Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Saturday (December 2nd) at the twentieth annual New Orleans Bookfair along with a bunch of other super cool book & zine exhibitors. We will be selling the print versions of five Swampflix zines, including a brand new “flash art” collection of hand-drawn illustrations from past reviews.
The New Orleans Bookfair will take place on Saturday, December 2, from 11am-4pm at the Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library (219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112) downtown.
One great thing about the Awards Season ritual is that it sets aside a commercially viable space for traditional melodramas, which have otherwise been banished to the depths of Lifetime & Hallmark television broadcasts. The only way you can still attract a sizeable audience to the grandly emotional domestic dramas Hollywood used to routinely market as “women’s pictures” is to save them for Oscar-qualifying runs in the last month of the year, when interviews with their stars are suddenly headline worthy news items instead of background promotional noise. In general, that’s all the Oscars are good for anyway: clearing out a little space in the calendar for wide audiences to discuss & celebrate movies outside the usual big-ticket tentpole IP. Few genres benefit more from that space than the emotional-breakdown acting showcases and lavish period pieces that are traditionally marketed to women, though, if not only for their value as easy filler for Best Actress and Best Costume Design awards ballots. It’s the most blubbering time of the year, and I’m always in need of a good cry.
If there’s any working director who understands the artistic value of the woman’s picture, it’s surely Todd Haynes, who was effectively anointed this generation’s Douglas Sirk after his period-piece melodramas Carol & Far from Heaven. Haynes worked his way back into Awards Consideration this year with May December, a film that purposefully, perversely plays with the hallmarks of modern melodrama in the director’s signature style. The film stars Natalie Portman as a method actor studying the quirks & mannerisms of the real-life tabloid headliner who inspired her latest role, played by longtime Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore. Moore plays a notorious Movie-of-the-Week topic due to the sordid formation of her family, which started in the 90s when she had an affair with a 7th grader, birthed his twin children behind bars, and then married him after prison to cover up the abuse with the cultural fix-all of good old fashioned family values. Portman promises to give Moore’s . . . unique family history the thoughtful, empathetic representation onscreen that was missing from its earlier, trashier depictions, but in the process of studying her subject, she uncovers ugly, festering truths just beneath the peachy family surface: Moore’s continued abuses of manipulative power, the young husband’s stunted emotional development in the years since the crime (played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Charles Melton), and her own twisted attraction to the role.
If there’s anything surprising about May December‘s stature as a serious Awards Contender, it’s that Haynes tells its story through disposable TV Movie aesthetics. Usually when a great directors’ film festival darling gets sidelined on Netflix it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny. Haynes calls attention to the heightened melodrama of the piece by ironically deploying soap opera music stings over minor, everyday domestic concerns, the same way Moore’s character violently sobs every time she overbakes a cake or forgets to buy enough hotdogs for a family cookout. The director is at his most prankish here, riffing on the real-life tabloid story of child rapist Mary Kay Letourneau in a parody of Movie-of-the-Week melodrama, revealing the bizarre details as Portman does research by literally flipping through a tabloid. He takes the emotional pain of the story seriously, though, the same way his Barbie-doll retelling of Karen Carpenter’s tragic life’s story in Superstar is far more dramatically severe in practice than its tongue-in-cheek presentation sounds in the abstract. The hazy soap opera filters, icy camp performances, and throwaway jokes about dwindling hotdog supplies set May December up to be a perverse laugh riot, but Haynes’s love for melodrama is too sincere for things to devolve that way. It’s the same effect as ironic audiences settling in to laugh at the “No more wire hangers!” histrionics of Mommie Dearest, only to be confronted by the film’s non-stop onslaught of genuinely upsetting domestic abuses.
As much as I appreciate Todd Haynes’s unique brand of weaponized irony, I can’t say that May December is my favorite melodrama that screened for critics this Awards Season. That honor belongs to the culinary period piece The Pot-au-Feu, which will eventually be released in the United States as The Taste of Things. The film is a romantically penned love letter to Juliette Binoche, just as every Todd Haynes film is a loving tribute to Julianne Moore. Binoche stars as the most underappreciated chef in 19th Century France, doing all of the complex, hands-on kitchen work that gets the master of her house recognized as “The Napoleon of Gastronomy.” That restaurateur (Benoît Magimel) acknowledges her value as a culinary artist, at least, and he spends every minute they’re not cooking together begging for her hand in marriage. Binoche prefers to let her cooking do the talking and expresses her mutual adoration for her employer through the beauty & poetry of her food. Only he and a small social club of nerdy gourmets (essentially, the world’s first foodie podcast) truly understand her value in the field, but the audience is invited to share in their awe. The emotions in the household get exponentially bigger as the two chefs’ mutual yearning starts to border on ritualistic kink, and it all eventually boils over into a fiery romance with no safety valve. Love, life, and tragedy inevitably ensue.
The Taste of Things is an aggressively sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals – very likely the best film about food since Pig. Its honeyed tone & lighting are absurdly cozy & warm, with handheld camerawork that takes the term “food porn” as literally as it can without indulging in sploshing. Still, the big emotions of its central tearjerker romance place it just as firmly in the melodrama category as Haynes’s latest, which is much colder & more detached. Both are great Wine Mom movies, but only May December plays into that genre with ironic, Lifetime-parodying self-awareness, while The Taste of Things is achingly sincere & straightforward in its full-hearted commitment to melodrama. Maybe that commitment makes it more mawkish & cliche, but it also makes it more emotionally satisfying when it violently yanks your heartstrings the way only the best women’s pictures can.
There are a few tried & true Awards Bait subgenres that always get released in bulk this time of year, in hopes of dredging up some much-coveted Oscar Buzz: the miserabilist drama in which glamorous movie stars bravely ugly themselves up to look like downtrodden commonfolk, the Wikipedia-summary biopic in which movie stars cosplay as recognizable historical figures through prosthetic “transformations”, the buttoned-up period piece that scoops up a couple easy Best Costume Design statues while no one is looking, etc. As much as The Academy has strived to change public perception of what qualifies as “An Oscars Movie” by diversifying its voting membership in recent years, we all still recognize Awards Bait when we see it. That’s what makes it so fun to spot the interlopers among traditional late-in-the-year releases – the trashy genre pictures that somehow get mismarketed as Serious Dramas for Adults to help fill out studios’ FYC publicity campaigns. Every now and then a sickly, grotesque psychological thriller like Jokerwill win a couple Oscars because it happens to star Joaquin Phoenix, who was grandfathered in as an Awards Contender from past, prestigious work. The Shape of Water, The Silence of the Lambs, Misery, Traffic, Training Day, Suicide Squad, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . . . There’s room for one or two trashy genre pictures to sneak into every Awards Season conversation, often resulting in the Oscars’ most controversial Major Category wins. Personally, I always find the chaotic discourse sparked by those lowly genre outliers amusing this time of year, since everything else about the Awards Season ritual feels so predictably repetitive & set in stone.
Since the hyperbolic decrying of Joker as “dangerous” and (more credibly) creatively bankrupt in 2019, I’m not sure there’s been a more divisive genre winner than Emerald Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar the very next year (among five nominations, including Best Picture). A bitterly funny rape revenge thriller with a music video pop art aesthetic, Promising Young Woman was mostly treated as a Serious Film worthy of awards consideration because of its relevance to #MeToo era feminism. If released in any other context than the Awards Season window the year Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison, it likely would have been ignored by the Awards Industry establishment, as most high-style, low-logic thrillers are. Instead, it became a hotly debated item of great political importance that year, picked apart for months by critics and the general commentariat for the ways its feminist talking points fall apart under politically informed scrutiny (especially as it resolves in last-minute copaganda). Just a couple years later, Fennell’s follow-up, Saltburn, is repeating the same pattern. An airport paperback mockbuster version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn is trashy, catty pulp that has the misfortune of being marketed & evaluated as Serious Art. It’s another deliciously styled, politically vapid thriller from Fennell, who still has yet to learn how to land a dismount in the last few pages of her screenplays but fills those pages with plenty eye candy to keep you smiling on the journey to that letdown. If released in the summer under any other director’s name, it would likely get by okay as Skinsploitation schlock, but the film festival & FYC awards screener ritual is unkind to that kind of beach-read indulgence – whether or not it eventually wins her a second Oscar.
I don’t think all of this instant, widespread scrutiny is healthy for Emerald Fennell’s art or career. Saltburn is an improvement over Promising Young Woman in most formalist contexts, but her loopy screenwriting impulses & confused politics persist here in a way that’s going to make her a repeat target for vitriolic discourse if she doesn’t start cutting her teeth on quieter projects. Here, she makes a grand political statement on the issue of Class instead of the issue of Misogyny, tracking the sinister social ladder maneuvers of a cash-strapped Barry Keoghan among the friends, family, and portraits of “dead rellies” on Jacob Elordi’s grand, titular estate. Anyone who’s ever seen a class-interloper thriller before knows exactly where Saltburn is going about halfway into the first act, so it’s unclear how shocking the details of Keoghan’s violent climb up the University of Oxford social ladder are supposed to be as they’re gradually doled out as gotcha reveals. The details of his obsessive, covetous attraction to Elordi’s dirtbag rich boy hunk are a fun diversion from the FYC season’s traditionally stuffy, buttoned up fare, though, especially by the time Keoghan is slurping up Elordi’s bathwater after a vigorous jerk off session. There’s a lot to be annoyed about in Saltburn if you’re looking for critical ammunition: the impatient trailer & recap montages that bookend the story, the choice to frame the grand opulence of its vast exteriors in Academy Ratio, the anachronistic needle drops that fall outside its 2006 setting, etc. I guess I just didn’t take it seriously enough to be enraged by it, the way much more serious critics are. To me, it falls more in the trashy, disposable lineage of a Gossip Girl, Cruel Intentions,Fierce People, or Do Revenge than in the lineage of great works like Mr. Ripley or Kind Hearts & Coronets. It’s dumb, harmless fun.
I at least understand how Fennell’s precedence as a promising Oscar Winner earns Saltburn an automatic slot in the Awards Season conversation. The Thomasin McKenzie vehicle Eileen is more of an enigma in that context, even though it’s the better film. Is it McKenzie’s association with recent (and likewise divisive) Oscar-winner Jojo Rabbit? Is it the venerated movie star glamour of co-star Anne Hathaway? Hard to say. The marketing for Eileen seems to be leaning on its Christmastime setting and its themes of lesbian obsession to position it as an indulgence in Carol cosplay. Calling it “Carol for perverts” might be bordering on redundancy, so maybe let’s settle for “Carol as dime store paperback noir.” It’s as if a Patricia Highsmith obsessive found Todd Haynes’s adaptation of The Price of Salt a little too classy to properly represent her work, so it was time to dirty up her reputation again. As soon as its title card materializes in throwback 40s noir font, it’s clear that the movie is having fun with familiar genre tropes, resurrecting an outdated mode of crime thriller screenwriting in seedy homage. What follows is a fun, loopy, perversely detailed daydream that doesn’t make much sense in the context of real-world logic, but follows the sweaty, impulsive logic of noir-era crime novels. It’s a story told through intrusive thoughts, illustrating the violent & sexual fantasies of McKenzie’s character as she imagines fucking or killing everyone within arm’s reach – depending on whichever desire applies. It takes a while for her to lose the distinction between imagined behavior vs. real-world action, saving the movie’s physically violent turn for third-act catharsis, but there’s plenty trashy, sordid imagery to string the audience along to that shocker conclusion.
Like Saltburn, Eileen is less commendable for the events of its plot than it is for the tensions between its two main characters. McKenzie’s protagonist is just as much of a violent little outsider weirdo as Keoghan’s; she just does as a better job of managing her violent impulses . . . for a while. She stars as a lonely small-town prison employee with no regular social interaction outside the verbal abuses of her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), who describes her as a non-person, the 1960s equivalent of an NPC. Filling her days with chronic masturbation and daydreams of bloodshed, she’s shaken out of her routine by the hiring of a new prison psychologist: a chain-smoking Hitchcock blonde played by an unusually devious Hathaway. The film’s visual echoes of Carol set up an expectation that Hathaway will be more involved in the central drama than she really is; she’s really just there to accelerate the obsessive, intrusive impulses of McKenzie’s imagination until tragedy inevitably strikes. Like in Saltburn, the lurid promise of their same-sex attraction is never physically consummated between bedsheets, but instead pays off in murder. Neither work could be credibly accused of “queerbaiting”, though, since their main characters’ sexual desires are explicitly detailed to the point of obsessive kink. It’s just that they’re both more psychological thrillers about intensely strange social outsiders than they are proper erotic thrillers about genuine, dangerous relationships. Most of the sordid action takes place in the characters’ warped imaginations. In that context, Eileen is the more satisfying movie of the pair, since it’s more of a thorough character study of a single person’s psyche than it is diagnostic of a larger, metaphorical social issue.
I don’t mean for this pairing to be predictive of either film’s Awards Season chances. I have no idea whether Saltburn or Eileen will make a dent on professional publications’ Best of the Year lists or stick around for the grueling gauntlet of Oscars Discourse. I’m only responding to them in this context because they were screened for critics’ Awards Consideration in the final month of the year instead of being unceremoniously ignored the way most trashy, pulpy thrillers are for rest of the calendar. The reasoning for that awards push is baffling to me in both cases, outside maybe the chance they give their actors to try out new, exotic accents onscreen (English & New English, respectively). I welcome the kind of discoursive chaos genre films like this bring to the Awards Season ritual, though, no matter how little they belong in conversation or how annoying that conversation gets when they happen to break through & win something.
You might assume that the ideal way to watch the 1985 supernatural Italo horror Demons would be to see it projected in the oldest operating cinema in town, in our case the original location of The Prytania. In the film, a group of strangers are gifted free tickets to a mysterious horror film at an ancient cinema that has materialized out of the urban void. That movie turns out to be a gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds. Seeing Demons in a classic single-screener cinema could only add an extra layer of uncanny meta-horror to that gory practical-effects display, especially if the cinema in question could cover the insurance costs of blocking the exits and cutting their customer’s cheeks at the box office.
It turns out there’s an even better way to see Demons, though, one that trades in the layered meta-aesthetics of a haunted cinema for the open-aired joviality of a family barbeque. Italian prog rock composer Claudio Simonetti recently toured one of the several undead mutations of his band Goblin to play live accompaniment for Demons in concert venues around the country, including The Broad’s outdoor extension The Broadside. The show was rigidly timed to a Tim & Eric style video package that opens with a postcard from Simonetti & Demons director Lamberto Bava, then concludes with a greatest-hits medley of 70s & 80s horror scores, most of which Simonetti composed under the Goblin name. In-between, the band played a reworked, bulked-up version of the Demons score to a full screening of the film, emphasizing both how few scenes prompted them to pause for dialogue and how frequently its now-anthemic theme is repeated for the gnarliest sequences of over-the-top gore. As for Demons itself, it’s got one of the greatest opening acts in all of nonsense Italo horror cinema, capturing the feeling of collectively dreaming at the movies without distracting itself with minor concerns like plot & coherence. Once the in-film movie projector and auditorium are torn apart there isn’t much glue to hold the whole thing together, though, save for the repetition in Simonetti’s synth riffs, so it was great to hear them cranked up to an obnoxious volume. By the end, the familiarity of those riffs gave the screening a celebratory, communal air – the culmination of a once-in-a-lifetime Halloween season of great movies screening at The Broad (including several directed by Demons producer Dario Argento).
Years ago, the hot horror-nerd ticket would have been to see the full classic Goblin line-up play a live score for Suspriria, a tour that (to my knowledge) never came through New Orleans. If you’re going to see “Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin” live instead (a variation of the band that only includes Simonetti from Goblin’s original membership), you might as well see them play a live score for Demons, since it’s a film that Simonetti scored after the legendary band had originally broken up. He might primarily be a solo composer, but you can tell Simonetti loves having a full band behind him, playing rockstar in his denim jacket & wallet chain combo. The encore set after Demons concluded touched on plenty of classic-Goblin staples, including themes from Dawn of the Dead, Suspriria, and (in my book, their finest work) Deep Red. It also included some wonderfully bizarre choices that rivaled Bava’s shoddy surrealist filmmaking in Demons, most notably in the glitchy-GIF repetition of the classic New Line Cinema logo while performing the theme from Cut & Run and in their prog rock remix of John Carpenter’s Halloween score, transforming a notoriously sparse piano line into an overcomplicated monster. I still would love to see Demons projected in an antique venue like The Prytania someday, just for the proper sense of ambiance. I can’t imagine it’ll be a more memorable or endearing evening than that evening at The Broadside, though, where the stage lights twinkling off Simonetti’s absurdly long wallet chain were like stars twinkling in the night sky.
Halloween’s over, and there’s a distinct chill in the air, which means it’s time to start watching Serious Dramas for Adults again, so we can all collectively decide which movies shy far away enough from traditional genre entertainment to deserve awards statues. I do not do my best work as an audience during the Awards Season catch-up rush, both because I’m easily distracted by the buzziest titles’ extratextual discourses and because Serious Dramas for Adults aren’t my usual thing. I like a little reality-breaking fantasy and high-style aesthetic beauty in my motion pictures, both of which are generally frowned upon this time of year, when subtlety & realism reign supreme. The last quarter of the theatrical release calendar isn’t boring, exactly, but it can be challenging to my over-the-top artifice sensibilities as an audience. Which is healthy! It’s probably for the best that I’m asked to eat my cinematic vegetables at the end of my meal every year, since I spend so much time at the buffet table stuffing my face with dessert. Besides, there is something beautiful & cozy about the boredom of binging restrained, underplayed dramas in these colder months, especially when I’m catching up with Awards Screeners and borrowed public library DVDs under a blanket on my couch.
And so, it’s great happenstance that I caught up with two aesthetically beautiful films about boredom this week. The Italian family drama L’immensità has been on my catch-up list for months, but I couldn’t think of a cozier time to watch Penélope Cruz model vintage 70s fashions and dance to vintage Italo pop tunes than right now. Of course, that kind of indulgence comes with a hefty price when you’re watching Serious Dramas for Adults, which means you also have to watch Cruz suffer an abusive husband and clumsily navigate how to raise a trans teen. She plays a protective mother who acts as a human shield between her cruel businessman husband and their cowering children, but she struggles to adapt that protective instinct to her trans son’s burgeoning status as a social outsider. It’s the kind of cultural farce where his gender is apparent to every stranger meeting him for the first time, but the family who’s known him forever refuses to adapt to his new name & pronouns because they’re resistant to change. Thankfully, mother and son share a bond stronger than this Conservative prejudice: the bond of boredom. Isolated for hours by the constraints of domestic housewife duties and teenage supervision while the abusive father figure disappears to his office, they’re both bored & lonely to the point of going mad. To stave off cabin fever in herself and her kids, Cruz offers twee escapism from the movie’s general restrained realism by parodying famous TV performances of Italian pop hits (most notably “Prisencolinensinainciusol“), complete with the kind of little-kid bedroom choreography that you can only come up with in the deepest pits of childhood boredom.
L’immensità hits on notes of Tomboy-era Sciamma and Cruz-era Almodóvar throughout without ever quite matching the poetry of either influence. All of the movie’s poetry & wonder belongs to Cruz, who’s dependably exquisite as always, especially whenever tasked to model vintage glamour. Otherwise, it left me wanting for the touch of a seasoned auteur, someone who truly gets the beautiful aesthetics of Boredom as a cinematic subject. Luckily, there’s a new film from Sofia Coppola in theaters right now to satisfy that hunger. Priscilla is Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, which positions it with the exact kind of historical importance and celebrity impersonation that thrives in Awards Season publicity. It’s also a movie about the boredom & isolation of feminine youth, which positions it with potential to resonate as one of Coppola’s career best. Although Coppola’s Priscilla is the downers & cocktails antidote to Baz Luhrmann’s brain-poison uppers in last year’s Elvis, both directors are technically just playing the hits in their respective Graceland biopics. Only one of them successfully recaptures the magic of their 1990s masterworks, though, and it’s the one where most of the scene-to-scene “drama” is centered on a teenage girl’s struggle to count away the hours she’s left alone at home. Priscilla pinpoints the exact middle ground between the cloistered domestic tedium of The Virgin Suicides and the surreally empty opulence of Marie Antoinette, almost making it one of Coppola’s best by default.
As a collection of standalone images & moments, Priscilla is a work of cosmetic beauty – combining vintage 60s & 70s glamour with anachronistic pop hits that find Coppola at her most prankish (especially when a rowdy game of bumper cars is scored by Dan Deacon’s 2000s synthpop banger “The Crystal Cat”). Again, that kind of indulgence comes with a hefty price when you’re watching Serious Dramas for Adults, which means you also have to watch Priscilla suffer an abusive husband in-between her sublime dress-up montages, an injustice punctuated by classic abuser catchphrases about how “she’s mature for her age” and how he “would never do anything that would really hurt her”. As the story goes, she’s effectively purchased & groomed to be Elvis’s bride at age 14, a power imbalance Coppola accentuates in the 1-foot-4-inch height difference casting of her Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and her Priscila (Cailee Spaeny). Elvis repeatedly refuses the sexual advances of his tiny teenage bride, choosing instead to dress her up like a doll to sit on his shelf, to be admired in pristine condition whenever he’s home from satisfying his more carnal urges with women he views more carnally. The whole situation is deeply absurd and deeply alienating, which is exactly what makes it so perfect for Coppola’s eye. Once she’s matured to a less eyebrow-raising age, Elvis marries Priscilla and allows her to work out her sexual frustration of being married to the sexiest man alive through the dirty lens of a Polaroid camera; otherwise, their sexual life together is purely procreative. Her job is to sit still & look pretty while her husband travels doing his job of being Elvis, counting away the days of her youth on the isolated alien planet of Graceland.
Priscilla is a truly Great film, the kind of seductive, devastating stunner that makes me grateful that the Awards Season catch-up ritual lures me outside my usual genre-trash comfort zone. In comparison, L’immensità is a much punier text, one that reminds me how much of the Serious Dramas for Adults end of the independent filmmaking spectrum is just as disposable as the genre schlock I usually seek out. Both films reflect on the beauty & abuses of domestic boredom in a credible way, but only one achieves true cinematic transcendence in the process. Maybe Sofia Coppola will direct Penélope Cruz in a future Awards Contender period piece about a despondent, dissatisfied housewife, combining the power of these two films into something even more substantial than either. I look forward to watching it with a mug of tea under a warm blanket and a digital screener watermark.
Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their schedule. This year, only the gross-out Juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp grabbed my attention from that section of the program, and I look forward to reviewing that film with regular podcast guest Bill Arceneaux later this month. Otherwise, the most exciting selections at this year’s NOFF were all documentaries, at least from what I could gather scrolling through blurbs & thumbnails on the festival’s website. All of the movies I ventured out to see on my own this year happened to be documentaries; they also all happened to feature queer themes in their subjects – sometimes subtly, often confrontationally.
So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary films I caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival. It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite
Since not all documentaries can get away with pushing the boundaries of fact or form, the medium is often most useful at its most informative rather than its most innovative. The Disappearance of Shere Hite feels like vital, vibrant documentary filmmaking without ever challenging the rules or structures of its medium; it’s simply an act of “Hey, were you aware this amazing person existed?” post-mortem publicity. Personally, I was not aware of Shere Hite’s existence before this doc’s festival run (starting way back at Sundance this January), which is something the movie assumes of anyone who’s too young to have experienced first-wave Feminism first-hand half a century ago. Shere Hite did not “disappear” in the Connie Converse sense; she only carries a similar air of mystique because the American media chose to forget her and willed her name recognition into cultural oblivion. Once upon a time, she was an important sex researcher whose debut publication The Hite Report was just as essential to American sex & romance discourse as the more formalist work of researchers like Kinsey and Masters & Johnson. That initial entry into the American sex chat was controversial in its time for reporting that most cisgender women orgasm through clitoral stimulation, not through vaginal penetration. It’s something that now registers as common, everyday knowledge but in the 1970s was treated as a vicious attack on traditional marital relations. In her most widely publicized follow-ups, she also dared to report that traditional masculine gender roles leave most men feeling dangerously lonely and that married women commit adultery just as often as married men. By that third common-sense statement, she was ridiculed out of her field by macho mob justice, fleeing to Europe so she didn’t have to hear any more angry men react to the headlines she made without ever actually reading the books she published.
Shere Hite conducted her research through self-printed sex-questionnaire zines. She was strikingly beautiful and dramatically eccentric in her fashion, making do as a nude model before reinventing herself as a D.I.Y. punk sex scientist. Her performative Old Hollywood glamour makes her an innately cinematic subject, so that there are hundreds of hours of televised interview footage to supplement the text of her writing. In a time when mainstream media was skeptically evaluating “the question of The Women’s Movement”, she devised a way to ask women what their private sexual lives were actually like in an intimately truthful approach, suggesting that there was obvious value to putting the tools of sex research in the hands of actual sex workers. I only know these things because I watched a documentary about her, even though there was a time when I could have seen her interviewed out in the open by the likes of Oprah, Geraldo, and Larry King. The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a politically sharp, oddly romantic documentary profile of an important figure the American media deliberately forgot because her challenges to traditional sex & gender dynamics were too uncomfortable to tolerate. The only thing that doesn’t fully work about the movie is Dakota Johnson’s softly precious narration as “the voice of Shere Hite” while reading her unpublished diaries between interview clips. It’s a performance that’s missing the Sandra Bernhard sass, Patricia Clarkson fierceness, and Susan Sarandon seduction of the real Shere Hite’s voice, which we often hear in direct contrast to Johnson’s. Still, having a movie star’s name attached to a woman who’s been deliberately stripped of her own name recognition is probably for the best. Anything that works towards undoing the Mandela Effect of a world without Shere Hite is worthwhile, so I can’t fault the movie (or Johnson) too much for it.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Speaking of Sundance selections about badass women who’ve fostered combative relationships with the American press, Going to Mars is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic portrait of poet-activist Nikki Giovanni. Whereas The Disappearance of Shere Hite is formally straight-forward in its linear overview of its subject’s biography & professional record, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project attempts to at least partially match the inventive fervor of its subject’s art in its own impressionistic approach (and attempts to better match her tone in its own celebrity voiceover track, provided by Taraji P. Henson). It weaves together threads of Giovanni’s current, relatively comfortable life as an aging academic with her radical past as a Civil Rights organizer and her romantic visions of a sci-fi future led by Black women. The title refers to her assertion that no one is better prepared for space exploration than Black American women, whose ancestors were already forcibly transported to an alien planet and forced to mate with an alien species. Recordings of her poetry performances are just as often paired with outer-space screensavers as they are with footage of Civil Rights protests of the 1960s & 70s. Somewhere between those two distant worlds, there’s Giovanni’s current status as a peaceful, settled citizen of suburban America – still clear-eyed in her awareness of the nation’s ongoing racial atrocities but content to leave the fight for justice to future generations. There’s great tension in the way the archival footage’s incendiary fury clashes with her current-day domestic comfort, but what’s really impressive is how sharply observed her poetry remains in both states. She’s still one of America’s great thinkers; it’s just that her observations now sound closer to Wanda Sykes stand-up than Angela Davis activism.
There’s always great tension in Nikki Giovanni’s relation to the world, whether answering Q&A softballs from well-intentioned but intellectually inferior audiences or chain-smoking while verbally sparring with an equally thorny James Baldwin. It would be inaccurate to say she has no fucks left to give in her old age, since she’s always been a no-fucks-given communicator in her art & public persona. What Going to Mars offers is a chance to celebrate that combative candidness as a personality trait beyond its political utility; it celebrates her as a great, greatly difficult person.
Anima: My Father’s Dresses
Moving on to the festival’s Virtual Cinema program (which is still running through the end of this weekend), the German documentary Anima might be the most formally experimental documentary I saw in this year’s line-up. It’s an epistolary film, functioning as a posthumous conversation between director Uli Decker and her deceased father, Helmut. There aren’t many home movies or personal photographs to illustrate the details of that conversation, though, because it’s specifically about a family secret held while Helmut was alive and able to speak for himself. So, Uli reads his words from personal diaries and sends her responses via voiceover narration, often deviating from conventional interview footage to instead indulge in roughly animated collage. It’s an intimate family portrait personalized to look like a cut & paste sketchbook, staging a conversation that could have never happened in real time due to the Catholic conservatism of their family background. The film is about the shocking death-bed reveal of a family secret, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the story it tells its audience (save for the bizarre, newsworthy circumstances of Helmut’s sudden death). The project is not so much about telling a story as it is about offering Uli a sounding board where she can work out & express the feelings her guarded relationship with her father never made room for while he was alive.
The secret Helmut guarded was that he was a crossdresser in his private life. The betrayal Uli feels about that secret being kept from her is mostly resentment that her own explorations of gender & sexuality were severely policed by her family in her youth, as a queer woman who grew up as an eccentric theatre kid. Her father felt a close affinity to her as someone who felt constrained by traditional gender roles, but never expressed that affinity in any meaningful way while alive. He hid it in journals, which she could only access after he passed. To the audience, this is not especially groundbreaking subject matter. Between the anarchic formal experimentation of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? in the 1950s and the extensive visual documentation of vintage closeted-crossdresser culture in this year’s Casa Susanna, there have been plenty of more artistically & historically substantial works to seek out before making time for Anima. Uli’s frustration with her family for playing the game of posing as a “normal” middle-class Catholic household that wouldn’t allow itself to be free & happy is the personal touch that can’t be found anywhere else, which makes it one of the few documentaries that can get away with this kind of shameless cornball navel-gazing (alongside Stories We Tell, Madame, Origin Story, etc.). I’m also a crossdresser who grew up struggling with Catholic shame, though, so maybe I’m just a hopeless sucker for this kind of material in general.
Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland
If you’re in need of an advertisement for the benefits of proud, public queerness (in opposition to self-imposed Catholic penance), NOFF also offered a short-form documentary on the local drag collective Chokehole. It even took the drag-wrestling hybrid show on the road to Germany, where the much more somber Anima is also set. I use the term “advertisement” deliberately, too, as Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland feels like the exact kind of Tourism TV commercial filmmaking that’s only available on hotel room channels, prompting you to get out of your complimentary bathrobe and contribute some vodka-soda money to the local economy. The first few Chokehole shows I attended were can’t-miss community events, the culmination of everything I love about Art: the absurdist exaggeration of gender performance in pro wrestling & dive bar drag, the half-cooked fever dream storytelling of vintage B-movies, the D.I.Y. construction of artificial worlds on no-budget sets, etc. I had ascended to genre trash heaven. By contrast, this documentary plays like an infomercial for a drag-themed amusement park. Curiously, the movie it reminds me most of was fellow globetrotting queer travel guide Queer Japan, not the sister Altered Innocence doc made by its director Yony Leyser, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution.
This aesthetic quibble isn’t a dealbreaker, exactly. The Chokehole crew totally deserves the professional spotlight they’re afforded here. I’m just hopeful this short is a proof-of-concept tease for a grander statement down the line, where the tongue-in-cheek psychedelic editing that goes into Chokehole’s live-show video packages will inform the cinema about those shows the same way The Disappearance of Shere Hite is informed by its subject’s sensual mystique, Going to Mars is informed by its subject’s combative poetry, and Anima is informed by its subject’s cloistered intimacy.
We do not have an Alamo Drafthouse in New Orleans and, to be honest, I’m totally okay with that. I appreciate the chain’s consistent enthusiasm for programming retro genre schlock, but there’s just something off-putting about watching any movie while underplayed teenagers scurry like peasants in the dark, delivering little treats & trinkets to the royal customers on our pleather thrones. Canal Place’s worst era was the brief period when it attempted to mimic the Alamo dine-in experience, which I’m saying as someone who worked in the theater’s kitchen during those long, dark years. I mean, why pay for a $20 salad when you can simply wait an hour and then literally walk to several of the greatest restaurants in the world? It was a baffling novelty in our local context. I was recently invited to an Alamo Drafthouse while vacationing in the Twin Cities, though, and I feel like I got introduced to the chain’s whole deal in the one context where it does make sense. For one thing, the Twin Cities Alamo is not located in the Twin Cities at all, but rather way out in the strip mall suburbs where there’s nothing better to do or eat within walking distance. In fact, there’s hardly anything within walking distance at all. “Public transportation” instructions on Google led me to take a train ride from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, then a bus ride from St Paul to the side of a featureless suburban highway, and then a cheap Uber ride for the final stretch to the theater. That’s hardly equivalent to wedging a combo restaurant-cinema onto the busiest corner of the French Quarter. Also, I traveled there specifically to attend an all-day horror movie marathon, where mid-film snack & drink deliveries were necessary for my hourly survival. That overpriced pizza saved my life.
The annual “Dismember the Alamo” event is a Halloween Season tradition where the theater chain programs four-to-five “surprise” horror films, typically selected from the AGFA library. The program varies theater to theater, so I can only report on what screened this year at the Twin Cities location (which is, again, not located in either of the Twin Cities). It opened with two movies I’ve already reviewed for this site in Octobers past: Messiah of Evil (which I love) and The Changeling (which I tolerate) – two artistically minded, leisurely paced horrors of relative respectability. The plan was then to screen two more slower paced, fussily styled horrors Swampflix has already covered in Ringu and Blood & Black Lace, but technical difficulties intervened. While the staff scrambled to get the second half of the program running, I was happy to have time to chat with a long-distance friend in a venue notorious for not tolerating mid-film chatter of any kind. Then, when the show got back on the rails, they had thrown out the planned program to instead play two oddball 80s novelties I had personally never seen. The pacing picked up, the movies got weirder, and the room took on more of a horror nerd party vibe than the horror nerd sleepover feel of the opening half. I got treated to the full surprise lineup experience of the Dismember the Alamo ritual, to the point where even the marathon’s programmers were surprised by the titles they ended up playing when the DCPs for Ringu & Black Lace refused to cooperate. The Great Pumpkin smiled warmly upon me that day, which I very much needed after traveling alone in the Minnesota cold.
The third film in this year’s Dismember the Twin Cities Alamo lineup was the 1988 haunted house horror Night of the Demons. It was perfect Halloween Season programming, regardless of its function as a much-needed energy boost within the marathon. In the film, the absolute worst dipshit teens to ever disgrace the screen spend Halloween night getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live. In the audience, the awed seriousness that met The Changeling gave way to chortles & cheers, especially as the Reaganite jocks onscreen received their demonic comeuppance from the monstrously transformed goths they bully in the first act. That vocal response continued into the opening credits of 1981’s The Burning, which is credited as the brainchild of a young Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein’s name lingered in the air as the film’s horndog teen boy protagonists pressured their coed summer camp cohorts for sex in nearly every scene, only to be violently interrupted by a disfigured slasher villain named Cropsy. The Burning proved to be a fascinating bridge between the urban, gloved-killer grime of Italo proto-slashers and the sickly summer camp hedonism of the standard American brand. I imagine it would’ve inspired multiple bodycount slasher sequels if it were simply retitled Cropsy instead of the much more generic The Burning, since the horrifically disfigured villain on a revenge mission has an interesting enough look & signature weapon (gigantic gardening shears) to justify his own long-running franchise. He at least deserves it as much as Jason Voorhees, since The Burning is a major improvement on a template established by early entries in the Friday the 13th series. Likewise, I wonder why Linnea Quigley’s hot-pink harlequin bimbo look from Night of the Demons hasn’t inspired decades of Halloween costumes among the horror savvy. It might be her at her most iconic, give or take her graveyard punk look from Return of the Living Dead or her chainsaw-bikini combo from the cover of the Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout VHS.
If there are any lessons in horror marathon programming here, it might just be in the attention paid to pacing. I love giallo & J-horror just as much as the next schlock junkie, but I was excited to watch objectively worse movies than Ringu & Black Lace just to make sure I didn’t end up using my pizza as a greasy pillow. Also, if you have to improvise your lineup on the fly, you might be surprised by the connections that arise from the last-minute entries. All four movies in this particular lineup were about cursed spaces haunted by the sins of the past — violence that lingers in the landscape where it took place, to the point of supernatural phenomena. In Messiah of Evil & Night of the Demons, that violence is perpetuated by otherworldly embodiments of pure Evil. In The Changeling & The Burning, it’s perpetuated in acts of revenge for personal wrongs of the recent past. All four films are connected by the tropes & traditions of horror as a storytelling medium & communal practice, a connection strengthened by a well-informed, horror savvy audience who stays immersed in that milieu year-round. More practically, though, what I learned is that the Alamo Drafthouse experience makes total sense in that movie marathon context. I cannot imagine a more comfortable venue where I could binge four horror movies in a row, save for my living room. And since I’m unlikely to invite 200 strangers to my house to watch a surprise horror movie lineup, even that caveat is moot. If there were a New Orleans branch of the Alamo Drafthouse, I’d attend the Dismember the Alamo marathon every year with religious devotion. I’d just hope that they’d stick it way out in the suburbs of Metairie or St. Bernard so that it’s competing with AMC instead of our humble indie spots like The Prytania, who’ve done a great job restoring Canal Place to its former glory.
The early-Fall lull between the Summer Blockbuster schlock dump and Awards Season prestige rollouts is always somewhat of a cinematic dead zone, but this year’s has been especially harsh. The ongoing SAG/AFTRA strikes have scared major studios into delaying some of their biggest Fall releases for fear that their marketing would fail without the star power of a Zendaya or a Timmy Chalamet doing traditional promo, leaving very little of note on the new release calendar (until the Studios cave on those actors’ reasonable demands for fair compensation). I’m sure it’s been a strain on movie theaters in the meantime, and I hope that they squirrelled away enough of that sweet Barbenheimer money this summer to survive the drought. Speaking selfishly, though, it’s been awesome for me as a regular moviegoer. Stumbling into this new-release wasteland during Halloween Season inspired local indie theaters to get creative in their respective repertory programming, resulting in what has got to be the greatest month of local film listings I can remember in my lifetime (with the caveat that I grew up in the era when suburban AMC multiplexes strangled the life out of what used to be a much more robust New Orleans indie cinema scene). I spent most of October bouncing and forth between The Broad and The Prytania on the same #9 Broad bus line, frantically catching as many never-seen-on-the-big-screen horror titles as I could while the getting was good. And there were still plenty more I missed that I would’ve loved to see properly projected, including the early Universal Horror all-timer The Black Cat. What a time to be unalive!
If I were to parse out the two distinct flavors of these theaters’ dueling Spooktober line-ups, I’d say The Prytania offered an older, dustier variety of venerated genre classics while The Broad offered slightly warped cult favorites of the video store era. I personally trekked out to The Prytania to see odds-and-ends obscurities I’d never seen before at all, let alone on the big screen (Dracula’s Daughter, Bell, Book and Candle, The Creeping Flesh), but they also programmed a long list of definitive Hall of Fame horror classics that should be checked off of any genre fan’s personal watchlist (Don’t Look Now, Psycho, The Wicker Man, The Shining, The Exorcist, etc.). Meanwhile, The Broad’s lineup made a few more surprising, left-of-field choices, mostly in straying from the classics to instead screen their most chaotic, divisive sequels. While The Prytania screened the John Carpenter slasher-definer Halloween, The Broad screened its Michael Meyersless sequel Halloween III: Season of the Witch. While The Prytania screened fellow slasher-definer Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th, The Broad screened Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, its most over-complained-about sequel. The Prytania’s schedule was so plentiful with exciting horror titles this October that I hardly had time to watch movies anywhere else, but I pushed myself to catch the most esoteric selections in the “Nightmares on Broad Street” program anyway, just to support the iconoclasm, as detailed below. And while I’m comparing the two theaters’ programs here, I should note that the one film they both played last month was Wes Craven’s teen meta-slasher Scream, which I suppose makes it their consensus pick for the greatest horror film of all time.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
The most rewarding trip I had to The Broad this October was to revisit Dream Warriors, a movie I mostly remember from late-night cable broadcasts and oft-repeated Blockbuster VHS rentals. The film marks Heather Langenkamps’s return (and shockingly morbid departure) as the series’ Final Girl figurehead, now a young medical student researching violent sleep disorders in order to help suffering teens survive nightly dreamworld visits from Freddy Kreuger. The film’s limited setting in a mental hospital narrows its focus to a small group of traumatized teen insomniacs and their befuddled doctors who can’t quite figure out how they all suffer from the same group delusion that causes them to self-harm; spoiler: it’s because Freddy is real. Dream Warriors has long been a favorite of mine in the series due to the novelty of its imaginative kill scenes, which include Freddy puppeteering one of his victims using their exposed veins as marionette strings and Freddy transforming his finger-knives into hypodermic needles to feed the hungry mouths of another victims’ pulsating track marks. It’s pretty fucked up, especially since it’s combined with Freddy’s early stirrings as a stand-up comedian – crushing one victim’s head with a television while quipping “Welcome to primetime!,” declaring another victim “tongue-tied” after literally tying them to a bedframe with his detachable tongue, and punctuating every misogynist kill with the punchline “Bitch!”.
What will always stick with me about Dream Warriorsnow, though, is that it’s the only Nightmare on Elm Street movie that has managed to make me cry. Maybe I’m getting too soft in my old age, or maybe it was just the theatrical atmosphere replacing the film’s usual brewskies-on-the-couch presentation, but I got unexpectedly emotional watching these kids get disbelieved and blamed for their own illness for so long before finding unexpected strength in solidarity. Every authority-figure adult in their lives is dismissive of their nightly suffering except the one who happened to go through their exact supernatural torture in her own youth, and then she teaches them how to fight against their isolating threats as a collective group through lucid dreaming. It’s oddly sweet, even as it is hideously gruesome. It’s probably no coincidence that the three best-remembered Elm Street movies are the ones Wes Craven had a direct creative hand in—the original, Dream Warriors, and New Nightmare—and, while I might personally prefer New Nightmare in that trio, they’re certainly all worthy of standalone repertory programming. Not many theaters would take a chance on the sequels outside a marathon context, though, so Dream Warriors immediately registered as mandatory viewing, even in such a crowded month.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Speaking of slasher sequels no one would usually take a chance on, holy shit. Dream Warriors has plenty of long-running goodwill among horror addicts as one of the best of its franchise, but Jason Takes Manhattan has a long-running reputation of is own as one of its franchise’s worst. Wrongly. The standard-issue complaint about this much-mocked slasher sequel is that it’s flagrantly mistitled, promising that Jason Voorhees will take a grand budget-burning tour of New York City, when in reality he spends most of the runtime killing teens on a boat trip to the city. Given that marketing department disappointment, I wish the film had simply been retitled Jason Takes a Cruise to calm the horror nerds’ nerves. Complaining about the locale of Jason’s tireless teen slayings in this outing three decades after the first-weekend jeers is idiotically shortsighted & petty, since Jason Takes Manhattan is scene-to-scene the most memorably entertaining entry in its franchise, give or take Jason X (which is mostly set on a ship of sorts itself). En route to Manhattan, Jason punishes high school seniors for celebrating graduation with the old-fashioned teen sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll that he loathes so deeply: filming amateur rock videos in the engine room, snorting coke off mirrors in the supply closet, and seducing the uptight principal to get out of completing their science fair projects. It’s a random assemblage of quirky slasher-teen behavior that even on land would be more entertaining than the snoozy cabin-in-the-woods doldrums of earlier Friday the 13th sequels, and then the Manhattan-themed rampage promised in the title is delivered as a sweet novelty dessert.
If anything, there’s something immensely satisfying about the way Jason’s whirlwind Manhattan tourism is delayed for a condensed, climactic payoff instead of being drawn out into urban slasher tedium. An opening credits sequence details the grimy back-alleys of 1980s NYC, particularly focusing on a barrel of toxic sludge that serves as the bathtub for a gigantic rat. We do not return to that alley until the third act, when Jason drowns the film’s most detestable character headfirst in that exact barrel, the rat now dead beside him to emphasize just how gross the sludge truly is. There’s also some great metaphysical character at work here as well, where Jason now appears to be made entirely of toxic sludge himself, having been submerged in the murky waters of Crystal Lake for so long that he’s essentially a hulking collection of sentient goo. His younger, drowned self appears to the film’s Final Girl in frequent, psychedelic hallucinations during the boat trip to Manhattan – underlining the killer’s supernatural constitution, connecting his qualities as an aquatic zombie to the waters that connect Crystal Lake to the Hudson Bay and, frankly, killing time between his actual kills. Mostly, though, his gooey, goopy body is just an extension of the way the movie associates New York City with sludge & grime, painting it as a landscape made entirely of rats, rape, street punks, and shared hypodermics. In a way, you get a little taste of Manhattan on the ride to its shores in Jason himself. More importantly, it’s one of the precious few entries in his franchise where he isn’t a total bore. Too bad so few people get past the misleading title to see that; it was the least well-attended horror screening I saw all month.
Now here’s where things get interesting. The Broad had already filled its schedule with classic horror films at the start of the month, and then Taylor Swift dropped a rushed-to-market concert film that cleared even more room on local marquees, since film studios were scared to compete with the most famous woman alive. I’ve never been a bigger Swiftie. Because Swift’s Eras Tour cleared the weekly release schedule, The Broad added three additional classic horrors to its line-up, all digital restorations of vintage gialli by Dario Argento. And so, I got to see my personal favorite Argento film on the big screen with my friends instead of the way I’ve watched it previously: alone as a fuzzy YouTube rip. Like with my appreciation for Jason Takes Manhattan, Opera is far from the wider consensus pick for Argento’s best; I was genuinely shocked to see it theatrically listed alongside his better respected works Deep Red & The Bird with the Crystal Plumage on The Broad’s marquee. At this point in the month, it was starting to feel like someone was programming a mini horror festival just for me, and it was delightful to see plenty likeminded freaks in the audience instead of the empty seats I was met with at the screening of my favorite Friday the 13th.
Opera finds Argento working in his Inferno mode, putting far more effort into crafting individual images than weaving them into a cohesive story. After being hired to direct a real-life opera of Macbeth and abandoning the project before production, Argento salvaged his scrapbook of ideas for its staging in this loose mystery crime thriller about a gloved killer’s obsession with an opera singer. The killer’s mechanism for torturing his muse is tying her up with pins pointed at her open eyelids so she cannot look away from his violent slayings of her friends, lovers, and collaborators. It’s a double-contrivance of Hitchcockian voyeurism, where the killer obsessively watches the singer from the anonymous crowds of her opera house and, in turn, makes her watch him perform his art backstage. It’s also just an excuse for Argento to indulge in a glorious clash of high & low sensibilities, alternating between operatic vocal performances in the theatre and thrash-metal slashings on the streets. Opera might feature his most overactive, over-stylized camerawork to date, too, most notably in scenes where the camera adopts the POV of the trained ravens on his Macbeth set to directly attack his own audience in murderous swoops & dives. Opera may not be as beautiful as Suspriria, nor as horrifying as Tenebrae, but it’s Argento’s mostly wildly impulsive vision – both his most invigorating and his most incompressible. I loved seeing it get the proper theatrical setting it deserves.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
YWhile there may still be some novelty in exalting Opera & Jason Takes Manhattan as the top of their respective classes, I’d say Halloween III: Season of the Witch has been thoroughly reclaimed in the modern discourse to the point where calling it The Best Halloween Movie is almost an online Film Bro cliche. Hell, that thought even occurred to me back when we covered it on the podcast in 2016, when I called it the best Halloween movie. There’s some necessary semantic clarification to make there, though, because I’m not only saying that its infamous Michael Meyersless deviation from the John Carpenter slasher franchise makes it the most interesting movie of its series. I’m saying that it’s the best horror movie in any context that’s specifically about Halloween as a holiday, from the roots of its pagan Samhain traditions to its modern Trick or Treat rituals in the American suburbs. The only films I skipped on the Nightmare on Broad Street roster were the widely beloved horror classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Candyman, and Scream, and I believe the horror nerd community has gotten over Season of the Witch‘s disregard for Michael Meyers slashings well enough that it now registers among that verified pantheon of seasonal greats (in a way they still haven’t gotten over the title of Jason Takes Manhattan). The reason I didn’t skip Season of the Witch, though, is that The Broad happened to screen it on Halloween Night, and I couldn’t fathom a better way to cap off this exquisite month of local repertory moviegoing. It was a hoot, and I’m already excited to see what they pull out of the haunted vault next year.
My favorite of the original Child’s Play trilogy, and thus my favorite Chucky movie overall. I love the way it trades in the grimy cruelty of the original for the visual sensibilities of a children’s film, from its exaggerated cartoon framing to its primary color palette to its bookend trips to the toy factory. Speaking of which, the climactic spectacle on the factory floor is some A+ mayhem, really leaning into the novelty of killer-doll gore at its purest. It’s one of those R-rated horrors that feels like it was specifically made for an audience of children sneaking the TV remote past their sleeping parents.
Child’s Play (1988)
The original Child’s Play hits all the exact story beats you’d expect from its Killer Doll: The Movie premise, but its in-the-moment execution is often exquisite. The animatronic puppetry is mind-boggling, the patter of little doll feet in the Evil Dead POV shots is somehow genuinely chilling, and the gradual transformation of Chucky’s head from generic My Buddy Doll knockoff to Baby Brad Dourif really sells the dark Movie Magic of it all. It’s also really funny to imagine the excruciating boredom a serial strangler would feel having to hang out with the world’s sweetest child until it’s time to smite his enemies; not to mention the frustration of having little plastic hands you can’t even properly wrap around a throat – horrifying.
An in-name-only “remake” that exploits the Chucky name to make its own evil-doll horror comedy for the A.I. era, functioning more as a prototype for M3GAN than a direct mutation of the 1988 original. While a drastic deviation from the Original Flavor™ Child’s Play in terms of plot & tone, though, it does ultimately amount to a similar effect. It plays like the exact kind of nasty, ludicrous horror flicks kids fall in love with when they happen to catch them at too young of an age on cable. It’s too violent for children but far too silly for adults, the exact formula that made early Child’s Play movies cult classics in the first place.
Bride of Chucky (1998)
Chucky is resurrected for the post-Scream era, complete with a nü-metal soundtrack, mall goth costuming, and postmodern references to competing horror villains like Freddy, Jason, Michael, and Pinhead. Thankfully, this comedic rebrand also pairs him with a totally committed Jennifer Tilly, who counterbalances the killer’s trademark misogyny as a bimbo-dominatrix-turned-fellow-doll who gleefully pushes all his psychosexual buttons just to watch him squirm. It’s not all that tense or upsetting as a horror film, but it’s highly amusing as a “The straights are not okay” anti-romcom, and it’s fun to finally see Chucky mastermind Don Mancini queer up the franchise that pays his bills.
Seed of Chucky (2004)
Don Mancini’s New Nightmare, riding the final ripples of the post-Scream meta horror trend as far as it had left to go (not very). It’s a mixed bag from start to end, but enough of the jokes land and the Glen-Or-Glenda doll is a novel enough intrusion for it to mostly make up for the eyerolls. Also very cute to see John Waters nerding out as an obvious fan as if he won a “Be in a Chucky movie!” contest, even if he just missed the series’ glory days
Child’s Play 3(1991)
Things would get worse down the line, but this has always been my least favorite of the original Chucky trio. It’s fun to see Chucky fully come into his own as a mainstay slasher villain, since this is late enough in the series for him to start quipping his way through every kill with catchphrases & cheap one-liners. Having to spend even 90 breezy minutes in its drab military school setting is a chore, though, and I always feel like I’m being punished alongside Andy for crimes I didn’t commit. That boredom is rewarded with a last-minute trip to an amusement park, but the killer finale makes me slightly resentful that we don’t spend the whole movie there.
Curse of Chucky (2013)
Considering how much flak the 2019 Child’s Play remake got for straying from Mancini’s original vision, it’s incredible that Mancini had made his own in-house, in-name-only Chucky knockoff just a few years earlier. In this case, Chucky’s more of a haunted house catalyst than of an A.I. cautionary tale, so he’s more Annabelle than M3GAN. Unlike Annabelle, though, this evil doll actually moves; his kills are brutal enough to make up for a lot of the usual trappings of a purposeless, tropey reboot.
Cult of Chucky (2017)
With Curse of Chucky, it felt like Don Mancini wanted to make a generic haunted house movie and the only way to land funding was to put a Chucky in it. Here, he does the same with the spooky mental asylum genre, except he puts many Chuckies in it. It’s the cheapest and least substantial of the bunch, but the gore gags are gnarly enough to make it worthwhile, and it’s delightful to see how convoluted the series lore has gotten to keep the story going. This has to be the all-time silliest ten hours of prerequisite homework to fully appreciate a TV show in the history of the medium, but if you’ve made it this far, you’re doomed to keep tuning in.
Like all corners of the creative arts, Universal Picture’s classic horror period was overrun with nepo babies. Carl Laemmle, Jr. kicked off the studio’s Famous Monsters brand by producing 1931’s Dracula after Carl Laemmle, Sr. passed down his studio-head executive position to his son instead of a more qualified protégée. Lon Chaney, Jr. changed his name from Creighton Chaney to cash in on the name recognition of his early-horror legend father, making him a more credible, marketable Wolf Man. Then, of course, there’s the case of Dracula’s children, who waltzed into power in Universal’s most prestigious sequels after their father’s untimely second death at the end of the first film in their franchise. While The Wolf Man fathered no cubs to take over his sequels, and Frankenstein’s Monster only made it thirty seconds into his own marriage before burning down the lab, Dracula’s progeny did a good job making the most of their family name. The Dracula kids don’t appear to have met or crossed paths, but their polygamous father did have multiple wives in the first film, so I suppose that doesn’t undermine the series’ narrative continuity.
Much like the goofier Frankensteinsequels from this early Universal period, 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is an absurdly direct follow-up to the Tod Browning original. The film opens with Van Helsing being arrested for Dracula’s murder at the scene of the crime, and then spending the rest of the film convincing his jailers that actual, real-life vampires are afoot. Dracula’s immediate replacement is his angsty goth-girl daughter, who is reluctant to continue the family business of draining innocent civilians of their blood despite it being the only thing she’s trained to do. She’s rebelled by moving to the big city, where she stalks the streets as a bisexual vamp, picking up hungry artists’ models and lustful playboys to drain back at her spacious parlor. Foretelling a lot of the later Famous Monster sequels, she feels incredibly guilty about this blood-addiction vice and spends most of the film seeking a medical cure for the family legacy that has shunned her from polite society & daylight – ultimately to no avail. Inevitably, like all nepo babies, she ends up not being able to strike it out on her own after all and moves back to the family castle in Transylvania for some super traditional Dracula kills, meeting the same tragic end as her father.
Like the direct sequel to James Whale’s original Frankenstein movie, Dracula’s Daughter has earned more critical respect in recent decades than the film that precedes it. Its reputation has largely risen due to the sexual transgressions of its lesbian seduction scene, in which the titular vampire convinces a young woman to expose her bare neck for the sucking by telling her she’s going to pose for a nude portrait. Likewise, Bride of Frankenstein‘s gender politics have drawn a lot of attention with modern viewers for the concluding scene in which the titular monster takes one look at her assigned undead groom and decides she’d rather be dead (again) than mate with her “man.” Of the two films, Bride of Frankenstein is the better direct sequel overall, since Whale was given unprecedented creative freedom to play up the stranger, campier elements of his original text in an anything-goes horror comedy free-for-all that doesn’t even bother to deliver on its central premise until the final three minutes of runtime. By contrast, Dracula’s Daughter has the generosity of affording its titular villain plenty screentime & pathos, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. Like the Monster’s bride, she effortlessly, tragically cool, so it’s nice that we actually get to spend time with her beyond a few quick frames of celluloid.
While Dracula’s Daughter exemplifies the Famous Monsters sequels’ penchant for direct, narrative continuations set seconds after their preceding films’ endings, 1943’s Son of Dracula exemplifies their penchant for wildly recasting the central villains from film to film. The most hilarious example I’ve seen is Bela Lugosi’s miscasting as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, a performance so laughably unconvincing that studio executives decided to remove his heavily accented dialogue from the final cut, fearing audience mockery. Lon “Wolf Man” Chaney, Jr. made more visual sense as the Monster in the previous picture, Son of Frankenstein, but could not be tasked with sitting in the makeup chair for two separate monster performances in the same picture (not to mention the narrative contrivance of Lugosi/Igor’s brain being transplanted to the Monster’s body at the end of Son of Frankenstein). Appropriately enough, that film was made the same year Chaney got his own laughably bad Famous Monster miscasting as the mysterious “Count Aculard” in 1943’s Son of Dracula. The reason Chaney works so well in his tyepcast roles as The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Lennie from Of Mice and Men is that he looks like a sweet, lumbering oaf who doesn’t know his own strength. That image doesn’t translate especially well to playing a debonaire European vampire who seduces women to their doom.
Despite Count Aculard’s ridiculous appearance and name (which registers among the all-time goofiest horror pseudonyms, like Dr. Acula in Night of the Ghouls, Jack Rippner in Red Eye, and Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), Son of Dracula is a surprisingly solid supernatural melodrama. Unlike his rebellious daughter, Dracula’s son has enthusiastically taken to the family business of seducing young women to death, moving to a Southern plantation to hypnotize & marry its recent heiress. Dracula’s daughter-in-law is a bit of a gloomy goth herself, and she attempts to manipulate the power of the Dracula dynasty for her own wicked profits, but the inevitable tragedy of the undead couple’s Southern Gothic surroundings makes a happy ending impossible. For his part, Count Aculard adjusts to the Southern atmosphere incredibly well, literally becoming a part of it by materializing as swamp gas in his nightly rises from the coffin. The movie carries over a lot of classic spooky set dressing of the original Dracula film despite this new locale, including a return to the flapping rubber bats that were missing from Dracula’s Daughter. Still, it’s visually accomplished in continually surprising ways, including an early version of the double-dolly shots from Spike Lee’s playbook as Count Aculard glides over the marshes to drain his victims.
Pumping out cheap-o sequels to Universal’s most successful horror films was obviously more about doing great business than it was about making great art. Through the tougher stretches of The Great Depression & WWII, the Famous Monsters that made Universal a major player in the first place were a near bottomless well for immediate cashflow. Frankenstein & The Wolf Man got stuck with the goofiest, trashiest end of that rushed-to-market schlock production, and by the time their many crossover sequels brought an off-brand version of Dracula into the fold (in John Carradine), the character was so far removed from Bela Lugosi’s performance in the original that it could do no real damage to the Dracula brand. Meanwhile, Dracula’s more direct sequels about his undead children are both very stately, handsome productions that hold up on their own among the best of Universal’s early horror run. Dracula’s Daughter is certainly the cooler of the pair and has rightfully been reappraised as a great work by modern critics. Son of Dracula would likely earn its own reappraisal too, if it weren’t for the goofy miscasting of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the titular vampire. Unsurprisingly, nepotism is a double-edged sword, one that can open opportunities you’re not always the best fit for.
Swampflix 