Author: swampflix

Sextette (1978)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

Mae West clung tightly to her sex symbol status until the day she died and that effort is more than evident in Sextette. West was 85 years old when she starred in what would be her final film, and while it’s definitely a train wreck, it’s the kind of trashy entertainment that I live for.

Marlo Manners (Mae West) is an international celebrity that just got married for the umpteenth time to Sir Michael Barrington, portrayed by a young Timothy Dalton (who would later star in one of my favorite film’s, The Beautician and the Beast). The newlyweds arrive at a lavish London hotel for a peaceful honeymoon, but all sorts of shenanigans occur because everyone wants a piece of Marlo, whether they’re an ex-husband or a news reporter. I didn’t think that West could get any stranger than her role as Leticia Van Allen in Myra Breckinridge, but she really outdoes herself in this one. She kept the same facial expression throughout the entire film while struggling to walk in her tight fishtail gowns and every single line from her character was a perverted one-liner. For example:

Sir Barrington: “I feel like the first man who landed on the moon!”
Marlo: “In a few minutes, you’re going to be the first man who landed on Venus.”

Classic Mae West! All of her jokes were beyond cheesy, but I laughed at just about all of them. There’s nothing better than an old lady with a filthy mouth. Rumor has it that she had an earpiece on during the production and the director, Ken Hughes, told her exactly what to say. I’m not sure if this is true, but it’s obvious that something fishy was going on due to the unnatural way she delivered her lines.

I can’t go without mentioning the numerous celebrity appearances: Regis Philbin, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, and Alice Cooper, just to name a few. Anytime a film has 5 or more cameos, it’s probably not going to be that good. This is especially true in Sextette. The film heavily relied on Mae West and the motley crew of celebrities for success, and not enough attention was given to the more important parts of the movie (dialogue, acting, etc.). There were also a couple of terrible musical numbers, and some of them even involved choreographed dancing! Of course, West got to do most of the singing, but I enjoyed Dalton’s version of “Love Will Keep Us Together” the most. He put Captain & Tennille to shame.

I think that Sextette was the best way to end West’s film career. She was a camp queen at heart, and her soul shines through every moment of this bad, bad movie.

-Britnee Lombas

God’s Not Dead (2014)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

campstamp

“You prayed and believed your whole life. Never done anything wrong. And here you are. You’re the nicest person I know. I am the meanest. You have dementia. My life is perfect. Explain that to me!”
– Mark

Friedrich Nietzsche first proclaimed “God is dead” in his seminal 1882 work The Gay Science. Finally, 133 years later, a counter-argument has emerged: a cinematic, philosophical treatise to reawaken our godless secular culture, the 2014 Christian drama featuring Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo and Duck Dynasty, the bluntly titled, God’s Not Dead.

Josh is an evangelical college student that makes the mistake of enrolling in a philosophy course taught by vocally atheist Professor Jeffrey Radisson. On the first day of class, the professor propositions his students that if they write “God is dead” on a sheet of paper and turn it in, they will pass for the semester. Seems easy, but Josh, the fearless God warrior, declines and stands up to the tyrannical, liberal heathen. This clash of faith and reason leads to a repetitive series of classroom debates and subplots that drive home the film’s central point (Atheists bad, Christians good) ad nauseam.

The way God’s Not Dead unabashedly stacks the deck against the nonbelievers is one of the only truly entertaining things about it. Throughout the film, Christians are portrayed as caring and virtuous while every single atheist is mean-spirited and morally bankrupt. Radisson belittles his religious girlfriend Mina in front of his colleagues. Josh’s wholly unsupportive girlfriend Kara breaks up with him because he will not renounce his faith. Mina’s atheist brother Mark is a sleazy businessman who won’t visit their mother suffering from dementia and dumps his girlfriend when she gets cancer. Without God, how can we make moral decisions? God’s Not Dead‘s answer is we can’t.

In their final debate, Josh crushes Radisson’s soul with the question “Why do you hate God?” The broken professor admits that he began to hate God after his mother died and storms out of the classroom amidst triumphant chants of “God’s not dead”. All this culminates in a particularly nasty ending that leaves Radisson fatally injured after a car accident. Luckily, there is a priest nearby who absolves him of his sins and converts him to Christianity moments before he painfully dies on the rain-soaked pavement. Does it matter if someone converts under duress? God’s Not Dead says no.

Evangelical Christianity celebrates its self-righteous victory as the film concludes with a performance by Christian rock band The Newsboys and an appearance by Duck Dynasty‘s Willie Robertson, who speaking on behalf of the always “tolerant” Robertson family, states that “reports of God’s death were greatly exaggerated.” The concert attendees are then asked to text the phrase “God’s Not Dead” to every contact in their phone. It’s an amazing evangelical strategy, but I suspect few people received these messages, as most viewers weren’t able to make it through the film’s almost two hour minute run time.

To be fair, the actual classroom debates in God’s Not Dead are pretty informative and do offer some balance and insight, but the film is still blatantly manipulative and the ridiculous ending negates much of the film’s redeeming qualities. Compared to other recent Christian exercises like Left Behind, God’s Not Dead has a decent script, is well acted, and shot competently but its sermon-heavy tone and overbearing, melodramatic moralizing will turn off viewers who don’t already agree with its message, even if they only tuned in looking for a laugh.

-James Cohn

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

witch

threehalfstar

campstamp

I expected to feel indifferent at best about the 2013 horror-action comedy Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. First of all, I had no idea it was a comedy. Something about the advertising made the film look like the dour psuedo-goth post-Dark Knight action snoozers I, Frankenstein & Dracula Untold. Instead, Hansel & Gretel has something essential that both of those films lack: a sense of humor. The idea of giving the gritty Nolan-Batman treatment to non-deserving pre-existing properties has the potential to be fun as long as the juxtaposition is humorous, something that helped make Michael Bay’s much-hated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot a fun watch for me. In giving the classic Hansel & Gretel fairy tale a gritty origin story, Witch Hunters nails the tone of how to make that proposition entertaining. It’s just as much Nolan’s Batman as it is Raimi’s Army of Darkness. Yes, the basic concept of the film is dumb, but it’s so deliciously dumb (and exceedingly violent to boot).

The traditional fairy tale part of the story is dealt with early & abruptly. Hansel & Gretel’s almost-got-eaten-in-a-candy-house childhood is but a brief prologue for the real story: after killing their first witch in that candy house, they grew up to be heroic action movie witch hunters who rescue orphaned children from the mythical wretches. The witches alternate from mildly annoying to legit terrifying here, but rarely overpower the appeal of the action movie tropes on display: cartoonish violence and posturing one-liners, like the two life lessons Hansel gathered from his childhood trauma: “Never walk into a house made of candy,” and “If you’re going to kill a witch, set her ass on fire.” The modern shit-talking is scattered among more archaic vernacular like “I accuse this woman of craft of witchery.” That dichotomy is the film in a nutshell: ridiculous, over the top action movie surface pleasures set in a world where it sticks out like a sore thumb. A surprisingly hilarious sore thumb.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is way more fun than it has any right to be. It’s surprisingly heavy on gore (especially decapitations), is unashamedly dumb (as most fun action movies are), and acknowledges its ludicrous superhero pedigree with casting choices like The Avengers’ Jeremy Renner and X-Men’s Famke Janssen. There’s also a super cute (and super huge) troll named Edward, some modern touches like Hansel’s need for insulin after being force fed candy as a child, and a laughable excess of late-90s goth aesthetic. What makes Hansel & Gretel enjoyable is its commitment to its own ridiculousness. It is a dumb action movie at heart and takes that role very seriously, as evidenced by the witch hunters’ machine gun bow & arrows and penchant for corny jokes. Jeremy Renner is no Schwarzenegger and there isn’t much going on below the basic genre surface pleasures, but it’s a very sleek, fun 90min popcorn flick that’s surprisingly efficient & self-aware. And dumb. The stupidity on display here is as relentless and delicious as being force fed fist-fulls of candy.

-Brandon Ledet

Night of the Lepus (1972)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

There’s a very strange inner conflict at work in the drive-in schlock classic Night of the Lepus. The film (also known as Rabbits) can’t decide if it wants to be a hip & trippy update to the sci-fi monster movie format (like its contemporary Phase IV) or if it wants to be a tragically square Rory Calhoun Western. The strange middle ground it finds between those two aesthetics is what partly makes it such a bizarre viewing experience. Well, that and the thousands of gigantic, murderous rabbits that plague the small ranching town it’s set in. Yes, Night of Lepus is a horror film about killer bunnies and there’s just as much tension between whether those bunnies are cute or terrifying as there is between the film’s dueling hip & square tones.

Posed initially as an allegory for over-population, Night of the Lepus immediately muddles its message with some musings on pesticides and reckless scientific research, to the point where no specific intent really holds water for the film. Here’s all you really need to know: a towheaded Rhoda Penmark-type accidentally introduces a chemical into the natural environment that causes thousands of wild rabbits to mutate into gigantic, bloodthirsty monsters. The most amusing part about this mutation is that the movie can’t decide exactly how large they are. The rabbits’ exact dimensions vary from shot to shot depending on the technique used to make them appear abnormally large. A lot of the film shows ordinary, cute-as-a-button bunny rabbits trampling all over an even cuter miniature of a small Western town but in other shots it’s grown adults in bunny rabbit suits tackling and swiping at the terrified citizens. This combination of effects is disorienting as well as alternatingly hilarious and terrifying. To the movie’s credit, they do find a way to make close ups of the bunnies’ blood-soaked teeth & paws genuinely disturbing, even if other scenes are just herds of adorable bunnies hopping across miniature sets.

Speaking of blood, the rabbit attacks in Night of the Lepus are surprisingly gruesome. The bright red acrylic that apparently everyone out West bleeds is splattered all over the film, sometimes during attacks, but mostly on the mangled corpses that the bunnies leave in their wake. This striking affinity for gore combined with weird nighttime shots of rabbits menacingly hopping to strange sounds, heavy breathing, and animal roars suggests a very strange atmosphere that the rest of the film just has no interest in keeping up. Janet “Psycho” Leigh, Rory Calhoun, and a dude that looks awfully similar to Rory Calhoun all play the material straight, like the rabbit attacks are just part of a particularly bizarre episode of Bonanza. Only the Rhoda Penmark stand-in, who of course feels no remorse for causing the deaths of hundreds of innocent people (and rabbits), gets in frequent laughs with her outrageously oblivious dialogue.

For the most part, Night of the Lepus is entertaining more in its indecision than its dialogue. Is this a Western or a monster movie? Is it more influenced by John Wayne or marijuana-smoking hippies? How large are the rabbits, exactly? Are they cute or terrifying? The answer to all these questions, confusingly, is a simple yes. Night of the Lepus is a lot of things all at the same time: both generic & bizarre, both adorable & nightmarish, both super cool & super lame. These inner conflicts are partly what makes it such a fascinatingly re-watchable cult classic. Well, that and the gigantic, murderous rabbits.

-Brandon Ledet

Fast Five (2011)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

In my review for the bottom-of-the-bucket sequel Fast & Furious (despite the misleading title, that’s the fourth film in the franchise), I called the film “unnecessarily dour”, which remains true, but that doesn’t mean it was entirely unnecessary. Fast & Furious worked as retroactive franchise glue, culling the scattered pieces of the first three films into a cohesive whole for the first time ever. While the first three installments seemed increasingly disinterested in constructing a consistent narrative as a set (with Tokyo Drift being the most hilariously detached of the bunch), the fourth was hell-bent on pretending that there was a grand purpose all along. It was not a pleasurable experience (there’s no reason it couldn’t have been fun while still being functional), but it did serve a purpose: setting the stage for Fast Five.

Fast Five picks up immediately where the fourth film left off, with newscasters (including Perd Hapley!) reporting on the disappearance of Vin Diesel & Paul Walker that concluded the last film, completing Walker’s transition from undercover cop to wanted man. Replacing Walker on the dangerous policing side of the occasion is a supercop played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. This is essentially the perfect role for The Rock, as he is allowed both to show his chops as a legit actor (his natural charisma is undeniable) and also as an action-film-ready superhuman muscle god. More importantly, an all-star crew of the gang/”family” members from the first four films are assembled here in the single best team-building montage outside of MacGruber. Tyrese Gibson & Ludacris return as a genuinely hilarious comedy duo, playing off of each other’s personalities expertly. Jordana Brewster is finally allowed behind the wheel again (speaking of natural charisma, I can’t explain exactly why I like her so much). Han (Sung Kang) again teases just when Tokyo Drift will occur in the chronology, just like last time. When a character asks him about this directly, saying “I thought you wanted to get to Tokyo?” Han responds “We’ll get there. Eventually.” That’s just gold. Diesel & The Rock’s onscreen interactions are pure gold as well, especially in a especially brutal fistfight that almost results in a bare-fists murder. There’s an overriding vibe of “the gang’s all here” that makes the film a fun, over-the-top ride of campy action.

Giving the cast a narrative reason to coexist was a somewhat important development, but what’s really important is that they’re firing on all cylinders as a group here. This is apparent as early as the opening heist, which is easily the most absurd action set piece of the series so far. It’s a glorious spectacle of a high speed train robbery that includes flying cars, flying Paul Walker, and a grand entrance in which Vin Diesel rips the wall off the side of a train. There’s a second over-the-top action sequence at the end of the film featuring an oversized vault being dragged behind a car like a wrecking ball, but even that scene has a difficult time topping the jaw-dropping opening minutes. In between those two points of widespread, car-driven mayhem, there’s a return to the torture scenes of the first couple films, a callback to the on-the-lens fecal splash of Tokyo Drift, and the highest kill count by gunfire of any film in the series so far, just endless scores of dead Brazilian cops & criminals left by the wayside.

There’s a lot of killer action movie surface pleasures scattered all over Fast Five, but that’s not what makes it special. What distinguishes the film is Vin Diesel’s Dominic’s sudden conviction that his gang of ragtag criminals and former cops is a “family”. Why is it suddenly so stirring when Diesel talks about family in Fast Five, so much more so than it was in previous installments? It’s because it feels like he truly believes it. As far as the franchise goes, the “family” in the first four films act like distant cousins who might see each other once a decade. Suddenly, in Fast Five it’s genuinely moving when Dominic talks about how his father taught him about the importance of backyard grilling, how a family always sticks together, and so on. It’s not a perfect film; it could’ve allowed more screen time for The Rock & (I can’t believe I’m saying this) more street racing and a ludicrous post-credits stinger has the gall to bring the dead back to life without explanation, but it was a huge step forward for the Fast and Furious franchise. Five films in, all the separate elements are finally clicking as a cohesive action movie unit. Where most extended franchises gradually unravel over the course of their sequels, this is one that took that time to find itself and cull its own “familial” mythology.

-Brandon Ledet

Fast & Furious (2009)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

onehalfstar

campstamp

Over its first three installments, the Fast and Furious franchise had very little concern for establishing a consistent narrative. Watching the films for the first time, it’s been difficult to imagine just how & when it got to the grand, sprawling-cast action spectacle promised in the trailer for Furious 7, as there was very little connecting the films besides a sports car fetish and an affinity for Corona. 2 Fast 2 Furious shared only one actor with its predecessor (face-of-the-franchise Paul Walker) and the third installment, Tokyo Drift, didn’t even have that much of a vague connection, but instead was only spiritually tethered to the rest of the franchise through the stunt casting of a rapper-turned-actor, in that case (Lil) Bow Wow. I loved Tokyo Drift for its lack of concern with justifying its own existence (and its voracious enthusiasm for driving sideways), but there wasn’t very far for the series to go as a cohesive unit by leaving that film . . . adrift.

The fourth Fast and Furious film, the succinctly titled Fast & Furious, tries to pull the series’ act together by working as retroactive franchise glue. In an opening high speed heist (an immediate callback to the first film), the original Furious couple of Dominic (Vin Diesel) & Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) make their triumphant return to the fold by robbing an 18 wheeler. This time, however, they have a new compatriot in their schemes: Han (Sung Kang), a very important player from Tokyo Drift who (spoiler) is supposed to be very dead. So, what does this mean? Is Fast & Furious supposed to be a prequel to the series? Not quite, since Paul Walker’s undercover cop shenanigans from the first two films have already taken place. So does that make Tokyo Drift a pseudo sci-fi car racing film set sometime in the near future? I buy that. I mean, they were driving sideways. This chronology is not-so-seamlessly (but very much amusingly) set up in an exchange where Vin Diesel’s Dominic tells Han “Time for you to do your own thing.” and Han replies, “I heard they’re doing some crazy shit in Tokyo . . .” They’re doing some crazy shit indeed, Han. First of all, they’re driving sideways.

The problem is that after these first ten minutes of retroactive narrative, Fast & Furious loses its sense of purpose. Setting the undercover police intrigue in the Dominican Republic, the film offers the franchise a new location, but not much else. There’s some nonsense about using liquid nitrogen to pull of heists, the only new toy for the cars is a GPS visualization (that plays into the series’ video game aesthetic, but really, it’s GPS; who cares?), and the movie introduces the idea that Vin Diesel’s Dominic has the ability to mentally reconstruct car crashes based on tire marks, but none of it really amounts to much. For the most part, the action is standard stuff you’d expect in any action franchise: Vin Diesel hanging dudes out of windows by their ankles, Paul Walker chasing criminals down back alleys in his tailored federal agent suit, lots of tumbling cars, etc. The best moment, action wise, is when Diesel does a controlled slide (Tokyo style) under a tumbling 18 wheeler, but that takes place during that saving-grace opening set piece.

Fast & Furious can’t even get its own franchise’s charms right. Besides there being no new shiny toys for the cars (unless you’re especially wowed by GPS), there’s no cartoonish warp speed during the street races, the leering lipstick lesbianism makes too big of a return, and although the rap rock is back (Hispanic rap rock this time) it takes a back seat to relentlessly sappy acoustic guitar work. The main thing it’s missing, however, is a sense of fun. Fast & Furious is just so unnecessarily dour, especially after the cartoonish excess of Tokyo Drift. If there’s one thing you want your mindless car-racing action movies to be it’s fun and Fast & Furious undeniably fails on that front. There’s some mild hilarity in its failure to achieve a serious tone, like in the exchange, “Maybe you’re not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you’re the bad guy pretending to be the good guy. You ever think about that?” “Every day.” For the most part, though, this tone just makes the film unbearable. There are a couple bright spots here or there, like the much-appreciated return of Jordana Brewster & the spectacle of the opening heist, but for the most part Fast & Furious is only concerned with herding the narrative cats of the first three installments. Once that business is out of the way the movie becomes exceedingly difficult to love. Hopefully it’ll serve as a bridge to better movies down the line, but when considered on its own, it’s not really worth its near two-hour runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

It Follows (2015)

/ swampflix / 24 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

Horror movie villains are often our sadistic, cinematic moral police, sent to punish the corrupt masses (especially attractive, fornicating teenagers) for their sinful behavior. The curse haunting the sex-obsessed teenagers in It Follows, however, is slower, more cerebral than Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. It values psychological over physical torture. Its horror is omnipotent, never ceasing. It’s the kind of moral police that watches you from behind a camera, following your every move.

At the center of the demon’s wrath is Jay, a 19 year old college student who enjoys her idyllic suburban neighborhood with her sister Kelly and friends Paul & Yara. They spend their fall days drinking on porches, watching 50s horror movies, taking collective naps. Innocent, naive, happy.

Their feeling of security is soon shattered following an initially innocent sexual encounter that ends with Jay being drugged with a heavy dose of chloroform. She wakes up half-naked, strapped to a chair, and told by her brief fling Hugh that she has been infected with a sexually transmitted curse. The curse can take any human form and stalks the stricken in calm walking tempo. Its touch means death. The only way to rid yourself of the curse is to pass it along to someone else. Have sex or be killed.

The ingenious premise of It Follows and strong stylistic vision of director David Robert Mitchell turn Jay’s mundane suburban surroundings into a playground for dark forces. The curse takes shape in variety of ways; an abnormally tall man with his eyes gouged, the methodical walk of a naked demon woman. As these terrifying images invade her picturesque world, the juxtaposition makes them even more disturbing. The way the story unfolds in It Follows keeps you intrigued but doesn’t go into too much detail about the true nature of the curse. This keeps the curse vague, menacing. A sense of permanent dread and anxiety hangs over the movie. Rich Vreeland, stage name Disasterpiece, also kills it with his strange, ominous soundtrack that is reminiscent of not only John Carpenter, but video game music as well.

It Follows doesn’t get everything right. It loses momentum at several points and builds toward a somewhat tepid climax, but these are small grievances. Overall it is an exceptional horror film that plays around with horror genre tropes, but feels modern instead of regressive. There is also potent subtext about the nature of our sexual attachments and intimacy anxieties. The film can also be interpreted as a metaphor for AIDS and other STDs. Other movies like the body horror flick Contracted (about a zombie STD) have also played around with these themes, but none feel as refreshingly original as It Follows. If nothing else, it’s a convincing argument for abstinence if I’ve ever seen one.

-James Cohn

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

Tokyo Drift, the third installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, is not a particularly unique film when considered on its own merit, but it is very much an outlier in the series it’s a part of. The first two Fast and Furious films are undercover police thrillers about trust & family and the criminal world of California street racing. Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, is about a high school reprobate’s struggle to find The Drift within. The Drift, in case you somehow didn’t already know, is the ability to more or less drive sideways, something Japanese teens are apparently very good at. The Drift also serves as some kind of metaphor for growing up or taking responsibility or something along those lines (with a direct reference to The Karate Kid for full effect), but one thing’s for damn sure: it has nothing to do with the world of the Paul Walkers, Vin Diesels and Tyrese Gibsons of the first two films. There’s a hilarious last minute cameo that attempts to tie it into the rest of the series, but for the most part Tokyo Drift is a free-floating oddity, just sort of . . . drifting out on its own, disconnected. It’s also a genuinely fun bit of trash cinema.

Although there’s very little narratively connecting Tokyo Drift to its predecessors, it does share a lot of their surface pleasures: it brings back the rap rock from the first film (with Kid Rock in this case), it adds new toys to the vehicles (this time a revolving sports car vending machine, 3-D paint jobs, and nitros tanks shaped like champagne bottles), and the cars reach the cartoonish, blurred warp speed that the series finds so fascinating (although this time they’re moving sideways). The most important connective tissue here, however, is the stunt casting of a rapper in a supportive role. The first film had Ja Rule, the second had Ludacris. Tokyo Drift has (Lil) Bow Wow, playing a wisecracking sidekick who winks at the camera, delivers one-liners like “Japanese food is like the Army: don’t ask, don’t tell,” and refers to the Mona Lisa as that lady who’s smiling all the time. In the previous two Fast and Furious films Paul Walker served as the only common element between them; in Tokyo Drift, Bow Wow’s stunt casting makes that connection even more tenuous.

Substituting Paul Walker in the central role is the aforementioned teenage reprobate Sean, played by Lucas “The Kid From Sling Blade” Black. Never you mind that Sean is easily in his mid-twenties (and the rest of his American high school classmates are nearing their thirties). He’s a teenage dropout who burns his last chance for redemption in an opening street race with Zachery “The Kid From Home Improvement” Ty Bryan in an attempt to “win” his opponent’s girlfriend. By the time the girlfriend in question declares “Looks like I got a new date to the prom” it’s more than fair for the audience to ask “Who are these people?!” The answer to that question never comes (although their connection to the franchise is hinted at in that all-too-important last second cameo). Saved from going to jail for his street racing transgressions by his leopard print hussy mother, he’s promptly shipped off to Tokyo to live with his military daddy, who really only exists to occasionally give the film some girl group song levity in lines like “It was either this, or juvie hall” and “Have you been racing, Sean?” Sean himself isn’t a particularly essential addition to the Fast and Furious world, but it is amusing to hear him pronounce Japanese words in a thick Southern accent once he reaches “The Drift World” and the idea of a girl-group style teenage bad boy looking for his inner Drift headlining one of these movies is a bizarre enough detail on its own regardless of execution, given how far removed it is from the undercover cop intrigue of the rest of the franchise.

Besides Bow Wow’s antics and Sean’s extended screen time, the real draw of the film is The Drift World itself. There’s an unashamedly trashy pleasure in Tokyo Drift’s world of Japanese sports cars sliding sideways in parking garages and down mountainsides, its Yakuza members who speak English even when they’re the only people in the room, and the live-action videogame feel of its downtown street racing. There’s a few innovations to the format here: it’s surprisingly the first film in the franchise to feature a car being built from scratch via montage; spectators discover a way to watch an entire race through a series of flip phones; this has got to be the only Fast and Furious movie to feature a Shonen Knife song on the soundtrack; and I’m pretty sure that during the opening race a smashed porta potty splashes digital feces on the camera lens. The most entertaining part of Tokyo Drift, however, is how little it is concerned with engaging with the rest of the franchise at all. It’s its own little side story about a young Southern boy trying to make his way through the class struggles of two worlds-apart high school hierarchies. Does he ever find his inner Drift? Yes, but does he get the girl? You betcha. As Sean himself says in the film, “It’s not the ride, it’s the rider,” and Tokyo Drift takes that lesson to heart, using the franchise as a vehicle to create its own space as a ridiculous, surface-pleasures action thriller with some ridiculous one-liners, a car racing fetish, and career high moment for rapper-turned-actor Not-So-Lil Bow Wow. I’m a little surprised by how much that formula worked for me and it ended up being my favorite film in the series so far.

-Brandon Ledet

Mall (2014)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

Last summer I attended a Linkin Park concert in Houston, Texas and before the concert began, there were a buttload of advertisements for Mall. I was really confused as to why a film was being advertised at a concert, but I later discovered that Linkin Park’s DJ and sampler, Joe Hahn, directed the film. He also directed some of Linkin Park’s best-known music videos, such as “Numb,” “From the Inside,” and “ Somewhere I Belong,” so I wasn’t really surprised to find out that he directed an actual feature-length film. As embarrassing as this may sound, the main reason I decided to watch Mall was because Mr. Hahn directed it. Interestingly enough, it was very similar to a Linkin Park music video, due to its slow motion action scenes, futuristic visual features, and soundtrack composed by members of Linkin Park along with Alec Puro (drummer of Deadsy).

Mall is based on a novel of the same name by Eric Bogosian. The film follows the lives of several individuals that connect once a meth addict shoots up their local shopping mall. The film does a great job with bringing attention to the subplots of each individual character without losing focus on the mass mall shooting, but the film does have its share of problems. The biggest problem is that the script is poorly written. It’s difficult to keep up with what’s happening because there’s too much going on and none of it is very interesting. On a more positive note, the film’s visual elements were excellent. Mall is actually kind of similar to Blood and Black Lace (April’s Movie of the Month) because it is a film worth watching for the visuals rather than the story.

I can’t go without mentioning that the one and only Gina Gershon makes an appearance in the film as Donna, a dissatisfied suburban housewife. This role was perfect for Gershon and she was definitely one of the strongest actors in the film. While her character was my probably my favorite, she hasn’t come very far since Showgirls. Yes, she’s still the campy hot mess that I fell in love with years ago.

Unfortunately, Mall wasn’t as good as I expected it to be, but it certainly wasn’t terrible. It falls right in the middle, making it an “ok” film. The underwhelming script and lack of buildup are overshadowed by the amazing cinematography, so it’s definitely worth a watch. A lot of people are going to hate this film, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Mall is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Movie of the Month: Blood and Black Lace (1964)

/ swampflix / 32 Comments

EPSON MFP image
Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made James & Brandon watch Blood and Black Lace (1964).

Britnee:
Mario Bava’s celebrated Italian thriller, Blood and Black Lace, is a landmark in horror cinema and one of the earliest giallo films in existence. It’s also considered to be the first “body count” horror film, so we can thank Bava for all of those campy, raunchy 80s slasher flicks. Watching this film is like taking a walk through an art gallery. It’s chock-full of rich colors, eerie scenery, deep shadows, and impressive camera angles. The outstanding cinematography alone is a good reason to watch the film. I have a special place in my heart for this Bava masterpiece and I’m so thrilled to present it as April’s Movie of the Month.

Blood and Black Lace is set at a fashion salon in Rome that is full of beautiful, young models, but there are quite a few secrets hiding beneath all of their glamour and charm. The models begin to be brutally murdered by a faceless killer (once a very important diary goes missing) and when I say brutal, I mean brutal. These gruesome murder scenes are very bold and in-your-face, which was not very common for films in 1964, but the murder scene shots are executed in such a way that they are breathtakingly gorgeous. After re-watching the film with the Swampflix crew, I realized how the models in the film were more like movie props than actual characters, much like the multicolored mannequins they were surrounded by in the salon. They lacked personality and character development, but I think that’s something that Bava did intentionally.

Brandon, do you agree that the ill-fated models were merely props? If so, what do you think Bava was attempting to convey by doing this?

Brandon:
What are models if not moving, breathing mannequins? I think you’re absolutely right to believe Bava was drawing that connection. Aside from their individual reactions to the discovery of the first victim’s diary, there isn’t much to distinguish one model from another outside their looks. The fact that he chose fashion modeling as the movie’s backdrop in the first place is not only calling attention to the fact that most of the movie’s charms are in its stylistic flairs, but also that the characters are mere mannequins in motion, personality-free objects meant to put Bava’s visual fashion on display. Even the film’s killer, whose face is entirely flat & featureless, is used as a prop here. The killer’s look is about as close to a mannequin as one could get. Bava makes no bones about the fact that his characters are there as both plot devices & living, breathing decoration.

As much as I would like to argue that he made the female characters especially featureless as a comment on sex politics (this is a world where it’s totally cool to call your lover a “little idiot” after all), I believe there’s a much simpler explanation for the women’s lack of character development: misdirection. The 50 years of murder mysteries that followed Blood and Black Lace may have somewhat prepared us as a modern audience for the final couple of twists at the end of the film, but Bava does pull off a clever bit of misdirection with his characters. By leaving the women somewhat blank (although they are awfully interested in that diary) he allows them to fade into the background a bit, never to be considered as suspects in the murders. Later, when the murders continue despite the male characters all being jailed at once it feels like a shock that a woman might be involved. And then it gets even more confusing when the most likely female suspects begin to drop off like flies. Blood and Black Lace may be rightfully remembered most for its intense visual style, which heavily influenced many giallo films to come, but its central mystery cannot be completely discounted as a major draw to the film.

James, do you think that Bava finds a good balance between paying attention to the film’s whodunit murder mystery & its visual eccentricities, or does one overpower the other?

James:
I definitely think that Bava’s visual style overshadows the movie’s central murder mystery but agree with Britnee that this was mostly intentional. The long tracking shots, oblique camera angles, and lurid lighting choices were, for me, far and away the most noteworthy aspects of the film, with the police procedural and central mystery seeming secondary. Although, it must be noted that the effective twist ending does make up for some of that. As I dug around for information on the influential director, I came across this quote that confirms that Bava felt the same way. In regards to Blood and Black Lace, Bava was “bored by the mechanical nature of the whodunit and decided to deemphasize the more accepted cliches of the genre”.

Instead of developing complex characters or an intricate plot that was central to these kind of films in the past, Bava focused on pushing the genre to its limits by stepping outside the accepted boundaries of sex and violence. This seems to further the case that Bava not only invented giallo films, but also slasher flicks, which are basically whodunnits with lots of murder and sex. Blood and Black Lace has plenty of both and what I really appreciated about the film was how it mixed these lowbrow, sensationalist tendencies with high art, something Dario Argento was a master at as well.

Britnee, what do you think of the way Bava mixes lowbrow with highbrow?

Britnee:
Personally, I think Bava did an exceptional job making the film’s uncultured components ultra chic and sophisticated. Blood and Black Lace is a refined slasher flick that pairs well with fine wine and fancy cheeses. When I first viewed the film, I couldn’t figure out why the production was so classy and not the sloppy, morbid mess that I expected it to be. Now, I have a much better idea of the reason why this film is so tasteful. The choices that Bava made for the visual aspects of the film transforms what could’ve been a just another crude horror movie into a literal piece of art.

Speaking of visuals, color plays such an important role in Blood and Black Lace. I noticed that there is a particular color that is prominent with some of the victims, and the color is present in the lighting, props, costumes, etc. For example, Tao-Li wears a lot of white clothing and is killed wearing white lingerie in an all-white bathroom. We didn’t really intend to have our Movie of the Month choices connect with one another, but there is a definite connection between The Masque of the Red Death and Blood and Black Lace when it comes to the color-coding that takes prominence in each film. I don’t believe that The Masque of the Red Death film had any impact on Blood and Black Lace because both films were released in 1964, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the colored rooms in Poe’s famous tale influenced Bava’s masterpiece.

Brandon, since you are the expert on The Masque of the Red Death, I was wondering what you thought of this connection? Is there even a connection between the two films at all?

Brandon: Like you said, the two works were released more or less as contemporaries so it’s less likely that one influenced the other and more just a coincidence that both Corman & Bava had an intense interest in rich, saturated color schemes. It’s obviously possible that Bava could have been influenced by Poe’s classic tale (I know that one was a stand-out favorite for me as a teen, even when it was assigned reading in countless English classes), but the connection might be more simple than that. By the mid-60s Technicolor film prints had more or less fallen out of fashion with major studios (because of the time & money involved, if nothing else) but both Masque & Black Lace are holding on to the saturated color associated with the Technicolor technique. Once a practical process used to bring vibrant color to early films, Technicolor was later used by Bava & Corman, among others, as more of an artistic aesthetic.

Bava’s exploitation of the rich color of Technicolor prints was put to great artistic effect in horror classics like Blood and Black Lace, The Whip and The Body, and Planet of the Vampires. It’s a stylistic choice that not only visually connects it to The Masque of the Red Death, but also establishes it as an early touchstone of the giallo genre. It’s not at all surprising that one of the final Technicolor transfers was used by Bava-descendent/giallo legend Dario Argento to produce his best known film, Suspiria. Bava’s attention to color in Blood and Black Lace is echoed through almost every giallo film that followed it, especially in Argento’s work.

James, besides the rich, saturated colors in Blood and Black Lace, what other elements of the film do you see passed down to the giallo movies that followed it?

James: The technical aspects of Blood and Black Lace are the easiest to spot in the gaillo films that followed. Dizzying cinematography, off kilter camera angles, bizarre framing, and violent close ups are used almost universally by other gaillo filmmakers, though few apply the surreal art house flair so effectively as Bava and Argento. I suspect Bava’s art house tendencies are also the reason for the film’s disorienting, somewhat disjointed murder mystery, another element I’ve seen in a genre that focuses more on style than plot and character development. Blood and Black Lace‘s lurid mix of eroticism and horror has also influenced countless films in and outside of the gaillo genre, the paranoia surrounding a masked killer preying on beautiful women being a recurring theme in gaillo and slasher/splatter movies of the 70s and 80s.

Lagniappe

Brandon: The one thing I’m surprised we didn’t touch on yet was the music in the film. Although the stylistic violence, the mentions of cocaine abuse, and the intrigue of the murder investigations suggest a morbid affair, the score relies on a very swanky brand of lounge music that makes the movie feel a lot goofier than it would look on paper. The disparity between the swanky score & the severity of the plot is apparent from the get-go, with the actors/characters being introduced in the opening credits as if they’re starring in a particularly violent 60s TV show about police investigations instead of a proto-slasher art film. It eventually fades into some more mood-appropriate chamber music late in the film, but the generally lighthearted nature of the Blood and Black Lace‘s soundtrack is just as strange of a detail as its brutal-for-its-era violence or Bava’s penchant for saturated colors in his lighting.

Britnee: Blood and Black Lace is really all about the visuals. Ingenious camera work and the innovative use of vivid colors steal the show and outshine all other aspects of the film. The plot isn’t horrible by any means, but it’s definitely not the backbone of this movie. Actually, I enjoyed the weak plot because it draws more attention to the film’s groundbreaking visual elements, and this serves as a reminder that there’s more to a film than just its storyline. Kudos to Bava for being brave and thinking outside of the box.

James: Considering that Blood and Black Lace was released in 1964, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to call the movie groundbreaking. The way the film focuses more on the gruesome killings than the characters and its unsettling erotic violence must have shocked audiences in the 60s, but it set the precedent for the next 20 years of horror films (at least). I was really drawn to Bava’s mixture of art house theatrics and lowbrow subject matter and admire his technical chops and over the top stylistic tendencies. Blood and Black Lace was a great introduction to an influential director, and I can’t wait to delve deeper into Bava’s filmography.

Upcoming Movie of the Months
May: Brandon presents Crimes of Passion (1984)
June: James presents Blow Out (1981)