Author: swampflix

Cross-Promotion: The Fly (1958) on the We Love to Watch Podcast

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I was recently invited to join in on an episode of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the iconic 1958 Vincent Price sci-fi horror The Fly. It’s always great to have a chance to talk about the original version of The Fly, which is generally overshadowed by its wonderfully grotesque Cronenberg body horror remake, because has its own merits & idiosyncrasies that can often be too easily dismissed or misremembered. On a more personal note, though, it was also just fun to join in on a podcast I listen to regularly as a fan.

It’s already pretty rare to find a podcast as in tune with my own taste in film as We Love to Watch, but the show is even more remarkable in the way it approaches its selections from an honest & receptive place. Co-hosts Pete Moran & Aaron Armstrong have the easy chemistry of long-time friends, which makes for a consistently pleasant listen, even when they disagree or digress at length. More importantly, though, they discuss all films sincerely and humbly. They always looking for the legitimate value in a work, no matter how prestigious or seemingly insignificant, instead of an excuse to tear it down, which is exactly the way we strive to approach criticism in our own reviews on this site.

Give a listen to We Love to Watch’s episode on The Fly below! For fans of the Cronenberg remake, check back with them next week for an episode on that practical effects masterwork as a point of contrast. You can also dig through old episodes & clips on their blog & their YouTube page if you like what you hear. They tend to cover a lot of the same territory we do here, both on our own podcast & in our reviews (The Thing, Southland Tales, Possession, High-Rise, Phase IV, etc.), often with a completely different, playfully enlightening take on the material. Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet

Watching The Dark Crystal (1982) with Toby Froud

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I’ve been a huge Jim Henson fan basically my entire life. I grew up with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and all of the Muppet movies. Given all of that, The Dark Crystal was a movie I watched a lot as a kid, but at that time, I don’t think any of the important detail stuck. It wasn’t until watching it last year as an adult I finally really appreciated it. The Dark Crystal functions in such a dense, beautiful world. It’s got new cultures, strange creatures, and symbols on top of symbols. I recently got the chance to see it with a Q&A by Toby Froud that expanded upon the time and love it took to create this masterpiece.

The Dark Crystal is an epic. It was Jim Henson’s passion project. He wanted to be known as a filmmaker and not just The Muppet Guy. It took Henson five years to make along with a team of highly dedicated creatives with a wide range of talents (jewelry making, costume designers, puppeteers, writers). Among them were Brain Froud who was the designer for The Dark Crystal and Wendy Midener who sculpted and created the Gelflings. They met working on the film. Toby Froud is their son and, following in the footsteps of his parents, a puppet fabricator for Laika. (He also was the baby in  Labyrinth.) Although The Dark Crystal was before he was born, he grew up with goblins and Gelflings all around, and has a unique perspective. It obviously was extremely influential for him.

Toby showed a slideshow of original concept art, screen tests, behind the scenes messing around, and supplied anecdotes to go along with each one. The Dark Crystal is one of the only movies in the world that is all puppetry. So many of the pictures showed just how much work and ingenuity these creatures took: men being stuck into Garthim suits, faces being sculpted, strange contraptions to figure out exactly how things would realistically move. Everything was crafted from the ground up. There was no story even to begin with. Jim Henson just started with images of creatures and ideas about the world; everything else just came as they started making things. People dedicated their time. Some people even risked their lives walking on stilts in Landstrider costumes on top of raised sets.

Given the dense nature of the world a lot of material has been written to expand it. There are the Creation Myths graphic novels and an upcoming full length novelization of events that occur after the original story. There have been rumors of a sequel coming for years, some sounding more serious than others. Toby Froud even said not to count the possibility out. That got me wishful thinking. A Laika-made Dark Crystal sequel is something that I would line up to see.

-Alli Hobbs

Shin Godzilla (2016)

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fourstar

30+ entries into the Godzilla franchise, it’s funny to think that the longest-running film series of all time would still be able to surprise its audience, especially after all of the violent/philosophical/chaotic/campy/what-have-you places it’s already gone in the past. That’s why I was shocked & amused that the franchise’s latest Japanese reboot, helmed by Hideaki Anno of Neon Genesis Evangelion (aka That Thing from Tumblr that Baffles Me), was entirely different from the kaiju genre piece I was expecting when I entered the theater. Shin Godzilla is very much reminiscent of its source material’s 1954 origins, a governmental procedural about Japan’s response to a seemingly unstoppable force of Nature ignited by nuclear fallout. Instead of following Gareth Edwards’s mistake in recreating that exact scenario in a drab modern action movie context, however, Shin Godzilla completely shifts its genre towards kinetic political satire. It plays like how I would imagine a creature feature version of The Big Short (a film I’ve yet to see, I should note): pointed & playful political humor that calls into question the very fabric of its nation’s strength & character. Instead of being attacked by predatory investors, however, the victims in Shin Godzilla face the towering presence of a giant, rapidly evolving reptile that shoots purple lasers & leaves a trail of radiation in its wake. Otherwise, I assume they’re more or less on the same vibe, but I’ll likely never know for sure since only one has the laser-shooting lizard beast & that’s the one I watched.

In an American production the tendency would be to push for a lone hero to save Japan from its kaiju problem. A Japanese film about Japanese temperament, Shin Godzilla instead looks for the virtues in collaboration & the power of the hive mind collective. It’s largely in the first half of the film where this kind of political philosophy is played for satirical humor. A condemnation of the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy, the film follows a bewildered Japanese government as they hold meetings upon meetings upon meetings about what to do about Godzilla in a process that produces inaction through belabored decision-making on what exact action to take. By the time any order is given the situation has shifted and the multilayered meetings & special emergency councils start all over again, like a rotary dial. Everyone is fearful of “rushing to judgement” and reads their opinions directly from print-out reports, so that nothing ever gets done in a Kafkaesque political process that goes in circles chasing its own tail. This slow process is depicted through the quick edits of a modern comedy, producing an interesting dynamic in its form vs. content divide. What’s even more interesting is how that dynamic evolves along with its titular laser-shooting monster. The ever-shifting official titles for the government’s ranks-climbing employees and their special councils & task forces for the “unidentified creature emergency” stop being played for laughs at a certain point and the tone understandably becomes morbid. Somehow even the slow, measured groupthink satirized in the first half is explained to have its own virtue and is eventually celebrated, especially in comparison with the rash, easy-fix violence proposed by foreign bodies like America & the UN. It’s a much more thoughtful & nuanced mode of political self-reflection than I ever would have expected from a giant monster movie.

Speaking of giant monsters, I guess it would be a shame to review a Godzilla movie without talking about Godzilla itself. Like with Pulgasari & Hedorah, the kaiju in Shin Godzilla is a rapidly evolving creature that starts off pathetically ineffective & maybe even a little cute. That is, if anything that could be described as a lopsided feline turkey with dead fish eyes & blood-gushing gills could be considered “cute.” When Godzilla reaches its final form it’s named “God incarnate” out of respect for its adaptability & its capacity for survival, but it starts as a half-formed, difficult to look at mess of mismatched biology. It’s a stumbling weakling that only makes it more frustrating when bureaucratic inaction allows it to evolve & soldier on into near-immortality. The film’s CG renderings of its creature-driven mayhem can come across as a little cheap or odd-looking, recalling the bizarre digital imagery of titles like Big Man Japan, but it’s no more visibly artificial than the costumes & miniatures of the Godzillas of old, all things considered. Also, Godzilla’s final form is so undeniably badass that the film’s digital means aren’t really worth questioning or nitpicking. Like with most Godzilla films, the creature is second to the concerns of humanity’s response to its presence here, but when the god lizard is in action it’s just as weirdly fascinating as ever. As always, there will be inevitable complaints that there isn’t enough Godzilla in this Godzilla movie, but when the human half of the story is as smartly funny & pointedly satirical as it is here, that line of griping rings as especially hollow.

There wasn’t a whole lot of laughter at our fairly well-attended Shin Godzilla screening, which means either that I’m exaggerating the film’s merit as a political comedy or that the satire isn’t translating consistently well across cultural lines. It’s been reported that Anno specifically wrote the film as a response to the government’s handling of the 2011 Fukushima Daiishi disaster, where a tsunami caused a full-blown nuclear meltdown in Japan. I’m sure there’s plenty of rewarding political subtext you could read in Shin Godzilla‘s take on that tragedy, but it has a much wider scope of intent than merely addressing that one issue. Everything from Japan’s general foreign policy to the looming shadow of Hiroshima to the country’s very sense of national identity is tackled here. Shin Godzilla barrels through all of these ambitious political topics with the quick pace absurdism of a modern comedy and the experimental framing & mixed medium experimentation (including moments of found footage aesthetic) of an indie monster movie. It’s an incredibly thoughtful, energetic work that will stick with you longer than any non-stop-Godzilla-action visual spectacle could, no matter what some audiences seem to believe they want from the franchise. Outside of a few clunky details like a stray stumbling in screensaver-quality CGI or a goddawful stab at an American accent, this is Godzilla done exactly right. Its philosophical ideas are enthusiastic & exciting and the monster exists only to serve them, the exact ideal for a creature feature not aiming for cheap genre thrills or easy camp.

-Brandon Ledet

The Final Terror (1983)

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twohalfstar

The general rules & confines of the slasher genre are so obvious & so rigid that they can be easily & recognizably spoofed in genre send-ups like The Cabin in the Woods & last year’s The Final Girls with no explanation needed. Like those titles, The Final Terror similarly seems dedicated to collecting & mimicking every slasher cliché imaginable, but it does so as a generic participant in genre tedium instead of as a self-aware parody. The film includes an escaped mental patient, a group of horny stoner young’ns being hunted in the woods, a killer with mommy issues, out-of-towners being punished for ignoring local superstitions, you name it. Usually, when a non-satirical slasher gathers this many influences from titles like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp in one place, they have to rely on the brutality & inventiveness of their kills to stand out as memorable in any particular way. Oddly enough, The Final Terror is near-bloodless, yet still very nearly distinguishes as a memorable work despite its wholehearted commitment to genre cliché. There’s a grimy, misshapen quality to the film that makes it strikingly odd, almost to the point of recommendation. Almost.

The Final Terror makes its requisite excuses to get its young, vulnerable people to the woods (a contrivance that hasn’t changed much in the three decades since, if you consider recent examples like Blair Witch) through a long-winded setup for an indistinct camping trip. The only personality that stands out at as at all memorable is the local guide to the terrain, a seething ball of rage bus driver & local guide named Eggar, who seems to be infected with whatever anger bug maddened the campers of Sleepaway Camp. Eggar yells as his customers about anything & everything: smoking weed, having girlfriends, telling scary stories by the campfire. Teen stuff. The movie begins relatively body-free until two campers are murdered while/for boinking, another genre hallmark, and it becomes almost too obvious that Eggar would be the killer (shown onscreen only as a disembodied arm & knife). That is, until it becomes clear just how much The Final Terror is dedicated to ripping off the twists & turns of the most famous film in its genre. If you’re looking for a slasher with any semblance of narrative subversion or mystery, this is not the place to start. For all intents & purposes you’ve already seen this film before, maybe even many times over.

It’s hard to say that anyone has actually seen The Final Terror, though, to be honest, since even its best VHS-quality transfers are drowned in fuzzed out, standard definition darkness. One potential victim complains while being hunted in the nighttime woods, “I can’t see a thing!” and I couldn’t help but wholeheartedly agree. Then there’s the curious case of the title, which makes absolutely no sense given the film’s nature as the first and last entry in its non-franchise, only adding to its overall indistinct nature. A more honest title might’ve been Corpsethrower, given how more of the onscreen scares consisted of already-dead bodies suddenly entering the frame than actual for-the-camera kills.

Still, despite all of its dedication to genre-faithful tedium, I found myself rooting for The Final Terror to succeed. There’s just too many weird details in the film for it not to stand out as something worth championing. A character starts to fight back & play war games with the killer while tripping on mushrooms & mumbling about Vietnam. He explains, “If you want to survive this, you’re gonna have to start looking & thinking like the forest” and convinces his fellow campers/victims to don Rambo camouflage & crawl through the mud. I also enjoyed the way the film pulls its campers away from the relative safety of their cabins into the expanse of the wilderness, as well as stray details like its Psycho-esque crossdressing, its jars full of body parts, the presence of a pre-fame Darryl Hannah, and a particularly shrill rendition of “Three Blind Mice.” All that was missing to make the film recommendable were some brutal and memorable kills.

The opening & closing murders of The Final Terror are achieved through crude booby traps, one even made of soup can lids & tree branches. If the camping-themed Rube Goldberg kills were more frequent, bloody, and ridiculous, there’s no doubt that The Final Terror would stand as a cult favorite for greedy slasher lovers everywhere. It already had a (less grotesque) Cannibal Holocaust quality to its grime & shoddiness. It already knew how to mimic genre standards like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp (perhaps to the point of its own detriment). It just needed to follow through on the promise of its homemade murder traps to escape its lowly status as a cookie cutter slasher with bad lighting and an indistinct title.

-Brandon Ledet

Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

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three star

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If most people had access to a single trip in a time machine, they’d likely use it to do some kind of good deed: saving a life, preventing a tragedy, correcting a mistake, etc. If I could take a single trip in a time machine, I’d waste it on something stupid, namely getting drunk with Ed Wood & attending a screening of Devil Girl from Mars. So much of Devil Girl from Mars feels like standard Ed Woodian fare that I suspect the infamous weirdo schlockmeister would’ve gotten a kick out of the film & perhaps been inspired by it to make something truly astounding. Devil Girl from Mars takes the same lofty, but empty stage play dialogue of Plan 9 from Outer Space & marries it to the same absurdly cheap, but highly memorable sci-fi visual effects. Yet, the film feels oddly flat & uninteresting for long stretches in a way that Ed Wood’s sci-fi work could never be accused of. As is, Devil Girl from Mars is an interesting trifle with a killer high camp villainess. If it had the aggressively inane guiding hand of an Ed Wood behind it, it might’ve been a trashterpiece. It already had the building blocks on hand.

Part of what makes Devil Girl from Mars so interesting, oddly enough, is also exactly what makes it dull: a false air of sophistication. A British production adapted from a stage play, the film aims for the heady B-picture space of a Village of the Damned or The Earth Dies Screaming, but falls far short of the mark. The dialogue is just as inane & inconsequential as any other 50s sci-fi cheapie you can conjure, but it’s given the utmost respect & reverence in a way that makes for both a curious watch & a disappointing slog, depending on who’s talking, human or devil girl. The stage play machinations of gathering various archetypes (an escaped convict, a lady barkeep, a square jawed alpha male, a wise professor, etc.) holed up at an isolated inn are belabored to the point of exhaustion, as if there was confusion about what kind of movie drive-in audiences would want to see: a stuffy parlor drama or a high camp sci-fi train wreck. Luckily, there’s enough of the latter to make Devil Girl from Mars worthwhile, but just barely, as the two halves of the film seem to be at war with each other.

The key to the entertainment factor in this film is, duh, the Martian devil girl herself. Our titular antagonist is dressed like an S&M take on Darth Vader, commands a lazily-constructed robot in the shape of a refrigerator, and flies around in an adorably shoddy UFO miniature. The people of Earth (or at least the people of the tavern) take her word for it that she’s from Mars without any semblance of doubt, based entirely on her sleek space dominatrix uniform, presumably. She boasts at length about her invisible force fields, her killer robot, the mental superiority of the Martian people, and rambles about the 4th dimension, the War of the Sexes, and a newly-invented organic metal; the tavern folk listen in bewilderment. I love the audacity of rambling off these giant ideas while sticking to the most bare bones cast, set, and effects imaginable. Yes, the killer fridge-bot shoots deadly laser bullets, but its arms lay limply at its sides; the film felt no need to animate them. The titular devil girl zaps men with her own atomic age ray gun, but when they disappear there’s no skeleton or goop left behind; there’s no visual effect as they fade away, only the cheap trick of removing them from the frame.

Devil Girl from Mars is mostly recommendable for the ridiculous camp of its central villain, but should be approached with patience, as it takes its mediocre dramatic setup just as seriously as its goofy sci-fi horror camp. An airplane is zapped out of the sky before the opening credits even have a chance to roll (take that, Sully), but otherwise it takes a while for the men to gather & grumble in the tavern before they’re tortured by the film’s space dominatrix & her robot sub. There’s a few stray lines that make their ludicrous bickering amusing (“I’m a scientist! I believe what my brain tells me to believe,”) but for the most part it’s too dry to be funny & too inane to be prestigious, resting somewhere in a B-movie limbo. With an Ed Wood behind the wheel, both halves of these films would shine together as one ridiculous whole, but until I get the chance to waste a trip in a time machine to make that happen we just have to settle on celebrating the good & forgetting the bad in this one. If you watch the film & Ed Wood’s name is in the credits or attached to a remake, you’ll know that my mission was a success.

-Brandon ledet

The Maries of Daisies (1966) vs The Merrye Girls of Spider Baby (1964)

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Daisies is a well-respected surrealistic art film from the Czech New Wave. It’s been discussed at length for its important status as a feminist film. Spider Baby, on the other hand, is a cult favorite, an oddball movie that, sadly, has mostly been forgotten. Despite those pretty major differences, there’s a key similarity that deserves discussion: the main pairs of characters in both films are almost the same people, right down to one being a brunette and the other a blonde. Both pairs are immature, mischievous, and have very little concept of real life consequences.

Spider Baby focuses on the Merrye family, which is so inbred that they suffer from a terrible condition which causes individual members to mentally regress as they age until they become savages. The Merrye clan lives in seclusion, and once a member of the family has fully regressed they get isolated further until they become such a threat to everyone that they get moved to their own section of the basement. Virginia and Elizabeth are two of the three remaining family members of their dying line, not yet old enough to be shoved into the basement. Being isolated from society gives them a dark, sprite-like quality. Due to their regression they have no knowledge of circumstances for their actions. Together they wantonly romp about the house, taking in pet spiders, eating bugs and suspicious fungi from their yard, and bickering almost constantly. Elizabeth is as volatile as a three year old on a bad day. Virginia regularly “plays spider,” which is a handy euphemism for murder. In their isolation, they act outside of society, with unkempt hair and make-believe games gone too far.

Daisies is a critique of Czechoslovakia under communist rule and the laws and regulations within. Marie and Marie are bored and disgusted with society. They decide one day to “go bad”. They turn into savages in flower crowns. The Maries of Daisies act stuntedly, but rather than being isolated, they’re wanton and disrespectful in public. They rip through the town, taking advantage of men, getting drunk, stealing, and eating to excess every time they get the chance. Despite their quirky destruction ultimately being intolerable, they never quite progress to murder, (though in their lawless chaos, killing doesn’t seem that far away). It is actually because of that chaos and anarchy the film was banned in its own country and from export at the time of it’s release, which resulted in Věra Chytilová being prohibited from filmmaking for 7 years.

Daisies is pointed to as a landmark of feminist cinema. Part of that distinction is that it’s an arthouse film directed by woman, but the other part comes from its idea of agency. The two Maries of Daisies are immature, “unladylike”, and savage by choice. They relish in the idea of bucking society, no matter how despicable they become. It’s no real surprise that Spider Baby would be neglected in a conversation of feminist films (or really any critical conversation about cinema), even though it features two distinct, disturbed women presented pretty sympathetically. One thing that discounts it from being a feminist film is that Elizabeth and Virginia are not given agency. They inherit their savagery via a family curse. They can’t help how wretched and impulsive they are. This makes them an object of pity and even demotes them to a damsel status resulting in them needing to be saved from society. Also, Spider Baby is directed by a man, so there’s that.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Daisies in an arthouse masterpiece and Spider Baby is a low budget horror-comedy that brings to mind the best moments of any Ed Wood film. From a character standpoint, they’re surprisingly similar. Marie and Marie don’t have a demented family in the basement, but that doesn’t stop them from being regressively chaotic like Elizabeth and Virginia. There’s a similar theme of chaos in both films that comes from presenting women who actively and violently don’t conform. Especially when, in the end, nonconformity is both sets’ downfall.

-Alli Hobbs

I Married a Witch (1942)

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It’s very cliché to say that a film is “ahead of its time,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe René Clair’s comedy, I Married a Witch. For a film that debuted in the early 1940s, it’s got a very different style of humor when compared to other comedies that came about during that era. When I think of films of the 1940s, I think of Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Meet Me in St. Louis, so watching a film that is about a resurrected witch that preys on a soon-to-be-married man just feels so scandalous!

The film begins with a good old fashioned witch burning in Salem, Massachusetts. Jennifer (Veronica Lake) and her father are outed as witches by Jonathan Wooley (Fredric March), causing them both to be burned at the stake. Jennifer doesn’t let Jonathan’s crime go unpunished as she places a curse on his family that will cause all the Wooley men to have unsuccessful marriages. After a hilarious montage showing generations of Wooley men suffering from the curse, the film flips to a present day scene (1942). One of the descendants of Jonathan Wooley, Wallace Wooley (Fredric March…again) is having a party to celebrate his upcoming marriage to his fiancé, Estelle (Susan Hayward), as well as his candidacy for governor. During the grand event, lighting strikes a nearby tree where the ashes of Jennifer and her father were buried centuries ago. The lightning strike causes both witches to be resurrected in the form of clouds of smoke. As they’re floating around outside of the party, Jennifer realizes that Wallace is a descendant of Jonathan, and she decides to torment him by making him fall in love with her. She eventually gets a body, and the shenanigans begin. After she has several unsuccessful attempts at making Wallace fall in love with her, she conjures up a love potion because, well, that’s just what witches do. Her plan completely backfires when she accidentally drinks the potion, causing her to fall head over heels for Wallace. Needless to say, everything still works out as planned because Wallace does eventually fall in love with Jennifer. This movie isn’t called I Married a Witch for nothing.

Lake is absolutely hilarious in her role as Jennifer. She’s totally a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but in the best way possible. Wallace is a stereotypical vanilla politician, and Jennifer is possibly the bubbliest witch in the history of cinema. Watching the two interact is so comical that after seeing this film numerous times, I still catch myself laughing out loud. But it’s Jennifer’s father, Daniel (portrayed by the hilarious Cecil Kellaway), that reigns supreme as the funniest character in the movie. He too eventually gets a body, but he spends a good part of the film as a cloud of smoke that finds himself trapped in various bottles of liquor. There are also several scenes where he is too drunk to perform spells, and he eventually loses his body and gets trapped in a liquor bottle for all eternity. This is why I will forever refer to him as the funniest, drunkest witch dad to ever grace the silver screen.

I Married a Witch is entertaining from beginning to end, and what I love most about this movie is that it is completely re-watchable. I’ve seen the film numerous times and it has yet to lose its charm.

-Britnee Lombas

The Dressmaker (2016)

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fourhalfstar

I don’t enjoy Westerns. They do nothing for me. It’s a frequent complaint I have, a well-respected genre that just completely shuts off my brain, and I have a difficult time falling in love with even the most modern updates to the format like Bone Tomahawk & Hell or High Water that are reported to be reinvigorating examples of the genre’s merits. To play directly into the “Actually, it’s really a Western if you think about it” critical cliché, The Dressmaker felt tailor made to shut my stupid mouth on the subject. The film, which is at once a violent camp comedy and a heartfelt melodrama, plays like 90s-era John Waters remaking Strictly Ballroom as a revenge tale Western where lives are destroyed by pretty dresses instead of bullets. If I were ever going to fall in love with a movie that could even vaguely be considered a Western, this formula would be my personal ideal. It’s violent, it’s campy, it’s unpredictable, it’s commanded by the female gaze; The Dressmaker is everything I love about cinema at large crammed into the mold of a genre that usually puts me to sleep.

Trading in the dusty roads of the American West for the dustier & more desolate landscape of a small Australian town in the 1950s, The Dressmaker may not have the authenticity in setting required to automatically qualify as a Western, but its intent within the genre is unmistakable. Kate Winslet, as fiercely talented & beautiful as ever, rides into town (on a bus instead of the traditional horse) to blaze a path of earth-scorching revenge for a past betrayal. A mother who doesn’t remember her and a community who has shunned her as an alleged murderess distort the facts of a childhood trauma she can’t quite piece together until the dust fully settles. Instead of establishing her dominance with a six-shooter, she fires off her sewing machine, crafting fashion so eye-meltingly gorgeous that the town that once conspired against her is powerless under the influence of her needle. They attempt to put an end to her coup by bringing in a hired gun seamstress as competition, but Winslet’s needle-slinging protagonist consistently proves to be the best dressmaker the town has ever seen. She will not rest until she knows the truth about her own past and everyone in her path is draped in her finery – dead, or alive & ruined.

There’s so much to love about The Dressmaker, but its most cherishable quality is its minute-to-minute unpredictability. The film has obvious fun with the general structure of a Western & plays with camp tones of an absurdist comedy, but it zigs where you expect those genres’ tropes to zag and much of its third act is an anything-goes free-for-all where the only thing that’s certain is that Kate Winslet is a badass and you’d be a fool to vex her. In the same film where Hugo Weaving plays a crossdressing sheriff with a John Waters mustache and enough room is set aside for a shameless drunk to heckle Sunset Boulevard, there’s also a romantic throughline that makes a boy toy out of Liam Not-Thor Hemsworth, pitch black revelations of rape & domestic abuse, accusations of witchcraft, jaw-to-the-floor wardrobe gazing (duh) and just about any other tonal left turn you can conjure. It has the small town melancholy of a The Last Picture Show, the over-the-top cartoon pomp & costuming of Death Becomes Her, and the in-cold-blood retribution of Westerns I can’t name because I usually sleep through them, sometimes before the title card. The Dressmaker is more than everything I wanted it to be. In a way it was also just everything, full stop.

Please don’t let all of this talk of violent Westerns & high camp cartoons steer you from watching this film, because it has so much more to offer outside those contexts. Regardless of genre, it’s a fascinating work in its rarity as an aggressively feminine revenge tale, one that feels so foreign in its isolated Australian Mortville setting & its worlds away from Hollywood tone that it’s almost operating in a realm of magic. The only other film from 2016 I could compare its general vibe to is the modernist Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship, but even that breath of fresh air can’t match the excitement & satisfaction of The Dressmaker’s consistent novelty. It’s a wholly unique experience, the kind of cinematic idiosyncrasy we’re all hoping to find when we go to the movies. The more I reflect back on it, the more I feel lucky to have seen it at all.

-Brandon Ledet

The Greasy Strangler (2016)

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fourstar

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How do you feel about anti-comedy? Do properties like Comedy Bang Bang or The Eric Andre Show or Xavier: Renegade Angel annoy or delight you? Your answer to that question is largely going to determine your reaction to the anti-humor horrors of The Greasy Strangler, which essentially applies the ethos of Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie to a creature feature format. Within seconds the antagonistic humor of this dirt cheap indie horror establishes itself as the definition of not-for-everyone, but it shouldn’t feel too out of step for folks who’ve spent enough time following Adult Swim’s ever-evolving line-up over the years. Personally, I found The Greasy Strangler to be an amusingly perverse provocation, one that works fairly well as a deconstruction of the Sundance-minded indie romance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who disliked the film for being cruel, grotesque, or aggressively stupid. Those claims would all certainly be valid. As a nasty slasher by way of Eric Warheim, however, that’s just a natural part of a very unnatural territory.

This is not a murder mystery. In the very first scene a father confesses to his live-at-home son that he is, in fact, The Greasy Strangler. This is a man who eats & drinks copious amounts of grease with every meal. He dips his hotdogs in tubs of grease. He asks questions like, “Why not put a little grease in your java?” At any inquiry of his grease fetish he retorts incredulously, “You probably think I’m The Greasy Strangler, don’t you?” in a tone that’s effectively a de facto confession. His son, who looks like a strange, sad hybrid between Jeffrey Tambor & Dawn Weiner, spends a lot of time around his greasy, murderous pop. He prepares most of his meals, lounges nude around the home with him, and assists in his (fraudulent) disco tour business, but doesn’t suspect at all that his father might be the local grease-covered serial murderer until deep in the third act. Such is the deliberate stupidity of this film.

As a creature feature, The Greasy Strangler undeniably delivers the goods. Although a decidedly camp-minded comedy, it boasts a truly hideous, horrifying monster that’s sickening to behold. What I find much more unique, however, is the way the film satirizes and sets aflame the modern indie romance genre. The color palette & social awkwardness of titles like Juno or Napoleon Dynamite or whatever their post-aughts equivalent would be is meticulously recreated here, but put to a grotesque effect. This is quirk employed for pure evil. Seemingly the only woman in this pastel horror show universe somehow enters a love triangle with The Greasy Strangler & his sad sack progeny. The world’s most upsetting prosthetic genitals continually bump ugly in what would usually play as a “star-crossed lovers find love in a world where they don’t belong” plot. The romance of The Greasy Strangler is just as upsetting & difficult to watch as its monstrous kills. The film pretends to strive for meticulous twee preciousness, but it doesn’t take long for its corny façade to crumble and the film becomes queasy in an entirely different, much more upsetting way.

Like with most (if not all) comedies, your tolerance & appreciation of The Greasy Strangler will depend greatly on your sense of humor. This usually goes doubly true in the case of anti-comedy, which is aggressively antagonistic in its reliance on repetition & inanity to the point where being annoyed is supposed to be part of the appeal. This film is built with several ready-to-go drinking game options, considering the ungodly number of times it forces you to watch the titular killer run his naked body through an automated car wash and the even more numerous, Gertrude Stein-esque utterances of phrases like “bullshit artist.” As someone who enthusiastically enjoyed the film, but expects plenty of dissent on that reaction, I have to offer the laziest critical advice imaginable: watch a trailer first. The Greasy Strangler’s advertising has been exceptionally blunt & honest about the film it’s selling and I feel like a two minute clip is more than enough to determine if this will be worth your time. I got everything I wanted out of it as a Tim & Eric-style slasher with a satirical edge in its approach to romantic indie quirk. That’s not going to ring true for everyone, but comedy is one of the most divisive genres around, so that’s to be expected.

-Brandon Ledet