Three Films Make A Post: Every house has a history. This one has a legend.

The Black Hole (1979): I’m usually a sucker for Disney in their dark/weird phase, but Gary Nelson’s leadenly directed science fiction feels like an overpriced TV movie, and not a good one at that. Perhaps it’s the cast of tired looking veterans (some of whom I usually love) that gives this impression, or dialogue so leaden it’ll give US SF cinema of the 50s a run for its money, or the script that randomly cobbles together elements of Star Wars, the pulp SF that influenced that film (but without George Lucas’s understanding of the form), 2001 and any old crap the writers could come up with.

In any case, the handful of good, dark and interesting ideas here and the sometimes brilliant production design can’t make up for characters whose actions don’t even make sense if you interpret them as walking talking clichés, desperately lame action sequences (the worst actually a laser gun fight between our heroes and a bunch of robots standing unmoving in one line), and the film’s complete failure to create a coherent tone.

Mayhem (2017): Joe Lynch’s horror comedy about a corporate lawyer (Steven Yeun) and a woman with foreclosure troubles (Samara Weaving) using the automatic get out of jail free card of an outbreak of a rage-inducing virus to murder their way up to the executive floor of his company on the other hand does know exactly what tone it is going for. It’s mildly cynical carnage, pretty people bathing in the blood of their enemies and some very obvious satire of the evils of capitalism (as embodied by Steven Brand and his underlings). It’s a pretty fun time, if you’re okay with a bit of slaughter (and who isn’t). It is well paced, sometimes funny enough for a series of guffaws, and certainly acted with full involvement by everyone on screen. I do wish its capitalism critique were a bit more nuanced/interesting/unobvious, though I am not completely certain the sort of angry, bloody slapstick this is going for could actually carry more depth.

Eve’s Bayou (1997): Last but pretty much the opposite of least, there’s Kasi Lemmons’s brilliant black southern gothic movie that camouflages as magical realism for the the mainstream viewer. It’s a sumptuously (but never the kind that’s just for show) styled tale of a black upper middle-class family in the Bayous of Louisiana, of the way secrets and lies are as much part of what forms a family as is love and understanding, of the ways we construct memory regardless of what’s the factual truth about things and persons and perhaps even about the things we did or were done to us. It’s heady stuff, told with great assuredness, and full of small and large complexities and ambiguities in the ways its characters behave and relate that feel truthful to the way actual human beings are.


At the same time as she’s being honest about people, Lemmons gives the film’s gothic melodrama quite a bit of oomph, using her brilliant ensemble cast (of exclusively African American actors, but the film doesn’t make a big thing out of that, as it shouldn’t need to) for gestures grand and small.

In short: Knights of Badassdom (2013)

Because Joe (Ryan Kwanten) – auto mechanic with a university degree and part-time metal singer - is suffering from a very bad case of the break-up blues from his long-time girlfriend Beth (Margarita Levieva), his friends Eric (Steve Zahn) und Hung (Peter Dinklage) drag him to a LARP weekend for distraction and entertainment. Well to be precise, it’s more like drugging and kidnapping him, but who’s counting? On the other hand, the LARP weekend is also meant as a great opportunity for Joe to get to know Gwen (Summer Glau), who, to emphasize Joe’s buddies obvious thoughts there, is played by Summer Glau in a nerd-centric movie.

Unfortunately, Eric has accidentally acquired (the Internet’s at fault, as always) an authentic old spellbook  to use as a prop. John Dee had hidden the tome away because it summoned demons instead of the angels he actually wanted to talk to, a problem I’m certain everyone can relate to. LARPing in progress, Eric summons up a succubus who takes on the form of Beth (don’t ask) and proceeds to roam the woods to sex up and murder various LARPERs.

It takes some time until our protagonists realize what’s going on, yet once they do, it will of course lie in their hands to put the situation right again. The situation might even get worse before it gets better.

Given the troubled post production history of Knights of Badassdom, I’m not really sure if what I just watched is what director Joe Lynch had in mind with the film, but at the very least, the version I watched is a coherent, basically whole movie that doesn’t give the impression of something horribly mutilated by its producers; or the producers might even have actually known what they were doing, which usually isn’t how these things go.

Anyhow, the resulting film is an often quite funny bit of horror comedy that doesn’t exactly aim high but does hit what it’s aiming at. Knights knows how to make fun of things as nerdy as LARPs and metal without ever giving the impression of looking down on them, making it basically the anti-Big Bang Theory. It does help that the film actually seems to understand the whys and wherefores of nerdism and geekery, is conscientious enough to actually list LARP consultants in its credits, and is very willing to treat its weird people just as that – people.

Apart from the sheer pleasantness of this approach, there’s also a fine and funny cast to enjoy, gratuitous SummerGlausploitation (which I’m not hypocritical enough to pretend I disapprove of), slightly more visible internal organs than I had expected, and a finale that is based on the positive power of mediocre yet sincere metal (turns out Bear McCreary does do other music than his usual minimalist semi-tribal drum based soundtracks) and an undead Peter Dinklage; also, a pretty fantastic – and deeply silly – large animatronic demon.

In combination, Knights of Badassdom offers more than enough to keep me quite, quite happy for ninety minutes; not unexpectedly, I like being kept happy.

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