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12 Eye-Popping 1950s Movie Posters

These Roger Corman 1950s movie posters are a testament to his storytelling and marketing genius.

We love Roger Corman, who died last year at the age of 98 after a spectacular Hollywood career that helped launch such luminaries as Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Charles Bronson, and James Cameron, among many others.

After studying industrial engineering at Stanford University and serving in the United States Navy, he got a job as a story reader in which he rejected most scripts — but saw the potential in one that became 1950’s The Gunfighter, with Gregory Peck.

When his boss got all the credit, Corman resolved to make his own films — which he churned out quickly, on the cheap, with verve and panache. He was masterful at marketing them, especially to rebellious teenagers, as the following posters illustrate.

Apache Woman (1955)

American Releasing Corporation – Credit: C/O

The second Roger Corman movie that he directed, after Five Guns West, which was also released in 1955, Apache Woman is about a government agent, Rex Moffett, sent to put down an Apache Rebellion. He soon crosses paths with the titular character, the half-Apache Anne Libeau (Joan Taylor).

The film is notable for helping launch the career of Lloyd Bridges, who played Moffett. But it’s also notable for a clever bit of branding by Corman: Note how often he uses the words “woman,” “girl” or “teenage” in his titles, to catch the attention of teenage boys looking for something at the local drive-in.

Day the World Ended (1955)

American Releasing Corporation – Credit: C/O

Roger Corman movie titles were never short on hyperbole, as Day the World Ended Reminds us.

The film is about a scientist who, like many other heroes of 1950s films, faces off against a radioactive being. (Anxiety and curiosity ran high in the years after the first use of the atomic bomb.)

The film is notably narrated by a man who soon go on to become one of the most trusted journalists in America, Chet Huntley, known for NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report.

It Conquered the World (1956)

American International Pictures – Credit: C/O

It Conquered the World is about an alien from Venus who wants to take over the Earth and Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves) a human scientist who wants to help the alien because it believes it can save humanity from destroying itself. (A similar idea pops up in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem).

The film marked an early appearance for Graves, the future star of Mission: Impossible, though he had already appeared in a notable role in 1953’s Stalag 17.

Naked Paradise (1957)

American International Pictures – Credit: C/O

The first of eight (!) Roger Corman movies released in 1957, this one concerns an ill-fated sailing trip to the Hawaiian Islands and stars Beverly Garland as the alcoholic Max, a young woman who ends up determined to turn her life around.

Garland also appeared in the Roger Corman 1950s movies Not of This Earth, It Conquered the World, and Gunslinger.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Allied Artists – Credit: C/O

Roger Corman was a master of inexpensive creature features — in the terrific 2013 book Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie, author Chris Nashawaty shares Albert Ruddy’s account of how Corman once gave him a budget of $50 to create a monster for the movie The Beast With a Million Eyes.

He ended up combining an aluminum mop, a syringe, and slimy green paint to create the creature.

Ruddy’s ingenuity would lead to a long and fruitful career that included producing The Godfather, arguably the greatest movie ever made.

Not of This Earth (1957)

Allied Artists – Credit: C/O

Part of the genius of Roger Corman was packaging his films as double features. Not of This Earth played with Attack of the Crab Monsters, which must have made for a very scary evening.

The very 1950s movie is about an extraterrestrial humanoid who seeks to steal human blood because of a deadly blood disorder that is depopulating his home planet, Davanna.

Teenage Doll (1957)

Allied Artists – Credit: C/O

Once in a while, a Roger Corman movie poster is a masterpiece of understatement. Just read the text of this one and try to contain your curiosity: What happened to the unfortunate young woman of the title?

As Nashawaty wrote in Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie: “Is she dead, or has she just been ravaged? Corman knows, and he isn’t saying. And if you want to find out, you’ll have to pony up for a ticket.”

One of the many 1950s movies that dug into “kids gone wild” paranoia.

Rock All Night (1957)

American International Pictures – Credit: C/O

When you think of rebellious rock music, you probably don’t think of The Platters, the beloved crooners and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees whose lovely hits included “Only You” and “The Great Pretender.” But Roger Corman had the good sense to make them seem like the soundtrack to shocking scenes of depravity in the poster for Rock All Night.

The film is one of many Roger Corman 1950s movies that is a lot more sedate than its raucous poster suggests.

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957)

American International Pictures – Credit: C/O

You can forgive the poster for The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent for not including the full title of the film, about a group of Viking women led by Desir (Abby Dalton) who go out to sea in search of their missing men and encounter, you guessed it, a giant sea serpent.

The film was a bit of a leap for Corman: He announced that he would budget it at $300,000, about triple his typical budget at the time, because he wanted to invest in the sea serpent effects.

And let us save you a Google: $300,000 in 1957 dollars is equal to about $3.3 million today, which is still a breathtakingly small budget for a film, even in the era of computer-generated images that were unavailable to Corman and his team.

Sorority Girl (1957)

American International Pictures – Credit: C/O

Notably for its fairly respectable poster, this film (also known as Sorority House or The Bad One — Corman was happy to change a film’s name for different markets) is about poor little rich girl Sabra Tanner (Susan Tanner) who lashes out at her classmates.

Her dangerous tendencies have calamitous repercussions for her sorority sisters — and for Sabra.

Machine Gun Kelly (1958)

American International Pictures – Credit: C/O

This gangster biopic also featured Susan Cabot, but is better known for the actor who played its lead: Charles Bronson, who would go on to action movie icon status for films including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West, and the Death Wish series.

Besides launching Bronson as a movie star, the film was also notable for earning some of the best reviews of any Roger Corman movie. Corman said in his memoir, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, that it was “a major turning point in my career.”

Even more impressive, it’s one of five Corman-directed films that were released in 1958. That’s down from the eight he directed in 1957, but still: wow.

She Gods of Shark Reef (1958)

Credit: C/O

Corman’s filmmaking efficiency is legendary, and one way he saved money was to shoot two films back-to-back at the same location. Such was the case with She Gods of Shark Reef, which was shot in Kaua’i at the same time as the aforementioned Naked Paradise.

The film concerns weapons theft, murder, and a shark-infested tropical island — as well as some lonely pearl divers who live in a secret, all-female village.

We have to wonder if the film was any influence on Honey Ryder, the pearl-diving Bond girl of 1962’s Dr. No.

Liked This List of Eye-Popping 1950s Movie Posters?

Credit: Paramount

You may also like this list of behind the scenes stories of Airplane!, which notes that the film’s directors, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, cast the film with actors they had seen playing serious roles in 1950s movies. We have to wonder if they caught Peter Graves in It Conquered the World.

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03/07/2025
12 Old SNL Sketches That Wouldn’t Fly Today

Here are 12 SNL sketches they wouldn’t do today, thanks to changing standards of what’s funny. As the show marks its 50th anniversary, we look back on things that were funny then but might not fly now.

Some SNL sketches and characters — like the Dana’s Church Lady, above — hold up incredibly well. In fact, SNL brought her back this past season.

But not every Saturday Night Live sketch stands the test of time because what the general public considers OK is always changing. And evolving technology — people no longer have to send letters or call NBC, they can just gripe on X — can create a very fast, very public sense that objections to a given joke or setup are snowballing, which makes everyone involved in the show more hesitant to run the risk of doing something potentially offensive to someone, somewhere.

Let’s take a dip into the past and remember some SNL sketches that some would prefer to be forgotten.

Pat

NBC

Perhaps the most infamous of SNL characters is Pat. The “It’s Pat” SNL sketches were all built around a single joke: Nobody could tell if Pat was a man or a woman. They’d poke and prod around, trying to find the answer, but they never would.

You can probably deduce why Julia Sweeney’s Pat character would be missing from modern SNL sketches.

Remarkably, there was a Pat movie, probably the worst movie ever produced based on an SNL character, which is really saying something.

Uncle Roy

NBC

Buck Henry was primarily known as a great comedy writer whose work included The Graduate and Get Smart. He was also a staple of the early seasons of Saturday Night Live, hosting a total of 10 times between 1976 and 1980.

He also had his own recurring characters, including three appearances as Uncle Roy — a predatory babysitter. The sketches are, obviously, very uncomfortable.

Anne Beatts was one of the writers on the Uncle Roy sketches. A veteran of National Lampoon, she was famed for her brazenness, a necessity to be a female comedy writer back in the 1970s.

Ching Chang

NBC

Dana Carvey had some incredible SNL sketches and countless great recurring characters: Garth. Church Lady.

Then, there’s Ching Chang. We don’t even like writing the character’s name out.

There is no malice in Dana Carvey’s Ching Chang character, but he’s hard to watch now. There’s a reason they didn’t make the Best of Dana Carvey collection. Let’s just focus on all the good Carvey characters, like Church Lady (above).

Lyle, the Effeminate Heterosexual

NBC

Hey, Dana Carvey returns! This one is less dicey, but does feel like something that would probably be avoided now, given the potential for it to stir controversy. Like many Saturday Night Live characters, this is a one-note premise, and it is right there in the character’s name.

Carvey plays Lyle, and basically everybody assumes he’s gay because of his mannerisms. These could have been really iffy, but the “game” of the scenes is that everybody who assumes he’s gay is totally fine with it, including his wife.

Much of the comedy comes from Lyle’s surprise and shock that anyone could think he’s gay.

John Belushi’s Samurai

NBC

A white guy could be a samurai. Tom Cruise did it in a movie! However, John Belushi was not simply playing a samurai who was white in all his various sketches about a samurai who runs whatever business. No, in the samurai SNL sketches, Belushi is playing a Japanese samurai.

That means, in addition to his traditional garb and hairstyle associated with samurai, Belushi is doing gibberish Japanese. He appeared in many sketches, mostly involving Buck Henry. Henry was a fan of the original sketch and asked to do a samurai sketch every time he hosted.

That’s even though one time Belushi hit Henry with his sword and cut his head open.

Robert Goulet

NBC

Will Ferrell played Goulet, the famed crooner, a few times. He’s a very Ferrell style person to play. There was no inherent issue with Ferrell’s Goulet impression. No, it is one particular time that Ferrell played Goulet that would not fly today.

The joke in one of the Goulet SNL sketches was that he was crooning famed rap songs such as “Thong Song.” A couple of the songs in the sketch, though, contained the N-word. And Ferrell said it. Live from New York.

Famously, Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor did a sketch that involved the use of that word, but it was 1975, Pryor was central to the sketch, and it was actively about racial prejudice.

Canteen Boy

NBC

We will stump for the infamous iteration of the Canteen Boy sketches not being problematic, if only being fitfully funny and a smidge lazy. Adam Sandler played Canteen Boy several times, but only once was did it spark offense — so much so that it was referenced in Alec Baldwin’s monologue the next time he hosted.

Canteen Boy is a classic Sandler character in that he is almost an anti-character. He’s just an odd assistant scoutmaster who has a canteen. Baldwin, in one sketch, played the scoutmaster who, well, makes sexual advances on Canteen Boy. Canteen Boy knows what is going on, and he flees and summons animals to attack Baldwin’s scoutmaster.

Still, the idea of a sexually aggressive scoutmaster upset people. Modern SNL sketches tend not to make jokes about this kind of thing.

Jazz Man

NBC

Billy Crystal was only on Saturday Night Live for one season, the infamous 1984-85 season when a show that was on the ropes was trying to right the ship. That included bringing in people like Crystal who were already famous.

In fact, Crystal had previously appeared on Saturday Night Live, and the first time he did he brought his Jazz Man character into the mix.

The Jazz Man is one of the wilder recurring characters in comedy. Crystal has brought it out time and time again, including into the new millennium. It’s one of multiple characters Crystal plays in blackface. At least when he plays Sammy Davis Jr. he’s doing an impression of a real person (not that it inoculates him, of course). With the Jazz Man, he’s just doing a stereotypical jazz guy. In, you know, blackface.

David Paterson

NBC

Paterson was the governor of New York for a couple years, and SNL is a New York-based show. Fred Armisen played Paterson several times on SNL. Given their respective racial makeup, that was already not ideal. However, Paterson is also legally blind, and Armisen’s impression of Paterson leaned heavily into that.

Armisen’s Paterson was a squinting, bumbling klutz. That would be questionable if Armisen was just playing a generic blind guy, but he was playing a real person who was legally blind. He turned Paterson into Mr. Magoo.

The real Paterson was bighearted enough to appear next to Armisen doing his impression one night — part of Armisen apologizing for the broad caricature.

Vinny Vedecci

NBC

Bill Hader is a fantastic impressionist, and he loves old-school archetypes. There’s a reason why he did a recurring Vincent Price sketch. One of his other recurring Saturday Night Live characters was Vinny Vedecci. Vedecci was the host of an Italian talk show, and he was boorish and brash. He also spoke largely in gibberish Italian. You know, that classic patter of Italian that isn’t actually words.

We include this one because Hader himself has said he would not do Vedecci again. An Italian woman told him that she did not like the sketch, because it sounded so much to her like a gibberish version of her father.

Hader had seen it in his head as a riff on classic comedy tropes, but this changed his perception.

Nude Beach

NBC

We end with a sketch that only occurred once, and personally we have no problem with it, but it raised huge objections at the time.

We’re talking about a beach sketch written by the indelible Conan O’Brien alongside the also great Robert Smigel. Matthew Broderick was the host when it finally aired, and Dana Carvey features prominently again. The sketch takes place at a clothes-free beach, and even the amount of skin in the sketch feels like it might not be tried today.

However, when writing the sketch, O’Brien and Smigel had a goal: “Penis” is a clinical, medical word that refers to an organ of the male body. O’Brien and Smigel set out to use it as many times as they could — more than 40 times in all.

Reportedly, well over 40,000 complaints were registered with NBC. We doubt the show would ever poke the bear this way again.

The Sharon Stone Airport Security Sketch

NBC – Credit: C/O

Last year on his Fly on the Wall podcast, Dana Carvey playfully apologized to Sharon Stone for a 1992 SNL sketch in which he played one of several airport security employees who try to get her to undress — supposedly “for security reasons.”

Besides the sexual harassment joke, Carvey played the character as Indian. Carvey joked on the podcast that “we would be literally arrested now,” for attempting to do the sketch today.

But he later clarified that he was just joking when he apologized to Stone, noting that when the sketch aired, “the whole audience went crazy, you do the sketch like six times with the read-through and the rehearsals, and she was such a sport with it. So there was no reason to apologize.”

He also noted that he’s done imitations of all nationalities and doesn’t apologize. But the modern SNL would never go for the sketch today.

Liked These Old SNL Sketches That Wouldn’t Fly Today?

NBC

You might also like this list of the 12 Best Saturday Night Live Sketches or this list of 15 Best SNL Characters.

Main image: SNL. NBC

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02/07/2025
Jurassic Lark: The satirical genius of Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs

Animatronic puppets, searing social commentary, this short-lived early ’90s sitcom had it all.

Reptilian newsreader Howard Handupme looks to camera: “A meteor, three times the size of Earth, is heading towards us in a collision course that will result in the extinction of all life on this planet.”

Left of frame, a rubbery green hand slides a sheet of paper across the desk. “This just in,” Handupme reports. “No, it’s not.”

“Oh, good,” says Earl Sinclair – a simple, workaday Megalosaurus – who promptly changes the channel.

So opens the first episode of the irreverent sitcom Dinosaurs, in which the dysfunctional Sinclair family contends with the strictures of modern life (dinos, in this timeline, having only evolved from being wild, swamp-dwelling brutes about a million years earlier).

A Jim Henson Television production, the series starred a cast of expressive – and expensive – animatronic puppets, the most memorable being Baby Sinclair (performed by Kevin Clash, who also popularised Elmo). Back in the show’s original run from 1991-94, Baby’s wily slapstick and weekly catchcry ‘Not the Mama!’ eclipsed the show’s more subversive quirks. But in the 30 years since Dinosaurs’ debut, its biting satire and sly commentary on gender, labour, politics, racism, the economy and climate change – not to mention television itself – has only grown more savage.

With its four idiosyncratic seasons hitting Disney+ on 29 January, now is the perfect time to reconsider this curious analogue artefact. From its prehistoric Pangaea setting (roughly 60 million years BC through to its reflection in the Anthropocene, withering under late capitalism, the prophecy of Dinosaurs is anything but obsolete.

Dinosaurs charged onto the US network ABC (plus ITV and Disney Channel in the UK, among other territories) care of co-creators Bob Young and Michael Jacobs. Their previous writing and producing credits included such all-American candy floss as The Facts of Life and Charles in Charge, but this new beast sacrificed the sweet accessibility of cookie-cutter sitcoms, favouring the playful parody and contained chaos vital to much of Jim Henson’s work, particularly with the Muppets.

That said, Dinosaurs was the first major Jim Henson Company work produced without supervision from the Creature Shop’s founding leader, who passed away in May 1990. Henson is said to have conceived the series, which shares thematic DNA with his unproduced screenplay for The Natural History Project – a fantasy feature à la The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Sadly it was scrapped due to its apparent similarities to The Land Before Time, at a time when Jurassic antics were just starting to peak on the pop cultural landscape.

Another way in which Dinosaurs tapped the early ’90s zeitgeist was by gutting the ‘wholesome ’50s father’ archetype. Upstanding dads had dominated sitcoms (subgenus: comedie domesticus, or ‘dom coms’) from Father Knows Best to The Cosby Show. Full of beer nuts and hot air, Earl (voiced by Stuart Pankin) inherited the ‘bad dad’ mantle from Alf Garnett (Till Death Us Do Part) and Archie Bunker (All in the Family), whose parenting deficits were honoured such ‘dumb dad’ renaissance texts as Married… with Children, The Simpsons and Home Improvement. Dinosaurs even skewered the trend with this facetious weeknight line-up:

“This is why TV stinks,” groans Earl. “One show’s a hit, they make 50 more like it,” to which Baby replies, “Don’t have a cow, man!”

But Earl is more cynical than his bumbling brethren like Homer Simpson and Fred Flintstone. What’s more, his wilfully shit behaviour isn’t typically framed as endearing, so we don’t laugh with him – the chuckles come when he gets his comeuppance. (Notably, Dinosaurs’ producers chose to can the initial laugh track, which means no one implicitly condones Earl’s buffoonery.)

Unlike many TV patriarchs, Earl is rarely handed a free pass to fail upwards, which makes it all the more meaningful when, in the third season episode ‘Honey, I Miss the Kids’, the flaccid antihero sincerely bonds with his progeny. Meanwhile, his wife Fran (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter) returns to work full time, itching to escape the cyclical tedium of domestic drudge work.

A prototypical nuclear family, the Sinclairs live in a version of suburbia that marries prehistoric aesthetics and postwar social values. Every relevant stereotype gets eviscerated, along with the idealised virtues of heteronormative parenthood (both adults express resentment toward each other and their kids), organised religion (teenage son Robbie rejects many cultural customs, like eating other animals and hurling old folk into tarpits), and soulless consumerism (when Baby demands the ‘leg smoother’ he saw on TV, he’s told he can’t have it because he’s a boy. “Oh, then I want a machine gun!”).

Traditional gender roles receive constant ribbing, with clichéd traits inverted. Man of the house Earl is beholden to the whims of his – to borrow a Sesame Street term – big feelings, whereas Fran is mostly moderate. Though she begins an obliging housewife, one part Stepford to two parts Bedrock, she becomes disillusioned with her lot and develops the voice to say so.

This is largely due the influence of her friend Monica Devertebrae (Suzie Plakson), a feminist Brontosaurus who takes her employer – the ubiquitous corporate giant WESAYSO – to court in ‘What “Sexual Harris” Meant’. The episode aired in late 1991, just two months after Anita Hill’s widely televised sexual harassment case, and it features one of Dinosaurs’ most searing jokes.

The ignobility of work regularly comes under fire, particularly in regard to Earl’s blue-collar job as a ‘tree pusher’ at WESAYSO Development Corporation. Managed by a tyrannical Styracosaurus called BP Richfield (sitcom stalwart Sherman Hemsley, All in the Family and The Jeffersons) who’s slick by name, if not by nature.

The company motto is “We’ll do what’s right if you leave us alone”, which, in practice, means razing a redwood forest to make way for 10,000 tract houses, and building a wax fruit factory that precipitates an ice age. (Howard Handupme’s news report was right: it’s not a meteor that ends all life on Earth in the series’ breathtakingly bleak finale.)

Dinosaurs leaves few sociopolitical stones unturned, illustrating how gender performance, class, work and the environment are all inextricably linked. In some ways, it’s a spiritual successor to another Henson series about ecology, Fraggle Rock, which also depicts nature’s precariousness and the dangers of xenophobia. (Earl’s opinions of the early hominid folk who cohabit this revisionist history echo the Fraggles’ view of ‘Silly Creatures’ aka the human race.) This begs the question, was Dinosaurs intended for adults or children? Like most Jim Henson Company work, it’s both, and the writers clarify this with a knowing wink.

The Sinclairs’ television set is their home’s focal point, and some of the show’s best roasts concern TV’s hypnotic allure. (‘Network Genius’ is a work of genius.) But Dinosaurs’ drollest running gag involves a puppet show that delights Earl and Baby equally. When Fran dismisses the show as kid’s stuff, Earl retorts, “You’d think that, because they’re puppets – so the show seems to have a children’s aesthetic.” He turns to eyeball the camera. “Yet the dialogue is unquestionably sharp-edged, witty, and thematically skewed to adults.” The mighty Megalosaurus flexes his dexterous brow.

Puppets mimic the human condition with an uncanny likeness. They’re not people, clearly, but an eerie approximation. When camouflaged in the soft power of a sitcom, they have a unique capacity to point fingers at society’s trickiest home truths. Slapstick and catchphrases are just a handy distraction. All these years later, Dinosaurs still goes for the throat.

The post Jurassic Lark: The satirical genius of Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs first appeared on Little White Lies.

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02/07/2025
Discover this gross-out ’90s high school movie by…

“All you need is mobility and life beyond this boring room and the limitations of this stupid computer. I, my love, will give you that freedom. I will give you a brain. I will give you immortality!”

The speaker is the priapic, chain-smoking Dr Gunther Wachenstein (Terry Kiser), addressing the robotic dinosaur that he keeps in a warehouse and hopes to animate with a human brain transplant. A Frankenstein-like mad scientist par excellence, if somewhat out of place and time in mid-’90s California, Gunther hopes to create a lucrative franchise of cybernetic body frames that will house the brains of the otherwise dead, whether humans or pets, and this T‑Rex is his improbable prototype.

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Yet Gunther’s words here come with a metacinematic resonance. For Stewart Raffill (The Ice Pirates, The Philadelphia Experiment, Mac and Me) was offered, out of the blue, the use of an animatronic tyrannosaur for a specific two-week period, and while the writer/director could sniff opportunity, he had very little time in which to throw together a screenplay that would flesh out this giant moving prop with a plot, with brains, and maybe with the kind of immortality that box office success can bring. Maybe – although Raffill also had enough self-awareness to make Wachenstein’s computer-savvy technician Bobby (John Franklin) quietly dismiss his boss’ grand ambitions with the comment: “What a crock of shit.”

This is the paradox of Tammy and the T‑Rex: it is utterly dumb, but smart enough to know just that; and while no gag is too low for its brand of anything-goes screwball, it really does bring a lumbering kind of life to its hybrid collection of ill-fitting ideas. Stitching together elements from ’60s B‑movie sci-fi, the high-school movie, the revenge flick, gross-out comedy and the previous year’s Jurassic Park, it comes with a confused identity – confused even more by the surgical excision of some six minutes of blood, guts, gore and profanity for its original US theatrical and home release in a bid to make it appeal more to the family market. In 2019, Vinegar Syndrome restored the unexpurgated version – the so-called ‘Gore Cut’ – whose heroine is credited as ‘Tanny’ and whose title is Tanny & The Teenage T‑Rex.

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01/07/2025
Jurassic World: Dominion | Little White Lies

But that’s not all! Very bad people have trained the raptors to attack people when a laser pointer in aimed at them, a plot point so stupid it wouldn’t have made it past brainstorming for Austin Powers 3. Finally, Biosyn – which is sort of like a more evil Monsanto – has used dinosaur DNA to create a species of locust that only eat their competitor’s crops and will cause global famine.

So, it’s up to our ragtag team of two former zoo keepers, a paleobotanist, a mathematician, a clone of a little girl and an (admittedly pretty cool) retired pilot to save the day. Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant has progressed so little in the past 30 years, he is summoned from a paleontology dig – apparently in this world having living dinosaurs at your disposal has in no way altered the methods of paleontological research. Said research has altered these dinosaurs, however, and now some come in an array of plasticky feathers that render them hopelessly cartoonish.

The film is not so much a narrative as a sequence of loosely tied-together chase sequences where every running person, car, plane, raptor, and larger-than-average locust travels at the exact same speed. With so little dialogue and so much green screen that it’s hard to imagine the cast had any clue what the film they were shooting actually was, most of the exposition is given to a flashback of a woman pregnant with her own clone, and franchise favourite BD Wong who seems utterly exhausted.

Beyond its nonsensical plot, the film imagines the audience will be delighted by a myriad of references to the first film – but in Dominion it feels less like watching a beloved band play their greatest hits and more like watching them hawk merch to pay for an expensive divorce. Embarrassing.

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30/06/2025
How Poker Forces Your Brain to Process Uncertainty in Real Time

Poker entails risk, quick judgment, and decision-making with incomplete information. Anyone who has played a few hands knows you spend more time guessing what you do not know. It is not a stretch to say poker turns decision-making under pressure into a real science.

How the Brain Tackles Poker’s Split-Second Decisions

Processing uncertainty in poker runs deeper than the ability to read bluffs or count outs. Every hand asks a player to weigh tells, bet sizing, stack depth, and the standard poker hand rankings. A player might decide between calling an all-in with top pair or folding when the board is full of potential draws.

Poker demands attention to more than the cards shown. Observing how previous hands played out, piecing together betting frequencies, and tracking position can change how uncertainty is solved at the table. One moment calls for a snap decision on a coin flip. The next, a player may need to pass on a high pair because the story does not add up.

The Nuts and Bolts of Uncertainty at the Table

Poker never gives you the full picture. You know your cards and the community cards. Everything else is up for debate. Playing hand after hand means your brain is always weighing clues, spotting patterns, and trying to stay a step ahead.

A sweeping study with over 35,000 players and millions of hands showed expert players handle information differently. These players act unpredictably and mask their true actions from others. Every bet, raise, or check is meant to deceive or extract information from opponents. That is a real-time blend of psychology, math, and people-reading.

Real Stakes, Real Pressure

Tournaments and cash games reward players who can calculate odds, anticipate outcomes, and still keep a poker face. Each hand is about calculated risk. Let’s say you hold a flush draw and an opponent bets big. Do you chase your draw and risk your stack? Or fold and wait for a better spot? Get it wrong and sit out the rest of the night.

This kind of decision-making improves skills that go beyond cards. You become comfortable acting without all the details. According to research, that habit builds discipline, sharpens risk assessment, and helps you see consequences before you act. Poker is full of real-time pressure. You only get a few seconds to figure out what to do and have to trust your judgment.

Pattern Seekers and Bias Breakers

Longtime players get used to working with incomplete facts. They start to see patterns in betting, timing, and player habits faster. Spotting when someone suddenly bets bigger or slower can tell you plenty about the strength of their hand. Missing these details will cost you.

But even regulars are not immune to mental traps. The confirmation bias, for example, can push a player to believe in their first read and ignore fresh evidence that their guess was wrong. Good players work hard to see past these blind spots. They review hands, talk hands out with other players, and always try to see what they missed.

Adaptation and Learning

None of these thought processes comes overnight. Players build this toolkit through thousands of hands and constant feedback. The best spend hours studying their own mistakes, watching others, and reading up on strategy. The goal is to become more adaptable and make fewer costly errors.

Online games have increased the tempo. Shorter turn clocks mean faster judgment calls. There is less time to second-guess and more room for sharp thinking. Players who think quickly and adjust to new information win more over the long run.

Real Life Benefits

Professional players like Maria Konnikova have spoken about how the discipline learned at the table shows up elsewhere. Bankers, negotiators, and even sports coaches report benefits from putting poker skills into action. You get better at finding clues, weighing the odds, and not folding under stress.

Science backs this up, too. MRI scans and clinical research on gamblers suggest that high-stakes poker changes how the brain reacts in risky situations. Profitable players display better emotional control and handle stress without letting it ruin their game.

Poker forces you to juggle uncertainty, risk, and split-second thinking every hand. Each session pushes you to make smart decisions with limited information. Regular play fine-tunes pattern recognition, silences mental biases, and pushes you to adapt strategies quickly. The same skills that keep you in the game also help in any area where decisions come fast.

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30/06/2025
American Comic Star Joe Kwaczala on the Secret to Filming Authentic Stand-Up Scenes

Joe Kwaczala is a Los Angeles-based comedian and the writer-star of the mockumentary American Comic, which follows two stand-ups, both played by Kwaczala, as they navigate the modern comedy world. Directed by Daniel J. Clark, the film premieres Sunday at Dances With Films. In the piece below, Joe Kwaczala describes getting the comedy world right.—M.M.

I made the film American Comic for a number of reasons, but on some level, it all goes back to this:

“HOW ARE THEY GETTING THIS SO WRONG?!”

This is me every time I’m watching a movie or TV show that incorporates stand-up as part of the story. It’s one of many things I’m yelling, really: “That doesn’t look like a comedy club!” “Audiences in a room that size wouldn’t sound like that!” “That wouldn’t get a laugh!”

I’ve been a comedian for more than 15 years, and I’ve always been fascinated by how fictional narratives can never seem to figure out how to portray stand-up on screen. I started to think about this more intensely as I prepared for production on my debut feature film American Comic.

In writing the script, I had drawn on countless experiences from my career to create a This Is Spinal Tap-like mockumentary satire of stand-up. With that being the premise, it was crucial not only to show stand-up on screen but for it to also feel authentic. If history is any judge, I was setting myself up for failure.

Joe Kwaczala on the Pressure to Get American Comic Right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZYp-HYdfNk

So the pressure was on to figure out a way to make this work. My tactic? To reverse-engineer it. By analyzing what doesn’t work, it would hopefully become clear what to avoid, and I could forge my path to success.

I thought about my main problems with depictions of stand-up comedy and landed on three areas: the setting, the audience reactions, and the material. When one of those doesn’t come across correctly, it all goes south. So I had to nail all three.

Among comedians, there might be varying opinions on the ideal setting for a stand-up show, but most will agree that intimacy is key. That means close quarters, low ceilings, the audience’s proximity to the stage and to each other. A lot of comedy clubs are designed with these qualities in mind.

Also Read: The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World, Including Dances With Films

But what do film productions need? Lots of room! To fit lights, cameras, and anything else the crew requires. Naturally, if a scene takes place at a comedy club, they will want to find (or even construct!) a location that gives them the space they need to film, and as a result, you get an environment with negative intimacy. The solution to this problem was pretty obvious: We had to shoot at real venues.

But what about the crew? Some of these actual stand-up rooms wouldn’t be able to accommodate even a small film crew. So we didn’t have one. Well, kind of. I collaborated on American Comic with director Daniel J. Clark, who made one of the great fly-on-the-wall documentaries of all time, Behind the Curve. He and I decided that for these particular scenes, the crew should consist of just him and a camera, filming the action in a corner of the room.

American Comic director Daniel J. Clark (left) on set with writer-actor Joe Kwaczala. Photo by Caroline Clark.

That way, we could take advantage not only of the physical dimensions of these real spaces but also of their less tangible, lived-in qualities that would be impossible to recreate anywhere else.

Obviously we were not the first people to think, “Let’s film our stand-up scene at a stand-up venue.” But even if they’re also using a real location, a typical production is still likely to utilize fake audience reactions. And that’s the next thing about stand-up on film that just doesn’t work. Productions will bring in extras and try to conduct them like an orchestra: “Laugh hard at this part, giggle at this joke, boo at this guy.”

This process goes against human nature itself: Laughter is involuntary! So this forced nonsense is undoubtedly going to feel wrong. Daniel and I realized the only way around this was to film during real stand-up shows.

At this point, I’ll remind you that American Comic isn’t a documentary. It’s a narrative feature film with a story about fictional characters. I play the two lead roles, and they were written to be comedians with styles very different from my own. And if we wanted to avoid fake laughs, that meant these characters needed to earn real ones.

We also didn’t tell these audiences I was in character. For it to feel real on screen, we needed real reactions. So that means there were dozens of stand-up shows that happened in 2024 where audience members had no idea that one of the comedians they saw was actually me playing a movie character. Sorry!

Although in that regard, I guess the movie is kind of a documentary.

This leads us to the final piece of the “Stand-Up Authenticity Puzzle:” the material. Anyone can get on-stage at a stand-up show and bomb with a bad joke. But the comedians I’m portraying in this film are supposed to be up-and-coming with some potential for success, so I had to write jokes for them that would work in front of actual audiences.

To further complicate things, these characters are awful, uninspired hacks. So my task as a writer and performer was to come up with jokes that I personally don’t like but still could get laughs. A tricky needle to thread! So I did what any good comic does with new material: I workshopped the jokes at shows and open mics and tweaked them based on the response. In fact, these characters and their jokes started doing so well that I started to worry: “Oh no. Is this what people like?”

I’m really proud of what Danel and I accomplished with American Comic. In the end, the hunt for authenticity was simple. Instead of taking stand-up and bending it to fit our filming process, we took our filming process and bent it to fit stand-up. Obviously, I’m hoping what we do in the film will be appreciated by general audiences, but I’m hoping the extra care in our treatment of stand-up will resonate especially with comedians. The ideal reaction?

“HOW ARE THEY GETTING THIS SO RIGHT?!”

American Comic premieres Sunday at Dances With Films in Los Angeles.

Main image: Actor-writer Joe Kwaczala in a still from American Comic, shot and directed by Daniel J. Clark.

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29/06/2025
In Shattered Ice, a Hockey Player’s Suicide Stuns a Small Town

When Jake Miskin was a high school athlete, five fellow students died by suicide in his small Massachusetts town. He set out to tell the kind of story he wishes they would have seen, that could have given them hope. The result is the moving, insightful Shattered Ice, which plays this weekend at Dances With Films.

Shattered Ice world premiered in February at the Sedona International Film Festival, where Miskin shared in a Q&A that the film uses sports as a metaphor because sports are how “a lot of lot of kids have their first heartbreak, their first friends, their first obstacles in life.”

It follows a high school hockey player named Will Mankus (breakout Charlie Gillespie, himself a longtime hockey player, leading an excellent cast) who spirals after the suicide of his best friend and teammate Danny (Sterling Beaumon).

Will goes quiet and takes up whiskey, blaming himself for not seeing the signs. So do many other people around the film’s town of Nehoiden, a fictional stand-in for Miskin’s real-life hometown of Needham, a Boston suburb that shares with Nehoiden both a quiet reserve and deep love of winter sports.

Miskin hopes Shattered Ice can break the metaphorical ice around the still-taboo subjects of mental illness and suicide.

“It’s inspired by my hometown, where we lost five students to suicide while we were in high school,” he said in the Sedona Q&A with festival executive director Patrick Schweiss. “I always wanted to tell a story about the conversations my friends or our town were or weren’t having, and showing how people grieve differently.”

Also Read: The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World, Including Dances With Films

The film doesn’t focus so much on the reasons for a particular suicide as on the wreckage every suicide leaves behind. The town of Needham came through to help him tell the story: Miskin and fellow producer Benjamin Stephen raised money through grassroots community fundraising — including a raffle and reaching out to local charities and investors — and making use of local businesses after dark.

(Your Massachusetts-based correspondent first met Jake when I overheard him pitching Shattered Ice at local breakfast spot Bagel’s Best — which turns up in a key scene in the film.)

Even as they raised money, Miskin and his collaborators plugged away to attract experienced, very assured director Alex Ranarivelo, whose past films include the sports dramas Born a Champion and The Ride, and actors including The Flash and Suits LA veteran Matt Letscher, as well as The Walking Dead actress Kyla Kenedy, How to Get Away With Murder actor Jack Falahee, and, crucially, producer and skating consultant Christopher V. Nelson, who worked on arguably the greatest hockey movie of all, 2004’s Miracle. (He vetoed actors who couldn’t skate.)

Ranarivelo said he was especially intrigued by the script because hockey is “so macho, and it’s guys being tough — it kind of felt like the last place where you’re going to open up and be vulnerable.”

Falahee, who is deeply sympathetic in his role as a young coach with problems of his own, was drawn to the film because he, too, had lost a friend to suicide. He took up acting when a friend, who had been expected to perform in a school play, took his own life. Falahee decided that appearing in the play would be a way to mourn the loss.

Shattered Ice at Dances With Films

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaujuFd-5sA

Miskin and his colleagues are working to get the film screened for high school athletes all over the country, and already have a plan to screen it for Massachusetts college hockey players, who are uniquely familiar with the culture of stress, bravado, and holding it all in that the film portrays so effectively.

The film’s partners include The Hidden Opponent, a non-profit that promotes mental health for student athletes.

Stephen went to school with Miskin and lost the same friends. He noted that they, like Danny in the film, didn’t seem like people who needed help.

“The students that we lost, the friends that we lost, a lot of them were just like Danny — student athletes, really talented. Everything on the surface is perfect. People are jealous of them, and, you know, they had standing in the school, social standing in the town and community,” he said.

“And I really think that it just goes to show — hopefully this came across in the message of the film — that you can never really know what someone’s going through. And the only way to really bring that out is to start talking and having those conversations.”

Following its World Premiere in Sedona, Shattered Ice had its East Coast Premiere at the Berkshire International Film Festival, where it screened to a sold-out audience and won the festival’s Audience Award for Narrative Feature. Dances With Films in Los Angeles will host the West Coast Premiere of Shattered Ice on June 29th @ 4:30pm at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood. Tickets are available here.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Main image: Shattered Ice. Nehoiden Films.

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29/06/2025
5 David Corenswet Roles to Catch Before He Stars as Superman

The new Superman stars David Corenswet as a new, vulnerable, dog-loving Man of Steel.

Besides playing Superman, Corenswet will of course play his version of Clark Kent in the new film, coming July 11 from Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn.

Corenswet, who is Philadelphia-born and Julliard-educated, will romance Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane, match wits with Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, and nuzzle cute super-canine Krypto.

But before David Corenswet becomes known for Superman, here are some other roles in which he stood out.

The Projectionist in Pearl

Mia Goth and David Corenswet in Pearl – Credit: C/O

You may remember David Corenswet as the smarmy projectionist from Pearl. It’s actually a pretty significant, though short-lived, role in the Ti West horror masterpiece.

Not only does he show Pearl (Mia Goth) her first dirty movie, but he also has the audacity to break up with her with these fateful words: “You’re scaring me, Pearl.”

River Barkley in The Politician

David Corenswet as River Barkley in The Politician – Credit: C/O

In Netflix’s Ryan Murphy co-created comedy-drama series The Politician, Corenswet has an 11-episode arc across both seasons as River Barkley, a student at Saint Sebastian High School who has, at different times, romantic relationships with Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) and Astrid Sloan (Lucy Boynton).

River is a popular boy at school, but he feels empty inside — we won’t spoil anything more here.

Also Read: Superman Teaser Trailer Finds the Man of Steel Bloodied in the Snow

David McDougal in We Own This City

David Corenswet and Larry Mitchell in We Own This City – Credit: C/O

In this six-episode HBO crime drama, Corenswet played Investigator David McDougall of the Harford County Narcotics Task Force. The show follows Jon Bernthal as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, which is being investigated for corruption.

We Own This City covers true events, and is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Baltimore Sun journalist Justin Fenton.

Reed in House of Cards

Corenswet and Willa Fitzgerald in House of Cards – Credit: C/O

Though he only appears in one episode of House of Cards, it’s worth mentioning here because it’s the penultimate episode of the entire series — and it has a lot to do with the past of Madame President Claire Underwood (Robin Wright).

In a flashback, Corenswet plays Reed, Claire’s former boyfriend when she was 20 years old. Though Reed urged her to turn down a proposal from Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), Claire turns him down and marries Frank in the hopes that he will open doors for her.

For better or worse, he does.

Jake in Look Both Ways

Corenswet and Lili Reinhart in Look Both Ways courtesy of Felicia Graham/Netflix – Credit: C/O

In this recent Netflix romantic comedy, Corenswet appears opposite Lili Reinhart‘s Natalie as Jake, the guy she could have been with if she had moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams instead of getting pregnant by her good friend Gabe (Danny Ramirez). The movie looks at both ways Natalie’s life could have turned out if that one life-changing moment had gone differently.

Main Image: David Corenswet as River Barkley in The Politician courtesy of Netflix.

Liked This List of 5 David Corenswet Roles to Enjoy Before Seeing Him as Superman?

Christopher Reeve as Superman. Warner Bros. – Credit: C/O

The Man of Steel is one of those roles that can come to define an actor’s career, in good ways and in bad. Here are 5 Roles Christopher Reeve turned down after playing Supes.

You might also like this list of the 12 Best Superhero Movies Before the MCU.

Main image: Corenswet in Superman. Warner Bros.

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28/06/2025
13 Shameless ’90s Comedy Movies That Just Don’t Care If You’re Offended

These shameless ’90s comedy movies don’t care if you’re offended.

They just want to make you laugh, no matter what. But at the same time, a lot of them smuggle in some smart observations, too.

Think we missed a great ’90s comedy movie? Let us know in the comments.

There’s Something About Mary (1998)

Twentieth Century Fox – Credit: 20th Century Fox

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)

New Line Cinema – Credit: C/O

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 Big Worm (Faizon Love) by partaking in the smallest possible share of Smokey’s stash.

When it gets to the big face-off between Craig and Deebo (Tommy Lister Jr.), Friday left-hooks you with a pretty stellar message about gun violence and what it really means to man up. S

ure, 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)

New Line Cinema

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)

MGM

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.

It’s also on our list of the 7 Sexiest Movies About the Amish.

Fear of a Black Hat (1994)

The Samuel Goldwyn Company – Credit: C/O

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)

Miramax – Credit: C/O

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)

Republic Pictures – Credit: C/O

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)

Paramount – Credit: C/O

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)

Miramax – Credit: C/O

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.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

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)

Universal Pictures – Credit: C/O

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)

Paramount – Credit: Comedy Central

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 Comedy Movies That Don’t Care If You’re Offended?

Credit: United Film Distribution Company

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.

Editor’s Note: Corrects main image.

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28/06/2025