Last week, TNMN community members from all around the world submitted their favorite sci-fi movies. Now you can see every submission, and decide whose is the best.

Two unqualified bozos are hired to transfer a rich teen to rehab.

→ Bizarre circumstances that keep getting more bizarre. This is a better film than Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but the bizarre-on-bizarre-on-bizarre narrative isn’t dissimilar.

→ Dave Franco antics. Consider his appearance as himself in The Studio a preview for what you get in Idiots.

→ Werewolf humor. Watch the movie and this will make so much sense.

The first time I came across Macon Blair, he was starring in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, a grounded, Coen-esque tale about a meek and underprepared revenge-seeker. The film debuted to critical acclaim and Blair mosied onto my radar with all the energy of a bloodied Milton from Office Space.

Since then, Blair’s gone on to direct several very well-liked feature-length films (The Toxic Avenger, I Don’t Feel At Home in this World Anymore). Idiots (originally titled The S***heads) is pretty much what it sounds like, and I’ve no problems with it. It’s an unhinged comedy about two complete s***heads who are threatened by a whole lot of other s***heads trying to prevent them from transporting a wealthy s***head teenager to rehab.

Watching the film, you might admire the sorts of filmmaking prowess Macon Blair has picked up along his acting and directing journey. The snappy editing, kinetic camera-work, and no-nonsense storytelling. You also might appreciate that you’re watching a very funny story packed to the brim with drug and sex and poop jokes and that not everything needs to break new ground.

I suppose everyone will leave this film with a favorite s***head, and for me it was Dave Franco and Nicholas Braun. But every one of these s***heads yielded at least one belly laugh from your author.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."

→ Macon Blair spent a decade trying to get the film made. “It almost happened in 2017, and then it fell apart and we let it sit on the shelf for a while and we brought it back. At the time that was encouraging (sic), but in hindsight I’m glad that it happened, because this is the version of the movie that I wanted it to be.”

→ Luke Wilson was the original lead alongside Ron Funches and Tracy Morgan. As Blair said in the quote above, it fell apart prior to principal photography. It certainly would have been a different film without this cast.

Every other edition, we conclude with a special feature — an original work of fiction completely unrelated to this week's film.

By Blake Levy

A doctor in a white lab coat steps down from the curb, cautious as if rappelling down the face of a cliff. He walks slowly toward the driver’s door and waves his hand down, gesturing for Kaitlyn to lower the window.

“Did you tell anyone you were coming?” he asks.

“I didn’t,” she replies. “Not even my husband.”

His eyes above his surgical mask read like a warm smile.

“Can you really fix her?” she glances toward her expressionless daughter in the backseat.

The doctor does his best to reassure her. And Kaitlyn and Chloe, they trail behind him into an unmarked building.

…

It all felt so ordinary. The outbreak wasn’t much more than a summer virus, leaping from kid to kid. A live virus that would run its course and die off, just like any other. A population immunized, a virus suffocated, snuffed out, extinguished.

The first documented case, it was traced back to some unspectacular urgent care visit. A twelve-year-old boy with blue-rimmed glasses tucked behind shaggy hair. The boy grimaced, complaining of a sore throat and rasped voice. The burnt-out physician assistant charged with the boy’s case, rolling his baggy eyes and biting his cigarette-scorched tongue. The boy’s friends, they teased him. They said he sounded like a sex hotline worker.

The boy’s mother was restless, seated in the bedside chair, knees shaking up and down and up and down. She sat there, a parental echo, substantiating her son’s complaints. “He never complains like this!” she insisted. “This is unusual for us. He barely ever gets sick.” Behind the PA’s N-95 mask, which sat a hair below his nostrils, most certainly a patronizing grin.

It’s strep throat. Stop bitching. We’ve all had it. Take your antibiotics and your iPad and get the fuck out of my exam room.

A few weeks later, the boy, he couldn’t speak a word. Soon, his tongue browned and shriveled like a dead leaf. A most rancid stench, like rotting seaweed. The tongue itself, crusty and liable to crumble. Shortly thereafter, he’d choke to death on it, his dried out tongue. The autopsy would show his internal organs suffering the same rot. From the inside out. Every organ crusted over and brown like days-old apple cores.

Soon, friends and classmates would start turning up in droves, each exhibiting the same symptoms as the shaggy-haired boy. All in a matter of thirty days. The same death march, a dreadful homework, assigned to every kid without discrimination.

Sore throats on day one. Crusty tongues by day fifteen. Airless, cotton-mouthed deaths on day thirty.

…

Chloe uttered her first words adorably, like any other.

Her feather-weight blonde hair fell shoulder length as she proudly uttered ‘ma-ma’ and ‘da-da.’ And then came things she wanted to ask for: ‘wa-wa’, ‘nack’, ‘nigh-nigh’. No heart fuller than Kaitlyn’s, a proud mother exposed to her daughter’s voice for the very first time.

The real words and thinking and personality, these showed up in bits and pieces when Chloe was younger. But the little girl, she really started to shine around eight.

Sure, she still said ‘mines’ instead of ‘mine.’ Sure, she couldn’t quite make the ‘r’ sound. But she could fully express her own original thoughts. Kaitlyn’s pride grew and grew the more Chloe came into her own. Little Chloe with the blonde hair and the bright young mind. Little Chloe with the freckly toes and quips like a sixty-year-old woman.

Kaitlyn, she’d tell her Mom’s Club friends, the ones with kids younger than Chloe. You just wait until they get to seven or eight years old. This, she boasted, was when their personalities really poke through. When they stop mimicking and start actually being themselves.

In the exam room, in the back of the unmarked building, Kaitlyn explains this all to the doctor, pleading with him to help them. Chloe, she didn’t deserve to have her voice taken away from her so young.

In the exam room, backdropped by an elementary mural of smiling, cartoonish jungle animals, seated in a drum circle, she begs the doctor to not be just another conman.

In the exam room, surrounded by public health notices about Necrofoliate Glossitis, Kaitlyn explains that Chloe, she’d only just begun speaking. And it’s not fair to take away a child’s voice before they get to use it. It’s not fair. They’d been through several experimental treatments already, and none seem to work.

The doctor assures her that he’s not a conman. He’s seen a hundred kids with this condition, and he’s sent 15% of them home healthy. His rates, he says, they are among the best in the industry.

His therapies were developed with the same rigidity and rigor as many that are FDA-approved. He is in this business to save children. There’s no other reason to be doing this sort of work, he insists. Otherwise, he quips, it’d be a pretty depressing gig.

Kaitlyn feigns laughter. “One more thing,” Kaitlyn interjects. “Chloe is 29 days in.” She cries and cries some more before pulling herself together with a wet snort. “From what I’ve read, she might only have a day or two left before—”

“–well, then,” the doctor’s eyebrows lifted as he interrupted. “We’d better get to work quickly.”

…

In the beginning, every kid exhibiting Necrofoliate Glossitis left with a negative strep test and an antibiotic, often dispensed perhaps only to avert negative reviews online. The reviews where parents said things like “these doctors don’t do shit” or “viral my ass” or “don’t come here if you want to receive actual medical treatment.”

You know what’s worse than worldwide antimicrobial resistance and the collapse of modern medicine? Not having a job. This is the joke, the one every new hire heard from their supervising physician at the urgent care. Just give them a fucking antibiotic and collect another paycheck, he chuckled, smug with experience.

As the summer weather turned, and the trees outside began browning and shedding their own crinkled leaves, half of the kids in town couldn’t speak a single word. When the urgent care finally reported it to the Center for Disease Control, it was too late.

Children are the dirtiest creatures on planet Earth. Pigs in shit. Only a fool, or a child, ironically, could have the capacity for hope that the disease would stop spreading.

Wasting no time were the conmen, who began moving snake oil to desperate parents by the fuck-ton. The parents, they’d heard it all.

Here’s an elixir that cures Necrofoliate Glossitis in five days. Here’s an experimental procedure that stops the illness from progressing further. Hear your baby’s voice again in three easy steps. Every promise broken, every child, once full of promise and expression, joyless and dead.

Even the dumbest parents were well-aware they were being conned. But a parent whose wallet was heavy enough, they had to do everything in their power to protect or heal their children, right? And so an industry was born.

It didn’t matter that the elixirs were Gatorade, the procedures, organ harvesting, and the three easy steps, hokum. What mattered was the money; the money was moving. The conmen, they didn’t sell cures. They sold a feeling. Self-assurance. The feeling that you were really doing all you could to protect your kid. Priceless like a blood diamond or a designer outfit stitched up by tiny, delicate, overworked child hands.

There’s no better buyer than a desperate, helpless parent.

…

In the exam room, the doctor finishes his spiel. Chloe looks at her mother with a barely-there grin, her lips struggling into a half-smile. As if she knows something Kaitlyn didn’t. That there’s reason for hope. Kaitlyn often told her Mom’s Club, Chloe was a great judge of character.

There was that grocery store clerk Chloe always made eyes at, who Kaitlyn later saw on the cover of Volunteer Magazine, heroically ripping weeds from some old lady’s backyard like a green-thumbed vigilante. And that landlord they stayed with before moving into their forever home. Chloe couldn’t look at him without screaming in agony. Later, he was caught with a lubricated broomstick up his ass, masturbating behind a Walgreens, right in earshot of where employees took their cigarette breaks. Kaitlyn always used to say what a good judge of character Chloe was.

The doctor looks at Chloe as Kaitlyn explains why she’s feeling so comfortable with him. Chloe, despite losing her voice, still has things to say, and still finds a way to say them. That half-smile, it’s a sign of confidence in him. Chloe believes in the doctor, and now so does Kaitlyn.

The doctor asks Chloe to stick her tongue out. Tears streaming down her face, she pushes her tongue outwards. It rustles out like a pine cone, scraping the pinks of her cheek, now raw and angry and red.

“Very nice job, Chloe,” the doctor encourages her, joking that she must be some kind of professional patient because no kid her age is this good. “Do you mind if your mother and I have a conversation together? You can stay here and play with this.” He hands her his stethoscope. Chloe nods and he gestures for Kaitlyn to leave the exam room with him.

The door thuds closed and Kaitlyn looks at the doctor. He’s standing in the closed doorway between her and Chloe.

“I wish I had better news,” the doctor says. “But there’s nothing I can do for Chloe.”

Kaitlyn pleads. There must be something the doctor can do. Anything.

“Well, there is one thing I offer all of my patients,” he continues. “The patients who deserve some hope.” The doctor walks to the nurses station and rests his elbow on the pink countertop separating it from the walkway. “I can give you and your daughter closure.”

Kaitlyn appears confused. Closure? The doctor explains that patients from all over visit him expecting to be saved. The problem is, not everyone can be saved. He’s talked to so many parents in Kaitlyn’s situation, and he finds that most of them want the same thing. They want their kid to be okay. To think everything is going to be okay. And they want this nightmare to be over.

“So, I obviously can’t give you exactly what you want,” the doctor shifts his weight back to his feet and removes his elbow from the counter. “But, I can still help you.”

…

You’re going to feel a small prick. Those were the last words the doctor said to Chloe before he began the treatment.

He’d told Chloe the plan. That he’d done a whole bunch of fancy research. That by extracting an itty-bitty piece of Mommy’s tongue, he can grow Chloe a new one. And this, he said, would save Chloe. This, he said, would make Chloe feel good again. Chloe clapped her hands and smiled almost as wide as she used to.

The plan he’d shared with Kaitlyn, it was a different plan from what Chloe heard. Not a plan, so much as a way to convince Chloe that everything was going to be okay. A way for her to go to sleep happy and never wake up in this nightmare again. Kaitlyn tearfully accepted the arrangement, which was (of course) not going to be covered by insurance. Because the doctor is working out of an unmarked building. Because assisted child suicide still isn’t considered ethical in most jurisdictions.

Kaitlyn signed the paperwork, not because it was legally binding, but rather because perhaps paperwork made this arrangement feel less terrible. A bureaucratic anesthetic. The doctor assured Kaitlyn once more that she was making the right decision. Chloe didn’t deserve to die choking on her own tongue with no hope. Watching her mother wail in agony, a fly stuck in ointment. Chloe didn’t deserve for her last battle to feel like a losing one. She deserved more. Kaitlyn accepted the doctor’s arrangement, like she had with so many other doctors just like this one.

The doctor sighs when the paperwork is complete. She’ll need to follow ACH instructions to transfer the cash before he begins the procedure. He grabs both of Kaitlyn’s hands. “You’re giving your daughter a gift. Hope. Closure. A demise without defeat. She’s lucky to have had you.”

Kaitlyn laughs. And then she keeps laughing. She shrugs at Chloe, and Chloe starts laughing. The doctor, he looks confused. This isn’t the reaction he usually gets when he offers to mercy kill someone’s child.

“You know, doctor,” Kaitlyn says. “No matter how many of you fucking assholes I come across. This part never gets any less satisfying.”

The doctor asks Kaitlyn what the hell is going on. Chloe spits out a prosthetic tongue and, with her little feet, like raindrops against a windshield, shuffles beside Kaitlyn.

“What’s going on is that you’ve made your way to the top of your field,” Kaitlyn replies. “And if you paid attention to any of your colleagues, you’d know that the top of your field is not a very fucking good place to be.”

Days later, the authorities would find the doctor alone in the unmarked building. The doctor, like an ant that’d been stepped on. Unceremonious and unspectacular, save for a few specks of blue glitter mixed in with the dried blood.

His brain matter spread behind him like a juvenile finger painting. The same brain matter that talked Kaitlyn and all the other parents into paying $50,000 to have their kids murdered. The same brain matter that set up the Swiss bank account and laundered the cash through the drug store on the other side of the unmarked building. The same brain matter that knew there was no better buyer than a desperate parent.

Kaitlyn and Chloe, miles away, had already crossed the doctor’s name from their blue-glittered notepad. The one she’d marked Chloe’s height and weight from every doctor’s visit since the day she was born. Kaitlyn and Chloe, they were miles away from the unmarked building by now.

Back in the exam room, that cartoonish jungle animal drum circle, now a demented, sticky, chunky blood ritual in the wake of Kaitlyn and Chloe.