Today is a very special day, when Jason's birthday actually falls on Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, I already recapped all the Friday the 13th movies, so here's a Stayvunpoast instead. No, this has nothing to do with Friday the 13th, but then neither did the Friday the 13th TV show, so consider this a 4D clever meta-commentary on that.
Happy birthday, Jason!!!1
Because my bl☺g is now over a decade old and I forgot about the anniversary like a husband in a sitcom (but more importantly because I'm lazy), here's a trip down memory lane in lieu of anything new:
How Do I Get a Restraining Order?
Travel Broadens the Mind (Warrington Kills It)
Where's Wallie in the Garden of Earthly Delights
Academia is Carving Out New Frontiers in Flimflam and Chicanery
This is What Disney Princesses Would Look Like as a Horse
Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge!!!
Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan!!?
The Stayvun, by Edgar Allen Poe
Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 12. The Caves of Chicomoztoc!
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Screaming Mimi!
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Miraculous Virgin!
Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Hot Spot!
RANKED: The Greatest Sideshow Stars of All Time!!!
Pulping in the 90s: The Shadow and The Phantom!
"But Pat, isn't this basically your entire blôgg?" Yes, gentle reader, but I cannot tell a lie.
Aight, listen up you filthy crackkkers. This week's greatest movie of all time of the week is by a Black director (it's about time). John Singleton's magnum opus, Higher Learning, stars Foreman from House as Will Smith, a young college freshman who butts heads with his bowtie conservative surrogate father figure Uncle Phil (Laurence Fishburne, Cherry 2000, Dream Warriors).
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| "WRONG, Will, the answer was in fact lupus" - Laurence Fishburne |
Meanwhile, a wise and prescient campus raype subplot results in Kristy Swanson (The Chase, The Phantom) making out with Jennifer Connelly (Dark City, The Hot Spot), as though such a pretext were remotely needed.
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| "Um, John, what's my motivation for this scene?" "Yours?" |
In a fit of 90s rap typecasting, the movie also stars Ice Cube (the "Bye Felicia" gif) as himself, and Busta Rhymes as Soyjak:
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| "wHITE peephole on MY campus? I'm going insaaaane aaaaagh" - Busta Rhymes |
Worse still, Will must contend with that perennial college campus menace: the local neo-nazi frat.
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| Your campus had one of these, right? |
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| "'Ignorance is strength' - George Orville" - John Singleton |
As a man almost as egregiously verbose as I am will remind you, Hollywood was always pozzed. Nonetheless, since reality leans way to the right of your wine aunt's MSNBC-fueled fever dreams of Drumpf nuking Wakanda, some of our beloved movies can't help but veer into based territory against all intentions.
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| The reproachful glare of two guys whose entire worldview was the opposite five minutes ago when the Overton window in the room was different. |
In this 1930s exercise in winning arguments in your head in the shower, Henry Fonda plays the one upstanding citizen who talks a jury of lazy bums, reticent old farts and evil strawmen out of convicting a boy accused of stabbing his father. A rousing morality tale for pompous libs everywhere, until you realise the kid is almost certainly guilty anyway and is going to stab again, all because a bunch of comically impressionable normoids followed the emotional manipulation of a clever psychopath. As Fonda walks them through absurd reach after implausible stretch, they take to sharing in the delusion by making up stories about reading glasses so they can convince themselves post-facto that their acrobatic U-turns were their own ideas. In one bleakly hilarious scene, they all harden their resolve to let the killer walk free because one of the jurors is raaaycist. Realise Fonda plays the devil, and suddenly the movie works!
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| One of these is a horrifying future we must do everything to avoid, but opinions are divided as to which. |
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers follows in the storied tradition of properties like Judge Dredd that attempt to tediously and redundantly satirise rw authoritarianism but instead make it look both necessary and cool. The dystopian future envisioned in the movie is impossibly clean and advanced, everyone is beautiful and healthy, and the prevailing values are camaraderie, excellence and cinematically eugenic sex. Meanwhile, in the enlightened rainbow flag utopia of the 21st Century, priorities are normalising obesity, decriminalising intentional AIDS transmission, and cuckholdry. Sequels attempted to make the satire even more safely in lockstep with the remit of any milquetoast talk show host by bashing Christianity too - which they also made look cool.
Bryan Sìnger has been called many things: homosexual pedophile, boy toucher, diddler, nonce, creep, pervert, groomer, bacha bazi enthusiast, man-boy love participant, bum bandit, ass pirate, average Hollywood director, and all of the above. Yet in his efforts to subvert and degrade the cultural values of America he accidentally made a 2000 classic that says all the opposite things to what he clearly intended.
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| Homo superior: cranking one out or taking a dump? You decide! |
X Men is clearly meant as a left-liberal fable about how such minorities as the gays and the of colour are people too and should be embraced unconditionally, but accidentally makes the opposite point. Senator Robert Kelly is the strawman foaming-at-the-mouth biggot who wants to enact legislation to publicly identify mutants because they can do things like mind control people and blow up buildings with a glance, which is so obviously reasonable and necessary that he instantly becomes the hero of the movie in the eyes of the entire audience. In actual dialogue he asks what exactly is supposed to stop a woman with the power to become incorporeal and walk through walls from walking into bank vaults and missile silos. Our supposed heroes have no answer for this.
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| Left of frame, wearing the devil's colours: our heroine. Right of frame, backed by a halo effect, our hateful reactionary. Was the DP secretly based? You decide! |
Kelly is further proven right about everything as we are introduced to Magneto (Gandalf), a former concentration camp inmate who now wants to exterminate the human race in a Dave Chappelle bit called "Space Jews". Soyoids seethed over Chappelle's joke - and then Isr*el started giving a million children the Biafra treatment. Didn't really think that one through, huh?
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| Is this the shittiest VHS cover ever? Yes. |
Slacker director Richard Linklater attempted to tell off white youth by having them hang out outside a convenience store, make fun of its Indian owner, be unlucky in love and in life, and learn Important Lessons too late to be of any use. The whole movie is clearly intended to bluepill the unsuspecting viewer from start to finish: protagonist Giovanni Ribisi is understandably bummed by his bubblegum feminist gf's trendy male-bashing but later learns that what he really wants is to treat her to a nice trip, only to find that it's too late, and she's now a helplessly enamoured groupie for the local rock star. A young PTSD army vet rags on the rock star's manager for her sheltered naïveté, but the joke's on him: erectile dysfunction! And the Indian storeowner dunks on our rabble of youths epic style when he tells them they're wasting their lives while he's studying for a diploma and they'll one day clean his pool. On closer inspection, each of these bluepills is a redpill, except the erectile dysfunction one, which is more of a non-sequitur. In a world where whites had the in-group preference of a normal racial group, they'd show this movie as a warning to their kids to get them to play 20 hours of violin a day or whatever it is Azns do.
Most westerns fall into two unsatisfactory categories: pre-60s boomercon fantasies shot like sitcoms and post-60s visually striking anti-westerns pushing fashionable nihilism. The Professionals is in the latter camp. Characters wonder in loaded dialogue whether global proto-commie revolutions are Good Actually, because in the 60s revolution was a cool buzzword for upper middle class hippy kids sheltered from the reality that revolutions involve murdering a lot of people.
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| You could have stopped there buddy. |
Jack Palance plays the tragically-cool revolutionary antagonist who on the point of death gives a poignant speech comparing the revolution to a great love affair, exciting to get into, but declining inevitably into bitterness and misery. This is supposed to make him sympathetic, but instead it's accidentally a solid warning not to get involved in lw violence because you will inevitably lose control of it and wind up in a mass grave. "What a retard", we think.
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| A challenger appears! |
While David Lunch himself is famous for refusing to explain his often cryptic films, critics have typically viewed Blue Velvet as a satirical attack on Norman Rockwell suburbia for some imagined hypocrisy. The only problem is that it makes small town Americana look unironically good and the forces that assail it from the bad side of town unambiguously bad. 60s hippy icon Dennis Hopper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) is significantly cast as the disruptive element and getting drawn into Hopper's world, far from his leafy street, is what starts to corrupt Kyle McLachlan's Jeffrey's soul. A similar misreading of Twin Peaks would later compound critics' uniform worthlessness.
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| Imagine designing a mask this cool only for soyjaks to drop decades later and completely ruin it. |
While its popularisation of reddit deconstructionism and surface level girl power themes skew soyward, Scream is today a reactionary classic since (spoilers) the plot hinges on Sidney misidentifying her mom's killer because hash tag believe womxn. Without our heroine's misguided determination to believe her mom was rayped by an evil cispig, the real killer might have been apprehended long ago. Things get still more unintentionally keyed and redpilled in the third instalment which anticipated hash tag me too by the best part of two decades. You remember hash tag me too - that was when multimillionaire AWFLs in Hollywood launched their hostile takeover against the equally left-liberal but male establishment of Tinseltown on the basis that they were all rapists, which raged across the headlines until they realised the rìght wìng wants the evil of that California cesspool exposed as mercilessly as possible, at which point they became embarrassed and it trailed off. Chuds stay winning!
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| "OK Claudia, for the next take I want you to give me your absolute least DTF look. You know what, good enough" - Visconti |
Neorealism-transcender Luchino Visconti overcompensated for his aristocratic wealth and bougie homosexuality by fronting as a c*mmunist, which was the hip thing to be in Italian cinema until they discovered the reactionary joys of making hilarious gay-bashing Mad Max ripoffs in the 80s. Fortunately he retained enough atavistic vestiges of humanity to make The Leopard, an undisputed masterwork that reads as a lament for the passing of aristocratic grandeur in the face of the ugly, prosaic politics of modernity. I might do a whole piece on it some other time, but if I don't, watch it anyway.
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| This is supposed to be a salacious headline but the only thing misleading here is the emphasis on Charlie himself. |
Another unintended satire of itself, Leslie (also released as Manson Girl or Manson: My Name Is Evil because everyone knows Charlie is the real draw) tells the story of how Leslie Van Houten became involved with the Family and stabbed a woman who was probably already dead, before being convicted in one of the most famous trials of the 20th Century. The director would later try to backpedal on a scene in the movie that shows Leslie's mother pressuring her to kill her unborn child by saying that the message was supposed to be that telling someone abortion is homicide would somehow legitimise future killing in that young person's mind, as opposed to the less come-on-now reading that enabling someone to kill would degrade the value of human life in her reckoning.
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| Me making the libtards' movies make sense (2024, colourised). |
The movie then goes on to make the case, completely straight-facedly, that murdering randos is OK because the US military killed more people in Vietnam, blatantly ignoring that the anti-colonialist c*mmie faction started the war (every Nam flick does this). This whataboutery is so comically weak that, far from strengthening Leslie's standing with the audience, it drains all sympathy for her and makes what is supposed to be a bitter ending, with the troubled juror swayed by her hippyish charms resolving to convict her instead being satisfying. Despite its intentions, well worth pirating for the performances. The guy who plays Manson is gr8.
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| The struggle is real. |
In 2019, the journos of the world decided it would be fun to try to encourage a mass shooting at a cinema by creating from whole cloth a narrative that perennial safe punching bags "incels" would commit just such a heinous crime on the movie's release. The fact The Joker went out of its way to avoid taking a political stance (the title character literally states he's not political) didn't stop the mass media machine from delivering their hated foes a gift by making it political. For them, any movie showing a sympathetic portrayal of an economically disadvantaged, socially awkward whiteboi was unacceptable. Fortunately, the crowd they tried so hard to provoke weren't taking the bait, and no shooting occurred - but a contemporaneous screening of Frozen 2 featured a machete fight, go figure. Expect the unwanted upcoming Joker 2 to try way too hard to placate lib sensibilities in penance for the unintended thoughtcrimes of the first.
While Safety Last is by far his most famous film, for me the greatest Harold Lloydkino is 1924's Girl Shy. Lloyd plays a kissless handholdless supreme gentleman writing a book about his totally fictitious love affairs in which he fantasises himself as an alpha Chad seducing such 1920s archetypes as "The Vampire" and "The Flapper". I don't know what the fuck those are supposed to be either but I'm sure it was biting social commentary at the time.
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| I think "The Vampire" is supposed to be like a goth girl but more theatrical. |
Our hero's life improves when he meets Mary, played by semi-regular Lloyd costar Jobyna Ralston, whose name was Jobyna Ralston, which is the most 1920s name I've ever heard. Harold and Mary hit it off over a dog-concealing train ride (not an euphemism) and soon get to talking. She's soon rooting for him to sell his book but the publisher and his staff ridicule it for the /r9k/-tier greentext that it is, causing Harold to self-sabotage by dumping Mary in the fear that he's a failure and unworthy of her love. Although the movie has a happy ending, it's striking how close it comes to being 2019's The Joker instead.
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| Lloyd and Keaton basically invented the literally-me protagonist, but in the 1920s there was still enough hope they could plausibly make out OK - a detail that dates these pictures far more than the lack of sound. |
Fortunately the publisher is persuaded to put out Harold's book as a comedic piece, so maybe Tommy Wiseau of The Room fame is a more apt comparison. This prompts the final act in which Harold must race against time to stop a heartbroken Mary from marrying a douche even the intertitles describe as forgettable, because presumably this sort of rom-com plot was seen as stale and predictable even then. No matter, though, as this self-conscious contrivance only serves as a pretext for the best high-speed action sequence in movie history, only arguably rivalled by The Road Warrior's tanker chase (yes), in which Harold burns through at least four cars, three horses, a fire engine, a tram, a motorcycle and a carriage to get to the wedding venue in time to defeat the douche and save his oneitis.
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| No greenscreen, no CGI, just an absolute madlad living in the moment. |
Were this movie made today, a character like Harold would most likely be vilified as a hash-tag-toxic incel unworthy of love, but in the 1920s people were still permitted to be human, so Harold joins Vincent Gallo's character from Buffalo 66 in the pantheon of unreconstructed shitlords who shrugged off the grey sludge of modernity to claim their waifus in that constellation over the rainbow.
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| The Breakfast Club knockoff poster is a clue that this is going to be on another level. |
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| Everything better on a moving vehicle. |
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| You fuck that log up Denny. |
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| This scene kind of goes on too long but it has a nice uneasy mood about it so paradoxically it works. |
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| This is what film critics actually believe. |
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| Thank you Tobe, very kino! |
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| Bride of Leatherface |
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| This is a correct use of the medium. |
