Right from the beginning, Planet of the Apes settles itself on a nexus between tactile action and implacable inaction. The prologue, set on a spaceship as astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) throws his throaty baritone into a mission log, establishes the very 2001: A Space Odyssey sub-Kubrickian cosmic chill of the material. Taylor, along with Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton), are on an amorphous vision of an intentionally nebulous, even pointless nature; what matters is not where they are going or why, but the existential frostiness of the pallid white of the ship’s interior and the very present deadened quality in Heston’s worrisome but unconcerned voice.
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Pop!: Planet of the Apes
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When we last left him, former police office Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) lost his family and his best friend, and had fulfilled a most unfulfilling form of revenge on the now lawless highways of the Australian outback. He had lost and repaid the loss only to realize that there was nothing to be won back. When we last left him, there was nothing left for him but the empty road.
Thirty six years later, with the release of the grandly, boisterously cinematic carnival opera of Mad Max: Fury Road, it is difficult to peer back through the looking glass and glimpse the humble origins of the Mad Max fiction. It is difficult to remember that, for all its commercial and critical success, the 1979 release of Mad Max was nothing more than a budget of 400,000 dollars (a paltry sum then and now) and one of the great modern cinematic visualists doing everything they could together to disturb, provoke, and ultimately, to entertain and thrill. It is difficult to remember how intimately inhuman the original Mad Max is, how nonchalantly brutal and matter-of-factly nihilistic it is in its almost impressionist depiction of apocalypse and social malaise propped up by stunning, startling car chases of unquenchable viciousness. It is also difficult, in lieu of the great majesty of the second film in the series, Mad Max 2:the Road Warrior, to remember how effective the original grinding house classic of action entertainment is to this day. 
Many of the films I’ve reviewed for this month’s descent into the darker regions of cinema at least welcome the benefit of general acceptance. They are, if horrible, known quantities in their horror and thus well-equipped to inform the viewer of their badness beforehand. Put simply, you know what you are getting into. Yet, deep down, any traversing adventurer of the medium secretly knows that the movies that are regularly trumpeted for their badness cannot truly take the cake, that the real depths of incompetence are almost certainly unknown to anyone but the form’s most cherished devotees. When you get down into it, we know that the films that are generally well-known to be the “worst movies ever” benefit from a certain functional quality that makes their badness understandable to the general public. It makes them actual movies, in other words, capable of being judged in relation to other movies and considered worse. 
In the frantic next-big-thing post-haste grab-bag of follow-the-leader early ’80s pop cinema, the successes of Star Wars and, to a lesser extent, more barbaric works like Conan the Barbarian, took the cinematic landscape for a ride and everyone was struggling mightily to stay on board. The general thrust of the plan was “make it like the 1950s would have, but add in just a bit more violence for the kiddies”, and with this, we can single out a few filmic years caught searching for cover under the perpetual hail of hyper-masculinized, macho bro-forces that mistook the likes Rambo: First Blood for a Reaganistic hagiography of big dudes with bigger guns. Littered deep under the fallout, after you move away the rubble for a few hours, one of the most culpably misguided, and among the earliest of these films, emerges: Megaforce, perhaps the most perfectly captured distillation of the year 1982 anyone was ever capable of dreaming up.
I would so deeply have loved to claim that Pitch Perfect 2 takes advantage of its premise with a tidal wave of bubbly, giddy affection and camaraderie that even I, born and bred A Capella enemy, could be swayed by its sheer cataclysmic force and gallant reluctance to submit to the screenwriting essentials of the cinematic world. By all accounts, the original Pitch Perfect (unseen by me) was an achievement primarily for its low-key, shaggy-dog bonding and unforced, almost non-narrative chill-out vibe. Ideally, in Pitch Perfect 2, singing scenes would double as bonding sequences for characters, and individual moments of plucky, even spunky, post-narrative fluff doctored up with flashy camera movements and zippy staging and framing would be the order of the day .
Reviewing the quintessential Euro-cool movie of the 1960s gave me the idea to add on a little bonus review of perhaps the most European of the “cool American” films of the decade, a truly great work of experimental pop from the master of not deciding whether his film would be amazing or awful, John Boorman…
Edited
Our Man Flint is not the best film to wield as a cipher for the amorphous concept of “camp”, but it is sufficiently campy to justify bending an analysis in the direction of camp. Arguably, a better film would be the following year’s Batman: The Movie, but although Batman is probably the better film as far as outright absurdism goes, Our Man Flint feels more honestly campy. This may seem patently ridiculous, but a further dissection of what exactly camp is (and exploring pop in the ’60s absolutely insists on a discussion of camp) helps us understand why Flint is a work of camp while Batman moves back and forth between camp and something more openly satiric. The privilege of Batman is the privilege of satire, namely that it has the confidence of its own superiority to the world of the “serious”, and that is not something Our Man Flint even considers.
The Long Take 