I have taken, in my time, a lot of grief for unapologetically loving Posse. I am not sure as to why.

It certainly can’t be because the movie isn’t entertaining. With a wealth of excellent performances from Mario Van Peebles, Big Daddy Kane, Tiny Lister, Billy Zane (as the crazy evil white dude) and Stephen Baldwin (as the crazy good white dude) and many others – including the usual Peebles brigade of former blaxploitation stars, this time around casting Pam Grier, Isaac Hayes and Peebles’ father Melvin – the acting in this Western is definitely up to snuff. (Amusing: current Black Panther writer Reginald Hudlin shows up as an extra.) The action sequences are excellent (as can be expected from Peebles’s direction), and the plot is perfectly decent. Okay, maybe the bits with the golden bullets are a touch melodramatic, but they also add a pleasant larger-than-life, mythic aspect to the movie.

Plus – and this cannot be underrated – the movie addresses a major complaint I have with Westerns, which is to say their whiteness. There were a lot of black people headed west during the post-Civil-War period, but in just about every Western movie you find a dearth of black people – short of Morgan Freeman’s turn in Unforgiven I’m hard-pressed to think of any offhand. This sort of thing is forgivable in earlier westerns like High Noon, but it’s something that continued way longer than it should have; even when movies like Silverado and Tombstone had token Mexicans (mostly because sloppy-looking banditos in sombreros with guns are a staple of the Western, for good or ill), there was always a conspicuous lack of black people. And that is lame.

Some have criticized Posse for being an overreaction to this, in the “oh so you’re not going to have black people in your Westerns well I’ll make a Western with all black people, how do you like them apples” variety. They have a tiny bit of a point, but given the cinematic situation with westerns and blacks, it’s not a very big point, and moreover it’s just plain harping considering that Posse isn’t just cinematic affirmative action but a damned entertaining movie in its own right. When Stephen Baldwin’s crazy white boy points out, quite reasonably, that “I ain’t ever personally enslaved nobody,” Peebles gives him ups that the argument doesn’t necessarily even deserve. That’s because Peebles, in addition to writing a damn fine oater, also wants to be fairminded.

But so what if he is? This is a movie with black cowboys quoting poetry and Scripture while they shoot the bad guys, with Stephen Baldwin throwing knives at people (this long predates Stephen Baldwin’s born-again phase, for those wondering), and Billy Zane wearing an eyepatch because he is EEEEEEVIL. It is good goddamned fun. I can understand not liking Westerns as a genre, because not everybody likes cowboys. But if you do like Westerns, why you would not like Posse is beyond me.

Brain Donors is one of those movies that I routinely inflict upon my friends. Unlike other overlooked movies I have previously mentioned, Brain Donors is not necessarily a movie everybody will love. Because Brain Donors can be explained in one simple sentence: it is a remake of a Marx Brothers movie with a young John Turturro in the Groucho Marx role.

“No?” Flakfizer doesn’t know the MEANING of the word “No!” We’re also a little fuzzy on “panaglutin” and “viscosity.” Actually, come to think, everybody should love Brain Donors precisely because it is a remake of a Marx Brothers movie (specifically A Night At The Opera, their finest, except with ballet instead of opera) with John Turturro in the Groucho role. And let me assure you that Turturro is full-on manic in what I consider to be his finest pure comedic performance ever. Yes, better than any Coen brothers film he’s ever been in. Yes, better than his freak turn in Transformers, where he was the best thing about a pretty marginal movie. As Roland T. Flakfizer (Brain Donors enthusiastically embraces the silly-name traditions of the Marxes), Turturro chews up the scenery then regurgitates it as cud to digest later. “Charity work. I gather these for those less fortunate than myself who can’t afford pornography.” Still, the Groucho role is only one of three in a Marx flick, and luckily Turturro has compatriots as game as he is: Bob Nelson, a more-or-less unknown standup comedian, takes on the Harpo role with exceptional gameness (and turns out to be a splendid physical comedian), and Mel Smith turns the Chico role from Italian-American to illegal-British-immigrant, matching Turturro word-for-word in often-dizzying dialogue. “I could make love to you right here.”
“Roland, let’s keep this professional!”
“Fine, I’ll charge you fifty bucks a pop.” Brain Donors is old-school, a finely-tuned romp with an enthusiastic love of silliness for silliness’ sake. Every single element of this movie is dialed up to eleven (except for Turturro’s performance, which I would estimate to be dialed up to around thirty-six). And the best thing is that it builds, and builds, and builds, starting with Turturro chasing an ambulance (literally) and slapping an inflatable rotator cuff on an opportunistic little kid while encouraging said kid to sue his parents (“I sued mine!”), and ending with one of the funniest extended sequences in film comedy ever, a twenty-minute sequence with the three numbskull-heroes deliberately sabotaging a performance of Swan Lake so that the evil ballet dancer (yes, there’s an evil ballet dancer) and the evil rich guy get their horrible comeuppances. “And that spells cash with a capital…”
“K!”
“You should go back to school.”
“I hated teaching.” I won’t pretend that Brain Donors is going to be everybody’s cup of tea; even a modernized take on the Marx Brothers isn’t going to appeal to everybody no matter how much I think it should. But it has John Turturro shooting at a large man in a duck costume onstage in the middle of a ballet, and if loving that is wrong then I don’t want to be right.