Flapjax Review | Fantastic Fest 2026
FANTASTIC FEST 2026 REVIEW
Fantastic Fest has always been a place where genres are encouraged to collide, and the 2026 lineup has leaned particularly hard into that tradition.
We’ve already seen movies combining international influences, horror, comedy, action and folklore in unexpected ways. Then there is FlapJax, Rocko Zevenbergen’s wonderfully sticky combination of science fiction, gross-out horror, workplace comedy and the kind of practical-effects-driven insanity that feels descended from the cult genre movies many of us grew up watching.
This is the kind of movie where a Lloyd Kaufman appearance makes perfect sense.
At the center of FlapJax is Arrow Bentley, played by Gabriel Cagan, the manager of Ham Utters, a struggling fast-food restaurant that appears to be moving closer to permanently shutting its doors.
For Arrow, that possibility is devastating.
Ham Utters isn’t simply his employer. The restaurant helped give his life direction, and he has developed an almost religious loyalty to the place. While everyone around him seems increasingly capable of imagining a future beyond its walls, Arrow remains convinced that saving Ham Utters means saving a part of himself.
The possible solution is FlapJax.
Once a popular menu item, FlapJax disappeared following some unfortunate complications. Now there is a new formula and an opportunity to bring the product back, potentially restoring Ham Utters to its former popularity.
Anyone familiar with this corner of genre cinema can probably guess that the new formula doesn’t exactly solve all their problems.
What follows is gross, sticky, gooey and frequently ridiculous.
That’s a compliment.
FlapJax taps into the spirit of the splatter movies and Troma-style productions that understood there was entertainment value in simply making audiences wonder what disgusting substance would end up onscreen next. The movie doesn’t apologize for its excess. It embraces it.
But what surprised me is that FlapJax has considerably more going on than its gross-out surface initially suggests.
Madeline Barbush plays Louis, Arrow’s co-worker and an important contrast to his obsession with Ham Utters. Where Arrow views the restaurant as the institution that changed his life, Louis increasingly appears interested in discovering whether there might be something more waiting beyond it.
Then there is Zeke, played by Estevan Muñoz, who also co-wrote the film. His arrival adds another personality to a workplace already struggling to remain functional.
Together, the employees give FlapJax a familiar loser-trying-to-save-the-day foundation. Arrow isn’t the obvious hero anyone would choose to confront something extraordinary. He is simply someone desperately trying to preserve the one thing he believes gave his life meaning.
His family life helps explain some of that desperation.
Georgia Kate Haege plays Arrow’s mother, Eleanor, better known as Popo, a former EDM and techno diva whose personality is nearly as notorious as the FlapJax themselves.
She’s a lot.
Their relationship adds another dimension to Arrow, particularly the possibility that years of pressure from his larger-than-life mother contributed to the person he has become. Beneath the science fiction and bodily fluids is a character whose loyalty to a failing restaurant may partially exist because he doesn’t know where else he belongs.
That would have been enough material for a fun genre comedy.
Fortunately, FlapJax gets stranger.
Rather than keeping the entire movie inside Ham Utters and relying solely on increasingly disgusting complications, the filmmakers introduce a parallel story explaining the origins of the substance behind the FlapJax.
Hiro, played by Takumi Mitobe, and his daughter provide a second narrative thread connected to a Japanese laboratory and the history behind what eventually finds its way onto the Ham Utters menu.
That decision is one of the smartest things the movie does.
There is only so far you can take gross-out horror before the audience becomes desensitized. More slime doesn’t automatically mean more entertainment. Without another layer to the story, FlapJax could have exhausted its central joke long before reaching the finish line.
The Japanese storyline gives the movie room to breathe.
It also expands the science-fiction mythology beyond a fast-food restaurant, making the increasingly bizarre events feel like part of something larger than a single disgusting menu item.
That extra dimension keeps FlapJax interesting even when its primary storyline is deliberately ridiculous.
The movie also feels remarkably current in its understanding of food culture.
Restaurants aren’t simply restaurants anymore. Social media can transform a specific sandwich, pastry or menu item into a destination. Food influencers can create lines around buildings overnight. People travel specifically to eat something they saw online and then document themselves eating it for everyone else.
FlapJax understands how absurd that culture already is.
Zevenbergen and Muñoz simply push it into science fiction.
A mysterious food product capable of reviving a dying restaurant doesn’t feel particularly far removed from a world where a viral menu item can suddenly become more famous than the business selling it. That contemporary angle gives the satire something recognizable underneath all the goo.
And there is a lot of goo.
For viewers who love practical mess, sticky creatures, bodily transformations and movies where you can practically feel the texture coming off the screen, FlapJax delivers.
The effects are part of the joke, but they are also part of the film’s charm.
There is something refreshingly old-school about watching filmmakers commit to making their movie physically disgusting. The aesthetic recalls an era of genre filmmaking where imagination and enthusiasm could overcome limitations, and where being strange was often more important than being polished.
That makes Fantastic Fest an ideal environment for it.
This is exactly the kind of movie that could absolutely destroy at a late-night festival screening. Put a packed genre audience in a theater at midnight, give them some gore, slime, ridiculous characters and Lloyd Kaufman, and FlapJax knows what to do from there.
What I didn’t expect was to enjoy the story surrounding all that insanity as much as I did.
The dual narratives give the movie additional depth. Arrow’s attachment to Ham Utters provides an actual emotional foundation, and the satire surrounding viral food culture makes the premise feel surprisingly relevant.
It is still ridiculous.
It should be.
FlapJax knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, but it also understands that gross-out horror works better when there is something underneath the slime.
Fantastic Fest 2026 has delivered another unexpected surprise.
For anyone who likes their science fiction weird, their comedy absurd and their horror covered in something sticky, FlapJax deserves a spot on the menu.
3.5 out of 5
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