Trashtacular

If you ever wondered what would happen if you left a beloved childhood character unattended in a leaky canoe, drifting down the stagnant waters of cheap horror, Popeye’s Revenge arises as your answer — but not so much with a punch as with a dispirited flop. Somebody somewhere, perhaps haunted by the nightmares of public domain, gazed at E.C. Segar’s iconic spinach-munching sailor and thought, “Why not transmogrify him into a slasher villain?” Why not, indeed.

How do you make a biopic about Vladimir Putin, the ogre of our current news cycle? If you’re Patryk Vega, you hammer it together with such reckless abandon that you’d think you’d stumbled into a Cold War-themed escape room designed by circus clowns. Nobody expects nuance, perhaps, but nobody expects this—a cinematic vodka shot that leaves you not so much woozy as existentially seasick. This is not the movie Putin deserves; it’s the movie assigned to late-night cable purgatory, a cautionary tale for future film students and insomniacs alike.

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?”

The original Platform—the Spanish dystopian riot from 2019—arrived like an incendiary pamphlet stuffed in your lunchbox, urging you to gnaw on all that’s rotten in social hierarchy until your teeth cracked on the metaphors. I left that movie feeling as if I’d been clobbered by class struggle, seduced by horror, starved and force-fed in equal measure—and I liked it. You wandered its vertical prison with Goreng, whose backbone and dwindling hope pulled you, one slippery floor at a time, through a fable of survival so bare-boned and unyielding you could feel the jailer’s breath.