Author: swampflix

#horror (2015)

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Imagine if The Bling Ring were a cheap slasher film directed by Tim & Eric and you might have a decent idea of how jarring #horror is as a feature film experience. An explosion of emojis, group texts, cyber-bullying and, oddly enough, fine art, #horror is an entirely idiosyncratic film, a sort of modern take on the giallo style-over-substance horror/mystery formula, with its stylization firmly in line with the vibrant vapidity of life online in the 2010s. It’s such a strange, difficult to stomach experience that it somehow makes total sense that the film premiered as The Museum of Modern Art in NYC before promptly going straight to VOD with little to no critical fanfare. That’s exactly what #horror is in a nutshell. Simultaneously functioning as a cheap horror flick & a precious fine art piece, it’s the exact kind of compromise between high art & low trash that always wins me over, even when its deeply flawed . . . especially when it’s deeply flawed.

Centered on a slumber party between a group of wealthy, spoiled, precocious brats, #horror aims for the same kind of cyberbullying-as-horror aesthetic achieved in last summer’s Unfriended, except that instead of adopting the look of a live group chat it works more in the realm of viral videos & cheap social network games. This particular crew of 12 year old girls are even more vicious than the usual Mean Girls™ stereotype. While taking selfies, playing dress-up, and experimenting with the vice of vodka cranberries, they constantly insult & tear each other down, submitting each verbal jab online for posterity. Their attacks on each others’ character & looks are rewarded with “points” & “likes” on the fictional social media video game they’re hopelessly addicted to. They push this cruelty as far as they possibly can, twisting the knife with statements like “I’d cry too if I were you. Actually, I’d just kill myself,” and making fun of each other for everything from overeating to grieving for their mother’s death. This is horrifying enough on its own, but it’s made even more disturbing by a mysterious slasher’s killing spree that disposes of the girls one victim at a time.

Although the film occasionally deals with such hefty subjects as cutting & bulimia, it also caters to an overwhelming sense of satirical parody. Mimicking the distracted, scatterbrained mania of social media obsession, #horror is a feat in hyperactive editing. The kaleidoscopic emoji color palette of its central video game gimmick combines with indie pop songstress EMA’s intense soundtrack work to make for a truly eccentric, singular experience I can’t say I’ve ever seen on film before. The thing #horror gets exactly right are the way it turns 12 year old’s concerns into tangible horrors. Older men are horrifying threats. Your online reputation means everything. The idea of putting your phone away for an hour is beyond reason, etc. Because of the compromised art-trash tone, though, this aspect sometimes devolves in to full-blown camp, like in a scene where a girl runs frightened in the woods while mean tweets & hashtags pop up on the screen as if they were chasing her. #horror is a bizarre work of mixed tones, as strange of a mashup of style & presentation as seeing a Lisa Frank depiction of a gruesome murder framed & hanging in a stuffy art gallery. I think I loved it? It’s near impossible to tell. What I can say for sure is that it was fascinating.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Big Business (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and Erin watch Big Business (1988).

Britnee: Many years ago, there was a local video rental shop in my hometown called Slick Sam’s (sounds more like a dirty sex shop), and that’s where I first came across one of my all-time favorite movies, Jim Abrahams’ 1988 comedy, Big Business. I can still see that sun-damaged, styrofoam-stuffed VHS cover sitting on the shelf just waiting for me to grab it. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that no one in the Swampflix crew had seen Big Business before, so I was able to make it my Movie of the Month selection for February. There’s not much love out there for this comic masterpiece, and it really does deserve some recognition.

In a small town called Jupiter Hollow, two women give birth to two sets of identical twin girls at the same time at a local hospital. One woman, Binky Shelton (Deborah Rush), is a big city snob that just so happened to go into labor while passing through Jupiter Hollow with her husband, but the other woman, Iona Ratliff (Patricia Gaul), is a local. The Sheltons and the Ratliffs coincidentally both name their twin daughters Rose and Sadie, and a kooky old nurse mixes up the sets of identical twins. About 40 years later, Sadie and Rose Shelton (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are rich business women living in NYC while Sadie and Rose Ratliff (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are country bumpkins living in Jupiter Hollow. Eventually, the two sets of twins end up in NYC at the same time, and all sorts of wacky things happen.

The performances by Midler and Tomlin are insanely impressive in this film. Midler plays a bitchy NYC snob (Sadie Shelton) and a kind small-town girl looking for adventure (Sadie Ratliff), and Tomlin plays a sweet, softspoken city girl (Rose Shelton) and a rough n’ tough country gal (Rose Ratliff). Portraying such different characters must’ve been such a difficult task for these comedy queens, but they both deliver.

Brandon, were you impressed by the versatile performances from Midler and Tomlin? Or were they just mediocre?

Brandon: I mean, Midler & Tomlin are both phenomenal personalities in general, so it’d be a total lie to say that anything they do or say is mediocre. However, it’s pretty clear that they both had a part they had more fun playing. It’s difficult to say which performance stands out most here between the two actresses, not because there isn’t a clear winner, but because the movie splits their performances into four quadrants: Rich Sadie & Poor Sadie (Midler) and Rich Rose & Poor Rose (Tomlin). There’s a definite, old fashioned nature>nurture mentality at work in Big Business, though, so the individual sisters who lucked into being raised in their “rightful” class environments are the more fun characters to watch, because their confidence is infectious. Poor Rose is certainly amusing in her bossy-but-small-minded local yokel skepticism. It’s Rich Sadie, however, who steals the show for me. As the Reaganomics-personified antagonist of the film, she’s allowed to be the most devious and, because Bette Midler is such a fabulous comedic performer, she strikes just the right tone of evil bitch that this film needed. Midler’s performance as Rich Sadie is just short of being a world-class drag routine. The way she saunters & pouts, insulting people’s outfits by saying “You look like a blood clot” while rocking the world’s largest shoulder pads is just begging for a drag-themed floor show revival. Poor Sadie has a couple of funny moments, mostly in a scene where she milks a cow to the beat of a country song & in her unholy fusion of Carribean-themed yodeling, but it feels like not nearly as much effort went into her character as the over-the-top vamping of her wealthy counterpart. The same could be said of Rich Rose. Tomlin & Midler are both fantastic in this film, but as far as versatility goes, it’s easy to see which characters got more attention.

Besides the easy likability of Midler & Tomlin in this film, something that really stood out to me is how old-fashioned everything feels. The swapped-twins plot of Big Business feels like it’s straight out of an Old Hollywood comedy, the kind that Fred & Ginger might’ve starred in if it had been released 50 years earlier. The nature-over-nurture value system of the movie is very much an antiquated line of thinking and (although there’s some confusion about who winds up with whom at the end) the film’s intense concern with finding each sister a potential mate is very much in line with the structure of a traditional comedy. Instead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Big Business is more like A Million Beaus for Four Sisters. As the two sets of mismatched twins find themselves nearly-but-never-quite bumping into each other while all staying at the same hotel, I felt like I was watching a Marx Brothers movie. Hammering the point home, Midler even recreates the infamous Marx Brothers mirror gag from Duck Soup in the scene where her two characters finally meet for the first time. Fred Ward’s oblivious-to-homosexuality line reading of “You guys are alright” reads a lot like the classic “Nobody’s perfect!” zinger in Some Like It Hot. There’s even a gag where a homeless drunk rubs his eyes in disbelief when he sees both sets of twins walk by, immediately tossing away the bottle he’s clutching. I’m not sure that cinematic gags get much older than that.

What do you think of this film’s classic Hollywood callbacks, Boomer? Were they an intentional homage to the Old Hollywood era or just a strange coincidence for a comedy that happened to be old-fashioned by nature?

Boomer: I’m not much of a fan of comedies of error in which the humor relies too heavily on farcical near-misses, and there was a point in this movie where I lost heart as I realized that the film was saving the inevitable serendipitous union of the City and Country Mice for the end of the film. Once I had this epiphany and stopped waiting for the film to get to that point, I found myself enjoying the movie more straightforwardly, and was pleased that the mistaken-identity elements weren’t played for cringe-comedy as much as I had expected. As has been noted, this is a classic Hollywood farce, which really serves to demonstrate to what extent Old Hollywood was still working from a centuries-old storytelling paradigm; this isn’t really an Old Hollywood Farce so much as it is a Old Globe Farce, based on William Shakespeare’s genre-defining Comedy of Errors. In essence, Big Business is a throwback to a time when films were based almost entirely on dramas that were ancient even then, making the film old-fashioned by default, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. My major problem with the film comes from the way that its antiquated nature shows through in the film’s moral.

When viewing the four main characters, only Poor Rose and Rich Sadie seem truly suited for their positions in life, with Rich Rose and Poor Sadie being reasonably well-adjusted but largely unfulfilled. Ignoring the two women who are in their “rightful” lives, Poor Sadie’s desire for a more exciting life than pig wrasslin’ and yodeling can provide evokes more empathy for her than the audience can really muster for Rich Rose, who certainly has the financial means to forsake her supposedly incomplete life for the purported pleasures of rural domesticity. As such, Rich Rose is the character who gets the least characterization, really only developing once Roone shows up in the third act. This would be a fine exploration of the nature/nurture dichotomy, were it not for the fact that, ultimately, Poor Sadie comes to the decision that not only is the way of life in Jupiter Hollow worth preserving, it’s worth praising as well; she forsakes her biological sister’s urban and urbane world to return to performing percussive cow milking alongside toothless men whose musical expertise is limited to playing moonshine jugs, and we, as an audience, are supposed to feel gratified by this conclusion. Rural living is the right fit for everyone, except the shrewish antagonist.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I got plenty of laughs out of Tomlin and Midler’s performances here, and even the potentially painful farce worked for me. I was just hoping for one more twist (for instance, that the Sadies were actually the children of the Ratliffs and that the Roses were the Sheltons’ daughters) that would make the film less overt in its praise for downhome simplicity over metropolitan cynicism. To a man, all of the New York-based characters that are not Rich Rose are foppish, conceited, untrustworthy, manipulative, and greedy, with the implication being that Rose feels unfulfilled because she is genetically predisposed toward “goodness,” being the child of salt-of-the-earth outlanders. But the “goodness” of rural living is enough to almost completely deprogram Poor Sadie, who is tempted by the carnal delights that ensnare and comprise Rich Sadie’s identity and existence but is able to reject them. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Erin, am I reading too much into this, or allowing my perception of the film to color my enjoyment of it too much? Is there something that mitigates this seeming moral that I may have overlooked? And what do you think about the Old Hollywood elements–do they work?

Erin: Boomer, I feel a little differently about the portrayal of country vs. city life, and I think that I came to slightly different conclusions about Big Business‘s moral assessment of both. I’d have to say that in true farcical fashion, both city life and country life are portrayed with an eye to their preposterous sides – yodeling and “making love in the back of a recreational vehicle” versus designer women in designer sneakers and the pompousness of grapefruits under silver lids.

Where I feel differently is that the on-screen portrayal of urban life seems to be much more positive than the portrayal of rural life. The Welcome to New York Montage, while funny, adheres pretty closely to the cinematic trope of New York as a vibrant, wonderful city (thought this might be more related to the visual presentation of Poor Sadie’s desires). Big Business‘s New York seems to be entirely made of the Plaza hotel and satin, even if its denizens are amoral and greedy. Rural life has gingham, and large, poor families.

If the moral of the story really is that rural life is better, I think it balances strangely against the onscreen portrayals of the rural and urban worlds. In a way, I think that starts to answer the second part of your question about the Old Hollywood elements (or the Old Globe elements, Big Business is truly a Shakespearean farce). I agree that that the movie reads as an old-fashioned screwball comedy and is pretty simple in terms of plot. On the other hand, I think that Big Business reads extremely well as an 80s movie. It’s got Bette Midler as a Power Lead (in TWO roles!), Big Business as the Big Bad, and steel drums lining the streets of New York.

What do you think, Britnee? To continue Boomer’s line of question, does Big Business manage to read well as an 80s movie? Does the old fashioned plot work well amongst the shoulder pads and polka dots of the 1980s?

Britnee: I’ve always viewed Big Business as a prime example of an 80s comedy. It’s packed with cheesy humor, wacky facial expressions, pumps and power suits, and of course, Bette Midler in her prime. It’s an 80s explosion! It wasn’t until this discussion that I realized that there are quite a few Old Hollywood elements present in this film. Now that I’m looking at the film through a much different lens, the movie is more interesting and much smarter than I initially thought. Creating a film that contains classical comic film features for an 80s audience mustn’t have been an easy task, but it’s a match made in heaven.

I know that this is completely off track, but I think that the film’s music deserves a bit of discussion. There are only two major lyrical songs in the film: Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and George Benson’s “On Broadway.” Both songs work well in the film (they’re so New York!), but as for the film’s instrumental tracks, they’re all kinds of ridiculous. It’s the type of music that belongs in a department store’s training video. Part of me feels as though the music was a bit too much, but another part of me thinks that the obnoxious tunes contributed to the film’s campiness.

Brandon, did you find the instrumental music in the film to be annoying or am I overthinking this?

Brandon: I don’t know if “annoying” is the word I would use. Maybe “cheesy”? Maybe “eccentric”? It’s undeniable that the background music of Big Business is always present, always noticeable, and perhaps even always awful, but I found it somehow added to the film’s charm. The soundtrack is another one of the areas where the film feels trapped between two times. Its big band music (which is mostly contained in the 1940s prologue) & countryside yodeling are decidedly old-fashioned, but the department store pop songs Britnee mentioned & the endless droning sax are so 80s it ain’t even funny (well, it’s a little funny). I don’t know if it was the exact DVD copy Britnee & I were watching or if the film was intentionally mixed this way, but the soft sax rock aspects were particularly noticeable (in that they were deafening) & particularly amusing. What really got me laughing, though, was the obnoxiously dramatic drum fills that crash the scene at the film’s climax. It’s as if Neil Peart had dropped in at the sound booth to add some last minute touches for the soundtrack.

Going back to that 1940s prologue for a second, the film starts in the old-timey countryside town of Jupiter Hollow, which prompted me to write “Stars Hollow” (the fictional town from Gilmore Girls, of course) in my notes. It was a surprise, then, that Gilmore Girls vet Edward Hermann (who, sadly, passed away a little over a year ago) appears in this film, delivering one of many great performances. It was also cool to see Seth Green run around as a raucous baby (almost literally) as well as the weird coincidence that both of the Roses’ beaus are future Tremors compatriots (Michael Gross & Fred Ward). All of this and Deborah Rush, aka Jerri Blank’s mom. The cast of supporting characters is surprisingly stacked, as long as you care about the niche pop culture properties they’re best known for.

Boomer, were there any supporting roles in particular that stood out to you as a favorite? Midler & Tomlin easily get the most to do, but I feel there was plenty enough opportunities for the other actors to shine.

Boomer: It’s funny, I was delighted to see Deborah Rush in this film, as she’s always an absolute delight, especially when she’s playing a terrible mother figure (Jerri Blank was a hot mess before she ever showed up, but Piper Chapman’s insufferable insulated white privilege nonsense is all on Rush’s padded shoulders). I was pretty disappointed that she disappears after her part in initiating the plot, but she does make the best of her limited screen time. I also really enjoyed watching tiny Seth Green run around as a screaming terror, and got a kick out of seeing Michael Gross, who will always be doomsday prepper Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise to me (although I didn’t make the Fred Ward connection that Brandon did). My favorite minor role came from Mary Gross, Michael’s sister, who played the soft-voiced secretary working for the Sheltons; as an actress, she’ll always have a place in my heart because of her involvement in Troop Beverly Hills. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I looked up the name of the actor who played the put-upon desk clerk, Joe Grifasi, but I couldn’t place him in any memorable roles based on a quick scan of his IMDb page; he must simply be one of those classic “that guy” actors.

It was a very minor role that has really stuck with me since watching the film. The narrative saw fit to include a vagrant character who oversees the comings and goings of the Plaza. This is a well-worn comedy cliche: a drunken vagrant sees some unbelievable sight, looks at the bottle in his hand, back at the unbelievable sight, and then tosses the bottle behind him. Normally, this character is never seen again, but this film brings back our friend a few times; we watch him catch sight of the Roses and Sadies coming and going multiple times. All in all, it seems like he gets more screen time than some of the lesser love interests. From the outside, this mostly low-stakes (give or take the fate of Jupiter Hollow, which is easy to forget in all the identity confusion shenanigans) rom com farce occurs entirely outside of the context of this character; as a result, his story plays out as a window into an existential horror that he can only passively observe. The Plaza: if you stand outside long enough, you’ll see yourself come out of there. And then he does! That’s some In The Mouth of Madness… um, madness.

While prowling through the sparse information that the internet has to offer about this film and its development, I read that the sets for the film were so expensive that ABC created an entire television series to use the sets in an attempt to recoup their losses. The series flopped and never made it out of its first season. It does make one wonder, though; would Big Business have worked as an ongoing series? It seems like it would, what with the potential to have stock twin hijinx intersect with stock cultural differences plots.

What do you think, Erin? Would this idea have legs? And in what stock sitcom situations would you most like to see the Shelton-Ratliff sisters (recast for a TV budget, of course)?

Erin: Boomer, I can definitely see at least a two-season Big Business show combining stock twin hijinks and stock cultural differences.  It would take a deft hand to extend the premise outside of the obvious shenanigans.  I’m envisioning a Green Acres meets Beverly Hillbillies situation.  Shoulder pads on the farm!  Country Rose get mixed up with big city Mafia!  Mistaken identities galore!  Pie and jam competitions at the fair!  Rich Sadie turns out to be a heck of a pig-caller!  Moonshine!  Country twins accidentally attend the Met Ball!

There’s at least half a season right there.  The challenge would be extending the premise into something stable and complex enough to keep a show on the air, but the promise of the ensemble cast might make it work.  I wonder if it’s cheaper to find multiple sets of twins or to constantly produce a double effect through camera and editing tricks.

I think that that my best description of Big Business would include words like madcap and zany.  It was definitely a lot of fun to watch, and it looked like the cast was also having a great time during filming.  That always makes a movie better for me.  All in all, I think that it was a solid entry in the filmography of the 1980s.  It’s charming and fluffy, with few dull moments and lots of shoulder pads.

Lagniappe

Erin: The fashions worn by the two sets of sisters are almost characters in themselves.  Big Business is almost worth watching just for the clothes!

Britnee: I really like Poor Sadie’s initial yodeling number that she performed at the Jupiter Hallow fair. “Well, hello, Jupiter Hallow. I know you’re doing fine. Every day you work the factory, every night a jug of wine,” is what immediately enters my head when I think about Big Business. I’m not a big fan of yodeling, but Midler has one of those voices that can make anything catchy and enjoyable.

Boomer: I was a bit disappointed that Sadie Ratliff ended up with (as I interpreted it) Sadie Shelton’s ex husband. They barely shared a scene or two, and she had much more chemistry with the desk clerk.

Brandon: Going back to what Boomer was saying about the vilification of city life vs the deification of the countryside, that push & pull didn’t bother me too, too much, but I will say that the evil “big business” end of the equation felt a lot more convincing & well-developed. I especially appreciated the Reaganomics-speak of the NYC twins’ inherited company, Moramax: “More for America”. As far as satire goes, that specific phrase easily ranks up there with Robocop & Gremlins II: The New Batch in poking fun at the state of class structure in the 1980s, even if most of the film’s message boils down to a simple rich = stressed out & snooty, poor = sweet & serene.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Erin presents Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
April: Boomer presents My Demon Lover (1987)
May: Brandon presents Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

-The Swampflix Crew

Sorority House Massacre II (1990)

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So here I am defending Sorority House Massacre against accusations that it too closely resembles its tangentially-related predecessor The Slumber Party Massacre (although I can’t fully excuse how heavily it borrows from Halloween), when Sorority House Massacre II has to turn around & make me look like a fool. Sorority House Massacre II is such a blatant, subpar ripoff of The Slumber Party Massacre that I had to check the title on the DVD sleeve several times just to make sure I hadn’t watched the wrong sequel by mistake. Completely ditching the vengeful sibling backstory of Sorority House Massacre, this sequel instead shows what I swear is exact footage from the killings in The Slumber Party Massacre. Like, exact. By the time the killer was hiding under a blanket or dangling a large power drill between his legs I felt like a crazy person. To make matters even more muddled, the killer from The Slumber Party Massacre (who most certainly doesn’t belong in this film’s backstory) is given a completely different name & origin than either killer in the two Massacre films that precede this mess. Besides being written & shot over the course of a single week, this discrepancy about which film is being followed up here exactly can be cleared up by recognizing that all three productions were handled by Roger Corman, who was no stranger to cutting corners financially at the expense of his films’ narrative continuity.

As best as I can make clear from the Sorority House Massacre II‘s jumbled mythology, a group of college girls purchase a sorority house for dirt cheap due to a mass murder that had occurred on the property five years prior, only to have the killings (shocker!) repeat themselves over the course of one bloody night. Whether this is supposed to be the bloodstained sorority house from the first Sorority House Massacre or the suburban home from The Slumber Party Massacre or neither house at all is solidly up for debate. No matter. The plot is, duh, a largely inconsequential inconvenience for the film to deliver its main concerns: nudity & gore. What I enjoyed about the first Sorority House Massacre was how surprisingly girly it was for a film that promised a blood-soaked softcore porn in its title. It relied on  bizarre dream imagery instead of lady-stabbing for most of its terror and, although it certainly wasn’t shy on the gratuitous nudity front, its dress-up & make-out montages were far from hyper-masculine masturbation fantasy material. Sorority House Massacre II, on the other hand, delivers loads more slasher genre hedonism on both counts. The film’s power tool murders, which range from the aforementioned drill to kookier instruments like bear traps, are plentiful & plenty bloody. Its nudity is also heavy on the leering, filming girls as the soap up their breasts in the shower, individually dress in skimpy lingerie, and give each other massages in high-waisted thongs. Whether or not the film is narratively in line with the first Sorority House Massacre, it certainly outdoes its predecessor in tastelessness, yet never aproaches its weirdo deja vu-inspired visual ideas (despite a last minute supernatural twist that does little to complicate its straightforward genre trappings).

Besides being in line with The Slumber Party Massacre in terms of narrative backstory & softcore porn salaciousness, Sorority House Massacre II also matches The Slumber Party Massacre‘s intentionally self-aware goofiness in its Ouija board & toilet bowl swirlies tomfoolery, its references to the fictional slasher Strip to Kill Part 7, and in lines like “This place would give Boris Karloff the creeps! […] I love those old horror movies & stuff like that.” I can see how the atrocious acting & dialogue and the shameless blood & tits formula of Sorority House Massacre II could make it more readily enjoyable for the boozy midnight crowd than the first Sorority House film, but I believe that the earnestness & the visual experimentation of the first film makes it the more interesting entry in the franchise. A followup to Sorority House Massacre II, Sorority House Massacre III: The Final Exam, was promised/threatened as recently as the 2000s, but I suspect any third entry in the franchise will skew even further to the winking parody end of the slasher spectrum, which is fine, but not nearly as exciting as the first film’s genuine weirdness. The real question is how a third film would pull together the narrative trainwreck Sorority House Massacre II made of its franchise’s continuity. As a run-of-the-mill genre exercise, Sorority House Massacre II is pretty alright, but not especially worthy of a recommendation. As a sequel meant to hold its series’ narrative throughline together in an A-B progression, it’s a total mess.

-Brandon Ledet

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

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When I stumbled across the surprisingly loopy Halloween knockoff Sorority House Massacre, I discovered the popular opinion that it was an inferior film in comparison with the Roger Corman production The Slumber Party Massacre. It’s easy to see why the two films are closely associated with one another. Besides the shared word in their titles, both are female-directed slashers, which is a rarity in the genre (assuming that Sorority House Massacre‘s mysterious Carol Frank was/is female), that depict groups of nubile teens being picked off one by one by an escaped mass murderer during a sleepover party. That latter, narrative similarity can almost be completely excused by the context of their shared genre, though, as there’s nothing especially unique about their respective set-ups. In fact, although Sorority House Massacre was released four years after The Slumber Party Massacre & is largely considered to be the derivative work, I’d argue that it’s the much more ambitious & experimental of the pair. The Slumber Party Massacre might have a larger fan base due entirely to is heavier reliance on nudity & gore, but none of those cheap thrills compare to the strange deja vu/dream imagery that Sorority House Massacre employs for a cheap, but sincerely unnerving effect.

What might be holding The Slumber Party Massacre back from being particularly remarkable as a genre film is its compromised tone. Written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown to be a parody of the slasher genre, the film was produced by Corman’s New World Pictures imprint to play as a straightforward genre exercise. There are some flashes of satiric brilliance left in Brown’s screenplay straining to make their way to the surface. Lines like “It’s not how big your mouth is. It’s what you put in it that counts,” or gags like a girl motioning to make out with her beau only to knock his decapitated head down from its perch feel like leftovers from the slasher parody The Slumber Party Massacre was intended to be. Then there’s the impossible-to-ignore, loaded imagery of the film’s villain attacking a group of young women with a gigantic power drill that he sometimes dangles between his legs. If the film’s originally intended form had been pushed a little further to the parody end of the spectrum, I might’ve been a little more on board with what it delivers. As is, these comedic moments feel like occasional respites form a pretty run-of-the-mill slasher picture. There’s nothing especially surprising about what transpires in The Slumber Party Massacre. It’s an enjoyable, but entirely predictable gore fest, complete with the eyeroll-worthy jump scare fake-outs instigated by cats, surprise house guests, and (most amusing of all) someone drilling a new peephole in the front door.

It’s hard to tell exactly why The Slumber Party Massacre has gradually earned a cult following as one of the “best” slashers of the 1980s. Which end of the film’s dueling, compromised tones is winning over people’s hearts? I suspect some folks are latching onto the remaining whiffs of feminist-leaning parody leftover from the script’s early stages, but the film’s top two “plot keywords” tagged on IMDb are “girl in bra & panties” and “female rear nudity”, so who knows? The film definitely delivers a lot more that Sorority House Massacre on the shameless nudity & grossout gore end. It’s easy to see how its group showers, severed limbs, lingerie, and power drill slashings would make it play better as a goofy midnight movie group viewing among boozed out friends in comparison with Sorority House Massacre‘s less salacious, dreamlike creep-outs. Still, I think that Sorority House is the superior Massacre, for what it’s worth. In the end, splitting hairs about which tangentially-related, genre-derivative, softcore porn-esque slasher from the VHS era is slightly better than the other probably isn’t a super effective use of my time (nor yours, for that matter), but dammit, this is all I got, so humor me. Sorority House Massacre reigns supreme. The Slumber Party Massacre is . . . pretty okay.

-Brandon Ledet

All Two Dozen of Russ Meyer’s Feature Films Ranked & Reviewed

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For the last third of 2015 I put a lot of my movie-watching efforts into making a journey through the rather buxom catalog of pervert auteur Russ Meyer. Meyer had an undeniably fascinating career as a boundary-pusher in schlock cinema. From inadvertently inventing the “nudie cutie” to creating some of the most brilliant rapid-fire montages ever assembled in his editing room mastery to working with Roger Ebert on a hit X-Rated comedy for a major Hollywood studio, Meyer was a mischievous pioneer, a true industry outsider. As such, his work is very difficult to pigeonhole, despite its consistent lean towards salaciousness & titlation (a huge emphasis on “tit” i that second descriptor). Some Meyer films are delightfully silly. Some are morally reprehensible. Some manage to be both simultaneously. A complicated brute of a man, Meyer defies you to defend everything he’s said & done in its entirety. And yet he’s made some of the most vibrant, idiosyncratic films the world has ever seen.

The question is what are we to do with the mess that Meyer’s left behind? It’s been fun picking through the pieces of the wreckage, but I doubt I have any significant answer to that conundrum now that I’ve made it through to the other side of his catalog. Honestly, I doubt I ever will. His work is wildly varied in terms of quality & impact. It’s much easier to discuss his oeuvre one film at a time than it is to discuss his accomplishments as a single unit.

So, if you’re interested in an entry point for checking out Russ Meyer’s filmography, the best I can do is list his films chronologically with links to their respective reviews & star ratings. Just in case a sold two dozen features sounds like too much effort for a newcomer (not to mention the home video distribution of his work being disastrously mishandled), I’ve also made a top five shortlist for the films I’d recommend as his best works, the ones most worth seeking out. If you’re looking for a career-spanning piece on the cultural impact Russ Meyer’s catalog has had in cinema, I highly recommend the book Big Bosoms & Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film by Jim Ryan. It’s a very fun & well-researched read, one that contextualizes Russ Meyer’s contribution to cinema better than I ever could myself.

The Breast of Russ Meyer
1. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
2. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
3. Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! (1967)
4. Mondo Topless (1966)
5. Supervixens (1975)
H.M. The Seven Minutes (1971)

RM’s Filmography, Ranked & Reviewed
1959: The Immoral Mr. Teas – 3.5 stars
1961: Eve and the Handyman – 1 star
1961: Erotica – 2.5 stars
1962: Wild Gals of the Naked West – 2 stars
1963: Europe in the Raw – 3.5 stars
1963: Heavenly Bodies! – 3 stars
1964: Lorna – 2.5 stars
1964: Fanny Hill – Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure – 3 stars
1965: Mudhoney – 2.5 stars
1965: Motorpsycho! – 0.5 stars
1965: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – 5 stars
1966: Mondo Topless – 4 stars
1967: Common Law Cabin – 3 stars
1967: Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! – 4 stars
1968: Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! – 3 stars
1968: Vixen! – 2.5 stars
1970: Cherry, Harry & Raquel! – 3.5 stars
1970: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – 5 stars
1971: The Seven Minutes – 4 stars
1973: Blacksnake – 0.5 stars
1975: Supervixens – 4 stars
1976: Up! – 3 stars
1979: Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens – 3 stars
2001: Pandora Peaks – 2 stars

-Brandon Ledet

Anomalisa (2015)

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fourhalfstar

As is the case with virtually every project that has Charlie Kaufman’s fingerprints on it, Anomalisa is an insight into the writer/director’s particularly idiosyncratic worldview and plethora of neuroses. The film tells the story of a lonely, mentally ill man (voiced by David Thewlis) who travels to Cincinatti to present a keystone speech at a customer service convention. Every person that he encounters along the way has the same face and speaks with the same voice (Tom Noonan), including cab drivers, his wife and son, and even the former lover with whom he attempts to reconnect on his single night in town. When she revels how emotionally and irrevocably devastated she was by his departure, he finds temporary succor in the arms of a shy woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose face is scarred and who is attending the conference with her more extroverted and attractive BFF Emily. Although he contemplates leaving his family for her, in the light of day, she moves from anomalous to anonymous as she takes on the face and voice of everyone else. His presentation goes awry when he has a mental breakdown on stage, and he returns home as empty and incomplete as he was at the film’s outset.

The film is a technical marvel, a stop-motion animated feature that utilized 3D printing to create the many stages of facial expression across a sea of duplicate people, and the design and detail work on display is simply stunning. Michael Stone’s gradually building psychotic episode is beautifully telegraphed in a mirror-contemplating scene that sees his face revolving through a series of different faces, and an operatically composed dream sequence includes a moment where his countenance falls apart and reveals the framework underneath. Technically, the film is virtually flawless once you become accustomed to the world’s aesthetic (the line that separates the tops and bottoms of faces is distracting at the outset), and the concept of a world of interchangeable people is realized elegantly.

The narrative, however, leaves a little to be desired. As a peak into Kaufman’s mind, this is yet another story about a reprehensibly self-oriented and self-interested man whose outbursts this time around are rationalized as the result of an undiagnosed mental illness. Once again, an unsympathetic man is brought so low that we the audience cannot help but feel some empathy for his plight; we spend so much time with Stone alone and in an “unobserved” state that he becomes familiar enough that we’re willing to go along on his journey. Of course, his journey exists only in the literal sense, as, ironically, there is no self-discovery for a man who spends so much of his mental energy reflecting upon himself.

Stone is a man who: passively suggests hooking up with his ex, moments after she reveals that she spent the first year after he left her unable to get out of bed; has raised an utterly spoiled and ungrateful child whose brattiness is communicated in a scant three minutes onscreen; and considers leaving his wife and family for what he presumes would be a life of less self-loathing with an uncomplicated Midwestern woman (who has much more going on under the surface than he is willing or able to see). Although we’re living in a post-Don Draper world and it feel’s like the west is drowning in stories of this ilk, Anomalisa feels fresh, if only because of its unusual visual rhetorical space. It’s utterly impossible to like Stone despite his fundamentally broken nature, but the nature of the presentation goes a long way towards making him stand out from the Tony Sopranos and Dr. Houses of the world. It’s a third-person depiction of a first-person point of view, and this immersiveness saves the film from feeling too stale.

This should in no way be read as an indictment of Thewlis’s performance, which is fantastic. He’s not alone: Leigh also does great work here, playing Lisa’s vulnerability and tenaciousness in equal parts, giving life to a character that is ultimately much more human and endearingly honest than Stone. There’s an edge to her line-readings that gives Lisa a physical presence that could be felt even if there were no plastic bodies awkwardly humping each other on screen. Noonan embues each of the diverse characters he plays with variations on a theme, and his irascible cab driver and burned lover are standouts. Still, Thewlis brings a great dimension to the role of Stone, which also contributes to the effectiveness of the story despite its static narrative.

The story is really only tired in broad strokes, however, as the particularities of details are generally novel. Lisa is essentially the opposite of a manic pixie dream girl, a customer service team leader from Akron who lives in Emily’s shadow and considers herself stupid; her favorite food is scrambled eggs and her musical interests skew heavily toward Cyndi Lauper, but she is genuinely interested in improving herself and the state of her life. Her encounter with Stone changes him not at all, but she grows as a result of it, which is a narrative anomaly (no pun intended). The film is also quite observational in the way that it captures true-to-life moments in awkward conversations with eager service industry personnel (including phone reps, cab drivers, bellboys, bar attendants, and cashiers) and being forced to witness interactions between unhappy couples.

This all illustrates the film’s interest in drama but fails in its recapitulation of the comic elements. Much like last year’s Queen of Earth, there is a conscious meditation upon the way that living with or adjacent to mental illness is not the perpetually joyless experience that forms the narrative basis of most literary interrogations of the subject. It’s a rarely discussed observation of the human condition, that while some people are comic or tragic figures, most of us have varying percentages of both throughout our lives, and it’s not always easy or indeed necessary to categorize existence in such binary terms. That’s not to mention the other subtle jokes throughout the film; for instance, Cincinatti chili sounds intriguing and horrifying, and I appreciate the pride that the fictional Ohioans take in their bizarre concoction and their zoo. There’s also a lot to unpack about the fact that Stone’s breakdown stream-of-consciousness is interpreted to be critical of soldiers, prompting an attendee to shout about “supporting the troops,” especially combined with the hotelier’s framed George W. Bush portrait in Stone’s dream sequence.

Speaking of which, as the film largely sticks to a realism even if the point of view is warped, the surreality of Stone’s nightmare sequence is worth the ticket price alone, and is what I expect most people will be talking about long after seeing the film. It’s also the most recognizably Kaufman-esque part of the movie; the sea-of-interchangable faces conceit is present throughout and is obviously evocative of the restaurant full of John Malkovitches seen in Being John Malkovitch (and revisited in Adaptation), but Stone’s story doesn’t otherwise lend itself to Kaufman’s more eccentric imagery. In the dream sequence, however, there’s an exploration of space that is reminiscent of the half-floor in the office building from Malkovitch, and Stone’s attempt to escape through a sea of improbably-close desks is pure Kaufman visual flourish. There’s less Synecdoche, New York in the film’s DNA, which may be for the best, as this film feels less like a masturbatory ode about being a misunderstood and self-destructive artist and isn’t also largely impenetrable (individual responses may vary). That having been said, in defense of Synecdoche, none of Anomalisa’s images are as haunting as that film’s perpetually burning house, curling tattooed leaves, or infinitely recursive series of miniaturized metropoli.

Overall, Anomalisa is a great film that draws you into its headspace with compelling imagery. While the plot may not be as much of a technical masterpiece as its cinematography, its potentially played-out story is sufficiently fleshed out (again, no pun intended) that it will likely remain culturally relevant long after the genre of paint-by-numbers privileged-white-guy-versus-ennui has receded back into the ether from which it came. If not a masterpiece, then the film is definitively a cinematic experience that demands to be seen.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Three Hidden Gems in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986)

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Recently, the Prytania Theatre (Louisiana’s oldest operating single-screen movie theater) had several special screenings of Labyrinth as a tribute to the late and great David Bowie. Bowie has had a pretty interesting acting career, starring in films such as The Hunger and Absolute Beginners, but Labyrinth is without a doubt the film he is best known for. His character, Jareth (the Goblin King), has been the source of so many sexual awakenings due to his mysterious aura and dashing appearance (not to mention that giant codpiece), but more importantly, the music that he created for the film is extraordinary. The soundtrack to Labyrinth is definitely my favorite film soundtrack of all-time. Each song has a lot of heart, a lot of fun, and a whole lot of Bowie.

Needless to say, watching this film on the big screen for the very first time was an unforgettable, life-altering experience, and viewing such a familiar film in a different setting caused me to notice a few things I never caught before:

1. The image of Jareth’s face appears in different areas in the labyrinth during several scenes, but it’s very well hidden (for the most part). His face can been seen a few times in the following places: the walls and floor of the labyrinth, the rocks in the tunnel, and the trees in the Bog of Eternal Stench. After doing some quick research, I found out that the hidden faces were put in the film for the DVD release. Whoever decided to place these hidden “Easter eggs” throughout the film is a genius.

2. Within the first few minutes of the film, you get a quick tour of Sarah’s bedroom. There are quite a few items throughout her room that become part of her labyrinth experience (stuffed animals that resemble Sir Dydimus and the Fireys, bookends that resemble Hoggle, etc.), but I never noticed the newspaper clippings of David Bowie attached to her vanity’s mirror. Also, directly on the side of the clippings is a doll that looks very similar to the Goblin King. How did I miss this all these years?

3. There is a fountain in the Goblin City that is basically a circle of  Hoggle-like goblins urinating. When Sarah first encounters Hoggle, he’s peeing in a fountain. I’m not quite sure what this connection means or if it means anything at all. My guess is that it is a sign that her journey is ending. Once Sarah enters the Goblin City, she’s coming close to finishing her quest. The Hoggles in the fountain look similar to her Hoggle-like bookends back in the “real world,” so this could be a sign that change is coming. Or this could simply be a goof. The world may never know.

-Britnee Lombas

The Boy (2016)

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January can often be dumping grounds for subpar studio fare, which can be an annoyance for some, but for fans of cheap, wacky horror this first round of cinematic crap can bring many blessings. Fresh off the heels of the mostly-alright The Forest, The Boy is the first of the year’s truly campy treasures. I’m always a sucker for the evil doll horror as a genre, so it was a given that I’d see The Boy no matter what, but the film actually delivered the bonus points of a major third act surprise that I honestly didn’t see coming, since I had boxed the film into the confines of the evil doll genre. I expected The Boy to play out more or less exactly like the last PG-13 evil doll movie to hit the theaters, the largely disappointing Rosemary’s Baby knockoff Annabelle, but the film sets its sights much higher than that light supernatural tomfoolery. It’s far from wholly original as a horror flick, but instead it pulls enough wacky ideas form a wide enough range of disparate horror movie sources that it ended up being an enjoyably kooky melting pot of repurposed ideas.

Greta, an American woman (played by The Walking Dead‘s Lauren Cohan), takes on the job of a long-term nanny for a wealthy young boy in the English countryside while his aging parents are away on a holiday. This would all be well & good if the titular “boy”, Brahms, were actually a living, breathing child, but he’s not. Brahms is a creepy porcelain doll, life-sized, but far from lively. A lot of The Boy‘s early creepiness relies heavily on the basic dynamics of this set up. Greta initially laughs when she’s introduced to Brahms, but her smile soon fades when she realizes how committed to the act his parents are. It’s unnerving enough that they’ve isolated themselves in an ancient English manor with their doll boy, his antique toys, and their dead-stare taxidermy, but by the time they’re calling each other “Mommy” & “Daddy” in regular conversation & asking to speak with Brahms privately, the film achieves an even weirder undercurrent than what’s promised in the trailers. Things get even weirder from there as Greta herself falls under Brahms’ spell, dressing & feeding him on his requested schedule & believing that she can hear him sob in his room & speak on the telephone.

The Boy‘s greatest asset is that it doesn’t stop there. A sharp left turn in the third act completely obliterates the slowburn psychological/supernatural horror established in the first half & delves into some utterly bonkers motherfuckery that should be a crowdpleaser among schlock junkies & trashy horror lovers. Like I said, the film is far from a wholly original work. It pulls from titles as recent as Dead Silence & Housebound and as far back in time as Pin & Friday the 13th. I’m pretty lenient on the horror genre relying on tropes & cliches to deliver its cheap thrills, though, and The Boy really does prove itself a solidly fun thrill of a horror film in the end, even if it functions as a pastiche. I don’t know if it’s because my expectations were so muted by its dull trailer or its early January release date, but I ended up really enjoying the film for what it was: a remarkably silly, sometimes eerie slice of genre-bound trash.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode#1 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Top Films of 2015 & Felt (2015)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #1 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our inaugural stab at the podcast format, James & Brandon discuss their individual Top 5 Films of 2015 lists & Brandon makes James watch the indie art therapy drama Felt (2015) for the first time. Enjoy!

Production note: The guitar riff musical “bumps” between segments were also provided by James.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Mary and Max (2009)

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The 2009 stop motion animation indie drama Mary and Max is somewhat of a strange case. It’s ranked among the highest-rated titles of all time on IMDb, but it’s not a particularly well-known film. That disparity is readily recognizable in the film’s box office numbers, which posits it as a financial flop that only managed to earn back $1.7 million of its $8.2 million budget, despite near-universal critical acclaim. Perhaps the divide between its critical & financial accomplishments is a question of tone. The sole feature film credit of stop motion animator Adam Elliot, Mary and Max adopts the visual format & storybook narration of a children’s film, but it’s, at heart, an emotionally merciless drama that touches upon, among other things: mental illness, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancy, atheism, war crimes, repressed homosexuality, obesity, and the endless cycle of poverty. It’s likely that the film didn’t do particularly well at the box office because it’s difficult to market an animated feature about heartbreaking loneliness, depression, despair, and the search for human connection among the disenfranchised. I’m getting choked up right now just mulling over the film’s themes, so easy to see why it might’ve been a difficult sell as a comedy (however black) & a fun night at the movies. All that being said, Mary and Max is a masterful work in the stop motion medium, easily one of the best examples of the format I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame it couldn’t have turned that achievement into financial success, though, or we might’ve had a few more Adam Elliot features in the six years since its release.

Detailing the strictly-epistolary friendship between two total strangers, a young Australian girl & a middle aged man in New York City, Mary and Max relies heavily on storybook-style narration to move its story along between its back & forth letter reading. This narrative structure doesn’t allow much room for complicated plot maneuvering or a fast-paced momentum. Mary and Max, as its title suggests, is more of a two-handed character study than a whirlwind of action & consequence. Mary is a young girl with an alcoholic mother & an emotionally reclusive father. Initially described as looking like mud & poo, Mary is somewhat of an outcast, self-conscious of her appearance, bored, and alone. Max is a lonely, atheist man of Jewish descent who has difficulty navigating the modern world due to his struggles with Asperger’s Syndrome. It seems at first like they might have very little in common besides the drab greys & browns that define their respective worlds & their shared love of a children’s show called The Noblets. As their friendship deepens & is challenged by decades of hard-fought battles with mental illness & life at large, though, a remarkably rewarding swell of emotion begins to elevate the film miles above the basic precociousness & impressive handmade craft stop motion automatically commands as a medium.

For a film loaded with fart jokes & gags involving bird anuses, Mary and Max is a remarkable achievement in emotional provocation. Toni Collette (who I’ve recently been binge-watching in United States of Tara) does an excellent job voicing the adult Mary & Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who, of course, everyone has been inadvertently binge-watching in quality work for the last two decades & mourning in more recent years) is even more of a treasure as the deeply-complicated Max, although neither personality is especially essential to the film’s charm. The real crux to Mary & Max‘s perfection as a small stakes drama/black comedy is in director Adam Elliot’s nuanced characterization of his titular leads & in the finely detailed visual world he made by hand (with help, I’m sure) in a painstakingly meticulous method/dying art. I like to imagine a world where Mary and Max was a wild financial success that allowed Elliot to immediately produce a long string of other feature films, the same way the success of Coraline, released the same year, launched Laika Studios. As is, I’m happy that this pitch black gem was ever produced in the first place. It’s not often that an animated feature about the importance of “real friendship” is this well constructed & this reluctant to play by the rules of its medium/genre. Just writing about the film’s emotional severity is making me tear up in the retrospection, which is a clear sign that Elliot got something significantly right here, even if that something was a difficult commodity to monetize.

Side Note: You can go ahead & include Mary and Max as yet another indication that no place in time has ever loved ABBA quite as much as 1970s Australia. The ABBA poster in Mary’s bedroom feels more significant than a mere callback to Toni Collette’s starring role in Muriel’s Wedding. It’s part of a larger Australia Loves ABBA narrative that I swear is A Thing. It makes more sense every day that ABBA: The Movie was set in Australia. It’s the band’s home away from Sweden.

-Brandon Ledet