From 2013 to 2016, I was the head writer and editor-in-chief of a film blog called Smug Film. I was also the host of its podcast. After I closed Smug Film’s doors, I moved on to just making (a ton of) truly independent feature-length films, but now, after nearly a decade, I am opening those doors again: Smug Film is back, baby! (I will still make films too, don’t worry—or do worry, if you hate my films.)
The original (now kinda broken, but whatever, no reason to delete it) Smug Film site is still available, containing a full archive of all the old Smug Film posts, as well as all the episodes of the podcast. But, that entire archive (of posts and the podcast) has been migrated by me over to Substack, which is where all BRAND NEW Smug Film pieces will appear! (And later, brand new podcast episodes, too!)
If you like my film writing here on my Kill The Lion Substack, I probably won’t be doing much of it on here anymore, and instead will just be writing on the Smug Film Substack—so, go subscribe to that one.
As an example of the kind of work you can expect from Smug Film, below is my first new Smug Film piece in nearly a decade, a thorough essay-review of the brilliant film ‘Surveillance Camera Man’.
There is a dearth of good film pieces out there on the internet, and Smug Film had (and still has, and will have more of) some of the best, and highly original, film pieces around. I choose great writers for Smug Film, and I do great writing myself. If you care about solid (and thoroughly non-AI) pieces existing, please read us and support us. We will make you smarter, and you will enjoy movies better.
So, without further ado, here’s my brand-spankingly fresh piece (which can also be read over at the Smug Film Substack):
Surveillance Camera Man (2018)
Directed by (Unknown)
50 min.
You can watch or download Surveillance Camera Man for free at Internet Archive.
For the past three years, I’ve wanted to make an existential zombie movie. It would be called ‘No Zombies’, and it would be similar in structure (a spiritual sequel, if you will) to my existential shark film from 2022, ‘No Shark’.
The beautiful thing about making an existential [insert type of movie] movie though, is that there’s no one way to do it. Sure, it might feel like there is, but, as my Letterboxd list of Existential Shark Movies shows, there’s way more than one way to existentially skin a particular cat. (As of the time I write this, there are 21 existential shark movies on my list and counting.)
Surveillance Camera Man is an existential zombie film (whether it even intends to be or not) that is far different from what I would do with ‘No Zombies’. So far different, in fact, that many who watch (and enjoy or not enjoy) Surveillance Camera Man, would probably go their entire life never even thinking about it as an existential zombie film, were I not to have pointed it out. That is the power of framing, and that is why, if you see something in something, you should absolutely say something. (Joel Schumacher’s ‘Batman & Robin’ would not be in the thankfully reappraised place that it is today had I not, for so many years, gone to bat for it as a deliberate and successful piece of campy entertainment.)
I say ‘enjoy or not enjoy’ about Surveillance Camera Man, by the way, because, for some inexplicable reason (I can’t pretend to understand the minds of people who don’t notice the clear, obvious value of certain art) some people absolutely despise Surveillance Camera Man. In fact, even more surreal than that, virtually everyone in the movie Surveillance Camera Man despises Surveillance Camera Man. It is a movie that cannot go seconds without being hated by someone, either within it or watching it somewhere on the internet. All this to say, it is a perfect film (and one that does, of course, have its audience). It is wildly funny, and uniquely beautiful, and ultimately, life-affirming and pro-human. I love it.
I don’t know who they are, and I can’t find them, but I guarantee that there are people in this world who cannot stomach watching Surveillance Camera Man, yet can watch, with glee, films like Cannibal Holocaust, and Cannibal Ferox, and the Nekromanitk films. These people must exist—I know human nature, and I know how weird people can be about certain things. Gore, and violence, and exploitation, and animal abuse, there are people who go out of their way to desensitize themselves to that. But videos of genuine (not at all staged) uncomfortable public interactions? That’s not a ‘hip’ thing to be inured to. We know this because there are people who literally cannot stomach listening to prank phone calls. The thought that someone, somewhere, once had their time wasted on a phone by an artist, fills them with rage. You know that I’m not making this up. We who like prank phone calls have all experienced playing The Jerky Boys, or Longmont Potion Castle, or Terrorizing Telemarketers for someone, and it being like we sat them down and showed them the Budd Dwyer tape. (Even Terrorizing Telemarketers, which literally just goes after telemarketers, who waste all of our time, and who we all can’t stand!) It’s insane the levels of instantly conjured and wholly fraudulent compassion people will muster out of nowhere, for no good reason at all, simply to denigrate a work of (or type of) art.
Surveillance Camera Man is very much a part of the same ilk as the aforementioned prank call gods—though not literally. In privately pitching it to my good friend (and fellow Smug Film royalty) Greg DeLiso as something he should watch, I described Surveillance Camera Man to him as ‘minimalist Longmont Potion Castle’. There’s a kernel of Longmont in there, but it makes Longmont feel almost like neverending progressive metal as compared to Surveillance Camera Man’s The Ramones: two or three of the same chords max, rinse/repeat every two minutes.
I also described Surveillance Camera Man to Greg as akin to the work of Greg’s much beloved (and my much beloved) John Wilson. Most are familiar by now with Wilson’s excellent HBO show, How To with John Wilson, but his work goes back way further than that, and all of it is worth seeing (and some of the early stuff is the best stuff he’s ever made).
Whether Greg will ever actually watch Surveillance Camera Man, I have no idea. But, I pitched it to him as strongly as I possibly could—and maybe, if he reads this piece, this will be the icing on the cake.
I don’t just care about Greg watching this movie though—I care about anyone watching it—anyone who is game to appreciate video’d performance art that is truly of-the-people, homegrown out of the ether, rather than sanctioned by some lame museum and done by some egotistical, inexplicably rich prick. Real, daring art is a vow poverty, essentially. If the mysterious man behind Surveillance Camera Man is a millionaire, it would only be because of random Bitcoin or stock market luck or something—maybe even a lottery win, or an inheritance. This is not artistic work that you do in order to get rich (or to be fawned over by the least charismatic, least talented, least intelligent people you will ever meet in your life—have I mentioned that I hate the art world?)
Surveillance Camera Man is the kind of art you make if you’re looking to get, at best for your efforts, a brick to the skull (and hopefully get footage of it, so that the violence is not entirely useless). This film consists of deliberate, non-violent prodding of strangers in highly specific and effortless ways, intended to push the pressure points in their brain that will cause them to turn into zombies of sorts—which brings us back to the point of this review.
What might you do, when bored, during an actual, literal, real world zombie apocalypse? What I mean is, a zombie apocalypse where zombies aren’t much of a threat, just a seeming one (let’s say that the movies lied, or at least exaggerated.) Well, like a crow, you might fuck with the cats (zombies) for fun from time to time. You’d see if you can get the zombies to suddenly act all stereotypically zombie, out of as little effort from yourself (as a non-zombie) at all. That is what Surveillance Camera Man is, in a nutshell.
Sure, these are real people and not zombies. But, it is worthwhile to document just how easily people can go from 0 to 100 when they arbitrarily feel that they have been wronged in some way. Every clip you see in Surveillance Camera Man occurred years before the Covid era—and in a world where we had actually given a piece of art like this consideration, and thought, and value, we might have learned a lot about mass formation psychosis in an infinitely easier and less taxing way. I am not exaggerating when I say that the proper understanding of works of art such as Surveillance Camera Man, at the time they are created, can save the world, preventing human-on-human mass catastrophe due to the wisdom that said works of art can bring us.
There are actual people who exist who, as a result of me merely mentioning, in this review, Covid era and mass formation psychosis (gasp—that term was popularized on Joe Rogan’s podcast!) will suddenly decide that they hate what I’ve had to say here in this piece, even if they were with me all the way thus far. These people are not hard to spot, visually—you can see them out in public, every day, still wearing their cloth mask. I doubt very many of them would have stumbled upon this piece in the first place, but, the point is, we all know that people like this exist—and much like some of the people documented in Surveillance Camera Man, they would turn themselves into a snarling beast of a zombie and lunge at me for saying what I said—because my saying of it gave them the supposed moral pretext / Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card to. (‘Words are violence’, as the popular misnomer goes.)
What Surveillance Camera Man specifically shines a light on are the popular misconceptions surrounding being filmed. ‘You need my consent in order to film me!’ ‘You need to delete that footage right now!’ etcetera—as well as, the abhorrent behavior of larping that you feel threatened by an innocuous person with a camera, granting you the imagined right to be violent towards said person and their property. A camera recording the interaction be damned, you will see people feign harassment in real time, even though, by definition of the literal camera recording the interaction, there is no possible visual evidence of such a thing happening (except that which has been hallucinated in the mind of the ’victim’).
The rules of Surveillance Camera Man (all art has rules—and the more confines the better, as that is the pot that the plant that is the art grows from) are simple. I fully believe that this would be a horrible movie if its rules were arbitrary and ever-changing to the point of incomprehension. Calvinball (as great as it is) this is not—Surveillance Camera Man is more along the lines of Go: simple to learn, but difficult to master (as a thing to do to others). The anonymous individual who is the titular Surveillance Camera Man is highly skilled, and is a fair and loving God of the world and its inhabitants which he brings to life through his art. He does not ask too much out of his subjects—only just enough for us to be able to see free will exhibit itself in all its unbridled glory. (An actual religious scholar who weirdly happens to have the same movie taste as me might be able to write a piece on which specific God that Surveillance Camera is most like, and which specific God that John Wilson is most like, and compare and contrast the two. But, no such person likely exists. That is not an excuse for you to ask AI to do it—you and I both know that the answer will be 99% bullshit.)
Speaking of AI, Surveillance Camera Man is of course a great example of a movie that AI could never in a million years generate. (AI-worshippers may disagree, but of course they will—they’ve picked their horse/God, and they’re sticking with it.) I could far more easily imagine AI generating a new, classics-section worthy work of Shakespeare than generating this. Which is to say that Surveillance Camera Man is better than Shakespeare, right? Well, only in that it’s a far more advanced work of art than Shakespeare, on both a technical and dimensional level (but, you could say the same about gonzo porn). Art being more advanced by way of coming out later and being build upon so much more of human history doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ‘better’ (and neither does AI’s ability or lack thereof to replicate it). All this to say though that, if you are worried about AI replacing everything, it’s important to remember that there is so much that it cannot, and will not, ever replace—including a vast amount of underrated and under-seen movies such as this one. (I’d throw my own movies into that same pile.)
As stated at the beginning of this review (but that’s so far up by now that I might as well state it again) you can watch Surveillance Camera Man for free on Internet Archive. I hope that you do, and I hope that you watch it with the wisdom that I’ve offered here. On top of that though, I’m sure (I guarantee, even) that you will see more and different things in it than just what I’ve seen in it—like any great piece of art, it’s open to interpretation and exploration (and re-interpretation, and re-exploration). As long as you don’t outright abhor it, we’re cool—and even if you do abhor it, please try to at least see something in it of value. This film will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I find it to be a hilarious and loving sendup of human behavior in the being-recorded-in-public age. You may not laugh even once, but it’s still hilarious. To quote Andrew Dice Clay from his seminal (and great, and misunderstood) comedy album masterpiece, The Day The Laughter Died: “This show’s not about laughter. It’s about comedy. You don’t have to laugh to enjoy it.” (That wisdom by Clay was delivered completely off the cuff, by the way.)
Before I go, I just want to point out something that further drives the point home of just how much can be seen within this movie: the obvious, intended purpose of Surveillance Camera Man is to point out how angry people get at the idea of a random human filming them, versus how complacent they are with the myriad ways in which they are recorded by actual surveillance cameras over the course of a given day. The only reason I did not bring this up (no I’m not stupid, I of course noticed it) is because it’s a pretty clearly stated purpose within the piece. As such, it is, in my opinion, a surface element. Not insignificant by any means—and not invalid as far as purpose—but, one that could be gleaned by and Tom, Dick, or Harry who watches this film. You don’t pay me to do basic shit for you like that. Hell, you don’t pay me at all—but, if you want to, a kind donation is always appreciated.
5 out of 5 Codys.