'Hello Dankness' mashes up the Trump years

Video artists Soda Jerk assemble a political narrative out of dozens of movies. Plus, erotic thrillers, the documentary!

There have been quite a few cinematic treatments of American politics in the Trump and post-Trump years, and yes, most of them have been very bad. 

But none of those films have looked anything quite like Hello Dankness. Directed by the Australian duo known as Soda Jerk, Hello Dankness remixes footage from dozens of well-known films, to form something resembling a narrative about the Trump years. 

It's a bit scruffy — how could it not be? — but I laughed a lot. 

Hello Dankness begins by inserting, completely uncut, that ludicrous Pepsi commercial where Kendall Jenner shows up at a political protest, hands a Pepsi can to a cop, and suddenly solves everything, leading everyone to hug: 

The idea, I guess, is that no act of satire could possibly come close to matching that, which may very well be true. But then the film gets going, by combining scenes from several movies about the "hidden dark side of American suburbia," like The 'Burbs and American Beauty. (For perhaps unsurprising reasons, the American Beauty clips have a lot of Annette Bening but no Kevin Spacey.) 

The twist is that the different houses are decorated with signs for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. Also, Wayne and Garth are racist now. 

Later, the filmmakers mash up various other films of the recent and distant past with real news footage of stuff like the George Floyd protests and Trump holding the Bible in front of the church. Mel Brooks fans will be delighted to hear "Springtime for Hitler," from The Producers, although the "Blazing Saddles Could Never Be Made Today" crowd might not appreciate exactly how it's deployed. 

The film is a lot fresher than most of the political satires of the past six or seven years, but it also reaches most of the same conclusions: Trump and his supporters are bad, while Democrats are ineffectual and way too smug. 

When it comes to 2023 movies that commit blatant copyright infringement, Hello Dankness is the second best, behind only Vera Drew's The People's Joker. 

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Meanwhile, there's another new movie out that assembles clips from hundreds of movies. It's called We Kill For Love: The Lost World of the Erotic Thriller and it's an exhaustive history of the erotic thriller genre. And I do mean exhaustive- nearly three hours long, it seemingly examines every single erotic thriller that was produced or distributed between 1982 and 1997. 

It's directed by Anthony Penta and yes, the movie covers Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and other Michael Douglas-focused movies that were made by studios and were big hits. But about 90 percent of its running time is taken up by more obscure direct-to-video releases from the '80s and '90s- few of which, on their own, made much of a cultural impact. 

The best scene of the film, by far, is when the narration describes how the straight-to-video thrillers were often retitled for their foreign releases for mysterious reasons so that Animal Instinct 2 suddenly became Animal Instinct 3. 

There are some fascinating insights shared, although I'd say the subject was much better explored by the last two seasons of Karina Longworth's "You Must Remember This" podcast, on "Erotic '80s" and "Erotic '90s." 

What killed the erotic thriller? No, it wasn't "wokeness," as the genre petered out about 15 years too early for that to be the explanation. It was, more than anything else, the death of video stores and the rise of free and easy access to online pornography. But as someone points out in the film, there are still erotic thrillers- they're called Lifetime movies. Every once in a while, a streaming service will put out a good one, like 2021's The Voyeurs with Sydney Sweeney. 

From all the combined clips, We Kill For Love probably features more bare breasts than in any other film of 2023. This was also the case in 2019 for You Don't Nomi, the documentary about Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls and the cult that grew around it. So if you're among those who believe that movies "never have any sex anymore" – as opposed to the equally wrong coterie who believe movies these days have too much sex — your best bet may be to catch a documentary about sexy films of the past. Or, you know, watch a foreign or indie film, neither of which ever stopped including sex or nudity. 

Hello Dankness opens this week at Film Forum in New York with further release plans unknown. We Kill For Love is available on VOD channels.