Filmland - Severance

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As I write this, it’s the weekend of The Belko Experiment’s premiere.  This new dark horror-comedy from the director of Wolf Creek and the writer of Slither and Guardians of the Galaxy promises a playful yet gory dive into a blend of office politics, gladiatorial combat, and the corporate culture of backstabbing and inhumanity on the way to the top.  

This kind of subject has always been fertile ground for horror.  The idea of corporate greed as culture and betrayal as the order of the day was a core theme in John Carpenter’s They Live, and the idea of the evil, greedy, monolithic corporation exploiting its workforce has been a cornerstone of the Alien franchise since the beginning. 

Corporate culture was also obviously on the minds of the people behind 2006’s Severance, a British-German horror-comedy about a team building exercise that ends up murderous.  One look at the poster tells you everything you need to know about this flick, to the point you have to wonder if The Belko Experiment was somehow inspired by this film.  So, to mark The Belko Experiment’s return to this fertile genre, let’s take a trip in the way-back machine and check out the movie that got there first.    

Static Thoughts - The Thin Blue Line

Tonight marks the return of one of the more eclectic and bizarre installments of our new “Golden Age” of Television: Brooklyn 99.  When Brooklyn 99 premiered a couple years ago it was quickly treated as the next thing in sitcoms and heralded by a lot of critics as something you needed to be watching to be in the know.  However, 3 years later the show holds a very different place in the television landscape as it’s struggled to define its identity as a lighthearted and non-serious cop comedy in the wake of growing concerns over police misconduct and brutality.  Maybe I’ll dedicate more time to Brooklyn 99’s metamorphosis in a future review but for right now, the show’s shift in focus rather than risk getting into more serious fair reminds me of a highly underrated British comedy starring Rowan Atkinson and David Haig entitled The Thin Blue Line. 

Static Thoughts - Jack of All Trades

This has been a very strange but good year for nerdy comebacks, but none stranger than Ash vs. Evil Dead.  Ash vs. Evil Dead is a TV show sequel to the cult classic film series by movie geek turned blockbuster hit maker Sam Raimi.  The fact that Ash vs. Evil Dead exists at all is a miracle given that it’s a big budget premium show made out of a no-budget 1981 horror flick but the fact that’s it’s actually really good seems like some kind of masterful alchemy or magic.  A big part of its charm definitely lies with Bruce Campbell, lord of sleaze and cheese whose career also started with the original Evil Dead.  What’s impressive and still kind of shows through is that Campbell wasn’t really an actor pre-Evil Dead, just a friend that director Sam Raimi got to star in the movie. 

That friendship has always proved strong and lucrative for both men, so in the ‘90s when Raimi hit it big as a TV producer with shows like Xena and Hercules he decided to give his old friend Bruce another shot with the starring role in a historical comedy called Jack of All Trades.  Now that Bruce Campbell is back in a leading role on our televisions and his place in our collective hearts has been reaffirmed I figure it’s a good time to look back on Jack of All Trades. 

Static Thoughts - Blackadder Goes Forth

Edited by Robert Beach 

On this day 97 years ago, the guns of World War 1 finally fell silent as on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month the Great War came to a close. The war had a total military and civilian casualty report of close to 38 million people, owing mainly to the sausage grinder that was trench warfare in the bulk of the war.  For literal years, the trenches would sit ideally as generals ordered their men into suicidal headline rushes across No Man’s Land. By all accounts, it was one of the cruelest and most nightmarish experiences of “combat” in human history.

who would’ve thought there was a comedy in all that?  

Well, it turns out geniuses thought that because in 1989 Richard Curtis and Ben Elton gave us just that with Blackadder Goes Forth, the 4^th and final season of the acclaimed BBC sitcom Blackadder starring Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McInnerny, and Stephen Fry. The season is remembered as one of the show’s absolute best and is often cited as the perfect vision of World War 1 in public consciousness.