Movies to Cure your June Gloom: An Alternate Hyperreal Calendar

Summer kicked off with a bang as Hyperreal Film Club had the most packed month we’ve had all year. Low-budget sci-fi riffs, high-concept guitar riffs, and hacking riffraff youth filled our screens this month, but summer is a time for quenching your thirst. Still looking for a way to beat the heat by staying in the cool AC oasis of your living room? A dream team of Hyperreal contributors have come together to offer up even more movies to add to your watchlist.

Starcrash—Valerian

Science Fiction epics are hard to come by, they’re hard to make, and in order to be “good” they require a level of laser focus and fun that most aren’t willing to commit to. But sometimes you get the pleasure of watching a film that takes a swing—whether that swing was a miss is up to you.

Enter 1978’s Starcrash. The plot details aren’t as important as the patches that put together this quilt: a country robot, a pair of smugglers (one who almost immediately decides it’s more comfortable to wear almost nothing and another who may be a God), a planet of Amazonian women, and appearances from David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer. Does it work? Not really, but it’s so fun that I’m not sure that it’s function was ever to “work” so much as provide a pleasant 94 minutes and scrounge up a little change on the way.

Watching Starcrash and seeing such a big attempt to take on the big guys (Star Wars) reminded me of another movie: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Two space police officers are given the task of going to Alpha and trying to keep the peace between the many different factions and races that inhabit the planet. When things go wrong it’s up to Valerian and Laureline to save the universe. Big set pieces, Rihanna as a shapeshifting alien named Bubble, and a pair of space cops that I wouldn’t trust to investigate a case from Blue’s Clues. I promise I like this movie a lot, but none of the story really matters and, much like Starcrash, this journey is more about the vibes.

The Legend of the Stardust Brothers—The Apple

In Makoto Tezuka’s The Legend of the Stardust Brothers, two rival frontmen of Tokyo’s battle of the bands circuit are brought to the otherworldly aerie of a mysterious record executive and offered the classic Faustian deal. That in his hands they will be reborn as pop sensations, superstars. But they must submit themselves wholly and sign away their identities, their very souls.

Stardust Brothers stuffs this tortured pathos into an endearingly zany romp that’s a little bit rockabilly, a little bit ‘80s futurism, a lot nascent J-Pop. It’s cartoonish slapstick, complete with on-the-nose sound effects and exaggerated pantomimed expressions that nearly break the fourth wall. Roughly 80 percent of the film is music videos, with elaborate sets and costumes, a true workhorse of a fog machine, animation, and animatronics. The lyrics are nearly impenetrable. These productions ratchet up the baroque expressionism until heads literally explode from the pressure of a contained, boiling id.

If you missed out on The Legend of the Stardust Brothers or are just looking for something similar, Menahem Golen’s 1980 film The Apple presents a nearly identical plot with substantially more cocaine and glitter and a more overt exploration of institutionally supported and enforced cultural hegemony as a mark of ascendent fascism. But where Stardust Brothers is bubblegum, The Apple is a phosphorescent speedball, full of sexy space age fashion from the fascio-cosmic future of 1994. Glistening skin, metallic thongs, holographic accessories, and diamonds draping supine bodies like constellations. The musical numbers are hedonistic and sweaty, the ending is completely baffling, and it offers an anthem on American consumerism that’s right out of Rocky Horror.

School Daze—S#!%house

Filmmakers use shared experiences to unify audiences, and one of the most popular shared experiences is going off to university. School Daze is Spike Lee’s sophomore outing and a statement film for the young auteur. At the heart of the film is a celebration of black culture told from the perspective of college students with a relatively aimless plot that is bolstered by musical numbers and cutting-edge comedic dialogue. When you watch this film you can’t help but get swept up in the nostalgia of a university experience. It’s a feeling also shared by S#!%house, from writer/director Cooper Raiff.

Both films are the byproduct of auteurs who wrote, directed, and starred in their respective films. While Spike uses the college landscape to explore conformity and Black culture, Cooper Raiff shows us a different perspective. S#!%house is an exercise in loneliness and stubbornness with Raiff playing a misanthrope in his freshman year. It as a companion piece to School Daze because it shows the other side of dorm life. The pain of being lonely or the fear of losing yourself in order to belong to a group—every feeling is bigger in college, and these two films showcase how much bigger those emotions feel in that time of life.

Hard Boiled—The Way of the Gun

An ultra-violent shoot-‘em-up utterly drained of stylistic flair, Christopher McQuarrie’s millennial oddity The Way of the Gun represents the bone-dry antithesis of John Woo’s sweaty sentimentality. Trading heroic bloodshed for performative nihilism, Gun is neither a great film nor an unhinged trainwreck, but a vaguely interesting post-Tarantino time capsule of tough guy cringe.

Ryan Phillipe and Benicio del Toro play down-on-their-luck crooks who stumble upon a scheme to kidnap the surrogate mother of a rich couple days before she is scheduled to give birth. What follows is, much like Hard Boiled, a convoluted plot strung along with double-crosses, explosive gun battles in public places, and a baby (unborn, in this case) shamelessly thrown in for extra suspense.

Gun was the directing debut from McQuarrie, who in the past decade has become Tom Cruise’s right hand man behind the last three Mission: Impossible installments. At the time, hot off his screenwriting Oscar win for The Usual Suspects, McQuarrie sought to make a back-to-basics action-western eschewing showy camerawork, inadvertently resulting in a style-free film with made-for-TV pacing. (The DVD director’s commentary, in which McQuarrie cheerfully picks apart his unforced errors, is a gold mine of filmmaking do’s and don’ts.)

While aiming for the sunbaked intensity of vintage Peckinpah, the film simply gawks at the raw toxicity of its characters with unsettling blankness, and crashes completely against Ryan Phillipe’s anti-charisma. There are some great scenes in The Way of the Gun—the opening, featuring Sarah Silverman as the girlfriend of a minor-league tough, sets the tone for the vulgar, black comic kicks the movie specializes in. But the goods are buried in an overlong film populated by unlikeable characters spouting you-can-write-it-but-you-sure-can’t-say-it dialogue. For genre completists only.

Serial Mom—Parents

Parents director Bob Balaban and Serial Mom director John Waters were born just one year apart into cookie-cutter American suburbs 700 miles from one another. Balaban, better known as the mild-mannered character actor from Wes Anderson and Christopher Guest’s oeuvre, says his “whole growing up was about the fear under the normalcy.” Clearly, their shared experiences colored their artistic sensibilities; both Serial Mom and Parents are blackly comedic caricatures of 1950s Americana that interrogate the cost of the abundant post-war lifestyle. Lavish spreads of barbecue and jelloed vegetables are a centerpiece of Parents, but where does the meat come from? Michael suspects that his parents kill people to nourish themselves, which isn’t terribly far from reality, given his dad’s job manufacturing chemical weapons and their cheerful life in a racially segregated suburb.

One of the most effective elements of the movie is the amateur child actor, Bryan Madorsky. Madorsky was not allowed to read the script or learn lines, so he wanders through Parents with an empty head and huge, haunted eyes. Madorsky’s father in real life was a strict marine sergeant and his mother was very passive, which makes Parents the story of his life as well as the story of Balaban’s. While the adult stars dabble in the overstated campiness of Serial Mom, Madorsky is completely naturalistic inside a stylized fantasy, seeming out of step with the hypocrisy and creepiness baked into his lifestyle. Parents is an impressive first feature, a sleeper cult hit, and a nauseating watch for vegans. Fans of Serial Mom will appreciate the contrast of sweet smiles and rivers of blood. If white people freak you out, this is the movie for you!

Night of the Comet—Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In both life and in entertainment, particularly action movies or thrillers, teenage girls are often dismissed as vapid, ignorant, flighty young people. That’s part of what makes films like Night of the Comet so satisfying: to see young women rise so far beyond expectations, fighting against evils without sacrificing their personalities. This duality of young womanhood is crystallized in the shopping-montage-turned-fight-scene, when Reggie and Sam fight off their attackers with both guns and high heels. The sisters survive not only the comet, but also zombies, villainous stockboys, and corrupt scientists.

Like me, Joss Whedon also found inspiration in Night of the Comet and began developing another concept driven by an underestimated young woman: a little story called Buffy the Vampire Slayer—but no, not the show. Five years before Sarah Michelle Gellar picked up the stake, Kristy Swanson embodied The Slayer, a cheerleader who begrudgingly adds vampire hunting to her list of extracurriculars. Her previously untapped supernatural skills—strength, speed, combat, and more–are cultivated, and by the end of the movie, Buffy’s saved her classmates and managed to squeeze in a dance with Pike (Luke Perry as an emerging heartthrob).

Movies like Night of the Comet and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while not (yet) considered Criterion-worthy, are important, though often underestimated (just like their main characters). Teenage girls—and their stories—are vastly underappreciated, but more and more often, they’re an example of how to leverage others’ expectations and prove them wrong. Reggie, Sam, and Buffy are more than just survivors—they’re heroes.

Bound—Les Diaboliques

Were the Wachowskis riffing on Les Diaboliques when they conceived their co-directing debut Bound? Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 classic features a similar premise—two foxy ladies allied against a toxic male sleazebag—but aims it down a much more twisted path.

The story opens with Nicole, a boarding school teacher, arriving to work in sunglasses to hide the results of her abusive relationship with the headmaster, Michel. But Nicole is not his wife—that would be Christina, the frail owner of the school, who suffers under the same abuse. Far from being in conflict with each other, the women are already in cahoots to rid themselves of Michel, a micromanaging egomaniac who serves the students rotten food even as he helps himself to his wife’s money.

In an ironic, proto-feminist twist on the whodunit template, Clouzot presents a steady parade of overbearing male characters trying to run roughshod over our heroines as they attempt their murder plot, from an indignant upstairs neighbor to a drunk hitchhiker they encounter on the road. A pushy policeman-turned-gumshoe inserts himself into Christina’s orbit, insisting his services are needed to find her missing husband. But the detective is soon attempting to solve another mystery—that of Michel’s missing body.

Often compared to Hitchcock, Clouzot tended toward stories that were more rough-hewn and gritty, with the same savvy camerawork and control of atmosphere as that other master of suspense. Les Diaboliques cultivates a stifling air of menace that veers into nightmare territory for one of the greatest shock endings in film history.

The African Desperate—Terror Nullius

Look, we love the movies here (it’s in the name!), but sometimes they can get a bit… same-y? There probably aren’t exactly outer limits to any given medium, but there are certainly crests and troughs, old rivers that carve deeper and deeper grooves into the solid ground of art and life. Sometimes it takes an outsider, someone with a studied and different perspective, to illuminate what’s both good and bad about the things we love.

The capital A Art world seems to have always had an uneasy relationship with film. Film was the usurper, the glamorous upstart tart come to steal wandering eyeballs and degrade us all into lesser beings. As they’ve circled each other, double helixes lodged deep in the human experience, artists have made films (the rarely screened but revered Cremaster Cycle), film people have made art (Jim Carrey painting… Bruce Lee), but there are fewer examples than one might expect of these mediums colliding in truly inspiring fashion.

That’s what makes The African Desperate so special, and similarly the gonzo maximalist collage work of Australian duo Soda_Jerk. Their film Terror Nullius is draped over the skeleton frame of the Mad Max world, but through wildly expansive and painstaking rotoscoping, they turn the story into a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria spanning continents, time, and all of film. Characters from Muriel’s Wedding, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Ready Player One, Wolf Creek, and dozens more co-exist with Nux and Lord Humungus in a 55-minute headtrip that will at turns delight and infuriate you. It’s a wholly unique experience that both ruthlessly dissects and comprehensively celebrates film, and we’d say it’s highly recommended viewing for explorers seeking enlightenment past the porous boundaries at the end of the film world.

Hackers—SLC Punk

Oozing out the ‘90s at every minute and from every pore, Hackers is more than just a movie, it’s an experience for the viewer. It throws the audience into a nostalgia power “hour” with the house/club music (one of which is performed by Massive Attack), the outfits, and the over-the-top hacking/sci-fi theme. For those who enjoyed the eccentric acting of Matthew Lilliard, it’s hard to not immediately follow up with SLC Punk, filmed 3 years after Hackers, featuring another punky Lillard residing in SLC during the 1980s and indulging in same the stoner/slacker vibe. Stevo, Lillard’s character, rebels against his parents due to their political beliefs and acts in his own manner, making decisions that he deems fit due to his own experiences and beliefs before turning back on his actions and decisions. An essential must watch for those who love the experience of watching period piece punk films Matthew Lillard, and any film that has the confidence to proclaim “Hack the planet!” and “What was the point? Final summation? None.”