Trashtacular

I went into Alarum thinking, perhaps out of misplaced optimism, or just that basic human longing for improvement, that it has to be better than Armor, the last shitty Randal Emmett movie with Stallone. But you know what? It's not! If cinema is meant to offer us hope and reinvention, here is a sequel in spirit, though not in name, that squanders even that. To its defence, Alarum brings a few new weak spots to the autopsy table, but much of the decay is depressingly familiar.

Let’s cut through the mariachi fireworks and that oily blast of DayGlo costumes: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is the sort of cinematic incident that makes you want to retroactively warn yourself away—like a bad tattoo or tequila made in a plastic barrel. “Where did the movies go wrong?” isn’t a question you ask as the credits roll, it’s a question you’re muttering thirty minutes into this so-called musical, when cultural resonance has been replaced by the clop-clop choreography of farce.

“Harry Brown” promises us a plunge into the urban underworld—a movie fit for the midnight oil, bruised and bruising, starring Michael Caine as a one-man answer to the cancer of youth violence. It’s a promise, I’m sorry to say, about as reliable as a travel brochure for Chernobyl.

There are dreadful movies, there are glorious ones, and then there are those—like this laugh-riot of a mockbuster—that leap into the yawning abyss between, flailing their cardboard limbs, and come up gasping, ridiculous, and (miraculously!) alive. Planet Dune isn't just bad. It's an epic car crash, a filmic yard sale, a Walmart-brand space opera that dares—gallingly—to sidle up to the grandeur of Villeneuve’s Dune and ask, “Can I copy your homework?”

I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.

Let’s be honest: some film critics will spend pages decrying the “worst film ever made” as if to purge themselves of the memory. But to really atone for our moviegoing sins? We must watch Night of Horror (1981)—the cinematic equivalent of receiving a broccoli-flavored ice cream cone at your own birthday party. And as punishments go, this is less “walk of shame” than “forced march of mirth.” Yes, dear reader, I lost a bet, and this scraggly, haunted little opus was my penance. Was it agony? A little. Did I enjoy myself anyway? More than I care to admit.