Movie Reviews
‘F*ck My Son!’ Review: Can a Movie Be Gross Enough That AI Isn’t the Most Disgusting Thing About It?
The funniest thing about Todd Rohal’s “Fuck My Son!” — alas, one of the only funny things about this impressively sick but tiresomely self-amused celebration of bad taste — is that the most controversial aspect of the movie isn’t its title, or its demented story about a gun-packing mother who forces a random woman to have sex with her monstrous son (imagine if the Sarlaac from “Star Wars” had a baby with the alien from “Mac and Me,” nipples and boils everywhere, diaper oozing wet shit, just a gaping hole full of hotdogs where his dick should be), or even how brutally it treats the sex slave’s elementary school-age daughter, Belinda, who will be cooked in an oven if her mom doesn’t comply with their captor’s demands).
No, the most controversial aspect of “Fuck My Son!” is that it uses some very crude and obvious AI for what amounts to roughly 90 seconds of screen time. A number of festival viewers were outraged. I guess some things are just too obscene for audiences to stomach.
Like everything else in Rohal’s film, the AI-afflicted scenes are designed to triple-underline their own grotesqueness. A prologue modeled after an AMC theater pre-show (“No jacking off in the theater,” “Do not pee or crap in your seat,” “Our restrooms are now closed”) is filled out with inhuman crowds, while the characters from Bernice’s favorite show — a “Veggietales”-esque abomination called “The Meatie Mates” — pop up throughout the movie in increasingly artificial form, their every appearance better reflecting the ghoulish slop that today’s children eagerly consume on YouTube.
As in Radu Jude’s recent “Dracula,” the technology isn’t used as a shortcut (if anything, incorporating AI made Rohal’s work considerably more difficult), but rather as a commentary on the soullessness of modern “art.” Reactive to a world in which people have become more offended by form than content, “Fuck My Son!” exists to explore the efficacy of shock value at a time when image-making itself has become so repulsive and society has ingested its own memetic sickliness as a sign of the future.
Rohal wants to push back against the numbing dystopia of Project 2025, so he’s cooked up a collective experience — one that will tour across the country, advertising its lack of streaming availability as its greatest hook — designed to startle us back to our senses and restore the sheer joy of transgression. Little other joy is on offer (either within this movie, or outside of it), but “Fuck My Son!” feels like it was only made to indulge in the fact that it still could be.
So while I may not have particularly enjoyed the experience of watching it, I have no choice but to admit that it does, indeed, exist. Critics are raving “This is a real thing that people made.” Put it on the poster.
Of course, this material didn’t originate with Rohal; an idea as pure and profound as “Fuck My Son!” has to come from somewhere. Usually it’s from a divine vision or the liquid meth they sell at the front of America’s finest gas stations. In this case, it came from a graphic novel: Johnny Ryan’s “Fuck My Son: A Tale of Terror, Issue One,” which Rohal has faithfully adapted like a sacred text. And that’s just as well, because the movie has no interest in making such intellectual property more palatable to a wider audience.
Either you want to see a movie called “Fuck My Son!” or you don’t (“It’s just garbage,” the director has said. “It’s made by trashmen for trashmen”), and Rohal’s film is squarely targeted at the people who might conceivably pay for a ticket; the aforementioned pre-show offers viewers the choice of “Perv-o-Vision” glasses that make all of the characters naked, or a “Nude Blok” edition for those who pray to “fill their lives with blissful ignorance and intolerance” (the film’s spirit all but requires comparisons to John Waters, even if its execution cleaves a lot closer to early James Gunn).
The world of “Fuck My Son!” is a small and seedy place where every mote of innocence only exists as an invitation for perversion, or worse. We first meet Sandi (Tipper Newton, recalling Sarah Silverman in her ability to conflate innocence with repulsion) as she takes little Bernice (Kynzie Colmery) dress shopping, where — of course — a peeper is spying on all of the dressing rooms. Shot like an ’80s Z-picture but always self-indulgent enough to make clear that it’s in on the joke, the movie soon introduces its leading ladies to an overbearing mother (a Chris Farley-esque Robert Longstreet, growling in drag) who’s fallen and can’t get up.
But it’s a trap! The mother lures Sandi and Bernice to her van, knocks them out, and takes them to the remote farmhouse where she lives with her mutant son Fabian (Steve Little). There’s so much sex in the world, and she can’t stand the thought that her sweet child will never get to have any of it. The mother wheels Fabian in, places Bernice nearby with a front-row view, and — wait for it — demands that Sandi fuck her son. Bareback. “Person to Person” star George Sample III eventually shows up to round out the cast, but that’s really about all there is to it. As positioned to Sandi, the terms couldn’t be simpler: “The sooner you fuck my son, the sooner I’ll let your daughter out of the oven.” What’s a mother to do?
Rohal pays lip-service to the idea that parents will do anything for their children, but this movie is much less interested in developing its themes than it is in watching Sandi fish around Fabian’s innards for his Lovecraftian penis (spoiler alert: she finds it, and the massive appendage becomes a veritable character in its own right). Is it gross? Very.
But the grossness doesn’t scale at a particularly engaging rate, and while Rohal’s agenda required a certain amount of cheekiness to validate the fun of its own shock value, it’s hard to overlook the reality that “Fuck My Son!” is far less disturbing than the movie promised by its title. For all of its eldritch horrors (Fabian’s penis eventually penetrates almost everything you can imagine, with child rape being the most obvious red line that Rohal won’t cross), this heightened story is too “fun” to be even half as fucked up as the things we read in the headlines every day, and not funny enough for its increasingly whacked out “WTF”-ness to be enjoyable on its own terms. Things get wild because they can, and then slaphappy because they can’t be anything else.
When a title card pops up that reads: “The Ending: Part I,” the joke is that a movie with so little substance would require something as pompous as a multi-tiered epilogue.
What meaning there is behind “Fuck My Son!” is easy enough to understand: Enjoy this kind of garbage while you can, because it won’t be long before late night TV hosts are locked in jail, Donald Trump starts talking about Eddington as if it were a real town he saw on Fox News, and everyone who saw “One Battle After Another” is labeled as a card-carrying member of Antifa (the “A” in “AMC A-List” stands for “Anarchy”). Appreciate when slop could still be a display of defiance instead, and not just the visual language of cultural defeat. See “Fuck My Son!” not because it’s good, but rather because it refuses to pretend that it isn’t bad. If only that argument were enough to convince me that it shouldn’t have been better.
Grade: C-
“Fuck My Son!” opens at the IFC Center in New York City on Thursday, October 16, before traveling to other theaters around the country. Its full touring schedule can be found here.
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Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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