Why Watch? Arm yourself against the biggest threat in your town. This short features the wonderful camp that comes with recreating the absurdly smiley public service announcements of the 1950s. Instead of advising you to hide under your desk to protect yourself from easily avoidable radiation fallout, this film wants to warn you of a pie-stealing, porno-reading infestation of hobos. Funny? Yes. Informative? You bet. Life saving? Probably. Of course, that’s assuming that none of these rail-riders is packing a shotgun. What does it cost? Just 6 minutes of your time. Check out The Hobo Menace for yourself:

When I purchased my ticket for the Thursday night midnight show of Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, I had no idea what I was in for; not because I hadn’t seen any of the previous Twilight films – I have, in fact, seen them all – but because I had never seen a Twilight film in a theater before, much less on opening night. The Twilight subculture befuddles me, as I’m sure it does any non-initiate of the series. Having seen all the films, I still feel like I’m viewing them from afar, like it’s some strange anthropological project of a phenomenon whose worth and value I will never fully understand. Twilight seems to encapsulate the drastic changes that have taken place in big-budget event filmmaking in the last thirty years. Rather than a film made with the intent of mass appeal (like franchises ranging from Indiana Jones to Jason Bourne), the Twilight films play almost exclusively to a specific – but dedicated – demographic. Of course, one could make this argument about many film franchises. Everything from Star Trek to The Dark Knight certainly have rabid fanbases at their core, but the audiences for these films seem to be “filled in” with a significant amount of casual fans. For example, I once viewed the Harry Potter films similarly to the way I now approach Twilight – not in terms of filmmaking quality, mind you, but in terms of being a cult phenomenon surrounding a fictional narrative that I [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

While insanely different, the words “raunch” and “camp” often get confused or misused when describing films. They both are expressions for a type of subculture within explicit films; Camp stemming from a “love of the unnatural” (Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”) and often used to reference gay-themed or identified films, while “raunch” originally meant anything that was highly vulgar or obscene. Both words have evolved over the decades from their harsher, more exact meanings to softer, even fluffy uses today. How many times have you used raunch to describe a slightly suggestive moment in a film, where in fact you probably meant risqué or gauche? Hell, I did it last night when discussing the new film Horrible Bosses, which is what spurred this whole exploration of the two phrases. Before Sontag named and defined it in the 1960s, the manifestation of camp elements in Hollywood went all the way back to the invention of the medium. Comedies like Charlie Chaplin’s 1916 film Behind the Screen presented cross-dressing and male-male loving. The “gay” kiss between the two main characters is later revealed to be a straight kiss between Chaplin and his co-star Edna Purviance. This film was controversial, but audiences embraced the over-the-top antics of Chaplin (arguably one of the purveyors of “camp”) and flocked to the theaters to see more from the mustached tramp and his pre-Code/pre-Talkie contemporaries.

Now to see if they’ll play it as a double feature with Spider-Man 4…