Author: swampflix

Who Can Kill a Child? Nic Cage, That’s Who

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When discussing the influencing texts & spiritual descendants of the 1970s grindhouse shocker Who Can Kill a Child?, the tendency is to focus on the Killer Children aspect of its plot. Seen as a gory follow-up to the shrewdly economic British chiller Village of the Damned and an early telegraph of the Stephen King-penned Children of the Corn, Who Can Kill a Child?’s lasting legacy has been rooted in bringing extreme 1970s ultraviolence to an otherwise well-worn Killer Children horror subgenre. Indeed, that is a large part of the film’s appeal as a gradually escalating creep-out. Its tale of British tourists being swarmed by an entire island of genocidal, adults-slaughtering children (as if they were Romero zombies instead of wide-eyed tykes) is incredibly harrowing. As its title suggests, though, most of the horror of that scenario is that at some point the cornered adults must fight back to ensure their own survival and, c’mon, who can kill a child? Just look at their innocent little faces! The British tourists eventually get there after much reluctance & inner turmoil, but there is a recent spiritual descendant to Who Can Kill a Child? that found adults who were much more enthusiastic about the prospect. Apparently, parents are the most enthusiastic child-killers we have around, especially when they’re played by Selma Blair & Nicolas Cage.

Both the adults-massacring phenomenon of Who Can Kill a Child? and the children-killing phenomenon of Mom & Dad (starring Blair & Cage as murderous parents) are unexplained supernatural events with ambiguous origins. The killer kids in our Movie of the Month are somewhat contextualized as exacting revenge on the adults of the world for the way children are always the ones who suffer most in times of war & famine, but the source of their newfound telepathic abilities and infectious killer instinct remains unexplained. Similarly, the widespread epidemic of crazed parents everywhere murdering their own children in Mom & Dad is visually linked to broadcasts of menacing static over television & radio, but the source of those broadcasts is never fully detailed – to the film’s benefit. However, the reason why those parents find it so easy to kill their own children once the static sets them off is much clearer here than the adults-slaughtering impulse of Who Can Kill a Child?. Before any supernatural event occurs in Mom & Dad, the familial relationships between parents & children are already hateful & combative. The film is first & foremost a satire about familial resentment in American suburbia, where passive-aggressive conflict, barely concealed racism, and disgust with teens’ bodies & sexuality are thinly paved over with epithets like, “You’re part of a family. That means you love each other even when you don’t love each other.” All the static broadcasts really do is chip away at that social convention to reveal that, of course, your family are the people you want to kill the most.

Selma Blair & Nicolas Cage are the exact kind of broad, over the-top actors necessary to make a horror comedy about parents who resent & murder their own children a fun romp instead of a vile slog. Their cartoon-level showboating is also necessary to match the filmmaking energy of Brian Taylor, who pushes his hyperactive sugar rush aesthetic from the Crank series to amore purposeful use here. Still, no matter how many deliriously over-the-top novelties are to be found in Mom & Dad—Nic Cage singing “The Hokey Pokey” while destroying a billiard table comes to mind—the underlying familial resentment that fuels its parent-child fights to the death remains palpable throughout. Blair & Cage play “successful” adults who find their manicured, suburban lives with The Right Career & The Right Family bitterly unfulfilling. Their light banter in early domestic scenes with their children barely conceals the family’s seething hatred for each other as they lie, cheat, steal, and insult their bonds into tatters. All the static phenomenon does is externalize the violence that was already threatening to explode under the surface. Who Can Kill a Child? is a much more somber, focused, and daringly explicit film in depicting its child-on-adult violence, but it never fully justifies its central premise with a clear reason or sentiment behind its Killer Children phenomenon. By contrast, Mom & Dad’s thematic justification for intergenerational violence is all too clear, uncomfortably mirroring the underlying resentment of all American households in a deeply ugly light. Despite its grindhouse-70s opening titles sequence, however, Mom & Dad is not nearly as willing to commit to depicting violence against children onscreen as Who Can Kill a Child? is, which almost makes its glibness with that violence land with less heft.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? , check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at its more muted predecessor, Village of the Damned, and last week’s assessment of its influence on Children of the Corn.

-Brandon Ledet

Nightbeast (1982)

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The opening twenty minutes of Nightbeast may very well be my favorite movie ever made. The other hour is pretty decent too. This $14k regional cheapie wastes no time trying to win its audience over, immediately flooding the screen with gorgeous D.I.Y. nightbeast action in a way that promises a nonstop low-fi special effects showcase. An incredible combo of collage animations & hand-built miniatures stage a spaceship crash in the forested wilderness outside Baltimore. The titular alien beast emerges from his wrecked ship with a raygun in hand and commences vaporizing all cops & townies in his path, revealing Looney Tunes body outlines where their corpses should be. Crosscuts between disembodied handguns firing and nightbeast reaction shots alternate at a strobelight pace. When not vaporizing victims in The Arrival-style animation effects, the nightbeast tears open their torsos with his giant claw, leaving a trail of post-Romero intestinal gore. It’s an incredible opening that’s extremely light on dialogue and extremely heavy on nightbeast. Then the creature loses his raygun and the movie loses its immediacy, slipping into a much more familiar mode of microbudget genre storytelling.

Once Nightbeast settles into constructing a plot, it isn’t sure what to do with itself, so it instead opts out in a way many late-70s, early-80s creature features did: lifting its story wholesale from Jaws. Despite protests from the town sheriff and the local science community, the grandstanding mayor of the small town the where the nightbeast crashed refuses to cancel a fundraising party & evacuate the city, putting his citizenry at unnecessary risk. There’s also a local, unrelated threat from a misogynist biker who strangles women who reject his sexual advances. Oh yeah, and the sheriff makes sensual love with one of his deputies. That’s it, at least until the nightbeast re-emerges for one final outburst of explosions & gore in the third “act.” It’s clear that local microbudget legend Don Dohler and his crew at the aptly titled Amazing Film Productions (including an early “music by” co-credit for a teenage J.J. Abrams) poured almost all of their money & effort into that bewildering first reel, gambling that the opening spectacle would be enough to carry the hour of comedown filler that follows. They weren’t wrong! There’s plenty of typical B-movie charm to the concluding hour of Nightbeast to maintain a goodwill for the cheap-o production on the whole, and then its final outburst of D.I.Y. practical effects spectacle is just enough to freshen your memory that it started off as an all-timer of a creature feature.

I’m a habitual sucker for this kind of communal “Let’s put on a show!” D.I.Y. filmmaking, and that enthusiasm for no-budget genre films may be required at the door to love this frontloaded frivolity for what it is. Despite featuring more sexual sleaze & gross-out gore than either camp (not to mention frequent John Waters player George Stover), this plays as a very wholesome middle ground between 1950s drive-in filler and Matt Farley’s regional horror comedies like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!. The titular nightbeast spills a lot of blood & viscera in this small Maryland town, but in lingering close-ups he’s so charmingly quaint that I can’t help but think of him as a harmless cutie (especially in comparison with the grotesque serial-strangler subplot). Most audiences would be understandably frustrated with the way the film slips into Jaws-riffing tedium after the alien beast loses his spectacular cop-melting raygun, but I personally didn’t mind the cooldown too, too much. If anything, the go-nowhere melodrama in the second act and the final-minutes return to the initial spectacle provided context as to just how cheap this production really was, only making those opening twenty minutes more incredible in retrospect. The ambition of that opening is must-see trash cinema excellence, whether or not you find the more pedestrian hour that follows as charming as I do.

-Brandon Ledet

The Head Hunter (2019)

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I was a little surprised to find the online enthusiasm for the cheap-o swords & snow fantasy horror The Head Hunter so muted & reserved, at least among the critics & bloggers I follow. Early reviews from the festival circuit praise it as an underdog gem that barely scraped together a $30,000 budget but somehow make a compelling feature out of it. Since it’s hit VOD, however, it’s been met with a polite 3-star shrug, which is strange since this is the exact kind of scrappy, make-do filmmaking genre nerds usually celebrate. Admittedly, I had a similar muted reaction to the low-budget, high-ambition fantasy-horror Hagazussa earlier this summer, so I’m guilty of this exact crime elsewhere, but I really do think The Head Hunter strives to be more of a traditionally entertaining crowd pleaser in its own cheap-o way than that fellow curio. Its scope is limited and it’s extremely light on dialogue, but it moves for its entire 72min runtime as it reaches for one grand, grotesque payoff to release all its atmospheric tension. That concrete payoff totally worked for me in a way the loftier Elevated Horror™ ambitions of Hagazussa did not, and I was surprised to find there wasn’t more of a fist-pumping, whooping-and-hollering reception out there to reward its budget-defying efforts.

In this post-Game of Thrones swords & snow fantasy horror, a medieval monster slayer seeks to add the head of the beast that killed his daughter to his trophy collection. That’s it; that’s the entire plot. It’s such a simplified, constricted premise for a feature film that it combines both the fridging & the macho-warrior-humanized-by-raising-a-daughter tropes that weigh down most modern action blockbusters into a single meat-headed motivator. What’s interesting about The Head Hunter is that it turns that setup into a picture about the process of beast-slaying instead indulging in full-on action-horror (which would require effects work far beyond its budget). This is essentially the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen video of monster-hunting. One gruff medieval warrior with a Nick Offerman-level scowl makes healing potions out of animal carcasses and hangs the ooey-gooey severed heads of his beastly opponents on his trophy wall of spikes. Of course, audiences would generally prefer to see those offscreen battles than the daily preparatory chores & bloody cleanup aftermath we get instead, and the monster slayings themselves do essentially amount to an [IMAGINE A BIGGER BUDGET HERE] insert. Personally, I found this setup to be an impressive device in low-budget filmmaking shrewdness. It knows it can’t convincingly stage battle scenes on its limited production scale, so it makes up for it by leaning into what it can do well: grotesque creature designs & a nihilistic mood.

Readjusting my expectations to The Head Hunter’s budgetary limitations & emphasis on process set me up to be absolutely floored by its climactic monster battle—which is onscreen, extensive, and shockingly cerebral in its brutality considering how shallow the premise can feel in the lead-up. After all the film’s withholding & obscuration, it really digs deep into the hurt & anger shared between our beast slayer & the monster who killed his daughter. All the frustration of feeling left out of previous battles melts away as you’re invited into a cramped, chaotic space for an up-close look at the only one that matters. There’s plenty to praise in The Head Hunter in terms of low-budget filmmaking craft: the attention to detail in its practical gore & costume design; its handheld cinematography that alternate POVs between Evil Dead monster cams & heroic video game screengrabs; its utilization of fog machines & natural lighting to enhance its no-budget forest sets; etc. What’s most impressive to me, however, is how physically & psychologically brutal its climactic showdown feels after that slow, methodical build to the moment – something it could not achieve without withholding the other monster battles before it (especially considering its budget). That choice seems to have alienated a lot of potential genre nerds hoping for more straightforward action-horror, but I personally found it to be incredibly impressive in both craft & effect.

-Brandon Ledet

Viy (1967)

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There’s a tricky balance between patience & expectation in recommending the historical curio Viy (aka Spirit of Evil) to the uninitiated. This is a one-of-a-kind cinematic artifact that concludes with what has to be one of the most gorgeous scares in the history of its artform. I’m already getting ahead of myself in overhyping it, though, as that glorious delayed payoff is a mere five-minute stretch of the film’s (mercifully brief) 77min runtime. There’s an early sequence that promises witchcraft & devilry for audiences patient enough to await its arrival, but much of the film is a slow, lightly comedic build to that final spectacle. I can only report that the witchy, demonic climax is well worth the wait, and that the movie would still be worth your attention even if it weren’t – due to its cultural significance as an early Soviet horror.

Cited as the first horror film produced in the Soviet Union, Viy feels like it’s gleefully getting away with something even when it’s pretending to be well-behaved. In the same era when Serious Artists like Andrei Tarkovsky struggled to express their religious beliefs onscreen under Soviet censorship, Viy sidesteps those restrictions by passing itself off as “a folk tale.” Adapted from the eponymous Nikolai Gogol text (which also inspired Mario Bava’s cult classic Black Sunday), it follows the story of young priests in training who very much believe in God, witches, and The Devil – with forbidden Christian iconography often decorating the sets they occupy. The mood is kept exceedingly light, though, as the bumbling would-be priests are basically frat boy buffoons on Spring Break who meet their end at the hands of a powerful witch. Despite the severity of its political & religious transgressions, this is essentially a horror comedy – with a comedic score keeping the mood light throughout (except at it blissfully chaotic climax).

While drunkenly enjoying a rowdy break from his studies in town, a young priest-in-training catches the lustful eye of a horny old witch. Unamused by her sexual advances, he beats her to death with a stone – a grotesquely outsized reaction to her enchantment. As retribution, the witch poses as the beautiful corpse of a local townie, insisting before her “death” that the very priest who bludgeoned her be summoned to pray for her soul over three consecutive nights. In classic fairy tale fashion, her menacing revenge on the idiot priest gradually escalates over those three nights—eventually reaching an intense supernatural crescendo during the final prayer session. The priest continually tries to weasel his way out of his responsibility to pray over the corpse (and, more to the point, to pay for his crime of drunkenly assaulting a witch), but his doomed fate is sealed as soon as the request is made. He gets his just desserts on that third night in a spectacularly satisfying act of supernatural revenge.

Viy’s value as a Soviet Era artifact is not going to interest every horror nerd. It’s a niche territory that’s only made more challenging by its shoddy English vocal dub, which plays like a book-on-tape translation where a single performer voices every character. If its historical context interests you, though (and if you generally have the patience for delayed payoffs to moody, atmospheric builds) the film is well worth the effort to reach its delirious haunted-house climax. The five-minute stretch that makes good on its long-teased witchcraft & devilry—boosted by an importation of Silent Era special effects into a 1960s filmmaking aesthetic—will leave an intense impression on your psyche that overpowers any minor qualms with its build-up. This is a quick, oddly lighthearted folk-horror curio with a fascinating historical context and an eagerness to wow the audience in its tension-relieving climax. That’s more than enough to melt my own horror-hungry heart, but your own mileage may vary.

-Brandon Ledet

Genocide (1968)

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It would be a reductive understatement to point out that the people of Japan were emotionally & spiritually fucked up by the events of World War II—particularly the US’s deployment of the atom bomb—but that was still my foremost thought while watching the 1968 eco horror Genocide (aka War of the Insects). Nature striking back against humanity’s nuclear ills had already been a cinematic fixation dating over a decade prior to films like Godzilla & Them!, but there was something exceptionally troubled about the tones & emotions of Genocide that taps into an even deeper well of ugly post-War fallout than even those superior works. Opening with images of a mushroom cloud and mixing discussions of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and military men’s PTSD with real-life war footage throughout, Genocide feels more like a cold-sweat nightmare about nuclear fallout than it does a proper feature film. There’s nothing unique to it in a thematic sense (as it often plays like a Mothra film with increased sex & violence), but there is a soul-deep discomfort to it psychologically that breaks through that familiarity.

A military airplane transporting an H-Bomb is downed on a Japanese island when attacked from the outside by a swarm of insects and from the inside by a solder suffering PTSD flashbacks. Western military men & Eastern Block spies race each other to recover the bomb first while two simultaneous mysteries develop around its disappearance: a murder trial involving a local man’s affair with a white tourist & the scientific explanation for the actual murderers responsible – poisonous bugs. It appears that all the insects of the world have joined forces to end humanity as retribution for inventing the atomic bomb. Their mission is accelerated by a mad-scientist Holocaust survivor who is blinded by her hatred of mankind due the torture she & her family suffered. None of these storylines cohere into a satisfactory, purposeful statement on the evils of War, but they do reflect a general psychological hurt across Japanese culture in their own jumbled, disoriented way. Genocide is a panicked nightmare of an eco horror where the killer bugs themselves are almost an afterthought in the face of humanity’s own colossal fuckups.

I don’t know that this picture is fully satisfying as a horror film. It does its best to unnerve the audience with the small-scale scares it can muster on what had to be a limited budget: model airplanes catching fire, Phase IV-style closeups of insect pincers pulling at flesh, nasty makeup work on victims’ festering wounds, a solitary psychedelic sequence of someone tripping on bug venom, etc. The real menace here is more deeply rooted in the psychological fallout of the War than the threat posed by the bugs, however. The way the insects organize, swarm, and gnaw flesh is never quite as eerie as the moment when they sing the word “genocide, genocide, genocide,” to torment their human foes. Genocide saturates the air in post-War Japan, as it’s presented here, to the point where Nature whispers it back to us in a creepy sing-song nursery rhyme. No matter where else the film may stumble in establishing a horrific mood (most notably in its limited scale and its occasionally shortsighted race & gender politics), that direct vocalization of a nation’s subliminal hurt is genuinely, impressively chilling.

-Brandon Ledet

Horror Noire (2019)

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It’s initially tempting to receive the Shudder-produced documentary Horror Noire as a kind of celebratory victory lap after the financial & awards season successes of Get Out helped greenlight so much new black art in the horror genre. Indeed, the film includes several interviews with black creators whose latest projects were funded in the wake of Get Out’s game-changing pop culture impact, including author Robin R. Means Coleman, whose eponymous source material itself was greenlit into this feature-length documentary the very morning after Jordan Peele won his Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (as reported on an episode of Shock Waves early this year). Horror Noire does allow the recent success story of Get Out to boost morale on its back end, and several black authors & filmmakers do use the opportunity to plug their latest projects, but this documentary is just as much of a rebuke as it is a celebration. It’s first & foremost an academic conversation covering the history of black representation in American horror cinema, from the coded racial caricature of amoral classics like King Kong & The Creature from The Black Lagoon to the celebratory upswing in black filmmaking in the modern day. The history of black representation, black audiences, and black art in American pop culture doesn’t leave a lot of room for Horror Noire to play like the victory lap a lesser film could slip into, and it’s impressive to see a talking-heads doc on this scale & subject to be willing to have those tough conversations. As one interviewee puts it, “We’ve always loved horror, but horror hasn’t always loved us.”

The list of celebrity interviewees from The Black Horror Hall of Fame gathered here is impressive and alone worth the effort of putting this doc together: Jordan Peele, Ernest Dickerson, Ken Foree, Tony Todd, Loretta Divine, Keith Davis, The Craft’s Rachel True, etc. Their talking-heads commentary is smartly staged as audiences watching the screen inside a movie theater rather than as creators toiling in their workspaces, emphasizing how onscreen representation shaped them as people as well as artists. The real joy of this film, however, is how much it allows author Robin R. Means Coleman to guide the discussion in her own words instead of letting the flashier celebrity interviewees fully take over. She obviously has a reverence for horror cinema as an artform, but she’s also fearless in interrogating the ways it has failed black audiences since the very beginning. American history itself is declared to be “black horror.” Birth of Nation is framed as a horror film from black audiences’ POV. Tropes like the easily scared back buffoon providing comedic relief, the “magical negro” helping white characters navigate supernatural realms, and the sole black character being the first to die – and so on – are called out for their social menace even in beloved horror classics like Candyman & The Shining. Get Out’s success is contextualized as a cyclical breakthrough moment that’s already been seen before in landmark texts like The Night of the Living Dead, Blacula, and post-Spike Lee 90s gems like Tales from the Hood. Coleman is given free rein to throw bare-knuckled academic punches here, and she does not disappoint.

Although this isn’t the surface-level celebration of black success stories in horror cinema that it easily could have been, it’s still only a thematic primer that compresses Coleman’s rigorous academic text into a breezy 83min discussion. As such, I didn’t walk away with too many deep-cut recommendations for titles I haven’t seen before (Sugar Hill, Abby, and Def by Temptation being the few standouts), but the implied promise is that there’s plenty more to dig into once I pick up the book that inspired this production. Since this is just a standalone feature and not a ten-part mini-series, however, that compression is perfectly suited for the task at hand: using the success of Get Out to center a crucial academic discussion that well deserves the signal boost. It’s not the exhaustive, final word on the topic the way a lengthy academic text could afford to be, but it’s a worthwhile conversation starter that isn’t afraid to take on the Goliaths of the genre as it interrogates a history just as worthy of scrutiny as celebration. A weightier film would’ve been less digestible in a single sitting, and a lighter one would’ve underserved the political & emotional severity of its subject. In that way, Horror Noire finds an ideal Goldilocks middle ground, while doing the essential public service of amplifying Robin R. Means Coleman’s authorial voice.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #93 of The Swampflix Podcast: Queen of the Damned (2002) & Nu-Metal Vampires

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Welcome to Episode #93 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our ninety-third episode, Britnee & Brandon travel back in time to wage war with the vampires of the nu-metal era, with a particular focus on Queen of the Damned (2002), Underworld (2003), and Dracula 2000 (2000). Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week: The Horrors of #NOFF2019 10/16/19 – 10/23/19

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There’s a wonderful overlap of goings-on in the city this week, as the 30th annual New Orleans Film Festival is descending upon us just as we approach Halloween. There are hundreds of titles screening all over the city for NOFF and we plan to cover at least a dozen or so of all types and shapes and genres for the site in the coming weeks. For the purposes of keeping our weekly Now Playing feature spooky all October, however, I’m only going to highlight a few horror-related NOFF titles here, so you can work the festival into your regular Halloween-season movie binging. Happy hauntings!

Spooky Movies Screening at NOFF

Scream Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street – A long-awaited documentary chronicling actor Mark Patton’s troubled relationship with the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Closeted at the height of Reagan Era homophobia, Patton felt he was bullied by the gay “subtext” the filmmakers behind Freddy’s Dead added to his de facto “Final Girl” character. He’s since embraced the role (and the horror community at large) in his journey to self-acceptance, but that turnaround has not been easy or fair. An important episode in queer horror history. Thursday 10/17 (9:15pm) & Friday 10/18 (8:30pm) at The Broad Theater.

The World is Full of Secrets – Set during the nostalgic haze of a mid-90s summertime sleepover, a group of teenage girls compete to one-up each other by telling the ghastliest, goriest stories they can conjure – answering the prompt “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard?” Described in the NOFF program as “something like a deconstructed episode of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?.” Saturday 10/19 (7:30pm) at The Broad Theater.

Swallow – Recalling the horrors of modern life & patriarchal control in Todd Haynes’s classic chiller Safe, this discomforting atmospheric creep-out centers on “a newly pregnant woman whose idyllic existence takes an alarming turn when she develops a compulsion to eat dangerous objects.” Sunday 10/20 (9:00pm) at The Broad Theater.

Hunting for Hedonia – A Tilda Swinton-narrated documentary on the history of medical research in Deep Brain Stimulation. Both a testament to the practice’s benefits for neurological disorders and a nightmarish exploration of its implications in mind control, psychological abuse, and sexual debauchery. Only “horror” in the sense that it explores the uncomfortably thin, easily exploited border between our minds and modern tech. Saturday 10/19 (2:30pm) and Tuesday 10/22 (6:30pm) at The Broad Theater.

Horror Classics Screening Elsewhere

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) – This bizarro tale of child-melting Halloween masks and ancient Stonehenge-worshipping cults was once the most hated entry in its franchise (as an experiment in releasing a Halloween film that opted to not feature Michael Myers) but has since been reclaimed beyond the point of being a cult classic. It’s just a classic now. Maybe the best film about Halloween as a holiday; certainly has the all-time best Halloween jingle. Screening in the midnight slot at The Prytania on Friday 10/18 and Saturday 10/19.

Alien (1979) – Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic, bolstered by the bottomless subliminal nightmare of H.R. Giger’s visual art, is still the all-time scariest movie ever set in outer space (and maybe even beyond). Screening to commeorate its 40th Anniversary on Sunday 10/13, Tuesday 10/15, and Wednesday 10/16 via Fathom Events.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) – The first Sleepaway Camp film stumbled into over-the-top melodrama, deep psychosexual discomfort, and Problematic-As-Fuck gender politics by attempting to spice up the first-wave slasher formula with some unexpected twists. This lesser-seen sequel is much more self-aware in its slasher-riffing intentions, functioning as a full-on parody of the genre in surprisingly fun & clever ways. Screening for free at the Frenchman Theater & Bar on Wednesday 10/23 (10:00pm, with a pre-party celebration beginning at 8:00).

House on Haunted Hill (1959) – Long before it trickled down into a nu-metal atrocity under the Dark Castle brand (thanks largely to its open-season copyright status in the public domain), this classic team-up between director William Castle and horror icon Vincent Price defined the haunted house horror flick for an entire generation of dweebs. No word yet on whether these showings will incorporate Castle’s innovative “Emergo” technology – in which a “skeleton” on a pulley system swooped over the audience to punctuate specific scares. Screening Sunday 10/20 (10:00am) and Wednesday 10/23 (10:00am) as part of The Prytania’s regular Classic Movies series.

-Brandon Ledet

Mister America (2019)

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Over a year ago, Tim Heidecker posted a video on his Instragram account stating that he was running for District Attorney of San Bernardio County, California. Truthfully, I had no idea if this announcement was some sort of joke or if he was legitimately running for a political office.  For those who are familiar with Heidecker’s unique style of comedy (best conveyed on the series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!), he walks a thin line between reality and satire, so my confusion was completely reasonable. Almost a year later, the movie Mister America was released, confirming that Tim was not really running for DA last year. He was working on a mockumentary and releasing social media clips that would eventually become part of this feature film. The whole situation is wild and extremely hard to explain to those who are unfamiliar with his comic genius. Last Wednesday, The Broad Theater had a one-night screening of the completed film, which I ab-so-lutely attended along with about twenty other fans of the Tim and Eric Awesome Show universe. It was by far the best comedy to come out this year.

Eric Notarnicola, the director of Mister America, is no stranger to Tim Heidecker’s hijinks. He also directed a few television and web series starring Heidecker: Decker, On Cinema at the Cinema, and The Trial, all of which reappear in Mister America at one point or another. While it is helpful to already be a fan of these Notarnicola-directed series with Heidecker (especially On Cinema) prior to watching the film, I don’t think it’s necessary to be familiar with the On Cinema Universe to enjoy Mister America. There’s enough background information provided throughout the movie to bring those unfamiliar with the series’ backstories up to speed. In Mister America, Heidecker is followed by a documentary crew throughout his journey of running as an independent candidate for District Attorney of San Bernardino County. Without having enough signatures to be on the ballot, no volunteers, barely any campaign funds, and no legitimate political platform, Heidecker has a tough time getting his campaign off the ground. To make matters worse, he has the reputation of being a murderer. While at an EDM music festival, he “supposedly” sold contaminated vape juice to several festival goers, causing them to die. His prosecutor for the case, Vincent Rosetti, is the incumbent DA of San Bernardino County, and Heidecker self-represented his defense in court during the legal battle. So with his legal self-representation experience and his connection with everyday San Bernardino citizens (he is officially a San Bernardino resident because he receives his mail at his hotel room), he truly believes that he has what is takes to beat Rosetti.

The style of humor that Mister America sells is the kind that has you cackling at the most minor details. For instance, while Heidecker is having a breakfast meeting with his campaign manager Toni (Terri Parks), he gets lost deep into his business/politician persona and can barely get his hashbrowns and eggs onto his fork. The camera kept zooming in on his fork failure, and I completely lost it. Another major player that brings the funny to this movie is mister Gregg Turkington, a regular guest on On Cinema. Turkington pops up for short interviews with the documentary crew to shit-talk Heidecker, and he always seems to come up with a bizarre movie reference for every scenario. My favorite scene with Turkington was when he tried to explain the similarities between The Shaggy D.A. and Heidecker’s campaign. He even goes so far as to bring a bootleg VHS copy of The Shaggy D.A. to the documentary crew, which he makes clear that he needs returned ASAP.  He also has a great moment where the crew follows him trash-hunting for VHS tapes (destined to become Popcorn Classics for On Cinema), and it’s something that I personally related to way too much.

Mister America is up there with the mockumentary greats, and it’s just a lot of stupid fun. I believe the movie theater screenings are finished, but the film is now available on demand. Trust me, it is worth every penny.

-Britnee Lombas

Ancestors of the Corn

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My memories of it were never especially vivid, but the 1984 Stephen King adaptation Children of the Corn scared me silly as a kid. All I truly remembered about the film was a rural town of killer children roaming roadside cornfields under the cult-leader rule of the prophet Isaac, played by series mascot John Franklin. I didn’t even have that central character’s name locked down in memory, though, as I’ve been wrongly referring to him by the more memorable name Malachi for decades (despite that name belonging to one of Isaac’s faithful child soldiers, not the leader himself). Still, even with the only the vaguest memory of that mid-80s cult curio rattling around in the back of my brain, it was easy to recognize it as a clear descendent of our Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child?. It’s not nearly as vicious, purposeful or, frankly, as good as Who Can Kill a Child?, but it certainly shares a lot of its thematic DNA.

Originally a short story published in Penthouse Magazine one year after Who Can Kill a Child?’s theatrical release, Stephen King’s killer-children cult thriller is strongly reminiscent of its elder. In both films, a tourist couple are trapped in a remote village overrun by violently rebellious children who’ve massacred all other nearby adults. Both films open with the eeriness of being the only car on the road while violent children quietly watch from their hidey holes. They’re primarily Daylight Horror films staged in open, sunlit spaces that are unusual for a genre that loves to build tension in cramped darkness. Their respective Killer Children contingents are headed by enigmatic leaders who mock traditional religious ceremonies in their town’s abandon churches and, most damningly, share the rarely used scythe as a murder weapon. If King was entirely unaware of Who Can Kill a Child? when he wrote this film’s source material (or if Fritz Kiersch hadn’t seen the picture before directing this adaption nearly a decade later) then this is a phenomenally precise case of parallel thinking.

At first, it appears as if the major distinguishing factor that would deviate Children of the Corn from the Who Can Kill a Child? template is that Isaac’s corn-worshipping flock aren’t killing adults for a supernatural cause, but rather a misguided superstition. There’s a Wicker Man-inspired track here about a cult who believes they must sacrifice anyone over 18-years-old to a vengeful god they call “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” to ensure a good corn harvest. Being ritually murdered by alarmingly organized children on the orders of a false prophet with an overactive imagination sounds genuinely chilling, but that’s not exactly what’s gong on here. There’s plenty of confirmed-to-be-“real” supernatural shit transpiring in these corn fields: harvest demons, Hellish weather patterns, predictive visions, and anything else Stephen King’s coke-addled mind could excitedly splatter on the page in its default over-excited state. If anything, it complicates Who Can Kill a Child?’s supernatural horror by adding more, more, more to the pile instead of appreciating the simplicity of the original’s premise & execution.

The true mutation of the Who Can Kill a Child? formula here is that Children of the Corn perversely feels like a Killer Children horror film made for children. The adult couple abducted by Isaac’s corn-worshiping cult (featuring The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton in an against-type distressed damsel role) provide a basic plot for the story to follow as outsiders who interrupt the killer-children’s natural order. They’re not necessarily the POV characters, though. The film is narrated by a cutesy child actor who plays a detractor within the cult who questions Isaac’s “wisdom.” Even with all the bloodshed & spooky cult rituals, the film plays with a Kids’ Movie sensibility throughout, which excuses some of its sillier touches like its faux-Latin choral score and its dynamic shots of “menacing” corn. A too-early viewing of Who Can Kill a Child? would scar a child for life, but catching Children of the Corn on late-night cable at an early could easily create a lifelong horror fan, something I can personal confirm. I suspect that’s how this deeply silly film earned no fewer than nine sequels, anyway, while Who Can Kill a Child? has been relegated to in-the-know cult status. Children of the Corn is about as original & hard-hitting as a Kidz Bop cover of that superior work, but there are far worse things a film could do than transform impressionable children into future genre nerds.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? , check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at its more muted predecessor, Village of the Damned.

-Brandon Ledet