Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2026.02

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Christine (1983) — 8/10
2. The Boys S04 (2025) — 9/10
3. South Park S28 (2025) — 9/10
4. Stranger Things S05 (2025) — 8/10
5. Lee Camp at the Cobra Club (2025) — 7/10
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — 6/10
7. Liz Miele: Space Camp (2025) — 7/10
8. Dead Poets Society (1989) — 9/10
9. Spaceballs (1987) — 6/10
10. Hellboy (2004) — 8/10

Christine (1983) — 8/10

Christine was born in Detroit in 1957, She came off the assembly line possessed. She took her first victim before she even left the factory.

Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) is a senior in high school in 1977. He’s not the coolest kid but he’s smart, he’s funny, and he’s friends with a guy on the football team Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell). It’s so refreshing that Dennis picks up Arnie for school, has lunch with him, worries about him. They’re friends.[2] This is not a classic jocks/nerds dynamic.

Buddy Repperton (William Ostrander), on the other hand, is a standard bully. He looks like he’s 30 years old and like he’s spent 10 of them working out in a prison yard. He and his crew are bullying Arnie in shop class. When Dennis shows up to help, out pops a switchblade. Arnie’s got balls, though. Even after Repperton has stepped on his glasses, Arnie confirms that Buddy had a switchblade when the teacher finally shows up.

On the way home from their illustrious first day of senior year, Arnie sees her. She’s standing in a yard, looking much, much worse for wear. Christine’s current owner George LeBay (Roberts Blossom) comes out to make the sale. She runs. $250 for the pink slip.

Arnie’s mother Regina[3] (Christine Belford) is a real ballbuster. She runs Arnie’s life down the last detail. She cannot believe he bought a car without consulting with her.

Arnie and Dennis bring Christine to Darnell’s (Robert Prosky) garage, where he says,

“I knew a guy had a car like that once. Fuckin’ bastard killed himself in it. Son of a bitch was so mean, you could’ve poured boiling water down his throat and he would’ve pissed ice cubes!”

Arnie has fixed Christine up quite well in two weeks. Even crotchety Darnell is impressed. He’s got “good hands.” He offers him a job. Arnie thinks about it. Like, he sits in Christine and thinks about it. It’s Stephen King-creepy.

Back at school, Dennis approaches the studious and very attractive new girl Leigh (Alexandra Paul). Poor Roseanne (Kelly Preston) thinks he’s looking at her. Leigh turns him down. She already has a date.

Dennis goes back to talk to George LeBay, to confront him about how the previous owner had died. George is quite talkative about Christine’s history, about how it wasn’t just his brother who’d committed suicide in her but also his sister-in-law who’d died much earlier, the exact same way: carbon monoxide poisoning. Their five-year-old daughter had choked to death in it.

Christine is looking pretty healthy already. She’s all fixed up. Arnie’s got her at a football game, where Dennis is playing. Arnie’s dating Leigh. That’s who she had a date with when she’d turned Dennis down. Dennis sees them necking and gets absolutely housed on the field while he’s distracted. He just barely avoids paralysis. Arnie visits him in the hospital. He’s not wearing his glasses at all anymore. He’s acting very adult but also too self-confident, no longer quite so guileless as he was.

Arnie’s at the drive-in with Leigh. He tries to move to second base. She refuses and runs out into the pouring rain. She admits that she hates the car, that she doesn’t want to be in it, and that she certainly doesn’t want have any sexy times in it.

They’re back in the car when a windshield wiper breaks. Arnie gets out to fix it. Leigh takes a bite of a sandwich. The radio comes on, suffused with the green deadlights we all know from Stephen King books and movies. She chokes. She can’t get out. He can’t get in. Someone else comes to her rescue, Heimliching the sandwich right out of there. It’s unclear why Christine didn’t re-lock the door. Maybe she just wanted to break them up instead of murdering someone in a way where Arnie could be blamed.

Donnie’s tormentors sneak in to the garage and start tooling up Christine, laying into her with sledgehammers and crowbars. She’s a complete mess. They leave. The radio starts to play.

Arnie finds the destroyed car. He is not well. He yells at Leigh, then argues with his parents and gets his dad into a chokehold when he dares to lay hands on him for cursing.

Arnie’s back in the garage, talking to Christine. She starts repairing herself. The effects are outstanding. Just incredible. This was in 1983. I don’t even know how they did it.

Christine’s out on her own. She takes revenge on Moochie (Malcolm Danare). One down. Arnie’s visiting Dennis in the hospital, where he’s still convalescing from his having nearly been paralyzed on the football field. Arnie’s talking in 50s slang. Outside the hospital, he’s approached by Detective Junkins (Harry Dean Stanton), who wonders why Arnie never reported the damage to Christine, how he’d repaired it so quickly, and what he was doing the night before, when Moochie had been cut in half.

Repperton’s driving with Rich Trelawney (Steven Tash) in his really sweet ride. They’re listening to Beast of Burden, which is honestly kind of a lame-ass song for those two toughs to be listening to.. It should have Paint it Black or something. Christine is hunting them. She follows them to their garage. CRASH. She destroys their car. SLAM. Rich is smushed into the wall. The gas tank starts to empty. The whole garage goes up, taking Rich and Vandenberg (Stuart Charno) with it. Repperton backs away. Christine reverses out, tires squealing, engulfed in flames, an avenging demon. She lets Repperton run a bit, then runs him down, leaving his flaming corpse in the road.

Darnell is working late, and he sees Christine enter the garage, scorched nearly beyond repair. But we know she isn’t…beyond repair. Darnell gets into the empty car, even though the entire interior is scorched. He seems to be … compelled. He’s happy in there. The radio turns on.

Junkins is there the next morning with questions for Arnie. Four dead from the night before. Arnie picks Dennis up for a New Year’s Eve party. Leigh had just left Dennis’s house. Arnie and Christine are cruising along at 90MPH, with Arnie chugging Southern Cross beer. Arnie’s doing such a good job of slipping into the role of a young man possessed by the ghost of an old, hateful man.

100MPH. Playing chicken. Arnie’s lip curls. “Aw man, there ain’t nothin’ finer than bein’ behind the wheel of your own car. Except maybe for pussy”

The next day, Dennis scratches “Darnell’s Tonight” into Christine’s hood. Later that night, he and Leigh are at Darnell’s, hot-wiring a bulldozer. They’re ready. For an eighteen-year-old, Dennis’s resistance to Leigh’s hugs is absolutely heroic. He really loves his friend.

Christine leaps out of hiding to try to plow into Leigh. Missed. Dennis advances to protect Leigh in the shovel of his bulldozer. Christine attacks from one side, then the other. They hear “You shitters!!!” Arnie’s in there.

After having smashed herself up, Christine has once again repaired herself.

She crashes into the office, where Leigh is hiding. Arnie flies through the windshield. He’s impaled on a shard of glass. He lunges at Leigh, falls back nearly immediately, yanks out the shard, then strokes Christine’s hood ornament, … and dies.

Christine ain’t done. She turns on her radio, then takes another run at Leigh. Dennis drops the shovel onto the back of Christine, crushing the entire back end. She drags herself on like The Terminator. Eventually, her lights go out.

Leigh runs to Dennis.

The radio comes on again. Christine repairs herself.

Dennis drives the bulldozer’s treads right back up on her, crushing, crushing, crushing, as the radio plays a 50s song, and Christine desperately heals and re-heals herself, eventually succumbing.

A suitcase-sized block of metal hits the packed dirt of a junkyard. Junkins, Dennis, and Leigh watch it. They hear rock-and-roll music … but it’s just a guy walking by with a boombox.

The camera zooms in, in, in. A piece of the grill twitches.

Cut to black.

George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone has never felt more appropriate.

This was a fantastic adaptation of a Stephen King novel. I really enjoyed it. John Carpenter not only directed, but he also wrote the music for this film. I watched it in English.

The Boys S04 (2025) — 9/10

Now this is what I’m talking about. Where Sandman season 2 sucked so hard, this show, in its fourth season, packs so much fun stuff into just the first 25 minutes of the first episode—at which point Homelander (Antony Starr) almost makes The Deep (Chace Crawford) give A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) a blow job. This show goes hard.

Interspersed throughout the show are social-media clips of the pro-supe movement driving major FUD for their hero Homelander, like, saying his victims deserve what they got because, as Firecracker (Valorie Curry) says on her podcast, “an eye for an eye may be in the Jew part of the Bible, but it’s still in there.”

One immediate drawback is that Starlight/Annie (Erin Moriarty) has doubled down on her makeup and plastic surgery, even though she almost certainly doesn’t need it. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) is as adorable as ever, though. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) might be bi.

Homelander finds a gray pube. He finds another. He decides to invite Sage (Susan Heyward)—smartest person on Earth—to join the Seven. She gets him to promise that he’ll listen and she gets to stay in her apartment, “reeking of Taco Bell and loneliness”. Homelander, of course, doesn’t keep any of those promises, which, given how smart Sage is, she must have seen coming a mile away.

Butcher (Karl Urban) is dying. The V is enveloping his brain in a black shroud. He’s coming apart but trying to hold it together. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is still the same, not sure what he wants; his dad (Simon Pegg) has had a stroke. Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso) is still trying to get his family back, but his ex-wife has asked him to search for her ex-boyfriend, who’s gone missing. Nothing good happens to the poor guy, who’s a huge—and inevitably disappointed—fan of Homelander.

Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), a dangerous and evil supe, is very close to becoming Vice President.

So that’s the setup, to get up to speed for the season. Homelander is spiraling. He invites three of his super-fans—one of them being the ex-boyfriend that Milk is trailing—into headquarters only to have Deep, A-Train, and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) beat them to death with baseball bats. “Every movement needs its martyrs.” Sage looks on dispassionately. It was, after all, her plan.

Step two is to show up at Homelander’s not-guilty verdict and provoke a riot. Easier done than said. A-Train is told to bring the three bodies to the scene of the riot to make it look like Annie’s Army killed people.

• Homelander is trying get Ryan set up as a superhero on his own.
• The Deep is trying to reassert himself after his dalliance with an octopus came to light.
• Butcher is out of the Boys but he’s now just doing the same thing he was before, but as an unaffiliated private citizen.
• The TruthCon is spectacularly detailed. There are so many posters that look like they actually mocked them up. Is this what a show looks like when you actually film it?
• Firecracker is the id of the right-wing movement.
• Butcher is still an insufferable piece of shit.
• But not as big of an insecure piece of shit as Homelander is. He is hilarious, though.
• A-Train is starting to turn; he gives the Boys some camera footage they needed.

Homelander’s representation of supes as superior—“humans are toys; they break”—is brilliant. You can read anything into it. “You’re chosen” Hmmm…like the chosen people? Or is he a white supremacist? Nope. He’s just a supe-supremacist. And he has a great reason, unlike any of the others before him—because they actually are genetically superior.

The Vought on Ice show is inspired. “It puts the Super in Christmas.” The Boys are on-again, off-again with Butcher but he’s too useful to ignore, even as damaged as he is. Annie keeps seeing more and more of her bitchy/shitty past appear. Firecracker, in particular, has some juicy tales to tell about their days on the pageant circuit.

Butcher fires back at her with a video of Firecracker having seduced a 15-year-old at a camp where she worked. It doesn’t work because, obviously, the right-wingers don’t care about pedophilia when it’s one of their own, and can a women really rape a boy anyway? I mean, c’mon…ammirite? High five.

Hughie and Mother’s Milk almost get killed by Homelander but somehow escape. Homelander suffers from the same drawback as Superman: he’s so powerful that it’s hard to make anything he’s in a fair fight. If you make it look fair, then it just looks dumb. For example, why can’t he smell Hughie in the vent directly above him before the drop of sweat falls? Does he have his senses turned down to avoid overloading? And why does he have to sniff it? Wouldn’t he have turned his senses up as soon as he noticed that something was wrong? And when Hughie’s scampering through the ducts, why does Homelander keep missing? Can’t he just see through everything with X-Ray vision?

Homelander is having a rough time of it; he is not mentally well. Maybe that’s throwing him off his game. He goes back to the lab where he’d been held as a child and starts picking off his former captors, one by one. They can do nothing but watch, and hope that he spares them. Spoiler: he doesn’t. He leaves only one lady alive, locked in a room with the shredded corpses of her coworkers.

They Boys are doing a pretty good job of turning A-Train to their cause because he has really had enough of the killing. But Sage is almost certainly onto him. Sage seduces dumb, dumb, dumb Deep and is setting him up for something. She’s setting everyone up for something. Not all the same thing but she’s weaving a lot of webs. She gets Deep to smash through her brain with a needle, bypassing her eyeball, so that she’s dumb enough to want to bang him. Her brain will grow back. It is uncomfortable to watch.

Frenchie and Kimiko are working an angle of their own, clashing with the Shining Light Liberation Army (which Kimiko had escaped in a prior season), and Frenchie is dealing with the trauma of having seduced Colin, the only surviving son of a family he’d once slaughtered. Oh, and Hughie’s trying to save his dad from brain death by pumping some V into him. I wonder what Simon Pegg’s power is going to be?

Oh Lord, it’s awful. His power is phasing through walls…and people He gets amnesia, kills a couple of people by accident, kills another on purpose, and then comes to his senses. Hughie and his mom put him down for good, having seen the error of their ways. That was quick.

Annie’s getting violent, beating the ever-loving hell out of Firecracker. Her powers are getting flaky but her strength is good. The Boys track down a supe-virus but have to use the only dose to take down suped-up, flying, vampire-sheep. Butcher keeps the top scientist captive to make him make more. He chops off the guys leg in order to prove to everyone else that the guy had died. They manage to recreate the virus, with Frenchie’s help, but then the one-legged scientist stabs Kimiko with it. In the leg. You gotta stop it from spreading. Man, that scene is grisly. Right across the thigh. She focuses on a stuffed bee toy that says “You’re the bee’s knees.”

I am forced to mention once again that Antony Starr as Homelander is incredible. His face looks it’s coming apart at the seams when he gets frustrated. I don’t know how he does it, but he has “ticking time bomb” written all over him. Firecracker can, um, lactate, so she takes Sage’s place at the top of Homelander’s hierarchy of priorities. This isn’t even close to the most disturbing thing because I didn’t even tell you about Hughie’s sojourn in Tek-Knight’s sex dungeon. There’s just a lot going on.

There’s a whole plot about trying to kill the president that I haven’t even mentioned because it seems almost incidental. But yeah, they’re doing that. Vice President Victoria Neuman is behind it, with Homelander. But she’s also working with the Boys in order to kill Homelander with the virus. But, um, if the virus is strong enough to kill Homelander, then it will probably spread to every supe on the planet and kill them too. Tough call. Anyway, Neuman’s got a shapeshifting killer on the job. The shapeshifter kidnaps Annie and replaces her. Hughie has no idea. He’s just happy that Annie is suddenly into anal. Annie’s getting her moment to shine, playing a sociopathic version of herself opposite her pathetic hot-mess of a self.

Butcher’s getting worse. His tumor is grinding him down. He’s in the hospital. He’s also getting a chance to do some great acting. “Magic.” Marvin’s having panic attacks. Frenchie’s trying to replicate the virus. Homelander lasers VP-elect Vicky on live TV, outing her as a supe.

Kimiko and Frenchie’s kiss is well-earned. Good job, everybody. Writing team gets bonuses.

Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) is dead. She begged for him not to do it, but Ryan killed her to prevent her from trapping him. Butcher finally seems to have figured out his new power; the other personality is driving now. He rejoins the boys in time to pull Vicky apart with his chest tentacles. He grabs the virus sniper rifle and heads out.

VP’s dead. President’s arrested for having organized her execution. Third-in-line Speaker Calhoun loves him some supes and he loves him some Homelander. This was Sage’s plan all along. The Boys are in the wind but the supe deputies have quickly rounded them up. Starlight gets away. So does Butcher. Of course.

Bring on season 5.

This season is UNHINGED. It’s so good. It came out in 2024 and it feels like they’re making the episodes as Trump goes along in 2025/2026, with Homelander as Trump. V News as FOX News, the whole thing. They nailed it 100%. it’s SPOOKY. The following video was published by “Vought International”. I don’t even know what’s real anymore.

See Something, Say Something − Official Music Video by Vought International (YouTube)

“Could be a moocher from the welfare state
Or your teacher who tries to indoctrinate
A socialist who says,
“the stars and stripes aren’t great”

“[…]

“Could be the scientist who makes vaccines
The guy with the beard who’s a beauty queen
The immigrant who keeps your apartment clean

“[…]

“Report that groomer when he comes for you
Cause he hates America
and Christmas too
It’s probably those who don’t believe in God
And anyone who thinks
that Supes are a fraud
It might even be your stepdad Todd
So tell them all the Golden Rule
If you see something, say something, call…
Then you’ll be a hero too”

South Park S28 (2025) — 9/10

Twisted Christian

This was the “6 7” episode. Cartman is possessed. There’s a storyline about the Antichrist. This one is not that good.

The Woman In The Hat

This one is very funny if you know who the woman in the hat is. It’s Melania, who’s haunting the White House. Trump is tearing down the White House bit by bit. Pam Bondi keeps getting shit on her nose from brown-nosing Trump so hard.

Tegridy Farm goes out of business because of Trump’s clampdown on marijuana production and the Marshes are forced to move in with Grandpa at Shady Acres.

The boys start an online community/channel called “South Park Sucks Now” that gets super-popular. They launch a coin. And then they plan a rug-pull—because that’s what you do, right? They take a lot of swings at crypto, which is great. MelaniaThe Woman in the Hat keeps popping up everywhere. It’s pretty hilarious.

Sora Not Sorry

This one starts even more bizarrely than usual, even for South Park, until it’s revealed that it’s an AI-generated video of Red, made by the other students. They’re all making horrible, stupid videos of each other with AI.

The police have no idea that none of these videos are real because they’re boomers and they’ll believe anything. So they pursue all sort of leads, questioning all sorts of people about the crimes that they’re supposedly involved in, that they’ve seen with their own two eyes online.

Peter Thiel features pretty heavily in this one, too. The South Park police arrest him, being not useless for once.

Turkey Trot

Cartman uses cutting-edge “race science” to try to win the Turkey Trot. That is, he gets Tolkien Black to join his team because he knows that he can run really fast. It’s just science. Race science.

The town doesn’t have money to sponsor the event, so … they get the Saudi royal family to sponsor them. They’re sponsoring everything else, so why not?

The White House sends Pete Hegseth in with shock troops to get Thiel out of jail, but the South Park police kick him out, in a pretty cool manner that is totally unlike the South Park police. Hegseth and his army think that the Turkey Trot is an antifa gathering. He calls them narco-terrorists later when hanging out of a helicopter. The South Park police end up throwing him in with Thiel. Justice.

The Crap Out

School counselor Jesus Christ has become a power Christian, complete with big-lipped, giant-breasted, vacuous girlfriend. Satan is excited about his ass-baby but Trump and Vance are scheming to abort it (the “crap out” in the title).

Trump and Vance set up camp in South Park as Santa Claus and an elf, looking to pop Thiel and Hegseth free from the local jail. Satan teams up with Towelie, eventually facing off against Jesus, who’s … checks notes … on Trump’s side? Satan’s baby ends up hanging itself while the video feed in Satan’s bowels was cut off (á la Epstein).

Somehow they make Satan going through all of the “baby’s first Christmas” stuff that he won’t end up needing really poignant, if not heart-wrenching. Satan watches Trump dancing in the White House, celebrating another victory, then quietly leaves.

Jesus repents, thanking Stan for having made him see the light about Trump, gifting him and his family the Marsh residence back. Fade out on Jesus and his girlfriend singing their song about her domestic abuse being her own damned fault.

Stranger Things S05 (2025) — 4/10

Man, what is there to say about this season? It’s barely watchable. It’s predictable. It’s worse for knowing how much it cost to make each, self-indulgent episode. You could have opened a huge soup kitchen with that money instead of wildly overpaying for CGI that looks like it was made on an older version of Blender on a Pentium 90.

The acting is awful. Or are they just doing the best they can with the pedestrian script? Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is definitely wooden and terrible. She has one facial expression. Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is fine but he’s now a one-dimensional, incredibly deady mercenary, mowing people down left and right. And it’s not just him: Everyone is just incredibly capable now. Steve (Joe Keery) is still kind of fun, as is Robin (Maya Hawke). The others are just not good, not even worth listing.

It seems like everyone’s in every scene. They plan out elaborate scenarios in every episode. They use props to explain everything. They seem to have infinite resources, with Murray (Brett Gelman) showing up like an Acme delivery several times, as if this were a Looney Tunes cartoon.

They’re trying to capture Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), who’s still ruining everything, keeping the town trapped in some sort of colocation with the “upside down”. The physics of the upside-down are such that walkie-talkies work in it, as well as between it and the real world. Look, none of this is very coherent. Stuff just happens because it has to, because the authors thought it would be cool. It feels like 12-year-olds wrote it. Some of the action stuff is kind of fun—the driving isn’t bad—but most of it absolutely tedious and drawn-out.

I wrote all of that before I watched the second half of the season. It got even worse. It was boring. It was even more drawn-out. The fun moments were few and far between. I liked it when Murray blew up the helicopter. There are dozens of needless, and unnecessarily long crying scenes, explanatory scenes, resolution of character-conflict scenes. It was so, so, so long. It left me wondering whether part of it might have been written by AI. It was that lazy and uninventive.

The show finally ended…and then there were still 35 minutes left. It was a slog. The graduation was awful. The best part of the show was probably the cheapest to produce. It was right at the end, when they were playing Dungeons and Dragons. They looked and acted normal, like high-school kids. Unfortunately, the part that immediately followed was the writers being utterly unable to choose which ending their show was going to have, so they just filmed both, and included both. Because why not?

The final episode was over two hours long. It was a whiny dumpster fire crammed to the hilt with fan service tailored for the dumbest, most easily placated fans. I missed parts because I’m not brain-dead enough to just sit there and watch it.

It lost an extra star because of how bad the second half was. Almost as if to mock us, they included clips of previous seasons in a montage, where we could wistfully watch and be reminded of why we’d watched the original seasons.

Lee Camp at the Cobra Club (2025) — 7/10

This was only half-an-hour of comedy. The start was a bit rocky but he saved it in the second half. There were some good bits on “Trump, RFK, and [his] trips to Israel & China”. He went to Israel as a teenager on the birthright trip, and visited Tibet in China for a documentary. If you have a membership, you can watch the show at My New Stand-Up Comedy Half Hour! by Lee Camp (Substack).

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — 6/10

This is the semi-autobiographical story of Hunter S. Thompson’s coverage of the Mint 400, a desert motorcycle race near Las Vegas in 1971. Writing credits go to Thompson and director Terry Gilliam. Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) is traveling across the desert with his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro). The have every drug under the sun with them. Characters drift past in cameos, with Duke’s drug-fueled haze occasionally stitching them into an incoherent and nearly pathologically paranoid story.

They pick up and get rid of a hitchhiker (Tobey Maguire). They are checked in to the hotel by a Desk Clerk at Mint Hotel (Katherine Helmond). They interact with a Magazine Reporter (Mark Harmon), though it’s unclear whether they can even see him, so high are they on mescaline, LSD, and ether.

While on ether, Duke sees a Wee Waiter (Verne Troyer), inventing a whole shock of paranoid fantasies on the spot, as if the little man’s image striking his eyeballs had triggered a shower of welding sparks, each of which illuminates a tidbit of an unseen world, where only drugs are capable of peeling back the veil.

Duke shares cocaine in a bathroom with a random musician (Flea), who snorts it off of Duke’s sleeve, where he’s spilled most of it. Gonzo offends a TV Reporter (Cameron Diaz), who he meets in an elevator, and who’s briefly interested in him, until she sees what a violent maniac he is. In this scene, as in many others, we are treated to the truly bizarre shape of Del Toro’s body in this movie, the swelling of his belly clearly exaggerated for effect, especially ensconced, as it invariably is, in a too-tight and too-short T-shirt that is, equally invariably, covered in the dried residue of his own vomit.

They spend a lot of time on the road, sometimes together, sometimes with Duke striking out on his own. They meet the hitchhiker not once, but twice. They meet Road Person (Lyle Lovett). Duke is pulled over by a Highway Patrolman (Gary Busey), who, in the end, is willing to let him go for a kiss.

When Gonzo has rejoined Duke, he’s with young Lucy (Christina Ricci), who appears out of nowhere to try biting off Duke’s leg. She’s an artist who’s painted dozens of bad portraits of Barbara Streisand on cardboard. They panic and realize that she’s too young and Duke makes Gonzo get rid of her. This is probably the most coherent that either of them is at any point in the film.

In a return to Vegas, they check in at the Flamingo Hotel, where they cut in line in front of Police Chief (Troy Evans), who isn’t going to get a room from the very gay Clerk at Flamingo Hotel (Christopher Meloni), no matter how hard he tries. The clerk is, somehow, deeply charmed by the pair of Duke and Gonzo.

At the hotel, the duo crashes a conference, with bizarre and incoherent keynote speaker L. Ron Bumquist (Michael Jeter). Later that evening, with the drug binge once again in full swing, they dream that a Judge (Harry Dean Stanton) is allowing a vengeful Lucy to accuse them of sodomizing a minor.

Finally, they are eating lunch in a diner, served by North Star Waitress (Ellen Barkin), who is the victim of a crass pass made by Gonzo. She refuses vehemently. He responds by asking her if she’s going to call the police, as he cuts the public phone’s cord.

They get Gonzo to the airport just in time and the film ends with Duke writing his article while descending deeper and deeper into filth and intoxication. He ends the film by inhaling amyl nitrate. Man did he love dissociative drugs.

I had given this movie a 9/10 but that was a long time ago and before I started taking notes, so I have no idea what I was thinking. Now, presumably 25 years later, I think it’s more of a six or seven. It’s got the bizarreness of Terry Gilliam but the typical quirkiness has been replaced with filth, which is a bit off-putting in these quantities. It’s probably a pretty realistic depiction of the level of coarseness and the lack of attention paid to hygiene by such enthusiastic drug users … but it’s a bit much.

Liz Miele: Space Camp (2025) — 7/10

This one hour of standup is decent with some good segments. I thought it a bit long but it’s worth it for some of the stories.

SPACE CAMP FULL SPECIAL by Liz Miele (YouTube)

“Themes and topics: dating, online dating, first dates, first impressions, Severence, New Girl, Nurses, travel nurse, rejection, anxiety, butterflies, kittens, cats, veterinarians, parents, pets, washing machine, accidents, suspension, straight edge, sXe, body modification, tattoos, boyfriend, Paris, travel, touring, France, subway, police, ticket, travel horror stories, storyteller, comedian, stand up comedy, jokes, rants, full special, sky priority, American Airlines, getting money back, Jet Blue, airlines, customer service, twitter, writing degree, writer, negotiation, Never Split the Difference, vasectomy, botched vasectomy, emergency room, ER, balls, Biggest Balls in Brooklyn, medical emergency, doctors, kids, no kid lifestyle, parents, soda, royalty, princess, wife, marriage”

Dead Poets Society (1989) — 9/10

John Keating (Robin Williams) returns to teach at his alma mater Welton Academy after having spent years teaching in England. He knows how stodgy his old school is, and he is prepared to shock his students out of a malaise in which they plod, learning art and poetry by rote, learning formulae with which they can determine the value of a given work by slide-rule rather than by how it makes them feel. He teaches them of death, of how we are all raging against the dying of the light, and how we must all seize the day: Carpe Diem

The students are portrayed as largely supportive of one another, with Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) a sort-of soft leader of a loose grouping of boys that includes several returning friends but also his roommate, a new arrival named Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), who is effortlessly taken up in the group, seemingly at complete odds with nearly any other film of this kind, which would have focused laser-like on his trials and tribulations as he is at-first mercilessly bullied by the others until he earns their grudging respect through some heroic and possibly self-sacrificing act.

In another break with genre, all of the boys are immediately enchanted with Keating’s teaching style rather than having several of them tell their parents about how dangerous he is and then having the dean threaten to have him removed. I imagine that that part is coming up, though, as Neil’s father (Kurtwood Smith) is an absolute hard-ass alum who has already planned out his son’s life to the last details, and there is no room for even an appreciation of poetry in that plan.

Although the cast is overwhelmingly male, we are introduced quite early to the adorable Ginny Danburry (Lara Flynn Boyle), whom Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles) meets at an official dinner that had been arranged by his father. He is smitten but she’s dating the quarterback of the school’s football team.

The boys discover that Keating used to belong to something called The Dead Poets Society. With some sly hints from him, they resurrect it, tramping to a cave in the dead of night to read each other poetry, both famous and written by themselves, to tell stories, to have probably the most wholesome fun I’ve seen in a film in ages. The tension in this film is purely between Keating and his students against a world that wants to squeeze every last bit of wonder out of them.

Keating gets Todd Anderson to recite his poem—it’s good. The boys are stunned to silence, then clap as one. The same thing happens in a cave when Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) plays a soulful song on a saxophone, reciting poetry intermittently. Again, the boys are stunned into silence, admiring of his talent.

This film is unrelentingly wholesome but it’s somehow believable. Dalton starts an insurrection of one, and is punished for it corporally by Mr. Nolan (Norman Lloyd). Less wholesome but unsurprising. Next, he reprimands Keating. The least believable part of the film was that Keating would been hired in the first place.

Neil’s father gets wind of his playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He shows up to personally straighten out his son. He tells him that it’s better to be a quitter than a fairy. Well, not in so many words but that was the gist.

Neil acts his little heart out in the play. Everyone thinks it’s pretty great, that he’s got a bright future ahead of him, as an actor. Well, everyone but his dad. Yeah, Red’s[4] a real hard-ass about it. He says that what his boy wants doesn’t matter. He’s to be an automaton remote-controlled by his father until he’s a medical doctor. Ten more years in school.

Neil rounds that down to zero more years in school by eating a bullet in his father’s study.

The school forces the boys to sign a statement blaming the suicide on Keating’s utter disregard for protocol. The school has found its sacrificial lamb; the parents will be satisfied.

Dalton didn’t sign the paper. He is expelled. The others signed it and are in English class. Ergo, Mr. Nolan is teaching. Keating enters to pick up his last personal effects from the office. Todd stands on his desk,

“Captain, my captain!”

Several of the other boys follow suit. Nolan is apoplectic.

“Thank you, boys. Thank you.”

Spaceballs (1987) — 6/10

Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) jilts her husband-to-be Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock), escaping in a Mercedes spaceship with her Maid of Honor Dot Matrix (Joan Rivers). Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) are on her tail immediately. Vespa calls her father King Roland (Dick Van Patten), who calls Lone Starr (Bill Pullman) and his sidekick Barf (John Candy), who squeeze a deal for 1M space bucks in exchange for the rescue. They owe that much to Pizza the Hutt (Dom DeLuise).

They pick up the princess and Dot, then crash-land on a desert planet, with Dark Helmet in hot pursuit. They meet Yogurt (Mel Brooks).

There’s no way around it; this movie has not aged well, even if parts of it are ironically funny. It was probably the first film to mock the merchandising by having Yogurt present a commercial for completely fictitious action figures, toys, and so on, as well as a plug for the next movie, Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money. It’s neat that absolutely nothing has changed in the last 40 years.

Spaceballs President Skroob (Mel Brooks) joins up with Dark Helmet to torture the combination to the air shield to the planet of Druidia out of the princess and her father. They threaten to have Dr. Schlotkin (Sandy Helberg) and his nurse (Brenda Strong) restore her old nose. That’s enough.

Lone Starr and Barf rescue Dot and Vespa, then head off Dark Helmet and the other Spaceballs to prevent them from sucking the air out of Druidia by transforming their ship into a giant maid holding a vacuum cleaner. Lone Starr uses “The Schwarz” to reverse the flow of air, saving the King and the planet. I wish I were kidding.

Lone Starr infiltrates the Spaceballs ship and ends up in confrontation with Dark Helmet, where they fight with light sabers and their Schwarzes. There’s even more egregious fourth-wall stuff here, with the whole camera crew appearing briefly. This fight lasts a while and it doesn’t get better. They just try out different things. None of them really works.

I left it with an extra star because it’s a classic and it makes me happy to see these actors … but the script is weak.

Hellboy (2004) — 8/10

American soldiers interrupt a Nazi occult ritual that brings Hellboy (Ron Perlman) to the earthly plane. Many Germans die but the important ones manage to escape, including one who calls himself Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden)—and is seemingly the same Rasputin who even the Russians couldn’t kill—as well as the also eternally youthful Ilsa Haupstein (Biddy Hodson) and Obersturmbannführer Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran). Rasputin was running the ritual with some sort of high-tech glove and was sucked into the portal he’d created with it. His two disciples resurrect him sixty years later.

Hellboy is all grown up and working for the government, handling occult and paranormal cases for them. He is under the care of Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (John Hurt) and has a psychic fish-man friend in Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). He has a new babysitter in the form of John Myers (Rupert Evans). Hellboy visits Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) in the sanitarium where she’s committed herself in order to learn to control her pyrokinetic powers.

Rasputin summons a demon named Samael, a demon for which two rise when one falls. It lays eggs before Hellboy can kill the first instance. They discover that it has lain eggs, not just in one of Hellboy’s wounds but also, presumably, in the depths of the vault where they’d found the first one. Abe dives down to find the nest while Hellboy confronts Ruprecht for the first time. Ruprecht is like a clockwork ninja, twisting a key in his chest before he goes into battle. He appears to be filled with sand. He fatally wounds Agent Clay (Corey Johnson), then turns himself “off,” laying down next to his victim for Hellboy to find.

Program chief Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) chews out Hellboy, telling him that, even if all the monsters were rounded up, there’d still be one left: Hellboy. Liz and Myers go on a date.

Meanwhile, Ruprecht has come back from the dead and, with Rasputin’s help, has killed professor Broom (who was dying anyway but still). The team hunts them to Moscow, with Hellboy ending up paired with Manning, who’s warming up to Hellboy, and Liz and Myers, who find a nest of Samael monsters. Hellboy and Manning encounter Ruprecht and finally take care of him, once and for all. Hellboy drops in to save them, taking out a few monsters, then lighting into many more. But there are so many. And there are so many eggs remaining.

Liz begs Myers to hit her, to initiate her suppressed pyrokinetic powers. She burns the monsters away from “Red”, frying the eggs as well. Hellboy survives, of course, Ilsa and Rasputin show up in the knick of time, triumphant and having captured everyone. They take Liz as a sacrificial victim.

Rasputin forces Hellboy to take part in the ceremony, unleashing his demonic powers to finish some sort of ritual, the details of which I’m not too clear on. It looks like it will release eldritch horrors from their quasi-eternal banishment. With one lock unopened, Myers tosses Hellboy a talisman with which he remembers who he is, and breaks off the ceremony, killing Rasputin.

Rasputin has one more trick up his sleeve, that is, in his belly. He births an eldritch monster, which kills him and Ilsa, who says, “die Hölle wird uns mit nichts überraschen können”. Hellboy gets Myers and Liz to safety, then goes back to take care of the gigantic, many-armed monster. Myers gives him a string of grenades. After getting tossed around from one arm to another, Hellboy pulls the pins just before it swallows him. Serious heartburn follows and Hellboy, who is pretty much indestructible, flies out. “Das gibt ordentlich Muskelkater.”

For an encore, he strides out and saves Liz, where Myers was helpless. A kiss. The end.

I watched it in German.