Author: swampflix

The Happytime Murders (2018)

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Brian Henson (son of Jim) is currently being steamrolled by pro critics in his jump from directing children’s puppetry films like Muppet Christmas Carol & Muppet Treasure Island to his first feature intended for adult audiences. Most of the negativity for Henson’s The Happytime Murders (as indicated by its 27 score on Metacritic & its 21% on the dreaded Tomatometer) seems to be framed around the jaded, seen-it-all attitude that his film’s central gimmick of raunchy Muppets humor is far from a brand-new novelty, with Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles serving as the most often-cited comparison point. That critique feels a little empty to me, as Feebles is far from the only raunchy Muppets-But-For-Adults media setting a precedent for Henson’s film. Wonder Showzen, Greg the Bunny, Crank Yankers, and TV Funhouse have all mined the Dirty Muppets gimmick for “mature” humor post-Feebles. Better yet, Meet the Feebles itself was also preceded by over a decade by the porno-comedy Let My Puppets Come. Henson’s latest is not a Feebles knockoff so much as it’s part of an ever-expanding genre of adult puppetry, a subclass of comedy distinct enough to have its own Wikipedia page. In fact, Henson himself has participated in this genre before as executive producer of the (underseen, underrated) political punditry spoof show No, You Shut Up!, which features puppets & performers recycled & repurposed in his latest critical debacle; the unexpected joy of seeing those puppets again was admittedly a huge part of why I’m soft on The Happytime Murders overall. No, it’s not a debt to Meet the Feebles that tempers the successes of Henson’s first feature intended for adults. It’s the debt that it owes to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? that really weighs the film down (and also tarnishes Roger Rabbit’s memory in retrospect).

In Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 comedy/special effects showcase Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, live-action humans & 2D cartoons interact in an alternate-history Old Hollywood past were the toons are seen as second-class citizens. Brian Henson’s The Happytime Murders unwisely picks up that same dynamic in its Muppet & human-cohabitated LA, underlining the racial allegory of the Roger Rabbit conceit for empty, uncomfortable political satire. Melissa McCarthy is tasked to hold down the Bob Hoskins role as the too-old-for-this-shit cop with open, callous bigotry for the puppets she must interact with while working her beat. As demonstrated by Max Landis’s recent critical disaster Bright, this Roger Rabbit blueprint for racial allegory divorced from actual racial identity has not aged especially well since Zemeckis’s film was released three decades ago (at least not in the hands of white artists interpreting POC experiences). While McCarthy is reluctantly paired with a puppet partner to investigate a string of puppet murders and learns that not all puppets are so bad along the way, the audience has no choice but to squirm through each political implication of that overriding allegory in a way that detracts from the film’s central mission: comedy. Sometimes these political missteps are uncomfortable in a presumably unintentional way, like when a rabbit puppet is “humorously” indicated to have dozens of illegitimate children (because rabbits breed a lot; it’s in everyone’s best interest to read further into it). Sometimes it’s deliberately uncomfortable in an #edgy way, like when a homeless puppet performs a minstrel tap-dance for humans’ spare change on an L.A. street corner or another has their blue felt bleached to appear more like their fleshy oppressors. In either instance, the conceit is a clumsy misfire that says way more about the failed legacy of Roger Rabbit than it does about Meet the Feebles.

There are a couple Roger Rabbit-isms that The Happytime Murders does pick up to great success, however; its jokes are often funny & its noir pastiche plot makes for a genuinely engaging story. If nothing else, my first-act guess about the puppet-murderer’s identity was only half-correct, so I have some unexpected respect for the film’s ability to stage an engaging mystery. That’s not typically what I look for in a comedy, though. I’m looking to laugh, which is not at all a problem with the talent on hand: McCarthy, who is always a hoot; Elizabeth Banks bringing back some of that scenery-chewing Power Rangers energy; The Office’s Leslie David Baker, playing the exasperated police chief role he was born for; Maya Rudolph doing her best impression of Annie Potts’s 1940s secretary schtick from the original-flavor Ghostbusters. Then there’s the puppetry itself, which applies the level of artistry you’d expect from the Henson family name to novelty sex imagery like cow udders being rhythmically milked, Dalmatian dominatrices working the business end of whips, and a puppet ejaculating entire cans’ worth of silly string. The worst I can say about The Happytime Murders’s raunchy puppet humor is that a few of its jokes are openly “borrowed” from outside sources (particularly the line “Does this smell like chloroform to you?” and a bit about sewn-shut assholes lifted wholesale from a Wu-Tang skit), but that’s nothing extraordinary given the film’s overall commitment to schtick. Humor is highly subjective so there’s no accounting for what people might find funny or too old-hat in the picture, but if you have a general appreciation for the adult puppet genre (or think a ZAZ-style spoof of the noir template might be worth a chuckle) the movie delivers the dumb-comedy goods.

The Happytime Murders is a three-star comedy with a half-star critical reputation, which is not at all uncommon with this shamelessly lowbrow end of raunch & schtick. The central allegory in its human-puppet racial relations is a clumsy embarrassment, but its general sense of raunchy Muppet humor is good for a goof, especially if Meet the Feebles isn’t your only comparison point for the adult puppetry genre, as they both benefit from a lager perspective than a 1:1 comparison. This is especially true for anyone who felt betrayed by the untimely demise of No, You Shut Up! (which was tragically canceled months before our last presidential election cycle, to my personal horror). As much as I enjoyed the film more than most audiences seemed to, it never made me as happy with a sex joke as it did with an incorporation of a discarded puppet or vocal performance from that show.

-Brandon Ledet

Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2018)

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My mental library of anime titles is embarrassingly shallow; if it’s not Miyazaki or Akira, I likely haven’t heard of it. As someone who cherishes the artistry of hand-drawn, traditional animation, however, I’m often a huge sucker for the stray titles from the medium I’ve seen (I was even mildly positive on the egregious Your Name.-knockoff Fireworks from earlier this year, at least as a novelty). Since the animation artistry itself is often what I’m typically drawn to in these works, it’s the freewheeling, psychedelic end of the anime spectrum that most attracts me – titles like Paprika & FLCL that indulge in dream logic sequences of fantastical mayhem simply because it looks cool. That disposition makes me the perfect audience for Masaaki Yuasa’s latest feature film, Night is Short, Walk on Girl. Surely, anime & manga die-hards familiar with the film’s source material (an eponymous novel & a television show titled Tatami Galaxy) will have a much richer contextual experience with Night is Short than I, but as a previously uninitiated appreciator of psychedelic visual indulgences, I still had a total ease in enjoying the film as a stylistic exercise isolated from extratextual concerns. A plot-light immersion in visual excess & tonal drunkenness, Night is Short is wonderful as an exhibition of the virtues of traditional animation, a chaotic night of unhinged fun that requires very little familiarity with its medium to enjoy on a purely aesthetic level.

The POV of Night is Short, Walk on Girl is split between two unnamed characters: a teen girl brazenly entering “the adult world” through a wild night of drinking & a slightly older boy who’s following her from a close distance in a hapless effort to woo her through stalking. Of course, the film is most fun when seen through the girl’s perspective, but their adventures are evenly weighted & equally absurd. “The night that felt like a year” stretches on endlessly ahead of them as they plow through cocktail bars, open-air used book markets, porno auctions, strangers’ parties, and guerilla theatre happenings all over the city of Kyoto. Time is explained to move much slower for young folks (interpreted literally in the ticking of wristwatches), so their single night of missed connections stretches on for an impossible temporal bacchanal. Besides the way youth distorts our perception of time, the film also contrasts different age ranges’ philosophies on interconnectivity. Older late-night drunks feel isolated, prone to despair, while the titular girl is so bursting with life & feelings of interconnectedness with the people of Kyoto that she sees cocktails across the city only as precious jewels to be collected as flowers bloom in the air around her. When asked “How much do you drink?” she defiantly responds, “As much as is in front of me,” spending her entire night binging on the simple, immediate joys of life while oblivious to the lovelorn boy with eyes only for her.

If I have one regret about seeing Night is Short on the big screen, it’s that I didn’t have the option to watch it dubbed. I realize that tarnishes my anime credibility more than anything else, but in a film that’s most notable for its visual achievements it would have been nice to not have been distracted by the subtitles while taking in the artistry. For all the film’s vague philosophy about youth, interconnectivity, and the passage of time, its plot mostly amounts to a frantic night of drunken, incoherent yelling. It only really comes alive as an achievement in narrative storytelling in the 15min stretch when it mutates into a full-blown musical. Otherwise, it’s the film’s poetic, freeform animation style that commands the tones & rhythms of each sequence—shifting from storybook illustration to erotic printmaking to Powerpuff Girls-style retro cutouts to whatever the mood dictates as the moment blooms. I was reminded of the recent restoration of Yellow Submarine while watching it in the theater, if not only for both films’ willingness to exploit their shared medium for the full spectrum of absurd, anti-logic indulgences it allows, whereas most modern animation feels dispiritingly restrained & unimaginative. I can’t say with any authority whether Night is Short is an especially remarkable achievement as anime, but I can say with certainty that in our modern era of CG animation doldrums, it’s an invigorating, intoxicating elixir.

-Brandon Ledet

Catwalk (1995)

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Like in my recent-years’ attempts to dip my toe into the insular worlds of fringe-art communities like drag, pro wrestling, and alternative comics, I feel totally out of my league when discussing fashion, despite my interest in it as an artform. It took decades of maturity & shedding of teenage snobbery for me to personally recognize fashion as the vital, vibrant artform that it is, something essential to so many things that were already important to me: drag, wrestling, punk, cinema. As such, my vocabulary & mental catalog of the giants of the industry are embarrassingly thin, something I could stand to correct with some crash course documentary-binging on the subject. With recent pics like The Times of Bill, The Gospel According to Andre, and McQueen falling just outside my distribution reach, but weighing on me heavily as works I should seek out, I find myself looking to past docs to fill in the gaps in the meantime, which is how I found Catwalk. Produced in the supermodel-dominated 1990s when dozens of catwalking fashionistas were big enough stars to be household names even for someone as uninterested in their artform as I was at the time, Catwalk seemed like an easy enough entry point into the world of high fashion as any. That was naive of me; the film is more a head-first dive into the deep end than anything.

Following an overworked Christy Turlington as she walks 1992 Fashion Week runways in Paris, Milan, and NYC, Catwalk is posed as a day-in-the-life, behind-the-scenes portrait of a fashion model in the year’s busiest season, but actually functions as a “Supermodels! They’re just like us!” act of brand management. The lifestyle porn of watching Turlington try on the world’s most beautiful clothes in rooms full of the world’s most beautiful people in the world’s most romantic cities is a potent fantasy. Outside a few shady quips, everyone profiled is on their very best behavior; even their version of clubbing is extremely mannered & image-controlled. That’s not too much of a problem, however, when you consider the quality of elbows Turlington is rubbing behind the scenes at these shows: models like Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Carla Bruni; designers like John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaulitier, and Isaac Mizrahi. Even the film’s tonally fluctuating music affords it an air of legitimacy, as it was provided by punk fashion pioneer Malcom McLaren. The only problem is that if you’re a fashion-scene dummy like myself you have no idea who these people are (at least by sight; their names might ring a bell) and the movie has zero interest in cluing you in, providing no captioned names until the end credits. This is a behind-the-scenes glimpse for people already in the know, one where announcing context would be blatant & gauche.

I have a feeling that if I return to this film after I’m more familiar with the fashion world superstars it casually profiles, I’ll get a lot more out of it. Even now, my ears most perked up in moments where people I was already familiar with happened into the frame because of the setting (Campbell, Cindy Crawford, RuPaul, Sandra Bernhard, Sharon Stone). As impenetrable as the film may have been to me as a fashion-industry crash-course, however, it did partially clue me into the general social atmosphere of a scene I’ve only before witnessed in parodies like Zoolander & (less cruelly) Prêt-à-Porter. Although this is a hangout documentary clearly intended for people already in the know, that casual familiarity with the scene does have a way of acclimating outsiders in a lowkey, context-light demeanor. I have a feeling I’ll appreciate this laissez faire fashion scene introduction more the further I get away from it. At the very least, it didn’t at all scare me away from pursuing the subject further.

-Brandon Ledet

Lettres d’Amour (1942)

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The library where I work recently acquired Criterion’s “Claude Autant-Lara—Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France” boxset and we’ve been making good use of those DVDs in my household. Three of the four films in the set were made and released during the German occupation of France during WWII. The last film, Sylvie et le fantôme, came out the year after armistice that ended the war. Brandon covered the first film in the boxset, Le Marriage de Chiffon, back in June, so if you’d like a little more background on the filmmaker or the context these four films were made in, go check out his review!

The second film in the boxset, Lettres d’Amour, opens with a scene of conflict between the petty bureaucrats of Napoleon III’s empire and Zélie Fontaine, a widowed, small-town postmistress and stagecoach owner. The bureaucrats argue that Fontaine does not respect their authority and, as a woman, is not fit to hold such an important public office on her own. Her rebuttal: a Bronx cheer to them and to all who make up “la Société,” the over-privileged elites who are engaged in a class war with “la Boutique,” the simple shop class trying to better themselves through hard work. It is interesting that this film was released uncensored during the Nazi occupation of France, considering its rebellious tone of lauding the common folk versus the government.

La Société’s case against Fontaine is hinged on a scandalous love letter ostensibly addressed to her from a mysterious beau who uses the pen-name “hedgehog.” Little do they realize the letters are intended for her best friend, wife of the local prefect and chief plaintiff in the case against Zélie. In a classic romance twist, once the “hedgehog” meets Zélie, he realizes that she is a far more likeable person and an all-around better romantic partner. Eventually, the town squares off with Zélie and her hedgehog on one side versus her former best friend and the rest of “la Société” on the other. But what form does the climactic clash take? Very polite dancing.

As Zélie says to her motley crew of commoners before they crash the quadrille of the wealthy, “This evening we do battle.” Dance battle, that is. A dance battle where everyone is wearing couture gowns designed by Dior and the only thing that gets hurt are some feelings (not a single toe gets stepped on!). This feminine, frothy set piece is pure, exquisite escapism – a perfect antidote to the grim lives of the French citizens who saw the film in its original run.

As with many other films that purposely appealed to women in this era, Lettres d’Amour failed to garner critical support (too sentimental, too trivial) during its initial release. While it certainly deserves reappraisal, its revival is somewhat tainted by the director’s late-in-life remarks that denied the Holocaust. How strange that a film that felt so progressive was made by a man who spouted vile epithets years later. At the end of the day, though, I still really loved this picture. Odette Joyeux, who stars in all four of the films in this box set, is a joy to watch as the stubborn leader of a minor rebellion. Her comedic timing is perfection and the jokes are surprisingly fresh despite being 60+ years old. The costuming is exquisite, and the setting is picturesque. I’m hoping the second half of this set will be as delightful as the first!

-CC Chapman

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week 8/30/18 – 9/5/18

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8/30/18 – 9/5/18

Here’s a quick rundown of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week, including a $2 screening of a former Movie of the Month.

New Releases We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

1. A Touch of Zen (1971) – A digital restoration of King Hu’s 3.5-hour wuxia epic (billed in the trailer as “the masterpiece that inspired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon“) is playing for one night only at The Broad Theater, tonight! (8/30/18). According to the Facebook event page, the screening will be preceded by “a complimentary Chinese Tea Ceremony demonstration and tasting” of “two authentic, specialty Chinese teas prepared in the traditional Gongfu style.” I’m far from an expert in Chinese martial arts cinema, but this seems like a once-in-a-lifetime event, not to be missed.

2. Searching – John Cho stars in a classy update to the Unfriended-style laptop thriller, attempting to lift one of my favorite trashy genres, the Evil-Internet horror film, out of the lowly ranks of titles like Friend Request & FearDotCom into something more respectable. Consider me intrigued.

3. The Little Stranger – Domhnall Gleeson stars in a Gothic horror throwback that looks to deliver all the goods you’d expect from that costumed, ghostly genre. Given how weirdly muted the response has been to 2018’s other Gothic horrors (in order of excellence: Beast, Marrowbone, Winchester), I doubt it’ll make much of a splash, but I’m totally on the hook for what’s promised in the trailer.

4. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood – A tabloid-friendly documentary about Scotty Bowers, a former WWII soldier & gas station attendant famous for his same-sex prostitution exploits with practically all of Old Hollywood. The filmmaking craft doesn’t appear to be anything special, but anyone with a passing interest in the Hollywood Babylon-style sex scandals of the early movie industry will likely be interested in Scotty’s eagerness to tell-all. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

5. BlacKkKlansman – Spike Lee hasn’t exactly disappeared, but it feels like he’s been hiding in plain sight for the last decade or so by dedicating his efforts to small-scale, limited appeal experiments (like, for instance, a Kickstarter-funded remake of the esoteric cult classic Ganja & Hess). BlacKkKlansman appears to be a much better-funded, commercially minded picture than we’ve seen from the infamous indie auteur in a long while, one that filters satirical jabs at Trumpian racial politics through a classic buddy cop genre structure & a historical look back at the not-so-distant past of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s incredibly exciting.

6. Crazy Rich Asians – Part wish-fulfillment rom-com & part extravagant wealth porn, this comedic romance fantasy looks like a crucial slice of escapist fun. It also promises to incite a much-needed corrective for Hollywood’s dismally deficient Asian American representation on the big screen, so it’s a worthy film to support while it’s playing in theaters.

Movies We Already Enjoyed

1. Babe 2: Pig in the City (1998) – A former Swampflix Movie of the Month & one of the only George Miller pictures that gives Mad Max: Fury Road a run for its money in pure cinematic excess is screening for a measly $2 fee at Broad Theater, Tuesday night 9/4/18. It’s a rare opportunity to see this Swampflix-approved cult classic big & loud with a rowdy, late-night crowd.

2. Marvel Studios 10th Anniversary Festival – To celebrate ten years of cinematic superhero glut & ever-expanding Disney bank accounts, AMC is screening the entire MCU catalog, from Iron Man (2008) to Infinity War (2018), all Labor Day weekend. Check out the “festival’s” full monstrous schedule here for details and check out our MCU review series Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. to see which films in the franchise we believe survived the test of time & are worth the trip to the theater.

3. Eighth Grade – The Broad Theater is teaming up with A24 to host what appears to be the last New Orleans screening of Bo Burnham’s coming-of-age drama/anxiety-fueled social nightmare free for all teachers in the New Orleans area, Wednesday 9/5/18 at 7pm.

4. Sorry to Bother You – Every week for the past month I’ve been amazed that this weird, divisive film is still holding on in its local theatrical run, but there are still a few stray daily screenings listed across the city. From Boomer’s review: “These continue to be dark days, and though we may not know how to fix them, we must not get used to them. And if you like your social commentary candy-colored but lacking in neat, pat answers, go see Sorry to Bother You. Hell, go see it even if that’s not your bag; your comfort zone could become your noose if you don’t push your boundaries.”

5. Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again – This decade-late sequel to the ABBA jukebox musical is notably better-made on a technical level than its predecessor (it shares a cinematographer with most Wes Anderson productions?), but it’s also a hell of a lot less horny & bizarre. For the most part, though, Here We Go Again delivers more of the same Mamma Mia! goodness, except this time with a little Cher for flavor. Britnee’s an especially big fan of this franchise and you can hear our dual review of both Mammas Mia! on a recent episode of the podcast.

6. The Happytime Murders – Melissa McCarthy stars in a crime thriller parody alongside dozens of foul-mouthed puppets, directed by Brian Henson (son of Jim). Look, I know the reviews are horrendous and this Puppets Gone Wild comedy gimmick has been done plenty times before (Let My Puppets Come, Meet The Feebles, Greg the Bunny, Wonder Showzen, Crank Yankers, Avenue Q, Brian Henson’s own No, You Shut Up! to name a few), but the joke is still funny to me, because I’m an immature dweeb.

-Brandon Ledet

John Waters’s Honeymoon Killers

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My first thought watching Leonard Kastle’s grimy black & white crime romance The Honeymoon Killers was “Surely, John Waters loves this.” Without any evidence or background context it seemed obvious to me that The Honeymoon Killers’s mix of camp excess & horrific violence was an influence on Waters’s work, especially evident in the early scene where the killers’ first mark is shown atonally singing “America the Beautiful” at top volume in a bathtub. Even Martha Beck’s over-plucked eyebrows felt like a blueprint for Divine’s signature look, an over-the-top perversion of vintage bad taste in 1950s fashion. The truth is, though, that John Waters was already a fully-formed artist by the time The Honeymoon Killers was released. In fact, his film that most closely resembles Kastle’s, Multiple Maniacs, was released the very same year & already featured Divine in her full, knife-sharp-eyebrows glory. Waters’s work is more a kindred spirit than a direct descendant.

The opening credits scroll for Multiple Maniacs is framed like microfiche, as if the audience were researching old crime reports in archived newspapers. Both Waters’s film & The Honeymoon Killers were inspired by real-life serial killers (the Sharon Tate murder of the 1960s & the “Lonely Hearts killers” of the 1940s, respectively) and lean into the grim, cruel despair of those subjects. You can practically stain your fingers on the films’ cheap tabloid ink. They’re also tabloid-ready stories (one real & one fictional) because their respective killers are romantically linked & commit their crimes as a couple, turning tales of human despair into a kind of in-print soap opera. Multiple Maniacs is much freer to pursue an impossible, fantastic narrative, though, since it was merely inspired by the Sharon Tate murder (and filmed before Charles Manson’s name was even connected to that crime), branching off into its own detached-from-reality criminal fantasy. As opposed to the newlywed grifters of The Honeymoon Killers, Divine & David Lochary’s own theft & murder spree is a long-establish bond involving a traveling side show (Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions) where unsuspecting audiences are robbed at the end of each performance. Both crime/love partner relationships devolve in the same way, though; the male accomplice is caught cheating & the woman goes berserk (to Godzilla-scale effect in Multiple Maniacs).

What’s maybe not immediately apparent in either of these pictures is how that low-fi crime & grime is contrasted with high art sensibilities. Offended by the Hollywood gloss of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, Leonard Kastle stated that with The Honeymoon Killers, “I didn’t want to show beautiful shots of beautiful people.” Waters may have bested him there, setting up his own romantic crime thriller as a side show where odd-looking weirdos perform heinous acts like licking bicycle seats, shooting heroin, and homosexual kissing (!!!) to their literally captive audience’s horror. Where Waters dared to stoop lower in the unattractive details, he also aimed higher with his artistic sensibilities, especially in a scene where Divine & Mink Stole paly with anally-inserted rosary beads while reciting the Stations of the Cross, an Andrei Rublev-esque vision of Christ’s trials intercutting their lesbian foray. That surreality emerges again in an unexplained scene where Divine is raped by a giant lobster, but I fail to recall what Tarkovsky movie that might resemble. Francois Truffaut once stated that The Honeymoon Killers was his all-time favorite American film, as it was the one that most closely approximated the handheld immediacy of the French New Wave. One has to wonder if he ever got to see the less widely-distributed Multiple Maniacs before making that claim (or if it would have made a difference).

Even if Waters was more a contemporary than a devotee of Kastle’s, he surely loved The Honeymoon Killers all the same. In an interview with NPR, Waters recommended The Honeymoon Killers as a personal favorite, quipping, “With internet dating today, this certainly could happen again.” What I’d most like to know at this point is whether that appreciation was mutual. Did Kastle ever see Multiple Maniacs? Would he enjoy it if he had?  Waters’s own aversion to Hollywood phonies & manicured beauty would at least indicate that Kastle may have appreciated it more than Bonnie & Clyde, but having fun with a Dreamlanders-era Waters film would require a little more extreme disposition than just that. It’s subjective which film is the better of the pair, but Multiple Maniacs is undeniably the more extreme.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the romantic crime thriller The Honeymoon Killers, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our examination of Martin Scorsese’s involvement with the film, and last week’s look at its mid-2000s Hollywood-phony equivalent.

-Brandon Ledet

Matt Farley’s Druid Trilogy

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One of the great mysteries of Matt Farley’s backyard-movie catalog for Motern Media is how many films, exactly, fit under that umbrella. Farley has been making microbudget narrative features with friends & local weirdos for decades, but any “official” list of Motern titles, even when cross-referenced between his IMDb page & Motern’s website, is deliberately incomplete & unclear. Although the full list of titles is seemingly unavailable (outside of asking Matt directly by Twitter or by phone, as he is very available), it is clear that the “official” Motern Media movie catalog is marked as starting with an interconnected series of films Matt & friends produced in the early 2000s about ancient druid cults disrupting modern New England. Like Matt’s frequent impulses to craft triple albums, six-hour marathon concerts, and 20,000 song catalogs, this early Druid Trilogy is a stupefying work of outsized ambition. The plan, as Matt explains it, was to make a 7-part film series on this single druid theme. Only four films were completed before the project was (presumably wisely) abandoned, three of which were released, leaving behind a charmingly imperfect, oddly open-ended trilogy with an absurdly complex mythology. If anyone would have had the prolific energy & single-minded stubbornness to see a 7-part series of supernatural comedies about modern-world druid cults through to completion, it would have been Matt Farley, so I have to trust that jumping ship after the initial trio was the right thing to do. As it stands, though, Matt Farley’s Druid Trilogy is exactly the glimpse of Motern Media’s early stirrings you might want to explore after falling in love with more fully-realized works like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! & Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas.

The first entry in the Druid Trilogy and, thus, the first “official” Matt Farley movie is the 2002 comedy Adventures in Cruben Country. What is sure to play as a fairly standard backyard movie project to the uninitiated will feel like a shocking revelation to already converted Motern devotees. All the way back in the early 00s, when I was but wee high school dweeb, Matt Farley’s pet subjects of walking instead of driving, the novelty songwriting process, the joys of one-on-one basketball, and Halloween costume monsters stalking the woods just outside of town were already fully-formed, lived-in obsessions. In an early, fictional version of what would eventually become The Motern Media Infomercial Podcast, Matt rants at length on a radio broadcast soapbox about how much better the world would be if everyone walked everywhere instead of driving cars, an argument you can still hear him make verbatim in the 2010s. In the film, he’s playing the fictional character of Matt Farley, the Musical Mayor of Thomasville. The film is a kind of fantasy where he can exercise the same auterist control he uses to run Motern in real life while governing an entire city of loyal citizens who have to listen to his official dispatches & novelty songs with rapt attention. True to form, Matt is far more interested in indulging himself with this Musical Mayor fantasy than he is with staging a conflict with the cult of “druids” (black-magic creeps with bedsheets for “cloaks”) who stalk the woods in nearby Cruben Country. When the mayor’s plan oversteps its bounds by proposing that Cruben Country be converted into a massive playground packed with basketball courts, however, the druids encroach to discredit him, threaten his journalist girlfriend, and essentially exile him from Thomasville. The highs of Adventures in Cruben Country never quite match the best of Farley’s work, but it’s still a successfully funny, adorable hangout comedy with strong Adventures of Pete & Pete vibes that telegraph what he’d later accomplish in Manchvegas. The movie is most astonishing in its early glimpses of novelty song-scored basketball games, extensive rants about walking, and Kevin McGee villainy – all of which would be better deployed later in his catalog, but are amazing in the earliness of their arrival here.

Sammy: The Tale of a Teddy and a Terrible Tunnel doesn’t exactly pick up where Cruben Country leaves off. Or does it? There are enough stray elements in common between the two films to suggest that Sammy is a direct sequel: Kevin McGee’s casting as the main evil druid; Matt’s ex-journalist love interest; a series of underground tunnels ostensibly intended to encourage walking; props like frying pans, frozen pizzas, and mystical jars of dirt worshiped by the druids, etc. However, there is no mention of Matt ever having been mayor of his small New England town. Also, I’m 90% sure the film is intended to be a direct parody of the early 80s cult horror The Pit (which I’m reluctant to confirm, since we’ll be discussing it as a Movie of the Month this October and I don’t want to prematurely read too much about it). The complex mythology of dirt-worshipping, government-infiltrating druids is maintained as background detail in this film, which mostly concerns an adult, brain-damaged Matt Farley, who has renamed himself Jamie and spends his days talking to an oversized teddy bear. The bear, named Sammy, issues commands to the infantilized Matt, eventually leading him to feeding human sacrifices to a tunnel-dwelling monster in the woods. If Cruben Country recalls Manchvegas, Sammy is much more prescient of the nastier tones of Freaky Farley, with the teddy bear encouraging some real disturbing Norman Bates/Peeping Tom behavior between non-sequitur gags about misshelved library books & frozen-pizza binges. The narrative of Sammy is just as incongruous with Cruben Country as the tone, as we never see the accident that transforms Matt into Jamie, nor are given direct indication if Matt used to be mayor. Is Sammy even set in Thomasville or are these films only of a series in the sense that they rearrange talisman props & characters into Madlib style configurations? They each feel self-contained enough for the latter to be true. I could easily ask Matt directly for the answer to these questions and for insight into what the unreleased Druids Druids Everywhere & the three unproduced films in the druid series might have been, but I’m honestly having more fun truing to parse out the mess on my own than I would with a clear, direct answer.

The third (and most artistically satisfying) release in Matt Farley’s Druid Trilogy is Druid Gladiator Clone, a film I’ve already reviewed at length & one I quite enjoy for its aesthetic resemblance to early 00s pranksters like Tom Green & the Jackass crew. If you haven’t fully caught the Motern bug, but are still curious about these early druid-mythology comedies, it’s the one to see, as it delves furthest into the unnecessarily complex (even in Motern terms) lore; it’s also, on a basic level, the funniest of the trio. As a trilogy (and abandoned heptalogy), however, this collection of work is remarkable in its microbudget ambition & its deadpan commitment to the silliest of premises. In other words, it’s pure Motern. Matt Farley already had his humor & his pet obsessions fully developed and ready to broadcast to the work in the early aughts. What the Druid Trilogy afforded him & director/co-conspirator Charles Roxburgh was a D.I.Y. film school environment where they could learn the details of comic timing & maxed-out absurdity that would later lead to more substantial (even if just as low-budget) work. This crop of films is the exact Early Motern insight I was looking for. It’s probably for the best that Farley’s earlier attempts at backyard filmmaking (as well as mysteriously unavailable titles from later in the catalog like Obtuse Todd) are still just outside my reach. Much like the disjointed, irreconcilable plots of these three loosely connected films, the Motern movie catalog is all the more fascinating for maintaining a slight air of mystery.

-Brandon Ledet

The Absurdist Joys of the Villainous Pun Name

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I have a running list of absurdly idiotic movie gimmicks that delight me to no end: horror films about internet-dwelling computer ghosts; plot-summarizing rap songs that play over end credits; music video dream sequences, etc. This week I may have discovered a new one: the not-so-secret villain who gives themselves away with an obviously evil pun name. Naming fictional characters is difficult business. It takes incredible skill & patience to find the right name that both says something about the character without being too blatant and feels natural on the tongue. This week I’ve been watching movies that don’t at all burden themselves with either concern, instead using their villains’ names as plain, upfront statements about where they stand in the world and how you should feel about them. It’s a tactic that’s far more often employed in the heightened realities of pro wrestling, drag, and comic books – one that sticks out like a sore thumb when it’s deployed in cinema, hilariously so.

The first of these villainous pun names to jump out at me was from the 1987 supernatural noir Angel Heart. The film joins the ranks of New Orleans-set erotic thrillers like The Big Easy, Zandalee, and Cat People ’82 in depicting our fine city as a sweaty pile of saxophones, street steam, horniness, gumbo, and Voodoo. The plot is, on the surface, a fairly standard noir riff where a young, strapping Micky Rourke ventures to investigate a missing person’s case while getting tangled up with various dangerous dames. Everything changes when a corny sex scene between Rourke & Lisa Bonet (a beautiful combination, considering the times) turns into a nightmare vision of Hell and the movie takes a supernatural turn. Anyone paying attention to the character names should see that directional shift coming from a mile away, however. Not only is Rourke’s professional sleuth named Harold Angel, but the man who hires him to investigate the crime (in “a special appearance” from Robert De Niro) is named Louis Cyphre. Turns out that long-nailed, slick haired trickster Louis Cyphre has a pure-Evil, supernatural role to play in Angel’s downfall. Who would have guessed?

The second villainous pun name I stumbled across was a much more recent, less nostalgically minded-title: Wes Craven’s 2005 airplane thriller Red Eye. A tight, gimmick-heavy thriller from the War on Terror era of Bush’s presidency, the film features Rachel McAdams being held hostage by Cillian Murphy on a late-night flight and subsequently being pressured into participating in a terrorist attack. Red Eye has a Final Destination feel to it, except with Terrorism feeling like the inescapable inevitability instead of Death. That set-up allows for over-the-top skirmishes with flight attendants, missile launches, and assassination attempts to feel at home with the overall tone, but the movie also has a stray concern with gender politics that lands far outside that thematic orbit. Murphy’s abduction & coercion of McAdams begins as extremely gendered flirtation, then erupts into domestic violence exchanges where he explains he has the upper hand because his “male-driven logic” trumps her “female-driven emotion.” That turn in the story is much more jarring than Murphy’s reveal as the villain, but the gendered violence of the film is less surprising when you consider his character name for a half-second: Jack Rippner.

After meeting Louis Cyphre & Jack Rippner by chance, I decided to revisit the most shameless villainous pun name I could recall. It’s an honor held by none other than schlock king Ed Wood Jr., who had the vision & the fortitude to name a character Dr. Acula in 1958’s Night of the Ghouls. Officially unreleased until the 1980s, cobbled together from footage pilfered form Orgy of the Dead & The Sinister Urge, and somewhat posed as a direct sequel to Bride of the Monster (at least in Tor Johnson’s resurrection of the character Lobo), Night of the Ghouls is a total mess even by Wood’s “standards”. It’s a charming mess, though, especially in sequences where Dr. Acula fleeces marks by staging fake seances in his spooky mansion for easy cash. Everything about Acula is a mystery. Actor Kenne Duncan is not at all vampiric in the role, not even vaguely. The character was obviously written for Bela Lugosi before his death, but why wasn’t it given to Criswell instead, who introduces the film while rising of a casket, then continues to operate outside the narrative? If Acula is a total fraud whose seances are staged for grifting, why would have burdened himself with such an obviously suspicious, villainous stage name? Was the character intended as an homage to Lugosi’s very similar conman in the 1940 horror comedy You’ll Find Out? I’m not sure Wood would have answers to these questions even if he were still alive, which I suppose is part of the fun.

Jack Rippner, Dr. Acula, and Louis Cyphre have better company in more well-respected films – characters like Hannibal Lecter, Cruella de Ville, and any number of James Bond or Harry Potter villains you can name. Honestly, though, I find them even more delightful as sore-thumb intruders outside of contexts like comic books or children’s literature that would excuse their over-the-top nomenclatures. Now that my eyes are open to the trope, I fully expect to notice more villainous pun names at the movies. At the very least, I hope to run across a Justin Sane or a B. Zilbub before my time on Earth is through and I fully expect to fall in love with the films that dare to exploit that gimmick. It’s consistently delightful & comfortably at home with this genre film territory.

-Brandon Ledet

I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)

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It’s difficult to know what you’re walking into with most 1950s sci-fi & horror titles. Parodic, post-modern appreciation of the era has trained us to expect that every 50s genre cheapie with an explicitly paranormal title will be a so-bad-it’s-good laugh riot, but that’s often not the case. I expected I Married a Monster from Outer Space to be a campy indulgence, one of the rubber suit Roger Corman monster movies that are typically afforded the MST3k treatment instead of full, rapt attention. The signs are all there. The sensationalist title is absurdly verbose. The titular monster is one of the rubber Roger Corman mold, wandering around cheap wooded & suburban sound stage sets to the victims’ shrieking terror. The effect is far creepier than it is campy, however, and the film even manages to make a substantial point through its paranormal metaphor. There were certainly implications that this would be the case. Not only was I Married a Monster from Outer Space packaged on a double bill with the cult classic The Blob, but it was also produced by Gene Fowler Jr., who similarly struck better-than-expected genre gold in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which practically invented the coming-of-age teen body horror. Still, I’ve been culturally conditioned to not take these things seriously, so it’s always a surprise when one knocks me on my ass.

If you’ve seen any movie with an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type plot where spouses have been mysteriously replaced with space alien doppelgangers, you can likely predict this film’s plot beat for beat. Our protagonist is a terrified, eager-to-please house wife who cannot figure out why her newlywed husband is acting so cold & distant to her in what should be the couple’s honeymoon period. She soon finds herself to be the lone conspiracy theorist in town who’s convinced that he – along with the other husbands, cops, and male authority figures – have been replaced with a space aliens who plan to breed with human women. A They Live! style device emerges where lighting flashes reveal the true, hideous faces of the creatures pretending to be suburban husbands, but the monsters mostly go by undetected until it’s almost too late. The story is familiar, but flows incredibly naturally from scene to scene with an editing room finesse atypical of this genre territory. The special effects also feel above par for the material, from the head-to-toe detail of the rubber monster suits to the distorted faces of the lightning strikes to the weaponized fog the creatures deploy when abducting their victims. All the surface level narrative details of I Married a Monster from Outer Space are exactly what you’d expect from its title; the attention to detail in its craft just happens to be a cut above.

What makes this film an underappreciated gem is not its story or craft, however, but its deployment of the suburban invasion metaphor. While many 1950s horror films reflect political or xenophobic angst about foreign menace hiding in plain sight among us, I Married a Monster from Outer Space instead condemns the power dynamics of marriage in its era. Before the aliens ever arrive, men are shown to be drunken brutes who feel burdened by their wives, who in turn don’t know their husbands form Adam (or atom). There’s a distinct kind of terror in marrying a total stranger, especially one who will have legal & physical power over you, something that happened often in the time when you were socially pressured to marry the first person you wanted to fuck. The alien husband replacement is terrible at small talk, cruel to animals, and threatened by suggestions that he should be checked out by a fertility doctor to assess why the couple can’t bear children. When his wife dares to leave the home to ask for help, other men are just as threatening. At best, they assume she’s drunk, hysterical, or looking to cheat on her husband. At worst, they’re also aliens in disguise, deferring to her husband’s authority and returning her to his arms. As presented here, 1950s marriages were a nonstop nightmare, whether or not you were married to a space alien in disguise. I was never a housewife in the 1950s, personally, but I totally believe it.

It would likely be best for me to fight the instinct of not taking these 1950s monster movies seriously at face value. Growing up in the hangover haze of Gen-X’s weaponized sarcasm & apathy has shaped my viewing habits in ways I should learn to challenge & counteract. If I’m being honest, though, my underestimation of certain pictures also plays to their advantage when they’re able to prove my skepticism false. I went into I Married a Monster from Outer Space expecting campy schlock. Instead, I found an eerie special effects creep-out & a damning exploration of the power dynamics of marriage in the 1950s. Having your expectations challenged in that way is a best-case scenario for any movie, no matter the genre or era.

-Brandon Ledet

Lonely Hearts Killers vs. Blasphemous Hollywood Phonies

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When opera-composer-turned-one-time-filmmaker Leonard Kastle dramatized the serial murder crime spree of Raymond Fernandez & Martha Beck, he deliberately avoided Hollywood glitz & glamor. The Honeymoon Killers was Kastle’s anti-Bonnie & Clyde project, a low-fi genre picture meant to capture the full grime & absurdity of his subjects’ tabloid-ready crimes without glorification. He explained “I didn’t want to show beautiful shots of beautiful people.” Before Kastle’s movie and since, there have been roughly a dozen crime thrillers about so-called “Lonely Hearts Killers,” murderers & thieves who lured their victims through romantic personal ads in the newspapers. Fernandez & Beck in particular have only received the movie treatment in two subsequent productions, however: a 90s Mexican crime drama titled Deep Crimson and 2006’s Hollywood-produced Lonely Hearts. It’s in that latter title that we got a glimpse of exactly the kind of movie Kastle didn’t want to make, a phony game of 1940s dress-up packed with “beautiful shots of beautiful people.” The Honeymoon Killers deliberately set out to be the anti-Bonnie & Clyde; Lonely Heats carelessly stumbled into being the anti-Honeymoon Killers, bringing the whole phony Hollywood enterprise full circle.

The first glaring Hollywoodization of true-life grime in Lonely Heats is the casting of Raymond Fernandez & Martha Beck. A large part of public fascination over the killers’ tabloid-documented trial was how much objectively better-looking Fernandez was than his lover/partner in crime. Martha Beck was a plain, ordinary woman who had intensely latched onto a very handsome (and eventually violent) man. Her caked-on makeup, over-plucked eyebrows, and low-fashion attire afford her the appearance of a John Waters character as she’s played by Shirley Stoler in The Honeymoon Killers. In Lonely Hearts, she’s played by Salma Hayek, one of the most exquisitely beautiful movie stars around. Jared Leto co-stars as Fernandez, equally miscast in the way his forever-young baby face struggles to convey the rugged, old-fashioned masculinity the role requires. When they attempt to age up Leto with a bald cap (in scenes where Raymond isn’t wearing his signature toupee) it plays as an unintentional joke. Leto looks as if he’s guest-hosting SNL, which I doubt was the intended effect in this drama about women & children-murdering grifters. In the casting alone, Lonely Heats undoes everything Kastle envisioned for The Honeymoon Killers, but it does so by having no particular vision at all. It’s likely no one had Kastle’s film in mind during the making of Lonely Heats; they were just naturally blasphemous to his ideals by deferring to Hollywood’s default mode of filming beautiful people playing dress-up.

After the casting of its leads, the second most baffling (and unintentionally blasphemous) decision Lonely Heats makes is in its choice of POV. Whereas Kastle’s film morally challenges the audience by making Fernandez & Beck the protagonists, Lonely Heats frames the story around the (presumably fictional) cops who are tracking them down. James Gandolfini provides convenient exposition for the film as a police force old-timer who burdens the proceedings with verbose noir narration so overly-familiar it borders on parody. John Travolta contrasts him as a loose-cannon partner with a troubled past & an apparent death wish, distracting from Fernandez & Beck’s exploits by wasting screentime on his own past romantic tragedy & his current troubled relationship (with a too-good-for-this-shit Laura Dern). Through this police procedural device, the movie allows itself to play very fast & very loose with the truth of the case that inspired its narrative, but then drop in flatly-stated facts about Martha Beck’s childhood sexual assault that Kastle didn’t dare touch in his own version of the story. The details of the individual crimes are familiarly paralleled in each film: bodies stuffed in clothing trunks, women struck in the skull with hammers, Fernandez & Beck posing as brother & sister to lessen suspicion in their grifts. Lonely Heats just distorts those details through a phony Hollywood POV and often tempers their impact by depicting cops uncovering victims after-the-fact. Where The Honeymoon Killers will show a victim atonally singing “America the Beautiful” at top volume in a bathtub for a campy comedic effect, Lonely Hearts will counter that deliberately un-sexy image with a perfectly posed naked female body found in a bathtub filled with her own blood, looking more like a fashion shoot than a suicide. Where Honeymoon Killers will show Fernandez & Beck teaming up to drown a child in a basement sink, Lonely Heats will only show cops discovering evidence of that crime in horror, long after the event. The details are largely the same (they both depict the same true-life crime spree after all), but the methodologies are philosophically opposed – if not only because Lonely Hearts seems to have no specific philosophy at all.

Of course, there’s an entertainment value built into phony Hollywood glamor. For all of Lonely Heart’s efforts to beautiful Fernandez & Beck’s crimes and shift the moral ambiguity of audience empathy by framing their story through the cops hunting them down, the film still does not skimp on sex or bloodshed, something it treats with the same casual decorative ease as its 1940s big band music & dress-up costuming. Lonely Hearts even occasionally achieves some of The Honeymoon Killers’s off-putting absurdist camp in its more lurid details, such as in a scene where a blood-spattered, bald cap wearing Leto masturbates for Hayek’s amusement. As always, Hayek herself is a joy to watch and is clearly having fun with the material. The “beautiful shots of beautiful people” ethos Kastle detested is difficult to despise too vehemently when it involves Hayek chewing scenery in 1940s femme fatale couture. The pleasures of Lonely Hearts are mild & unexceptional, though, requiring a willingness on the audience’s behalf to settle for an outrageous tabloid saga being reduced to a generic crime picture & an old-fashioned game of Hollywood dress-up. If you want the full scope of Fernandez & Beck’s violence & absurdity, watch The Honeymoon Killers. If you want beautiful shots of beautiful people playing cops & robbers in a low-rent version of old-fashioned Hollywood glamor, Lonely Hearts is your destined-for-cable-broadcasts alternative.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the romantic crime thriller The Honeymoon Killers, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s examination of Martin Scorsese’s involvement with the film.

-Brandon Ledet