New Year, New Movies: An Alternate Calendar
2024 is here and surely, this time, it’ll be a better year than the one that came before. At the least, one aspect of that is guaranteed with Hyperreal Film Club’s absolutely untouchable roster of planned films. For the first month of the year, we started out strong with an underrated Gregg Araki movie, a rarely-screened Canadian cult classic (yes, they make movies up there, too!), and a truly unhinged ‘90s movie starring Drew Barrymore. Here’s what you can follow them up with.
Splendor—Blonde Death
Maybe it's cheating just a bit to pair Gregg Araki's Splendor with a film that almost certainly inspired his taste in film, but any excuse to recommend Blonde Death is good enough for me. Let's get the similarities out of the way real quick: a formerly-repressed blonde balances the competing affections of a brooding dark-haired hottie and a chaotic hard-to-control blond-haired hottie. Hilarity ensues. Hearts get broken. In at least one film, violence erupts and Disneyland is mocked. Sure, Blonde Death isn't quite a perfect match for Araki's more Old Hollywood-inspired ménage à trois romance, but they're both still perfect examples of indie and New Queer Cinema at its finest. If you're already on Araki or Jon Moritsugu's (Mod Fuck Explosion) wavelength, grab a copy of Blonde Death whenever Bleeding Skull has another print run.
Crime Wave—God Told Me To
As I said in my intro to Crime Wave, I don't really want to tell you anything about the film. It's a movie best experienced with no foreknowledge of the plot—just a willingness to throw yourself into the film's off-kilter wavelength with the confidence that even if you won't enjoy the film, it'll still be a unique movie-watching experience. God Told Me To, written and directed by schlock royalty Larry Cohen, is very similar. Ostensibly about a mysterious wave of murders committed on the orders of "God," the story quickly takes a series of detours into wilder territory. If you've ever seen Q: The Winged Serpent or The Stuff, you know that Cohen brings a peculiar off-tempo energy to even his most easily-digestible high-concept genre films. But with God Told Me To, it really feels like he's tapped into a creative well that few people have ever found and even fewer have been able to use to make an actual film. Go in blind and enjoy.
Guncrazy—Vigil
Let me lay my cards on the table: It was very difficult to think of a pairing for Guncrazy. The movies it most resembles either shared a creative team (Freeway, Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby, all three written by Matthew Bright) or are films that very obviously riffs on (Badlands, Bonnie & Clyde). That particular mix of low-class, trailer-trash, bad taste vibes in a rarely-portrayed setting anchored by a star-making performance by a child actress is a hard film to double feature! And while Vigil definitely does not scratch that '90s icky id—to this day, it's still one of the most lauded international New Zealand films of all time and the first to play at Cannes—it tackles many of the same themes: girlhood, how dependent on a family structure children can be even when it's not offering them safety or comfort, the leering, predatory eyes of older men and the burgeoning knowledge of one's own womanhood. And while Vigil is noticeably less guncrazy, maybe it can be used as a breather after watching Tamra Davis' second-most unhinged film (right behind Billy Madison).
Ziah is the founder and former editor-in-chief of the Hyperreal Film Journal. He can usually be found at Austin Film Society or biking around town.