Team America: World Police (2004)

From the creators of South Park, this comedy stars a bunch of puppets with huge eyes. Okay, they're actually voiced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

The movie follows North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who is trying to pull off a global terrorist plot — but the puppets of Team America are hell bent on stopping him in his tracks.

Unfortunately, it barely broke even on its $32 million budget (all of our box office numbers for this story come from Box Office Mojo). But we still have a soft spot for it.

Evan Almighty (2007)

This follow up to the popular Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty stars Steve Carrell, but it unfortunately kind of flopped. That's too bad though, because it's actually really funny!

Carrell plays a successful politician who meets God, played by Morgan Freeman, and is informed that he's the new Noah and he needs to build an arc.

Too bad this one earned about $75 million less at the box office than it cost to make.

"Is it too much to ask for a little precipitation?!"

Top Secret! (1984)

This hilarious 1984 parody comedy movie stars Val Kilmer as an American music star who goes to East Germany to perform in a music festival. There, he meets Hilary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), who gets him unexpectedly involved in an underground resistance movement.

As Gutteridge says in Top Secret!, "I know, it all sounds like some bad movie." And sadly, it was a pretty big flop upon its release in 1984.

*Stares into camera, breaks the fourth wall*

The Master of Disguise (2002)

Are you turtley enough for the turtle club?

You are if you can recognize the subtle greatness in this much-maligned 2002 comedy. The Master of Disguise stars Dana Carvey as Pistachio Disguisey, the heir to a family who have the secret ability to transform into anything or anyone they want.

I know what you're thinking: "That's crazy. So crazy it just might work." Click here to see our definitive ranking of all 15 of Carvey's different sketch comedy characters in the movie.

Even though this movie was beloved by me and all my friends when I was 6, The Master of Disguise currently sits at an embarrassing 1% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was so lambasted that it did considerable damage to Dana Carvey's career. But it's okay, 'cause we're so back now.

How Do You Know? (2010)

Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, and Owen Wilson star in this quirky little 2010 comedy. It didn't do too great when it came out, but I personally always liked it.

Witherspoon plays Lisa, a professional softball player who gets cut from the U.S. women's team and begins a fling with an f-boy baseball player (Wilson). But then she goes on a date with goofy and charming George (Rudd) whose father (Jack Nicholson) is trying to frame him for stock fraud. It creates a weird little love triangle that has Lisa considering the meaning of love.

Okay, it's a little cheesy — and it only made back $30 million at the box office on a $120 million budget. But still, it's a good airplane watch.

Osmosis Jones (2001)

Sometimes I lose track of whether this was a real movie or just a fever dream I had in 2001.

It starts out live-action, with Bill Murray playing a careless zoo keeper who unknowingly gets a horrible virus. So, Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell police officer, has to go inside his body and get rid of it with the help of cold medicine pill.

Yeah, it's as odd as it sounds, and it didn't even come close to making back its budget at the box office. But I remember being totally transfixed by it as a kid.

Office Space (1999)

Now, this is a beloved cult-classic comedy. But when it came out in 1999, Office Space barely broke even at the box office on its $10 million budget.

Starring Ron Livingston as an average office worker named Peter Gibbons who is in love with a waitress played by Jennifer Aniston, Office Space is a dark comedy satire homage about office life in middle America.

Obviously, it's withstood the test of time and then some, as many people still talk about it glowingly — and it gained back some financial ground with home video sales. Now, it has a cult following.

This all just goes to show you that box office numbers don't always indicate how good a movie is.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

Before he was Captain America, Chris Evans starred in this cheeky comedy drama as a high school football star who makes a bet that he can turn an awkward girl into a prom queen.

It didn't do that bad at the box office, making back a little over double its budget, but it was poorly reviewed at the time. Right now, it sits at 32% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. But it's also come to be remembered quite fondly as an early 2000s parody genre movie, so that's saying something.

The girls who get it, get it, and the girls who don't, don't.

EuroTrip (2004)

This 2004 comedy follows a recent high school graduate who gets dumped and decides to go on a trip to Europe to find his German penpal, Mieke. He and his friends fall into funny scenarios on their quest, which proves to be more challenging than they thought.

Unfortunately, EuroTrip only made back $17 million of its $25 million budget at the box office, but a lot of people still like it.

Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

Everybody loved You've Got Mail, but you don't hear much about the other Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie from the 1990s.

This one stars Hanks as a guy who gets diagnosed with a terminal illness and decides to live it up — only to be paid handsomely to go out in style by a rich guy who wants him to dive into an active volcano. Meg Ryan is his romantic interest.

Weird premise, I know. Some regard it as a sleeper classic, while others, like the Flophouse Podcast, discuss why they think its a bad movie.

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

Now, people love this movie, and its even got a follow up called Wet Hot American Summer: 10 Years Later in 2017. But when it came out in 2001, it totally flopped at the box office, earning less than $300,000.

It's so funny though! Come on, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Showalter, and Bradley Cooper in a movie about camp counselors in 1981? It's so good. The world just wasn't ready for this one.

At least now people see how great it was.

Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006)

On a quest to find a legendary guitar pick that has magic powers, Tenacious D band mates Jack "JB" Black and Kyle "KG" Gass form an iconic friendship that could just lead to the creation of greatest rock band the world has never known.

Too bad this movie only made back a little over $8 million of its $20 million budget. Now, people are more forgiving of it and it's known for its good qualities, but back in 2006, people just didn't really turn out to the theaters to see it.

Sometimes, great things take time to appreciate.

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The film was shot partly in the region around Chilliwack, a town of about 100,000, roughly 60 miles inland from Vancouver. Chilliwack, surrounded by snowcapped mountains and hiking trails, sustains a thriving film scene — as Sunday's awards demonstrated. The three-day festival, which started with a screening of Osgood Perkins' Longlegs (shot in Vancouver and edited in part by Chilliwack's Graham Fortin,) included more than 100 feature and short films.

Sunday's awards, hosted by Luchagore Productions co-founder Gigi Saul Guerrero, honored filmmakers from Chilliwack and around the world. The Best of Fest award went to Matthew Rankin's Universal Language, Canada's selection in the race for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards to be held next year. It is an often absurdist vision of a France divided between French and Farsi.

Mongrels producer Nach Dudsdeemaytha, who is based in Vancouver, was thrilled to screen a locally-made film for the Chilliwack community. It premiered earlier this year at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

"Mongrels was such a labor of love that was homegrown here in the Greater Vancouver area and brought a bunch of independent creators together," he told MovieMaker after accepting Best Feature Film on behalf of the film.

"A lot of us on the team are writers and directors as well. We had such a tiny budget. We had so many challenges. But it was just an amazing experience to work with the community to bring this vision to life."

The film reflects a moviemaking tradition of banding together with a group of likeminded collaborators and helping one another complete each other's films, outside the Hollywood studio system. It continues with Rat King, which won Best Fraser Valley Film. The film was made by students at GW Graham Secondary, under the guidance of teacher Michael Florizone, and reflects what students in even a smallish community can accomplish when enough people take filmmaking seriously.

The awards were held at the charming Grand Hall in Downtown Chilliwack's cozy, Christmasy District 1881. Screenings were held at the comfortable, homey four-screen Cottonwoods Cinemas, and panels and talks — including one where Perkins revealed a devlish secret about Longlegs — took place at the state-of-the-art entrepreneurial space Cowork Chilliwack.

Cowork Chilliwack owner Tim McAlpine, whose daughter worked on Rat King, joked at the awards ceremony that he was handling out the award for Best Festival Director.

"There’s one nominee and that’s Taras Groves," said McAlpine, who noted that Groves, a British-born director who relocated to Chilliwack years ago, approached local business leaders with an idea for the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival a decade ago. It is now thriving, and Sunday's awards capped its eighth year.

Here is the complete list of winners at the 8th Annual Chilliwack Independent Film Festival. (MovieMaker lists short films in quotation marks and features in italics.)

Chilliwack Independent Film Festival Winners

Best Script

"Sorry for your Cost," written and directed by Rosie Choo Pidcock

Best Score

"Discoteque," by Masashi Yamamoto

Best Cinematography

"The Hatch"," by Mikah Sharkey

Best Editing

"DTF?," by Haley Sawatzky

Best Animation Short

"Tennis, Oranges," by Sean Pecknold

Best Documentary 

"Altona," by Heath Affolter, Jon Affolter and Nathan Affolter

Best Student Film

"Team Building Exercise"

Best Fraser Valley Film

"Rat King," written and directed by Ayush Senanayake. 

Best Actor

Sam Krochmal, "DTF?"

Best Actress

Nhi Do, "The Sorrow"

Best Director

Jess McLeod, "DTF?"

Best Genre Short Film

"Neighbourhood at the End of the World," by Shane Day

Best Live Action Short Film

"One Day This Kid," by Alexander Farah

Best of BC

"Auganic," by Krit Komkrichwarakool

Best Feature Film

"Mongrels," by Jerome Yoo

Best of Fest

"Universal Language," by Matthew Rankin

Pitch Sessions (winner gets to be Telefilm Canada nominee to win a $250,000 budget for their film)

"Wah Lau," by Tanya Jade

Chilliwack Spirit Award

"The Worst Day Ever," by Keegan Connor Tracy

You can learn more about the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival here.

Main image: Mongrels. Game Theory Films.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

But First

By nature, horror movies are generally pretty unrealistic. So let's acknowledge up front that it's quite silly to debate the ending of horror movies that are already full of hard-to-believe scenarios. This is just for fun, and these are just our opinions. So take them with a grain of salt.

Marty in The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

In this horror film, five college students think they're visiting a cabin in the woods for a fun party weekend, but are shocked to discover that they're actually being used as human sacrifices in a twisted ritual meant to appease the Ancient Ones.

Each member of the group represents an archetype: the virgin, the athlete, the whore, the scholar, and the fool — that's Marty (Fran Kranz). And fitting with that archetype, Marty isn't the brightest. There's a scene when Marty is stabbed by a zombie. He's dragged off screen, and it seems like he's dead.

However, it's revealed later that he somehow survived. But honestly, it's hard to believe Marty was that smart or that lucky. Realistically, he should have stayed dead.

Noa in Fresh (2022)

In this cannibalistic horror movie, Sebastian Stan plays Steve, AKA Brendan, a doctor who has a nasty side hustle of kidnapping women and surgically removing parts of their body to sell to billionaires on the human meat black market. Daisy Edgar Jones plays Noa, his latest victim.

Trapped in a cell inside Steve's lavish remote home, Steve surgically removes parts of Noa's body, but intends to keep her and his other victims alive as long as possible so their meat stays "fresh" as the title suggests.

But, spoiler alert: Noa gets away in the end. However, it's just a little hard to believe that Noa would have made it out of Steve's clutches alive. First of all, when she and Steve's other victims escape and team up on him, they are all healing from having actual chunks of flesh taken out of their bodies. How are they agile enough to run around the house, let alone the woods outside? They would be in so much pain. And if they had pain killers, they would probably be too numb and woozy to run.

Another sticking point is that after Noa shoots Steve, she gets strangled by Steve's wife, Ann. Noa only gets away by managing to stab Ann in the neck with a set of keys. But would a regular pair of house keys really stab through someone's neck like that? I doubt that Noa would have the strength, while being actively strangled, to stab someone with enough force. Seems like Ann should have easily been able to overpower Noa, since Ann was otherwise healthy.

It's just so hard to believe that Noa managed to survive this ordeal. But good for her.

Matt Hooper in Jaws (1975)

In this classic 1975 thriller, Richard Dreyfuss plays marine biologist Matt Hooper. But we argue that it's pretty unlikely that Hooper would have survived the whole ordeal with the shark.

If you remember, during the final showdown, Hooper goes underwater inside a shark cage in order to try and get close enough to kill it with a lethal injection of strychnine. But the shark chews right through his steel cage, making him drop the spear he was going to use for the injection. It's super hard enough to believe that Hooper could have avoided being eaten by the shark after it bit right through the bars, leaving him totally vulnerable. He should have died right there and become the shark's dinner.

But somehow, Hooper manages to swim away, and he just hides on the seabed during the entire ordeal when the shark savagely devours Quint (Robert Shaw), the shark hunter. Wouldn't the shark have gone and eaten Hooper, too, after eating Quint?

It's just so hard to believe that Hooper could have just calmly swam away from the shark and hid behind some seaweed while it went on its killing spree.

Then, after killing the shark, Hooper and Brody (Roy Scheider), the main protagonist, calmly paddle back to shore despite the water being full of blood. Wouldn't that blood have attracted other sharks? We have a lot of questions.

Lindsay in The Human Centipede (2009)

This has got to be one of the most disturbing horror movies of all time. Without rehashing too many gory details, at the end, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) is the only survivor left from a three person human centipede. She is surgically attached to two other people, who both end up dead dead. So even though she technically lives, she couldn't have stayed alive much longer after that, since she wouldn't be able to eat or drink anything.

Also, the two detectives who were trying to bring Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) — the evil mastermind behind the human centipede experiment — to justice are also both dead by the end of the movie. So there's no one to save Lindsay and she really doesn't stand a chance. Honestly, this barely counts as surviving, because she's basically as good as dead.

Chad Meeks-Martin in Scream VI (2023)

In the sixth installment in the Scream franchise, there's one character whose survival is just a little too hard to believe — Chad Meeks-Martin.

Played by Mason Gooding, Chad is the nephew of original Scream character Randy Meeks and the son of Martha Meeks. In Scream VI, he's dating Liv McKenzie (Sonia Ammar). In one memorable scene, he's stabbed multiple times by two Ghostfaces. Like, really, seriously stabbed with knives. So much so that, as you can see above, he had blood dripped from his mouth. Then he's left there to bleed out.

There's no way a person would survive this in real life, but somehow, Chad gets resuscitated. I'm no doctor, but his survival seems almost inexplicable from a medical standpoint. And thus, we argue, Chad should have died.

John Kramer in Saw II (2004)

In the second installment of the Saw franchise, John Kramer (Tobin Bell), the Jigsaw Killer, gets beat up pretty badly by Detective Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg).

Now, at this point, John Kramer was already old and rather sickly — he was revealed to have a terminal cancer diagnosis at the end of the first movie. How can a cancer patient be beat up that badly and still survive? He got beat up so badly that his eyes are swollen shut. Come on, he was already hanging on by a thread!

Jigsaw should have died right there.

Wallace in Tusk (2014)

Justin Long is unforgettable in the incredibly disturbing movie, Tusk. His character, a podcaster named Wallace, is held captive in the mansion of a creepy old man who turns him into a walrus by fusing his body with a suit made of human flesh, plus some tusks made out of bones from Wallace's own leg.

Although Wallace eventually gets rescued, first he gets brainwashed into believing he's actually a walrus. But instead of being given the dignity of having the walrus flesh suit surgically removed and being restored to his human form, for some reason, Wallace is forced to remain as a walrus forever. We're left with the horrible reality that he lives out the rest of his life in a zoo, despite the tear he cries at the end indicating that he still has some humanity left.

This is why we argue that Wallace probably should have died when Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp), the Canadian detective, tries to put him out of his misery by shooting him. But Wallace's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez), who has been cheating on him with his best friend (Hayley Joel Osment), stops LaPointe from killing Wallace.

There's also a question of why he couldn't just be turned back into a human, but perhaps a surgical transformation that intense would have killed him or psychologically been too much for him to handle. Still we think he should have either been mercy killed or risked death in order to be returned to human form. Anything would have been better than zoo life as a weird franken-walrus.

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Main Image: Saw. Lionsgate.

Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters topped the box office in 1984, but it's not on our list of must-see movies of 1984 just because of its popularity. The supernatural comedy is iconic regardless of genre or decade. Bill Murray pops, of course, but he’s just the beginning of the quality cast. We could, and should, shout out Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis. Honestly? The entire cast of Ghostbusters is worthy of praise, from Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd to Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, and Rick Moranis.

While the special effects have not aged perfectly, that’s an unreasonable thing to expect from a 1984 movie. There have been sequels, reboots, and legacy sequels, but the original Ghostbusters beats them all.

Beverly Hills Cop

A lot of people are rewatching this one lately thanks to the brand-new Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, in which the apparently ageless Eddie Murphy returns, four decades later, as Detroit cop (and frequent visitor to the West Coast) Axel Foley.

1984 was the final year in which Eddie Murphy served as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, and it was the same year that he starred in Beverly Hills Cop., his first big hit that didn't pair him with a more established star, like Trading Places and 48 Hrs did. Amazingly, Murphy was only 23 when Beverly Hills Cop came out.

Deftly directed by action-comedy guru Martin Brest, Murphy’s first foray as Axel Foley is a delight. It’s a classic fish-out-of-water story, but the action is not skimped on.

The Terminator

If you have only ever seen Judgment Day, the massive blockbuster sequel to The Terminator directed by James Cameron, you should check out Cameron's original. It’s a very different movie: nasty horror film that is violent, not afraid of nudity, and lo-fi. The Terminator is where the grindhouse meets the multiplex.

It is also, of course, one of the films that helped propel Arnold Schwarzenegger to superstardom. In this film, Schwarzenegger’s size and non-emotive acting are benefits. He’s a horror movie slasher in cybernetic form.

Amadeus

The 1984 Oscar race was, frankly, not especially impressive. It’s the best argument against 1984 as an all-time year when it comes to American movies. From a must-see films perspective, though, the Academy Award should be acknowledged. Thus, we have selected Best Picture winner Amadeus.

Fortunately, the Milos Foreman film is a solid winner, in the top half of Best Picture movies. It’s an unconventional biopic of famed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and also Antonio Salieri. We’re considering it a dual biopic given that F. Murray Abraham won Best Actor for playing not Mozart, but Salieri.

This is Spinal Tap

The mockumentary was not invented by This is Spinal Tap, but many still consider it the best example of the genre. It also happened to feature Christopher Guest, who went on to became the master of mockumentary with films like Best In Show. (Guest did not direct this one, as that honor went to Rob Reiner.)

This is Spinal Tap focuses on Spinal Tap, a rock trio that has seen better days. It’s endlessly inventive, as a movie has to be when it is helping to define a style of filmmaking. Many musicians rave about the accuracy of the trials and tribulations Spinal Tap goes through.

Yes, this movie, and we feel an obligation to say this, goes to 11.

Romancing the Stone

Robert Zemeckis had a problem. He was a promising wunderkind in the world of film, and an acolyte of Spielberg, but Zemeckis’ first two movies were flops (even though those films, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars, are now considered good films.)

Spielberg told his young friend that he needed a hit, and it had to be a work-for-hire gig. Show you can direct a successful film, Bobby, was the message.

Thus, Zemeckis grabbed the script for the adventure-laden romantic-comedy Romancing the Stone. Michael Douglas plays a rogue, because of course he does. He joins forces with Kathleen Turner, a writer of romantic novels who needs a little spice in her life. It was a hit, and Zemeckis got a chance to direct his passion project: A little film called Back to the Future.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The tentpoles of the American slasher flick? Halloween and Friday the 13th are two of them, two franchises that were born in the 1970s. The third tentpole is A Nightmare on Elm Street, which kicked off a franchise of its own in 1984.

Freddy Krueger is right up there with Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees when it comes to horror baddies. He’s a different type of character, quippy where the other two are, well, silent. Oh, and he murders you in your dreams. That allowed A Nightmare on Elm Street to become a trippier, different sort of slasher flick.

Look for a young Johnny Depp as well, in his debut film role, and a fabulous performance by lead Heather Langenkamp (above).

Purple Rain

Purple Rain is an experience. A Prince experience.

The iconic musician plays a version of himself (The Kid) in this quasi-biopic, quasi-musical. It’s packed with scenes of The Kid and his band playing music, which is obviously smart.

Oh, and the music of Purple Rain is iconic. This soundtrack is where “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and the titular song come from. That’s why this one is a must see.

The Muppets Take Manhattan

Not every Muppets movie is a must see. Muppets in Space, for example, is skippable. In fact, you should absolutely skip it. On the other hand, some Muppets films are worth seeing. For many, and we’re in this camp, The Muppets Take Manhattan is the best of the Muppet movies.

It birthed the Muppet Babies, and it features some of the most-beloved Muppets songs. In fact, from top to bottom, the music in The Muppets Take Manhattan may be the best, though it lacks a “Rainbow Connection” or “Movin’ Right Along.”

If you like these not quite mops, not quite puppets, go on and watch Manhattan be taken.

Gremlins

An alternative Christmas film classic, Gremlins was a huge success for screenwriter Chris Columbus and director Joe Dante. Produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin, the movie is now seen as one of the movies that helped pave the way for the introduction of the PG-13 rating. Apparently gross (and awesome) gremlin deaths were too bleak for the young ‘uns out there.

A limited number of famous faces can often be a benefit to horror movies, even horror-comedies. Of course, the true star of Gremlins is, you know, the gremlins. And of course, the mogwai, led by the iconic Gizmo (above).

Dante, a lover of B movies and student of film, was a fine choice for such a movie. The sequel, which is utterly bananas, is arguably even better.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Raiders of the Lost Ark is great. The first Indiana Jones movie is a classic. In 1984, the second film in the series, Temple of Doom, arrived as a prequel. At the time, it was a huge hit. It’s part of one of the iconic film series of the last 40 years.

Time, though, has not been kind to Temple of Doom. These days, some viewers consider Temple of Doom spotty, and compare it unfavorably to the next Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Indeed, it’s quite dark, and a bit gross. But if you care about blockbusters, and about the evolution of Indiana Jones, Temple of Doom remains a must see.

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Main image: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Paramount.

Perkins shot the recent Nicolas Cage horror hit in Vancouver, near Chilliwack, and one of the film's editors, Graham Fortin, is from Chilliwack. Perkins has shot two more projects in British Columbia since making Longlegs, which made him a perfect guest for the festival.

Following an opening night screening of Longlegs and Q&A with Perkins on Friday night, the writer-director also gave a follow-up talk on Saturday where he fielded audience questions on a wide range of subjects.

The most interesting question: Who calls FBI Agent Lee Harker at a crucial moment in the film?

Obviously, Longlegs spoilers follow.

So... Who Called Agent Lee Harker When She Wakes Up in the Basement in Longlegs?

Short answer: "It's the devil," Perkins said Saturday, to the ohhhs of the Chilliwack audience.

The call comes at a crucial moment in the film. Harker (Maika Monroe) wakes up realizing her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt) has been helping Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) kill families since her childhood. In order to save Lee, Ruth agreed to pose as a nun and place demonic dolls in the homes of Longlegs' targets. Longlegs has also, creepily enough, been living in their basement.

When Lee awakens in the basement, she answers a phone call: A scary voice reminds her that the daughter of her supervisor, William Carter (Blair Underwood) has a birthday. She realizes Longlegs is targeting Carter's family, and races to their home.

But that wasn't always what Perkins planned, he told the Chilliwack crowd.

Perkins, who both wrote and directed Longlegs, said he always sits in with his editors during the editing process. The inclusion of the devil's voice came in response to a suggestion from the second Longlegs editor, Greg Ng.

"Here's how film editing works," Perkins said. "In the script and as we shot it, she's downstairs, she's sleeping, she wakes up in Longlegs' bed: gross," Perkins said. "And she realizes, Oh, my God, I'm in the basement. Then she comes up the stairs: Oh my god, I'm in my mom's house. Oh my God, he's been living in my house this whole time.'"

So she goes to the phone: "Gotta call the cops and get help — oh, the phone is dead. That's how it's written, and that's how we shot it," Perkins said.

"And one day, we're looking at it," Perkins recalled. "And just out of nowhere, Greg says, 'What if the phone's ringing?'"

Perkins said his initial response was "What?"

But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense: What if the phone were ringing?

"So what we're able to do then is bring her, with a ringing phone, up the stairs — bring her to the ringing phone. Reveal the house with the ringing phone. Oh, she'll pick it up," Perkins recalled.

And then, when she answers the phone, he knew: "Let's put the devil on it."

He had five different people try to do the devil voice, he said, and "picked the one we liked the best."

He said the change in editing was an example of how a script is not the same as the final movie. He offered a metaphor in which a large sign with an "H" means hospital — but isn't the hospital. It just leads to the hospital.

"Like you're driving down the highway and you see the H by the side of the road — hospital. The sign is not the hospital. The sign is pointing to where the hospital is. The script is the H sign that's pointing to the eventual movie," Perkins said. "It's getting people in one place at one time. That's what the script does. It gets everybody to the spot. Then when you're there, you shoot it, and it changes into something totally, totally different."

Main image: Maika Monroe in Longlegs. NEON.

The Chilliwack Independent Film Festival concludes today.

Mel Brooks Was Inspired by His Son's Love of Star Wars

Spaceballs riffs on many sci-fi classics, but it especially parodies the original 1977 Star Wars. He got the idea for Spaceballs, he wrote in his memoir, All About Me!, because "my son Max loved the Star Wars movies. I would take him to various showings of them. And for his tenth birthday, he had a Star Wars-themed birthday party."

That gave Brooks an idea: "Science fiction! Now there's a genre I haven't wrecked yet."

He had of course already taken on Westerns with Blazing Saddles and horror films with Young Frankenstein, both in 1974 — as well as several other genres.

Mel Brooks Takes Some Credit for Star Wars

If there hadn't been a Star Wars, there wouldn't have been a Spaceballs. But if there hadn't been a Young Frankenstein, there might not have been a Star Wars — at least not as we know it. Let us explain.

Mel Brooks writes in his memoir, All About Me! that 20th Fox executive Alan Ladd's decision to greenlight Brooks' 1974 hit Young Frankenstein helped him earn enough clout to be “in a position to greenlight over three hundred films during his illustrious career, including High Anxiety (1977), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1977), Blade Runner (1982), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Thelma and Louise (1991)."

Of course, Spaceballs borrows from Alien, too. As well as many other sci-fi classics.

Spaceballs Was Also Inspired by It Happened One Night

One of the biggest reference points for Spaceballs wasn't a sci-fi film, but a Frank Capra classic, 1934's It Happened One Night. The film was the first to sweep the top five Oscar categories — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress.

The film follows an heiress (Claudette Colbert) who flees her dull groom on her wedding day and falls for a cool regular guy played by Clark Gable. "We took that same basic plot and shot it into space!" Brooks wrote in his memoir.

In Spaceballs, Princess Vespa of Planet Druidia (Daphne Zuniga) flees her dull groom, Prince Valium, on her wedding day, and falls for a cool regular guy named Lone Starr (Bill Pullman).

Daphne Zuniga Wasn't a Mel Brooks Fan

Prior to working with Brooks, Zuniga (in a promotional image, above) said she found his movie parodies "too crass and just not funny," according to Turner Classic Movies. But she changed her mind after her Spaceballs experience.

"I have this image of Mel as totally wacko and out to lunch. And he is. But he's also really perceptive, real sensitive in ways that make actors respond," she said.

Brooks recalls that when he offered her the part of Vespa, she said, "I don't know. I haven't done much comedy." To which he replied, "That could be a plus!" (He explained that part of good comedy is playing it straight.)

Zuniga, of course, turned out to be very funny in Spaceballs, mostly because her character seemed to be taking all the absurdity around her quite seriously.

Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks Turned Down the Part of Lone Starr

Both Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise turned down the part of Lone Starr, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

You can see how they looked around the time of 1987's Spaceballs — that's Hanks, left, in a 1988 promotional image for Big, and Cruise, right, in a 1988 promotional image for Top Gun — and imagine what might have been.

The part, of course, went to a then-little-known Bill Pullman.

John Candy Ad-Libbed One of the Best Jokes

John Candy played Lonestarr's Chewbacca-like mawg (half-man, half-dog) companion, Barf. (Spaceballs is not a subtle movie.) Brooks says he ad-libbed one of the movie's best lines when he and Lone Starr's flying RV crash-lands in the desert:

"Well, that's gonna leave a mark."

Chris Farley later borrowed the line in 1996's Tommy Boy.

Rick Moranis Improvised Another Great Moment

Candy's SCTV colleague, Rick Moranis, played Dark Helmet, the movie's ridiculous version of Darth Vader. Brooks said Moranis "brilliantly improvised" another of the film's best moments, when Dark Helmet is caught playing with Spaceballs action figures of himself, Lone Starr, and Princess Vespa.

"Knock on my door! Knock next time!" he yells at the inteloper, Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner). "Did you see anything?"

"No sir!" Sandurz replies. "I didn't see you playing with your dolls again!"

George Lucas Had One Objection

Speaking of dolls: As a courtesy, Mel Brooks showed the Spaceballs script to Star Wars creator George Lucas. As Brooks noted in All About Me!, Lucas told him he was a fan of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and had no only one caveat:

"He explained that if I made toys of my Spaceball characters they would look a lot like Star Wars action figures. And that would be a no-no for his lawyers and his studio's business affairs department. So he gave me his blessing to make my funny satiric takeoff on Star Wars as long as I promised that I would not sell any action figures."

That Talk With George Lucas Inspired Another Great Joke

Lucas' no-action-figures rule inspired another of the funniest scenes in the film, when Brooks' wise version of Yoda — called "just plain Yogurt" — reveals his secret weapon:

"Merchandising! Merchandising is where the real money from the movie is made! Spaceballs the T-shirt! Spaceballs the coloring book! Spaceballs the lunchbox! Spaceballs the breakfast cereal! Spaceballs the flame thrower! The kids really love that one."

The Desert Was a Problem

In the scenes parodying the Tatooine desert sequences in Star Wars, which were shot in Yuma, Arizona, Brooks and his team faced a problem familiar to all moviemakers who shoot on sand: Removing the tracks from the previous take.

"We had to get a blower or a sand broom out there to make sure that the sand was ready for the next take," Brooks wrote in All About Me!

The desert shoot was hardest on professional mime Lorene Yarnell, who played the movie's version of C-3PO, Dot Matrix, who was voiced by Joan Rivers.

Spaceballs Inspired Elon Musk

Many investors have been inspired by sci-fi, but perhaps only Elon Musk has been inspired by Spaceballs. Musk's Tesla cars feature a "ludicrous mode" that launches them from zero to 60 in under three seconds.

It is inspired by "ludicrous speed" in Spaceballs, which is a joke on "lightspeed" in Star Wars and "warp speed" in Star Trek.

The Wizard of Oz Connection

Spaceballs was shot partly on MGM's Studio 15, which was the same location where The Wizard of Oz was shot.

"Sometimes when I was directing, I would imagine seeing Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr all cavorting around the stage," Brooks wrote in All About Me!

OK, but can you sync Spaceballs to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon?

After Spaceballs

Spaceballs wasn't Mel Brooks' biggest hit — Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein had far better returns — but it soon developed a devoted fanbase.

It inspired Spaceballs: The Series, an adult animated show, and also inspires countless people who see Brooks out in public to shout, "May the Schwartz be with you!" a beloved line from the film, as Brooks recounts in All About Me!

Meanwhile, Max Brooks, whose tenth birthday party inspired Spaceballs, went on to create his own sci-fi masterpiece. His 2006 novel book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, was the basis for the terrific 2013 Brad Pitt film World War Z.

Liked This Look Behind the Scenes of Spaceballs?

You might also like our looks behind the scenes of two other Mel Brooks classics: Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, the film that, according to Brooks, helped pave the way for Spaceballs.

Main image: Spaceballs. MGM

But First

We aren't talking about movies with an X rating, which are their own category. And we aren't talking about movies like Serpico, The French Connection and Mean Streets that depict shamelessness but are, you know, classy about it.

We're talking about movies that ruthlessly shock and pander for the sake of good clean — or not so clean — thrills.

So here we go.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Smokey and the Bandit is one long car chase — and what a car chase — with a blunt-talking, wouldn't-fly-today flirtation thrown in between the Bandit (Burt Reynolds) and runaway bride/hitchhiker Carrie (Sally Field).

Everything about it feels dated, from the CB radios to the hitchhiking, but dang if it isn't just irresistible. It's also packed with fun casting, from Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice to songsmith Paul Williams as Little Enos Burdette.

Dukes of Hazzard fans will delight in noting the similarities between the movie and the show and can have some fun moonshine-fueled arguments about who thought of what first.

Caligula (1979)

When Penthouse founder Bob Guccione set out to make a mainstream movie, the result was Caligula — a story of the indulgent Roman emperor with big names attached.

Led by rather fearless Clockwork Orange veteran Malcolm McDowell, the film stars Teresa Ann Savoy (above), as well as Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole. But what it's best known for is its over-the-top sex scenes.

It was written by the very respected Gore Vidal, who disavowed it after director Tinto Brass substantially altered his script.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

A gloriously shameless movie (starting with that title) that uses ickiness to its great advantage. It's one of the most effective and captivating horror movies ever made thanks to its hardcore atmosphere, oozing with sex and violence.

Filled with the sounds of animals and buzzing flies, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes clear from the start that it has no limits, even before we hear the first rev of Leatherface's chainsaw.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

lsa, She Wolf of the S.S. affects high-minded ideals with a ridiculous opening card (see above), but it's all just an excuse to tell the story of Ilsa, an evil Nazi warden who wants to prove women are better at suffering than men, and should therefore be allowed to fight for Hitler.

Of course, she proves this through a series of "experiments" on women who are scantily clad, at best. Let's all say it together now: "They couldn't make this today."

A Canadian film by director Don Edmonds, it managed to get reviewed by Gene Siskel, who called it ""the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown." We can't tell if that's a thumbs up or thumbs down.

The Driller Killer (1979)

Abel Ferrara has made some straight-up classics — including King of New York and Bad Lieutenant — but the Bronx-born director cut his teeth with The Driller Killer. (His debut was an adult motion picture in which he also performed.)

Ferrara also appeared in The Driller Killer (above) about a New York City artist who deals with his urban angst by going on a killing spree with a power tool.

The film made it onto the United Kingdom's list of "video nasties" criticized for their extreme content.

Dolemite (1975)

Look, we love Dolemite, but when the hero of the movie is a pimp, you're watching a sleazy movie.

Rudy Ray Moore's endlessly entertaining Blaxploitation icon sprang from his filthy standup comedy routines: He passed on stories of a streetwise hustler named Dolemite who explained, "Dolemite is my name and f---ing up motherf---ers is my game."

Dolemite was also a triumph of DIY, indie moviemaking — as spelled out in the recent Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Widely regarded as one of the best exploitation movies ever made, this Swedish film by director Bo Arne Vibenius stars Christina Lindberg as as a mute woman who endures a series of unbelievable traumas — which Vibenius isn't shy about showing onscreen.

She eventually finds herself a double-barrel shotgun and goes on a revenge mission that she — and her targets — very much deserve.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

We hate this movie, because it's so incredible effective. One of the most shameless 1970s movies of all, it has a handmade quality that makes it violence and cruelty feel all the more real.

Director Wes Craven made his debut with Last House on the Left — a story of abduction, brutality and vengeance, scored by eerie hippie music — before going on to create the classic Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream horror franchises. With all due respect to those films, they aren't remotely as scary as Last House on the Left.

Salo (1975)

Inspired by the writings of Marquis de Sade, this film by Pier Paolo Pasolini is about a group of fascists who round up a group of adolescents and do horrible things to them for 120 days. Just make a list of things that gross you out, and we promise they're in Salo.

Interestingly, Abel Ferrara, who you may remember from our Driller Killer entry, made a movie about Pasolini in 2014 about his life around the time he was making Salo.

It stars the great Willem Dafoe, a good friend and frequent collaborator of Ferrara's.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

You probably remember the disco, but not the desperation.

Saturday Night Fever is a nuanced and gritty character study of Tony Manero (John Travolta, above) that unflinchingly depicts racism and sexual violence. Tony is deeply flawed, and no hero by today's standards, but the movie tries to win back our affection for him by the end.

For such a successful film, it's a very sleazy movie and a rough watch — but the dancing is fantastic, at least.

Piranha (1978)

One of many killer-animals movies rushed to the screen after the blockbuster success of Jaws, Piranha — unlike, say, Orca, to use one example — made no pretense of respectability. And we respect that.

A Roger Corman production through and through, this movie existed to show swimmers get attacked by toothy fish, and we love that. It's the epitome of a B movie.

But it was also important to the careers of some great filmmakers, including Corman: Six years after Piranha, Joe Dante went on to direct the massive hit Gremlins. And Piranha co-writer John Sayles would go on to make films including Eight Men Out and The Secret of Roan Inish.

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

A movie we both love and respect, The Kentucky Fried Movie is a sendup of grindhouse and sleaze that is also, itself, pretty sleazy — but in a good way. It leaves no joke unturned, and parody-movie sendups go waaay further than necessary to satirize the things they're satirizing.

The Kentucky Fried Movie is one of funniest of all sleazy movies, and it led to more mainstream, less sleazy success for director John Landis and writers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would later go on to make Airplane.

Liked Our List of Shameless 1970s Movies?

If you liked this, you might also like our list of Gen X Movie Stars Gone Too Soon.

And you might also like this behind the scenes look at The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Main image: The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Luckily, his wife, Victoria Taylor, had an idea: an officer of the law abusing his power. It evolved into Blood Star, a story of a young woman (Britni Camacho) in a bad relationship who crosses a sheriff (John Schwab) in a middle-of-nowhere stretch of New Mexico. As he torments her on the open road, she realizes he's done this sort of thing before.

"We threw around a lot of different ideas, different locations, different monsters, and after a few weeks Victoria had the idea about a corrupt lawman," Jacomelli tells MovieMaker.

The pair are based in Brighton, about 50 miles from London, home of Beast London, their commercially focused production company. They initially thought of setting their film in the UK, but then turned to the American Southwest. (Palmdale, California, outside Los Angeles, quite credibly stands in for New Mexico in Blood Star.)

The found screenwriter George Kelly online to help hone the idea, and he became the first of many collaborators they found online. Blood Star is his first writing credit. Additionally, actors Camacho and Schwab were both leading a movie for the first time. And the production had a tight shooting schedule and budget.

"I threw myself into this movie with a no-fear attitude and a beautiful naivety that you have when you do something like this for the first time," says Jacomelli. "It enabled me to take risks and experiment. I knew it would be hard work and there would be pitfalls, but I was determined to make it work and produce something we could all be proud of, despite huge budget restraints.  Obviously, with hindsight, I might not have been so quick to jump headfirst into the project, but then we might never have made a movie!"

What's striking is that they didn't just make a movie, but also a genre film that finds time for unforgettable Tarantinoesque moments, including one in which we watch the sheriff just eat chicken. It also makes the extremely bold move of rendering our heroine speechless for the last 15 minutes of the film — a real calling-card move that pays off.

Though it is available on video on demand in the UK, France and Germany, Raven Banner — the company behind the impressive run of Hundreds of Beavers — is representing it as it seeks distribution in North America.

Also Read: ‘Rat King’ Reflects a Chilliwack, BC Film Scene That Takes Young Filmmakers Seriously

We talked with Jacomelli as he prepared for the film's screening 9 p.m. Saturday at the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, in a British Columbia setting that couldn't be much different from the New Mexico desert: Chilliwack is surrounded by splendid mountains, greenery and untamed rivers, and when we ran into Jacomelli Saturday morning, he was hoping to go out and watch eagles snatch salmon.

We talked with him about first-time filmmaking, the power of silence, and predators.

Lawrence Jacomelli on His Directorial Debut, Blood Star

MovieMaker: You're British. Why set your first feature film in the American Southwest?

Lawrence Jacomelli: At first, we looked at different story settings for that character and considered shooting it in the city, and it could have been London, which might have been easier.

But I was drawn to the idea of a road movie and also the approach of setting it all in a car. That idea was then developed into the first outline for Blood Star, which is a road movie with a few pit stops. The car still plays an important role but ultimately I felt that a desert road movie that showed off the landscape and other aspects of Americana I love would have a broader appeal.

We set it in the American Southwest because we needed the story to take place in the middle of nowhere. A place full of nothing, where there is no escape.

MovieMaker: What were the benefits and setbacks, if any, of having never made a feature before? And was there any experienced old hand you looked to for guidance? 

There were a lot of inherent costs that were unavoidable due to the nature of the script and setting: buying the cars, housing the crew out in the desert, plus expensive extras like a low loader trailer and an 80-foot condor (used to raise the lights for the desert night scenes).

On the flip side, there is a lot of production value in shooting a story in a setting like that. And this was a big consideration. I wanted to make a visually beautiful film that would connect with the audience and have production value. So it was a conscious decision to use the sheriff and the desert roads — it’s familiar and people love that, I love that too — but the story itself I think is unique, and that’s the most important consideration of all. 

As for the experienced old hand… I would say that role was taken by our lead actor John Schwab. John is a fantastic actor but he also brought a lot of experience to the table and with that a lot of reassurance. He was incredibly helpful when it came to the rehearsals and blocking the scenes. John is also a producer so he understands the process of filmmaking very well and he was an incredible part of the team. Just having his experience at 2 a.m. in 12 degrees when it came to nailing a scene in one take was amazing!

MovieMaker: How did you assemble your team?

Lawrence Jacomelli: I think when you are making a first film, you are in a catch-22 situation. You don’t have the luxury of a budget where you can get proven talent, so you have to look for rising talent, and that in itself is a skill. We didn’t have budget for a casting director, so Victoria took on the role of casting for the movie. It takes more time, but the talent is out there. 

We found all of our crew online — firstly our screenwriter and then the production team. The first person we attached to the project was the first AD, Nick Ryan. The 1st AD is the key person who can immediately tell the director if it’s possible to shoot the movie in a certain number of days. 

This was followed by the line producer, Zaina Tibi, and the cinematographer, Pascal Combes-Knoke, making up our three key heads of department. They were all experienced in indie film production with budgets from around $200,000 to $1.5 million. It was crucial for me that they all had a really deep knowledge of movie production and of low-budget movie productions in particular.

The crew were also living locally to the movie set and they’d all had experience shooting in the Palmdale area on more than one occasion, so they had background knowledge of the filming restrictions in the desert. It was essential that we wouldn’t be wasting too much time navigating unknown waters.

The crew all worked for the same rate — it was amazing that they were prepared to make this concession and I believe it was because everyone bought into the script and wanted to be part of something cool.

As for the actors, I do believe that casting is everything, especially in a movie and especially one like this, where there is so much weight on the two lead roles. Normally I’d audition a lot of actors but it just so happened that both John and Britni came to me as recommendations from colleagues, and when Victoria and I met them, we were hooked.

MovieMaker: What surprised you most as a first-time filmmaker?

Lawrence Jacomelli: When Victoria and I got on the plane to go home after shooting this movie in 10 days, we were wrecked, physically and emotionally. I had all the drives in my rucksack and to be honest, I had absolutely no idea if we had everything we needed to cut all of our scenes together successfully.

The schedule was brutal, and many of the plans for shots and scenes went out of the window.  A lot of the shots were actually filmed in one take and some I didn’t even get a replay on! So the big surprise for us came after the first cut when I realized that we did indeed have a movie.

MovieMaker: You have a pretty long scene of the sheriff eating chicken. You're perhaps breaking a supposed rule of filmmaking, in that I don't think it advances the plot. But it's one of my favorite scenes because it helps establish tone and somehow makes me dislike the sheriff even more than seeing him commit murder. Why was it important and/or fun to include?

Lawrence Jacomelli: The purpose of that scene is to show that he is sitting and waiting for his ‘prey’.  The main action is that he answers the phone and reveals that he has many old phones in a box, suggesting that he has done… whatever it is that he is doing… before.

As for the chicken… Firstly, I wanted a visual motif that represented how he saw his female victims: as meat. I wanted a scene that captured him consuming meat in the same vulgar way that he did those women. Secondly, I wanted an action that would put the audience in the car with him and make them feel uncomfortable and start to be repulsed by him and ask questions about him. I think it was fun and important to include this scene. Most scenes are about pushing the story forward, but this scene is about pulling the audience in.

MovieMaker: 11. You make a very bold decision to render your protagonist speechless for the last 15 minutes of the movie. The drawback is no pithy dialogue, but her deeds end up being more powerful than her words. Can you talk about how you landed on what I consider a cool move? 

Lawrence Jacomelli: Blood Star is a film about violence against women: It explores the core themes of brutality, coercive control, misogyny, and the silencing of the female voice. Through the character of the male protagonist, the film also tackles the issue of abuse of power – the threat sometimes posed by those in positions of authority whose task should be to protect the vulnerable in society. 

The decision to render the protagonist without a voice was the big decision of the screenplay and we thought and worked on this a lot. It’s not just about the 15 minutes without dialogue, but the action resulting in the actual silencing of the female voice.

Women who suffer at the hands of men are left with horrendous emotional and physical scars, so we felt that just giving her a few bruises that would heal in time wouldn’t deliver the message. So, I had to trust my gut on that and, as you say, be bold. Most people don’t question the fact that there’s no dialogue in the last 15 minutes — it’s such a visual ending to the story, packed with tension and set-pieces, that you just don’t need any more dialogue. 

You can learn more about the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival here.

Main image: Britni Camacho in Blood Star. Courtesy of Lawrence Jacomelli.

But First

For a refresher, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of five young people on the trip of a lifetime: Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her wheelchair user brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), Pam (Teri McMinn), Jerry (Alan Danziger), and Kirk (William Vail). The take a drive in a van together to visit a house in central Texas once owned by Sally and Franklin's grandfather.

But when they pick up and quickly kick out a crazed hitchhiker who brandishes a knife at them, they don't realize that he's a member of the Sawyer family of murderous cannibals who reside at the neighboring property. The cannibal family include the iconic villain Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), his hitchhiking brother (Edwin Neal), his dad, Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow), and Grandpa Sawyer (John Dugan).

Blindly following the lights of the house in the distance, the teens unknowingly wander towards their doom.

The iconic film was directed by the late Tobe Hooper, who died in 2017 at age 74. While he was alive, he gave several interview explaining the wild on-set conditions that created the incredibly ominous atmosphere that translates so well into the movie.

You can stream The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for free with ads on Tubi, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, The Roku Channel, and Pluto TV.

The Opening Scene Used a Real Human Skeleton

In an interview with Interview Magazine, Hooper said that the film's iconic opening scene in a graveyard used a real human skeleton.

"Some of the skeletons were real," Hooper (above, in hat) said. "When he’s impaled on the tombstone in the beginning. It’s a real human skeleton underneath it. That was a practical, budgetary thing. It was less expensive to get real human skeletons from India than to buy plastic reproductions."

Tobe Hooper's Doctor Inspired Leatherface's Skin Mask

Leatherface is named that because he wears a mask of human skin. Hooper got the idea for that from a creepy little anecdote often told by his family doctor growing up.

"Our family doctor treated everything from a skull fracture to immunization. He told me that when he was in pre-med school, he skinned a cadaver’s face, cured and dried it, and then wore it to the school’s Halloween party. That image stuck," Hooper told director Barend de Voog at the Offscreen Festival in Brussels, where he presented the 4K restoration of the film.

Ed Gein Was Also an Inspiration

It's also been said that Ed Gein, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield, also inspired the Sawyer family characters. Gein died in 1984 and was convicted of killing Bernice Worden in 1968. However, he's more known for exhuming corpses from graveyards and making keepsakes out of their bones and skin, much like the cannibal family in the movie.

Hooper confirmed that Gein was one of his inspirations in the Offscreen interview.

"I can’t remove that from the equation, because I had relatives from Wisconsin and they would pay us a visit when I was about four or five years old. They told us the story about this man who lived in the next town from them, about twenty seven miles or so, who was digging up graves and using the bones and skin in his house. That was all I knew about it," he said.

"They didn’t mention his name. But to me he was like a real boogeyman. That stayed in my mind. When the doctor told his story, I was a teenager and all that stuff about Wisconsin came back to me."

'Everybody Hated Me,' Hooper Says

There was a lot of tension on set because of Hooper's intense directing style, which involved lots of screaming.

"At the end, everybody hated me. It broke up into camps," Hooper said in the Offscreen interview. "The reason they hated me was because I wasn’t new to this. I had made about sixty documentaries for television. About ninety percent of the time I knew exactly what I wanted. Normally, I’m a really calm guy, but when I’m making a film I really have to assert myself, because if I don’t and things go sideways, it will all come back on me and be my fault.

"So I had to be aggressive. I screamed a lot. That created tension. But the more they hated me for my screaming, the more bad vibes came up, out of the ground and from the air, and that all got into the film somehow."

The Bloodsucking Finger Scene Was Real

In the iconic dinner scene, Grandpa Sawyer (played by 18-year-old John Dugan in prosthetic makeup) sucks blood out of Sally's (Marilyn Burns) cut finger. Turns out, that was actually happening in real life, because Gunnar Hansen, who plays Leatherface, secretly cut Burns without telling anyone.

“The prop knife they used, which contained a tube of fake blood that Hansen was to squeeze onto Burns’ finger, had malfunctioned,” Joseph Lanza writes in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified A Rattled Nation.

“They tried many takes, and finally, Hansen grew so impatient that he surreptitiously sliced her finger for real before exposing her to Dugan’s saliva.”

What's even worse is that neither Burns nor Dugan realized the blood was real until years later. “I didn’t find out until years later I was actually sucking on her blood, which is kind of erotic really," Dugan later said, according to Lanza.

A Truckload of Dead Animals Was Dumped Onto the Set

In the film, the Sawyer family home is littered with the skeletons of both humans and animals. In an attempt to find enough animal corpses to use as props, a truckload of dead animals was dumped into the backyard of the house where they shot the movie in Texas.

"We needed stuffed animals to decorate the set. You know, domestic animals that the family members would have been working on. So I asked [art director] Bob Burns to find some, but he couldn’t find any stuffed domestic animals. I said to Bob: Just figure this out, please. So on the day of shooting the dinner scene, a big dump truck pulls up at the house," Hooper said in the Offscreen interview.

"It had one of these hydraulic beds and they dump all of these animal cadavers at the back of the house. A hundred at least. Dogs, cats, everything. They came from the city pound and had just been euthanized. It totally freaked everyone out, including me. Well, the truck drove away. So Dottie Pearl, who did make up, was shooting formaldehyde into these dead animals. She had a dead dog laying in her lap and she shot the dog with the needle, but the needle went through the dog’s leg and into her leg. She shot herself with formaldehyde."

To get rid of the dead animals, one of the crew members ended up lighting them on fire with gasoline, creating huge flames, billowing smoke, and an awful stench.

The Broomstick Prodding Scene Was Also Real

In the scene when Drayton prods Sally with a broom stick while she's bound and covered in a burlap sack, he was actually injuring her — with her permission.

“Marilyn said, ‘Hit me, don’t worry about it,’ ” Siedow said in the 2000 documentary The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Family Portrait.

“And every time we’d try it, she’d come up with a few more bruises. Finally, I got with it and started having fun doing it and started really slugging her, and we kept that up — we did eight shots — and then they finally said, ‘That’s a take.’ She just fainted dead away. The poor girl was beaten up pretty badly.”

In his Offscreen interview, Hooper explained that he had chosen to use a fake broomstick instead of a real one, thinking it wouldn't hurt Burns as much. But he realized too late that the fake broomstick was actually worse.

"The broomstick that Jim Siedow uses to poke Marilyn Burns, that was fake also. I told [art director] Bob Burns to make a fake one, so as not to hurt Marilyn. When Jim was whacking her with it, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t know that it was a rubber stick with a steel rod inside it. It was safer to use a real broom handle! But Marilyn gave her all to that movie. She would really do almost anything to project the energy that we needed toward the end of the film," Hooper said.

'People Were Running to the Windows and Throwing Up'

In order to create real tension on set, Hooper separated the actors into two camps during lunch and dinner: the teenagers and the Sawyer family. He also asked some of them not to take showers so they would smell extra bad, which was exacerbated by the extremely hot temperatures in the house.

"I kept them apart at lunch and dinner. I asked them not to bathe, so it became difficult to be around each other with all the odors. It was already over a hundred degrees in that house, but we had to shoot some of the dinner scene in daylight," he said in the Offscreen interview.

"So we put a big black tent over the house. With the tent it would get up to a hundred and seventeen degrees. And all the bones and skeletons in the house started cooking and putting out these noxious odors. People were running to the windows and throwing up."

In an interview with Interview Magazine, Hooper added: "We wouldn’t let Franklin [Paul A. Partain] have lunch with the other actors, and we wouldn’t let him bathe. There were all these little techniques and devices that I found to create some kind of sensory impulse to help get the truth."

The Chainsaw Was Inspired by a Crowded Department Store

Hooper also told Interview Magazine that the idea to have a chainsaw be Leatherface's weapon of choice came to him while he was at a crowded department store.

"I was in a department store around the holidays, thinking, 'I just can’t wait to get out of this department store.' This must have been in 1972 or 1973. There were thousands of people in there, and I was weaving through them to get out, and I found myself in the hardware department.

"I looked down and there was a rack of chain saws in front of me for sale. I said, 'If I start the saw, those people would just part. They would get out of my way.' That birthed the idea of the chain saw. Obviously I didn’t do that at the time," he said.

Liked This List of 9 Freaky Facts You Didn't Know About The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

You might also like this list of Goldfinger: 12 Behind the Scenes Photos of a James Bond Classic Turning 60.

Main image: A still from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bryanston Distributing Company, New Line Cinema

There's Something About Mary (1998)

What's in Mary's hair (above) will be enough to keep some people from liking this movie not matter what. There's also plenty of bathroom and private parts humor (notably in the spectacular opening sequence) that the sensitive won't be able to endure.

And if they get through that, the movie takes the radical approach that people with disabilities should be very much in the mix when it comes to the jokes — not as the butt of them, but taking and throwing shots along with everyone else.

All that said, There's Something About Mary, like a lot of Farrelly Brothers movies— and '90s movies — has a very big heart underneath all the gross-out jokes.

Friday (1995)

The blunt talk of Craig (Ice Cube) and Smokey (Chris Tucker) will turn off a lot of people, but come on: Friday is funny. And we love the setup of goodhearted Craig getting pulled into trouble with Deebo (Tommy Lister Jr.) by partaking in the smallest possible share of Smokey's stash.

Friday also has a pretty stellar message about gun violence and what it really means to man up. Sure, it's better to settle your problems with words. But if that's not an option, fists are a lot less likely to kill.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

There are so, so many dicey jokes in Austin Powers — it's a movie gloriously packed with innuendo and overt gross-out jokes.

But because the movie knows the jokes are silly and gross and stupid, it feels smart, and we feel smart laughing at it. It's paying homage to decades of James Bond-style wordplay.

Also, the scene where Austin refuses to bed Vanessa — "'cause you're drunk, it's not right" — has aged very well. We once saw it with a crowd of millennials, in 2017, and the line got an applause break. Yeah baby!

Kingpin (1996)

The second Farrelly Brothers movie on our list would probably offend Amish people, if their beliefs allowed them to see it. They're missing out on a lot of racy humor, most of it courtesy of Claudia (Vanessa Angel), as well as an absolutely terrific but filthy joke involving a bull.

Woody Harrelson's reaction to the best line in the movie — delivered by an Amish character, no less — is maybe his finest moment onscreen, a masterwork of understated acting. And you'll never look at a milk mustache the same way again.

Fear of a Black Hat (1994)

Starring  Rusty Cundieff, who also wrote and directed, Fear of a Black Hat is a sharp satire of constantly shifting hip-hop trends that reacted to them almost as quickly as they happened.

The film, which premiered at Sundance, traces a political/gangster rap group called NWH (the H is for hats) that splinters into various other genres, including desperate diss tracks, P.M. Dawnesque philosophizing, and C&C Music Factory-style dance music.

The movie's love for hip-hop is obvious — you can't satirize something this mercilessly without knowing it very well. We love this movie.

Clerks (1994)

Clerks is a Kevin Smith movie, so of course it's loaded with coarse jokes — none rougher than a sequence in which Dante (Brian O'Halloran) laments the sexual history of his girlfriend (Marilyn Ghigliotti). Meanwhile Dante's ex, Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer) has a horrific, mistaken identity encounter with an elderly customer at the store where Dante, well, clerks.

The iffy moments weren't too offputting to keep the Library of Congress from adding Clerks to the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The film, made for an initial budget of about $27,575, helped usher in the indie film boom of the '90s.

Freeway (1996)

Matthew Bright pitch-black Freeway, starring a young Reese Witherspoon, is one of our favorite movies from the 1990s because of its relentless, almost grindhouse commitment to sensationalism. It's making fun of the tabloid trash of the '90s even as it perfects it.

In this very twisted update on Little Red Riding Hood, Witherspoon plays an illiterate runaway trying to get to her grandmother's house after her mother is arrested for sex work. Her Big Bad Wolf is Bob (Kiefer Sutherland), a supposed good samaritan who is actually a serial killer.

One of the many pleasures of the movie is its exquisite casting: Besides the excellent leads, it features Dan Hedaya, Amanda Plummer, Brooke Shields and Bokeem Woodbine, among others.

The Nutty Professor (1996)

If you're not much for what the kids (the really small ones) call potty talk, you're not going to like The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy's update of a squeaky clean 1963 Jerry Lewis movie of the same name. The film won Best Makeup at the 69th Academy Awards thanks to Murphy's portrayal of not only rotund professor Sherman Klump, but also the members of his extended family, who are prone to rude noises.

The movie also makes many, many jokes about Sherman's weight, and though we're rooting for Sherman, and against the people who mock him, it can be hard to watch — especially if you've struggled with your weight.

Chasing Amy (1997)

The plot of this Kevin Smith movie would be a non-starter today: A lesbian woman (Joey Lauren Adams) starts dating a heterosexual guy (Ben Affleck). Many people have found a lot wrong with the film — besides a premise that many find objectionable, it's raunchy throughout.

But it also has its strong defenders: It was pretty advanced, for a mainstream comedy of its time, in its presentation of gay characters.

And filmmaker Sav Rodgers has made a new documentary, Chasing Chasing Amy, about how it led to his own queer coming out.

Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo (1999)

Whatever you think of Rob Schneider, the setup of Deuce Bigalow is undeniably good: a man thoroughly unqualified to be a gigolo accidentally stumbles into the job.

Unfortunately, a lot of the humor of Deuce Bigelow comes at the expense of his clients, as the movie runs through a checklist of people the films creators apparently consider undesirable, for one reason or another.

Which isn't to say we didn't laugh at all during Deuce Bigelow. We did. Sometimes a deliberately dumb movie is just what you need.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Some people will flat-out reject the whole vibe of this deliciously demented Halloween movie (or is it a Christmas movie?) directed by Henry Selick, from the mind of Tim Burton. It's about the Pumpkin King, Jack Skellington, who grows bored with simply crushing it every year at Halloween and decides to branch out into Christmas.

It's full of genuine scares — the clown with the tearaway face in the first moments is a good gauge of whether kids can handle the movie — but it never tones down the darkness, decay, or worms.

Because of its total commitment to goth atmospherics, the people who love it — many of whom aren't even in kindergarten yet — absolutely love it. And the people who don't can go watch a million less thrilling holiday movies.

As an added bonus, the film features a murderer's row of voice talents, including Danny Elfman, who did the music, Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara and Chris Sarandon.

American Pie (1999)

The surreptitious surveillance of Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth) hasn't aged well at all, and the movie treats the situation too lightly for many modern audiences. (Plenty of people knew it was wrong in 1999, as well, including, to the movie's credit, some characters in the film).

But that's only one of the potentially offensive things in American Pie, which also features, of course, a very upsetting scene between a young man (Jason Biggs) and a pie.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999)

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut seeks out sympathy for the devil: We're supposed to root for Satan himself as he tries to escape an abusive relationship with Saddam Hussein.

There's also lots of violence against kids and flagrant anti-Canadian propaganda. But of course, Canadians were too nice to get offended.

But the best thing about the movie is Satan realizing that he doesn't need anyone — not even Saddam Hussein — to complete him. What he needs is a little time alone.

Liked This List of Shameless '90s Comedies That Don't Care If You're Offended?

If so, you just might also like this list of '90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Or this video of '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Main image: Kingpin. MGM.

Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee was born on March 31, 1965, and died on March 31, 1993 at just 28.

Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, died of an accidental shooting on the set of his 1994 film The Crow (above).

Adding to the terrible tragedy was the fact that his beloved father died 20 years early at only 32.

River Phoenix

River Phoenix was born on August 23, 1970 and died on October 31, 1993 at just 23.

He was the Gen X actor for the duration of his short life, growing up on camera and delivering iconic performances in films from Stand By Me to Running on Empty to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to My Own Private Idaho. He died of a heroin and cocaine overdose at the West Hollywood club The Viper Room.

Phoenix is survived by a very talented family that includes his younger brother, Joaquin Phoenix.

Tupac Shakur

Tupac Shakur was born June 16, 1971 and died September 13, 1996 at just 25.

Tupac Shakur's death was a major loss to the worlds of music and film — before his death, he delivered impressive performances in films from Juice to Poetic Justice, and seemed poised to become one of the most successful Gen X actors and rappers, a performer who could convey incredible empathy and charisma both onstage and in front of a camera.

He died from injuries in a Las Vegas shooting. Earlier this year, police arrested a man they say ordered the shooting.

Chris Farley

Chris Farley was born February 15, 1964 and died December 18, 1997 at just 33.

One of the most explosively funny Saturday Night Live stars of the early '90s, Farley was legendary for his commitment to characters and bits, happily diving through walls and coffee tables to sell a joke. His pairing with fellow SNL player David Spade in 1995's Tommy Boy is pure bliss, and their reunion in the next year's Black Sheep seemed to mark the solidifying of one of the funniest Gen X comic duos.

Farley also evoked a chaotic sweetness in films like Wayne's World and his solo starring vehicle Beverly Hills Ninja (1997). Still very much "on" even when he was off-screen, he was known for wild antics and pranks like interrupting SNL castmate Mike Myers in the shower.

Following in the footsteps of his idol, John Belushi, Farley gave everything to his art. But he also developed a drug habit like Belushi's, and like his hero died of a drug overdose at 33.

Aaliyah

Aaliyah Dana Haughton was born January 16, 1979 and died August 25, 2001 at only 22.

Aaliyah was already a major pop star known for hits including "If Your Girl Only Knew," "4 Page Letter" and "Are You That Somebody" when she made her feature film debut in Romeo Must Die, for which she recorded the slinky hit "Try Again."

She had been recording a music video for her song "Rock the Boat" in the Bahamas when she and eight others were killed in a private plane crash.

Her second and final film, the Anne Rice adaptation The Queen of the Damned, was released the year after her death.

Heath Ledger

The Australian actor was born born April 4, 1979 and died January 22, 2008 at only 28.

In his short life he proved himself one the most dazzling Gen X actors, starring in hits including 10 Things I Hate About You, The Patriot and A Knight's Tale before earning an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his role in 2005's Brokeback Mountain.

He earned a posthumous Oscar for his role as The Joker in The Dark Knight, released the summer after his accidental overdose death from medications.

Corey Haim

The Canadian actor and teen idol was born December 23, 1971 and died March 10, 2010 at just 38.

After breaking out in the 1984 thriller Firstborn, he starred in the iconic '80s teen films Lucas, License to Drive, The Lost Boys and Dream a Little Dream, often alongside his friend Corey Feldman, which earned them the nickname The Two Coreys. The friends starred in an A&E reality show of that title in 2007.

Haim, who had battled drug addiction throughout his adult life, died of pneumonia.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman was born July 23, 1967 and died February 2, 2014 at only 46.

He was known as a deeply committed, nuanced, and astonishingly versatile actor known for roles including The Talented Mr. Ripley, Mission: Impossible 3, the Hunger Games franchise, and Capote, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar in 2006.

He struggled with heroin addiction early in life, and successfully abstained from it for many years before relapsing. He died from mixed drug intoxication, and heroin and other drugs were reportedly found in his home.

His most frequent collaborator was writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, for whom he appeared in Boogie Knights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and The Master. Years after Hoffman's death, Anderson cast his son, Cooper Hoffman, as the lead in his 2021 film Licorice Pizza.

Brittany Murphy

Brittany Murphy was born November 10, 1977 and died December 20, 2009 at just 32.

The star of Clueless (above), Girl Interrupted and 8 Mile quickly established herself as one of the most likable of her stars of Gen X, moving amiably from romantic comedy to serious drama to horror, but always maintaining a bighearted demeanor.

She died at age 32 under what a coroner determined to be pneumonia, exacerbated by anemia, though the cause of death has been disputed.

Paul Walker

Paul Walker was born September 12, 1973 and died November 30, 2013 at only 40.

Best known for playing the heroic Brian O'Conner in the Fast & Furious franchise, Walker was a wildly charismatic actor also praised for his roles in the teen comedy She's All That, the road thriller Joy Ride, and the diving thriller Into the Blue. But he could do serious drama as well, as he proved with 2006's Flags of Our Fathers.

Walker died in a single-vehicle collision as a passenger in a speeding Porsche while driving off from a charity event.

Verne Troyer

Verne Troyer was born January 1, 1969 and died April 21, 2018 at just 49.

Best known for his role as Mini-Me in the Austin Powers films, he broke into acting by working as a stunt double for the infant "Baby Bink" in 1994's Baby's Day Out. Other notable roles included Griphook in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Percy in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which also starred Heath Ledger. He also reteamed with Austin Powers star Mike Myers in The Love Guru.

His cause of death was ruled to be suicide by alcohol intoxication.

Luke Perry

Luke Perry was born October 11, 1966 and died March 4, 2019 at just 52.

Though best known as one of the stars of Beverly Hills 90210, he also starred in films like 1992's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 1994's 8 Seconds, and had noteworthy appearances in 1997's The Fifth Element and his final film, 2019's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (above). He also had a key role on the TV series Riverdale.

He died following two strokes.

Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman was born November 29, 1976 and died August 28, 2020 at just 43 years of age.

In his short life, he had an incredible run of successes, playing icons Jackie Robinson in 42, James Brown in 2014's Get on Up, and Thurgood Marshall in 2017's Marshall — demonstrating remarkable range in the process. But he was of course best known for his role as T'Challa in the 2018 blockbuster Black Panther and in three Avengers films. And he earned a posthumous Oscar nomination for his role in 2020's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Boseman died from colon cancer, which he concealed as he continued to do excellent work in film's like 2020's Da 5 Bloods.

Anne Heche

Anne Heche was born May 25, 1969 and died August 11, 2022 at just 53.

First appearing in 1993's The Adventures of Huck Finn, Heche had a remarkable run of roles in the '90s films Donnie Brasco, Volcano, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Wag the Dog. In 1998, she starred in Six Days, Seven Nights (above) and Return to Paradise. Her later roles included Catfight, My Friend Dahmer and TV shows including Everwood, Men in Trees and The Brave.

She died at a Los Angeles hospital after she was critically injured in a car crash.

Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry was born August 19, 1969 and died October 28, 2023 at just 54.

Though best known for Friends, he also had an impressive film career that included star turns in Fools Rush In (above), Almost Heroes, Three to Tango, and The Whole Nine Yards and its sequel, The Whole Ten Yards.

Perry was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his home in Los Angeles, and his cause of death was later determined to be due to acute effects of ketamine.

Shannen Doherty

Shannen Doherty was born April 12, 1971 and died July 13, 2024, at only 53.

Though best known for TV roles — including Little House on the Prairie, Charmed, and especially Beverly Hills 90210 — Doherty was also an accomplished film actor who appeared in the Gen X classic Heathers and had a lead part in Kevin Smith's 1995 Mallrats.

Brenda Walsh, her 90210 character, was one of the most iconic Gen X TV characters, and her on-screen chemistry with Luke Perry made their characters, Brenda and Dylan, one of the most scrutinized and fascinating couples in TV history.

She also had a successful career in reality TV and continued to work hard on a wide range of projects as she battled breast cancer, first diagnosed in 2015. She died from the disease at her home in Malibu.

Thank You for Reading Gen X Movie Stars Gone to Soon

You may want to cheer yourself up with this list of 12 Old Movies That Are Still a Total Pleasure to Watch, including Breathless, above.

Or you might enjoy our video version of the story you've just finished.

"Like the mama's boy he plays, he was scared of women (even Fonda and Bardot), until a good wife turned his life around," the People cover said of his dad.

Speaking Friday night at the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, following a screening of his phenomenal horror hit Longlegs, Osgood Perkins recalled how the cover affected him.

"It was this whole thing about, 'Tony Perkins is scared of women,'" Osgood Perkins recalled. "At the time, I'm eight years old, I'm like, eh?"

The cover was hinting at Perkins' homosexuality, something of an open secret in Hollywood at the time: "Now some X percentage of the population reading that were like, 'He's gay. We all know that,'" Osgood Perkins explained.

But no one had explained the situation to Osgood, including his mother — the wife who, according to People, had turned Tony Perkins' life around.

Osgood Perkins explained Friday that he grew up with a sense that his mother, actress and model Berry Berenson, wasn't honest with the kids about the family dynamic. But at the same time, even without being told what was happening, he knew that something in the household was unusual.

That tension between what was said and wasn't said has informed his films since, including Longlegs.

"I'm the kid in the house, so I know everything, right?" Perkins explained. "Those of you who have kids know your kids know everything. And so that juxtaposition of, 'I think I understand everything, but I don't understand anything' — that essential kind of taffy — that becomes real interesting fodder for art forever."

Osgood Perkins has spoken before about how much his parents have influenced his work. As he told MovieMaker earlier this year, he believes people make horror movies, in part, to cope with death. His father did in 1992, at the age of 60, and his mother died less than a decade later when she was a passenger in one of the planes in the 9/11 attacks.

Perkins delved into his family's history in response to an audience member's question about his thoughts on the importance of femininity in horror films.

Longlegs was the opening film of the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, and the talk was another sign of how seriously Chilliwack, a British Columbia mountain town of about 100,000, takes film and the creative process.

Osgood Perkins on Femininity in Silence of the Lambs and Longlegs

A minor spoiler about Longlegs: Late in the story, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who is hunting the serial killer Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), Lee discovers that her mother (Alicia Witt) has been keeping a secret.

Longlegs uses Silence of the Lambs as a reference point, and in that 1991 masterpiece, underestimated FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) discovers late in the film that serial killer Buffalo Bill (spoiler, but have you seriously not seen Silence of the Lambs?) is making a suit out of his female victims.

The reveal in Silence of the Lambs parallels one in Psycho in which Anthony Perkins' character, Norman Bates, becomes (another spoiler, and strong recommendation that you see 1960's Psycho) the original gender-bending Hollywood killer.

Osgood Perkins explained to the Chilliwack audience that in Longlegs and his previous films — including his 2015 debut as a writer-director, 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter — he drew inspiration from complicated feelings around sexuality.

Being a teenager, he said, is "hard enough when you're not in the taffy of like Tony Perkins in Psycho."

It's hard to apply hard labels to feelings, half-feelings, and confusion — which is exactly what Perkins gets across in the often-shifting Longlegs.

But tension and uncertainty are better sources of storytelling inspiration than simple, straightforward stories about his life. It's one of the reason he enjoys writing female protagonists, he said.

"As you're writing, you've got kind of tools to keep yourself interested. And one of those is, maybe write women protagonists, because what the f--- do I know about a woman protagonist? I don't know," he said. "And so that curiosity becomes part of the mystery, becomes part of what's interesting about what you're doing, and it keeps you kind of alive to the process."

Longlegs is now available on video on demand from NEON. You can learn more about the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, including another Osgood Perkins' event today, here.

Main image: Nicolas Cage as Longlegs. NEON.

The Olympia Restaurant (1978)

Early Saturday Night Live sketches often felt seat-of-your pants and tended to lag at times as everyone tried to find the same pace. Not this one: A typical morning in the life of a Greek diner that refuses to adapt, it has a simple, recognizable hook and sweet slice-of-life simplicity. The rhythm is as pleasing as a morning routine.

SNL is sometimes known for big characters, but almost everyone in this sketch plays it straight and real, which adds to its charm. Gilda Radner is especially good as the one customer who seems to understand the place, and Bill Murray gets the funniest moment with his panicked nodding, using only a single word.

The sketch is a little more poignant when you know that star John Belushi's immigrant dad operated a struggling restaurant when Belushi was growing up in Wheaton, Illinois.

Key line: "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, four Pepsi, two chip."

Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute (1979)

The great Margot Kidder, playing a bank vice president on a business trip, receives a visit from a profoundly Midwestern, profoundly decent, assuredly unsexy sex worker: Fred Garvin, male prostitute.

Dan Aykroyd brings big dad energy to the role of a kindly, folksy gigolo, and Kidder is a perfect straightwoman. The setup is absurd, but everyone plays it with endearing vulnerability. Like many Aykroyd characters, Fred Garvin would provide the template for many played-straight ridiculous characters to come.

This one doesn't always turn up on lists of the best SNL sketches, but it should.

Key line: "Ma'am, you're dealing here with with a fully qualified male strumpet."

Buckwheat Dead and America Mourns (1983)

A high-flying, edgy satire of breathless coverage of President Reagan's attempted assassination in 1981.

This sketch is the clear highlight of the years after the departure of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players. Eddie Murphy is brilliant not only as Buckwheat, but also as the man who shot him, John David Stutts.

It also foreshadowed decades of round-the-clock news coverage with just as little self-awareness as Joe Piscopo's take on Ted Koppel.

Key line: "It's good to see you all. Hi! I killed Buckwheat."

First CityWide Change Bank

With maybe the simplest concept of any Saturday Night Live sketch, this piece by legendary writer Jim Downey (above) — who also stars as an eager-to-please service representative — masterfully ridicules seemingly sincere corporate ad campaigns.

The execution of a very basic idea is perfect.

Watch here.

Key line: "We will give you the change, equal to... the amount of money that you want change for."

Chippendales Audition (1990)

A sketch where everyone else plays it straight so Chris Farley can give it 2,000 percent as Barney, a young man determined to be a Chippendales dancer.

Some — including the brilliant former SNL writer Bob Odenkirk — believe that the sketch was cruel to Farley. But listen to his many friends in interviews on Dana Carvey and David Spade's Fly on the Wall podcast and you'll hear that Farley was very much on board with the premise of the sketch — and no one has ever been more committed to a sketch.

The sketch works not because of the jokes about Farley's weight, but because of how sweetly and sincerely everyone plays the situation.

Watch here.

Key line: "I wish I could just flip a coin and be done with it, but we can't. We're Chippendales."

Yelling in the Kitchen (1993)

Once again, a simple idea, skillfully executed. This one rarely makes lists like this, because it's a one-off, and pretty unflashy. But it's so well acted, and one of the best examples of the everyday genius of Phil Hartman.

He and Nicole Kidman play a seemingly cool, laid-back couple who keep their disputes private — or so they apparently believe. An added bonus is Mike Myers playing straight man, which he does supremely well, despite being known for big, weird, lovable characters. And Julia Sweeney is brilliant as always at playing cheerful, normal people.

In a cool, weird aside, Addams Family siblings Jimmy Workman and Cristina Ricci play the kids.

Watch here.

Key line: "Beth, Amy? Can you scoot in here with me for a second?"

Matt Foley: Van Down by the River (1993)

Everyone else — from Julia Sweeney to Phil Hartman to David Spade to Christina Applegate — just tries not to hold it together as Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley at his best, absolutely takes over.

The original Matt Foley sketch was a carryover from Farley's time working with writer-performer Bob Odenkirk at Chicago's Second City. By the time it came to SNL, it was at its full frenetic brilliance. It's also a sketch with heart — we end up sympathizing with everyone involved.

Watch here.

Key line: "He's been down in the basement drinking coffee for about the last four hours so he should be ready to go."

Dillon-Edwards Investments (1999)

Another sketch you probably won't fall on many lists of the best SNL sketches, but this is the perfect mix of stupid and smart. Chris Parnell plays it straight as a father concerned with his financial future.

It's also perfectly timed at less than 90 seconds, which makes us love it even more.

Watch here.

Key line: "A lot of investments companies rushed onto the internet. But Dillon-Edwards took their time."

More Cowbell (2000)

Passions run high in August 1976 as The Blue Oyster Cult records their hit song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" under the watchful eye of rock legend Bruce Dickinson (Christopher Walken). Also, let's save you a Google: Gene Frenkle, the percussionist played by Will Ferrell, is not a real person.

This one turns up on almost every list of the best SNL sketches for a reason. Lots of reasons, actually.

Watch here.

Key line: "I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell."

Debbie Downer: Disney World (2004)

Debbie Downer (Rachel Dratch, always outstanding) proves that she can even ruin breakfast at Disney World.

It's a flawlessly written sketch that only gets funnier as everyone involved understandably falls apart with laughter. At one point, host Lindsay Lohan has no choice but to flee the sketch altogether. We're not fans of people breaking on camera, but this one is the gold standard of breaking on camera.

Every Debbie Downer sketch on SNL is great, but this is our favorite. It's one of the best SNL sketches and best SNL moments.

Watch here.

Key line: "It's official: I can't have children."

Meet Your Second Wife (2015)

A brutal jab at men who marry much younger women, "Meet Your Second Wife" is a very dark, very funny sketch with a solid premise and plenty of perfect small jokes packed in throughout. The unstoppable Tina Fey and Amy Poehler anchor a basically perfect, sharp-elbowed sketch. Bobby Moynihan and Aidy Bryant especially stand out with subtle, skillfull turns.

Fey and Poehler are responsible for many of the best SNL sketches and performances, but this one's our favorite.

Watch here.

Key line: "Actually it's seven."

Black Jeopardy With Tom Hanks (2016)

A lovingly detailed, laughs-in-the-specifics sketch that suggests maybe isn't America isn't so racially divided, after all. Exquisitely acted by everyone — Kenan Thompson (pictured), the longest-serving SNL castmember ever, is superb.

But Tom Hanks is especially surprising as a MAGA-hat wearing conspiracy theorist who comes off as a pretty good guy. This is one of those best SNL sketches where you catch sharp new insights every time you watch.

Watch here.

Key line: "What is: I don't think so. That's how they get ya."

Live Report (2016)

Saturday Night Live has done multiple sketches in which a local news anchors get caught up in a very curious detail seemingly irrelevant to the major breaking story they're covering. This is the best.

Newscasters Beck Bennett and Cecily Strong – as well as reporter on the scene Kenan Thompson — are ostensibly covering a Tampa sinkhole, but also can't understand why a local shopper played by Margot Robbie is married to a regular-guy Matt Schatt (Mikey Day).

One of the best SNL sketches of recent times and all time, this one is a perfectly written and acted game of change-the-subject.

Watch here.

Key line: "So... you two are married to each other."

Liked This List of the Best SNL Sketches?

If you enjoyed this list of the best SNL sketches, you might also like these 12 Wild Stories From Behind the Scenes of Saturday Night Live.

Also: We understand these things are subjective. So please share your own list of the best SNL sketches in the comments.

All images from NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Yeah, you read that right. Washington plays real-life historical figure Macrinus, a former Roman emperor, in the sequel to the classic 2000 movie Gladiator. But what makes him comparable to the president-elect Donald Trump?

Allow Scott to explain.

“[Macrinus] was a prisoner of war — probably at a North African state — and actually was taken to Rome probably as a gladiator. Survived. Got free. Got into the business of maybe making wine and bread. He evolved into a very rich merchant selling shit to the Roman armies — food, oil, wine, cloth, weapons, everything," the 86-year-old director told The Hollywood Reporter.

"He maybe had a million men spread around Europe. So he was a billionaire at the time, so why wouldn’t he [have ambitions toward the throne]? ‘Why not me?’ He’s also a gangster — very close to Trump. A clever gangster. He creates chaos and from chaos he can evolve," he added.

Indeed, the real-life Macrinus was a prominent figure in his time.

More About Denzel Washington's Gladiator II Character Macrinus

Macrinus was the emperor of Rome from April 217 to June 218 AD. He reigned jointly with his young son Diadumenianus. They were of Berber origin, an ethnic group that was descended from the Stone Age tribes of North Africa. They pre-dated the arrival of Arabs in that region, and spoke Afro-Asiatic languages like Amazigh, which is related to ancient Egyptian.

He was the first Roman emperor who wasn’t from the senatorial class. He never got to visit Rome during his reign, though, which was another first.

Before he became the emperor of Rome, Macrinus was a praetorian prefect under Emperor Caracalla, who is played by Fred Hechinger in Gladiator II.

But things between Macrinus and Caracalla got a little sticky later on, when Macrinus conspired against him and carried out a murder plot. Classic Roman empire stuff, ya know? Macrinus then took over as emperor after Caracalla’s death.

Also Read: Dylan Sprouse Tells Us His Roman Empire

So he was a schemer, as well. Even Washington himself has explained how craftilt he played Macrinus.

“He’s trying to use everybody. He’d use his mother, he’d use his own children; he’s already used up his soul, so he didn’t have any left. He’s in bed with the devil,” he told THR.

While the original Gladiator takes place from 180 to 192 AD, Gladiator II picks up multiple years after Gladiator ends.

Scott described the character of Macrinus as a "wealthy" and "beautiful" man.

“Denzel is an arms dealer who supplies food for the armies in Europe, supplies wine and oil, makes steel, makes spears, weapons, cannons, and catapults. So he is a very wealthy man. Instead of having a stable of racehorses, he has a stable of gladiators," Scott told Vanity Fair . "He’s beautiful. He drives a golden Ferrari. I got him a gold-plated chariot.”

Scott also recently said that original Gladiator star Russell Crowe — who played Maximus, the father of Paul Mescal's Gladiator II character Lucius — really wanted to be a part of the sequel, but it just never worked out.

“Russell and I had a go at it around 18 years ago,” Scott told People. “I had Nick Cave writing the script and I kept saying [to Crowe], ‘But you’re dead.’ And he said, ‘I know I’m dead. And I want to come back from the dead.'”

Scott had considered trying a “portal to bring him back from the dead” as one way to get Crowe back in the sequel.

“The only way of doing it was to go to another battle and through a dying warrior, he comes back into the spirit of the warrior,” Scott said. “So that’s his portal.”

But Crowe didn’t like the idea, because another actor would have to play the dying warrior who serves as the conduit for Maximus.

“He said, ‘So that’s no f—ing good, is it?'” Scott remembers Crowe reacting. “It didn’t really work.”

Gladiator II is now playing in theaters.

Main Image: (L) Denzel Washington as Macrinus in Gladiator II, Paramount Pictures, (R) Donald Trump, Donald Trump speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011, Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Bobby Deerfield (1977)

This movie is so underrated, this reporter could write a book on it.

Bobby Deerfield follows Al Pacino as the title character, an American race car driver living in Europe who has to reevaluate his life after one of his fellow drivers dies in an inexplicable crash. While visiting another driver in a medical facility, he meets and begins to fall for a quirky and outspoken woman named Lillian (Marthe Keller) who unfortunately has a terminal illness.

I'm convinced that Bobby Deerfield walked so The Fault In Our Stars could run.

Listen, Bobby Deerfield isn't perfect. I see why it wasn't super well-received by critics in its day. But there's just something really charming and pleasant about it. And Pacino does a hilarious Mae West impression at the end that will make you melt.

Author! Author! (1982)

One reason you may not have heard of this movie is because it's not currently streaming anywhere and it's really tough to get ahold of even a DVD copy of it. But if you can manage to see it, it's a totally worthwhile little picture.

In Author! Author!. Pacino plays a struggling playwright who becomes the de-facto father of a group of unwanted step-children left in his care from past relationships. He's a great single dad and his step-children love him.

It's full of funny little moments, like when his producer friends ask to bounce an idea off of him: "Let me bounce this off you, and that off you!" he yells back, throwing scripts at them.

Please, I need more people to watch this movie so someone will understand my niche references.

Me, Natalie (1969)

Technically, Pacino only has one short scene in this 1969 movie starring Patty Duke — but it's his first on-screen role in a feature, so it's worth noting.

The film follows Duke as Natalie, a so-called "ugly ducking" who moves to Greenwich Village and meets an artist there.

If you don't want to watch the whole movie, you can catch Pacino's scene here — but be warned, his character is not very likable. Hey, they can't all be chivalrous!

S1m0ne (2002)

In 2002, an AI generated person seemed pretty futuristic — but today, it seems pretty realistic.

In this Andrew Niccol-directed drama, Pacino plays a producer who finds himself in a pickle when the star of his movie walks off the set. So he decides to create a digitally-rendered actress who only exists on screen.

But when she becomes an overnight sensation, everyone understandably assumes she's a real person — creating yet another pickle for our producer friend.

Just another example of how life imitates art.

...And Justice For All (1979)

Directed by Norman Jewison, ...And Justice For All stars Pacino as Arthur Kirkland, a defense attorney who tries to win cases for clients trapped in an unfair legal system.

Pacino was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for this role, and the screenplay by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson was nominated for an Oscar as well — but you don't really hear about this movie so much anymore.

It's worth watching just for the scene where Pacino yells " You're out of order! You're out of order! The whole trial is out of order!"

Liked This List of 5 Great Al Pacino Movies You've Probably Never Heard Of?

You might also like 12 Essential Al Pacino Performances

The prevailing wisdom is this: don’t do it. 

“It’s insane,” they’ll say.  

“A waste of money and time and resources,” they’ll whisper. 

Don’t make that short film. Don’t go to film festivals. Don’t pour your heart and soul into a bite sized piece of cinema when you could do anything else.

It is, admittedly, in all estimation, a very bad idea.

But when faced with all the reasons not to make a short, and there are many, I did the damn thing anyway - and my journey, taking a small idea scribbled on a scrap of paper in my bedroom, to screens all over the world, from Beloit to Bulgaria, might have been the best decision of my career. Little did I think that this little-movie-that-could would land on the Oscar long-list and end up being considered for the Academy Award. 

In the spring of last year I flew my cast and some crew to Waco, Texas to film “The Heart of Texas,” a 15-minute live action short film about Janie May, an aspiring singer-songwriter stuck in the paycheck-to-paycheck grind who has a life-changing encounter on her way to a career-making opportunity that forces her to examine the cost of her American dream at the expense of another’s. If that seems a bit vague, it is, as there is a central twist that I would hate to spoil here. 

Production was a challenge, from the blazing Texas sun, to the classic not-enough-time-not-enoung-money scenario, to a myriad of other challenges. But we pulled it together and got it in the can in three quick days. Battered, burnt, bruised, and broke I flew home wondering if I had made a huge mistake. Maybe they were right, maybe you shouldn’t make short films. 

I’ll admit, there is a strong case against it. In this day and age you’re up against shortening attention spans, indifferent executives, and the whims of the almighty algorithm. You can’t really sell a short film. Sure, maybe you’ll get it onto a streamer, or onto an airline headrest playlist, but you’re not going to make your money back, not really.

It’s expensive to make and market a short film, and even more time and money goes into sharing it at festivals. Once you factor in travel, hotels, food, car rentals, printing postcards, and posters, festivals can add up quickly, not to mention the opportunity cost of missing out on other work. Shorts can often disappoint or fall short (apologies for the pun) in other ways for emerging filmmakers. 

More often than not, shorts don’t become the features they were hoping to incubate into or they don’t move the needle of a budding filmmaker's career, even with prestigious film festival laurels pinned to the poster. Heck, sometimes it’s even a challenge to get your friends and family to drive out to a screening, so much so SNL did a great sketch about it, or to sit still long enough at their computer to get to the good part (we have the Vimeo receipts, we know when you digitally duck out early), which is, perfectly understandable. Your audience owes you nothing. I believe if you’re going to ask someone for 15 minutes of their time, you better earn it, buster. 

So why do it? Why put yourself through the pain, peril, stress, and strain of making a short, especially if, with today’s tools, you could have just made a feature? Honestly, I don’t know. All I can say is that my journey has opened the door to a relentless bloom of opportunity, discovery, friendship, and wonder I never would have experienced had I not said yes. 

So, I humbly submit to you, dear reader, my flawed and subjective: Six Reasons to Make a Short Film

Short Films are Do-able

Maybe you don’t have the time, budget, or resources to bite off a feature film. Maybe you only have a weekend, a two-person crew, or 1 location. Make the short. It’s better to have a completed short film than a non-existent feature film.  And yes, you can make micro-budget features, but those inevitably take time to shoot and edit. A short can be done, it’s doable, so do it. 

Short Films Build Muscle

Filmmaking is a sport. You need to have the strength and stamina to do it. Shorts help you get there. When filming a short you have to do all, or most, of the things you would have to do on a feature, but on a smaller scale. You might learn how to pull a permit, or use a new piece of gear. You get to be on set working with actors and crew members. You have to problem solve, make creative compromises, and manage resources. Making shorts is like going to the gym for filmmakers. No pain, no gain. 

You Get To Go to Film Festivals

This is a big one. Going to festivals is a massive opportunity for emerging and established filmmakers.

First, there are people you’ll meet: fellow filmmakers, audiences, producers, writers, cinematographers, people who own cameras or work at rental houses, people who want to work on your film, people who don't owe you anything and will give you real feedback.

I met several collaborators at film festivals that I continue to work with today. The people who travel to festivals to screen their film are your people: the true, dyed-in-the-wool filmmakers. 

Also Read: ‘Rat King’ Reflects a Chilliwack, BC Film Scene That Takes Young Filmmakers Seriously

There are also the films: You get to the good, bad, ugly, inspiring. Festivals are the place to see what your peers are making, what’s winning, what’s not working. You’ll discover actors you want to work with, shots you want to emulate, music you want to Spotify later. This is the place where you will see something new and different, sitting in the dark, cell phone off, with an audience that has no idea what’s coming up on the screen next. 

Then, there’s the unforeseen opportunities: you’ll be touring and learning about different locations all over the world. There are contests, grants, trophies, prizes, gift bags. You might walk home with some funding for your next movie, or a tote bag you can use everyday for grocery shopping that starts a conversation with another filmmaker while you’re picking out avocados, and boom — you’re off to the races. There is no telling what unknown benefit will find you between the screenings. Which leads us to…

Short Films Build Your Reputation 

All the greats started making short films: Scorsese with "The Big Shave," Spielberg with "Amblin"... heck, some still make shorts. Wes Anderson just won his first Oscar for a short film this year. Yorgos Lanthimos put out a short film called "Nimic" in 2019. Shorts are an extension of your brand — a visual business card. As you share your short you will learn how to talk about it to audiences, colleagues, the press, and fellow filmmakers. Your shorts become breadcrumbs that people can follow to see where you are headed as an artist and where you’ve been. 

Short Films Set The Groundwork for Future Projects

Shorts are a proving ground for a future feature, sure, but more than that they are a place to figure out what works, both in terms of your creative voice and your creative team. By making your own shorts, and (listen up) working on other peoples shorts, you will meet the people that will eventually help you make that next thing.

Every good thing I’ve achieved in my career started with making something. By making something you build the foundation for what's next. 

Short Films Are Fun as Hell

If nothing else, shorts are fun to make, they are allowed to be fun to make. They are not a commercial product built to make back their investment. The creative stakes can be high, but the financial stakes can be low. Making something creative with your friends or family can teach you something about your voice, what you want to say and how you want to say it. You may learn you never want to make a movie again, and that’s valuable too. In the end we are all going to die, so why not spend some time making art. 

There you have it. A short list of reasons to make that short film. There are many, many more reasons why you should do it, but I’ll leave those for you to discover and share on your own. 

Making 'The Heart of Texas'

And look, my film "The Heart of Texas," is living proof. The film was written in a moment of inspiration and then sat idle in a drawer until I made a different short called “How to End a Conversation.” That film was shot in one day during the pandemic with very little resources and a couple friends. We did it because it was do-able. We had to book locations, adhere to covid safety protocols, and have a tight production plan.

When it came to post, we cut and re-cut the picture, we re-wrote the film with a new voiceover, and composed an original score — in other words, we built the muscle. Then we got to go to film festivals, like the Waco Independent Film Festival, where I met Lauren Noll — a writer, director, and actress with a fantastic short called “Honor.” I loved her short, she loved mine. We were both there building our reputation and our network in the film community.

We got to talking, and together we pulled out the script for "The Heart of Texas," re-wrote it together, sent it in to the Waco Indie Film Fest Screenplay Competition, and won a grant — an unforeseen opportunity that we made the most of. We assembled a cast and crew of friends, professionals, and many local talents in Texas. We shot the film and started building the groundwork for a feature film version of the short.

And the cycle continues. Now we are wrapping up our festival run after playing at Hollyshorts, In The Palace, Sidewalk, Mammoth, Lighthouse, Beverly Hills, and many others. Now, we are in consideration for Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Academy Awards. While I’m hard at work on the feature version of "The Heart of Texas," I’ll tell you this, I’m already working on my next short as well.

So sure, novels sell, poems don’t, but the world needs poetry and poems are worth writing. Go write the script, get the crew together, make the short. I promise you won’t regret it… too much. 

You can learn more about Pittsburgh Shorts, which is playing "The Heart of Texas" tonight, here.

Main Image: Lauren Noll in "The Heart of Texas." Courtesy of the film.

The Canadian filmmaker started making TikToks during the pandemic, after what he thought would be his big break fell through.

"I had a little bit of a break at traditional success. When I graduated university, we had to do a practicum, like a final project. Me and a partner made a pilot for a TV show, like a variety comedy show," Christensen recently told MovieMaker in a roundtable interview with fellow TikTok filmmakers about how the app is impacting the future of filmmaking.

Adult Swim, the network behind Rick and Morty and Bob's Burgers, saw their pilot online and expressed interest.

"On the Adult Swim Reddit, weirdly enough, they were like, 'We love this. We want to make something with you guys.' And we thought it was fake. So we didn't even reply to it," he says.

"Two months later, they email us again. They were like, 'Hey, we want to do a pilot with you guys. Let's make this happen. So they sent us like $10,000 U.S., which in Canadian is a little more... so it was a big deal for us. We were 20. We were freaking out."

Sadly, fate had other plans.

"Pretty much right after we made that, we sent it off to them, and then COVID hit," he says. "Nothing really came of it."

But something good still came out of it, Christensen says.

"I realized that social media was probably a good place to bypass all of the distribution and all the production and all of the hoops that come with traditional film and TV. So I just start putting TikToks out when I was going crazy in my room during COVID," He says.

"It just kind of happened, so it was kind of circumstance. Definitely what's kept me on there is that there are no barriers? I'm just directly connected to the audience. So any films, any ideas that I have, it can just go right to them. So that's why I'm still here."

More About Ben Christensen, AKA DangerBean55

Christensen currently has nearly 800,000 followers on TikTok, where he posts mini cinematic-style short videos that range from funny skits to dramatic, tear-jerking moments that really make you think.

His most viewed video has 25 million views, posing the question, "If you could bring one musician back from the dead to see live, who would it be?"

Other memorable skits include "Lost Stuff", a hilarious look at the things we lose overtime, including ourselves — and "Missing Socks", an an Interstellar-style story of two friends who travel to another dimension to find the socks that get lost in the dryer, then discover that only one of them can return.

In keeping with Christensen’s style, it’s full of more than one satisfying twist, and surprisingly emotional dialogue. Leveraging his large and enthusiastic social media following, Christensen recently crowdfunded a $40,000 budget to make his upcoming short film, “Kill Space.”

After spending some time on @DangerBean55's TikTok page, you'd be forgiven for hallucinating that you were in a movie theater.

Now in his late twenties, Christensen has been using the same screen name since he was in middle school. And if you're wondering where DangerBean55 came from, ask yourself what your screen name was when you were 12.

"I really am diehard and my handle hasn't changed," he says. "Everyone's like, what is that? And I'm like, I don't know. I made it in like sixth grade. My bio on YouTube was I will never change my handle. So I'm still DangerBean."

Main Image: Ben Christensen, photo by Kristine Cofsky

The film is the product of a raise-all-boats atmosphere in Chilliwack, a community of about 100,000 where the festival, local filmmakers, students, and even the nearby Vancouver Film School all contribute to each other's success.

"Rat King" writer-director Ayush Senanayake says growing up in a film-forward environment — which included taking public school film classes throughout his teens — has made him very certain of his career path.

"I intend only to make films in my life. I want to create and contribute to this massive medium like it’s the only thing I truly know and love, because it is," Senanayake, 17, tells MovieMaker.

Yes, of course many teens are captivated by social media, not making atmospheric Lynchian thrillers like "Rat King." But many of those TikTok-addicted teens haven't had the kinds of opportunities offered to students at GW Graham Secondary in Chilliwack.

The film is a powerful representation of the kind of work very young people are capable of when the adults in their lives give them the freedom and means.

What's remarkable about "Rat King" is not just that Senanayake and his classmates made a festival-quality film, but that they did so while paying homage to the last days of the analog era. Though "Rat King" never overtly explains when it takes place, the set and props place it in the late '80s or early '90s — a time of waterbeds, rotary phones and VCRs.

"Students enjoy vintage things, especially from the '80s," says Michael Florizone, who teaches film production at GW Graham Secondary and grew up, like many of his students' parents, in the '70s and '80s.

"On several occasions during downtime, students would sneak into the set and enjoy old movies on the tube TV and VHS player," Florizone recalls. "Thankfully, we still have many students who have self-control and are not glued to their phones. ... Students often just need the time, encouragement and space to create."

And, of course, TikToks and movies don't have to be at odds.

How Chilliwack Spawned the 'Rat King'

Senanayake started learning filmmaking in Florizone's junior and senior production classes and the school's TV production class, which led him to doing the Film Production Workshop for grades 11 and 12.

When students voted on what project to make together last year, they unanimously selected Senanayake's pitch for "Rat King." The film tells the story of a grieving young man (Jared Magale) who pledges allegiance to the otherworldly creature of the title.

Thanks to GW Graham Secondary's commitment to film, for the last few years, it has had a formal affiliation with Vancouver Film School, one of MovieMaker's 30 Best Film Schools in the U.S. and Canada, about about 60 miles west of Chilliwack.

British Columbia's tax incentives, good weather and strong film scene have long made it one of Hollywood's favorite shooting locations, and the partnership between GW Graham Secondary gives students a pipeline to Vancouver — aka "Hollywood North" — and by extension, the film and TV industry. VFS's support includes handing out free and discounted tuition.

The VFS partnership is just one of the benefits of Florizone's commitment to teaching filmmaking at a high level. He studied film, theater and visual arts, and began making his own films about five years ago with a short called "The Lender" that screened at CIFF. He has also taken part in CIFF's pitch session, and acted in several films, including one made by Chilliwack festival director Taras Groves.

"Chilliwack is an exciting place to be," Florizone says. "It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada and people here have a hunger for creativity and innovation. ... While 'Rat King' may not directly reflect the story of Chilliwack, the way in which it was made  embodies the vibrant, collaborative and creative spirit of our community."

The film takes place in a run-down two-bedroom apartment that — though you would never know — the students created in Florizone's classroom. "A first for  our school and our school district," Florizone notes.

Creating the film, he says, involved students "jumping into set and prop construction, scouring thrift stores for vintage items, and developing a vision for the story."

He adds: "Others worked on mastering cinema and lighting techniques using our Red Komodo camera while taking time to learn the workflow required for large raw cinema files."

Senanayake felt an "unwavering sense of gratitude" to his fellow students for choosing his story to make into a short.

"It gave me a duty to deliver something special and make their time worthwhile. The amount of dedication, trust, and patience I felt for me while making 'Rat King' has brought me to tears several times," says Senanayake, who has finished GW Graham Secondary and is now a student in North Vancouver's Capilano University’s Motion Picture Arts Program.

"Rat King" will play the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival on Saturday afternoon as part of the festival’s Fraser Valley Films block, highlighting filmmakers of the region. Three other films from GW Graham graduates are also playing the festival: "Pebble Pockets" by Daniel Walker and Nate Ross, "Baby Rental" by Mason Fraser and Kael Gough-Johnson, and “A Poacher’s Honor,” by Danny Crabb.

Florizone says that while "Rat King" has a darker tone, "this project is ultimately a  celebration — bringing people together to create something extraordinary and highlighting  Chilliwack's potential and creative community."

Only two non-students were involved in the production of "Rat King": Florizone, who produced and provided the voice of the title character, and Nadine Johnson, mother of one of the film's cinematographers, who played the lead character's mom.

Here are the student members of the GW Graham Secondary program who made "Rat King." Look for their names on Hollywood productions soon — or in the credits of films made in Chilliwack.

Ayush Senanayake – Writer, Director, Composer, Set Construction, Set Dressing, Props

Jared Magale – Acting - Daniel Ernst, Set Dressing 

Vincent Ball – 2^nd A.C., Set Construction, Set Dressing 

Ben Bueckert – ADOP (Assistant Director of Photography), Composer, Assistant Audio Engineer, P.A. Set Construction, Set  Dressing

Esther Colon – P.A, Casting, Props, Set Dressing, 

Wesley Eagles – Boom Op, Foley Artist, Marketing Manager, Set Dressing 

Talon Francis – P.A., Graphic Design, Props 

Jaykeb Garcia – Gapher, Assistant Editor, Set Construction 

Iryn Lee – Lead Editor, Shot List, Audio Engineer, P.A., Assistant Music, Set Construction, Set
Dressing, Props

Elise McAlpine – Lead Editor, Composer, Audio Engineer, Costume, P.A., Set Dressing, Makeup,  Props 

Sheyda Navidi – Acting – Emily Ernst, Shot List, Storyboard, Colour Grading, Foley, Props Artist,P.A, Assistant Music, Set Dressing, Casting, Set Construction 

Keon Sheikhi – Boom Op 

Rylie Siraj – Costume, Set Construction, Set Dressing, Makeup, Props 

Mason Fraser – Prod. Coordinator, Casting, P.A. 

Kael Gough-Johnson – D.O.P, Assistance Editor, Assistant Audio Engineer, Gapher, Grip, Set  Dressing 

Sahil Grewal – ADOP (Assistant Director of Photography), Gapher, Assistant Audio Engineer 

Ben Bueckert – 1^st. A.C., Composer, Assistant Audio Engineer, P.A. Set Construction, Set  Dressing

C-Jay Bryce – Lead Composer(Score), Props Design, Costume, Set Dressing, Props Kyonna Clarke – A.D, Set Construction 

Reet Ghattaura – Set Prep 

Zander Smith-Pauls – Acting – Alex Taylor, P.A., Assistant Grip, Assistant Editor, Set Construction

Praise Ekhator – Composer  

Main image: Jared Magale in "Rat King," playing this weekend at the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival. Courtesy of Michael Florizone.

Indeed, long before the version of Gladiator II starring Paul Mescal was created, director Ridley Scott tried to find a way to bring Crowe's character Maximus back for a sequel.

"Russell and I had a go at it around 18 years ago," Scott recently told People. "I had Nick Cave writing the script and I kept saying [to Crowe], 'But you're dead.' And he said, 'I know I'm dead. And I want to come back from the dead.'"

Scott had considered trying a "portal to bring him back from the dead" as one way to get Crowe back in the sequel.

"The only way of doing it was to go to another battle and through a dying warrior, he comes back into the spirit of the warrior," Scott said. "So that's his portal."

But Crowe didn't like the idea, because another actor would have to play the dying warrior who serves as the conduit for Maximus.

"He said, 'So that's no f---ing good, is it?'" Scott remembers Crowe reacting. "It didn't really work."

Nick Cave also wrote a script for a Gladiator sequel all the way back in 2001 that would have Crowe's Maximus return as a sort of immortal ghost that was able travel through time.

According to Den of Geek, Crowe asked Cave to write a script that "sorted out" the problem of his character being dead, which he could then show to Scott to convince him to work him into the sequel.

In the script, which was temporarily titled Christ-Killer, Cave had Maximus waking up in a sort of purgatory version of the afterlife alongside dying Roman gods. They tell him that he must stop the new religion of Christianity from spreading by killing Hephaestos, the God of fire, so that he can finally be at peace and reunite with his dead wife in Elysium. The script got a whole lot more complex, but basically, Maximus is able to return to the ancient Rome 20 years after his death.

Also Read: Who Is Denzel Washington’s Gladiator II Character, Macrinus?

But Crowe didn't approve of that script either.

More From Russell Crowe About Gladiator II

Now that 24 years have passed since the original Gladiator came out, Crowe has said he's not sure what to think about the sequel, coming out on Friday.

He did win an Academy Award for best actor for his role as Maximus, so it makes sense that he would be nostalgic and want to come back for one more go.

On the Kyle Meredith With... podcast, Crowe said he was "slightly uncomfortable with the fact they’re making another one."

“Because, of course, I’m dead and I have no say in what gets done,” he said.

He doesn't agree with all of the plot points in the new film, which stars Paul Mescal as Maximus' son, Lucius, alongside Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington, and Joseph Quinn.

“A couple of the things I’ve heard I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not in the moral journey of that particular character,’” he said. “But I can’t say anything, it’s not my place, I’m six feet under. So we’ll see what that is like.”

Sadly for Crowe, he did not get to appear in the sequel at all. But hey, there's always next time! Scott told USA Today "yes, it's true" that he's planning on making Gladiator III as well.

Hopefully we won't have to wait another 24 years for that one.

Main Image: Russell Crowe in Gladiator (2000), DreamWorks, Universal Pictures

First, we should note that the movie isn't completely faithful to the true history of the Roman empire, since it's fictionalized, of course — so we don't intend to give any spoilers here. We'll just tell you about the true history behind the inspiration for Washington's character.

Macrinus was the emperor of Rome from April 217 to June 218 AD. He reigned jointly with his young son Diadumenianus. They were of Berber origin, an ethnic group that was descended from the Stone Age tribes of North Africa. They pre-dated the arrival of Arabs in that region, and spoke Afro-Asiatic languages like Amazigh, which is related to ancient Egyptian.

The original Gladiator takes place from 180 to 192 AD, and Gladiator II picks up multiple years after Gladiator ends. So at the start of the sequel, Macrinus is not yet the emperor of Rome — but he is a powerful presence.

“Denzel is an arms dealer who supplies food for the armies in Europe, supplies wine and oil, makes steel, makes spears, weapons, cannons, and catapults. So he is a very wealthy man. Instead of having a stable of racehorses, he has a stable of gladiators,” Scott told Vanity Fair of Macrinus. “He’s beautiful. He drives a golden Ferrari. I got him a gold-plated chariot.”

Washington's Macrinus and Mescal's gladiator character, Lucius, have an important relationship in the new movie.

"You will be my instrument," Washington says to Mescal in the trailer. "You have something. I knew it from the start. That rage is your gift."

Who Was Denzel Washington's Macrinus in Real Life?

The real-life Macrinus was the first Roman emperor who wasn't from the senatorial class. He never got to visit Rome during his reign, though, which was another first.

Before he became the emperor of Rome, Macrinus was a praetorian prefect under Emperor Caracalla, who is played by Fred Hechinger in Gladiator II. This is perhaps where the timeline of the real life Macrinus and the Denzel Washington version of him intersect: During this time in his life, he was in charge of the civil affairs of Rome.

But things between Macrinus and Caracalla got a little sticky later on, when Macrinus conspired against him (classic Roman empire stuff, ya know?) and carried out a murder plot. Macrinus then took over as emperor after Caracalla's death.

Also Read: Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan Adopt American Accents as Futuristic Farm-Dwellers in Foe Trailer (Video)

Gladiator II follows Paul Mescal as Lucius Verus, the son of Russell Crowe's character Maximus who is stuck in the life of a gladiator just like his dad, who died in the first movie.

The Roman army is commanded by general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), and the rulers during this timeline are the aforementioned Caracalla and his co-emperor, Geta (Joseph Quinn).

“It’s brutal, man. I call him Brick Wall Paul,” Pascal told Vanity Fair of Mescal's performance as Lucius. “He got so strong. I would rather be thrown from a building than have to fight him again. To go up against somebody that fit and that talented and that much younger…. Outside of Ridley being a total genius, Paul is a big reason as to why I would put my poor body through that experience.”

Watch the Trailer for Gladiator II

To see all of these gladiators in action, you can watch the trailer for Gladiator II below.

Gladiator II arrives in theaters on November 22.

Main Image: Denzel Washington as Macrinus in Gladiator II, Paramount

Psycho (1960)

Slasher movies are generally defined as a subgenre of horror where a killer (or sometimes killers) stalks a number of victims and takes them out one by one, generally using something sharp.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is often cited as the first slasher film, even though it doesn't start as one — its a taut relationship drama about a girl gone bad (Janet Leigh) who steals $40,000 from her boss to start a new life with her boyfriend. Then she stops at the wrong hotel, takes a shower — and the movie makes a dramatic shift in genre.

Film would never be the same.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

We kind of hesitate to call the Texas Chainsaw Massacre a slasher, because slasher implies a knife, but we're going with it because chainsaws have blades. Very fast blades.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with director Tobe Hooper's interesting parallels between human victims and farm animals, was one of the first slasher movies to offer social commentary. You can read it as a plea against eating meat, if you're so inclined, but we see it as a commentary on the Vietnam War.

The fact that many different people read the film in so many different ways is a testament to its power.

Black Christmas (1974)

People sometimes say the Canadian slasher Black Christmas was the first North American slasher, but we say no: Both Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre got there. (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out just in time for Halloween, and Black Christmas came out just in time for Christmas.)

Still, this movie by Bob Clark — whose varied list of films would eventually include Porky's, A Christmas Story and Baby Geniuses — established for North American audiences the very familiar setup of a group of young women, who often attend college, play on a sports team, or cheerlead together — getting attacked by a mysterious creepy stranger.

Black Christmas stands out from other slasher movies with a stellar cast that includes Margot Kidder (future Lois Lane in the Superman films), Keir Dullea (who just six years earlier had starred in 2001) and Olivia Hussey (who starred in Romeo and Juliet in 1968, the same year Dullea appeared in 2001.)

Halloween (1978)

This John Carpenter film, starring Janet Leigh's daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, kicked off both Curtis' illustrious career and the slasher movies craze of the 1980s. Carpenter and co-writer/producer had the chilling notion to open Halloween with a sequence from the perspective of the killer, making the audience unwittingly complicit in Michael Myers' killing spree.

As artful as Halloween was, many of its imitators cared less about provocative filmmaking techniques than they did about accruing the highest body count possible. What makes Halloween so appealing (and hard to beat) is how it takes its time establishing the reality of Haddonfield, Illinois (named for the lovely New Jersey town where Hill grew up) and its relentlessly chilly atmospherics.

Slumber Party Massacre (1980)

We know: The title of this movie doesn't really scream "Criterion Collection." But the film turned up on the Criterion Channel recently because of what Criterion describes as a "smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980s slasher formula."

Slasher movies are frequently accused of misogyny — Carol J. Clover's perfectly titled book Men, Women and Chainsaws has a lot to say on the subject — but Criterion notes that Slumber Party Massacre, by director Amy Holden Jones, was a written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown.

It's an interesting slasher in that it includes many gratuitous elements, but also seems acutely aware of how it utilizes them. And it's a delightfully suspenseful, beautifully controlled movie — right up to all the massacring.

Friday the 13th (1980)

Inspired by the success of Halloween, Friday the 13th created a dark, murky, dreamy scenes of horrendous campground violence inflicted on unsuspecting campers who didn't always have the best judgement.

Of course we all remember the film series for Jason, the hockey-masked killer, but Jason isn't the killer in the original Friday the 13th, as Drew Barrymore's character was brutally reminded in the opening scene of another movie on this list.

For better or worse, this is one of the first movie people think of when they think of slasher movies. And it brought us Kevin Bacon, who is zero degrees of separation from Jeannine Taylor in the image above.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street changed up the slasher genre in several ways, including the introduction of a killer who preys on his victims in their dreams.

Endlessly imaginative, and flawlessly executed by writer-director Wes Craven, it also gave us a blade-gloved, burn survivor killer in Freddie Krueger (Robert Englund), billed in the original credits as "Fred Krueger," a smart and courageous heroine in Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and a promising start for a new young actor named Johnny Depp.

It opened to extremely good reviews — especially for its genre, which wasn't very well-respected at the time — and of course spawned many spinoffs and sequels, as well as a 2010 remake.

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

OK, look: We're just including this one because it's very fun. Slumber Party Massacre II picks up five years after the original with a weekend getaway that includes Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), the younger sister of Valerie Bates (Robin Stille) in the original Slumber Party Massacre.

What makes Slumber Party Massacre 2 stand out as a camp classic and fabulous '80s time capsule is the killer — played by Atanas Ilitch — a kind of rockabilly psycho who dances like Michael Jackson and takes out his victims with a guitar drill.

Unlike many serious-acting slasher movies, this one is the epitome of dumb fun, and you have to be really smart to pull off something this perfectly ridiculous.

Scream (1996)

Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Nightmare on Elm Street mastermind Wes Craven, Scream took to heart all the years of academic deconstruction of slasher movies to make a poppy, thrilling meta horror movie that is as Gen X as Gen X gets. It's aware of all the tropes it enlists, but also punctures them in smart and surprising ways — and it's edge-of-your-dorm-futon entertaining from the very first scene, the aforementioned Drew Barrymore scene.

Scream's decision to horribly kill off its most famous face within the first 12 minutes of the film rewrote the rules of slasher movies, and established that audiences would need to sharpen up — the days of dumb slasher movies ended with Scream.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Another Kevin Williamson-scripted slasher, I Know What You Did Last Summer has also popped up recently on Criterion. It stands out as a remarkably grounded, well-constructed thriller that is almost impossible to predict, with Hitchcockian twists that put its leads — especially the phenomenally engaging Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) through an emotional wringer as they try to avoid getting the hook.

The top-notch cast also includes an excellent Anne Heche, Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr.

And who says slasher movies aren't romantic? Prinze and Gellar, married more than 20 years, met on the set.

Final Destination (2000)

After Scream, all slasher movies needed a sharp hook. (And sometimes a literal one, in the case of I Know What You Did Last Summer).

Final Destination is built around the concept that if you cheat death, it will find you eventually. The film opens with Alex (Devon Sawa) getting a premonition that he'll die on a plane crash and skipping the flight — which does indeed crash.

But Death isn't done with him. It plots to kill him through an ingenious combination of means, presaging the Rube-Goldberg-style killing machines of the Saw movies. The conceit was excellent enough to power a whole franchise of Final Destination movies.

X (2022)

Our favorite slasher movie in years, this Ti West film, set during the filming of a 1970s adult movie, is heavily inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and serves as a very modern meditation on sexual guilt. While in many past slashers, young people were killed for giving in to their sexual impulses, in X, sexual repression and shame are the source of the violence.

The magnificent cast of rising stars includes Jenna Ortega and Mia Goth, who is especially good in a double role.

Goth reprised the part of one of her characters in the excellent X sequel Pearl, and plays her other character in MaXXXine, which is in theaters now.

Thanksgiving (2023)

The last film on our list just made its Netflix debut after arriving in theaters in the fall of 2023. Thanksgiving, by Eli Roth, is both a comical sendup of slasher movie tropes and a very effective slasher in its own right.

The ensemble cast includes Patrick Dempsey as a sheriff in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a town where a Black Friday riot at a local big box story has inspired a mystery man to dress up as town founder John Carver and start killing locals. You'll be thankful not to live there.

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Main image: Friday the 13th.

But First

We aren't including straight-to-video cash-ins or films promoted as sequels that don't involve any of the original creative team from the first movie.

So we are not including, for example, 2012's Easy Rider 2: The Ride Home, which didn't bring back the cast or production team from 1969's Easy Rider.

So with that, are 12 ridiculously long breaks between hit original movies and sequels, including the recent Twisters, above, and the brand-new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water: 13 Years

James Cameron's 2009's Avatar is the most successful movie of all time, raking in nearly $3 billion. But still, some people wondered, as they waited more than a decade for its sequel: Did the world want more Avatar?

The answer was absolutely yes. The 2022 Avatar: The Way of Water has earned more than $2.3 billion, and earned the third-highest grosses of any movie. (Avengers: Endgame is No. 2.)

Clearly the time Cameron spend nailing down his story and perfecting all those computer-generated images was worth it. Cameron plans several more films in the series.

The Incredibles and The Incredibles 2: 14 Years

Most kids old enough to see 2004's The Incredibles in a theater were adults by the time Pixar got around to making 2018's The Incredibles 2, the follow-up to the original superhero smash.

You know what? The Incredibles 2 was totally worth the wait. It built on the themes of the first Incredibles, expanded the world, showed us the kids growing up, and delved deeper into Bob and Helen's marital dynamics. Also, animation this beautiful takes a long time to painstakingly create.

We get it.

Chinatown to The Two Jakes: 16 years

The 1990 sequel The Two Jakes did its best to hold together the creative team behind 1974's Chinatown, one of the most respected movies of all time. It was written by Robert Towne, the brilliant Chinatown screenwriter who died earlier this month, and again starred Jack Nicholson as private investigator Jake Gittes. Other returning cast included Joe Mantell, Perry Lopez, James Hong, and, briefly, Faye Dunaway. Robert Evans once again produced.

Original Chinatown director Roman Polanski couldn't direct — not in America, anyway — because he had fled the country to avoid sentencing on a charge of unlawful sex with a minor. So at one point Towne was expected to direct, and eventually Nicholson took the helm. The film got mixed reviews and failed to impress at the box office.

Was the directing the problem? We don't think so. Sam Wasson's excellent 2020 book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood details how close the original Chinatown came to falling apart — Towne had serious trouble with the script before ultimately writing one of the all-time great screenplays. It's hard to imagine lightning striking again, 16 years after the success of the first Chinatown.

Before his death, Towne was working with David Fincher on a Chinatown prequel series.

The Hustler and The Color of Money: 25 years

Many people don't even realize that 1986's The Color of Money is a direct sequel to 1961'sThe Hustler, with Paul Newman reprising his role as "Fast Eddie" Felson, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He had previously been nominated for playing the same role in The Hustler.

Martin Scorsese directed the film, which was widely considered inferior to The Hustler at the time of its release, but has aged quite nicely. And it's fascinating to see Tom Cruise act against one of the greatest movie stars of all time, on the way to becoming another.

Both The Hustler and The Color of Money are based on the novels of the same names by Walter Tevis.

Tron and Tron Legacy: 28 years

There was a terrific Simpsons joke in 1995 in which almost no one in the cast has seen (or will admit seeing) 1982's Tron.

But the movie, a moderate box office success in the early '80s, when arcade games were red hot, had enough of a following to spawn a sequel, 2010's Tron Legacy directed by Joseph Kosinski that brought back Tron stars Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, as well as original Tron writer-director Steven Lisberger, this time as a producer.

The new Tron paid homage to the original while spinning its story fascinatingly forward, and looked arguably even cooler than the first. It also proved that Kosinski was stunningly adept at bringing 1980s film into the modern era, as we'll see in the next slide... and then see again.

Twister and Twisters: 28 years

The new Twisters is a standalone sequel with the same general subject matter — twisters — as the original 1996 Twister. Joseph Kosinski, who you may remember from the previous slide, came up with the story and was scheduled to direct before Lee Isaac Chung took the reins.

Though Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton starred in the first Twister, this one stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos as storm chasers — some of whom are more cautious than others.

Independence Day and Independence Day: Resurgence: 30 years

Was it worth the three-decade wait for a sequel to 1996's Independence Day that didn't bring back Will Smith as its star?

Even though 2016's Independence Day: Resurgence brought back Roland Emmerich, director of the original, and his co-writer, Dean Devlin, as well as stars Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman, it proved to be a critical and box office disappointment with $389.7 million worldwide.

How is that disappointing? Because the budget was around $165 million.

Coming to America and Coming 2 America: 33 years

Maybe one reason Eddie Murphy knew he could pull off this past summer's Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, three decades after Beverly Hills Cop III, is that he had already made another sequel with an even longer break between films:

2021's Coming 2 America brings back many of the stars of 1988's Coming to America, including of course Murphy as the beloved Prince (now King) Akeem.

Though most critics and audiences didn't feel it measured up to the original (what does?), it provided much needed laughter during the pandemic when it was released on Amazon Prime Video.

Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049: 35 years

The original 1982 Blade Runner, set in 2019, is a sci-fi classic that felt like a closed story, impossible to improve upon. But for 2017's Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve dared to take over from original Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, and did the original film justice in this sequel that featured K (Ryan Gosling) hunting down replicants and running eventually into the hero of the original film, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford).

Ana de Armas, in one of her breakout roles, added an element of mystery and sadness as K's A.I. hologram girlfriend, Joi.

Blade Runner 2049 was a box office letdown, but feels like a building block to Villeneuve's incredibly ambitious Dune films. It also spawned a TV series, Blade Runner: Black Lotus.

Top Gun to Top Gun: Maverick: 36 years

Joseph Kosinski's mastery of revisiting older material is most apparent with 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, which he directed. It brought back 1986's Top Gun star Tom Cruise as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, and has proven to be, so far, the biggest hit of Cruise's long career.

Earning nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, it was the second-highest-grossing film of 2022, behind Avatar: The Way of Water, and deserves much of the credit for bringing audiences back to theaters after the long pandemic shutdowns. (Avatar: The Way of Water was released a mere 13 years after the original Avatar.)

Did Tom Cruise save movies? You could make that case. And a new Top Gun is in the works.

Beetlejuice and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: 36 Years

Say this for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Everyone has aged very well since the 1988 original of half of the same name. And Michael Keaton didn't even have to worry about aging, given that his character is, well, dead.

In addition to returning Beetlejuice stars Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara, the sequel includes new additions Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, and Willem Dafoe in a new story of the Deetz family.

Audiences found it very much worth the wait: The Tim Burton comedy has earned more than $450 million on a $100 million budget.

Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Returns: 54 Years

The live-action record for the longest break between an original movie and the movie sequel goes to 1964's Mary Poppins and 2018's Mary Poppins Returns.

We know this Emily Blunt-led charmer is almost more of a reboot than a sequel, and didn't include most of the original team, many of whom were no longer with us. But we're counting it because the storyline directly continued that of Mary Poppins, the sequel brought back Dick Van Dyke from the original, and both were based on the works of author P. L. Travers.

We could have included a lot of other Disney films on this list — 101 Dalmations, Lady and the Tramp and others all had straight to video sequels. But again, we're only counting theatrical releases.

Which brings us to the longest of the ridiculously long breaks between original movies and sequels, on our next slide...

Bambi and Bambi II: 64 Years

That's right, 64 years. What changed in Bambi's life over those six-plus decades? Not much. Because 2006's Bambi II, also known Bambi and the Great Prince or Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest, takes place not after, or before, but during the events of the original 1942 Bambi.

Yep: imagine Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi went off on side mission during the original Star Wars that the movie didn't bother to mention. That's kind of what happens in Bambi II. It occurs soon after the death of Bambi's mother — a crucial, horrible moment in Bambi — when Bambi's dad, the Great Prince, realizes he's gonna have to look after Bambi all by himself.

A caveat: Bambi II was a straight-to-video release in the United States, but was released theatrically in Argentina, France, and Germany, earning about $35 million in box office.

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So he decided to make a horror movie about it.

His short, "Virgin", premiered at this year's FilmQuest, which took place from Oct. 24 to Nov. 2. He and his team — on which he served as director, writer, and producer alongside cinematographer Tommy Oceanak and co-producer Annalea Fiachi — finished the film just two days before it played at the festival in Provo, Utah.

"When I was growing up and listening to the biblical stories, I always thought the nativity story sounded like it was a scary haunted house story to me. I couldn't imagine being Mary and Joseph all alone out there while Mary was about to give birth to baby Jesus," Menon tells MovieMaker.

"The idea of what could have been going on in Joseph's mind at this time - wondering if his fiancee and the woman he loves, Mary's pregnancy is immaculate or not - was fascinating especially since this aspect of the story is very seldom analyzed or written about in detail."

Menon has a background in both Hinduism and Christianity, giving him a unique perspective on the nativity story.

"Since I grew up in a household where multiple religions were worshipped - Hinduism from my mother's side and Christianity from some part of my father's side - my relationship with religion was always complex and ambiguous as I was exposed to both religions and went to a Catholic school," he says.

The film follows Mary and Joseph, renamed Miryam (Jessica Damouni) and Yosef (Herman Gambhir), as they prepare for the birth of Jesus in a barn. Yosef is still unsure if he believes that Miryam's baby was immaculately conceived. As Miryam begs God to show Yosef a sign that she's telling the truth, the Devil (Katie Lynn Stoddard) pays them a visit.

"I wanted to make a movie that was similar in tone of The Shining, The Witch and Beyond The Hills. The idea of mixing retelling the nativity story as a haunted house movie is what I wanted to do — this would allow the themes of love and faith to be explored in an entertaining genre fashion," Menon says.

"I wanted to ensure that throughout the film you cannot tell for certain if Miryam and Yosef are being haunted or if the hauntings are the projections of Yosef's jealousy and/or Miryam's guilt."

More From Ramone Menon About 'Virgin'

In addition to using more period-accurate names for Mary and Joseph, Menon also had the script translated into Aramaic in order to make the film more realistic.

"Making the film in the Aramaic language added an extra depth and challenge as I wanted to ensure the characters and story was grounded in reality before the story is invaded with the supernatural and scares. Both the actors had to learn and rehearse their dialogue in English first and then translated it to Aramaic with the help of an Aramaic translator," he says.

Back in biblical times, around 4 B.C., women who were found guilty of committing adultery would have been stoned to death, Menon says. He wanted the gravity of whether or not Joseph believed Mary's story to be felt in the movie, because if he had not believed her, he would have had the power to have her killed.

Also Read: Karla Sofía Gascón on the Many Transitions of Emilia Pérez 

"Mary and Joseph were engaged, and then she goes to her cousin's house for four months, and she comes back pregnant. And when she comes back, Joseph apparently went into a depression, and the only reason he decided to stay with her is because otherwise she would be stoned to death, because they would think that she'd cheated on him and was unfaithful," he says. "But according to the Bible, Joseph, in one of his drunken stupors, sees the Archangel Gabriel who comes and tells him that, no, this is the Son of God."

Shot with a budget of $26,000 on a DJI Ronin 4D 4-Axis cinema camera and gimbal in 8K, Menon is in the process of developing the feature length version of "Virgin."

"My cinematographer Tommy Oceanak convinced me to shoot on DJI Ronin 4D because we could move faster while filming since we had a lot of scenes to shoot in three days and the Ronin 4D gimbal allowed us to get away without using dolly tracks and the steadicam," Menon says.

The short version of "Virgin" is currently being submitted to other film festivals, with the feature length version scheduled to being shooting in early 2025.

Main Image: Jessica Damouni as Miryam in "Virgin" courtesy of Ramone Menon

Keep in mind, this movie came out 22 years ago, so some of these characters have aged better than others. That being said, we've used the power of Energico to rank them according to our personal opinions.

Admittedly, The Master of Disguise was not very well received by critics back in 2002 — in fact, it was absolutely ripped to shreds, standing at just a paltry 1% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. But some might say it deserves some more respect than it got. Say what you will about this movie, but in the words of Pistachio Disguisey, it's "so crazy, it just might work."

Here are 15 of Dana Carvey's characters from The Master of Disguise, ranked from worst to best.

15. Prince Lamijama

Alright, let's get this one out of the way up front.

Yes, Prince Lamijama was a tad racist. Dana Carvey was indeed in brownface here as an Indian snake charmer who plays Kenny G's "Songbird" on a plastic recorder to coax his pet snake, Buttercup, out of her basket.

This character definitely aged like milk, earning it the lowest spot on our list.

14. The Trojan Man

Another blink-and-you'd-miss-it moment, but still, it's a funny one.

While Grandfather (Harold Gould) is explaining the history of the Disguisey family, he reveals to his grandson Pistachio — that's Carvey's main character in the movie, the guy underneath all the disguises — that the Disguiseys have been using their powers of Energico, the force that allows them to transform into anyone or anything at any time, for generations.

They go back to Europe in ancient times, when thieves were trying to steal valuable artifacts. Carvey plays this Trojan soldier-looking man pretending to be a statue who hilariously pokes a thief in the butt with his sword to stop him from making off with some sort of bronze vase.

13. Abraham Lincoln

The Disguiseys were around in the mid-1800s as well, when they helped Abraham Lincoln add some pizazz to his speeches on the campaign trail.

This one is pretty funny because it's just Dana Carvey in an Abraham Lincoln costume dancing to "I Like To Move It" by Reel 2 Reel.

12. Cow Pie Man

This one is a pretty standard poop joke, but it gets points for thinking outside the box. To escape Devlin Bowman's (Brent Spiner) henchman, he hides in a field of cows as a literal cow pie. The henchman step on his poop mask by accident, leaving a boot print.

When Pistachio, as Cow Pie Man, stands up wearing a suit made of grass, it's so unexpectedly absurd that it draws a laugh — at least out of some of us.

11. Cherry Pie Man

Similar to Cow Pie Man, the aforementioned Cherry Pie Man emerges from, you guessed it, a cherry pie. Covered in slippery cherries, Pistachio evades the henchman because he's literally too slick to catch.

Bonus points for the moment in this scene when he starts firing cherries out of his mouth like a machine gun, hitting one henchman directly in the forehead like a gunshot wound in a gangster movie.

10. Pistachio Disguisey

And now, we come to Pistachio himself. A nerdy Italian waiter working in his family's restaurant, Pistachio isn't very remarkable — until he learns about his secret power of disguise. His call to action is his mother (Edie McClurg) and his father, Fabrizzio (James Brolin), getting kidnapped by villain Devlin Bowman (Brent Spiner).

Pistachio is funny because he's so weird. He wears underwear on his head, makes a beard out of shaving cream, and worships his mother's cannolis. He's also great at impressions, from the southern couple whose accents he imitates at the restaurant ("Are you mockin' my husband? Cause you better not be") to Donkey from Shrek.

One of Pistachio's most memorable lines is, "That's crazy. So crazy, it just might work."

9. Braces Girl

This one never fails to crack me up. In a brief scene at the beginning when Pistachio is just learning how to put on disguises, he disguises himself (not very convincingly) as a girl with braces and long red pig tails.

It's enough to con a teenage boy, however, who hands him a rose, making Pistachio blush.

8. The Toy Salesman (Tro-Bubbles)

Technically, the toy salesman only appears in the credits and in the deleted scenes, but he's so memorable that you'd think he was in the actual movie.

He appears in a toy store scene opposite Jennifer (played by Jennifer Esposito) as Pistachio's assistant and love interest. Devlin Bowman asks the toy salesman to show him some toys, so he pulls out a yoyo, but he can't get it to work. "Whoopsy cadabra, looks more like a no-yo!" the toy salesman yells, before mumbling incoherently while waving the string in Bowman's face. "Easy now, I don't want any tro-bubble!"

What's funny about him is mostly the costume featuring a handlebar mustache, a top hat, and, yes, a fat suit, which renders Dana Carvey almost unrecognizable.

7. Quint From Jaws

Carvey does a pretty spot-on impression of Robert Shaw's shark hunter character Quint from Jaws. Rowing on a pond in a row boat called Orca, he starts mumbling about a great white shark and calling the henchman who are after him "my wee Spanish ladies."

Then he tells a story that's kind of like the wreck of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, except it inexplicably involves an ice cream man.

"Ever seen a shark's eyes, chief? Kinda like doll's eyes, all black and lifeless like," Carvey says as Quint. "Twenty-nine kids go in the water, 22 kids come out of the water. The ice cream man'll take the rest. April the 9th, half past 4 p.m."

6. George W. Bush

At the end of the movie, Pistachio disguises himself as George W. Bush. Carvey famously played George Bush Sr. on Saturday Night Live and even had a friendship with the former president, but he does an impression of the younger George here. And it's hilariously spot-on.

In his signature Texas accent, Carvey repeats the iconic line from earlier in the movie, complete with hand gestures: "This is what you're doing," he says, opening and closing his hand like a mouth talking.

"This is what I want you to do," he says, clamping his hand shut, like a person shutting their yapper.

5. Terry Suave

A detective from Scotland Yard, Terry Suave attempts to rescue Jennifer by request of the British government as part of Operation Minty Hippo.

What is Operation Minty Hippo, you ask? Well, I could tell you, but it would be a real "ding dong diggy diggy ding wad, hut one, hut two, I need a Charleston Chew. Get it? Got it? Doubt it."

Anyways, Terry Suave never gets old.

3. Constable Mueller

From the Bavarian Tax Authority, Constable Mueller comes as another rescue attempt for Jennifer.

Claiming that she owed a substantial amount of back taxes from her time at the University of Hidelstrüdel, the Constable is funny because of his German accent, his goofy little laugh, and his giant fake teeth.

But don't worry, he's not going to bite.

3. Mr. Peru

Okay, this one is pure gold. Carvey does an impression of Al Pacino's Scarface character Tony Montana in this scene at Devlin Bowman's party. Wearing a silk shirt unbuttoned to reveal excessive chest hair and waving around a shrunken head, he says, "Say hello to my little friend."

Then, after heckling a waiter serving hors d'oeuvres — "with your attitude, they ought to be called crabby cakes," Mr. Peru starts dancing, quite impressively I might add, to "Conga" by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine.

Is this bit a little questionable in today's age, considering that Carvey is neither Peruvian nor Cuban? Perhaps. But then we'd have to come for Al Pacino, too.

2. Gammy Num Nums

Gammy Num Nums has me in stitches every single time I watch this scene. She's just Carvey in an old lady costume, but her weirdly intense flirting with Devlin Bowman is just so absurd that it's hilarious.

"My, aren't you a tall drink of water? And I just love MOISTURE," Gammy says.

After assuring him that his "desires" are perfectly normal, Bowman says he's not interested. To which Gammy fires back:

"Well guess what, Backstreet Boy? This is one girl scout that isn't content to be the Malcolm in your middle!"

1. The Turtle Guy

Of course, this is Carvey's most memorable bit from The Master of Disguise. I fear that the phrase "Am I not turtley enough for the turtle club?" will live rent free in my head for the rest of my life.

Perhaps what makes this scene so enduring is the sheer absurdity of it. A turtle suit? With a bald cap and a prosthetic upper lip like a turtle's? Couldn't get any weirder, except it could — the turtle guy also bites a man's nose clean off and then flings it back onto his face as if nothing happened.

But my favorite line is this thinly veiled threat: "What if harm found it's way to you? Terrible terrible turtle harm?"

Long live the turtle guy.

Honorable Mentions

There are a handful of other characters who seem to have been cut out of the movie, so they just made it into the end credits or in deleted scenes. Among them are Groucho Marx ("How that elephant got into my pajamas, I'll never know"), Bob Ross, a dinosaur, Spartacus ("Unleash hell"), Forrest Gump, a Frenchman who pretends to be a queen, a ventriloquist dummy, and Dracula.

There's also Henchman Steve (pictured above) towards the end, who doesn't really count because he's not played by Dana Carvey in disguise, but by actor Mitch Silpa. It's the scene when Pistachio's disguise is given away by his Cherry Pie Man shoes.

All of these honorable mentions are funny, in my opinion — but then again, I love this movie more than most people. You're mileage may vary.

And we should also mention that if you want to watch The Master of Disguise, it's streaming for free on Tubi or for purchase on YouTube, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video.

Liked This List of Master of Disguise Characters, Ranked?

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But that’s not the complex part. Emilia tries to undo some of the substantial harm she did as a cartel boss by becoming a philanthropist who locates the remains of people who have been killed by cartels. Emilia is the woman she has always dreamed of being. 

Also? For all the drama, it’s also a comedy. And a musical. Which meant Gascón had to sing, as both Manitas and Emilia.

The film asks questions about identity that go far beyond gender identity. Can Emilia really become a new person? And have a new life? 

Gascón pressed director Jacques Audiard on Emilia’s reasons for wanting to transition before agreeing to accept the role.

“Does Manitas just want to run away from justice, or is it that he is trying to become their true self?” Gascón asked. 

Audiard wrote the screenplay with collaborators Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi, and Léa Mysius, based on a single chapter in journalist and author Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute. 

The chapter is about transitioning, but Gascón, herself a trans woman, felt the script’s first draft needed to better explain who Emilia is.

“It would have been a joke if we did not make their motives clear,” Gascón tells MovieMaker. 

“It would have been a big mistake, but I think we made the message clear. The comments and the feedback we have received makes it seem like there is no doubt about it.” 

Even as Emilia tries to right wrongs, one uncovered body at a time, her history is unchanged. 

And the jealous, controlling, and violent person she was before always threatens to surface.

Emilia Pérez and the Two Ways to Make Movies

In May, all four leads in Emilia Pérez —  Gascón, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz — shared the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Gascón became the first trans woman to win the award. 

Before her Cannes win, Gascón had a long career in Spanish and Latin American film and TV. She starred in the Telemundo series El señor de los cielos in 2014, when her season won the first International Emmy Award for a foreign-language program. 

Gascón also co-starred in 2013’s We Are the Nobles, the blockbuster Mexican film about three spoiled children who are cut off from their family fortune and forced to get jobs.

“In the words of The Noble Family’s director Gaz Alazraki, there are two ways to make a film: you can shoot a film for festivals or you can shoot a movie to make money,” she says. 

“It is rare for both to happen, but when it does, it is wonderful. The Noble Family really connected with the audience and then it took off.”

Emilia Pérez did very well with film festivals: Besides Cannes, it was programmed for the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival, among others. But Gascón hopes its streaming on Netflix means it will resonate far beyond the festival circuit. 

Also Read: Gladiator II Costume Designer Janty Yates on Dressing Denzel Washington — and Ping-Pong

“I actually want the public to see it because I cannot tell people what to feel or what to think. I think it’s creating a precedent in the history of cinema because Emilia Pérez transcends the screen,” she says. 

“It has an important message that is for a wider audience.”

Karla Sofia Gascón on Song and Dance

Saldaña plays Rita, an overqualified and undervalued lawyer who goes from representing criminals to helping Emilia transition and develop the non-profit. 

Saldaña also does much of the dancing and singing in the movie. But that still left plenty of singing and dancing for Gascón, who found it especially challenging.

“You cannot sing the same song 45 times and they all sound great,” she says. “It was challenging for me because I’m not a singer and I had to sing in two different voices with two different registers.”

One register belongs to Manitas, and the other to Emilia. 

To master the songs, Gascón recorded them in a studio before the shoot, then live on set, and again after the shoot concluded. 

She’s had experience dubbing movies for international distribution, so the re-recording process came naturally. 

“I actually love being able to create two different voices and changing those voices,” she says. “That was really beautiful.”

The section of Emilia Pérez in which Gascón plays Manitas marks her first time playing a male-presenting character since she transitioned in real life

Gascón wants to play characters who are as far away as possible from her, and Manitas fit the bill.

“Yes, it’s the first time, and I think it’s not the last. Playing Manitas was joy,” she says. “It was fun to sit in the makeup chair and have the prosthetics applied.

“I understand that for other trans people, it would be hard to play a character that looks like they were before. But for me, it wasn’t hard. It was fun.”

Emilia Pérez is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Emilia Pérez. Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Pérez in Emilia Pérez. Photo credit: Shanna Besson/PAGE 114 - WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS - PATHÉ FILMS - FRANCE 2 CINÉMA © 2024.

“You just walk down any street. Trajan’s Column is just filled with legionaries, and generals, and peasants, and you can just get virtually everything off that,” she says. 

The column, which commemorates Roman Emperor Trajan’s victories, was completed in A.D. 113, fairly close to the time when Gladiator and its sequel, set a generation later, take place. Nearly 100 feet high, it includes 2,662 figures in the dress of the time.

Yates’ emphasis on going straight to the source is one of the qualities that has made her director Ridley Scott’s go-to costume designer since Gladiator. He hired her after she worked on one of his son Jake Scott’s films, Plunkett & Macleane, in 1999, and Gladiator won her the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. 

The British designer started out in fashion, and broke into film with 1981’s Quest for Fire, a prehistoric adventure that required her to cut pieces of fur for a cast playing some of the earliest humans.

She has worked on 16 Ridley Scott films, including Hannibal, The Martian, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and the recent House of Gucci and Napoleon. She was especially excited about Gladiator II because it reunites her with Denzel Washington, with whom she worked on 2007’s American Gangster.

She says that one key to costume design is making sure that actors are very happy with their costumes: “I always say, happy actors, happy performance, happiness all around,” she explains.

She’s also very accustomed to navigating disagreements between actors and directors about how a character should look, joking, “I’m the ping-pong ball.”

She recalls that Washington was especially exacting about his look for Gladiator II. The two-time Oscar winner plays Macrinus, a character Yates describes as “very ambitious, and very quite mean, actually.” She detailed one particularly long fitting at Washington’s home.

“He wanted this jewelry and that jewelry, and he didn’t care how much it cost because he’d pay for it. And so I was just throwing jewelry onto the outfits on the floor. It went on for five hours. And then he said, ‘Oh, forget what I said about jewelry. I like your jewelry, it’s fine,’” says Yates.

The new film follows young gladiator Lucius (Paul Mescal) as he is forced to fight in the Colosseum — another monument that remains standing in modern-day Rome — and stand up to tyrants including Emperor Geta (Joseph Quinn). The cast also includes Pedro Pascal and Connie Nielsen, returning as Lucilla from the first Gladiator.

Also Read: Who Is Denzel Washington's Gladiator II Character, Macrinus?

Yates calls Nielsen “a joy — and for me, she’s a clotheshorse.” Yates aimed for a “very, very simple” look at first, inspired by designers like Halston, who was known for minimalist, elegant designs. 

“I thought it was genius… and it was a perfect look, but Ridley didn’t like it. He wanted more and more detail. A lot more embroidery, a lot more of this, a lot more of that. So it’s fine. We just went back. You can never guarantee that what you think is right is going to be what he likes.”

The Challenges of Gladiator II

Gladiator II was an especially hard film to finish because it was interrupted by the strikes last year. But some things were easier than on the first Gladiator, she said.

“We were up at two or three in the morning, every morning, fitting 3,000 extras on the first one. Now we only had, maximum, probably 500 or 600.”

Another advantage: Roman style didn’t shift too dramatically from the time period of Gladiator to the time of Gladiator II: “You know, fashions didn’t change that much over 20 years,” she says. “Not like now.” That meant she could re-use much of the knowledge she accrued in her research for Gladiator.

Also, for the new film she worked with David Crossman, an expert on military costumes with whom she most recently worked on last year’s Napoleon: ​​”He looked after all the gladiators and praetorians and all the Roman legionnaires,” she says. He also worked on Mescal’s costumes.

“So that was a huge weight off my shoulders, really, because I’d done them all in the first one. And so I was able to possibly spend a lot more time on Lucilla’s clothing, on Denzel’s clothing… We had lots of dancing girls and all sorts of characters that Ridley likes to put into his movies to work on. We were not short of work.”

Janty Yates’ Advice to Costume Designers

 MovieMaker spoke with Yates at the SCAD Lacoste Film Festival, held by the Savannah College of Art and Design, at the school’s campus in the medieval French village of Lacoste. SCAD students focus on fields from fashion to film, and Yates imparted her experience with both.

Yates, who received SCAD’s Lifetime Achievement in Costume Design Award during the festival, gave the students some frank advice that applies to all careers in the arts: “Designers sleep under their cutting tables when they don’t have anywhere else to sleep,” she said.

She advised them “to be very willing” to do what they need to do to break into the industry.

“For the first couple of years, do it. Say yes to everything. Run everywhere. Do as much drawing as you can. … Just always be there, willing to learn. And also be willing to not earn a lot of money. Give yourself periods of time trying to save up, give yourself a period of time to pay for the next job, et cetera. 

“So it’s not very cheerful advice, but it does work.”

She also suggested that even when money is tight, beginners should assemble collections of clothing.

“I would, in your own way, create your own collection,” she said. “If you can, create one or two, if not three collections.”

Gladiator II arrives in theaters Friday, from Paramount Pictures.

Main image: Denzel Washington as Macrinus in Gladiator II. Paramount Pictures.

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad creator always said the show would turn Mr. Chips into Scarface, and boy did he make good on that promise. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) earned our sympathy in the excellent pilot of Breaking Bad, as Gilligan skillfully piled on a set of circumstances that made us root hard for Walt: his financial struggles, his spoiled students, his career disappointments, other kids making fun of his disabled son.

By the final season of Breaking Bad, Walter White was very much on top — of the Albuquerque drug trade, and of the world.

But even if you could justify his murder of his criminal rivals, it was hard to forgive him for his role hooking countless people on incredibly strong meth, or his willingness to jeopardize the lives of innocent people — including children — in his quest for control.

Veep

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is outstanding as the mercurial, selfish, cowardly Selina Meyer, a politician who doesn't really believe in anything.

The hilarious joy in Veep lies in watching her and her capable but callow staff desperately try to protect themselves and their status without doing anything courageous that might actually, you know, help people.

It feels suspiciously like how government actually works, too much of the time, and it's cathartic to see it play out onscreen instead of behind closed doors.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Larry David's character on Curb, who is also named Larry David, is the gold standard of unlikable lead characters. He's a self-centered, gleefully rude, extremely rich guy who will argue with people over tiny amounts of money or mild inconveniences rather than just counting his blessings.

And yet: He's usually right. There's a social expectation that the extremely well off will have the dignity and grace to let certain things go, and Larry's pettiness never fails to make us laugh.

We wouldn't want to hang out with him, but we love watching him,

Dexter

You know someone is an unlikable lead character when being a serial killer isn't his main problem. At least Dexter is a fairly moral serial killer — a serial killer who goes after other serial killers.

Dexter's problem is his prickly, uncomfortable energy in all aspects of life, and general lack of feeling. Remember when his wife, Rita, was murdered, and he just shuttered her kids off to their grandparents?

That was good for the show — no one wanted to watch Dexter juggle murders with being a stepdad — but it was also just weird.

The Idol

We didn't like either of the two lead characters in The Idol, but we were in the small group of people who really did like the show. Of course we weren't supposed to like Tedros, the sleazy cult leader played by The Weeknd, but we also didn't find much admirable about Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) the singing star he preyed upon who turned out, at the end, to have maybe been in control all along.

Both had rather grimy, selfish goals, and we didn't care if they achieved them. Yet we loved the show for its excess and willingness to go to darkly absurd places, and realize that Depp and The Weeknd were admirably open to being unsympathetic and unlikable lead characters so that others could shine, like Suzanna Son's Chloe, Troye Sivan's Xander, Rachel Sennot's Leia, and especially Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Destiny.

We're sorry HBO let the show go after one hypnotic season.

Schitt's Creek

Very rich people are generally unlikable lead characters — even when they're knocked into desperate financial straits, like the Rose family of Schitt's Creek.

Their haughtiness, helplessness and general ineptitude made them all hard to root for — yet we loved watching their misadventures.

Such was the comic brilliance of father and son co-creators Dan Levy and his father, Eugene Levy, and their co-stars Catherine O'Hara and Annie Murphy.

The Phil Silvers Show

Phil Silvers was perhaps TV's first unlikable lead characters: His Sgt. Bilko was known for tricking his underlings into doing his work for him, or for outright conning them — and others.

It's no surprise that Larry David has cited him as an influence, crediting his Bilko character with "saying and doing things that no one else would say and do, nasty things — being unlikable and being deceptive."

All in the Family

Archie Bunker, created by Norman Lear and played by Carroll O'Connor, was groundbreaking in his unlikability — Lear gave him enough rope, every episode, to lay bare the ignorance of his narrow-mindedness and bigotry.

The tension between Archie and his family — especially son-in-law Meathead (Rob Reiner) made All in the Family fascinating and endlessly funny — would Archie ever learn?

The show refused to turn Archie into a clueless cartoon or an instrument for preaching at people. He was complicated but capable of change, and he and his family loved each other despite their disagreements.

Girls

Lena Dunham deliberately crafted her Girls character, Hannah, as frequently insufferable: She's spoiled, initially relying on her parents for money, yet often overconfident to the point of pretentiousness.

We would hate to be in a meeting with Hannah, listening to her espouse eye-rolling pronouncements like the classic "I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation."

Yet we loved the show, because of its willingness to be blunt and honest about its unlikable lead character — and all characters — flaws and all.

The Sopranos

Tony Soprano opened the door to countless modern antiheroes, from Walter White to his HBO companions on Curb, Veep and Girls. He's selfish, violent, and disloyal to his friends, family and mistresses.

But he's also fascinating. Are his occasional bouts of generosity and good sense examples of his better self shining through? Or just a sociopath's attempt to seem like a normal person? We'll never know.

James Gandolfini did a magnificent job of presenting a character who was oddly sympathetic and reprehensible at the same time — all the time.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

One of our favorite things about It's Always Sunny is how incredibly willing the leads are to be reprehensible. They're dopey, lazy and self-righteous — but always think they're smarter than anyone else. They have no loyalty to anyone, especially each other.

They never learn anything, and only change with the times when they think it will be to their sexual advantage, as when Dennis (Glenn Howerton) went progressive in an effort to court millennial women.

And yet: This is one of the funniest shows ever on television, and the longest-running live-action sitcom. It's almost like they're on to something.

We also love that Always Sunny creator Rob McElhenney is such a huge fan of the next show on our list that he even did a cameo on it. The shows have a lot in common in their willingness to tell great stories without worrying about likability.

Game of Thrones

With very few exceptions (Jon Snow, Sansa, Grey Worm, Samuel Tarly among them), every Game of Thrones character had serious flaws. No one proved this more than Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) who went from being arguably the most admirable character on the show to one of its deadliest villains.

We rooted hard for her at the start, then watched her transform from a queen of dragons and breaker of chains into a brutal despot, as nasty as some of the ones she had dethroned.

Lots of people hate that about Game of Thrones, but to them we say: Did you watch Game of Thrones? Her transformation is a perfect expression of the shows ideas about the dangers of absolute power, and the up-and-down nature of life itself.

Liked Our List of TV Shows With Unlikable Lead Characters?

You may also like this list of TV Characters Who Deserved to Die, featuring some of the unlikable lead characters on this list.

The Terminator Came to James Cameron in a Dream

“The Terminator came from a dream that I had while I was sick with a fever in a cheap pensione in Rome in 1981. It was the image of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire. When I woke up, I began sketching on the hotel stationery," the film's writer-director, James Cameron, told the British Film Institute.

“The first sketch I did showed a metal skeleton cut in half at the waist, crawling over a tile floor, using a large kitchen knife to pull itself forward while reaching out with the other hand. In a second drawing, the character is threatening a crawling woman. Minus the kitchen knife, these images became the finale of The Terminator almost exactly.”

The Terminator Script Didn't Grab Arnold Schwarzenegger at First

The terrific new book The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage, written by Nick de Semlyen, reveals that Schwarzenegger was not initially impressed by the Terminator script.

"Still, urged to take a good look at the script by his girlfriend Maria, who had been hooked by it when it arrived at their home, he agreed to meet its writer -director for lunch," de Semlyen writes.

Maria, of course, was Maria Shriver, to whom Schwarzenegger was married from 1986 to 2021.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Was Originally in the Running to Play Kyle Reese

When Schwarznegger was first approached about the film, he was in the running to play the heroic Kyle Reese, the role that ultimately went to Michael Biehn.

“It was a total coincidence because I didn’t even try out for Terminator,” Schwarzenegger once told Howard Stern. “I was trying to be Kyle Reese, and during the lunch when I met with James Cameron, the director, I kept talking all the time about The Terminator.”

OJ Simpson Could Have Been The Terminator

Studio chief Mike Medavoy wanted the Buffalo Bills star in the role of a cold-blooded killing machine.

We'll let you handle the joke here.

Medavoy later explained to EW: "At the time, O.J. Simpson had one of those commercials for Hertz where he jumped over a counter and ran to get a rental car. It was all of that athletic stuff, which I thought the Terminator should have."

Arnold Schwarzenegger Says 131 Words — Total — in The Terminator

Three of them, of course, are "I'll be back."

Don't believe us? Watch this.

Linda Hamilton Wanted to Do Shakespeare

"I was going to be a Shakespearean actress when I came out of the Strasberg studio in New York. And so I wasn’t as excited about The Terminator as my people were," Hamilton told EW. Maybe I was a little snobby. I thought, 'Oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m not sure about that.'"

But later, when she watched him work, she remembered thinking to herself: “Hmm, this might work.”

She added to EW: "There was something so utterly robotic and terrifying about him. I realized that we were doing something new here, and all of the sudden I believed."

Sarah Connor's Age

The movie never mentions Sarah Connor's age. Though different Terminator movies have since given her different dates of birth, the original film's script states that she is only 19 years old.

Specifically, it says she "is 19, pretty in a flawed, accessible way," whatever that means.

Could have just left it at "pretty."

Shooting During Shooting

James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Biehn blew off steam during the shooting of the movie by... shooting.

Here they are at a shooting range with John Milius, who directed Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian.

The Terminator Was Defeated by Ralph Macchio, and Nerds

The film did fine at the box office, but it wasn't in the Top 20 movies of 1984 — it ranked No. 21 domestically, behind movies like Revenge of the Nerds, Breakin', Bachelor Party, and Red Dawn. The top movie of 1984?

Domestically, it was Ghostbusters, followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, and The Karate Kid. (Internationally, Beverly Hills Cop was the No. 1 movie, followed by the others listed, in the same order.)

Yep: The Karate Kid trounced The Terminator. But no one was complaining, because The Terminator was made for just $6.4 million, and earned $34 million domestically, and $38 million total.

It Found Its Audience on VHS

The Terminator quickly gained a VHS following: It was the No. 2 VHS rental of 1985. (Though again lost to that infernal Ralph Macchio, whose film The Karate Kid was No. 1.

Partly because of the original film's huge home-video following, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was No. 1 at the 1991 box office. And a franchise was born.

Thanks for Reading These Terminator Behind the Scenes Stories

You might also like this list of the Best Arnold Schwarzenegger Movies. We ranked The Terminator pretty high.

Main image: The Terminator.

All images from Orion pictures except where noted.

"AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare," Affleck explained at the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit.

His thoughts came in response to a question posed by CNBC Squawk on the Street co-anchor David Faber.

"Is it a benefit, or is it a real threat? Is it possible that a Netflix could say, you know, we're going to do our own, excuse me, James Bond thing out there with a bunch of actors that are completely recreated for this market or that market?" Faber asked.

Then Affleck launched into an incredibly smart take on the limitations and capabilities of AI.

"A., That's not possible now. B., Will it be possible in the future? Highly unlikely. C., Movies will be one of the last things, if everything gets replaced, to be replaced by AI," Affleck says.

"The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct that is something that currently entirely alludes AI's capability, and I think will, for a meaningful period of time.

"What AI is going to do is going to dis-intermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking, that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people want to make Good Will Huntings, to go out and make it."

Then Affleck went on to explain his view that AI has the ability to imitate but not create new art.

"Look AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make Stickley furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That's how large video models, large language models, basically work. A library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it the context, right? But they're just cross pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created," Affleck says.

"Not yet," Faber countered. But Affleck maintained his point.

"Not yet, and really, in order to do that, look — craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop. And I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for AI to learn, because it's taste. And also lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality," he says.

Also Read: Ben Affleck Turned Down a Pitch for a Good Will Hunting Sequel

Affleck is an actor, writer, and director known for starring in and co-writing the Academy Award winning film Good Will Hunting opposite Matt Damon, with whom he co-founded production company Artists Equity. Affleck has also directed films including The Town, Argo, and Air.

So basically, Affleck isn't worried about the parts of the movie business that he's a part of — but he does fear for the visual effects industry.

More From Ben Affleck on AI and the Future of the Movie Industry

"I wouldn't like to be in the visual effects business. They're in trouble, because what costs a lot of money is now going to cost a lot less, and it's going to hammer that space, and it already is. And maybe it shouldn't take a thousand people to render something. But it's not going to replace human beings making films," he says.

"It may make your background more convincing. It can change the color of your shirt. It can fix mistakes that you've made. It can make it, you know, you might be able to get two seasons of House of the Dragon in a year instead of one. And if that happens, according to macroeconomics, in, you know, cultures where there are basically oligopolies competing, what should happen is with the same demand and the same spend is they should just make more shows. Which, you should have the same spend, and now you can just watch more episodes."

Then Affleck explained his hopes for AI to replace the revenue stream Hollywood lost from DVDs when streaming came around.

"Eventually, AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession where you could say, 'I'll pay $30 and can you make me a 45 minute episode where, like, Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewie.' And it'll do it, and it'll be a little janky and a little bit weird, but it'll know their set, it'll know those actors. And it will remix it, in effect, and it will do that," he says.

"That's the value, in my view, long term of AI for consumers. Which is eventually my hope for AI, is that it's an additional revenue stream that can replace DVD, which took 15 to 20% out of the economy of filmmaking."

He continued: "There should be negotiated rights and visual rights that say, if you wanted — because people want to make five minute, 30-second TikTok videos where they look like the Avengers. Well, great. Just like you used to be able to buy your Iron Man costume at the store, you're going to buy your Iron Man pack, and you and your buddies are gonna look like Iron Man and Hawkeye on Twitch. That's what's gonna really happen."

You can watch Affleck's full remarks below.

Main Image: Ben Affleck at CNBC's 2024 Defining Alpha investor summit, CNBC.

Here are some Goldfinger behind the scenes images of Bond, his friends, and his foes.

Shine On

Goldfinger is perhaps most famous for the demented way that the titular villain kills his aide-de-camp, Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton: He kills her by having her painted gold, which leads to her death by skin suffocation.

Above, Sean Connery ensures that the real Eaton isn’t suffering any skin suffocation despite her gold body paint. She seems fine.

Sharp-Dressed Man

For once, a Bond girl isn’t wearing the most revealing costume. Here’s Connery with Eaton and Bond creator Ian Fleming, who died the month before Goldfinger was released.

Roles in the Hay

Connery and Honor Blackman, who plays, uh, Ms. Galore, rehearse an infamous fight scene in the Goldfinger behind the scenes image above.

We’re not sure if we can safely type Ms. Galore’s first name, as our stories are syndicated to lots of different media platforms with lots of understandably sensitive filters.

True Love

Sean Connery as James Bond with his true love: His iconic Aston Martin, one of the all-time most beautiful movie cars.

A fully restored Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 sold for $6.4 million in 2019.

Auction house RM Sotheby’s said at the time that it included such features as “hydraulic over-rider rams on the bumpers, a Browning .30 caliber machine gun in each fender, wheel-hub mounted tire-slashers, a raising rear bullet-proof screen, an in-dash radar tracking scope, oil, caltrop and smoke screen dispensers, revolving license plates, and a passenger-seat ejection system.”

Odd Job

Harold Sakata, who played Oddjob, clowns around on set and shows he’s no bad guy behind the scenes. 

The Fall Guy

From left to right, actor-stuntman Bob Simmons, who played Bond in the gunbarrel sequence, Connery, and Nadja Regin, who played Bonita.

The gunbarrel sequence, of course, it the opening segment in the film in which Bond, wearing a hat, walks across the screen in profile and suddenly turns to fire his gun toward the audience as the Bond theme plays.

Make-Up

Eaton’s gold paint reportedly took 90 minutes to apply, but it was worth it: Her gold-painted image graced the cover of LIFE magazine as part of the promotional campaign for the film, the third of the 27 Bond movies.

If you’re a collector, her issue of LIFE is the November 6, 1964 issue.

She’s being painted above by makeup artist Paul Rabiger, who also worked on Bond films including Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and From Russia With Love.

Good as Gold

Shirley Eaton is all smiles, even covered in gold paint.

Eaton, a British actress also known for the Carry On films, retired from acting in 1969 to devote herself to family, but in 1999 she release her autobiography, perfecly titled Golden Girl.

It was a bestseller, and she went on to release three more books.

In the Club

Harold Sakata as Oddjob and Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger.

Orson Welles was among those considered to play Goldfinger, a gold tycoon who is obsessed with the soft metal, but he wanted too much money. (Shouldn’t that have made him even more qualified for the role?)

Fröbe, a German actor, was dubbed by actor Michael Collins, continuing something of a Bond tradition: Ursula Andress was similarly subbed in the original Bond film, Dr. No.

From Russia With Love

Tania Mallet, who played Jill’s sister, Tilly Masterson, poses for an amateur photographer named Sean Connery.

Mallet, and English actress and model who sometimes signed her name with two Ts, had an origin story straight out of a Bond movie: She was a descendent of Russian aristocrats on her mother’s side.

She had auditioned for the role of Tatiana Romanova in the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, but the filmmakers passed because of her British accent.

How Sean Connery Became Bond

Ian Fleming, left, didn’t initially think Connery resembled the super-suave elegant James Bond of his novels, who of course resembled Fleming himself.

But he soon saw the appeal of the Scottish actor, and in one of his novels after Connery’s casting, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he even “responded to Connery’s cinematic Bond by putting some Scottish blood into him,” as Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in the new book Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an excerpt of which you can read here.

Liked These Goldfinger Behind the Scenes Photos?

You’ll probably also love These Images From Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, featuring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress. You might also like this video of 10 Gen X Film Stars Gone Too Soon.

Main image: An insert of Sean Connery and Margaret Nolan in Goldfinger. United Artists.