mark Zuckerberg impression. But this is the first Lex we’ve ever seen that I thought felt truly UNHINGED. He’s obsessed with Superman, as Lex Luthors often are, but Hoult’s interpretation takes it to the next level. Hoult’s Luthor is as petty and bitter as he is brilliant, his entire motivation boiling down to the fact that he cannot stand the fact that the world prefers Superman to him. To his credit, he’s not unaware: he knows perfectly well that he’s obsessed and bitter, but that doesn’t change anything. When his rage actually boils over, as it so often does, he can be legitimately frightening. He is, in fact, the perfect foil for Superman. Where Superman represents all of the goodness and nobility inherent in the human race – and, in fact, has specifically chosen to do so – Luthor is a perfect representative of all of our negative qualities: fear, anger, envy. I can only imagine how hard James Gunn must have been laughing when he wrote the scene in which we find out that the trolls who have been slamming Superman on social media are literally monkeys being mind-controlled by Luthor. It’s such a perfect picture of the people who live only to dispense hate online that you have to wonder if it’s even a fantasy.

Meet the gang.

Then there are the other heroes in this film. Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific gets the most screen time, joining Lois in the rescue mission once Superman is caught in Luthor’s pocket dimension and fighting with Superman in Metropolis at the finale. He also comes across as the smartest (which is kind of his whole thing), most mature, and most responsible of the “Justice Gang.” He’s a leader and a man of conviction, although he does have a wry sense of humor and little patience for fools, which makes you wonder how he survives being on a team with Guy Gardner. Of all the gang, he’s the one I feel could most handily star in a movie of his own.

Speaking of Gardner, Nathan Fillion just KILLS it as our resident Green Lantern – funny, arrogant, and self-centered, but at the same time, absolutely fearless (which is one of the job requirements) and dedicated to doing what he thinks is right. It may not always be pretty, but Guy Gardner gets the job done. Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl has the least to do out of the three of them, but even she manages to make a name for herself, showing just how tough she is and getting some really good moments, especially at the end.

How could you not fall in love with that face?

Although not technically a member of the “Justice Gang” until the very end, I effusively loved Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho. Introduced in a sort of antagonistic role, with Lex having him make Kryptonite to torture Superman in his pocket dimension prison, it quickly becomes clear that he’s doing it against his will. Luthor has his son, and if bombarding the world’s greatest superhero with toxic radiation was the only way to keep MY kid safe from a psychopathic billionaire, I have to admit I’d probably do the same thing. But when Superman convinces him that there’s a way out, he turns very quickly and becomes a valuable ally. In the final fight on the Boravian front, he quickly proves his value and his worth, and becomes a character that you root for wholeheartedly. 

Krypto?

Krypto is a very good boy.

The last thing I want to talk about is the world that Gunn is building. He is quite adamant that each DCU project be able to stand on its own, and this movie absolutely does that, but at the same time he’s laid enough seeds to have fans farming for months. For example, the opening narration tells us that in this universe, metahumans have been known to exist for 300 years. That’s a REALLY specific number. In most iterations of DC Comics, there have been larger-than-life figures throughout history: the Viking Prince, the Shining Knight, western heroes like Jonah Hex and so forth. But the modern metahuman usually doesn’t become a thing until roughly the World War II era. So why 300 years ago? Did something specific happen at that point that kicked off metahumans on the DCU Earth? Is it when the Starheart fell to Earth, does it have something to do with Nabu or the wizard Shazam? There isn’t nearly enough information to come up with an informed theory, but that’s not about to stop us from guessing.

We also get enough Easter Eggs to make me itch for the Blu-Ray release of this movie so I can pause it and peruse certain moments. The scene in the Hall of Justice, for example, has a mural of what appears to be the Justice Society of America in the background. I noticed Wildcat specifically, but I need to go back and see who else made the cut. I also feel like a careful examination of the people in the cells of Lex Luthor’s pocket prison will reveal certain things about who (or what) exists in this world. 

The final scene has two wonderful moments – one is a quick cameo by Supergirl (Milly Alcock) which is a BLATANT set-up for her own movie, especially if you’ve read Woman of Tomorrow. The second part is a lovely character moment for Clark. Early in the movie, when his robots healed him, they showed him the recorded message from Jor-El and Lara to “soothe” him. In the end, having learned that his Kryptonian parents weren’t quite who he thought they were and understanding that he has chosen to be human, he instead is soothed by the memories of his life with Jonathan and Martha Kent.

Every dad wants this moment.

The scene that made me most emotional in the entire film is the one where Pruitt Taylor Vance as Jonathan tells Clark that it’s his choices that make a person who he is, and then breaks down telling his son how proud he is of him. This hit me right in the Dad Place (that’d be the heart), and the fact that my own seven-year-old boy was sitting in the chair next to me no doubt was a contributing factor to how I had to scramble to see if there were any napkins left from the popcorn. People will want to pick apart this movie and apply their own messages and agenda to it, which is a stupid, tiresome pastime I never have any patience for. Here’s the message I took from it, and I don’t think this one requires any mental gymnastics to make it fit:

You are who you choose to be.

Superman is the best of us, not because of his powers and not because of what he CAN do. He’s the best because he chooses to do good. He’s a hero because he wants to help people. And this movie shows time and again how he inspires others to do the same, from the children raising flags on the battlefield to the way Guy and Hawkgirl change their minds and join in the final fight – and perhaps most importantly, in the form of a food truck vendor who spends his life trying to protect his hero. Superman raises up ordinary people, and if Lex could get out of his own damned head, he could do the same. 

It’s a message we all could stand to remember. 

You know, I’m worried I might have missed something. I think I need to see this movie again. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!

Geek Punditry #131: Summer Morinings at the Movies

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Last Sunday I was out to lunch with the family (as we often do on Sundays) when I got an alert from the AMC Theater app on my phone. “Yo Blake!” the app said (I paraphrase). “We’re showing Minions: The Rise of Gru on Wednesday! Tickets are only three bucks for AMC Stubbs members! You want in?”

I looked over at my son, he and I both off from school for the summer, and said, “Hey Eddie, do you want to see a Minions movie on Wednesday?”

He did.

He posed like at least three of the characters in this image.

I’ve written before – extensively – about my love affair with movies, and more importantly, with movie theaters. Yeah, ticket prices have gone up. Yeah, the theaters can sometimes be filled with rude, obnoxious people. Yeah, I can’t pause the movie to go to the bathroom. Yeah, they show an obscene number of commercials before the movie actually starts. (I do not include movie trailers in the “obscene number of commercials.” I adore movie trailers – they can show as many of those as they want.) And if the movie I want to see isn’t one that I can bring a seven-year-old to watch, that means my wife and I have to arrange for somebody to babysit him, an operation that at times seems to require a level of planning and strategy that could have won the American revolution. But despite all of the problems associated with a visit to the theater, I still wholeheartedly believe that the best way to watch a movie is to do it in a darkened theater with an excited crowd.

Pictured: optimum movie excitement.

When we took Eddie for his first movie theater experience a little more than two years ago (I wrote about it here) I was nervous. I didn’t know if he would like it. Would it be too loud for him? Would he lose interest? Could he possibly stay in his seat that long? Even though we were taking him to see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, would the movie itself simply fail to engage him? I imagine these are fairly common worries when a parent takes a kid to the movies for the first time, but I also know that I personally have a deeper love for the movie theater experience than the average parent does in this day and age. It was a real concern for me, that the kid I love so dang much would turn out to hate an EXPERIENCE I love so dang much. But I was delighted that the boy enjoyed himself. In the two years since then, we’ve brought him to the movies several times, and only once did we wind up having to leave because he couldn’t sit still. (I do not blame him – he was five years old and it was before his doctor and we managed to find an ADHD medication that really worked for him.) Last summer was the first time he actually ASKED us to take him to a specific movie, and while I may not have necessarily chosen The Garfield Movie as one of my all-too-rare cinematic excursions these days, he wanted to go to the movies! I was happy to oblige.

This summer – this month, in fact – is going to be the big one. The first time he sees a movie that’s not targeted precisely at kids. Next Friday Erin and I are taking him to see Superman. And again, I have felt pangs of nerves concerning this. Yeah, we’ve gone to the movies with him several times, but almost all of them have been animated movies. And the only one that WASN’T – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – has a cast made up of 75 percent CGI characters, and TWO villains played by Jim Carrey, who is essentially a Looney Tune in human form. (Aside: It’s a shame they never made a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with him in it – it could have been a masterpiece.) 

“Hedgehog season!”
“Echidna season!”
“Hedgehog season!”
“Echidna season!”

In my younger days, when I had the time to go to the movies two or three times in a week, it was a different experience. My friends and I would arrive at a theater sometimes not even knowing what we were going to see – we’d look at the schedule when we arrived and pick a film that was starting soon. Then after the first movie ended, we’d go out and look at the schedule and do it again. We would each pay for our tickets independent of one another, then go into the theater and sit wherever we wanted. We would get snacks, popcorn, or drinks, and that was the limit of what we could spend money on in a movie theater.

When I brought Eddie to the theater on Wednesday, I had purchased our tickets three days prior. I knew specifically that we were to be seated in Row G, seats 7 and 8. And nearly half the lobby had been given up to merchandise: not just candy and snacks, but toys, collectibles, t-shirts, and the ubiquitous popcorn buckets and drink cups that have become almost required for any tentpole film. I have mixed feelings about a lot of these changes. I don’t really object to the merchandise sales – if it’s good enough for concerts to help keep touring bands afloat, there’s nothing wrong with a movie theater selling stuff to remind people of their favorite films, after all. But like any sort of collectible market, it’s spun off a rather distasteful secondary market of people who swoop in without any particular love of a movie, buy up all the merch they can, and sell it on eBay at a markup. I hate flippers, people who take advantage of the care and affection others have for a film, a comic book, a creator. Although I didn’t have any intention of spending the eighty bucks AMC wants for a Galactus Popcorn Bucket when Fantastic Four comes out, it rankles me that if I WANTED to it would likely be sold out before I could get there, but I could score one for $200 online. 

“I AM GALACTUS! DEVOURER OF SNACKS!”

As for the assigned seating – I actually like this particular innovation. It takes off a little of the pressure of having to get to a movie early to get a good seat, which can sometimes be invaluable when you’re toting a little chaos gremlin like a child with you. Sure, there was a fun sense of camaraderie that developed in those days when we would stand in line for hours waiting to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (let’s not debate the movie itself, guys, I’m talking about the fun of spending the day amongst like minded fans, which is undeniable). But if I’m being perfectly frank, I’m not 20 years old anymore. The idea of standing in any line for two or three hours makes my spinal column start to itch in anticipation of the aches that are soon to come.

So I don’t mind at all knowing that I can buy tickets ahead of time (as I’ve already done for Superman) and be guaranteed a seat in a relatively low row, right in the middle, where I like it. The only problem with purchasing tickets ahead of time is when you’re getting a large group together, trying to coordinate it so that you all buy tickets in the same row. Either you all have to have a text chain to ensure everyone is buying the right tickets in the right place before some stranger winds up between you and your girlfriend, or you have to assign one person to buy the tickets all at once and then you pay that person back. In either case, it’s an added degree of hassle. But considering how long it’s been since I went to a movie with anybody other than my wife and son, it hasn’t been an issue for me in quite some time. 

But man, I love these summer bargain matinees. It’s not a new thing, mind you. Movie theaters have long pulled kids’ movies from past years back into theaters for mid-week screenings in the summer: hits from the past few years that are now easily available on a billion streaming services. Perhaps movies that the kids in question have already seen a dozen times. Movies that you don’t actually have to see in a theater, if all you want is to see the movie. That doesn’t matter to them. They get to go to the movies. Eddie loves the Minions. He’s seen all four Despicable Me movies as well as the first Minions film. As it happens, the only movie in the Minionverse he HADN’T watched yet was the second Minions film, The Rise of Gru, which also just happened to be the one AMC told me was coming back to the screen this week. So I bought tickets for the two of us for just $3 each and took him down there. And if you ask him right now, he could tell you all the things he loved about going.

He loves that it’s “like nighttime” in the theater, even in the middle of the day.

He loves getting to pick out snacks (it was Gummy Bears this time) and share a bucket of popcorn with his dad. 

He gets CRAZY excited when Superman shows up on the screen. (There wasn’t, technically, a Superman movie trailer on Wednesday, but we DID see commercials which used clips from Superman to promote Toyota, Dairy Queen, Progressive Insurance, and Milk-Bone Dog Biscuits, and that made Eddie happy). 

He liked the end of the movie, which happens at a Chinese New Year parade, complete with an impressive CGI fireworks display – and this kid loves fireworks. 

And ever since that one “bad movie” – the time when he couldn’t handle it and we had to leave – he gets very proud of himself for making it through a movie. He was beaming and smiling as we walked out of The Rise of Gru, terribly pleased that he’s grown up enough to go through a whole movie without having to leave. As we walked through the lobby towards the parking lot, he waved back and said, “Bye, AMC! See you next week for Superman!”

You’re ding-dang right, we will.

This doesn’t happen when we watch a movie at home. And I’ll never get tired of it. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He’s all a-tingle waiting for next Friday, and if Eddie wants to, he wants to take him to see Fantastic Four: First Steps, too. 

Geek Punditry #113: The Medium is Killing the Message

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , , ,

When you teach the same subject for long enough, there are certain topics and certain lessons you start to look forward to. One of my favorite things to cover with my 12th grade English students, for example, is Hamlet, and I particularly look forward to the famous “To be or not to be” scene. I always start by telling the kids that this is the big one, the grande supreme enchilada, the most famous speech that Willie Shakes ever wrote which, by proxy, also makes it one of the most famous speeches ever written in the entire history of the English language. Then I look at the kid who has already volunteered to read the speech out loud and say, “No pressure.”

Here’s a level three nerd joke. Ahem: “Took him 900 years to get this part right.”

After we read and discuss the speech together, I show them clips of several different film versions of Hamlet. We talk about how different actors play the role, how the different settings change their interpretation of the scene, and fun English class stuff like that. The most entertaining version – to me, at least – is when we watch Ethan Hawke’s depiction of the scene from 2000. In this version, director Michael Almereyda has changed the setting to the modern day (or at least, what was modern in 2000) and has Hamlet deliver this speech wandering the Action Movies section of a Blockbuster Video store. But I’m showing this to contemporary high school students. Even the oldest of them wasn’t born until 2007, and the vast majority of them have no idea what they’re looking at. Popular guesses include a gas station, a convenience store, and a bookstore. The ones that DO recognize Blockbuster Video, I assume, do so because they’ve seen Captain Marvel.

The weird thing is, after updating the setting, they kept the headgear 100 percent historically accurate.

It’s funny to me, to see the cultural disconnect between the film and the modern audience. No doubt Almereyda intended to make the movie contemporary, but in choosing that particular setting, this film feels even more dated than a traditional version of Hamlet set in the 7th century. And the percentage of my students who know where Hawke is before I explain it gets smaller with each passing year. These are kids who have never – and WILL never – browse the video section of a store.

And as entertaining as the lesson usually is, the fact that this is an artifact of times gone by makes me a little sadder each year.

I grew up in the 80s. I was in high school and college in the 90s. The peak of Video Store Culture is intertwined with the most important developmental years of my life. I remember as a kid, my parents taking us down to the video store and letting us roam the aisles looking for movies to watch. My younger brother and sister would gravitate towards the kids’ movies, and while they would pour over the shelves trying to make their own decisions, I found myself drifting to sections of the store I knew my parents would NEVER allow us to rent from, especially the horror section. Ghoulish monsters, blood dripping down faces, whatever the hell was going on with the box art for The Stuff…I was mesmerized. 

9-year-old me would have TRADED my brother to find out what was going on here.

VHS box art of the 1980s was a unique art form that has no peer in the history of pop culture, save perhaps for paperback book covers of the same era. Great box art could make even the lamest, cheesiest low-budget schlockfest seem tempting. But my folks weren’t the sort who would allow a 9-year-old kid to rent something like Creepshow no matter HOW enticing the box art was. So those movies found a home in my psyche only in poster form, which is how they remained until I was old enough to rent them and watch them myself. At which point – let’s be honest – I discovered that a great many of those movies were better as box art than they ever were as films. But that was okay.  

As I got older and went to video stores myself, I would gravitate to all kinds of movies, devouring things that I’d been curious about for years but had never been able to indulge in before. Not just horror, but classic sci-fi, old comedies, or indie darlings I’d heard good things about like Magnolia. It didn’t hurt that around the time I graduated college, my best friend Jason became the manager – and eventually owner – of the video store I most often patronized, so I got to sample an awful lot of movies for free. And as culture shifted from VHS to DVD, I went from being simply a viewer to a collector. I would go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Borders, or Barnes and Noble and spend hours walking through the shelves, examining the DVD cases, trying to find old favorites to add to my shelf or new movies I’d never heard of that were worth a watch. I could do this alone, but it was more fun to do it with Jason or our other friends. Either way, though, there was a tangibility to holding those cases in my hands, reading the description on the back, studying the list of special features to see if there was a good making-of featurette or commentary track that would be worth listening to or – of course – admiring the cover art.

This is a pleasure that has largely been lost to us. Netflix slaughtered the video store in its sleep, and of those retail stores I mentioned the only one that both still exists and has a physical media section at all is Barnes and Noble, and it’s nowhere near what it used to be. And while I know that we always lose certain cultural elements as time passes and culture evolves, this is one of those changes that has hurt not only the people who make these movies, but the consumers who watch them as well. 

It’s the streaming era I’m talking about, of course. That’s what killed the video store, that’s what has DVD and Blu-Ray sales on life support. (Thank God for horror movie fans, one of the last stalwart groups to demand physical media for their preferred art form. They’re the ones keeping the whole thing alive right now.) Sure, the convenience of streaming can’t be beat. I don’t need to go down to the video store anymore. I don’t need to HOPE that the movie I want to watch will be available. I don’t have to take the risk that I’ll get a disc with a scratch that has rendered it unplayable, and never again will I need to double-check that I’ve rewound a tape before I return it.

Was there anything worse than opening the DVD case at home and seeing THIS?

But this same convenience has made the entire movie-watching experience feel more disposable, like it doesn’t matter anymore. If I went down to Jason’s video store hoping to rent Scream 2 only to find that it had already been rented, that’s when I would look for something different and discover movies that I may otherwise have never watched, like Amelie. With streaming, you just have to hope that the movie you want is on a service you subscribe to, and if it is, there’s no need to roam.

But even if the movie you want ISN’T on your service, or even if you don’t know what you want to watch, the browsing experience isn’t the same. In a store, looking at a movie case, you had the opportunity to pick it up, read the back, gaze at that beautiful, beautiful cover art. Today, every movie is reduced not to art, but to a thumbnail. Most of the time it’s a still shot from the movie, probably a close-up of the biggest star in the film, with the title superimposed on top of it. It’s bland, lifeless. Just as the greatest box art could make me watch the worst movies, so can a cookie-cutter thumbnail cause me to scroll right past one of the best movies of the year, and I’ll never know. 

We’ve lost the community aspect as well. For people like me, TALKING about the movie after I’ve watched it is just as vital a part of the experience as actually watching it. Discussing what we liked, what we didn’t like, what did we think the sequel would be like, should there even be a sequel at all? At the video store, you can chat with other customers. “What are you getting? Oh, I’ve seen that one, that’s great. Say, I really liked From Dusk ‘Till Dawn but I’m not sure what to watch next. Any suggestions?” Sure, the streaming services TRY to do this, but I would take the suggestion of a random film geek in a video store over the Netflix algorithm every second of my life, and it wouldn’t even be a struggle.

Netflix has “We think you’ll love these.” Your local video store had “Vinnie’s picks.” Nobody ever saw Vinnie. No one knew who he was. But Vinnie introduced you to Boondock Saints and you LOVED him for it.

And with this, the respect given to a movie by the audience is being cut down. I know a lot of people who’ll stop a movie if they aren’t engaged in the first five minutes. And sure, that’s your prerogative, but there’s something to be said for a slow burn. Some movies need to be given time to get into the story, and sometimes that’s what makes it effective. In the video rental days, once we made it home with a movie we WATCHED the damn thing, no matter how bad the first five minutes were, because that was our only option. And I think we were better for it. I don’t want to tell you that you should sit around watching something you don’t like, but the disposability of entertainment has caused us to forget how to give a story a fair chance. I can spend twice as long scrolling through the options on Hulu than I ever did looking at the DVDs at Borders, but I’ll end up far less satisfied.

Then there’s the way movies are presented today. TVs have, for the most part, gotten substantially larger than they were when I was a kid. You would think that would make the viewing experience better, but somehow the opposite has happened. My students, my nieces and nephews, are more likely to watch a movie on their Chomebook, their tablet, or – worst of all – their PHONE. Not to say I’m not guilty of this at times – when my sports fanatic son is bound and determined to watch a lacrosse match between two colleges I’ve never heard of with an announcer who has all the life and energy of the sloth from Zootopia, minus the personality, I’m certainly not above pulling up an episode of Star Trek on my laptop. But it’s not my preferred method of watching anything, and the idea of watching an entire motion picture on a phone screen is giving me a migraine. But to kids today it’s common. I’ve had students tell me they’ve watched entire movies chopped up into two-minute segments and posted (in portrait mode for the love of God) to TikTok, a practice which I’m pretty sure is directly responsible for the sharp rise in instances of bird flu in the United States.

I took this picture myself just to illustrate my point and it STILL makes me want to punch me in the face.

The only thing that mitigates the sting for me is that I know I’m not alone. I have many friends – both in real life and on social media – who join me in bemoaning the decline of video store culture, and while there may not be enough of us to bring that culture BACK, it helps to know that other people feel the same way as you do. Coincidentally, on the same day this week my students were confused by the Blockbuster store in Hamlet, I listened to an episode of the Movie Crypt podcast in which filmmaker Alex Ross Perry discussed his new documentary Videoheaven, a “video essay” (in his own words) about the rise, influence, and fall of the video store told through clips of movies and TV shows featuring video stores. The movie is almost three hours long, he says, and frankly, it sounds amazing. I am very excited about this film and very anxious to get a chance to watch it.

I’ve never met Mr. Ross Perry, but just based on this poster, I suspect he’d be my kinda people.

Ironically, I’ll probably have to wait until it comes to streaming.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Yes, he’s old. You wanna make somethin’ of it?