They grow up so fast!  It seems like just yesterday Kansas Bowling was a teenage backyard filmmaker making horror-blog headlines with her debut feature B.C. Butcher, like the Tromaville equivalent of Lights Camera Jackson.   Now she’s an all-growed-up twentysomething edgelord, touring the country with her mondo genre throwback Cuddly Toys – officially graduating from enfant to enfant terrible.  Bowling’s recent visit to New Orleans felt like a mandatory cultural event even though I generally hate the retro mondo movies Cuddly Toys spoofs & subverts; I just had to see what other local schlock gobblers are excited about her work, since the things I knew her from felt so obscure: the aforementioned caveman slasher comedy B.C. Butcher, the Jackass style gorilla-on-the-loose slasher comedy Psycho Ape, and an excellent, years-old episode of the sorely missed Switchblade Sisters podcast in which she eloquently praises the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head.  That curiosity led me somewhat astray, trapping me in a small theater with boisterous horror-bro laughter at some of the cruelest, gnarliest violence in Cuddly Toys, then forcing me to confront the possibility that some of that sour humor was intentional on the director’s end – given that she seems to have a genuine appreciation for the mondo schlock of olde.  You could even feel her genuine mondo appreciation in the film’s traveling road show presentation, which was likely inspired by mainstream distributors being weary of touching such sordid material but also feels true to the regional exhibition of the genre’s grindhouse heyday.

To be fair, Cuddly Toys isn’t as purely exploitative as vintage mondo schlock like Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, or whatever obscure, racist cannibalsploitation relic your friend’s scuzzy older brother dared you to watch at an unsupervised sleepover.  Bowling appears onscreen as “Professor Kansas Bowling”, recent graduate of teen-life university, narrating a feature-length slideshow with the same faux-educational tone of vintage mondo.  Her presentation includes references to distinctly 2010s teen life but is shot on 16mm film stock to match the look of her satirical target.  Her “academic” lecture to the clueless parents of America is pitched as a scare film about their teen daughter’s delinquent behavior when they leave the relative safety of home.  In practice, she’s “documenting” the horrific daily life of the typical teenage girl by mixing real-life interviews about rape & misogynist abuse with comically exaggerated depictions of rape & misogynist abuse. Like in true mondo tradition, it’s difficult to parse out what authentic snippets of real life are lurking in the exploitation sleaze bucket that swallows it, except now you also have to parse out what’s intended as irony vs what’s sincere.  Also in true mondo tradition, I often hated the experience of watching it, even though I’m hopelessly attracted to vintage sexploitation of its ilk (of which only Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless is innocent).  Every time I watch a 70s grindhouse relic for the first time, I always brace myself for sexual assault imagery that lingers a couple beats past making its point, and Cuddly Toys is queasily accurate to that tradition, even if its point is nobler than the vintage films it mimics.

And yet, I can’t totally dismiss the bratty outsider-art feminism of this D.I.Y. bombthrower.  Cuddly Toys makes admirable gestures to link the sexual violence of subcultural teen life in the 1970s with subcultural teen life now, even directly referencing Marilyn Manson’s despicable revival of the stadium-rock groupie era.  Despite ostensibly being structured as an academic lecture, it also does a good job of avoiding direct moralist instruction, both by muddling its Feminism 101 talking points with shocks of edgelord irony and by intercutting its testimonials and re-enactments in a deliberately messy, experimental editing style.  Somewhere in all its shock-value leering of underage sex & misogynist violence, there’s an earnest, soul-deep interest in the inner lives of American teen girls, recalling Lauren Greenfield’s portraiture of Californian teens in the 1990s.  It can be outright beautiful in individual, intimate moments, often straying from the mondo genre send-up at hand to promote Bowling’s side hustle as a prolific music video director.  In general, I found Cuddly Toys much more compelling as a sketchbook-in-motion for Bowling’s loose assemblage of Movie Ideas than as a satirical mondo throwback.  It appeared to be shot over several years in cities as far-spanning as LA, NYC, Vegas, and Mexico City, automatically making it a much denser & more personal work than B.C. Butcher, which was shot in a single week just outside Bowling’s childhood home.  In its best form, it functions as a kind of avant-garde travel diary, which is fitting for a movie in which a loose collection of wayward teens read semi-fictional selections from their own personal diaries, documented in their densely over-decorated bedrooms.

All of my self-conflicted handwringing about this film’s various failures & successes results from watching a director I find fascinating dabble in a genre I find distasteful.  Distastefulness appears to be a personal interest of Bowling’s, though, so I can’t fault her for trying to mine something politically powerful out of the vintage schlock she watches for fun.  For my sake, I hope her revival of kitsch genre relics leads her to make something more akin to nudie cuties than roughies in the future, but that’s an entirely selfish impulse.  Judging by the alternation between howling laughter and stunned silence in that Cuddly Toys audience, it’s apparent she has plenty enthusiastic devotees to what she’s already accomplishing – way more than I thought to expect.

-Brandon Ledet