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DC’s Weirdest Ever Movie May Finally Do What Marvel Can’t

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published

The recent Clayface teaser has fans buzzing, and for good reason. The entire thing is atmospheric, moody, and downright creepy. It doesn’t look like an advertisement for a superhero movie at all, and that’s the point.

Cowritten by Mike Flanigan (the spooky maestro behind killer shows like Midnight Mass and Fall of the House of Usher), Clayface has been designed primarily as a horror movie. This will be a first for DC, and this means that the upcoming film will (regardless of its final quality) become part of superhero history.

However, the movie is also set to make history in a very different way. DC has always tried to distinguish itself from Marvel, first by making the DCEU into a dark-and-gritty dudebro fest and later by making the DCU feel more like the futuristic, alternate universe of the comics. With Clayface, DC is set to finally set itself apart by doing the one thing Marvel refuses to do: release different kinds of tights-and-flights films rather than ultimately turning everything into generic superhero slop.

The Copycat Loses It All

zack snyder batman

Back before the days of superhero fatigue, it seemed like the MCU was practically printing money, with one hit after another raking in over a billion dollars at the box office. As it turned out, fans really, really liked seeing superheroes onscreen together as part of a cinematic universe. Warner Bros. tried to replicate this magic with the DCEU, but everything fell apart. Mainstream audiences rejected movies that felt like a Temu MCU, and they particularly hated the one thing that set the DCEU apart: its focus on gritty, humorless characters and needlessly brutal ultraviolence.

While it outlasted the DCEU (not exactly a difficult accomplishment), the MCU’s shine eventually wore off. These films stopped raking in cash, with some projects actually losing money. The common explanation is superhero fatigue, but I have a theory that audiences hate the “super” while still liking the “hero.” That is, they are happy to watch different kinds of heroes (including Daredevil and Loki), but they hate the glut of movies and TV shows that eventually become nothing more than flying characters firing goofy laser bolts at each other until someone falls down. 

Marvel running from its own generic machinations, or Clayface teaser?

What does this have to do with Clayface, you say? Well, this movie is on track to be DC’s first horror movie. It’s also their fourth major project (after Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux, and Penguin) to focus on a villain rather than a hero. While Folie à Deux was a critical and commercial bomb, Joker made over a billion dollars at the box office, and Penguin is a Golden Globe and Emmy-winning hit TV show. Should Clayface prove to be a hit (and right now, it has plenty of buzz), Warner Bros. will have solidified itself as the home of unconventional superhero cinema that goes beyond the typical tights-and-flights formulaic storytelling.

Marvel’s Eternal Formula

kumail nanjiana cast of eternals

Weirdly enough, this is something Marvel has never really managed to do. Almost every major MCU project focuses on its heroes, who are rarely allowed to have any nuance or shades of grey because that would get in the way of the next memeable, t-shirt-ready quip. Plus, the third act of these projects always descends into a CGI slugfest with the graphical fidelity of a PS3 cutscene. Marvel considers it part of their essential formula, but these inevitable showdowns make their projects predictable. Moreover, the resistance to changing this formula has held back certain shows and films that were otherwise trying to do something new.

For example, WandaVision was this visionary, genre-defying TV show, but it still had an Avengers-lite ending where Scarlet Witch fired badly-rendered energy blasts at Agatha Harkness. The Eternals had an Oscar-winning director and nominally focused on the crunchy intersection of immortality and identity, but it still ended with a CGI-laden showdown against made-in-China Superman. Black Panther tried to examine the evils of both capitalism and colonialism, but the day was inexplicably saved by lasers (half of which were fired by the CIA!). Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was meant to be a horror movie, but all anyone remembers is Professor X’s hover chair and Jim from The Office in a Fantastic Four uniform.

batman clayface

For Marvel productions, it is functionally impossible for writers and directors to escape the superhero formula. DC, meanwhile, keeps making something different, including bizarre thrillers like Joker and Seven-style forensics features like The Batman. Now, Clayface is set to be DC’s first horror movie, and its very existence proves something important. While Marvel’s House of Ideas has clearly run out of steam, DC is now the once and future home of superhero movies that step outside of the traditional formula. Its success might be enough to prove that superhero fatigue doesn’t really exist and that the public is starving for something Marvel can no longer deliver: genuinely surprising genre entertainment.   


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A new tool just combined ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more — lifetime access is on sale for $70

TL;DR: ChatPlayground lets you send one prompt to multiple AI models, and lifetime access is now only $69.97 with code May5.


Credit: ChatPlayground AI

Anyone who has worked with AI tools knows that different models can give wildly different answers to the same prompt. Manually sending each prompt to each model to find the best option wastes a ton of time, which is why tools like ChatPlayground AI are growing in popularity. ChatPlayground lets you run multiple AI models at the same time, and a lifetime subscription just went on sale for $69.97 (reg. $619).

ChatPlayground has a simple premise that ends up saving a ton of time and frustration. Instead of manually working with a bunch of different AI models, ChatPlayground lets you talk to them all together. The platform supports more than 20 AI models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, Llama, and Perplexity, among others. That means you can use the same workflow for writing, coding help, generating ideas, or creating images, and then compare the output.

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Don’t like any of the results a prompt gave you? You can tweak it and run it again to see how each model changes their answer. There are even prompt engineering tools to help you refine and reuse the prompts that worked well. ChatPlayground even lets you upload images and PDFs, then ask questions about them, so you can actually check how different models work with the same document.

The Unlimited Plan does exactly what it says. It lasts for life with no recurring payments, and you get unlimited messages every month. It’s also on sale through May 17 for only $69.97 with code May5.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Sydney Sweeney Is Being Deliberately Destroyed

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published

sydney sweeney

Euphoria, the HBO teen drama, has been responsible for launching some pretty big careers. Without this show, Zendaya probably wouldn’t be a beloved Marvel movie star, and Jacob Elordi wouldn’t be an Oscar-nominated horror icon. Of course, the breakout Euphoria star the internet loves the most is Sydney Sweeney, someone whose buxom beauty has made her the internet’s favorite fantasy lady. Unfortunately for this blonde bombshell, the show that helped make her career is now trying to break her career in the most humiliating possible way.

Her Euphoria character, Cassie, has a current story arc where she makes money on OnlyFans. That’s not so crazy on paper. Every day, more young, well-endowed women are using this platform to make cold, hard cash. But this plotline is just a thinly veiled excuse to put her into a number of strange situations that seem like the barely concealed fetishes of the showrunner. As degrading clips from Euphoria continue to go viral, we are left with only one conclusion: Sam Levinson is deliberately using his hit TV show to humiliate Sydney Sweeney.

Down, Girl

Since you’re probably not watching Euphoria, here’s a quick breakdown of what’s been happening to Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie. In short, she is trying to pay for her expensive wedding to Jacob Elordi’s character (Nate), so she turns to OnlyFans as a way to raise the $50,000 she needs.

With the help of former friend turned current manager, she begins carving out some weird, kinky niches for herself on OF. This includes dressing and acting like a dog and dressing and acting like a baby. Recently, she even acted like a giant, complete with a scene of her stomping all over town, Godzilla style.

Even if you’ve never watched Euphoria, you’ve probably seen some of the viral images, GIFs, and memes centered on her character and asked, “What in God’s name is Sydney Sweeney doing?” The simple answer is that she’s doing whatever she is told. She doesn’t write the scripts or choose her character’s arc. Instead, the actor must obey Sam Levinson, the acclaimed showrunner of Euphoria.

Why is Levinson making his hottest actor do all of this crazy stuff, though?  My pet theory (unlike Sweeney, it doesn’t have ears or a tail) is that he is doing so to humiliate her, effectively flooding the internet with degrading images of her.

I Kink, Therefore I Am

All of these bizarre things Sydney Sweeney is doing as part of her OnlyFans character arc correspond to very specific kinks. Dressing and acting like a dog is part of pet play, where a submissive acts like an animal and a dominant pretends to own them. Dressing like a baby is part of infantilization. Even her recent, kaiju-style hijinks correspond to a giantess kink (also known as macrophilia), in which Titan-sized women tease, overpower, crush, and even kill submissive, standard-sized men.  

Now, I’m not here to kinkshame anyone. There’s no problem if you’re into any of the stuff that Sweeney is doing on Euphoria, and you’re probably really digging seeing clips of the world’s hottest leading lady making niche content for mainstream television.

For Sweeney, though, that’s the real problem. Scenes and images of what she is doing on Euphoria keep getting shared, without context, online. When normies search “Sydney Sweeney” on the internet, these images are some of the first things they see. Meanwhile, when kinksters search for things like “pet play” or “giantess,” you guessed it … these images are some of the first things they see!

Feeling Like A Freak On A Leash

Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, but mainstream audiences generally find the things Sweeney is doing on Euphoria now to be weird and degrading. By making her do one weird thing after another, Sam Levinson has consistently humiliated Sydney Sweeney, associating her acting (possibly permanently) with degrading things.

That would be bad enough for any young actor, but it’s particularly bad for Sweeney, someone who (through movies like Christy) is fervently trying to be seen as a serious actress and not just a body. Unfortunately, her name is now synonymous with some of the wildest acts this side of Eyes Wide Shut

Obviously, there’s no proof that this is Levinson’s intent. But it’s worth noting that some of the stuff (like her acting like a baby) is strictly forbidden by OnlyFans in real-life, so none of this adds to the verisimilitude of the plot. All it does is drag down a rising star in a kind of bizarre humiliation ritual that does very little but objectify her in front of increasingly horny audiences. If Sweeney isn’t down with things like onscreen pet play in Euphoria, then all of this is just weird and degrading. If she is into it, though, then there’s not much left to say.

Except, of course: “Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl!”


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Steven Seagal’s Insane, R-Rated Sci-Fi Thriller Will Make You Wish The Bad Guys Win

By Robert Scucci
| Published

I love watching Steven Seagal movies. Under Siege (1992) is Die Hard on a boat, and it’s actually a great watch thanks to the supporting cast involved, especially Tommy Lee Jones. Hard to Kill (1990) is amazing because the most badass thing Seagal says in the entire film happens when he’s alone in his bedroom, muttering about taking the evil senator on his TV to the blood bank. And how could we talk about Steven Seagal without mentioning On Deadly Ground (1994), a cautionary tale about corporations destroying the environment that somehow involves Seagal, the good guy, blowing up half of Alaska?

At face value, these movies are tremendously entertaining, but not for the reasons you’d think. Most of the entertainment value comes from Seagal believing he’s a living, breathing legend, even though most of the fight scenes involve him talking tough, running awkwardly, and wiggling his hands around. But if you really want a Steven Seagal punisher that could double as a drinking game, it has to be 2006’s Attack Force.

And what would that drinking game be, you ask? Every time Seagal opens his mouth and it sounds like a Martin Sheen impersonator is dubbing over the dialogue, you take a sip of whatever you’ve got. Be warned: you’ll probably need your stomach pumped if you actually commit to this bit.

I Don’t Even Know What This Movie’s About

As of this writing, I’ve written 1,945 articles for this site, most of them movie reviews. Usually, I’ll knock out a quick summary, talk about the themes, break down intention versus execution, and figure out who the movie is actually for. Attack Force finally broke me. This movie isn’t about anything or for anyone, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh my face off the entire time I watched it.

Attack Force 2006

To the best of my understanding, Attack Force follows Steven Seagal’s Commander Marshall Lawson, who, as expected, suffers from a terminal case of “Damn, he’s good” syndrome. On this mission, however, a commander is only as good as his team, and his squad gets wiped out almost immediately by a stripper named Reina (Evelyne Armela O’Bami). Marshall, with help from his girlfriend Tia (Lisa Lovbrand), discovers that Reina murdered his team while high on a new party drug called CTX, which Tia co-developed alongside corrupt nightclub owner Aroon (Adam Croasdell).

Though Tia helped create CTX, she wants nothing to do with Aroon’s comically evil plan to taint Paris’ water supply with the drug because it turns anybody who takes it into a bloodthirsty maniac with an insatiable appetite for flesh, or something close to that. There’s a lot of dialogue about animal instincts and violent mammalian impulses, but none of it really clarifies anything. There are also reports that earlier versions of the film involved aliens, so who the hell knows what happened here?

Attack Force 2006

Long story short, Steven Seagal wears these weird talon gloves that let him punch and slash people at the same time, a bunch of people die, and then the movie abruptly ends with zero explanation or closure. I’m trying to make it make sense, but I’m a writer, not a miracle worker.

It Gets Worse

The most insane thing about Attack Force is the sloppy overdubbing. Legend has it that there were so many rewrites after production wrapped that entire chunks of dialogue had to be replaced in post. The problem is nobody was available for reshoots, so a healthy percentage of Seagal’s lines were redubbed by a guy who sounds more like Martin Sheen than the actor he’s supposed to be portraying. We’re not talking about little touch-ups either. There are scenes where Seagal switches between two completely different voices within the same conversation. He’ll start speaking normally, the next few sentences are dubbed over, and then the exchange suddenly snaps back to his real voice like nothing happened.

To add insult to injury, the hand-to-hand combat sequences in this movie are ridiculous. Most of Seagal’s fighting at this point in his career involves him glaring intensely, waving his hands around like he’s performing interpretive dance, and relying on frantic camerawork to disguise the fact that a past-his-prime action star is basically doing the Macarena while people fling themselves across the room after running into him. I wish I was exaggerating, but if you watch Attack Force for any reason, I hope it’s to study these production disasters for the love of the game because the movie has absolutely nothing else going for it.

Attack Force may genuinely be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I say this as somebody who once gave Buttcrack (1998) a five-star review. At least Buttcrack knows exactly what it is. It’s a bunch of people trying to make the dumbest movie imaginable and somehow landing a distribution deal in the process. I can respect that, and I do respect that. Attack Force, by all appearances, was a legitimate attempt at a sci-fi action thriller, but there’s barely any sci-fi, no thrills whatsoever, and action scenes that feel like they’re on life support waiting for somebody to pull the plug. I respect none of this.

As of this writing, you can stream Attack Force for free on Tubi. Seriously, don’t pay for this one.


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