More than Street Trash: Red Letter Media, and a love letter to shared cinema

There are many things which make Red Letter Media one of the best sources of film criticism on the internet. But, while its cynicism-fuelled early successes might have you believe otherwise, the team’s latest hour-long review underlines the brand’s true x-factor: friendship.

It is fair to say Milwaukee, Wisconsin is not the most famous city in the US by a long-shot. The 31st most populous hub in the country is possibly best known for serial killers, sporting mediocrity, breweries, and a life-size bronze statue of The Fonz from Happy Days (the famously nostalgic sitcom set in Milwaukee, which has since seen many distinctly unhappy days). But over the last two decades, Red Letter Media has been putting Milwaukee on the map.

Founded in 2004 by Mike Stoklasa – later joined by friends and collaborators Jay Bauman and Rich Evans – the video production company has long taken up residence in Brew City. 2009 first saw the project receive widespread attention, when founder Stoklasa’s 70-minute video essay reviewing Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace went viral. Racking up more than a million views in the first four months after its release, the multi-part essay (that’s how you had to upload to YouTube back in the day, and I feel like a toothless old prospector even having to explain that…) has continued to reel in generations of viewers in the many years since – attracting praise from Simon Pegg, Patton Oswalt and Roger Ebert.

Adopting the ludicrously sinister character of Harry S. Plinkett, Stoklasa disarmed audiences who might have expected this form of content to come from a smooth, sneering internet-era eunuch. Rather than trying to live up to that image, delivering a snarky CinemaSins-style catalogue of everything ‘logically’ incorrect in a movie about magical space samurai – desperate to prove he was ‘smarter’ than the movie – the filthy and deranged Plinkett supplied a surprisingly methodical, thematic autopsy of George Lucas’ bloated CGI cash-grab.

Ultimately, the Plinkett reviews still stand out amid the review/reaction video industry that has since boomed around it on YouTube, precisely because it they aren’t interested in showing that the people making movies are dumber than the people reviewing them. Despite their cynical (and often distressingly bleak) window-dressing, they offer up earnest advice to filmmakers – they focus on the things that went wrong, try to explain them, and offer a priceless guide to aspiring filmmakers in the process.

In the years since, Plinkett reviews have been phased out of Red Letter Media’s regular productions. Cut-away gags about dead babies or having sex with cats were a ticking time-bomb as the ‘wild west’ era of YouTube gave way to more advertiser-conscious forms of censorship. But the company has managed to find new ways of keeping that core differentiator alive – while fostering another one, which might even be more important.

Half in the Bag

Since 2011, Stoklasa and Bauman have fronted an ongoing series, with a more standard kind of Siskel & Ebert format. Aiming to produce something less intensive to edit than a Plinkett film, and with a quicker turnaround, the duo began posing (loosely) as VHS repair men, desperate to find a new grift to replace their work in a dying industry. Most of the time this involved them drinking on an endless job for an elderly man played by Evans (also called Plinkett, whose lore I do not have the time or energy to get into here), and trying to milk their last repair job for all it’s worth.

Coincidentally, the slacking off results in Bauman, Stoklasa (and occasionally Evans) talking about what they’ve seen at the cinema recently. While initially, this set up the series to focus largely on mainstream Hollywood productions, with exceptions when a film festival put something more left-field on nearby, on-demand video (especially after the lockdown era closed theatres) has led to an increasingly enjoyable divergence into paths less travelled. While the team do still sometimes find the time to take in whatever Marvel has farted out that week, the casual fans endlessly demanding reviews of the latest Batman reboot will find they are barking up the wrong tree. Instead, they are more interested in promoting the things they find interesting, but which haven’t received a wide release, or indeed much publication.

While some indy darlings like Everything Everywhere All At Once might have been familiar to viewers by the time they turned up on the show, they have also picked out movies even those in the know will have overlooked. As well as unapologetically unique movies like British video-nasty pastiche Censor, they have taken onweird and wonderfully flawed movies making their way to streaming like Rawhead Rex – and everything in between. They have even devoted whole episodes to highlight the niche acting prowess of Kyle Gallner, who I am now convinced should be viewed as one of the most gifted performers of his generation.

The heart of those earlier reviews continues – with the negatively received movies receiving an intricate unpicking from the team. And again, unlike so much of the online critic circuit, this focuses not on sensationalist gotchas, but on where different decisions might have been made – and really, where you might avoid making the same mistakes in your own tiny productions. On top of that, however, Stoklasa, Bauman and Evans have added two very special things.

Most obviously, they have used their growing clout to help platform some of the most exciting new filmmakers in the industry. But beyond that, they have also offered a small amount of kinship. I am not saying they are your friends, or that they even pretend to be. They have what I would say is a very healthy (comedic) disdain for their fans. But during the pandemic in particular, what is being offered here was emphasised – a window into a particular kind of bonding, which speaks to viewers at our lowest moments. There is an authentic bond between the team which shines through, and reminds us of what makes the shared experience of cinema so special: finding something we enjoyed (for whatever reason), and giving it to / inflicting it on those we love. (Something I need to thank my friend and fellow IFL contributor Bradley Neale for having done that for me, with the Plinkett reviews, all those years ago!)

Best of the Worst

All of this has carried into Best of the Worst – which has probably become the company’s flagship series. These are feature-length recordings of the core team, plus a growing roster of regular guests, which treat viewers to a vicarious B-movie night.

Again, it’s a format which lovers of movies – and movie criticism – will be familiar with. It is reminiscent of Mystery Science Theater (though Stoklasa has humorously stated he doesn’t watch “that shit”) – but with added insight. While the night of entertainment often includes cries of “how embarrassing” or other staple catchphrases, the post-mortem rarely turns to ridiculing the filmmaker (other than notable cases where the writer-director-star-craft-services decides to say something reprehensible, as in the ironically titled Honorable Men).

Rather, the series maintains a degree of practical advice – often with a refreshing slice of self-awareness thrown in for good measure. That is something rarer than rockinghorse shit in this business – and worth its weight in gold.

As I have said before in my review of Dan Olson’s film criticism, if you are going to offer authentic criticism that actually helps people, it is to be open about why you feel the way you do about a filmmaker’s work. If there is a relevant experience from our lives that shapes how we think about a movie, we should be willing to draw on it, and talk about it. After all, whatever we think of the piece we’re watching, the filmmaker has already put their feelings on the line, so the least we owe them is to be emotionally honest, and vulnerable, in response.

In Best of the Worst, the gang don’t just say what does or (more often) doesn’t work in a film. For that matter, they don’t only say how things might have been improved. They also offer insight into why they know that – they pull back the curtain, and let us know how they have been informed by potentially painful failures of their own. This crops up in multiple reviews – including Suburban Sasquatch and Lycan Colony – but the gold standard probably comes from their special episode highlighting LGBT+ drama Ben and Arthur.

Ben and Arthur is a film which has since been acknowledged by its own creator as being very poorly made. There would be no point in simply savaging such a film – especially when it broadly has its heart in the right place. But one of the key areas the episode finds most joy in is the minutae of set-dressing – spelling out how an independent film can get buy-in from a critical audience, with some relatively cheap and basic touches. Explaining how they know these hacks, Stoklasa, Bauman and Evans hark back to their own 2016 feature Space Cop – which they have repeatedly referred to previously as a “miserable” experience, while discussing at detail what went wrong there.

This means that time and again, I’ve drawn on Red Letter Media as a top-tier example of criticism; one which anyone looking to get into this work should take inspiration from. But again, whether you make a film for yourself, whether you decide to become a film critic or not, there is something else here which has kept more than a million loyal viewers returning, month after month.

The expanded Best of the Worst team includes regulars Jack Packard, Josh Davis, and Tim Higgins, as well as a widening panel of industry guests. Comic artist Freddie Williams II; Canadian special effects maestros Colin Cunningham and Jim Maxwell; B-movie auteur Len Kabasinski; actors Macaulay Culkin and Jack Quaid; and impressionist Josh Robert Thompson have each had such a barnstorming time in Milwaukee, that they have returned for second and third doses. Perhaps that is because there is something fantastically binding about enduring a cultural experience with other people: a friendship which you might melodramatically say comes from having survived something together. At the same time, in the procured episodes, where one of the team introduces the others to something they’ve already seen, there’s something endearingly human about the interaction, which we recognise and gravitate towards.

We bond over culture in this way, not just because we need to be seen to be ‘in’. The water-cooler discussion about culture often conflates the idea of being able to discuss a must-see show as a desire for conformity, or needing ‘currency’ to function as part of broader society. And so, we get endless culture designed both to be disseminated in easily replicated chunks, and which in turn deifies this process. Marvel’s endless universe tells us we are clever for simply recognising pieces of canonical branding. And we know Ellie in The Last of Us is smart because she can discuss pop-culture with adults.

But Red Letter Media is tapping into something deeper. Finding culture that helps us understand or cope with the world at large, and sharing it with other people – people that we care about – because it could help inoculate them against another day of anger / pain / suffering in the real world is a beautiful thing. It is a core part of modern friendship, and can leave a lasting legacy that touches us even when relationships change or end.

“Here’s a piece of culture that moved me, for better or worse, and made the surrounding gloom a little more bearable. I’d like you to have that experience too.”

re:View

That all brings me to the Red Letter Media series, and episode, which finally prompted me to write about the Milwaukee crew in all its grimy glory. re:View sees the team take a look back at a piece of film or television which shaped the way they see film (usually for the better), without necessarily needing a reason. They just want to talk about something they remember, to revisit it, and see what they still like about it – while recognising the way it has influenced their friendships in the years since.

In the latest episode, Bauman is joined by Josh Robert Thompson – who evidently had a really good time impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first Best of the Worst – to discuss the little-known ‘melt film’, Street Trash. Away from their main gigs, impressionists often seem uncomfortable the moment they drop character, and (like Anthony Hopkins in Magic) often fall back into another voice as soon as possible. But to the credit of Bauman and the team, the atmosphere they have cultivated – where Thompson can feel among friends – means the vocal artist spends almost the whole video as himself.

Remembering how he first saw the movie, Thompson recalls:

“My best friend… my best buddy at the time Matt Loede was a sports reporter in Cleveland for many, many years. And unfortunately, he passed away several years ago from cancer. But Matt and I bonded over Street Trash. Matt’s dad was a police officer and used to get us into these movies for free. So, I don’t know how that worked. He would just he would just flash his badge. He would he would do the flip though. He’d go, “Oh yeah, yeah, they’re fine.” So, we got to see all these free movies because of the badge.”

The experience did not end at the cinema, though. The film captured the boys’ imaginations in such a way that it became a ritual they would return to again and again over the years, no matter where they were in their lives.

“We must have watched this movie 50 times, maybe a hundred,” Thompson continues. “Every time we got together, we watched the movie, to the point that we could quote it verbatim as if it was like our own Rocky Horror Picture Show… We would get together and watch this movie. And whenever I would see him, even after I moved to Los Angeles, I would fly back to Cleveland and visit. And when I would first see him, we would reenact the scene where Bronson is pushing on some guy’s car hood.”

Of all the things I expected from a Red Letter Media video, tearing up over someone’s recollection of a movie scene, where an alcoholic veteran attacks a motorist, was not on my bingo card. But having recently been visited by my childhood friend Ben, who flew out to Amsterdam from the Old Country, I’ve just lived this exact experience. Parts of who we are have become tied to an expressed through our shared experiences with film – of pieces of visual ideology we loved or hated – to be talked over and riffed on for time immemorial. And having helped shape that friendship, provided us both with something to enjoy and laugh at even in the times our lives weren’t going so well, those fragments of rechewed culture will one day be a part of our grieving and remembrance, and making sad moments a little more bearable again.

It has probably never been this overt, but that’s always been at the heart of Red Letter Media’s critical formula for success. Sure, the ‘how’ relating to helping make better art, or to inform better discussion is there too – but this is the ‘why’, because we are social animals, who thrive by sharing information and experiences. The bonds we create through culture, which allow us to take on and even mock the most daunting aspects of life, are priceless. And managing to help us appreciate that fact through movie criticism makes Red Letter Media truly the Best of the Best.

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