Trigger Warning: sexual assault and grooming.
This was a year filled with swings and round abouts. I was in college, I was in karate and training a lot, I was working at Blockbuster and loving that, I was watching a shit load of movies and I was trying to rebuild how I felt about myself. And I was sexually assaulted.
Now, that is a big bomb to drop right at the end and I always feel the need to qualify the severity of this assault in comparison to other assaults and other people have suffered and while I continue to feel that way, an assault is an assault and the fallout from this one has reverberated throughout my life ever since. It continues to affect me and as recently as two years ago when ‘Quiet on the Set’ came out on HBO, I felt the full brunt of the years and years worth of grooming that had happened to me prior to the event. I will never forget the specific timing of it because it was the night before I went to see Twister with my friend John and I spent the whole movie trying to act normal while I was internally screaming.
He didn’t know anything about it and was acting the way that he always did when we went to movies and that fucked my head up as well. I was specifically trying to act normal and that nothing had happened and some how the fact that it was working made me feel much worse. I didn’t want anyone to know but I wanted everyone to know at the same time. One result of this is that I have never watched Twister again and I had to white knuckle my way through the sequel Twisters a few years ago (I quite liked it). Twister triggering me is the least of the fallout from this event but it is the thing that keeps the timing fixed in my mind. We saw Twister on opening day. So the night before is when it happened.
It is interesting to take a step back and look at it from a more detached lens and look at the year before and then life after. I was recovering from an entirely different traumatic situation and was starting to closer to normal despite some interpersonal struggles and some rockiness in my relationship, but things were pretty good. Then a nuclear bomb was dropped and everything got fucked. I was in pretty deep denial about it and when I would look it in the face, I thought it was my fault and I had somehow invited it or allowed it to happen. It is rough to have your whole ass personality be based on the idea that you can defend yourself and then have that happened. I didn’t defend myself aside from extricating myself from the situation as quickly as possible and then went home.
It is pretty fucked up to me that my thoughts are so enmeshed in movies that I associate what I did when I got home with the scene in Ace Ventura after he realizes that Einhorn is a man. That is deeply transphobic and I hate associating any reaction I had to that scene but it is what it is. I told my cousin what had happened and no one else for years. She helped me realize it wasn’t my fault and that it was assault which relieved some of the burden but the parts of me that hate me told me a different, much louder story.
So, the rest of the year was me trying to compartmentalize and push that event and those feelings as far back into my mind as I could while I tried to continue somehow. As ever, movies were a big part of that and this year had a lot of movies that I deeply love in a way that I don’t associate with surviving assault and helped me to feel better.
There are a lot of dramatic heavy hitters this year that I love but those do not appear on my list. The ones you will find here are as much about healing and feeling like myself as they are about overall quality. This year was a critical one for me and how I survived moving forward and because of this the loyalty that I have for these movies are really deep and important to me. In this year more than just about any other, context is key.
I wish this entry didn’t have to rely so heavily on what happened to me but this project is about honesty for me and for what movies I loved and why and unfortunately that is intimately connected to trauma in this case. I would also love to say this is the last time the list will get heavy but it is not. If you have to jump off the ride, I understand but I hope you don’t. Lots of cool movies are on the way.
Runners up in roughly release orders: Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, From Dusk Til Dawn, Happy Gilmore, Bottle Rocket, the Birdcage, Fargo, Executive Decision, Flirting with Disaster, Sgt. Bilko, Primal Fear, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, the Craft, the Great White Hype, Mission Impossible, the Phantom, the Rock, Independence Day, Multiplicity, Trainspotting, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, a Very Brady Sequel, 2 Days in the Valley, D3: the Mighty Ducks, That Thing You Do, Long Kiss Goodnight, Sleepers, Romeo + Juliet, Ransom, Jingle All the Way, Sling Blade, Jerry McGuire, Mars Attacks!, One Fine Day, and the People Vs Larry Flint.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1996 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 30-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.Scream-Wes Craven
Witten by Kevin Williamson and directed by horror master Wes Craven, Scream was a slasher movie at a time when slasher movies had fallen out of favor and become a joke. Continuing the meta horror started in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and infused with the self-referential humor of Williamson’s tv output, Scream revitalized slashers by acknowledging what had come before while offering up a compelling Giallo-style murder mystery chock full of fun and likeable characters embroiled in murder, intrigue, and misfortune all while introducing a new major slasher in Ghostface.
Scream is a grab bag amalgamation of previous horror movies borrowing from the big star murder fake out in the beginning from Psycho, to Black Christmas and When a Stranger Calls phone shenanigans. The kills are fun and creative but don’t get bogged down with trying to top anything that has come before and Ghost Face as a character is as funny as he is sadistic with Roger L Jackson’s voice providing the perfect balance of menace, playfulness, and sadism. That he is a killer who talks to his victims puts him in fairly rarified slasher air with his closest counterpart being Freddy Kruger from another of Craven’s masterpieces.
The first Scream movie’s greatest strength is how it keeps the audience off balance throughout the whole experience. The mystery of who is behind the mask has become an institution in the series but at the time, it wasn’t incredibly common for American slashers outside of a handful of movies like Prom Night or Sleepaway Camp. Generally the audience just knew who the killer was. Jason was Jason, and Michael Meyers was Michael Meyers but with Scream the fun and horror stemmed quite a bit from not knowing who Ghost Face was.
The movie supports this by masterfully offering suspects and clues before pulling them back and it genuinely kept the audience guessing. I am a person who can often figure mysteries out before they are revealed and Scream kept me off balance and on my toes from beginning to end. It is easy now to look back and say that it is obvious but I can say that at the time it was not. That it turned out to be two killers was a masterstroke that blew people away at the time and was pretty much unheard of up to that point.
None of the mystery elements would have worked without a strong cast playing strong characters and Scream succeeds here as well. The performances are great across the board and it was a serious bummer when it turned out to be Billy and Stu because Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard did such a good job. The hints are there upon rewatch but despite the movie casting suspicion on Billy all throughout, it also convincingly takes a lot of the clues away up to and including killing him near the end only to reveal it was a fake out all along. These things have become tropes in the years since but when Scream was first in theaters, it was fresh and it worked really well.
Slashers were in such a slump at the time, I didn’t go see Scream right away. I had no intentions to go see it in the theater despite thinking it looked okay from the trailers. It wasn’t until co-workers of mine at Blockbusters came in after seeing it and told me I absolutely had to see it because it was so up my alley. They also said that I was ‘just like Randy’ which I continue to not know how I feel about but with the recommendation, I went. I was blown away.
I saw Scream five times in the theater and have seen it countless times since. I love it and the series that followed with total devotion. I took as many people with me to see it in the theater as possible to share it with them. Most of those people loved it as much as I did and it became solidified in their cannon as well.
Scream was one of those movies that inspired my writing quite a bit and it deepened my love of horror movies even further, which is impressive on its own. It also made me watch Dawson’s Creek which Williamson also wrote and that should speak to just how devoted I was to it.
Scream kick started a new renaissance for slasher movies that led to a cavalcade of imitators, none of which managed to reach the heights of even the worst Scream sequel (Scream 3 if you were wondering). But regardless of their quality they did signal the renewed interest in horror movies for decades to come. That Scream just released its seventh entry earlier this year further speaks to how much people love these things. It all started right here and I am so glad it did.
I showed this to my mom because she was, as I have mentioned previously, a closet horror fan and a lover of mysteries and she dug it. She liked it enough to further support my Wes Craven love by buying me his new releases for Christmas without me asking for them or ever talking to her about them and occasionally movies that he did not write or direct but she thought looked like he did (Soul Survivors I am looking at you). It was always nice to share this love of horror with my mom even if she never copped to it. I was fine with her not really admitting it as long as she kept watching them with me. This gave us yet another series to watch together.
Scream also inadvertently led to me being told, in no uncertain terms, that I am not cool enough to be on Mtv. My friend Nicole wanted to be on Road Rules really badly and asked for my help to make an audition tape for it. I had watched the Real World plenty but I had never really watched Road Rules (they were produced by the same company). Still, Nicole knew that I made movies with my friends and, more importantly, had a video camera so she came to me. We talked about what she needed to have in it and she said she wanted to do something interesting to get the answers out in character dialogue. I had gotten a full Ghost Face costume for Halloween (which has its own story attached I will write about next) and I suggested that we set it up like the opening scene of Scream and I would play Ghost Face quizzing her but about Road Rules and herself instead of horror movies. Her now ex-husband played the both the opening victim (Steve in Scream) and the Stu-style second killer. We revealed we were doing it all because we were jealous because we wanted to be on Road Rules too (which was not true at all but it worked for the narrative). So we shot it and sent it and then I didn’t think anything else about it. A few months later I got a letter from Mtv thanking me for my creativity and bravery for sharing so much of myself with them but that I just wasn’t right for Mtv. It was fairly respectful but it did amount to my minding my own business and then being rejected by Mtv out of nowhere. It turns out, Nicole put my name in to be on the show as well. She didn’t get on either and neither did her ex-husband but they at least asked to be considered.
On Halloween, I want to IHOP after the annual Halloween party I did with some friends and we all went in costume. I was dressed as Ghost Face and had not planned to keep the mask on the whole time but then an ex-girlfriend was our server and I didn’t want it to be awkward and at one point when she was admiring the costumes she said “I want to know who the Ghost Face is because that could be ANYbody.” I did the slow Ghost Face nod and decided to keep it on the rest of the night.
Most recently, when my partner and I decided to have a commitment ceremony (we are both relationship anarchists and are not interested in marriage) we decided to do invitation photos in which a friend wore my Ghost Face costume and stalked us through the photos. We also had Freddy Kruger and the Silence (Ice Nine Kills’s mascot) stalking us but the Ghost Face ones were my favorites. I also have taken a picture at the theater by the poster in a Ghost Face mask for the last three Scream movies. Clearly, Scream has had a fairly profound impact on my life and continues to do so. I am not sure where the series will go next but wherever that is, I am here for it. I really needed this movie when I got it and my fandom of it helped me get through some dicey times this year. It still does and I watch it with a fair amount of regularity. Scream is absolutely a top 10 movie of all time for me.
2.Swingers-Doug Liman
Written by star Jon Favreau and directed guerilla style by Doug Liman, Swingers tells the story of Mikey (Favreau) a struggling actor in LA trying to get his career going while dealing with his relationship ending. His friend Trent (Vince Vaughn) is trying to get him back out there into the dating scene while his friend Rob (Ron Livingston) provides support as a friend from back east also trying to break into acting. The group of friends, which also includes Patrick Van Horn as Sue, and Alex Desert’s Charles, go from club to club trying to hook up while talking about the trials and tribulations of trying to make it in Hollywood.
Swingers is a comedy that introduces its own unique vernacular off the strength of is snappy and clever dialogue that highlights the pitfalls of desperation while offering insight into the grieving process and what it takes to move on. The various situations Mikey and Trent get into are just plain hilarious and the cringe inducing series of voice mails Mikey leaves on a girl’s answering machine lives in my head rent free to this day.
I saw this movie on video and not only did it make me interested in swing dancing, it also provided a fairly perfect analog to me and my friend group. Really any friend group I had ever been in could be broken down in terms of Swingers characters. My own identification with Mikey also broke a lot of ice with a lot of girls that I was too afraid to talk to or take steps forward with. I am enormously shy with women and am apparently genetically incapable of being able to tell if someone is flirting with me. So to be able to point to Mikey and say ‘I am just like that’ became something of a short hand that if moves were to be made, I was unlikely to be the one to make them. It panned out quite a bit in those days.
Swingers also became the inspiration for a web cartoon I did for a number of years that originally started out as a screenplay that my friend Jeff and I were writing. It was fairly thematically similar to Swingers with the ultimate lesson being learned that childish tactics and bullshit were not going to lead to relationships and that you have to make peace with yourself first. Of course in the cartoon strip those lessons were learned only after a series of embarrassing misadventures that were based on my life. I haven’t revisited Swingers in quite some time but it and its influence is indelibly burned into my heart and my brain. It continues to mystify me that the guy that played Mikey now writes and directs Star Wars shows and movies and kick started the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man. Pretty rad even if he did also make Cowboys and Aliens.
3. Mystery Science Theater 3000: the movie-Jim Mallon
Mystery Science Theater 3000 is my favorite TV show of all time. Created by Joel Hodgson for Minnesota public access station KTLA, MST3K is a show about a guy, Joel, trapped on a satellite orbiting the earth by two mad scientists and forced to watch bad movies while they monitor his mind. In his desperation to have companionship, he builds robots to keep him company: Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy, and Cambot. Gypsy (now fashioned as GPC to avoid the racial slur) controls the vital satellite systems so she doesn’t have speech functions and Cambot just films the show so that leaves Crow and Servo to watch the movies with Joel. The show is host segments interspersing in theater scenes in which Joel and the bots watch terrible movies and make fun of them. That is it in a nutshell.
The show was picked up by the Comedy Channel which in turn became Comedy Central and gained a fair amount of popularity on that station. This led to a deal with Universal pictures to make a feature film of the show. This caused some massive problems.
Following a dispute regarding who would direct the movie between Joel and series director Jim Mallon, Joel left the show before the movie even really started. This led head writer Michael J Nelson to step up as the new host of the show, Mike. In the run up to the movie, Frank Conniff, one of the mad scientists TV’s Frank, also left the show. So when the movie came out it was only Trace Beaulieu as Dr Clayton Forrester in the Mad’s lab Deep 13.
The experiment for the movie was sci-fi ‘classic’ This Island Earth, which raised the hackles of some sci-fi fans as they consider it to be too good for the riff treatment from Mike and the bots. Aside from that, studio interference led to the movie’s run time to be an hour and 15 minutes including out of the theater segments which is both shorter than This Island Earth and shorter than an MST3K episode on TV. These elements led to the movie failing at the box office bringing in just over a million dollars in the US and Canada. But even with all of that shit, the movie rocks.
I saw the movie initially at sneak preview screening in a crowd of people who may never have heard of television, robot puppets, sci-fi movies, or movies in general let alone MST3K. Despite being one of the only people in the theater laughing, I loved it. I went to see it again in its short theatrical run at the now defunct Catalina Theater, a theater that has stood empty for decades, held hostage by a doctor’s office that owns it just for the parking garage. I got into a fairly massive fight with my girlfriend at the time during the screening but I still loved the movie that second time.
I have a long and storied history now with MST3K and the people who made it. I have met several of the actors, interviewed several for the website I used to work for, and had Trace and Frank on my podcast. I have seen MST3K performed live, gone to offshoot Cinematic Titanic live shows, contributed to kickstarters to continue MST3K, supported other (and much more popular) offshoot Rifftrax also on Kickstarter, and I own screen accurate puppet replicas of Crow and Tom Servo. I continue to watch MST3K Turkey Day marathons every Thanksgiving and I quote various and sundry episodes and the movie ad naseum. I also participate in movie riffing at Mondo Mondays at the Loft, which the one time you can talk during movies there. I am way the fuck in the bag for MST3K. So my love of the movie is no surprise.
If you are a fan of the show and haven’t seen it somehow, you definitely should. It isn’t the best example of what MST3K is but it is great. It is available on 4k as well so you can see it in all of its low-budget, cheesy glory. Join us, won’t you?
4.The Frighteners-Peter Jackson
Telling the story of fraud paranormal investigator Frank Bannister (Michael J Fox) who finds himself embroiled in a series of mysterious deaths in a small town, the Frighteners is a horror comedy without which we likely would not have gotten the Lord of the Rings.
Frank Bannister can see ghosts after a traumatic event earlier in life and uses this ability to con people with the help of two ghost pals Stuart (Jim Fyfe) and Cyrus (Chi McBride) when he starts seeing a grim reaper like figure ripping the souls out of people who appear to die of a heart attack. That Frank sees a spectral number appear on their foreheads and spooks him further even as he becomes the prime suspect in the killings. He is being tracked by FBI agent Milton Dammers (Jeffery Combs) and falls into an unlikely romance with Lucy Linsky (Trini Alvarado) after her husband is killed and she asks Frank for help to communicate with him.
The Frighteners is exactly my kind of horror comedy with real laughs and authentic tension wrapped up in an impressive special effects package. WETA workshop cut its teeth with the tech here that would be used for the Ring Wraiths in Lord of the Rings and despite the movie not really being a hit, it has lived on as both the springboard Peter Jackson used into mainstream success and a cult classic in its own right.
I saw the Frighteners in the theater on a theater hopping trip. I also saw the Quest that day which was a Jean Claude Van Damme martial arts picture that was god awful. The Frighteners captured my imagination, however, and has become one of my absolute favorite horror comedies. It isn’t as funny as Jackson’s previous Dead Alive, but it is much cooler to me. People’s mileage varies on this one as I learned when recommending it at Blockbuster, but it hits my sweet spot perfectly. I can watch it pretty much any time and it makes me feel better which was of great use around this time.
5.Kingpin-Bobby and Peter Farrelly
Kingpin is a simple story of Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson), a bowling prodigy who loses his hand due to the treachery of his con partner Ernie McCracken (Bill Murray) enlisting an Amish bowling prodigy, Ismael (Randy Quaid) to win a bowling tournament to help him pay off his debts. Along the way they rescue another con artist Claudia (Vanessa Angel) from an abusive boyfriend and double crosses abound until Roy ultimately has to face off against McCracken who has become reigning bowling champion. See? Simple.
Kingpin is the Farrelly brothers film between Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary and is as crass and off color as either of those. It is also my favorite of theirs. The performances are all in and the movie does not shy away from its inherent ridiculousness. There are heart warming messages buried deep down in this movie but they are mostly buried beneath the preponderance of gross out jokes and physical comedy. Off color as it is, the movie doesn’t punch down and manages to feel edgy without being insensitive, a line the Farrellys cross in later films to those films’ detriment. I saw this on video and bought it when we sold it used at Blockbuster and it became a pretty regular favorite to watch over and over. I have subsequently purchased it on other formats and still go back to it from time to time. The gross out humor isn’t for everyone but if it is your cup of tea, this is great.