Folks…you gotta go see Artists and Models…trust me…
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I generally enjoyed The Backrooms, it delivered on the main thing I was there here for: watching a guy wander about a fucked-up realm. Though the plot they cooked up did not at all come together, I did like how it was based on the theme of memory, of misremembering due to trauma, which lines up with the Backrooms being a misrememberance of reality. I do find the idea unsettling that our reality is the only firmed up state of things and under-girding it is all things falling into abstraction, just don’t think about it toooooo too much.
My favorite shot was the one that started with the room the psychiatrist was trapped within as a kid, this one single place that never really left her mind, and the camera sunk as it showed the room become abstracted more and more, elements meshing like sounds hitting each other, until it had become something only slightly recognizable in shape.
For as dumb as the chase at the end was, I did like how it resulted in the psychiatrist stumbling through yet more fucked-up backrooms recklessly, having to figure them out as best she could and move forward. I liked that bit.
Glad I saw it, not a movie I’d rewatch though.
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I came so close to feeling like I fw that movie but then it got racist and was like actually, this guy you’ve grown invested in doesn’t matter now it’s about his white therapist entirely. I was so on board for dangerous exploration shenanigans and it’s like no it’s just like the best we can do is a white woman is tormented by a crazy black guy who’s now completely evil for vague reasons like “he’s just wired this way” which they say multiple times. Like I sympathized with his anger issues and like discontent with feeling stuck in his life but I was actually supposed to interpret it as a clear sign that he’s a bad guy which is so fucking racist!
I called it cube for teenagers but uhh it’s giving more like bioshock infinite lmfao
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they completely dump a black guys story to make room for the white woman with real problems. I can’t believe I’m supposed to see his appointments with her as unsympathetic! the man is a struggling alcoholic and i guess that’s enoguh for white people to go YEAH BAD MAN. BORN BAD. PROBABLY WANTS TO DECAPITATE HIS EMPLOYEES
would love to watch a documentary where they just wander aroudn the sets and explain building them
I did hoot at the conversation pit of dooom tho
oh also what the fuck is Santa clara valley does someone wanna run that one by me
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Dumb chases at the end seem like a Kane Parsons signature move, unfortunately. I thought his web series The Oldest View was pretty interesting until it also devolved into an idiotic extended chase sequence. I can’t prove he played too much FNAF as a kid, but… Well, I suppose it could just be a generational imprint from growing up around twitch streamers.
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When he scalped someone like crazy don like Phantasmagoria I was like wow this is the wrong kind of nostalgia for the 1990s
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the rat they killed in the beginning was blob and we should have listened to that omen
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how come she got a tailored silent hill 2 experience but he didn’t. like come on bro. they kept calling it an office building when he found it, it looks like that before he ever goes in, and then the white lady shows up and suddenly it’s generating hyper specific childhood trauma liminal spaces tuned to her
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seat belt belts are also a mid to late 90s thing not fucking 1990. they got popular when I was in middle school and I remember the first kid who got one blowing everyone’s brains in 1996 in SANTA CLARA VALLEY
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that’s because he couldn’t think abiht the man’s character beyond a shallow mirror work universe yeah. he had the white woman’s story completely fleshed out though
like the guy is obviously traumatized but his whole back story is one angry exchange where he calls his wife fat over and over to make me hate him. like obviously there’s stuff going on his life but because he’s a black man we’re just supposed to not care??
ALSO HES A FUCKING ARCHITECT HE COULD HAVE HAD A WHOLE MOVIE ABOUT MAPPING THE BACKROOMS AND MAKING THE DESIGN HIS OWN IF YOU WANT INTERESTING EVIL. I can’t believe she got this whole completely neutral she’s done nothing wrong ever history and all Clark gets is angry shithead
ALSO WHERE WAS THE BIPHOBIA I WAS PROMISED
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“There’s laundry down here.”
“What do you think, clothes?”
is one of the funniest exchanges I’ve ever heard in a movie though like I almost lost my shit at that it’s like fucking troll 2 but UNLIKE TROLL 2 I DON’T THINK HE WAS TRYING TO BE FUNNY
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The environmental storytelling mural mentioned the floorplan shifts but we never really see that happen a single time in the movie, I can’t believe his extensive mapping of the place occurs entirely off screen, and nobody ever bothers using any of his maps anyway
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- I would be interested in seeing how much of it was sets vs CG.
- Could lumber prices be to blame for the relatively room-starved nature of contemporary liminal cinema?
- My favorite biome was the wet rooms with tiled walls. Can we get a sequel with just these? Call it “Wetrooms”, I’ll be first in line.
- Another data point that proves dialog ruins movies.
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[sighs]
The wet part is called The Poolrooms and it’s a whole thing. There’s like, lore and shit. There’s so much lore and shit.
This sure is a thing I know for some reason.
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people on this site tend to know pretty niche things youre okay
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I do think the guy also got his tailored experience, a bunch of stuff in the zone was from his store, including his throne and of course the Dread Pirate Roberts
Couple funny refs I noted
- building company is called Reverchon (from the oldest view)
- There’s a section based on the full photo set the original backroom pic is from
- Pool rooms of course, plus a couple of other mutations
Now I think of it the memory theme can also go with the endless mutations and iterations memes go through. Parson himself cam at a point where the backrooms had long drifted from the original concept and steered it back to its origins
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Master of the Universe (2026)
As someone who knew there were the toys, didn’t see either animated versiones or rhe RL movie from the 80ies, didn’t expect to have a good time with this, tbqh!
maybe it was good to have seen nothing else than a short teaser clip a long time ago, and going into it expecting nothing else than a mild 1980ies winkwink-rehash.
Hell, i would even go to bat for this being a better Star Wars movie, because the flying things battling pewpewpew bits were executed better than you’d expect.
Some plot-beats felt like a kid would play them as-is, and i think that childlike honesty made it through to moi, the audience. Also the OST goes hard, and cool to see that Brian May got drafted in to do guitarr stuff 
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Watched Visitors from the Galaxy, a Czech sci-fi film from 1981 by a director/animator about an artist that has sort of Haruhi Suzumiya powers, coming to realize this as he manifests aliens.
There’s a lot of creativity and big swings taken here, which I appreciated a lot. You are thoroughly entertained all the way through, and though I was not moved by this story, I was fascinated by it, and found it immensely pleasant.
It’s obviously an incredibly bizarre movie; it can be tedious, it is very inefficient, really strange decisions are made by characters, it wants to fuck the robot woman, and it strings you on a story that feels a whole lot more work than its worth. But the vibe gets across, the contemplative and curious sense of an artist with granting himself grace and exploring himself without fear. Some of this is maybe me adding some color to the extremely nothing protagonist, but I dunno, he has an interesting face and a lot of the movie involves you looking at him thinking, so you build your own imaginings of what he’s mulling over.
The energy of this movie is extremely communal in a way I liked a lot. It is not quite comedic in tone, though people act with that complete lack of fear you see in comedies, so make of that what you will. I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve seen a flick where the town is so thoughtlessly supportive and trusted. That said, a whoooole lot of the film is people bothering other people, but it isn’t really antagonistic so much as it just seems like how they talk shit out.
The effects are soooooooooo good, the little touches like his encubed gf sneezing after being retrieved from the water, the alien mother’s green finger whip, the creature morphing from a toy… all done with light humor an no bashfulness, rightly believing this strange effect will achieve their goal, warts and all. I also greatly liked the costuming and fashion on display, everyone looks great.
One of the only Czech movies I’ve seen, and I enjoyed it a lot. I plan to check out what else Dušan Vukotić - the director - has done, notably A Visit from Space, Magic Sounds, and The Seventh Continent.
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if you want another czech film recommendation, and one that I think you would especially get a kick out of, Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians is great, as are the films by Karel Zeman (especially 1962’s The Fabulous Baron Munchhausen)
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