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.
Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Sunday (October 22) at the second annual ACAB Zine Fest along with a bunch of other super cool Arts, Crafts, And Books exhibitors, hosted by Burn Barrel Press. We will be selling the print versions of four Swampflix zines, including two new zines about Suspiria & other classic genre titles, as well as the leftover stock of our John Waters & Matt Farley zines from the long-gone days of NOCAZ.
ACAB Zine Fest will take place Sunday, October 22, from 11am-5pm at Gasa Gasa (4920 Freret St, New Orleans, LA 70115) Uptown.
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Sunshine, wine, swimming, antiquing, ambient acoustic strumming … If it weren’t for all of the violent hallucinations & vampiric ghouls this would be a pleasant little getaway” Currently streaming on Paramount+, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on PlutoTV.
“I braced myself for it to be far more needlessly vicious than it was, given the New French Extremity’s fetish for grisly details. Calvaire does a good job of implying instead of dwelling and, more importantly, of cutting its unbearable tension with gallows humor so it’s not all misery & pain. Part of my amusement might have been enhanced by the two main characters being assigned names I associate with comedy: Marc Stevens (who shares a name with John Early’s grifter villain on Los Espookys) and Paul Bartel (who shares a name with one of the greatest comedic directors to ever do it). Regardless, director Fabrice du Welz also amuses himself by framing this grim & grueling torture session as ‘the best Christmas ever’ in its sicko villain’s mind, contrasting the hyperviolent hostage crisis the audience is watching with the delusional family reunion of his imagination in a bleakly hilarious clash of realities. I don’t mean to imply that Calvaire‘s not also a nonstop misery parade, though. It’s that too.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A very cool, loose hangout dramedy about truck stop sex workers that gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic grindhouse slasher to pay the bills. Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“What I mean when I say ‘kids are scary’ is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their wellbeing? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“In which a pair of drunkard ghosts coach a child who’s been scared bald on how to grow his hair back, only for their advice to work way too well for his own good. Little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between Hansel & Gretel and The Pit. Wonderfully deranged.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I was starving for a genuinely over-the-top animal attack movie after being let down by Cocaine Bear, and this hit the spot. It’s basically the same faintly sketched-out story, but its tactility & sincerity go a long way in making its attack scenes much worthier of the ambling journey. There’s something especially unnerving about the way the animals appear to leap out of stock footage, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, the stunt doubles). Incredible that it wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“As trippy as it can be in its Skinamarinkian disorientation, it’s anchored to a concise, recognizable premise that could neatly be categorized as The Blair Witch Project Part IV: Blair Witch Goes to Hanging Rock. It strikes a nice balance between the slow-moving quiet of its bedroom art brethren and mainstream horror’s return to big, bold, bloody haunted house scares. Maybe that makes it a less artistically daring film than World’s Fair or Skinamarink, but it also makes it a more overtly entertaining one.”. Currently streamingon Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Seeing a lot of grossed-out responses from unsuspecting audiences wishing this was more of a straightforward road trip love story. I’m coming from the opposite direction, wishing it weren’t so tenderly underplayed & remorseful about its hunger pangs for gore. It’s kinda nice to have something that drifts between those two magnetic pulls, though, especially since it’s so unusual to see a Near Dark-style genre blender positioned as a prestigious Awards Contender.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“Feels like Lynch twisting himself in knots to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling … and he eventually gets there. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, and this one turns their mopey interchangeability into a kind of existential horror.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“In The Lawnmower Man, director Brett Leonard justifies testing the limitations of stage-of-the-art 90s CG animation by inventing convoluted science lab experiments that create a VR cyberworld. Here, he takes a bold step forward by suggesting that exact CG cyberworld is where our souls go when our bodies die, treating his Windows 95 screensaver graphics as if they were the most typical, durable approach to visual effects available. Stunning, even if extraordinarily goofy.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Brandon Cronenberg’s deeply unnerving debut is a sickly TMZ geek show. I need to stop hanging out online, because I keep reading flippant dismissals about how unimpressive he is as body horror’s premier nepo baby, then still really enjoying each of his movies when I get to see them for myself.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“In which a madman plastic surgeon transforms an injured go-to dancer into his missing daughter’s doppelganger, in order to claim her inheritance in her absence. Technically, this is a PG-rated comedy, but it feels like it should have been bumped to the top of the video nasties list. Delicious, deep-fried Southern sleaze.” Currently streaming on Screambox.
“Hideous gore, gratuitous male & female nudity, and a babyfaced Udo Kier soaring miles over the top as a camped-up villainous lead. What more could you want?” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and AMC+.
“Like all other Amicus anthology horrors I’ve seen, this is consistently entertaining throughout but never exactly surprising nor even thrilling. It’s horror comfort viewing, best enjoyed under a blanket with a humongous mug of tea.” Currently streaming on Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The greatest British portmanteau horror of all time, trading in the rigid stage-play traditionalism of classic Amicus anthologies for a more fluid, music video era dream logic.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“A pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief. Restructures the seaside ghost story of Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.” Currently streaming on Hulu.
“A pensive motherhood horror about the pain of trading in youthful passion & rebellion for familial comfort & ease. Lots of thematic overlap with The Five Devils in that way, even if they’re nothing alike aesthetically. Besides landing every one of its scares and dramatic beats, this just has some truly world-class hand acting. Cracking knuckles and spatchcocking chickens will never feel the same again.” Currently streamingon Shudder and AMC+.
“Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time, a superlative indicated by its definitive title. Terry O’Quinn is the stepfather, a sociopathic serial killer who cycles through families like he’s updating his wardrobe, killing the old batch in cold blood instead of dropping it off at Goodwill. O’Quinn is an explosive volcano of white-man rage, barely suppressing his violent outbursts under a thin facade of Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best-style suburban Family Values. It is one of the all-time great villain performances, regardless of genre. There was already a bland, forgettable remake in the aughts, but the only other actor who could maybe pull this performance off is Will Forte, whose comedic version of bottled-up fury is a direct echo of the terror in O’Quinn’s piercing, hateful eyes.” Currently streamingon Peacock, Screambox, for free (with ads) on Tubi, and for free (with a librarby card) on Kanopy & Hoopla.
“A tense domestic thriller about a pushy, macho plumber who walks all over a married couple of uptight academics; directed for television by a young Peter Weir. Cuts to the core of liberal urbanites’ fear of the working-class brutes they invite into their home for routine repairs; a home invasion thriller where the menace is politely welcomed inside.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“As absurd as this prototypical slasher can be tonally, it feels true to how I remember high school: a conformity cult led by fascist jocks, lording over poorly socialized losers who would’ve been just as awful if we were given the opportunity. Our jocks never offered to take us hang-gliding, though, so now I feel like I missed out on something.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“A strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.” Currently streaming on Paramount+.
“It wasn’t until after the viewing that I realized the director, Gerard Johnstone, was also the man behind Housebound, a film we loved so much that we made it into content for Swampflix twice: first with a very positive 2015 review and again five years later as the topic on one of our earliest episodes of the Lagniappe podcast. That actually explains the comedic sensibility; it’s not omnipresent, but it’s almost funnier that the jokes are paced with some distance between them, allowing them to break the tension when they reappear, and the emotional whiplash of it all is part of the fun. ” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A young, baby-faced Clint Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer. It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics. It isn’t long before the prematurely bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like ‘“’What elements do I need for a Black Mass?’”’ and ‘“’What are the keys to Satan’s magic?’”’, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression. And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.” Currently streamingon Shudder.
“Some fun, fucked-up Discomfort Horror that Malignantizes the post-torture porn cruelty of titles like Don’t Breathe into something new & exciting. It also has the best end-credits needle drop since You Were Never Really Here, leaving the audience in a perversely upbeat mood despite the Hell we just squirmed through.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Max.
“Simultaneously a familiar experience and an alien one, mixing generic horror tropes with an experimental sensibility – like a Poltergeist remake guided by the spirit of Un Chien Andalou. It’s the kind of loosely plotted, bad-vibes-only, liminal-space horror that requires the audience to meet it halfway both in emotional impact and in logical interpretation. In the best-case scenario, audiences will find traces of their own childhood nightmares in its darkened hallways & Lego-piece art instillations. Personally, I was more hung up on the way it evokes two entirely separate eras of my youth: my alone-time online as a sleep-starved teen and my alone-time in front of cathode TVs as a sleep-starved tyke a decade earlier.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Shudder.
“Before pressing play I was skeptical this would be enough of a Horror Film to work as proper Halloween season viewing. One of the first shots is a newspaper headline that reads ‘STRANGLER STILL AT LARGE!'” Currently streamingon Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel.
“Super scary, both as a traditional Gothic ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Daniel Radcliffe’s career path as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire.” Currently streamingon Paramount+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“The surprisingly goofy midway point between Poltergeist and Jacob’s Ladder. Can’t quite match the euphoric highs of either comparison, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. The rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Amazon Prime, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A deliciously trashy VHS slasher where every single kill comes with its own punny quip. You hardly have time to question why they call him Dr. Giggles before he’s performing involuntary open-heart surgery while giggling like a madman and proclaiming ‘”‘Laughter is the best medicine.'”‘ It has no idea how to fill the time between the kill gags, but it really delivers the goods where it counts.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and multiple opportunities to feel greatly offended while never being able to exactly pinpoint its politics. Wonderfully fucked up stuff.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I always assumed we didn’t have basements in Louisiana because we’re built on mushy swampland. Turns out it’s because we’re built on seven gateways to Hell. Honestly makes a lot more sense.” Currently streamingon Shudder, Peacock, andfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner. Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration. His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization. Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films. Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez. Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer. Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year. I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen. Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.
The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking. Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato). Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc. Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text. Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work. In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform. Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art. No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them. Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough. Nothing ever could be.
The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc. The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering. Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works. In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology. His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty. The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas. He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO). By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own. As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”
There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform. The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead. A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24. Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys. The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.
I have an ambivalent relationship with my gender identity, which I tend to label with “cis enough” and “cis-by-default” so I don’t have to think about it too hard in concrete terms. Part of that ambivalence is in figuring out where a mostly-straight male crossdresser fits in the current gender studies zeitgeist, which is righteously (and rightfully) focused on ensuring that trans people have a right to exist in public. Any personal irresolution I carry around as a man who’s both attracted to women and to wearing “women’s” clothing feels at best secondary to that political activism, especially in recent years when Conservative pundits have turned the basic daily existence of transgender people into an easy Culture War target for fascists & bullies. My interest in trans narratives in cinema is two-fold, then: admiration for the societal transgression of decidedly rejecting your assigned gender identity and belief in the necessity to reinforce that trans and gender non-conforming people have always been part of the human social fabric. There have been at least two great recent releases that speak to that dual interest, two documentaries on vintage trans life that allow their subjects to tell their own stories at length without editorial interruption. And since this is the most I’ve ever overshared in a single paragraph on this blog, I will report that I recently watched them both in a comforting afternoon double feature while recovering from a vasectomy.
The most recent film in this pairing is the new documentary Casa Susanna, which was plucked from its festival run for television & streaming broadcast in PBS’s American Experience series. The titular Casa Susanna was an American getaway camp for covert crossdressers in the 1950s & 60s, established as a Catskills meeting place for a larger attempt to build “a national sorority of crossdressers” who organized through backpages in the era’s fetish magazines. Documenting a time when public crossdressing was against the law outside “female impersonator” nightclub performances to entertain the straights, Casa Susanna is a heartfelt tribute to the value of “safe space” havens in a rigidly moralistic world. Two elder trans women who met at the getaway camp in their youth reunite at the historic site and trade stories with the daughter of an attendee who documented his own time there in a book titled A Year Among the Girls. The director only intrudes on these oral histories through inclusion of archival footage that establishes the general mood of the era, from anonymous home videos of the scenery to news reels of Christine Jorgensen reluctantly announcing her historic, headline-grabbing sex change. Mostly, the history of American transgender identity in the era is recounted by two women who lived it, whose full stories are told in long takes with no contextual chyrons or talking-head punditry. They talk about how some crossdressers (including their younger selves) used the societal isolation & like-minded camaraderie of Casa Susanna as a trial run for full-time public trans identity, while others used it as a temporary break from “playing the game” of straight, cisgender life. In the film’s most vivid sequences, they narrate a breathtaking slideshow of vintage glamour photos taken at Casa Susanna in its heyday, invaluable evidence of authentic American life that the American majority seeks to extinguish & forget. It’s a small, intimate film that only covers the personal stories of the few remaining women who were still around to tell them, but it does so with immense care & warmth.
1983’s Vestida de Azul (Dressed in Blue) is a much more substantial, confrontational work. Restored & re-released this year by MVP queer cinema distributor Altered Innocence, it’s a Spanish documentary about trans sex workers in the country’s post-Franco years. Those women’s stories are likewise told directly by the subjects in question, but in this case they are supplemented by dramatic re-enactments of their most cinematic anecdotes. The women meet at an artificially staged Sex and the City-style brunch to gab about the ups & downs of their collective lives as a social class, then are each allowed command of the narrative to invite audiences into their individual worlds. There’s a consistent class consciousness to their self-advocacy, explaining that they only participate in sex work en masse because no other profession has made room for their public existence, and because they need to eat. Lines like “Crimes are always committed by the poor” resonate just as sharply and vividly as the women’s stunning early-80s fashion, typified by black-lace lingerie worn directly under a fur coat. Where Casa Susanna is gentle & warm, Dressed in Blue is aggressively candid, documenting estrogen injections, breast surgery, and sex-trade price negotiations with a confrontationally matter-of-fact candor. The entire picture is thorny, sexy, and cool – instantly recognizable as a Paris is Burning-level cinematic landmark, except about the art of hooking instead of the art of voguing. It’s essential viewing for anyone with affection for queer resilience stories or, more generally, for documentary filmmaking as an artform. You can practically hear a young Pedro Almodóvar frantically scribbling details in his notebook in the background and, as much as I love his early work, there’s something invaluable about directly hearing these women’s stories without the filter of his well-represented perspective.
It’s occurred to me in writing this that I’ve committed the exact mistake I’m praising these two documentaries for avoiding: pointlessly imposing my own voice on these women’s stories. The impact & importance of Casa Susanna & Vestida de Azul rely on their shared cultural value as oral histories. The amount of time their subjects are allowed to talk without interruption is remarkable in both cases, even if the earlier film allows room for more traditionally, transcendently cinematic indulgences. At the same time, their dual effect triggers an unavoidable moment of self-reflection in the audience – both in assessing our own personal relationships with gender and in political rage against the systems that make those relationships so needlessly strained & unnatural. That’s what I was thinking about while icing my testicles with frozen peas last month, anyway, in an unrelated private struggle with my body.
And so, with all of the festival buzz surrounding Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming vulgar Frankenstein riff Poor Things, we have lived to suffer yet another round of online Sex Scenes Discourse. It’s only been a month since the young Evangelicals of the American suburbs were traumatized by brief flashes of Florence Pugh’s breasts in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer the last round, and now we’re hearing from international YA fiction nerds who claim that “Most actors and many viewers don’t particularly like or miss [sex scenes in movies]. Only film critics and some directors seem to want them.” Like everyone else who’s addicted to online outrage bait, I always find myself scrolling through the replies to these Sex Scene diatribes in stunned disbelief of the support they receive, convincing myself that Zoomer prudes are itching to bring back The Hays Code. Also like everyone else who’s addicted to this monthly ritual, I’d be a lot better off just putting down my phone and watching a dirty movie instead. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these anti-sex scene freaks don’t speak for an entire generation of moviegoers; they’re isolated cases of puritanical mania, most of whom get their steady stream of chaste content through Disney+ and romance paperbacks written for teens, only to be scandalized by intimate moments of nudity & bodily contact the one or two times a year they accidentally watch a movie for adults. For the rest of us—audiences who believe sex is a common aspect of human life worth interpreting onscreen—there are still a few cinematic holdouts that haven’t given up the culture war to The Prudes, despite constant online chatter decrying their existence. The very best way to combat Sex Scene Discourse is to log off and go see a dirty movie in public, the filthier the better, which is exactly what I did the week Poor Things kicked off another round of puriteen grumbling online. Actually, I saw two.
Because America is a nation founded by Puritans, my best bet finding graphic depictions of sex at my local multiplex is catching up with the few adult dramas that happen to land domestic distribution at international film festivals. Memphis-born American director Ira Sachs seems to understand this conundrum, which is likely how he ended up making his messy bisexual love triangle drama Passages in France instead of the US. Here, Passages was threatened with an “NC-17” rating for its frank, onscreen depictions of queer sex, the modern equivalent of an “X.” In Europe, it’s a standard-issue adult drama, acted out by a small cast of Euro film fest regulars familiar to mildly risqué dramas just like it: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Rogowski stars as a temperamental, narcissistic German filmmaker living in Paris with his much stabler, milder-mannered English husband (Whishaw). At the end of a typically tense film shoot (of a fictional movie also titled Passages), Rogowski feels the communal attention to his control-freak antics & directorial authority plummeting, so he acts out by sleeping with a French woman on the film’s crew (Exarchopoulos), seemingly on a first-time bisexual whim. Addicted to the thrill of stirring up drama in his marriage and in the romantic life of his new sexual partner, the film follows his desperate, darkly hilarious stunts for attention as he plays his two lovers against each other for his own momentary amusement, until he pushes both relationships past their breaking point, leaving him inevitably, permanently alone. It’s basically Poly Under Duress: The Movie, as anyone who makes the mistake of finding Rogowski attractive is sucked (literally and figuratively) into his hedonistic little orbit. There’s nothing especially deep or revelatory about Passages as a character study of a horned-up narcissist, but it is always encouraging to see that someone is still out there making complicated dramas about messy adult relationships, and Sachs goes the extra mile by centering this particular story on The Messiest Bitch in Paris.
Sachs also dared to directly engage with the Sex Scene Discourse in his response to the MPAA’s decision to slap this would-be R-rated drama with a higher, penalizing NC-17 rating – yet another data point in the organization’s long history of homophobia (see also: their egregious R-rating for M Knight Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin earlier this year). The main sticking point with most sex scene haters is that they’re “unnecessary” because they “do not advance the plot.” Personally, I think anyone who’s watching movies for The Plot above all else are already lost causes and would be better off reading an airport novel than engaging with cinema as an artform, but I appreciate the way Sachs pushes back on this notion anyway. In Passages, all advances in plot & characterization are achieved through sex scenes. We learn more about these characters in their private moments of intimacy than we do in their more guarded public lives, and there’s something especially pointed about the way Rogowski’s character deliberately creates drama in the bedroom to make his weekly schedule more interesting now that he doesn’t have a film project to work on. In explaining his refusal to edit Passages to meet the MPAA’s criteria for an R-rating, Sachs stated, “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie. To make an interesting sex scene is not easy. Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film. It has a story. And I wanted each one to have its own relevance and have its own details and be interesting to the audience. I think making interesting sex scenes is the hardest thing . . . What I tried to track here was not to look at sex, but to look at intimacy, not constructed through editing and avoidance.” That sounds like an artist who’s committed to the cause, and we’re lucky to have him fighting on the frontlines of the online Sex Scene Wars.
All that said, I don’t know that treating sex as a normal, natural human behavior onscreen is enough anymore. It might be time to escalate the weaponry of war and make our dirty movies even dirtier, officially adopting a scorched Earth policy. That’s why it’s always important to go see a John Waters repertory screening whenever it’s offered to you, and I’m fairly sure The Prytania’s recent screening of 1977’s Desperate Living was the first time a Waters film has played here since NOMA’s retrospective of his work in 2017. It’s been even longer since I watched Desperate Living in particular with a crowd, and it was projected off the same ancient DVD scan of the film both times, well over a decade apart, because there’s no better version available – a damn dirty shame. Partly a hand-constructed dystopia about a community of crust-punk murderess outcasts and partly a storybook fairytale about a lesbian uprising that topples an unjust monarchy, Desperate Living is my personal favorite John Waters film and, thus, my favorite work of art. About halfway through this most recent screening, I was thinking that this little D.I.Y. geek show manages to touch on every single cinematic subject I’m passionate about except witchcraft, and then I had the joy of rediscovering Mink Stole cooking up a magic rabies potion in a giant cauldron, completing the full set. I was also delighted to see more graphic queer sex on the big screen for all the same reasons detailed above, including its unexpected contributions to the almighty Plot. Yes, Waters includes plenty of his signature pure-shock-value sex & violence in Desperate Living, most notably in scenes where Edith Massey’s evil-queen villain expresses a distinctly Gay Male sexuality purely for the audience’s delight: spanking her army of leather-clad twink underlings, huffing their jock straps, and cheerfully exclaiming “Look at those balls!” at their naked, writhing bodies. However, there’s also a surprising tenderness in the sex scenes between the various lesbian couples of Mortville, most significantly in how Mink Stole’s relationship with fellow fugitive Jean Hill evolves from employer-employee to partners-in-crime to mutually-betrayed-lovers, all tracked through their onscreen sexual contact.
Waters has also been roped into commenting on the state of Gen-Z puriteens and Sex Scene discourse, because he’s the kind of interview subject that regularly gets roped into commenting on the state of everything. An interviewer from the Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “From the rosary job in Multiple Maniacs, to Divine playing both participants in a filthy roadside fuck in Female Trouble, to penetration via chicken in Pink Flamingos, Waters’s films are chock-full of sexual debauchery. I elicit his take on a recent opinion, seemingly held among a younger, online generation that sex scenes in films are unnecessary. Waters scoffs: ‘I haven’t heard that one. That’s a good one. Young people don’t want to see sex in movies? Jesus Christ.” Honestly, I appreciate that complete dismissal of Sex Scene Discourse as a worthwhile topic of discussion even more so than Sachs’s earnest attempts to combat it through his art. It’s laughable that an entire generation of young people would be disinterested in sex as a cinematic subject; we just happen to live in a time when that outlier opinion gets amplified online for outrage engagement, making the voice of a few sound like the voice of the many. I can report from the ground that there were plenty of young people (presumably ones with internet access) present at that recent screening of Desperate Living, and they were hooting & hollering just as loud as the elder perverts in the room, myself included. There was something righteous & defiant about watching such a filthy movie in public (screened as a weekend kickstarter for this year’s Southern Decadence festivities), as if we were protesting for our Constitutional right to watch graphic sex at the multiplex. Meanwhile, my mid-afternoon screening of Passages at The Broad that same week was much more subdued, as it’s a movie that treats sex as a normal, healthy aspect of daily life instead of a nuclear weapon to wield against Evangelical suburbanites.
In summary, the answer to the supposed problem of Sex Scene Discourse is the same answer to most problems in the Internet Era: go outside. It helps to live in a sizeable city with adventurously programmed cinemas like The Prytania and The Broad, of course, but according to the easily spooked adult YA readers of the world, you can’t seem to go see any movie without being accosted with an “unnecessary” sex scene these days, so any theater will do. And if there is absolutely no public access to adult-targeted movies where you live, it is your solemn duty to invite friends over to watch the filthiest movies you own with popcorn at home. Having recently invited friends over to watch Rinse Dream’s semi-pornographic take on Dr. Caligari, I can proudly say that I am doing my part. It is imperative that the puriteens do not win this particular battle in the culture war, even though I’m starting to think there aren’t enough puriteens in the world to register as a genuine threat in the first place.
Just like when I rated & ranked the Alien franchise, the original Ninja Turtles movie remains an easy favorite. It’s not only a priceless time capusle of bodacious 90s kitsch, but it also exemplifies how attention to visual craft can make a classic out of potentially disastrous material. Without the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s involvement the first live-action Ninja Turtles film would be ranked on the same worst-of-all-time lists as Howard the Duck, Troll 2, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and Mac & Me. All those titles have their own mesmeric movie magic to them, but this one needs much less good will & forgiveness from the audience to legitimize it. It’s a legitimately great children’s film, one with a surprising amount of grit & gravitas considering the inherent goofiness of the source material.
The franchise’s most recent theatrical outing (and, obviously, the inspiration for this ranked list) is not only the best Ninja Turtles movie in the three decades since the original, but it’s also generally the best mutation of the breakthrough Spider-Verse CG animation aesthetic to date and the most a Trent Reznor score has actually sounded like Trent Reznor’s band. It’s particularly delightful to see a TMNT movie focus on the “teenage” portion of the acronym by making everything as gross as possible and by making the young, crimefighting turtles’ ultimate goal to save prom from being cancelled. In all other Ninja Turtles movies, the titular heroes’ “teenage” status is an aspirational quality for younger viewers, who look up to them as skateboarders, pizza-chompers, and users of obscure slang (“Cowabunga!”, “Radical!”, “Tubular!”, etc.); in this one, being teens means they’re charmingly awkward dorks still figuring out their place in the world, which feels more accurate as an adult looking back on those years.
Turtles Forever (2009)
This genuinely funny fish-out-of-water comedy imports the deliriously goofy Ninja Turtles from the 1980s cartoon series into the (slightly) more realistic world of the 2000s Ninja Turtles cartoon (and then eventually imports both crews into the even grittier world of the original underground comics, sans sarcasm). It has aged remarkably well, both as a loving nostalgia piece commemorating both TV shows and as an early predictor of the superhero genre’s current, implosive addiction to multiverse team-ups. I can’t wait to see the Mutant Mayhem turts repeat the gimmick in their own inevitable multiverse sequel.
It’s easy to work up nostalgia for 1990s pop culture all these decades later, but it takes a real trash connoisseur to look back fondly on the crass commercialism of the recent past. Michael Bay’s CGI Ninja Turtles film is bad-taste 2010s filmmaking in a nutshell or, if you will, on the half shell. It encapsulates everything “wrong” with the mainstream schlock of its era: lens flairs, found footage, product placement, fascination with viral videos, over-reliance on CGI, shaky cam, action confused by quick cuts, large-scale destruction of a major city, a phony third act death crisis, and a dubstep beat for the obligatory, plot-summarizing rap song that plays over the credits. The film itself is even an example our greatest, most frequent sin of the decade: the reboot. More specifically, it’s a gritty reboot, the most ludicrous gritty reboot of the post-Dark Knight era, considering the inherent goofiness of the source material. To top it all off, it boasts an above-it-all sense of irony that compels the movie to periodically point out how inherently silly that source material is. Characters poke fun at one another for “doing the Batman voice” and frequently mock the basic idea of talking humanoid turtles. The further we get away from a time when those qualities were our grotesque norm, the more endearing it will become as a cultural relic.
Instead of pushing the brooding grit of the Dark Knight era’s needless reboots to their most ludicrous extreme like its hilariously hideous predecessor, Out of the Shadows calls back to the light, fun, cartoonish energy that made the original live-action Ninja Turtles trilogy such a nostalgia-inducing relic of the 1990s. I guess you could ague that banking on 90s nostalgia is in itself a snapshot of modern blockbuster filmmaking, but that’s not what makes Out of the Shadows special. Here’s what does make it special: a manhole-shooting garbage truck modeled after the franchise’s infamous pizza van toy; a pro wrestler that plays a tank-operating rhinoceros; a perfectly hideous realization of the villainous mech suit-operating alien brain Krang; etc. Given enough time, this is a film both silly & visually memorable (read: deeply ugly) enough to generate its own future nostalgia entirely separate from that of a previous generation’s (not that it was above playing the 90s cartoon’s theme song over the end credits).
Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
This direct-to-video crossover event is shockingly violent for an animated Ninja Turtles movie, frequently interrupting Michaelangelo’s teen-boy tomfoolery (voiced by a perfectly cast Kyle Mooney) with Raphael & Batman drawing blood from various outmatched combatants. I suppose that tonal imbalance makes sense, since the target audience has to be old enough to be nostalgic for both the Ninja Turtles’ & the Batman’s respective animated series but also immature enough to be watching a Batman vs Ninja Turtles movie in the first place. Luckily, I qualify, so I got treated to the once-in-a-lifetime phrase “Jokerfied ooze”.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)
This rushed-to-market sequel replaces the grit & gravitas of the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie with nonstop catchphrase recitals, hack comedy routines, Vanilla Ice product placement, and Looney Tunes sound effects. Those indulgences are still “turte-rific” in their own way, though, and it all amounts to a “max-amundo” action comedy that inspired an entire generation of Millennial children to “Go, ninja, go” to the polls to vote for environmental protection laws.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)
In which the turtles time-travel to feudal Japan, a setting that separates them from their most essential accoutrements (pizza, skateboards, urban grime, etc.), so it’s not surprising it killed the momentum of the original live-action franchise. This does make sense as toned-down course correction after the nonstop catchphrase goofballery of Secret of the Ooze, and I guess it’s nice to have official confirmation that the Jim Henson costume designs look like kappa. It just also feels like the least ninja-turtley Ninja Turtles movie, verifiable by the fact that there isn’t a single pizza delivery in either of its dual timelines.
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022)
This series finale Event Film (wrapping up an animated TV show I had never heard of before starting this project) is pleasant enough but entirely disposable, by which I mean it’s a Netflix movie. There’s some novelty in it plugging Ninja Turtles characters into the plot of The Terminator, but if you are not currently 7 years old and would rather just be watching The Terminator, that novelty can also be a huge hindrance. The animation itself is vibrant & colorful but also flat & unremarkable. The most remarkable thing about it, really, is that Ben Schwartz’s vocal work manages to make Leonardo more annoying than any previous movie version of Michaelangelo – a true miracle.
TMNT (2007)
The Michael Bay Ninja Turtle movies get a lot of shit for their hideous computer animation, which is probably deserved, but at least they have personality & texture to them, however grotesque. This room-temperature CG gruel is lifelessly, insipidly hideous, as if it were a proof-of-concept storyboard for a potential Ninja Turtles movie instead of the final product. I can’t believe it was released in theaters and not on an interactive CD-ROM. It’s also way too self-serious, both for a kids’ movies about pizza-addict turtle ninjas and for a reptilian joy ride on The Polar Express.
Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper. Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”. Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess. In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.
A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite. However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful. There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front. Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking. It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales. Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.
Flashdance (1983)
A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance. Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review. It’s not hard to see why. While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal. Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video. When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke. When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids. When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really. She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre. A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.
I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too. Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism. It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder. It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.
Stripper (1986)
There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper. The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living. The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness. At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival. That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series. Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time. Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.
Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven. It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs. It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime. On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.
Vamp (1986)
It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special. A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks. So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists. Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power. In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.
There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring). It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty. As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.
Every year, I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself. This year, that personal celebration happened to coincide with the national celebration of Barbenheimer: our newest, most sacred federal holiday. I didn’t participate in the full Barbenheimer meme myself, largely because I didn’t understand the value in cramming Gerwig’s & Nolan’s latest into an incongruous double feature simply for the LOLs. Instead, I paired Oppenheimer with fellow unfathomable-weaponry-of-war “Dad movie” Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, and I sought out an appropriate Schwarzenegger classic to watch with family the same day as Barbie. Luckily, Last Action Hero happens to be celebrating a 30th birthday milestone of its own this year, and it proved to have a surprising amount of thematic overlap with the summer’s biggest hit. In a way, Last Action Hero is Barbie for Boys™, which is to say that its fictional character’s real-world existential crisis at the opposite extreme of the gender spectrum made for a surprisingly rewarding double feature – much more so than I suspect I would’ve found in the all-day Barbenheimer mind melter.
Margot Robbie stars in her own existential meta comedy as Stereotypical Barbie, a plastic ideal of girl-power pop feminism whose insular dollhouse world is shaken when she’s introduced to real-life human problems, emotions, and politics. Barbie is both a delirious celebration and a pointed critique of the world-famous Mattel toy brand – combining the bubbly pop feminism of sleepover classics like Legally Blonde with the menacing, high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood nightmares like The Wizard of Oz. It’s fantastic, an instant classic. Last Action Hero is more of a cult curio that had to gradually earn its cultural footing over time, but it approaches Schwarzenegger as a household brand the same way Gerwig’s film approaches Barbie. Schwarzenegger stars as both himself and as a typical Schwarzenegger action hero, Jack Slade, who does not initially realize he is a fictional character sidestepping the harsher consequences of life in the Real World. When a magical golden movie ticket frees him from the silver screen and he gets a taste of reality, Slade is confronted with the limitations of his once indestructible body and his insatiable addiction to macho hyperviolence, sending him into an existential tailspin. There are few things more hack than assigning movies a strict placement on the gender binary in the year of our Dark Lord 2023, but both of these meta comedies are specifically about the ways gender stereotypes are established & reinforced by corporate pop media products, to the point where they become kitsch and, ultimately, targets of satire. It’s just that women had to wait an additional three decades to get a Last Action Hero equivalent specifically marketed to them, to Hollywood’s shame.
The funny thing about Barbie & Last Action Hero‘s shared purpose is that in both cases the call is coming from inside the house. There is potential, legitimate criticism to find in Gerwig’s decision to make a crowd-pleasing commercial for a Mattel product, even if her script (written with partner Noah Baumbach) includes direct, damaging punches to the Mattel brand. She’s participating in the same Art Vs. Commerce tug of war that all mainstream Hollywood movies wrestle with, but she makes that struggle a blatant feature of the text, even casting the Mattel execs toying with her script behind the scenes as on-screen buffoons and comic relief (led by Will Ferrell). Likewise, Last Action Hero was initially conceived as a spoof of excessively violent, comically tropey action movies of its era: films like Rambo & Commando. Hilariously, the project was written & directed by two of the filmmakers most directly responsible for the exact tropes it mocks: director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Predator, The Hunt for Red October) and screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon[s] 1 – 3). When Barbie features a TV commercial for Depression Barbie or when Last Action Hero features a trailer for a shoot-em-up version of Hamlet, the movies are mocking the exact pop media tropes and real-world social ills the industry behind them helped create in the first place. They’re self-conflicted, but in a way that adds authenticity to their parodic intent. Last Action Hero‘s goofball ZAZ gags are much funnier in the visual context of a typical John McTiernan action flick, just as Barbie‘s intrusive existential thoughts and feminist rants are much sharper in the visual context of a legitimate Mattel toy commercial.
The truth is that you don’t have to look far to find direct comparison points for Last Action Hero. It wasn’t even the only self-spoofing action hero meta comedy of 1993, since Schwarzenegger’s fellow Planet Hollywood investor Sylvester Stallone had his own macho-fish-out-of-water satire in Demolition Man that same year. And that’s not even counting the more generalized action genre spoofs of the era like Hot Shots & Naked Gun, nor their more recent smartass superhero equivalents in the Deadpool series. Meanwhile, most of the aesthetic & tonal touchstones I can think to compare the new Barbie movie to are all relics of the VHS rental era:Josie and the Pussycats, The Brady Bunch Movie, Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, Spice World, the aforementioned Legally Blonde, etc. Those titles have all stood the test of time as obsessive-rewatch classics not only because they’re all sharp-witted and visually vibrant, but also because Hollywood hasn’t bothered to offer up-to-date replacements in the same high-femme register in the decades since. The instant, participatory enthusiasm for Barbie is reflective of an audience starved for a kind of women-marketed satire that Hollywood doesn’t regularly make anymore. Meanwhile, Last Action Hero bombed in its time, failing to take on its opening weekend rival Jurassic Park the same way Barbie trounced Oppenheimer. It still has its own dedicated-to-the-cause cult audience, though, mostly among lifelong Schwarzenegger super-obsessives like me who grew up with it as a childhood favorite. There’s just so much other self-mocking action schlock out there that it’s a little more difficult to immediately recognize it as something special.
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