On today’s Unwatchables, we ask the question: how do you follow up one of the most popular sci-fi trilogies ever made? If you’re the Wachowskis, it’s with three straight flops, each one stranger, more expensive, and more widely derided than the last. We’re joined by Brad Efford of the internet zine Wig Wag to survey the sisters’ entire post-Matrix career, and figure out if anything deserves cult status— or if it’s all just Unwatchable. They are 2008’s live-action cartoon Speed…
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Irreversible 2002
I’m beyond thrilled to welcome Mike D’Angelo— aka “The Man Who Viewed Too Much,” staple of the AV Club, The Dissolve, Las Vegas Weekly, and now Alternate Ending, among others (as well as a thriving Patreon)— to Unwatchables. Mike personally witnessed hundreds of people flee the Cannes premiere of Irreversible, and to this day considers it the most painful to watch of all great films. We discuss what makes the film so unwatchable (yet profound?), what sets it apart from…
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The Steel Helmet 1951
I somehow sorely underrated this when I first saw it almost a decade ago, and almost skipped it when revisiting Fuller’s filmography before it randomly came back on my radar. And thank god it did, because it’s a major work, as bleak and blisteringly cynical a war film as I’ve seen. From the long, agonizing first shot of a bound Sergeant Zach crawling among the bodies of his company, Gene Evans’ gristled scowl is the whole film reduced to one…
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Reservoir Dogs 1992
It took a lot of mental energy, at least at first, to try revisiting this with fresh eyes— and not just because of the countless times I’ve seen it since first being thrown for a loop back in middle school. (My parents had long since given up trying to keep me away from age-inappropriate movies by then.) As much of a watershed as Reservoir Dogs was for me at the time, I can only imagine how exciting and out-of-nowhere it…
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The Curse of Frankenstein 1957
At the very least, The Curse of Frankenstein charts its own course, beholden to neither Mary Shelley’s novel nor the Universal classic whose legacy still looms large. Hammer mainstay Terence Fisher is especially wise to stray as far as possible from the latter; this Masterpiece Theater-style production doesn’t have an ounce of the ’31 film’s chilling atmosphere, let alone a performance as terrifyingly heartbreaking as Boris Karloff’s. In fact, this version marginalizes the monster as much as possible, not introducing…
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Jupiter Ascending 2015
Jupiter Ascending at least has the decency to be bad in a memorable, epically misconceived way that rarely happens anymore in films with $200 million-plus budgets. That doesn’t make it much fun— all my laughter here was “at” rather than “with”— but few directors entrusted with the GDP of a small country would allow a performance like Eddie Redmayne’s to make it all the way from conception to thousands of theater screens. If there’s anything that’ll stick with me, it’s…
