Nerding Day: Rewind or Die

As a relatively new addition to the 1900HOTDOG All-Stars team of loosely affiliated comedy writers and kid sleuths, I feel I’ve finally settled in enough to be able to speak to the arc of a dogger in the midst of being seasoned. Although I’ve written for other sites, each is a unique beast reflecting its proprietors, and there are always some new ropes to learn and skills to pick up. In this case - because Sean and Robert are alien freak geniuses in terms of their ability to produce obscure pop culture artifacts on the order of a John Waters multiplied by a Chuck Klosterman - the main challenge has been finding appropriate topics to cover. After blasting through the dozen or so deep cut weirdo movies I grew up with, it became clear that I needed to find some new areas to mine for content. The good old days of huffing paint in the Cracked basement and making stuff up about Batman were over.

Video games seemed like a natural pivot for me right away - I already host a games podcast, I worked for IGN for some years, and video games are chockablock with slipshod art that’s funny by accident. “Dumb shit,” we call it in the biz. And indeed, for a while I was able to fuel my comedic fire with those pixelated logs of mediocrity. Thus, it was with vigor and some measure of confidence that I signed up to cover REWIND OR DIE, an indie game that, upon cursory examination, looked poorly made and had all the trappings of solid DOG-fodder: VHS aesthetics, random violence, and dialog written and performed by avowed amateurs fucking around in their spare time.

Imagine my welling horror when it became apparent after the first few minutes of play that the game was FINE. “Fine” is the exact wrong quality level to make for a good comedy article, and this game was that - not great, but also not bad in a way that deserves to be earnestly mocked. The team at Comp-3 have made an absolutely adequate ninety-minute game about a disaffected Kevin Smith-type schlub working the night shift at a video store and fighting off a slasher. He solves some puzzles, he wins, it’s fine.

In fact, the game was quality enough that stepping into the virtual rental shop even did the thing it was meant to, which was to fill me with a stirring of nostalgia for a time and place long gone. It was tongue-in-cheek, but an homage nonetheless. Part of me resonated with this familiarity, and yearned to stay in this cocoon sorting and re-shelving tapes, ignoring the looming threat of some murderous interloper and getting lost instead in the minutiae of a procedurally-generated workday repeated endlessly. It was far from the filet mignon of Matrixes, but I was going to choose the steak anyway.

Briefly forgetting I even needed to fashion this unit of life experience into a joke to trade for money, I simply was. I microwaved my lunch, conversed with customers, took out the trash. Nothing was funny, but nothing needed to be, like a Swaim column before he really gets going. As if to prove the point, a guy with a “MOVIE BUFF” tee walked in and started spouting off some trivia across the counter - my counter. Home court.

In retrospect, that was probably when the first cracks of doubt appeared in my hastily-erected facade. “Micky Myers?” That didn’t sound right. “William Shart?” I was filled with a sudden tension, a discord between my chosen reality in the game and the outside one to which I was still bodily anchored. It was like being slapped by my writing partner. I was a comedian once, wasn’t I? In another life, I wrote and evaluated jokes. How could I have let myself sink, Artax-like, into such a humorless illusion? SHART? WILLIAM SHART? What was I doing here? I no longer felt safe. The fake man just kept flapping his face-meat at me.

The ROCK Boxer. They sat around a table for hours thinking of parody movie titles and the best they could do for Rocky was “The Rock Boxer.” I suddenly heard “Twisted Nerve” play and blacked out, torn between loving the '90s and hating shoddy wordplay. Perhaps I would still be there, pinioned on the sharpened edge between two emotions like a butterfly in a display case, or the ever-fracturing place on the moon where light fights shadow…if it hadn’t been time to reshelve the adult section. I drifted away from the customer in two dazes - one in my chair, one in the game - and tried to again immerse myself in the happy world of the imaginary rental place. As I pushed through the beaded curtain, I reasoned that most of the terrible puns must surely be behind me now.

But then, I’ve never been too bright.

Look: sex is funny. Poo poo and pee pee are quite funny. Clever wordplay can be funny too. That doesn’t mean everyone is equipped to combine these elements successfully. As my brain valiantly struggled to suspend its disbelief, I was assaulted with copyright-safe sex pun after copyright-safe sex pun. Each affront to my comedic instincts buffeted my consciousness like an ailing ship tossed at sea (specifically a stranded Carnival cruise flooded with dysentery).

Ocean’s 11 Inches. Robocock. The lazy puns hit my psyche like depth charges, like a friend’s sudden betrayal. I returned to myself once more, suddenly became a joke writer again. Although I had already written about the game at length, I deleted almost everything below the sentence you’re reading now in a fit of pique. I had misstepped, and I knew at once what I must do to restore the balance.

So, here, then, is the A.F.I.’s top 100 movies list in its entirety, if it were porn. To make the shift in topic less jarring, I have left in the remaining images of my unrelated REWIND OR DIE playthrough, as well as some of the old “segue sentences” and other connective tissue that originally lead into and out of each. This will make your reading experience totally seamless.

A.F.I.’s (Adult Film Institute’s) 100 MOVIES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE THE LITTLE DEATH

1. Citizen Fuckstick. A dying tycoon laments the loss of “Rosebud,” a toy butthole he’d loved as a child.

2. Cisablanca. A timeless treatise on the excesses of cisgender whites, and the only film title ever to be banned from Twitter.

3. The “Step” Godfather. A totally unrelated-by-blood step grandpa makes his naughty grandson-in-law an offer he can’t refuse.

4. All Quiet on the Morning After.

5. Bone with the Wind. “Frankly my dear, I have a pretty serious fart fetish.”

6. Torrents from Your Labia. The sand is going to be a problem.

7. A Streetcar Named Analingus.

8. In the Wetterfront. “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been in somebody.”

But alas, that wasn’t the only animal head I was destined to have stuffed up my metaphorical ass that night, as a creepy knock at the store window soon revealed.

Clearly, the call was coming from inside the pig. Quickly combining the bloody tee-shirt with my trusty flashlight (which the UK devs of course call a “torch”) I made a - wait for it - torch! What came next was even cuter.

9. Schindler’s Fist. Can you kill every Nazi just by violently fisting them in the ass? One brave man risks it all to do what’s right.

10. The Thirty-Third Man.

11. Schwingin’ in the Wayne. Wayne and Garth finally “go there,” and soon Garth has a newfound confidence and Wayne screaming “I’m not worthy!”

12. It’s a Shareable Wife. A guardian angel helps a suicidal man fuck his wife, which she is into.

13. The Jizz Slinger.

14. Sunset Bdsm. “Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my speculum.”

15. The Eiffel Tower on the River Kwai. A couple war buddies revisit the small river where, fifty years ago, they both boned a girl from opposite ends and high-fived, finally ending one of World War II’s darkest chapters.

16. King Dong.

17. The Conceiving of a Nation.

18. Psechsy. Hitchcock’s shocker that stunned a nation with its frank depiction of granny shower roleplay.

19. Vaginatown. Perhaps the best film noir ever to dissect the power of wealthy men to escape the consequences of their sexual crimes. Dir. Roman Polanski.

Spoiler alert: he wasn’t.

Having triumphed over Kevin in the great “microwave burrito” debate, I doused the torch in his blood and sneaked behind the dumpster - only instead of the trash monster from Mullholland Drive I was confronted with something about eight times as scary and fourteen times as baffling. It’s wild to even try to describe, but here we go.

20. Some Like It Boofed. Two men in drag ladle pea soup up their asses, foiling a police manhunt.

21. Scarred Whores. George Lucas’ seminal sci-fi epic, later digitally remastered and re-released under the title “Sex Workers With PTSD.”

22. Woodfellas.

23. The African Queef. Katherine Hepburn propels herself downriver the way only she can!

24. Shuddering Depths.

25. The French Insertion.

26. The Blue Balls of Wrath. “Wherever there's a fight, so horny people can cum, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' off a guy, I'll be there.”

27. V-ToGo.

28. 2069: A Face on a V. Stanley Hugedick’s slow-burn space opera tracking mankind’s development as it swirls around a central alien artifact known only as “the BBC.”

29. The Maltese Hawk Tuah. “You know how to whistle, don’t you? You gotta spit on that thang.”

30. Tooshie. Starring Dustin Hoffman as herself.

31. From Here to Seventeen Minutes From Now.

32. Ah’m-a Do Us.

33. Gooning Bull. An enraged boxer masturbates but doesn’t cum for a very long time. The boxing gloves help.

34. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Changed My Name Which Used to Be Rev. Weirdfuck. An infamous and satirical cautionary tale about the dangers of squandering your essence.

“I’m finally getting the hang of this,” I thought idly, stuffing the stuffed pig into the bony hands and then the whole child’s skeleton into the open locker. I was briefly reminded of my own bar mitzvah.

That’s when it hit me. Of course by “it” I’m referring to the paint can on a rope from earlier. First the frozen stoop, then the nail through the shoe, now this? This was supposed to be a simple B&E job!

35. Bonnie and Clyde and Mitzi and Greg and Rowena and a Docile Ferrett. They met as criminals. They became lovers. Then they met some more lovers. Then they all became criminals (ferrets can’t consent, docility aside).

36. Rebel Without a Cosplay.

37. A Poke@Lips Now. An hallucinogenic vision of the Vietnam War through the lens of social media blowjob content.

38. Mr. Smith Goes Down on Washington. An idyllic and newly-elected Senator eats his way to the top, revealing the corruption that underpins the whole American boobocracy.

39. The Philadelphia Cream Cheese Story.

40. The Pleasure of the Sierra Mommy. Against a Western backdrop, four schemers jealously fight for the ultimate sex prize. “Vaj-es? We don’t need no stinkin’ vaj-es.”

41. Fanny Hall. Editor’s Note: Sorry, we’ve been meaning to remove this one! The guy who made it is a sex creep, and this is the editor of a fictional, made-up sex publication from an imaginary porn dimension talking. My head is a penis and my mouth and eyes are vaginas, and I’m telling you that I’m sorry this Woody Allen movie made it on the list even in parody form.

42. The Prodfather Parts You. This one, however, I proudly stand behind. Get it?! Okay, done with the Editor’s Notes, sorry.

43. A Clockwork Sporangia.

44. Doctor Zhivagina.

45. E.T.: M. AO. Covering the full range of video game content ratings, from Everyone and Teen games like Mario Bros. to Mature and Adults Only games like E.T.: The Erect Testicle.

46. Double the Men in Me.

47. Why Spoon. Two cowboys meet on a dusty street at high noon and waste little to no time on foreplay.

That’s naturally when we get a name for our slasher - Slaw - which causes the whole previous section at the Roller Rink to suddenly make a grim kind of sense. Tennis, anyone?

Of course, I didn’t take the threat at face value. Slaw had at this point said at least four things that proved patently false: I COULD outrun him, there WAS a way out, and help WOULD come - plus the Bruce Boxleitner thing.

48. To Fill a Mockingbird. Based on the novel of the same name, followed only fifty-five years later by its sequel Go Set a Crotchman.

49. It Happened Eight Times in One Night. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the original rom-com. Boy meets girl, boy and girl can’t stand each other, boy and girl have sex eight times consecutively in real time, end of film.

50. Snow White and the Seven Little Squirts.

51. A Butch Named Cassidy and Sundance the Barely Legal.

52. Midnight Fuckboy. A naive young man travels to the Big City to try his hand at sex work. It goes great, everyone has a ball and he befriends a funny homeless man.

53. The Breasts/Rears of Our Wives. Documentary, and the first recorded use of split-screen to simultaneously show both breasts and rears, which lead to eight days of rioting in Prague.

54. Milk by Milk-Lemonade. Following a case of mistaken identity, an ad executive is pursued relentlessly by a ruthless spy…all the way to where the fudge is made.

55. South Side Story.

56. The Grad You Ate. Featuring a classic soundtrack from folk duo Hymen & Garfuckle.

57. Rear Widow. She promised nothing would ever enter her vagina again once her husband passed, but a neighbor with a telescope makes a find that could change both their lives forever.

58.GAS*H.

But no matter how long I googled or screamed abuse at Siri, every single strategy guide I found only focused on how to teach the dog to understand its predicament, rather than help.

I named her “Francumstain,” after the movie, and vowed to return once I found a key or some kibble.

59. The Throat Goat of Oz. “Pay no attention to the chorging noises from behind the curtain!”

60. Polycule of the Lost Ark.

61. Chill Taxi Driver. Cabbie Travis Bickle slowly goes insane and becomes fixated on a stranger, meaning you can pretty much get away with whatever in the backseat. He truly does not care, finger stuff, whatever you want.

62. Fant(Asian).

63. Mouths. A small New England beach community is threatened when everyone who goes in the water starts getting incredible blowjobs, grinding civilization to an immediate halt.

64. Poon Platoon. Group camshow.

65. Fargo Fuck Yourself. Solo camshow.

66. The Pound of Tudyk. Perennially underappreciated character actor Alan Tudyk is hired to nanny for an Austrian family and teaches them all how to fuck right.

67. The Plaisance of the Clams.

68. Hetwork. “I’m gay as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

If I was going to turn this article around with something really funny, now was the time. I sat there with the game on pause for forty minutes, staring at the skulls, thinking of the funniest line my decades of comedy writing experience could possibly bring to bear. I chuckled to myself as I finally typed it in:

Nailed it.

69. Nice.

70. Strange Cooch. What do you get when you cross a musical about a stagecoach with cruising for sex with strangers? Ten Academy Awards.

71. The Transchurian Candidate.

72. All About Vee. “There’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: angry scissoring.”

73. An American in a Parisian.

74. Forest Hump. Follows the life of a simple, big-hearted man who loves to run, shake hands with Presidents, and go into the woods at night to fuck holes in the ground.

75. Bend-Hur.

76. Shitty Tights. Charlie Chaplin invents the romantic comedy, as well as the ballerina scat subgenre.

77. Matches with Wolves. Kevin Kostner’s Directorial debut, it is also uncut footage of him having sex with a timber wolf he met on Timbr.

…aaaaaaand, that’s when I chewed his face off. Which they really should assign to a different hotkey.

I wouldn’t normally be so aggressive, but I could tell we were closing in on the ending, and aside from pushing the caged dog into the river it felt like I hadn’t accomplished much productive so far. Slaw was still out there, pigging it up, and our fine stock of tapes was sitting unrented.

78. The Gold Gush. A hot opportunity has everyone rushing to reach California before it all gets pissed away.

79. The Rock Boxer.

80. American’s Rough Feeties. It’s no Scarred Whores, but Lucas’ love song to the footjob-craze sweeping the 50’s America he grew up in still rings true, and he even cameos as all of the feet.

81. The D Hunter. Mentally shattered by his time in Vietnam, an unstable veteran plays a game where if you lose, a guy puts his D right up against your temple and you have to jerk him off, and there’s a one-in-six chance he’ll blow a wad. No one pays him to do this.

82. Intimate Encounters of the Richard Kind.

83. The Defiled Bunch.

84. Immodest Times. Charlie Chaplin’s quaint dissection of “modern life” and all of its dubious contraptions, from the simple hand-cranked wooden vibrator to a full sensory deprivation vinyl gimp-bag. “The Little Slut” does it again!

85. Giant, and Throbbing Also.

86. Fun for Piven. He may have buried his past as a ruthless gunslinger, but his past as a serial sex creep is just about to catch up to him.

87. Mutiny of the Cunty.

88. Francumstain.

89. Easy Ride.

90. Spatton. General George S. Patton (George C. Scott) recounts his eventful life to the camera as we give him a sloppy POV blowjob.

I actually gasped - not in the game, in my fucking seat. The handprint! The pig head! The dog! The Jeremy Piven allegations! It all clicked together in a way that I am incredibly grateful I don’t have to condense or shorthand, because I honestly doubt I could. The journey, such as it was, had ended. Slaw was on ice.

And, frankly, whether that’s “the good ending” or makes for the funniest article I ever wrote or not, I hardly care. To make such a cogent and urgent point, while also handing in a genuinely fun game, is something I think climate change activists and the animators’ unions will agree makes REWIND OR DIE an accomplishment on a sociopolitical level even more than a content one. It’s a journey I personally wouldn’t trade for anything.

91. The Felchers. John Ford’s iconic saga of love, death, and creampie-eating on that great wagon-train Westward.

92. My Fair Futa.

93. Flung Goo Over the Cuck’s Boo’s Breast. In an oppressive mental institution, one new admittance stirs up trouble in a very specific way that it turns out makes for an extremely awkward and belabored title.

94. A Taint in the Sun. A tragic love triangle emerges when an up--and-coming executive (Montgomery Clift) innocently bumps into the new girl while they’re both sunning their perineums.

95. The Unlocked Apartment.

96. Bringing Up Baby: Day One.

97. Fuck Soup. Considered the Marxxx Brothers’ finest feature, in which the brothers have their way with the titular bowl of broccoli cheddar (Margaret Dumont).

98. Plump Friction.

99. Yank My Doodle? Dandy!

100. Guess Who’s Cumming on Dinner. A conservative family’s values are called into question when they balk at something modern viewers would consider commonplace: a Black man joining them for dinner and cumming all over it.

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