Author: swampflix

The Love Witch (2016)

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fourstar

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I understand why a lot of people are immediately turned off by intentionally “bad” movies. Forced, manufactured camp value can often feel cheap & disingenuous, especially when the filmmaking it supports aims lazily low in its overall sense of ambition. Accusations of taking the low road and making an intentionally “bad” movie are certain to accompany Anna Biller’s erotic horror comedy The Love Witch, but the film is far from lazy in its ambition & attention to craft. The Love Witch carefully recalls the cheap sets, rear projections, absurdly stilted dialogue, and half-hearted attempts at sophisticated smut of many erotic horror B-pictures of the 60s & 70s. Biller doesn’t rely solely on easy humor & cinematic nostalgia to make this schlocky throwback worthwhile, however. Besides writing, directing, and editing The Love Witch, Biller is also credited with the film’s set & costume design. She exhibits a godlike control over her visual palette, crafting an intricately detailed work packed with occult paintings, pentagrams, potions, candles, jars, lingerie, and intensely-colored make-up. She elevates the depths of lazily decorated schlock to a new high standard of meticulous visual artistry, a kind of personalized, auteurist ambition that’s often missing from “bad”-on-purpose cinema. More importantly, though, Biller uses this backwards gaze into the B-picture abyss to reappropriate traditionally misogynist modes of genre filmmaking for a fresh, fiercely feminist purpose. The Love Witch is more than a comedic exercise in camp-minded nostalgia; it’s also a beautiful art piece with an unforgiving political bent.

Samantha Robinson stars as Elaine, the titular witch, who finds herself in constant trouble with the law for her deadly seduction of men. Elaine uses “love potions” & “sex magic” to lure men into her dangerous web of lust & overwhelming devotion. She doesn’t exactly murder her suitors & side flings in cold blood. Rather, the men she seduces just aren’t physically or spiritually capable of handling the immense pressure of true love & genuine emotion that accompanies her supernatural mode of romance. Their bodies crumble while trying to reconcile a basic human experience the women around them handle with grace on a daily basis. The Love Witch airdrops legitimate feminist criticism into its cartoonish narrative in this way. There’s plenty of inane banter played for laughs, like when Elaine babbles about “parapsychology” or explains that she first wanted to become a witch because she “wanted to have magical powers.” What’s striking, though, is the way these camp cinema callbacks are interrupted by lines like, “Men are very fragile. They can get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way,” and “You sound as if you’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy.” The Love Witch filters modern feminist ideology, particularly in relation to heterosexual power dynamics, through old modes of occultist erotica & vaguely goth burlesque to craft the ultimate post-modern camp cinema experience. Biller establishes herself as not only a stylist & a makeshift schlock historian, but also a sly political thinker and a no-fucks-given badass with a bone to pick, which is more than you’d typically expect with an intentionally “bad” movie about witchcraft & strippers.

The Love Witch plays like a restoration of the best camp film you’ve never heard of, one where time-traveling cellphones & feminist ideology appear as if they’re a natural part of the territory. The film is eerily accurate in its dedication to recreating cheap horror erotica, right down to the awkward dead space that punctuates each line of dialogue & the over-use of goofy lighting tricks to evoke its love potion psychedelia. It plays exceedingly well with a crowd; the raucous audience I saw it with was enthusiastic and treated it like a midnight movie despite it being an early evening screening. Beneath all of the film’s gloriously bad visual art, eye-melting costume design, and absurdly overstated dialogue, however, it’s a surprisingly dark, quietly angry political piece. The men of The Love Witch range from selfish crybabies & power-hungry rapists and the way the film undercuts & subverts their privilege & control is surprisingly pointed for something so deliberately silly & narratively slight. Mixing in a little sugar to sweeten the medicine, the film appears to be an intentional exercise in dimwitted, oversexed schlock, but that “so bad it’s good” facade is only one layer to a work that’s much more visually & politically fascinating than it initially appears to be.

-Brandon Ledet

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

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fourstar

“I just had the worst thought. I’ve got to spend the rest of my life with myself.”

Is the world finally realizing that the 90s high school movie was one of the all-time heights of comedy cinema? The last gasp of the genuine Heathers & Clueless lineage might have been Mean Girls in 2004, but we’ve recently seen a few really great throwbacks to the era that repurpose 90s high school movie tropes for a new effect. Cheerleader reinterprets the genre as an abstract art piece. The To Do List transforms it into a raunchy, gender-flipped sex comedy. The DUFF lightly parodies it in a longform homage. The Edge of Seventeen, for its part, follows the basic rules of the 90s high school movie, except it matures the material slightly by portraying its teen girl protagonist as a deeply flawed antihero. Nadine (Hailee Seinfeld) is a mean, self-centered emotional wreck who talks trash a mile a minute as a means to cover up her own anxieties & vulnerabilities. In other words, she’s a realistic portrait of a teenager (or at least how I remember my asshole teenage self). The Edge of Seventeen is a worthy contribution to the high school comedy genre, not least of all because it adds a realistic layer of paradoxical self-loathing narcissism to its young protagonist that taps into a strikingly honest aspect of teen life that isn’t often represented onscreen. Or at least not often enough.

The movie opens with a grizzled history teacher (Woody Harrelson, reprising a less-drunk version of his role in The Hunger Games) shrugging off Nadine’s threat of suicide. She’s in so much pain; you can see it in her eyes as she rattles off a long list of grievances with the world and the details of the way she’d most like to die. Her teacher slowly, methodically deflates her moment of crisis by turning it into a quietly sweet, but deeply mean-spirited joke. This method works in its own weird way as it both slows down Nadine’s panic-mode thought processes, but also matches her own mean-spirited mode of verbally lashing out at people she cares about, but can’t control. Her reasons for being suicidally upset range from legitimate grief over a lost family member to petty anxiety over not being able to dictate the romantic pairings of her best friend, her family, her crush, or the boy who crushes on her. She harshly pushes away anyone who could potentially care about her, yet yearns for genuine interpersonal intimacy. The Edge of Seventeen is an eerily accurate portrait of teenage life that captures both the small details of lazing around watching TV, depending on others for transportation, and puking orange soda mix drinks into your parents’ toilet as well as the larger themes of godlike hubris clashing with soul-crushing self deprecation that makes teens so difficult to deal with, even when you are one. As self-centered as Nadine constantly seems to be, she often breaks down to ask friends questions like “How do you even like me? What’s wrong with you? I don’t even like me.” It’s that exact narcissistic self-conflict and focus on an anxious time where every thing means everything that makes this film so true to one of life’s most unpleasant stretches.

One of the best parts about The Edge of Seventeen is how it accomplishes all this while still feeling like a traditional high school comedy. This isn’t the soul-shattering trauma of The Diary of a Teenage Girl or the indie-minded, slang-loaded melodrama of Juno. In its own muted way, The Edge of Seventeen follows the will-they-won’t-they patterns of any & all high school romcoms and it’s tempting to call the film typical of its genre because of that narrative predictability. Everything outside of the basic plot structure is handled too smartly for me to be that reductive, though. Nadine’s own quest for self-acceptance and friendship is given far more prominence than her romantic machinations. Of all the people she can’t seem to get along with despite herself, she clashes hardest with her mother, yet the two are nearly identical personalities. The movie could’ve made a huge, emotionally cathartic deal out of that tension or out of Nadine’s oddly antagonistic relationship with her favorite teacher. Instead, it lets those relationships exist as they are and allows the audience to catch up with how they’re significant in its own time. It’s also an R-rated teen comedy with a female emotional bully protagonist who’s far less interested in winning people over than she is in protecting herself from yet another damaging blow to her heart & her ego. As much as The Edge of Seventeen feels like a throwback to a genre that saw its heyday two whole decades ago, it also exists as a shining exception of unflinching black comedy & truthful self-examination that doesn’t often touch the teen comedy genre outside an outlier like Election or Strangers With Candy. It’s a rare treat in that way, however bittersweet.

-Brandon Ledet

Loving (2016)

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threehalfstar

With his two feature film entries in 2016, Jeff Nichols has established a very clear (although probably unintentional) genre pattern in his career. The director seems to be strictly alternating between realistic familial drama & high concept sci-fi in his work (with a little of the former category seeping in to inform the latter). The sequence so far looks like this: Shotgun Stories (drama), Take Shelter (sci-fi), Mud (drama), Midnight Special (sci-fi), and now Loving (drama). Although Shotgun Stories is contrarily my favorite title from the director, I typically find myself more enamored with the sci-fi end of this divide. Loving finds Nichols returning to the muted, sullen drama of Mud, this time with a historical bent. It isn’t my favorite mode for a director who’s proven that he can deliver much more striking, memorable work when he leaves behind the confines of grounded realism, but something Nichols does exceedingly well with these kinds of stories is provide a perfect stage for well-measured, deeply affecting performances. Actors Joel Edgerton & Ruth Negga are incredibly, heartachingly sincere in their portrayals of real-life trail-blazers Richard & Mildred Loving and Nichols is smart to take a backseat to their work here, a dedication to restraint I respect greatly, even if I prefer when it’s applied to a more ambitious kind of narrative.

Loving, which really does have a conveniently apt title thanks to history, is an exercise in directorial patience & discipline. A decades-spanning dramatization of a young Virginian couple as they raise children & defy a federal law banning interracial marriage in a historical Supreme Court decision, this film could have easily been an over-the-top melodrama about hard-fought courtroom battles & explosively violent racism in the South, especially in the hands of an Oscar-minded director like a Ron Howard or a Spielberg. In Nichols’s version of the story, however, the seething anger over the Loving couple’s interracial romance is just as quiet & deeply seated as their love for one another. The score can be a little imposing in its own tenderly sad way, but for the most part Nichols avoids cliché and mostly just makes room to allow his actors to quietly do their thing. Portraying a couple who were more interested in being left alone than (literally) making a federal case out of the “crime” of being married, Edgerton & Negga brilliantly use the negative space of non-reaction to convey the emotional swell of a scene. Negga is especially skilled at this maneuver, making the mute reaction to a phonecall or a shared physical intimacy with Mildred’s sister hit like a ton of bricks without ever calling attention to herself. The distracting presence of actors Nick Kroll & frequent Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon detracts from that disciplined subtlety, but they’re also playing characters who bring publicity & legal attention to the Lovings’ case, so their sore thumb effect might’ve been deliberately intended. Either way, all of the romance, suffering, and compassion in Loving rests in Edgerton’s & Negga’s steady, capable hands and Nichols’s best moments in this traditionalist drama is in the way he harnesses their quiet energy for a subtly devastating effect.

If you wanted to be especially morbid in your reading of the film, you could say that Loving has an alarming amount of significance in a modern context, given many Western countries’ sudden far right return to horrifying ideology like “God’s law” & “racial purity.” This isn’t the metaphorical, history-minded political statement of titles like the Hitler-themed black comedy Look Who’s Back, though. If anything, Loving reminds me of the quietly measured drama of last year’s Brooklyn (sans the pretty dresses for the most part, unfortunately). It doesn’t force attention-grabbing moments of high stakes drama, but instead details a fragile romance in a perilous era that threatens to shatter it under immense social & legal pressure. Loving is less about racism than it is about, well, loving and the movie only really stumbles when outside personalities disrupt the believable romantic ideal Edgerton & Negga establish in their scenes (Nick Kroll’s presence is especially egregious on that note). Nichols finds interesting detail to signify the era: the early stirrings of rock & roll in exciting hot rod races; playful abandon in Mason jars full of moonshine; the horror movie atmosphere of small town law enforcement creeping through the night. His best impulse here, though, is in the way he backs up to allow space for Negga & Edgerton to work their magic. It’d be tempting say that any director could’ve made Loving, because of that absence of stylistic imposition, but I don’t think many directors would’ve displayed the same level of restraint in a drama about such an important Supreme Court case. Nichols puts a relatable, knowable face to history here (with his talented cast’s help, of course). Although this is far from my favorite work he’s put in so far as a director or as a stylist (Midnight Special makes sure it’s not even his most winning success this year), it’s this exact kind of discipline & restraint that sells his higher-concept work so believably & effectively.

-Brandon Ledet

Last Night (1999)’s Studio Comedy Equivalent in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

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The Y2K scare in the late 90s lead to a brief cinema trend of End of the World features, but there weren’t many out there quite like our December Movie of the Month, Last Night. The Don McKellar-helmed black comedy strayed from the alarmist thriller beats of titles like Armageddon, Deep Impact, and End of Days to chase a much more realistic, resigned Gen-X vibe of sullen gloom & gallows humor in the face the Apocalypse. Much more recently, End of the World cinema trended once again, this time likely inspired by the supposed end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012. Among the traditional alarmist thrillers this time around (like the appropriately titled 2012) there were actually a good number of mainstream comedies on the topic: This Is the End, The World’s End, It’s a Disaster, etc. Only one of these Armageddon comedies of the 2010s managed to match the weirdly subdued in a time of crisis vibe of Last Night. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a much more minor & less stylistically focused work than Last Night, but it still makes for an interesting companion piece for McKellar’s Canadian cult classic. It not only reflects the way humor & pop culture attitude had shifted in the decade or so between their releases, but also points to how Hollywood convention could’ve made McKellar’s piece a much less interesting work if it weren’t a dirt cheap indie.

Both Last Night & Seeking a Friend for the End of the World center their tales of a world unraveling on a neurotic male protagonist who faces dying alone after the recent departure of his romantic partner & the impending doom of an inevitable Apocalypse. Unlike Patrick’s wife in Last Night, who died before the announcement of the world’s end, Steve Carell’s protagonist in Seeking a Friend loses his own wife to infidelity and she bolts from their marriage in the opening scene. In both features, the leads are neurotic men who can’t will themselves to join in the orgiastic parties surrounding them as they wrestle with their grief, but instead take unexpected comfort in newly-formed intimacies with total strangers (Sandra Oh in Last Night, Kiera Knightly in Seeking a Friend). News broadcasts continue to the bitter end in both films; insurance & gas companies continue to function; riots overtake the cities; characters obsess over curating their life-ending soundtracks, including off-screen radio DJs. What really ties the films together outside of their narrative details, however, is their general search for an authentic response to a world-ending crisis. Once the initial shock of a Doomsday scenario fades, what does worldwide grief look like and how can it be reflected in the personal response of a lone protagonist? Last Night and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World stand out from their temporal peers & reflect each other’s unique tones through this pursuit of a believable, down tempo Apocalypse.

As much as I enjoy Seeking a Friend as a down tempo comedy, however, I don’t think it quite measures up to the significance of Last Night as a unique work. Last Night is an odd little duck. It may feature a Gen-X 90s tone in its humor (along with a unfortunate influence from Woody Allen neuroticism), but it does carve out a very specific space that’s indicative of Don McKellar’s authorial voice. Seeking a Friend, by contrast, feels very conventional for a major studio comedy, a project by committee. Where Last Night finds small moments of shared, nonverbal intimacy, Seeking a Friend filters its entire plot into a familiar romcom formula. It also trades in Last Night‘s everything-is-connected ensemble cast structure for a more traditionally linear road trip narrative and unfortunately allows its female lead slip into something of a manic pixie dream girl cliché, which is far from the devastating performance Sandra Oh gives in her role. Most tellingly, Last Night never feels the need to explain how or why the world is ending because it doesn’t necessarily inform its characters’ behavior, but Seeking a Friend feels the need to spell it out in the very first scene. You can readily see exact gags that reflect each other in both works. The brilliant “Taking Care of Business” guitar jam gag in Last Night is reflected in Seeking a Friend’s End of the World Awareness Concert & its radio DJ promising “a countdown to the End of Days along with all of your classic rock favorites.” Craig from Last Night‘s pursuit of bucket list sexual experiences is represented in Seeking a Friend by a family restaurant called Friendly’s that’s devolved into a nonstop pansexual orgy. The movies do share a lot of content in their smaller details. However, Last Night employs them for a much more unique effect than the cookie cutter comedy beats of Seeking a Friend (as funny as they can be).

I think what’s most interesting here is just how normalized the idea of a low stakes response to the end of the world had become between 1999 & 2012. Don McKellar’s Apocalypse comedy is a dirt cheap production with a small cast & limited scope. Seeking a Friend, by contrast, features two recognizable stars (along with a long list of the time’s comedic up & comers: Patton Oswalt, Rob Corddry, Rob Huebel, Amy Schumer, Gillian Jacobs, TJ Miller, I’m out of breath) and spreads its story out over a wide range of road trip-driven set pieces. It’s far from a summer blockbuster in terms of scale, but it still boasts the generic feel of a studio-funded romantic comedy, however dark. When Don McKellar made Last Night in 1999, concluding an ensemble cast black comedy with a bright light signifying the Apocalypse was weird fodder for an off-kilter, low budget indie production. By 2012, it was familiar enough territory for a major studio romcom starring two household names. That’s a fairly quick turnaround on pop culture sensibilities, all things considered.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003)

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fourstar

Director Guy Maddin is a weird little cookie. Admittedly I’ve only seen a small sampling of his work, but I’ve yet to fall in love with another one of his features quite as hard as I did with his beer-themed black comedy The Saddest Music in the World. His films are always interesting, though, if a little exhausting. Last year’s The Forbidden Room was a beautiful set of interconnected, humorous vignettes that worked really well for me as isolated short films, kind of like high art sketch comedy, but were especially tiring as a full-length collection. Looking a little further into Maddin’s catalog, though, the director has plenty of full-length experiments dedicated to a single idea; his ballet horror Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, for instance, is a much more focused & disciplined effort that matches his trademark visual aesthetic to its most logical genre structure. By fully committing to a single narrative & matching Maddin’s deliberately aged visuals to a silent horror era aesthetic, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary proves to be a much more digestible exhibition of the director’s peculiar talents than any of his vignette-structured works. This is a film with extremely limited commercial appeal and it’s one that might take the full context of his career to fully appreciate what he’s doing with the material, but it’s just as beautiful and amusing and flippantly high brow as anything he’s ever accomplished. I love seeing him indulge a single idea at a feature’s length and Pages from a Virgin’s Diary exemplifies exactly why that kind of extended focus is ideal for his directorial style, even when the main conceit is so narrowly minded.

Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is not a ballet-themed horror so much as a horror-themed ballet. The film finds Maddin shooting a straightforward ballet production of the Dracula story in a cinematic context. Instead of hanging back to display the dancers’ full bodies & artistry, he cuts the frame in very tightly and adds silent film era intertitles to advance the plot instead of conveying story entirely through dance. The playing-to-the-back-row stage play expressiveness of the ballet works really well in tandem with Maddin’s style, though, which requires a broad physical performance to recall the vaudevillian days of early cinema. Often, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary plays like a high art horror comedy. It makes a weird joke out of the details of Dracula lore: drowning the frame in cartoonishly large piles of garlic, mirroring Love & Friendship‘s character introduction gags with details like “Eater of Bugs,” playing the bumbling hubris of men for humor (like when Van Helsing performs the most inefficient & smugly disgusted gynecological exam of all time on Dracula’s prime victim). Maddin’s sly humor is contrasted with the dead babies, decapitations, and sexual violence of the source material to make for a truly horrifying, but strikingly flippant viewing experience, one that’s sex jokes & vampire kills are made oddly delicate by its very nature as a ballet. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary might be the kind of high faulting art film pretension that rolls eyes & changes channels at first glance, but it’s also playfully subversive in its prankster humor & genuine horror thrills, making for a very worthy entry in the director’s catalog, despite its deceptively slight premise.

Of course, as with all Guy Maddin projects, the flashiest aspect of Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is the director’s dedication to visual craft. Deliberately degraded film, tinted color changes, a screen segmented into tight parallel lines: Maddin seems to be working in a digital medium here, but his trademark throwback to ancient cinema past matches the material exceedingly well, making me desperately curious about what a high budget version of this movie would look like. The ballet aspect of the film is the only dynamic that distinguishes it from a genuine silent horror, but that aspect does feed into Maddin’s aesthetic as a traditionalist. I also had great appreciation for the way he played with the film’s pacing, speeding up comedic bits to a movie trailer tempo for greater humorous effect and slowing down certain ballet flourishes for moments of lyrical contrast. You won’t find many horror comedies this visually interesting or poetically minded, with giant pipe organs spewing green gas & perverted sex demons filling the frame between subtle gags about modesty & desire. Even if it isn’t his best film, you also won’t find a much more concise argument for Maddin’s distinct talents as a director, as he transforms traditional mediums like ballet, silent film, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula into something entirely new & oddly fresh. I’d love to dig up more of his features that are dedicated to exploring a single concept for the entirety of their runtimes. He seems like a director who has too many ideas at once and too little time or funding to follow them all at length, so I should probably be exceedingly grateful for the times such as this, when he finds inspiration to break out of his usual short film format and follow one spectacularly weird idea (say, a traditional ballet shot as a high art horror comedy) to a feature length. It’s his best self.

-Brandon Ledet

The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)

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fourhalfstar

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I’m not sure how much of my ecstatic reaction to the 1960 Italian horror cheapie The Vampire and the Ballerina had to do with my pitifully low expectations going in, but the film bowled me over. Where I expected lazy, thoughtless schlock, I happened to find something deliriously strange and carefully made. The Vampire and the Ballerina resembles so much cheaply made cult classic trash of its era, from the burlesque horror of Cat Women of the Moon to the vampiric kills & stock footage reliance of Plan 9 from Outer Space to the rubber mask monsters of The Brainiac. And yet, for a film so silly & so rooted in the context of its time, this throwaway horror title paradoxically feels ahead of the crowd in terms of where horror was going to go in the future. Hammer House horror, style over substance giallo, and, especially, over-sexed European vampire films of the 60s & 70s all feel somewhat indebted to the weirdly off-kilter shocks, scares, and titillation lurking in this strange little genre film. This is the exact kind of rare gem I’m looking for when I’m digging through piles of trash cinema and, as usual, I found it in a place I least expected it.

A group of young, attractive, scantily clad dancers are “preparing a ballet” while guests at a wealthy man’s estate near a remote village. There are several mysterious murders coinciding with their stay, explained by local superstitions to be the work of a vampire. The film’s rules adhere to traditional vampire lore: deadly sunlight, stakes through the heart, garlic, crosses, the whole deal. It only adds the caveat of the monsters needing to feed under a full moon to that dynamic, a little flavor borrowed from werewolf pictures. At first, the girls’ wealthy host (who wears capes & seems to know an awful lot about vampire history) or one of their macho beaus seem like prime suspects for these murders, but this film is anything but a murder mystery. As soon as the vampires appear onscreen, posing as gracious hosts of a crypt-like castle, you know for a fact that they’re the perpetrators. Where The Vampire and the Ballerina (a title that really should be pluralized) gets weird is in the strange revelation of how the two vampires’ relationship works. It’s a bizarre glimpse into one of cinema’s most toxic codependent relationships, a weirdly unromantic back & forth that’s far more satisfying than any who’s-the-undead-killer mystery could have possibly been.

The film’s thematic weirdness is only amplified by its strikingly thoughtful (although cheaply produced) cinematography. Images of silhouettes growing on cave walls, passing sky & falling dirt seen from the POV of a freshly bit victim being buried “alive,” and the vampire’s legitimately upsetting rubber mask & plaster visage all combine to make for a much more striking visual experience than you’d typically expect from this kind of work. Where The Vampire and the Ballerina shines best, though, is when it combines this visual thoughtfulness with the tawdry horniness that drives its most base thrills. The movie makes no excuse for oggling at the dancers as they lounge around in flimsy underwear and perform in revealing tights.The shameless butt shots in the dance scenes, which fuse ballet with world music & burlesque, crowd the screen in a leering cacophony of hip shaking, leg flashing filth. This combines in other scenes with the film’s more lyrical ambitions to make for some truly strange, sexually charged imagery: a victim shot from between her killer’s legs (a la Slumber Party Massacre), stock footage trees thrashing in the wind as hypnotized women writhe in sexual frustration, a woman sunbathing on a rock as a background waterfall flows the frame’s attention directly to her crotch. The Vampire and the Ballerina is in every way cheap, artful filth and I’m in awe of how much memorable imagery it was able to generate in spite of being such a slack jawed work of horror-minded eroticism.

I don’t want to make this sound as if it’s some long lost masterpiece that could rival the heights of a Bava or a Corman-Cycle Poe. It’s a deeply silly movie, one that features several nonsensical minutes of women chasing each other through the woods to big band music for reasons I couldn’t explain if I tried. I do, however, believe that The Vampire and the Ballerina has some strong, untapped cult classic potential. Cynically made as a cash grab in the wake of Christopher Lee’s Dracula finding popularity in Italy, this is a deliberately over-sexed work that anyone under the age of 16 was banned from watching at the theater. You can feel those trashy origins in every frame of The Vampire and the Ballerina, but the film still manages to be a surprisingly artful experience for me. Anyone who regularly enjoys a slice of cheap black & white schlock should get a kick out of the film’s creature designs & shameless, theremin-scored burlesque. What’ll really stick with you if you’re on that wavelength, though, is the strange relationship dynamics between its vampiric killers & the artfully odd images the film manages to pull out of a seemingly nonexistent budget. If you watch enough of these kinds of horror titles, they start to blend together and everything begins to feel monotonous; The Vampire and the Ballerina is an exciting reminder that there’s still weirdo outliers out there waiting to be discovered. There’s still gems lurking in cinema’s discarded trash.

-Brandon Ledet

Mad Moana: Fury Cove

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Disney’s Moana (2016) was a jarringly alienating experience for me in a way I haven’t felt since venturing to the theater to watch John Waters’s brief cameo in Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip (although the raucous laughter at my screening of the brutally unfunny Deadpool ranks as a close second). I just had no business being there, to the point where I have no business rating or reviewing the film in any traditional way. I’ve had positive experiences going out of my comfort zone to watch highly-praised Disney productions this year, namely Zootopia and The Jungle Book, but with Moana I was way out of my league. The buffoonish sidekicks, the uncanny valley CGI, the constant indulgences in  *cringe* musical theater: Moana was mostly just a reminder that Disney’s princess mode, no matter how highly praised, is just not for me. Brave, Mulan, Frozen, and so on have all alienated me in the same way (with The Little Mermaid being a rare exception to the rule) and not even song & dance numbers from the likes of a pro wrestler (The Rock), a Flight of the Conchords vet (Jemaine Clement), and a Godzilla cameo could turn me around on an experience that was so uncomfortably foreign to every fiber of my being. Moana did feature one isolated gag that spoke directly to me, though, an extended homage to Immortan Joe & the War Boys, just about the last influence I expected to find in a Polynesian Disney Princess action adventure.

The filmmakers behind Moana (an extensive team that has included names as significant as Hamilton‘s king nerd Lin Manuel Miranda & comedic genius Taika Waititi at some point in its production) have acknowledged in interviews that the film’s homage to Mad Max: Fury Road was indeed intentional, so I’m not just grasping at straws for something to enjoy here. The homage is brief, however, and although the film was not nearly as much of an obnoxiously undignified experience as Road Chip, it did remind me of mining the entirety of that work for a pitifully minuscule glimpse at the Pope of Trash. While on their quest to restore order in the world via a pebble-sized MacGuffin, Moana & [The Rock] are at one point pursued by a tribal army of Kakamora, a fiendish crew of mythical spirits who take the physical form of coconut War Boys, complete with their own coconut Immortan Joe. The Kakamora approach Moana’s puny-by-comparison boat in massive warships, attempting to board her ship & rob her of her all-important MacGuffin Pebble. Moana doesn’t directly reference Fury Road with any specific visual cues; it instead tries to mimic the feel & the scale of George Miller’s massive accomplishment in a more general way. The Kakamora appear in ocean mist the way the War Boys appear in the kicked-up dust of desert sands. They tether their ships to their target vessel as a means to both board it and slow it’d progress. Most tellingly, they play themselves into battle with a live music soundtrack of tribal drums. All that’s missing from the scene is a blind little Kakamora threateningly riffing on a coconut guitar.

If history has proven anything it’s that I’ll continue to shell out money for any new theatrical version of Fury Road that achieves distribution: 2D, 3D, (most absurdly) black & white. I doubt I’ll ever stop returning to that well and, alongside its stellar reviews from those more in tune with the merits of the Disney Princess™ brand, just the mere mention of a Fury Road homage was enough to drag me to the theater for a CG cartoon musical I had no business watching in the first place. In some ways it’s tempting to read into how Moana & Fury Road communicate plot-wise. Both films center on a female badass trying to welcome back Nature to a crumbling society  by employing a storied male warrior sidekick & the restorative help of water to defeat an evil presence and convert a longtime patriarchy to a matriarchal structure. In both instances, success also hinges on a race to a narrow physical passage that seems impossible to reach in time. These shared sentiments are likely entirely coincidental, though. Borrowing a little of Immortan Joe’s War Boy mayhem for its coconut pirates was simply a means to an end. Besides being a delightful nod to a property you wouldn’t expect to be referenced in this context, it also affords a key action sequence the sense of scale & visual specificity that makes George Miller one of the greatest visual minds of the genre. So much of Moana was Not For Me (which is obviously my fault and not the movie’s), so it was kinda nice in those few fleeting minutes to mentally return to a property that is a continuous source of personal pleasure. Moana was smart to borrow some scale & adrenaline from Fury Road in a scene that desperately needed the excitement (despite the Kakamora never registering as at all significant to the overall plot). Honestly, though, I was just glad to have the film’s more alienating musical theater & CGI sidekick buffoonery broken up by something familiar & genuinely badass that offered me a moment of escape from what was a personally misguided ticket purchase.

-Brandon Ledet

London Road (2016)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

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fourhalfstar

Let’s get one thing straight: I do not like musicals. Please don’t break your string of pearls by snatching them too quickly. It’s not a topic worth dwelling upon but, even aside from any logical problems that I have with regards to musicals vis-à-vis people bursting into song and suspension of disbelief, I personally find them to be a relic of a bygone age of theatre. That having been said, however, I recently saw London Road and absolutely loved it.

London Road stars the always amazing Olivia Colman (Peep Show, Hot Fuzz, Broadchurch) and the original London cast from the stage production (as well as a very tiny cameo by Tom Hardy, despite his prominence in the sparse marketing for the film). The plot concerns itself with a real-life series of prostitute murders that occurred in 2006 in the small British town of Ipswich, and the film plays out almost like a documentary, with “talking head” segments scattered throughout. The central gimmick of the production is that all of the dialogue (and songs) are taken from real witness statements and interviews, down to the “errs” and “umms.”

The statements provided begin with the viewpoints of the people of London Road, a street located in an area of Ipswich that saw a large upswing in prostitute activity following nearby construction. Each of them has a different view of the influx of women, ranging from sympathy to scorn and outright derision (one woman even later says that the serial killer who murdered five sex workers may have done the neighborhood a public service). All of them, however, admit to feeling that the street felt less like home after this “invasion” and recalling unpleasant encounters with said women, saying (and singing) that they were discomfited by these outsiders even before the violence began.

We then swing around to hear the story from the point of view of the prostitutes, their struggles and tribulations, including addiction, interaction with the police, and fear of the modern day ripper. They tell a harrowing story about how it took the murder of five women for anyone to care enough to try to get them off the street. “I want to get myself clean, if I could do anything,” one woman sings, while another praises how far she’s come from the days when she would spend hundreds on drugs every day: “all I do is like £15 worth of drugs a day now.” Mixed in is the giddy song of two teenage girls that alternates between thrilled and terrified, and a chorus of people who await the arrival of the killer at the courthouse. A community that has been torn apart by both murders and the discovery that their neighbor was the perpetrator find themselves existentially fraught, but find a way back from the brink.

I really liked the music in this film. Generally, one of the things that I dislike most about your traditional stage or film musical is the taxing way that exposition is forced to fit into the metrics of a song, the natural and idiosyncratic lyricism of plain speech being inelegantly strangled and forced to fit into a rhyme scheme while also carrying the heavy lifting of outlining a narrative. Here, however, the naked emotions present in the admissions that London Road’s residents make and the simple language thereof lend the film a realism that more standard musicals cannot approach. Although the movie wanders into sentimentality at the end, it manages to warm the heart without being too treacly and cloying, a feat which many “uplifting” works can’t manage irrespective of the presence of belabored songs.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Pet (2016)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

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fourstar

Pet is directed by Carles Torrens, who recently helmed the well-received 2013 film Sequence, and written by Jeremy Slater, who co-wrote 2015’s underwhelming The Lazarus Effect as well as the critically derided Fant4stic (sic) Four. Slater was also the executive producer of the recent Fox miniseries The Exorcist; although I managed to miss his films, I did watch all of The Exorcist that has aired so far, and I didn’t care for it (each episode had some good skin-crawling horror imagery but the show itself is dreadfully dull).

The film follows feckless-if-reliable animal shelter employee Seth (Dominic Monaghan), who finds himself infatuated with the lovely-but- boring Holly (Ksenia Solo), supposedly a former classmate with whom he now shares part of a bus commute; she scarcely notices him, as she spends the entire ride journaling each day. Seth spends time gathering information from her off-brand social media profiles and endlessly rehearsing for each interaction, but his stalking quickly escalates despite her attempts to blow him off courteously. After Holly goes to the bar where her infidelious ex-boyfriend (Nathan Parsons) works to confront him about a gift of flowers, only to learn that he had nothing to do with it, she confronts Seth and hits him with her bag, scattering its contents. Seth is further beaten by the ex when Holly accuses him of impropriety, but he makes off with the journal that was left behind. Seth reads the journal at length and begins construction of a person-sized cage in a forgotten basement of the shelter; after following Holly home one night, he drugs her and absconds with her to the cage, where he tells her that he wants to “save” her.

This is where things get really interesting, as Pet swiftly takes its first major turn, setting us up for a chain of reveals, playing out like a more “eXtreme” version of Hard Candy, with the audience being unsure of which character really has the moral high ground and who’s really in control. Admittedly, the trailer for the film claimed that the movie challenged expectations about whether Seth or Holly was the real monster, and I found it difficult to conceive that this could be adequately pulled off; I have to say, however, that the film successfully manages to do so.

SPOILERS BEGIN.

Earlier, we see Holly have a few brief conversations with her best friend and roommate Claire (Jennette McCurdy), and we see Holly have another conversation with her after she is caged, apparently as a coping mechanism. Seth quickly lets her know that he has overheard one such conversation, and confronts her with her journal, in which Holly has recounted the evening on which she intentionally wrecked her car with Claire (with whom the ex was cheating) in the passenger seat. When Claire didn’t die immediately, Holly finished her off in a way that would make it appear she died in the crash. All of the appearances of Claire have been hallucinated. This killing seems to have unleashed something in Holly, as her journal details the killings of several other people. She attempts to play this off as creative writing, and although Seth tells her that she is a good writer (she most certainly isn’t, given the few brief insets that we saw flash by on the screen), but that after reading the journal, he followed her to make sure it was true before committing to his “cage the girl you love” plan.

The film continues to spiral into madness from there, with Seth believing that Holly kept the journal because she secretly wanted to get caught, and Holly believing (or perhaps pretending to believe for the sake of gaining his trust) that Seth was drawn to Holly because they are alike, encouraging him to consider his own potential for bloodlust. It’s never clear who’s telling the truth from moment to moment, who is playing who and to what end or for what reason. Although I was dissatisfied with the final twist, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that although I foresaw three possible endings, none of the predicted outcomes came to fruition (if you’re worried that the film will all end up being a story written by Holly, please allow me the honor of letting you know in advance that this is not the case).

SPOILERS END.

This is a flawed film. Above and beyond any knee-jerk reactions to the ostensible misogyny of the piece, there’s a weird tonal shift in the ending that makes it feel like a tacked-on reshoot, with a couple of strange elements that make one feel out of place. Notably, a character is considering violence, sees a knife, and approaches the person against whom they are enraged while hiding something behind their back before revealing that they are concealing something innocuous; why? Every action we saw the characters take up to that moment had been for the purpose of concealing something from another character, not the audience. It was disorienting. Combined with the fact that the epilogue raises quite a lot of logistical questions and has a notably different lighting and color scheme from the rest of the movie, it doesn’t feel
quite right.

Furthermore, the performances are a mixed bag. Monaghan performs ably as the nebbish Seth, whose apparent ineffectuality and affability makes even his emotional violence lack menace, which is disquieting in and of itself. On the other hand, while there are moments when Solo is knocking it out of the park, especially given that the audience is unsure if she’s truly revealing herself or creating a facade that will ultimately help her earn her freedom, there are weaknesses in her performance as well. The personality that ultimately seems to be her truest self feels the least authentic, and that hurts the film. McCurdy’s brief appearances contain the film’s weakest acting, but she’s not onscreen enough to affect it too negatively.

Overall, however, the film has more to praise than to denigrate. The cheapness of the film is apparent in several sequences that are genuinely cinematic in their framing but appear to be shot on low-end digital video; on the other hand, that same sparsity of funding also means that the film has room to breathe as a character piece, regardless of whether any of the character growth that we see is genuine. If Don’t Breathe is is a schlocky thriller with slick artistic design that disguises its crassness, Pet is a low-rent version of the same, with sufficient style but none to spare. There’s also a wonderfully executed duality in Seth and Holly: he accuses Holly of leading a double life, with a “Holly” character that she plays in public while hiding her real interests under the cover of night; this is ironic, coming from a man who, in private, meticulously practices conversations for each social interaction. Seth’s time spent alone is used exclusively to prepare for the character he plays in public; he has no real internal life. Holly may be playing a role in the real world too, but at least she knows it. It’s a lovely statement on identity wrapped in a nauseating thriller and marred by a subpar conclusion, but well worth the time if you can stomach it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond