Author: swampflix

Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie (1990)

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threehalfstar

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Bridging the gap between the George A. Romero-produced television series of the same name & the start of Tales from the Crypt‘s television run, Tales from the Dark Side: The Movie is a delicious little slice of early 90s horror anthology. Besides the occasional shocks of gruesome practical effects & general Creepshow vibe, Tales from the Dark Side also features great performances from some always-welcome faces in all their 90s glory: Christian Slater in full Heathers mode, a handsomely young Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore in dated aerobics gear & the makeup of the undead (not at the same time, unfortunately), Deborah Harry as a killer housewife preparing to cook & serve a child for a dinner party, etc. Much like the look of its recognizable cast, it’s a very dated film in terms of visual & cultural aesthetics, but it’s enjoyably dated, as horror anthologies typically tend to be.

The aforementioned Deborah-Harry-preparing-to-cook-a-child story is the tie-in or “wraparound” segment that provides the framework for the film’s three short tales of terror. Adopting an Arabian Nights structure, Harry’s would-be victim tyke prolongs his precious little life by telling his captor scary stories while she prepares to cook him. At first he recounts the tale of a revenge plot that involves a mummy rising from the dead to mummify the living. Then he tells the story of a murderous cat squaring off with a mafia hitman. Finally, he concludes his stay of execution with a romantic tale that revolves around an artist & a winged demon that looks like some kind of cross between a gargoyle & a gremlin.

As with Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, and the Tales from the Dark Side television show, these stories have no significant connections outside of the wraparound segments, but rather function as individual short stories with their own narrative ups & downs. The opening mummy segment front-loads the movie with the recognizable talent & the most complex storytelling of the film. After that story concludes, it may initially feel like diminishing returns in the much sillier killer cat tale & the lackluster romance of the gargoyle yarn, but both sections actually pack a much stronger punch than they first imply. The narratives may become a little weaker as the films progress, but the intense body horror in their individual conclusions become increasingly intense. The cat’s final kill & the gargoyle’s transformation are both practical effects spectacles that rank among the best I’ve ever seen. Much like dated aesthetics & very loosely connected narratives, sitting through a couple underwhelming (and thankfully brief) stories to get to some prime gore also comes with the horror anthology territory. Tales from the Darkside might not be the most significant example of its genre, but it’s definitely worth a look for fans of the horror anthology in general, especially for that gruesome killer cat scene. That’s one for the ages.

-Brandon Ledet

Shaun the Sheep (2015)

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threehalfstar

Stop-motion animation masterminds Aardman Studios return to the big screen for the first time since The Pirates! Band of Misfits this year with the exceedingly charming Wallace & Gromit spin-off Shaun the Sheep. British audiences are likely to already be familiar with Shaun through his television show, but for casual, American Aardman fans this is probably the first introduction to the delightful little sheep. As always, Aardman delivers fantastic stop-motion work here, but although their films are consistently entertaining, there’s something particularly special about Shaun the Sheep that makes it feel like their best feature at least since 2005’s Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Because the movie is largely a non-verbal affair, its success relies entirely on visual comedy that feels like a callback to the silent film era & it’s incredible just how much mileage it squeezes out of each individual gag. It’s going to be difficult to determine just what children’s attention spans will survive that kind of antique entertainment, but for adult animation fans it’s quite a treat.

That’s not to say that the film is at all stuffy. It’s far more smart than it is intellectual. For every brilliant silent comedy gag (such as a black market in which ducks are paid in bread or the strange idea of birdwatching as a form of sexual voyeurism) there’s just as much pedestrian humor to be found in plumber’s cracks, farts, burping, and public urination. Children & adults both are likely to share a chuckle or two there, but I doubt many tykes are going to catch on to the on-screen references to films like The Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver, and The Terminator. There’s also a plotline that poses celebrity culture & social media as forces that turn people into sheep for trends & fads that may be a little more adult than the kind of humor you’d find in Ardmaan’s (much less satisfying) Pirates!, but it’s a thread of thought that is somehow a lot more cute than it is cruel. Even if some children can’t connect with Shaun the Sheep at every single turn, there’s easily enough universally enjoyable positive vibes in the film’s pop music montages (which at one point include a bah-bershop quartet & beat bah-xing), plot-summarizing rap song at the end credits (something I genuinely wish more movies would bring back), physical comedy, and potty humor to keep a lot of them entertained.

The story Shaun the Sheep tells is perhaps its least interesting aspect. The fish-out-of-water tale of a herd of sheep traveling to “The Big City” (which is not too dissimilar to “The City” in Babe 2) to recover their lost farmer/caretaker/best friend leaves a chaotic path of destruction & an opening for a newfound villain in a heartless animal control bounty hunter, but nothing too interesting in the way of narrative invention. I’ve never seen the Shaun the Sheep television show, but I’m assuming that the urban landscape is a break from the daily drudgery of farm life portrayed in the series, since that’s how the movie version begins. For newcomers unfamiliar with Shaun’s traditional farm setting, the story is more or less a loose framework that provides a platform for Aardman’s genuinely amusing line of nonverbal humor. Shaun the Sheep is cute, smart, and thoroughly hilarious from front to end. No matter whether the movie inspires you to erupt into belly laughs or mild chuckles, it’s one that’s near-guaranteed to leave you with a positive feeling.

-Brandon Ledet

She’s Lost Control (2015)

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twohalfstar

It’s difficult to tell exactly how much of my disinterest in She’s Lost Control has to do with my personal tastes, which lean towards excess over understatement, but there really isn’t much in this film for me to recommend. I didn’t exactly expect a bright, ecstatic affair from a drama about a sex worker ostensibly named after a Joy Division song, but She’s Lost Control still surprised me in just how lowkey & somber it could be from scene to scene. I didn’t particularly loathe the film at any point during its melancholy proceedings, but I didn’t engage with it much either.

As a sexual surrogate, the protagonist Ronah toes the line between therapy & sex work. She doesn’t have johns; she has patients. Early on in the film, when she proclaims “You pay me for my time but you can’t control how I feel” (in a speech she apparently delivers often), she’s already establishing that her clients are men towards which she has an incredibly vulnerable potential for emotional attachment. These are broken men with deep-seeded intimacy issues (such as a difficulty being undressed in front of a partner or a mental block when it comes to physical contact) that Ronah attempts to coax out of their well-guarded shells. Her vulnerability in these scenarios reaches a breaking point late in the film that feels simultaneously inevitable & brutally cruel.

There’s a lot of potential in these fragile, intimate moments, but first-time director Anja Marquardt does very little to tie their meanings into something more than “These things happen.” I’m sure that this was a deliberate choice & it’s one backed up by a similarly somber visual aesthetic, but I still found very few memorable moments in the final product, despite the great potential. Other folks more tuned-in to the gloomy, low-key indie drama as a genre might find something much more fulfilling here, but for me She’s Lost Control was essentially a gray wash of uncomfortable intimacy that signified little more than how cruel people can sometimes be when you make yourself vulnerable before them.

-Brandon Ledet

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

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fourhalfstar

I was at first a little overwhelmed by the idea of a N.W.A biopic stretching out for a 147min runtime, but as I was watching Straight Outta Compton in the theater its length gradually began to make total sense. It’s an incredibly thorough biopic, digging not only into the cultural & political climate surrounding the group’s origins, but also the aftermath of their falling out & disbanding. Even at 2.5 hours, not everything was covered & large swaths of historical accuracy were tossed aside in favor of a tight narrative & an indulgence in a killer 90’s aural & temporal vibe. Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant. When a sample wraps up the music video portion of the end credits by proclaiming “Damn, that shit was dope!” (the very same sample that concludes the song the film’s named after) it was difficult to disagree.

Because stories ultimately belong to those still around to tell them, the film’s narrative is undoubtedly bent towards the stories of Ice Cube & Dr. Dre, who are both credited as producers here. In a lot of ways they use the film as a sort of redemption piece, reshaping their personal history to include a reconciliation with departed group member Eazy-E, who lost his life to HIV-related health complications at a young age. The real-life tale as long as I’ve known it has been that the group never truly resolved their very public feuds (a deeply ugly mess of shoddy contracts, legal disputes, and diss tracks) while Eazy was still alive. The movie version cleans that mess up in an unbelievably tidy way perhaps more fit for the likes of a made-for-TV TLC biopic, but that tendency towards a clear A-B narrative feels entirely intentional. There’s a scene late in the film where Cube confronts Eazy for calling out his acting debut Boyz n the Hood for being “an afterschool special” & Eazy responds “I like afterschool specials.” The simple, clean redemption story Straight Outta Compton tells doesn’t feel at all far from that sentiment.

So according to this romanticized, cleaned-up folklore, Dre was the group’s seminal producer, Cube was responsible for its best writing, and Eazy held down the majority of the raw talent, street cred, and business acumen. Folks like MC Ren, DJ Yella, and The D.O.C. are not only sidelined, but sometimes they’re even downplayed as lesser talents to make the film’s holy gangsta rap trinity shine all the brighter. Yella, for instance, shoulders most of the blame for Dre’s involvement in the Prince-influenced, sexually ambiguous funk days of the Worldclass Wreckin’ Cru & other club gigs that required him to wear sequins & play mindless party records. Ren gets the real short end of the stick here, though, verbally thrown under the bus as an inferior lyricist that couldn’t hold down the crew after Ice Cube’s departure. As a fan of the group’s entire output (and Ren’s solo records for that matter), these claims sting a little, but just as the fudging of the Eazy redemption story makes for a clearer narrative, dissing Ren in the script does actually make sense story-wise (even if it’s a shame that he only raps a total of three verses in the entire film to make more room for Cube, Dre, and Eazy).

If the film didn’t capture the entirety of the group members individual nuances, it at least got the imagery down. Actors Corey Hawkins & O’Shea Jackson, Jr. look & sound incredibly similar to the roles they’re playing (Dre & Cube, respectively), with Jackson having the distinct advantage (and possible awkwardness) of portraying his own father. New Orleans native Jason Mitchell pulls the hat trick of not only looking & sounding like Eazy-E, but also outshining his fellow cast members as a damn good actor, bringing to life what turns out to be one of the group’s more interesting & complicated characters. R. Marcos Taylor & speaking of Love & Mercy, Paul Giamatti (playing infamous record industry tyrants Suge Knight & Jerry Heller) aren’t nearly as visually accurate in their roles as the film’s villains, but they do provide an all-too-believable menace to their scenes that allow them to get by more as archetypes than carbon copies. The only actor who looks jarringly out of place here is a brief appearance by an absurdly inaccurate Snoop Dogg, but that’s more than made up by the likeness of the rest of the cast, an appearance from a Tupac lookalike so accurate he could’ve been a hologram, and clips of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video shown at the end credits to remind you just how detailed the film’s attention to visual preciseness was.

Visual & historical accuracy aside, director F. Gary Gray should get a lot of credit here for creating a wildly entertaining biopic with exactly zero deviations from the genre’s format. This is a movie that somehow makes room to capture our current cultural 90s fetishization, ludicrously timely reflections on race-based police brutality that are sadly just as potent now as they were in the days of Rodney King, and an extended gag that calls back to the infamous “Bye, Felicia” line in Gray’s debut film (and original collaboration with Ice Cube) Friday. Instead of calling into question N.W.A’s more unsavory attributes, namely their misogyny & homophobia, Gray just lets them play themselves out. Misogyny is on display in hedonistic, music video style pool & hotel parties where women are treated like party favors (sometimes literally tossed around like objects) & homophobic rants are allowed to be voiced in Ice Cube’s infamous diss tracks & Eazy’s reaction to his HIV diagnosis. Straight Outta Compton makes no moral judgements about its subjects, but rather just more or less portrays them as they were.

There’s some glorification inherent to the biopic format here & a lot of ground was breezily glossed over (including contributions from names like Vanilla Ice, Bone Thugs, Above the Law, and J.J. Fad), but it’s unwise to nitpick too many of Gray’s decisions here, since the final product is so enjoyable & packed-to-the-gills as is. It’s not only successful as an aurally & visually beautiful slice of N.W.A fan service, but it’s also a great primer for younger folks who mostly know Ice Cube as an actor & Dre as Eminem’s buddy who peddles expensive headphones. Even as a longtime fan, I learned a thing or two along the way (most excitingly that Eazy-E once dined with President George H. W. Bush). Gray competently captures the social & political climates that gave birth to his infamous subject as well as the context of their dissolution’s aftermath (even if he intentionally fuzzes up the details in-between), but the story he tells in Straight Outta Compton is mostly remarkable in how fun & rewatchable it is without at all straying from its biopic format. He used an already well-established narrative structure as a bottle to capture the lighting that was what the made the group so special & their songs so endlessly listenable to this day. That’s no small feat & the final product ended up being one of my favorite trips to the theater all year.

-Brandon Ledet

l gatto a nove code (aka The Cat o’ Nine Tails, 1971)

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three star

Speaking of l gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails) in the book Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Argento himself referred to his sophomore follow-up to 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as one of the his least favorites from his canon. Released just 51 weeks after Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails is a weaker effort, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it is more grounded and follows a more linear narrative than Argento’s previous film. Where Plumage was impressive in that it already exhibited so many of Argento’s stylistic eccentricities, Cat almost seems like an earlier work, with mostly monochrome environments and a drab color scheme; whereas Plumage was populated by bizarre characters and situations (I still can’t get over the hermit painter who raised cats for food), Cat is much more straightforward.

The film follows Franco “Cookie” Arnò (Karl Malden), a blind retired reporter and caretaker of his young niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis). One night, he overhears a man in a car discussing blackmail; the next morning he learns that a nearby genetics research facility, the Terzi Institute, was broken into, but there is no evidence that anything was stolen. Still later, Lori tells Arnò that she recognizes the man from the car, Dr. Calabresi, as the victim of an apparent rail station accident, as this makes the front page. Arnò reaches out to Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), a journalist whom he previously met when Giordani was investigating the Terzi break-in, and discusses his suspicions: Calabresi was involved with the break-in, and he was killed in order to prevent his blackmail from coming to light. The photographer who captured the supposed accident is also murdered, garrotted and then slashed, as is Calabresi’s fiancee once she uncovers evidence that names the killer. Giordani strikes up a sexual relationship with the adopted daughter of the Terzi Institute’s founder, and Arnò sends Lori away as attempts to kill the two journalists mount.

Cat trades Plumage’s psychological reason for the killer’s murder for a physiological one, as the killer is hypothesized (and ultimately revealed) to have a genetic mutation of the chromosomes, possessing XYY genes. The belief that this mutation leads to a predisposition toward violence has long since been disproven; it cropped up in the trial of Richard Speck (who was later found to have standard XY genes anyway), and still floats into the public consciousness from time to time, even featuring in an episode of Law & Order, long after everyone should have known better. This would seem to discredit the film’s premise, but modern sentiments can allow us to read the text as the killer learning of their condition and committing violent acts not because of their predisposition towards violence, but because knowledge of their genetic make-up allows them to act out in ways they could not before, essentially giving the murderer a reason to act on their desires, rather than an impetus for said desires. Still, it does date the movie in a way that other Argento films are not.

The performances here are stronger than in Plumage, but that does not always a great film make. Karl Malden is a stand-out, which should come as no surprise considering that his resume boasts On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Patton; his performance as Arnò encourages sympathy but not pity, and it’s impossible not to enjoy his screen presence. Catherine Spaak is underutilized as Terzi’s daughter, and it’s unclear if her coldness on screen is a result of a lack of talent for the craft or a deliberate stylistic choice. Even my brief synopsis above mentions her only in passing, as her contribution to the mystery is an obvious red herring; she could be removed from the film altogether, and this change would have virtually no effect on the outcome. Franciscus, for his part is well cast, and his range is greater than Plumage’s Tony Mustante, making Giordani a more compelling figure than Dalmas was; compare the scene in which Dalmas fends off the advances of an aging antique dealer in Plumage with the subtlety on display when Franciscus’s Giordani pursues a potential lead to a gay social gathering. He is clearly discomfited, but only on the personal level, not in the abstract, which is not only a mark in the actor’s favor but the director’s, as it demonstrates a positive departure from the way that homosexuals and other “deviants” were portrayed in Plumage.

Also telling is the way in which the murders are committed. As I wrote in my Plumage review, there has been no small amount of scholarship devoted to the sexual overtones of the slasher genre, with predominantly female victims and phallic murder weapons; here, however, the murders are committed with the specific goal of hiding information, and the victims are men as often as (or perhaps more than) they are women, and the woman who is killed onscreen dies in the same manner as the men: fully clothed, with her dignity, via strangulation (although her murder is, admittedly, more brutal and drawn out than those of Dr. Calabresi or the photographer). There are no scenes in which a woman becomes hysterical when trapped by the killer, or in which there is a component of lasciviousness. In fact, Lori, despite being a child, plays a very important role in noticing and gathering information that Arnò cannot because of his lack of sight. I honestly would have preferred to see more of this, as the older man/young woman mystery-solving duo is one of the elements that I love so much about my personal favorite Argento film, Phenomena, which we will be getting to eventually. Although Lori ends up becoming a hostage, this is less because of her sex and more because of her age, and it’s a bit of a surprise how much more progressive this film is than Plumage, especially since less than a year passed between the two movies’ premieres.

Cat isn’t a bad film; it has a great cast, a good mystery, and some great moments. Unfortunately, although this is a film not lacking for substance, its blasé cinematography is nothing new, and it lacks the stylishness that sets Argento apart from the herd (and the ending is so abrupt you’ll wonder if you missed something). Although I recommend the film for fellow Argento fanatics, and horror/slasher fans in general, home video releases of the film are generally abysmal. It seems that not a single VHS release escaped being trimmed, for censorship (of violence and homosexual themes) or to fit the length of tape in a videocassette, as was the case with JTC’s release. Despite advertising itself as being “fully restored,” Diamond Entertainment’s DVD release actually contained the same cut as earlier mangled VHS releases. Anchor Bay’s DVD of the film, which was what I watched, at least contains the full film; ironically, for a film with a disabled hero, there is no release of this film that would work for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers. Fans like me, who prefer to watch Argento’s films in Italian with English subtitles, are unable to do so–the only subtitles are translations of onscreen text. Blue Underground recently released a Blu-ray of the film, but I don’t know if this oversight has been corrected. Still, if you have the time, opportunity, and a copy of the film in its entirety, it’s worth a watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Subtle Terror of Babe 2: Pig in the City vs the Straightforward Terror of Pigs (1972)

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Although the idea of talking pigs in children’s media is not at all uncommon, Babe 2: Pig in the City is distinctive from its verbal swine brethren at the very least in its eagerness to terrify its pintsized audience. The only live-action talking-pig children’s movie that even comes close to Pig in the City on the terror scale is the 1999 made-for-TV adaptation of Animal Farm & even that horror show is softened a bit by the kindly wise voice of Kelsey Grammar. For more true pig-themed terror you have to look beyond Pig in the City‘s kids’ movie genre & venture into the seedy world of adult horror cinema. Horror flicks like Razorback & Chaw typically look for menace in the wild boar instead of the domesticated pig, which is a little besides the point here. 1972’s Pigs (alternately titled Daddy’s Deadly Darling) is about as literal you can get in the quest for pig-themed horror, delivering exactly what you’d expect, for better or worse, from a grindhouse exploitation film about flesh-eating pigs distributed on home video by infamous schlock-peddlers Troma.

There are of course innumerable, immediate differences in what you’ll find in these two wildly different features. The pigs in Pigs don’t talk (or think much for that matter). They’re also the main source of the movie’s terror, whereas in Pig in the City Babe is a unifying force that helps a hodgepodge gang of animals buck against the terrors of the outside world. Also, while Babe 2 is an adventurous film that explores expansive, otherworldly landscapes, Pigs rarely leaves the disgusting slop of its sty. That’s not to say, however, that they’re entirely separate form one another, at the very least thematically speaking.

Pigs is entirely faithful to its 70s schlock format, perhaps even painfully so. In its opening minutes, for instance, it powers through the rape-revenge plot of typical 70s exploitation fare in a (thankfully) breezy bout of exposition that does little more than get the requirement out of the way early. The Horror Movie Victim, Lynn, stabs her father to death after an attempted rape and is committed to a mental institution when she fails to cope with what happened. Thus completes her brisk transformation into an Escaped Horror Movie Crazy. Once on the lam, Lynn finds herself vulnerably alone in a seedy small town (much like how Babe is abandoned among reprobates in The Big City) where she quickly takes up a waitressing job at a bar owned by a fellow Horror Movie Crazy, who happens to have the curious hobby of murdering people & feeding their corpses to his pigs. There is an occasional subversion of schlock tropes here in that his flesh-eating pig farm is treated like no mystery & that instead of sizing Lynn up as a potential victim, he forms a makeshift family with her, essentially becoming her new father figure. Other than that, Pigs plays out almost exactly as you’d expect based on its genre & date of release.

Reading between the lines, there’s a surprising amount of connective tissue here. Both Pig in the City & Pigs have a strangely psychedelic quality to them that disorients their audiences. Pig in the City is, of course, more graceful in this effect, using a wide-angle lens POV of a child’s eye to overwhelm the screen with clowns, fires, confetti, and Nazi-esque dogcatchers. Pigs is much cruder in its psychedelia, assembling bizarre montages of pigs squealing while the heroine-murderess Lynn loses her mind. As the pigs feed on human corpses, their mouths soaked in blood, quick jump cuts & strange sound collages throw the viewer off-balance in unexpected ways, especially considering how cheap (in every meaning of the word) the film can be.

What’s even more surprising is the two films’ shared narrative focus on how familial bonds can be formed from the unlikeliest of sources, whether they be a roving gang of starving animals or a pair of mentally unhinged sociopaths who feed anyone they consider a threat to their pet pigs. The focus on familial bonds may be a result of the pig’s historical role as a farm animal & the farm’s domestic tradition (it’s a theme that’s certainly echoed in all of the non-Babe, pig-themed children’s media I’ve seen as well) or it could just be a simple coincidence. Either way it’s a theme that connects seemingly unreconcilable films otherwise related only through their live action pig subjects & the fact that they’re terrifying. If there’s ever a remake of Pigs (and anything’s possible in today’s remake market, mind you) it could up that terror factor even more by giving its flesh-eating pigs the power of speech. Especially if it keeps the squeal-laden freakout montages. There’s a lot a film like Pigs could learn from Babe 2, but a talking pig that also eats human flesh really sounds over the top in a way that I can get behind.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, George Miller’s Babe 2: Pig in the City, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s exploration of how it serves as a key to understanding Miller’s strange oeuvre.

-Brandon Ledet

Casting By (2013)

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threehalfstar

One of the most disingenuous things about the way we talk about cinema is the idea of the auteur. Directors have so much input on so many aspects of each production that it’s tempting (or at least convenient) to discuss a film’s merits based on the work of a single person, when it really takes hundreds of contributors to complete a picture. Films are one of the most collaborative forms of art our there, requiring the blood, sweat, and tears of a wide range of people to achieve success. There are many roles in film production that don’t get their proper due, but according to the documentary Casting By the most egregiously overlooked position of all is that of the casting director.

Casting By follows the history of the casting director credit in the film industry by focusing on the career of Marion Dougherty, a legend within the field. Among countless other household names, Dougherty can be credited for at least partially helping to launch the careers of Warren Beatty, James Dean, Robert Duvall, John Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Peter Falk, James Caan, John Travolta, Gene Wilder, Glenn Close, and the list rolls on infinitely. Due to the endless list of celebrities who owe at the very least a kind word or two about Dougherty for helping get their foot in the door, Casting By is packed to the gills with great little Hollywood anecdotes about an industry that’s known for refusing to change its ways (including an especially raw one from Richard Donner that had me on the verge of tears) & a woman who doesn’t take no for an answer. Dougherty not only has an immense talent for spotting potential stars in the raw, but she also stubbornly refuses to accept the roles women & people of color are relegated to in Hollywood’s margins. Casting By is not a particularly flashy documentary in any formal way, but it is one that serves the noble purpose of preserving an often overlooked legacy on film.

One of Casting By‘s strongest stances is a call for an Academy Award category to honor the work of the casting director & it makes a pretty strong case. There’s even a quote from Marty Scorsese, who has worked closely with Marion Dougherty many times in the past, early in the film that claims that casting is more than 90% of making a movie. It’s hard to argue with that point, especially when the film delves into the early days of studio contracts when on-retainer actors would play parts whether they were right for them or not, just because they were there. Dougherty came up through the time of New Hollywood, helping to define what it was exactly that a casting director does. She would help steer directors & studios into finding the right actor for the job, instead of the more traditional typecasting of actors based on physical appearance alone.

It’s a shame that there still isn’t a casting director Oscar to this day & Dougherty hasn’t at the very least been awarded an honorary Acadamy Award herself. Although Marion Dougherty has struggled for decades to earn the respect that casting directors deserve & to break up the boys club of film production in general, she has received few accolades for her work. It’s only right that Casting By serves as a document of her legacy, laying out in plain, simple words just how important she has been to the shape & climate of American film & just how vital the role of casting director that she pioneered is to the motion picture landscape.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)

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threehalfstar

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In my initial review I faulted the Norwegian horror comedy Dead Snow for keeping its Nazi zombie antics under wraps until far too late in its runtime. There was plenty of over the top cartoonish gore to be had in the film’s third act, but for some reason the it pretended that the audience didn’t know exactly what was coming (despite the prominence of Nazi zombies all over its advertising) & kept its monsters concealed in the dark for as long as possible. Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead ditches the first films’ reluctance to immediately devolve into blood-soaked chaos & instead opts for a constant barrage of Army of Darkness-type gore gags from front to end. Even the opening sequence’s recap of the first film’s plot is little more than a flimsy excuse to rehash all of the gore that’s already come as a primer for the entrails, severed limbs, and copious gallons of blood soon to follow.

Despite its eagerness to please on the gore front, Dead Snow 2 surely has its own problems. In addition to occasionally uncomfortable caricatures of hot nerd girls & sexually ambiguous Eurotrash, the film also has a tendency to self-referentially pat itself on the back. Martin Starr’s turn as a self-proclaimed zombie hunter (read: nerd fantasy fulfilment in the flesh) is often a mere conduit for the movie to proclaim its own uniqueness, going so far as to explicitly say in the dialogue that they’re inventing a new zombie genre. This may be awkward, but in a lot of ways it’s difficult to disagree. Red vs. Dead is far from the by-the-numbers retread of films like Wyrmwood. I can at least personally attest to having never seen Nazi zombie surgeons, Nazi zombie priests, magical Nazi zombie arms grafted onto still-human hosts, or gasoline syphoned through a corpses’ intestinal track in a movie before, much less all in the same picture.

As awkward as Dead Snow 2 may be at times, it’s difficult to deny that it’s thoroughly more entertaining than its predecessor. Even the bro-culture politics & self-referential zombie genre discussions have their roots in the first entry, so it’s difficult to get too down on its crudeness on that front. A non-stop gore fest about Nazi zombies attempting to reclaim their stolen gold & completing long-forgotten marching orders from Hitler himself is not the place I would typically look for a moral beacon  or an absence of hubris anyway. This is a live-action cartoon in which undead Nazis mercilessly disembowel the living from the opening minutes until they’re finally stopped in their tracks just before the end credits. Even when they dismember children or the handicapped (very rare targets for horror films, for obvious reasons) it’s easy to dismiss the cruelty of that behavior in the context of the film. I mean, they are undead Nazis after all. If you can stomach (or even frequently seek out) this kind of blindly brutal, played-for-laughs mayhem in your genre films, there’s no doubt that you’ll have fun with the buckets of blood Dead Snow 2 sloshes at the screen. In my case, I enjoyed it even more than the first one, which pretended a little too hard to be more tastefully restrained that it truly was at heart. With the second entry, taste has thankfully gone out the window entirely.

-Brandon Ledet

John Dies at the End (2012)

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fourstar

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I wrote a couple months back that the recent coming of age comedy Dope was a sort of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for 90s hip hop geeks & bucket hat enthusiasts. A snarkily overwritten, but genuinely sincere & visually expressive comedy for video game & manga-addled teens, Scott Pilgrim has become an unofficial benchmark for young adult media with highly specific target audiences. Viewed from that perspective, John Dies at the End can be understood as a Scott Pilgrim descendant for teen schlock junkies, a comedy specifically aimed at young B-movie nerds. That is, if John Dies can be understood at all.

The trick to appreciating John Dies at the End is allowing yourself to get on its wavelength & roll with the out of nowhere punches. The film does adopt a helpful interview & flashback story structure to vaguely rein itself in, but it’s mostly a loose collection of horror movie tangents that take on subjects as wide & as varied as zombies, alien invasions, exorcisms, demons, the Apocalypse, abandoned malls, heroic dogs, white rappers and alternate universes. The doorway to these swirls of madness is a mysterious needle drug known as “soy sauce”, the only real connective tissue to the film’s off-the-wall proceedings.

The episodic structure of John Dies would lend itself quite nicely to a Joss Whedon-esque television series, but in its cinematic form it feels much like a long string of practical jokes, cheekily playing with audience expectations at nearly every turn. Whether it’s a mustache suddenly taking winged flight or household objects transforming into floppy cocks, much of John Dies‘ humor is derived from the mischievous element of surprise. There are a few genuinely funny (and surprisingly vulgar) turns of phrase in the dialogue, like in the line “A toast to all the kisses I’ve snatched . . . and vice versa”, but it’s generally the film’s “Everything you know is wrong” edict that drives most of its amusement.

Just like how Scott Pilgrim felt authentic to its video game & manga roots, John Dies at the End is smart to stick to what makes B-movies great. Besides its genuinely eccentric weirdness, the film also boasts a tendency towards practical effects & grotesque creatures befitting even films like Possession or the best works of Cronenberg. John Dies even backs up its Scott Pilgrim connection by depicting the titular character playing guitar in a rock band, a trope also cringingly echoed in Dope. If any of the three films I’ve cited in this (admittedly loosely connected) genre appeal to me directly based on my personal tastes, John Dies at the End is an easy favorite. It’s overenthusiastic chase for a B-movie aesthetic is firmly in my wheelhouse & I ended up enjoying the film quite a bit once I gave into its purposefully messy charms.

-Brandon Ledet

Razorback (1984)

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threehalfstar

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An Australian horror film about a supernaturally enormous wild boar, Razorback should not be worth much more than its value as an 80s creature feature, but there’s something oddly special about it, especially in its visual palette. Although it is by all means a run of the mill horror film, at least narratively speaking, it also excels in monster movie mayhem & dreamlike visual trickery. Its skeezy tale of big city folks from New York being tormented by dangerous, near-feral Outback locals is far from extraordinary in the context of its genre & can often be downright repugnant in its cruelty. Still, Razorback endures as a unique oddity. The true draw of the film, of course, is the titular razorback, a gigantic beast whose remarkably horrific screen presence makes for one of the best cinematic monsters I’ve seen in a good while, but there’s also a much stranger undercurrent of psychedelia backing the boar up with a beyond-ominous atmosphere that helps the film outshine its mundane dedication to the horror tropes of its era.

The wild boar star of Razorback is far from the kind of cinematic swine you’ll find in titles like Babe or Gordy. It’s a disgusting, vile monster of a beast, tearing apart homes & vehicles and snatching up babies & women with wild abandon, his menacing tusks threatening to gore everything in site. There’s a certain amount of typical low budget monster movie concealment that keeps the razorback in the dark, hiding him in shadows or depicting action from a boar cam that captures his POV, but whenever he’s afforded screen time he shines as a grotesque menace. Given the unlikability of most of the film’s local brutes, it’s almost tempting to sympathize with the boar in all of his horrific magnificence. There’s even a scene where the hideous bastard prevents a near-rape, almost shining as an unlikely hero, but that sentiment is severely undercut when he immediately devours the would-be victim.

Even the schlockiest of horror flicks rarely can survive on the strengths of their monsters alone & although Razorback boasts some surprisingly effective creature horror, it’s the movie’s general atmosphere that makes its special. The film has an otherworldly eye for Australian wilderness, illuminating the setting’s wide open landscapes with strangely colored lights, animated skeletons, and humanoid pig faces. Just as a dehydrated traveler would hallucinate in the Australian wild, Razorback‘s visual eye is a horrifically detached-from-reality trip through a dangerous landscape ruled by dangerous reprobates & and ripped apart by a supernaturally dangerous boar that ties the whole thing together in a neat little creature feature package. It’s an alarmingly wild film (especially considering its strict adherence to genre tropes) that’s definitely worth a look next time you want to take a trip into the more sordid, but oddly psychedelic depths of the natural horror genre.

-Brandon Ledet