This Film is Not Yet Watchable – September 2024

To put it lightly, August was… a cultural wasteland, a bubonic plague of cinematic garbage where one disaster after another flooded your local multiplex, to the point that Nicole Kidman saying “We make movies better” actually made you wonder how terrible the flick you watched was before AMC magically improved it by doing nothing. We had two historical bombs in the forms of Borderlands and The Crow, and the only real hit was Alien: Romulus, which reached the dizzying heights of… fine, but probably felt like goddamn Spartacus by comparison to the rest of the month’s output. August does tend to be a secondary dumping ground for the studios, but usually they wait until the trash pile settles before lighting it on fire.

Thankfully, like a fever finally breaking, we’ve made it through and we’re into September. The weather’s starting to cool, the kids are back off to school, football is starting, and at the theatre we’re transitioning to Festival Season and eventually Awards Season. The worst is finally over, and in a year where the pickings have been rather slim, it looks like we’re at long last getting to the high quality stuff.

This month’s column hopefully stands as an early example of this shift, as for the first time in what feels like an eternity, the major studio output has decidedly more good stuff than abject crap. Out of the 31 releases coming this month, 19 of them passed at least the most rudimentary of smell tests, leaving only a dozen for me to wade through here. Remember when 12 was considered a big number for this piece? I’m pretty sure I do, too, but it feels quite distant. Still, in a year where we’ve tied and broken previous records three times, 12 seems like a well-earned respite.

Today was my nephew’s first day of first grade, which warms the old cockles. The wee man is growing up and getting his first taste of the real world, and that’s exciting as all get out. It also would have been my grandmother’s 93rd birthday today, and while she’s been gone since 2001, I often think about her old house where I grew up and all the wonderful memories I had there, like when she was “My Santa” and got me the Nintendo I never thought possible for Christmas. Thinking about stuff like that is what makes the rest of the shit we have to sift through worth it, and it helps me to remember that no matter how awful things get on the big screen, they are just movies after all, so it’s not that bad. So as we go down this dubious list, just find some happy thought to keep things in perspective and remind yourself that it’s gonna be okay.

This is the September 2024 edition of “This Film is Not Yet Watchable!”

The Killer’s Game – September 13

“Did he just hit me with a motorcycle? That’s just disrespectful.”

That should be the type of pithy one-liner that gets you excited for an action bloodbath. Instead it just makes you sad because what’s even more disrespectful is letting Dave Bautista appear on screen with THAT haircut.

There are a lot of things off about the trailer for The Killer’s Game. There’s the lame framing device about an assassin – especially one as jacked as Bautista – pretending to have a boring civilian job. There’s the continued efforts to try to make Sofia Boutella into a serious actress, even though her natural accent is less convincing than the completely fake one that Ben Kingsley affects. There’s the supremely fake CGI blood spatter. There’s the insane proposition that Bautista’s character – or any human – would get a terminal diagnosis and not wait for a second opinion before taking drastic measures. Or you can just take the idea that a hitman would put out a contract on himself but not be allowed to cancel it when the absurd but totally predictable reversal of that diagnosis occurs.

There are exactly two bright points in this. The first is the release date, which means we’ll actually get through the first weekend of September clean. The second is Pom Klementieff saying that getting paid to kill her rival gets her wet.

I’m only human.

Uglies – September 13

Dystopian Young Adult adaptations are getting worse by the day, to the point that we have Uglies, a YA story where 16-year-olds get cosmetic surgery to look “pretty” in a society that values flawless beauty above all else…

And it stars Joey King. Are you serious? She’s considered “ugly.” I would swim through sulfuric acid if it meant getting a single date with someone as drop dead gorgeous as her, and we’re supposed to believe that this society – or she herself – would consider her to not be pretty. Get fucked, Netflix.

Does anyone know how satire works? You don’t get to do commentary on shallowness and the misplaced desire to conform to beauty paradigms when EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PERSON IN YOUR FILM IS A FUCKING TEN!

This is just asinine, to the point that it’s almost funny. It could even be profound and insightful if you could convince me that there’d be actual conflict between these two factions with the understanding that attractiveness is subjective and they’re just fighting themselves like the mud-soaked Greasers and Socs from The Outsiders, but we’re clearly going for no such nuance.

Thankfully (teaser), we have a different entry later on that treads similar thematic grounds much more competently and intelligently.

Here After – September 13

“Brain damage is probable. It’s a question as to what degree.”

Now you might think I’d be joking about the fact that they cut from this line to a shot of a crucifix and Connie Britton praying, as if the gag is that being religious is a form of brain damage. And while I’d be tempted to go down that road, the trailer makes this completely unnecessary.

That’s because the rest of it shows us a movie where Britton’s daughter survives drowning, only to become possessed by a demon and turn into an agent of the devil, which goes right past damage and straight to braindead.

Paramount+ presents Rosemary’s Moody Teen, coming soon to a platform that they inexplicably charge money for. Jesus Tittyfucking Christ. When you hear Britton saying, “My daughter brought back someone from the other side. I think I know who it is,” your only instinct should be to do a Dana Carvey impression. “Hmm, could it be… SATAN?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”

Subservience – September 13

Well shit. I already made a joke about the House of Whacks segment of “Treehouse of Horror” last month when making fun of Afraid (which has a 21% score on Rotten Tomatoes, for what it’s worth). So now what do I do?

Um… this version actually gets what Pierce Brosnan wanted and bangs its owner? Only it’s Megan Fox? And it will almost certainly not provide any nudity in the process, which is the only reason anyone other than Brian Austin Green has ever watched a Megan Fox movie?

Yeah, I got nothing. This is just stupid.

Transformers One – September 20

For the longest time this was the leading candidate for “The Worst Trailer in the World.” No one asked for another Transformers movie, and they certainly never asked for a “prequel” where the future Optimus Prime and Megatron are goofy roommates. We didn’t ask for a story where the ability to transform is just a hardware upgrade. And we sure as fuck didn’t ask for a bunch of tired, kindergarten-level lame comedy clichés.

That said, I let it off that highest hook for two reasons. One, it’s a cartoon, which means it’ll hopefully be like the animated film from the 80s and at least be marginally good. Further, this is clearly meant for little kids getting their first taste of the franchise rather than hardcore fans who have been with it for decades. There’s still something cynical about re-introducing the toy line for an entirely new generation, proving the powers that be have learned nothing about corporate ethics over the last 40 years, but at the same time you can’t exactly fault them for going with what works. Two, I already devoted a video to the series last year. I don’t really want to repeat myself without good reason.

It’s still gonna suck megaballs, though. And it’s super weird to include a Rolling Stones song, given that no one in the target audience knows who the Stones are. I know it’s because the producers/ad agency just hear the words “Start Me Up” and think they can make it a direct reference to starting up a machine, even though that’s not nearly what the song is about. I propose a new rule going forward where if you include a catalog track in a trailer, it has to be within the actual context of the song. I’m not saying I want to see the Transformers make a dead man cum, but I am saying I want the production company to be forced to create that image in exchange for using the track.

Never Let Go – September 20

Remember how The Watchers kind of sucked? Well let’s do it again, only with Halle Berry doing a terrible southern accent, some completely disposable child actors, and throw in some faux-religious bullshit! That’s Phase One!

Phase Two: ?

Phase Three is PROFIT! Somehow.

Bagman – September 20

Everyone knows what a bagman is. Everyone except the creators of this movie, apparently.

See, instead of being a salesman, politician, or shady money man (be it seriously or in jest; my stepdad used to joke that he’d like to be my bagman if I ever got famous), he’s instead a Krampus-like figure who eats children. To the idiots at Lionsgate, this makes for a compelling horror monster. For roughly 40% of this nation, it’s what they think of whenever they hear the word “Democrat.” It’s stupid as fuck either way.

Also, spare a thought for Sam Claflin. This guy had a really promising start to his career, appearing in the Pirates of the Caribbean and Hunger Games series, and gaining quite a name for himself as a bit of a heartthrob. Since then, however, his “film” peak has been the god-awful Enola Holmes, and now he’s reduced to this. Thankfully he still has a somewhat successful streaming/TV career thanks to Peaky Blinders and Daisy Jones & the Six, but he deserved so much better.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man – September 27

I’m not gonna quibble with Hellboy fans over whether or not we should keep making these films. I will however quibble with the utter lack of Ron Perlman, the shitty CGI, a lady inhaling a raccoon, and one of the most irritating tropes in horror, the bone-crack sound effect.

There was a time when this sound actually was scary, like in The Exorcist, when it accompanied Regan’s head doing its freaky 180 turn. You could honestly convince yourself that the poor girl’s neck was being snapped for the sake of Pazuzu’s demonic demonstration. Nowadays, however, it’s just used as a cheap foley insert whenever a character in anything resembling horror contorts their body unnaturally, or just tilts their head slightly to the side. It’s this genre’s equivalent of the Wilhelm Scream. There was once a practical use for it in productions and even as an in-joke to other sound designers. Now it’s just overused noise, and this film’s trailer has it in spades. In this 2:15 preview alone I counted 11 separate times that it came up, and sometimes it didn’t even make sense, like in the act of swallowing the raccoon, or three times in a row as bony finders gripped a surface.

“You doubt the power of prayer?” asks a blind, black minister stereotype. Well, this movie exists, so, yeah. Yeah, I very much doubt it.

Rez Ball – September 27

I don’t think this will necessarily be bad, just a tired rehash of every other sports movie for the last three decades, especially ones where there’s a racial element. There’s personal tragedy. The team gets counted out. They’re a ragtag bunch of misfits. There’s a racist white player on the “villain” team who dismisses them for being non-Aryan (which seems really tone deaf given that this is about basketball). Eventually our heroes come together, get better, tap into their culture, beat the racist naysayers, and win one for the Gipper or something.

How far off do you honestly think I am on this? Again, I’m not saying it’ll be bad. The fact that you have LeBron James and the people who made Reservation Dogs behind this probably means its heart’s in the right place. But it sure as hell looks formulaic, by the numbers, and completely uninspired. And in 2024, I’m sorry, but you just need to do better. DO. SOMETHING. NEW!

Amber Alert – September 27

Leave it to Lionsgate to turn one of the biggest societal ills we have into a lame excuse for an action chase flick that ends in the Saw house. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but there was a time when they were the premiere distributor for independent films that would otherwise never see the light of day. Now they’re just a shlock factory, and even when they put out something that purports to have artistic value, they still fuck it up, which I’ll get to shortly.

As for this, no one in their right mind would actually pursue a car from a real Amber Alert. That’s a really quick way to get the kid killed. Simply report the car and the street it’s on, and then let the police handle it. And don’t give me this “30 minutes out” bullshit, either. This abduction takes place in a major city. There are plenty of cops who can ensure that just ONE sighting can get the girl home safe. Any form of direct engagement from a civilian will lead to tragedy in the vast majority of cases, which makes it even more disgusting that Lionsgate would exploit this very real issue for cheap tension. At best it’s mindless entertainment with a problematic backdrop. At worst you’re encouraging people to make really stupid decisions that will end in catastrophe.

Apartment 7A – September 27

Ah, New York. If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere…

Or you’ll end up in a shitty horror movie on a shitty streamer. Either one.

Yes, Julia Garner came to New York to be on stage and see her name in lights. Instead she’s relegated to Paramount+, where Dianne Wiest is the literal landlord from Hell. An injury halts the Broadway ambition, so Garner gets a free apartment, and even though every instinct, red flag, and friend she has tells her it’s a bad idea, she takes it, and then suddenly a whole bunch of shady shit goes down. This leads Garner to think that maybe this was a bad idea.

FUCKING DUH!

I’m sorry, am I supposed to have any sympathy for this idiot? Because honestly, to properly invoke the Stones, my sympathy is for the possible literal devil in Wiest, because surely there just aren’t that many stupid people willing to skip right into her trap like this fool. At least I hope not.

September is when we usually start getting a glut of horror films as we build up to Halloween (also my nephew’s birthday, yay!), and I’m not deluded enough to expect all of them to be good. But I do at least expect a modicum of effort to make our characters come off as having all their chromosomes. This fails to clear even that low bar.

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With that, it’s time to hit our monthly rock bottom with the triumphant return of “The Worst Trailer in the World!” It felt weird not doing a video last month, so I was eager to get back in the saddle and lovingly vent my spleen. Thankfully, Lionsgate was apparently quite happy to accommodate, as was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, with a self-own for the ages.

Megalopolis – September 27

There’s a bit of a late-breaking postscript to all this. See, the backlash to using fake AI quotes was so instant and overwhelming that Lionsgate took down the full trailer the same day it premiered. If you were to search YouTube for it, as I did when making the video, you’d find the 1:30 teaser (what I use for the first third of my video) from the production company, and that’s it from any official source. Thankfully, several news organizations and channels that simply repost every trailer that comes out (IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, IGN, Rapid Trailer, etc.) did not remove it, so I was able to get the footage from one of them secondhand.

Today, less than 24 hours after I posted my video, Lionsgate came out with a new trailer to replace the one they took down. The difference? They just took out the pull quotes montage and replaced it with the same quick mini montage that a ton of studios put in front of their online trailers to let you know the trailer is about to start, because how would you know you were going to watch the very video you clicked on if they didn’t tell you? So the lies are gone (even though they kept the sample from the Godfather score), but the arrogant, effete praise and vicarious stroking of Francis Ford Coppola’s ego and cock that took up the other two minutes are exactly the same? Great move, guys. So major. Very enlighten.

I haven’t felt so confident in one of my videos in a long while. Mr. Papadopoulos will be quite pleased.

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Finally, we end things this month as we do every month, with the “Redemption Reel.” Remember when I said that there was a film coming out that handled the beauty paradigm conundrum far better than Uglies could ever hope to? Well, this is what I was talking about.

A Different Man – September 20

It’s possible that you’ve seen Adam Pearson before. His most famous role was in the fantastic Under the Skin, where he played the one human victim that Scarlett Johansson’s alien took pity on and spared, his loneliness and physical appearance causing her to question her actions for the first time.

Pearson returns here in A Different Man, where his condition is once again put front and center, but in a much more thoughtful context than you’d initially consider. Pearson, like his twin brother, has neurofibromatosis, a condition where multiple benign tumors form all over the body, leading to skin deformities. In Pearson’s case, it’s quite severe, and you could be forgiven for comparing him to Joseph Merrick, aka The Elephant Man (though Merrick was never properly diagnosed and it is believed he had an entirely different illness called Proteus Syndrome), but he lives a good life, and he uses his public profile to advocate for those with disabilities and deformities.

In A Different Man, we are presented with a darkly comedic, satirical take on how we value ourselves based on how others perceive us. Sebastian Stan plays a man called Edward, who has neurofibromatosis, but in this world, there’s a treatment that allows his tumors to heal and be shed from his body. Suddenly he’s able to live the “normal” life he’s always wanted, the world finally seeing him as he’s always seen himself. He also finds love in the form of Renate Reinsve, who I absolutely adored in The Worst Person in the World, and I’ve been dying to see what she does next ever since.

Then Edward is confronted by Oswald (Pearson), who will be playing him on stage, confronting him with a living mirror image of the life he left behind, and leaving him to wonder just how genuine the world around him truly is now that he’s able to be just a face in the crowd.

This is fascinating, and the makeup job on Stan looks tremendous. Director Aaron Schimberg won the Directors to Watch Award at this year’s Palm Springs Film Festival, and Stan himself took home the Silver Bear for Best Actor in Berlin. It’s fitting that A24 is putting this out, because they’ve become what Lionsgate used to be. Whether they’re masterpieces like EEAAO or just quirky diversions, A24 has taken the mantle as the studio you want behind you if you’re an indie filmmaker, because you know they’re going to give you the resources to tell a unique story. A Different Man may prove to be a complete failure (unlikely given that it has an 86% rating on RT after its festival run), but even if it does, you know you’ll be seeing something ambitious, a new and interesting way to tackle an issue we’re all aware of, but may not always think about. And if it gives Pearson a proper chance to shine, I’m all for it. I can’t wait to see this!

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That’s all for this month, folks. Boy it feels good to get back to normal. As always, I hope you enjoy yourself at the cinema, no matter what you go see. Take care of yourselves, and if anything happens that makes you smile, hold on to it.

Join the conversation in the comments below! Do you plan to see any of these films? Was I too hard on any of them? How exactly is Adam Driver going to save the world with a T-square? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and YouTube for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!