Swampflix’s official coverage of the best films of 2022 won’t start until January 2023, but listmaking season is already in full swing elsewhere. General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year lists, and I’m proud to say I was able to take a small part in that ritual this year. I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2022, representing a consensus opinion among 84 critics across nine states in the American South. Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a pretty great list! At the very least, it’s incredibly cool to see the skull-cracking action flick RRR rank so highly among the winners (including a win for Best Foreign Language Film) and to see something as bizarre as Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic recognized as “the film that best evokes the spirit of the South” (SEFCA’s Gene Wyatt Award). At Swampflix, we’re always pushing for vibrant, over-the-top genre filmmaking to be recognized alongside more typically prestigious Awards Season fare, and this year’s SEFCA winners include a healthy balance of both.
Speaking of which, the biggest story of this year’s list is the total dominance of the Daniels’ big-hearted sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not only was it honored as our #1 film of the year, but it also pretty much swept all major categories, including awards for Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Director(s) (Daniels), and Best Original Screenplay (Daniels). Online discussion of Everything Everywhere‘s faults & merits has gotten shockingly hyperbolic since it hit theaters way back in March, but it’s undeniably cool that a movie that playful & adventurous is earning so much genuine grassroots praise as a serious contender for Movie of the Year. To quote SEFCA President Matt Goldberg in today’s press release, “As film critics, one of the best things we can do is celebrate films that push the boundaries of narrative and genre. We hope that our voice can pull in viewers who may not normally check out a film where two women with hot dog fingers figure out their relationship. As strange as the film can be, its core message of embracing the richness of our relationships in the face of nihilistic apathy will endure far beyond this year’s award season.” Right on.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli continue their celebration of Angela Lansbury by discussing the coming-of-age werewolf anthology horror The Company of Wolves (1984).
Our current Movie of the Month, 1972’s A New Leaf, was the directorial debut of stage comedy legend Elaine May. May reluctantly starred in the film herself opposite Walter Matthau, who plays a destitute, asexual playboy aristocrat who plans to marry her neurotic heiress character, kill her, and liquidate her fortune. Only, his plans are thwarted when it gradually dawns on him that there is one thing in the world he enjoys more than money: his wife’s company. A New Leaf is a darkly funny, bitterly anti-romantic romcom until, against all odds, it ends on the familiarly sweet notes of a traditional romcom. Elaine May’s performance is a large part of its success, as the only reasonable response to watching her nervously unravel under her gigantic glasses is to immediately blurt out “Marry me,” regardless of whether you also want to kill her for her inheritance. It’s a shame, then, that her frustrations behind the camera tripped up the film’s potential success.
Every movie Elaine May directed was delivered over-schedule & over-budget. Even her relatively laidback, low-budget debut stretched 40 days past its shooting schedule, with an entire hour of extraneous bits & bobs the studio edited out of the final product despite May’s protests that it needed to be a three-hour romcom to work. If she had delivered A New Leaf on-time, on-budget, and properly trimmed, it would’ve been considered a huge hit instead of just breaking even, and she might’ve had an easier time fighting for her cuts of similarly troubled productions down the line. Instead, she toiled away in the background, writing screenplays for some of the most beloved Hollywood comedies of all time – poor thing. She did manage to squeeze four feature films out of Hollywood producers before they took away her director’s chair, though, and luckily for audiences they’re all great movies, whether or not they lost money. If you enjoyed A New Leaf, I recommend that you watch all three films May directed afterwards, detailed below. And if you’re a Hollywood producer, I recommend that you spend even more money on whatever dream project the 90-year-old auteur wants to see made before she leaves this world. Chances are high you’ve already wasted much more money on much worse films.
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
I guess it’s inaccurate to claim that every Elaine May movie was a commercial flop. Her follow-up to A New Leaf was her one hit comedy, enough of a financial success that it inspired a major studio remake starring Ben Stiller in the aughts. Curiously, it’s also the only film in her catalog that’s not currently available to watch at home through official means. The Heartbreak Kid has been left to rot on YouTube and Archive.org as a long-forgotten 20th Century Fox acquisition that the art-indifferent overlords at Disney have no concern for. Which is a shame, sinceit might very well be May’s career best as a director. At the very least, its anti-romcom humor is even darker & more vicious than A New Leaf’s, which is impressive since that debut was about marital murder.
Charles Grodin stars as a fresh-out-of-college shit-talker who immediately realizes on a honeymoon road trip that he despises his bride. While vacationing in Miami, he ditches her for a younger, blonder co-ed who he has no business fooling with, inevitably finding himself still deeply unhappy after another successful romantic conquest. The Heartbreak Kid is essentially a horror film about a nightmare world where everyone has to marry the first person who makes them horny before they get to have sex, regardless of compatibility or moral deficiency. May’s psychedelic zoom-ins on the Miami resort sunshine, Groden’s complaints that his wife is “not really his type,” and the escalating tension of the plot’s sitcom hijinks are outright maddening, whereas the similar poisonous romance humor of A New Leaf plays oddly, subtly sweet. Together, they make a great pair, and they’re the best argument for May’s genius as a comedic auteur.
May’s least typical work is her all-in-one-night gangster drama Mikey & Nicky, starring Peter Falk & John Cassavetes as a pair of uneasy, paranoid friends at the bottom rung of the crime-world ladder. Falk appears to be the kinder, more calming presence of the two, but over the course of the film both characters expose themselves as low-level scumbag criminals without a decent bone between either of their bodies. They’re not all that different from the self-absorbed, oblivious brutes of May’s comedies, except that working in a different genre means she no longer has to ingratiate them to the audience for the story to work. Moving away from a character-based comedy structure also expands her scope to capture a portrait of a grimy, pre-Giuliana era NYC instead of just a couple losers who occupy it. The film’s late-night setting, 70s funk soundtrack, guerilla-style camerawork, and authentic casting of dive-bar creeps as background extras all feel like they’d be much more at home in a Scorsese picture like Taxi Driver or Mean Streets than a typical film from Elaine May. But she’s damn good at it.
Mikey & Nicky presents the best argument that May deserves as much time to tinker around in the editing room as she desires. The dialogue has a tight, pointed feel to it, as if the screenplay were written for the stage. So, it’s mind-blowing to read about how its narrative flow was mostly constructed after-the-fact in the editing room, like a sprawling, improv-based Apatow comedy. Her way of putting a story together might not have been financially sound at the time (considering that her over-schedule shoots were burning through celluloid while Apatow’s only clutter up digital servers), but you can’t argue with the results. She makes great movies.
The only time I can feel the overcooked, under-planned sweatiness of Elaine May’s directorial style is in her final picture, the one that effectively became a punchline synonym for box office disaster. Ishtar is not nearly as bad as its contemporary reviews suggested. In its earliest stretch, it’s an ahead-of-its-time, Tim & Eric style anti-comedy, starring Dustin Hoffman & Warren Beatty as a pair of sub-mediocre songwriters who abandon their shared dream of making it big in New York City to instead make some quick money as a nightclub act in Morocco. The film also isn’t as great as its modern reclaimers suggest. Once it arrives in Morocco, May loses the personable intimacy that makes her earlier comedies so great, as Beatty & Hoffman’s buffoons are gradually drafted against their will into a conflict between the CIA, leftist guerillas, and the dictator of the fictional country of Ishtar. The movie loses a little of its post-Andy Kauffman, proto-Tim & Eric sheen as the whole battle comes to a head in its third act slump, which involves a blind camel, some unfortunate detours into brown face, and our bumbling leads getting lost in the desert.
Despite some of that exhausting, comedy-killing bloat in the third act, Ishtar does not deserve its reputation as One of the Worst Comedies of All Time. It’s doubtful it was even the worst comedy released in the spring of 1985. The film is often funny in a strikingly subversive, adventurously unconventional way. It even goes as far as to include harsh criticisms of US interference with political affairs in the Middle East instead of broadly stereotyping the people of the region the way lazier 80s comedies would (for the most part). Still, it ended up being the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, as it finally sealed May’s reputation as box office poison after four consecutive debacles. Even the critics had turned on May at the arrival of her final feature, seemingly eager to tear it down before it was even released. Even if her productions were overly extravagant for what she was supposed to be delivering, I’d say that was a mistake. After all, she was only hurting the money men. She consistently put out great art, even when it was bad for business.
I only attended two in-person screenings at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival: local premieres of the New Orleans drag scene documentary Last Dance and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning horror film Nanny. Everything else I caught at this year’s festival was presented on its Virtual Cinema platform, streamed at home on my laptop & TV. Logistical obstacles kept me from catching more titles in person, which is a shame, since one of the major joys of NOFF is being immersed in microbudget, niche-interest cinema alongside huge, enthusiastic audiences that those movies would not reach otherwise. After a week of rushing from screening to screening trying to cram in as many personal, handcrafted pictures as I can before they disappear into the distribution ether, I tend to lose track of the textures & standards of professional, corporate filmmaking. It’s a low-key, intimate headspace I never want to emerge from, and there’s something especially cool about dwelling there with the sizeable crowds that are missing from arthouse theaters every other week of the year. I obviously couldn’t simulate that experience attending the festival’s Virtual Cinema at home, but I did still get to see some pretty great movies.
Last year, I wrote a quick-takes roundup of the higher-profile Spotlight Films I caught at NOFF, but this year I’m flipping it around. Stay tuned for standalone reviews of Last Dance & Nanny, as well as an audio recap of the full #NOFF2022 experience on an upcoming episode of The Swampflix Podcast. In the meantime, here’s a brief round-up of all the smaller, more esoteric NOFF titles I watched at home – the closest I could get to full immersion in indie-budget Festival Brain.
Three Headed Beast
The first film I watched on NOFF’s Virtual Cinema platform this year ended up being my clear favorite. The intimate, largely dialogue free drama Three Headed Beast got me excited to spend a week watching nothing but microbudget indies with no commercial appeal, and I was surprised that each subsequent virtual “screening” was a case of diminishing returns. A small, quiet dispatch from our sister city Austin (where one central Swampflix contributor currently dwells), it’s got an infectious D.I.Y. spirit that’ll convince you the only resources you need to make a great film is a few free friends & weekends and a halfway decent script. It’s cute, it’s stylish, it’s sexy, and it’s a more emotionally involving drama than most Awards Season weepies with 1000x its budget.
In Three Headed Beast, a loving bisexual couple struggles with their open relationship when one of them catches feelings for a younger third. The historical details of their relationship dynamic—how long they’ve been together, how long they’ve been open, who suggested the change, etc.—aren’t spelled out until late in the runtime, when the wordless montages of their various romantic trysts are put on pause for the film’s first lengthy exchange of dialogue. It’s all clearly communicated in their body language before that late-in-the-game explainer, though, and a tryptic split screen editing technique helps pack as much of that visual information into the frame as possible in an intricate, exciting way. The tension of who’s putting more logistical & theoretical work into their polyamory (through podcast & literature research) vs. who’s actually committing to that lifestyle with a full heart is complexly mapped out using very simple, straightforward tools of the editing room – pulling a great, low-key romance drama out of very limited resources. Plus, it’s the only film I saw at this year’s festival that includes a tender act of analingus, which has got to count for something.
Friday I’m in Love
I’m embarrassed to admit that my two favorite selections at this proudly local film festival were both imports from Texas. The pop culture documentary Friday I’m Love is a detailed hagiography of the locally infamous Numbers nightclub in Houston, which opened as a dinner-theatre cabaret before converting to an immensely popular gay disco, then mutating once again into a new wave & industrial music venue. Decorated with the tape warp & pre-loaded fonts of a vintage home camcorder, the movie presents “Houston’s CBGBs” as a Totally 80s™ nostalgia pit, one filled to the brim with half-remembered anecdotes about counterculture legends as varied as Divine, Ministry, Grace Jones, Nine Inch Nails, and Siouxie Sioux. The doc is primarily a time capsule record for people who happened to live near the gay Houston neighborhood Montrose when the club was its cultural epicenter, but anyone with a decent sense of taste in music would find something worthwhile in that hazy stroll down memory lane.
Friday I’m In Love commits the worst crimes of a low-budget pop culture doc. It invites talking heads to endlessly daydream about the glory days; its director makes themself a part of the story for no particular reason; it could have easily been reduced to a short. And yet it’s got so much great archival footage of the loveable freaks who ran wild in the pre-internet world that it easily transcends those petty quibbles. It turns out I’m willing to overlook a lot of gruel & glut as long as you throw in some anecdotes about drag queens, goths, and Björk, and there’s something especially charming about seeing those beautiful freaks party in the Texas heat. It turns out I wasn’t the only one so easily charmed, either; the movie won this year’s Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Street Punx
While the one truly local film I caught on the Virtual Cinema platform wasn’t my favorite of the fest, it was maybe the best suited for the fest. Street Punx is perfect NOFF programming in that it’s a flippant satire about the petty, logistical frustrations of making the exact kinds of movies that never make it past the film festival circuit. You get to laugh at the ludicrous, aimless hipsters who don’t even know why they’re making art in the first place, then immediately dance with them at the afterparty. It’s self-critical about the entire enterprise of making niche-interest, microbudget films about “the real world” instead of genuinely engaging with it, while also never taking that to-the-mirror indictment all that seriously.
In this low-key slacker comedy, a pair of directionless New Orleans filmmakers attempt to scrape together funds to make a movie about street punks in Myanmar. Hiding behind moodboard comparisons to the unscripted No Wave influences of filmmakers like Jarmusch, they’re never straightforward to potential investors about why they want to make a movie in Myanmar, mostly because they don’t even know the reasons themselves. The studded jackets and spiked mohawks of their potential subjects look great on camera, especially in contrast to the ceremonial Buddhist robes worn by local monks & nuns. They’re not even really interested in those surface-level aesthetics, though; nor are they are interested in the violent military coups that give those punk-culture rebels a political purpose. Their concerns are selfish & petty well past the point of parody (including the director using the potential location shoot as an excuse to bang her Myanmarese crush), and most of the movie is a comedy about attempts to justify the project as anything other than a grotesque personal indulgence. It’s a funny joke too, even if Street Punx itself feels a little messy & aimless in the exact ways it’s critiquing its would-be film-within-a-film for being.
Wetiko
My least favorite film of my Virtual Cinema selections was also the one with the highest ambitions, one that has a much clearer political purpose than the fictional Myanmar punk culture film in Street Punx. In Wetiko, an Indigenous youth gets tangled up in a spiritualist turf war between authentic Maya shamans and their phony Euro initiators in the Yucatan, since his family’s pet store supplies hallucinogenic toads needed for their rituals. It’s sharply critical of druggy white colonizers coopting Maya shaman traditions for recreational & self-aggrandizing purposes, recalling the criticisms of ayahuasca tourism in the overlooked, underloved drama Icaros: A Vision. Featuring performances in the English, Spanish, Mayan, Afrikaans, and (fictional) Empire of Love languages, it’s got an impressively broad scope for such a tiny production, and the New Orleans Film Festival should feel proud to have hosted its World Premiere.
I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Wetiko isn’t as great as it could have been. It’s shot on film, so it’s automatically got a leg up over most modern festival programming in terms of texture, color, and warmth. It’s a shame, then, that it loses some of that ground in its choppy, “trippy”, CG-laced editing techniques during its hallucination sequences, which often feel cliché when they need to feel darkly magical. Thinking back to the way this year’s magnificent Neptune Frost updated its own ancient mystique with the string lights & glowsticks of modern urban living, it’s easy to find Wetiko lacking in comparison. I still found plenty to enjoy about it though, from the eyeroll-worthy cult members of the Empire of Love Conscious Community Center’s awe for “the universal hum of connectedness” to their satisfying violent overthrow at the hands of true local shamans who actually know what they’re talking about. If its stoney-baloney trip-outs had just looked a little more uniquely uncanny & nightmarish, it likely would’ve been my favorite screening on this list. “Impressive but flawed” is far from the worst thing you could say about a film festival title, though, and it was cool to see one of these low-profile movies punch above its weight class.
Even as someone who’s only casually familiar with Angela Lansbury’s career, I was saddened to hear of her recent passing. I’ve never successfully watched an entire episode of Murder, She Wrote without drifting off to sleep or off to another channel; the most experience I have with her prestigious singing career is hearing her voice a cartoon teapot; and yet the TV interview clips memorializing Lansbury on local news broadcasts last week had me instantly crying for reasons I can’t fully articulate. She just seemed like such a kind, thoughtful, talented person that the world was lucky to have around – a very particular, gentle flavor of sweet that’s been draining from our cultural palate. Online posthumous praise for Lansbury has also helped me see new, nuanced shades to her persona, since I had only previously seen her typecast as a lovely old biddy for all of my life. Between reading John Waters’s real-life anecdote of bumping into Lansbury at an NYC fetish club to watching her bratty debut in Gaslightand listening to her get gruesome in Sweeney Todd, I now have a better rounded appreciation of who she was a person & a performer; and I feel like crying all over again.
Getting acquainted with the tougher, saucier side of Angela Lansbury has only enhanced my appreciation of her frothier performances as well. I’m particularly thinking of her turn as the Cockney-accented Mrs. ‘Arris in the 1992 made-for-television adaptation of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a novel that was adapted again for a much lusher production this year. The 2022 version of Mrs. Harris is played by Lesley Manville, who I’m used to seeing as a heartless hardass in projects like Harlots & Phantom Thread. She’s a big-ol’ softie in her new starring vehicle, though, leaving all of the ice-queen viciousness to her villainous co-star Isabelle Huppert. Manville delivers the exact sugary sweet, kill-em-with-kindness defiance you’d expect from Lansbury in the role, playing Mrs. Harris as a human doormat who gradually learns to stand up for herself without ever stooping to the cruelty of the world she seeks to change. What’s hilarious is that Lansbury’s Mrs. ‘Arris is a much tougher customer. You get the sense that she could easily drink & swear Manville’s Harris under the table, tinging the role with a touch of the Cockney sass that kickstarted her career as a teenager in Gaslight. She’s still a total sweetheart, but there’s a sharpened edge to her character that’s missing from the newer, higher profile adaptation.
While Lansbury got to play Mrs. ‘Arris with a little grit & gristle (reflected right there in the accented title), Manville got to be in the better movie. Both adaptations maintain the novel’s basic premise that a kindly British housekeeper splurges her life savings on a couture Dior gown in Paris, much to the frustration of couture’s snootiest gatekeepers. That premise is just all there is to the made-for-TV version, which wouldn’t be much of a movie without Lansbury’s loveable screen-presence babysitting the audience between commercial breaks. Meanwhile, Manville’s Mrs. Harris essentially becomes a union organizer—inspired by an ongoing trash strike that’s only mentioned as a traffic obstacle in the Lansbury version—radicalizing both the workers at Dior and herself. Both versions of Mrs. Harris are lauded for being kind in a cruel world, but only Manville gets to learn to prioritize herself in the face of oppressive class & gender politics; she’s in a drama, while Lansbury is in a sitcom. The most telling difference between the two films is when a Parisian love interest warmly refers to Mrs. Harris as “Mrs. Mops” in honor of the maid that cleaned his room at British boarding school. In the made-for-TV version, it’s played as a sweet gesture; in the theatrical version it breaks her heart, and you desperately want to see her punch the cad’s throat.
I don’t want to exalt the 2022 version of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as some high standard of artful cinema that the made-for-TV version can’t live up to. Both adaptations are the exact kind of passive British entertainment meant to be enjoyed under a giant blanket with an empty mind & a nice cuppa. Only the theatrical version has a true emotional hook to it, though. When Mrs. Harris inevitably gets the pretty dress she wants, the movie just works on a level that the 90s one can’t – joining “Paddington wishes Aunt Lucy a happy birthday” and “The Girlhood girls dance to Rhianna” on the list of scenes I can think back to when I need a quick cry. Lansbury doesn’t need a good movie to hit that emotional trigger, though. I can apparently watch 30 seconds of her doing a press junket interview with Entertainment Tonight and well up with tears in the same way. Her Mrs. Harris movie didn’t need to be especially “good” to be worthwhile; her sweet-but-secretly-tough presence was enough. All that said, there’s a much wider, brighter world of Lansbury projects out there I should have prioritized before watching her pretty-dress movie, especially now that I have a better handle on who she was. And maybe I should start with forcing myself to fall in love with detective-novelist Jessica Fletcher, who was likely an even tougher customer than Mrs. ‘Arris; I just have to stay awake long enough to get to know her.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month AllimadeBoomer,Brandon, and Britnee watchA New Leaf (1971).
Alli: Oh, heavens! I’m so glad to finally share this movie with y’all.
Elaine May’s 1971 black comedy A New Leaf is about bachelor Henry Graham (Walter Mathau), who goes absolutely broke after squandering his fortune on his Ferrari, horses, exclusive clubs, fancy restaurants, and his impeccable art collection. After getting the idea from his butler, he decides to marry a rich woman and kill her for her money. His target is botanist Henrietta Lowell (Elaine May), who is a hopelessly clumsy, gauche, and stunted adult. As their marriage and the movie progresses, Henry takes on more and more responsibility in their household in the hopes of having the opportunity to murder Henrietta and become independently wealthy again. I like to describe this movie as the “anti romcom.” There are plenty tropes of a standard romcom with none of the actual romance: a bachelor who has never considered marrying, a meet cute featuring lots of spilt tea, an impossible deadline for the wedding, and disastrous boat trip (although this one is a disastrous canoe trip). I’d even argue that there’s a sort of “opposites attract” dynamic at play.
Except they’re not exactly opposites. Henry. Henrietta. Two sides of the same coin. They’re both adults unable to handle the day to days of adult life. For Henry, it’s because he doesn’t want to. For Henrietta, she’s just so caught up in her ferns that she’s clueless. Both are unmarried and not actively searching until now. With Henrietta getting the confidence to hang off cliffs to find her ferns and Henry learning the practical logistics of household management and taxes, they find a way to—for lack of a better term—complete each other. By the end of the movie, I find them endearing together somehow.
What did y’all think of the movie? Do you think they belong together even if they’re not lovers and—with some obvious queer subtext—Henry has no interest whatsoever in women?
Brandon: Funnily enough, when I search for “Walter Matthau A New Leaf gay subtext”, the top Google result I’m getting is Alli’s original review of the film for Swampflix in 2016. Considering how much online movie nerds like to read into fictional characters’ “queer coding”—intentional or otherwise—you’d think we’d be in our usual spot in the double or triple digits of results pages. All I can really confirm is that Henry’s sexuality was on my mind throughout the film. I kept trying to pin him to a specific modern queer context every time he intimately grabbed his butler’s arm or scoffed when a country club manager expressed surprise at his sudden (financial) interest in women. Elaine May has enjoyed some recent reappraisal as an overlooked auteur in historically macho film canons (alongside other greats like Varda, Ottinger, Wertmüller, and Campion), an effort that’s intensified even since we covered Mikey & Nicky as a Movie of the Month in 2017. So, it’s a little curious that there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how this marriage-cynical anti-romcom could be interpreted through a queer lens.
Ultimately, I settled on both Henry and Henrietta being some form of ace. They are both so unbothered with and oblivious to physical sexual attraction that it doesn’t even occur to them that the everyday companionship of marriage might be emotionally beneficial even if they have no desire to fuck. The entire arc of Henry’s character here is the painfully gradual realization that he enjoys & benefits from Henrietta’s company. That delay is, of course, comically ridiculous, since no reasonable human being could watch Elaine May nervously unravel under those gigantic glasses without immediately blurting “Marry me!” (whether or not they also want to murder her for her inheritance). Plot-wise, the two movies A New Leaf most reminded me of were Charlie Chaplin’s against-type black comedy Monsieur Verdoux and its Ealing Studios descendent Kind Hearts and Coronets, both about the convenient financial gains of murder. The difference is those predecessors have ice-cold hearts that May’s film only pretends to emulate in its earliest stretch. This ultimately is a very romantic movie about two absolute weirdos who belong together but don’t know how to express—or even realize—their mutual fondness in a world oblivious to their asexuality. At least, “Walter Matthau A New Leaf asexual” leads to much more credible online resources than this unpolished, self-published blog.
Boomer: I’m also going to throw my hat into the ring for Henry being asexual. There’s that scene right around the 25-minute mark where Bosley from Charlie’s Angels tries to fob Henry off on a water skier at some social event, and, when the two are alone in the night, she attempts to remove her bathing suit top and Henry bleats in terror: “No! Don’t let them out!” I laughed quite a lot at the delivery, but there’s something so bone-deep terrified in that line read that doesn’t say “gay,” to me, it says “completely and abjectly terrified at the very prospect of sex in any form.” It’s also the first time that we’ve seen Henry hit an emotional peak; he’s mostly just gruffly irascible and impatient, but he never hits a boiling point and instead stays in a low, simmering annoyance. The closest he comes before this moment to showing a positive emotion is when he surveys his favorite lunch restaurant and speaks, not to the handsome waiter but to the dining area itself, as if he is a lover bidding a final farewell. “Desire” only exists to Henry insofar as he can only tolerate the finest that life has to offer.
To be honest, at first this felt like it was going to make me hate this viewing experience. When Henry’s attorney, Beckett, is finally able to make contact with him in order to tell him that he’s used up all of his (vast, incomprehensibly vast) funds, it follows closely on the heels of a scene in which Henry is about to go gallivanting around the skies in a fighter plane, and he doesn’t even seem like he’s having a very good time doing it. But even with all that rich assholery, it’s impossible not to love Walter Matthau in anything that he’s in; even when he’s a total jerk, you can’t help but be charmed by him and his curmudgeonliness. By the time he was wistfully bidding farewell to all of the cultural hallmarks of excessive wealth, I hadn’t come to like him necessarily, but I wasn’t taking delight in laughing at his downfall either. When it comes down to it, he’s ultimately very good with the household finances and starts plugging up holes in Henrietta’s estate budget immediately, which immediately stops her unscrupulous family lawyer from continuing to leech from her. That was the first scene where I really liked Henry, and it carried through the rest of the film.
Britnee: I really enjoyed this! It’s the asexual “romcom” that I didn’t I needed. A New Leaf is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in a while. It reminded me of one of my favorite films of all time, What’s Up, Doc?. Both came out in the early 70s and are so comically chaotic. Walter Matthau’s performance as Henry, the spoiled middle aged man-child, completely blew me away. I’d only previously seen him in the Grumpy Old Men movies, Dennis the Menace, and Cactus Flower. He somehow looks like he’s been 70 years old forever. What a face! His emotionless delivery of back-to-back sassy lines had me howling. The scene where a child walks in on him while he’s getting dressed for the wedding is one of the best. When he yells at her to get out and repeats “I won’t have her touching my things!”, I saw so much of myself in his character. It’s very “psychobiddy,” even coming from a 50 year-old man.
I also have to mention how impressive Elaine May is. To manage such a brilliant film as her directorial debut while starring in it herself is such a major accomplishment. I’m ashamed to not have known of this sooner. This is why Movie of the Month is so great! Also, I’m dying to try one of Henrietta’s Malaga Coolers. Not only has May made her mark in the film industry, she’s also made it into the world of fragrance, as the Demeter fragrance line has a perfume based on the beverage. I’ll have to get one for my purse!
Like Boomer and Brandon, I also picked up on the asexuality of the main characters. It made sense for Henry, but I had to think a little more to figure out Henrietta. She was more into Henry than he was into her (obviously), but she was more interested in the companionship Henry offered than anything sexual or romantic. They both remind me of these old neighbors I had many moons ago. They would sit on their shared porch and nag each other constantly, but they hung out every day and appreciated each other in their own weird way.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Renee Taylor (Sharon) is fabulous for her entire four minutes of screentime. That waterski scene is comedy gold. The character played like a younger version of her famous role in The Nanny (Fran’s mother, Sylvia Fine), which makes me wonder if that’s her true personality or just a character she’s developed. Either way, I’m so thankful for her existence.
Alli: I’m also fascinated by the Malaga Coolers. All a quick google search on them brings up is this movie, so it was obviously the worst imaginable offense against wine snobs she could invent, which I love. BUT I actually have tried this beverage. Once, as an adult, I went to my grandma’s house, and she busted out the Mogen David and soda to whip some up. It was … not great, as you would expect.
The Malaga Cooler: the drink of awkward botanists and crazy Grandmas everywhere. (RIP my grandma, who died this year. She was quite a lady.)
Boomer: So after having to drive my friend’s car back from the Halloween party last weekend because someone forgot to eat before drinking, I took my own car out for a midnight drive to get some fast food. Unfortunately, after passing the Whataburger because the line was insurmountable and getting halfway to Jack-in-the-Box, my check engine light came on, so I turned around and went straight home. After going to the AutoZone first thing the next morning for their free diagnostic, it turned out that there was an issue with my catalytic converter. You see, I had carbon buildup… on my valves. The man at the store asked if I took mostly small, short trips (I do), and apparently I, like Henry, simply don’t take my car out for enough long drives to “clear the throat” of my car, as it were. As a non-car-guy, I didn’t realize that this was what was happening with Henry’s car as well; I just let that whole scene float past me in the stream. Luckily, I went and got it checked out quickly enough that the AutoZone employee was able to recommend something called Cataclean, which you pour into your tank and it clears out all the carbon (from the valves). I’m happy to say that, four days later, my check engine light has gone off! (Not sponsored.) So this is my advice to all of you out there in readerland: if you take a bunch of short drives, like I do, then get you some of this stuff and use if before it becomes a problem. And if your check engine light comes on, don’t ignore it; get it checked out right away. The life you save could be your own (car’s).
Brandon: Having now seen all four of Elaine May’s feature films, I find myself struggling with the question of whether or not she’s a “great” director. She certainly makes great films. Even the worst of her catalog, the misunderstood anti-comedy Ishtar, deserves more attention and praise than it gets. At the same time, each of those movies was delivered over-schedule & over-budget, so it’s not like she was especially adept at managing her shoots. This relatively laidback, low-budget debut stretched 40 days past its shooting schedule, with an entire hour of extraneous bits & bobs that the studio edited out of the final product despite May’s protests that it needed to be a three-hour romcom to work. If she had delivered A New Leaf on-time, on-budget, and properly trimmed, it would’ve been considered a huge hit instead of just breaking even, and she might’ve had an easier time fighting for her cut of similarly troubled productions like Mikey & Nicky down the line. Instead, she toiled away in the background writing screenplays for some of the most beloved Hollywood comedies of all time, poor thing.
I suppose Elaine May is a great director in the only way that should matter to audiences: her movies are sharply funny & uniquely entertaining. How she manages time & money is more of an issue for Hollywood executives to worry about; they’ve certainly invested a lot more financial capital on projects with a lot less cultural value than May’s four modest bangers. I only really bring up the question here to note that her management of the practical & financial aspects of filmmaking is remarkably similar to the disastrous, hands-off way she runs her inherited estate as Henrietta in A New Leaf, adorably so.
I am wildly out of sync with the consensus on the two highest profile movies making their way through arthouse theaters right now, which means it must be Awards Season again. Both Todd Field’s Tár and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness emerged from the festival circuit with plenty of praise & accolades, but now that they’re hitting wider audiences, the Correct Opinion to have on both has drastically split: Tár is genius, and Triangle is vapid. I can only halfway agree. Whereas most media-smart people I follow online see an exquisite, perversely funny treatise on #cancelculture in Tár, I only see a slightly better tailored version of Aaron Sorkin’s self-satisfied political fantasies, now shot with all the elegant refinement of a Lexus car commercial. Meanwhile, Triangle of Sadness won this year’s Palme D’or, and it’s being received among people I generally trust as if it’s the European equivalent of Green Book. I can at least get behind the consensus that the surface-level things Triangle of Sadness has to say about the grotesqueness of the wealth class are blunt & unsubtle. I just also found it to be delightfully, cathartically cruel to its satirical targets to the point where subtlety & insight had nothing to do with its merits as a class-conscious comedy. Speaking as someone who prefers entertainment to nuance, there is no doubt in my mind that Triangle of Sadness is the better film of this unlikely pair, and it’s been jarring to see that conclusion so relentlessly contradicted by every take I’m stumbling across in the wild. I haven’t felt so out of touch with what cinema obsessives value since . . . almost exactly one year ago.
In the broadest terms, both Tár and Triangle are political provocations about how power quickly corrupts the marginalized. Two (soon-to-be three) time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett stars as the titular orchestral composer Lydia Tár, who has risen to the top of her field despite the macho gatekeepers above her, only to use, manipulate, and discard women lower on the ladder in the exact predatory ways men in her position have for eternity. The lesser-known character actor Dolly De Leon goes on a similar journey in Östlund’s film, when the luxury yacht she scrubs toilets on sinks into the ocean, leaving her worshipped as an abusive tyrant on the island where her privileged, unskilled employers depend on her blue-collar work ethic for food & shelter. Neither woman wastes much time abusing their positions of power to squeeze sex & adulation out of their underlings. In Tár, that abuse prompts provocative questions about the moral conflict between appreciating great works of art and appreciating the great pieces of shit who make them. In contrast, Triangle of Sadness asks no questions. It’s more a grotesque boardwalk caricature of the ultra-wealthy at their most obliviously evil, followed by a cosmic comeuppance of Titanic proportions. Depending on a minimum-wage toilet scrubber for daily survival is just one indignity among many as their luxury-yacht voyage is disastrously derailed. At one point, they’re made to roll around on the floor like pigs in their own puke & shit while a drunken Woody Harrelson reads Karl Marx quotes over the yacht’s loudspeaker. We were invited onboard that yacht to point and laugh, not to ponder the complex power dynamics of modern living. That may be the easier, cheaper route to take in this kind of Awards Season art film about wealth & prestige, but that also means it’s the quicker road to success.
These two films aren’t tethered by theme so much as they are by their dark, transgressive senses of humor. Lydia Tár’s monstrous behavior is the same as any macho anti-hero’s; once it is narratively condemned, the audience is invited to take delight in its moral transgression. When Tár crosses the good-taste boundaries of safe space, trigger warning, and identity politics rhetoric in her lecture to Zoomer students, the audience is supposed to find her offensive to a point . . . but then also take delight in her freedom to speak “the truth” (apolitical Gen-X nonsense) to “power” (idealistic Gen-Z children) without fear of being #cancelled (because that’s already inevitable). It’s an Aaron Sorkin political rant coated in a couple thin layers of moral-distancing armor. Outside the classroom, her elitist disgust with the uncultured “robots” of the world work much the same: both a stain on her personal morality and a transgressive thrill for an audience who partly agrees with her, against their better judgement. It’s basically French Exit for the most boring people alive (i.e., subscribers to The New Yorker, which is name-checked in the first few lines of dialogue). Triangle of Sadness has no such pretensions. It picks out an easy, agreeable political target, strips them of their finery, slathers them in shit, and isolates them as far as it can from their bank-account safety nets. Its humor is rooted in Jackass & John Waters-style scatology; its schadenfreude is worthy of a Femdom Island reality TV show; it’s a loud, braying joke told over one too many bottles of whisky. I just personally found that joke much funnier than the understated musings of Tár, which aims more for droll chuckles than full belly laughs.
I know that I’m in the wrong here. I’ve seen enough intelligent people roll their eyes—in exasperation at Östlund’s film and in ecstasy at Field’s—to know that I’m just too impatient & too uncultured to “get it.” I’ve been paying attention to The Discourse long enough to know when I’m out of my element. So, just go ahead and disregard anything I have to say about Film Twitter’s punching bags & pet favs until, let’s say, the evil-doll horror M3GAN hits theaters in January. Until then, I’ll be searching for the scraps of crass entertainment I can find in the arthouse darlings that eat up marquee space this time of year, which is probably why I’m overly grateful that Östlund was willing to meet me halfway.
Every October, I sit on the sidelines while more dedicated movie nerds cram in 31 new-to-them horror films, one for every day of the month. I’m usually too busy with New Orleans Film Fest screenings, podcast homework, NOCAZ prep, and other personal movie-watching rituals to keep up with that schedule. A lot of those priorities have shifted in recent years, though. NOCAZ, for instance, doesn’t even exist anymore. So, in the past couple years I’ve gotten the closest I ever have to properly celebrating Spooktober alongside my buddies, watching 32 horror films in October 2021 and 30 in October 2022. These numbers are puny when you realize they’re boosted by rewatches. They’re even punier when you compare them to the triple-digit anomalies more voracious viewers like the hosts of We Love to Watch are racking up, but it’s at least a stride in the right direction. When I grow up, I want to be a proper Spooktoberer. One day, one day.
This Spooktober, my pen could not keep up with my eyes, and I didn’t find time to write or podcast about all of the horror movies I watched before Halloween Night. I’m willing to write proper reviews of this year’s new horror releases that I watched last month, but I’m a less eager to let the older titles clog up my Drafts box. So, here are a few quick mini-reviews of new-to-me, old-to-the-world horror movies I watched in the lead up to Halloween.
Evilspeak (1981)
After watching Clint Howard slum it in the all-around lazy kindertrauma slasher Ice Cream Man earlier this month, it was wonderful to see him shine as the lead in a Great horror movie for a change – although one with an equally goofy premise. In Evilspeak, a young, baby-faced 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.
There are two notable endorsements of Evilspeak‘s quality from infamously disreputable sources: Anton LaVey publicly praised the film’s Satanic powers, and British censors listed it among the initial Video Nasties list of banned home video titles. Evilspeak starts off goofy & unassuming enough for audiences to expect a safe & subdued resolution to Clint’s schoolday woes. Once he gets his cathartic Carrie payback scene in the school chapel, though, it quickly devolves into a gruesome gore fest, with Clint soaring above his tormenters while wielding a gigantic sword and an army of feral, flesh-starved hogs. The only thing you can really fault the movie for is casting someone who was already bald to play a picked-on high school student (hiding under a thin, combed-over toupee), but hey, I had a very good friend at that age who started balding before we graduated, and it’s a pretty convincing reason why he was such a target for bullying.
Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man (1973)
The title pretty much says it all. Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man is one of the 53 lucha libre films starring masked pro wrestler El Santo, nine of which featured him teaming up with his in-ring rival Demonio Azul. From what I can tell, a significant portion of that filmography is horror-related too. At least, the only other Santo movie I’ve seen to date, Santo vs. The Vampire Women, is essentially a Hammer horror film that happens to include some wrestling. There’s no reason to be intimidated by the seemingly daunting number of Santo films that are out there, though. Watching these two out of order—released a decade apart—I can confirm that they work a lot like real-life pro wrestling in that you can jump in at any time and still get into the drama of the match at hand pretty quickly: Santo good, Dracula bad, etc.
What really took me aback about this particular Santo horror was its pristine presentation on the free-with-ads streamer Tubi, which I’m forever struggling to wrap my mind around. Tubi has this tag-team lucha horror presented in the pristine HD condition you’d expect from a Powell & Pressburger restoration on The Criterion Channel . . . give or take a few Geico ads and a goofball English dub. The Eastman Color palette is shockingly vivid, to the point where watching Santo & The Blue Demon blow off steam with a friendly game of chess is just as gorgeous to behold as the film’s haunted-house bats, gargoyles, and cobwebbed torture dungeons. The simplicity of Dracula’s plan to “turn the world into vampires & werewolves” makes this a relatively predictable novelty, but some truly wonderful Dracula & luchador imagery results from that set-up (as long as you can push past the embarrassingly lazy vocal dub).
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
It’s a shame Bela Lugosi didn’t live long enough to play Dr. Acula in Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls, but at least his first mad scientist role was as Dr. Mirakle in the Universal picture Murders in the Rue Morgue. Dr. Mirakle is a carnival sideshow murderer who experiments mixing women’s blood with his pet ape Eric’s in a disastrous attempt to prove the theory of Evolution. When he’s frustrated with the results of “experimenting on” (i.e., murdering) prostitutes, he moves onto the women of Proper Society, so Parisians take notice and drive him to his doom. The movie was heavily edited before release to downplay its shocks of violence, sexuality, and Evolutionary theory, leaving behind a short, chopped-to-pieces mess. Lugosi looks great in his unibrow & tuxedo combo, though, and it’s easy to tell why they expanded his role as the central villain to the point where the story held very little—if any—resemblance to its Edgar Allen Poe source material.
Lugosi’s Dracula film has been slipping out of public favor in recent years for being “boring” (something I think a musical score easily fixes), while the Poverty Row slapstick comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla has gradually been building a cult – to the point where it was screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival as a horror “classic.” Murders in the Rue Morgue is far from Lugosi’s best, but it’s amusing as unlikely middle ground between the Universal Horror prestige and ape-on-the-loose goofballery of those two pictures. His performance is fully committed, there are some shocking moments of pre-Code violence, and the gorgeous Expressionist photography smooths over a lot of the scatterbrained plotting. You can find all of those elements put to much, much better use in other Poe-adjacent Lugosi pictures of the era like The Black Cat& The Raven, but they’re still charming here.
House (1986)
House II: The Second Story (1987)
It’s a shame that the 80s haunted house horror comedy House has to share its title with the 70s Nobuhiko Obayashi masterpiece of the same name & sub-genre, since being compared against one of the greatest films of all time doesn’t do it any favors. This isn’t a Cronenberg vs 2006-Best-Picture-Winner Crash situation, though. The 80s House is too endearing to be an embarrassment, even if it struggles to stand out on its own. Not only does it share its title with a far superior haunted house horror comedy with similar war-atrocity themes; it also lands as a goofy midpoint between the better-funded special effects showcase of Poltergeist and the eerie Vietnam PTSD horror of Jacob’s Ladder. House has no chance to match the euphoric highs of either comparison point, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. Its story of a Vietnam veteran facing his inner demons while writing a memoir in a haunted house is restrictively straightforward & contained, but its rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places – which is sometimes all you need from a Halloween-season spookfest.
Despite its all-timer of a title, House II: The Second Storyis an embarrassment. I enjoyed the goofball humor that underlines the carnival-ride scares & Vietnam flashbacks of the first House, but The Second Story tips a little too far into Porky’s era frat boy comedy and the whole thing kinda unravels. The monsters are deliberately cute instead of scary, which means that the most frightening moment is when Bill Maher shows up as a Reaganite record exec. And since the jokes aren’t funny, there really isn’t much to do except appreciate the occasional bursts stop-motion animation and rubber-suited monsters – things that were much more plentiful & satisfying in the original. The best I can say about The Second Story is that its title is great, and that I appreciated it as my last new-to-me watch of the month, since it’s the only title in this batch that features a Halloween dance party.
Party Line (1988)
If you’re only going to watch one 1988 sleazoid slasher about the phone sex hotline craze, you might as well watch the one where Divine appears out of drag as a police detective alongside Lust in the Dust co-stars Tab Hunter, Lainie Kazan, and Paul Bartel – Out of the Dark. If you’re going to watch two, I guess there’s also Party Line, ya freak.
In Party Line, a pair of wealthy, mutually obsessed siblings use a phone-sex party line as a recruitment tool for vulnerably horny victims. Leif Garret stars as the requisite Norman Bates crossdresser killer in this watered-down De Palma knockoff, joined by Miss Universe beauty queen Shawn Weatherly as his honeytrap partner and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree as the police chief who busts their (barely covert) schemes. Without question, the movie is a hotbed for terrible politics, especially in its overt suggestion that rape victims & crossdressers are predisposed to become homicidal maniacs. It’s an amusing relic of its era, though, especially in its exploitation of the party line dirty talk fad and its stylistic combination of MTV & Skinemax aesthetics. As long as you’re prepared to feel queasy about the story it’s telling, the only major drawback, really, is that its novelty is undercut by Out of the Dark doing a slightly better job with the same fad the very same year.
Just like all other major entries in decades-running horror franchises, David Gordon Green’s Halloween was sharply divisive among genre fans as soon as it hit theaters in 2018. Even so, its reputation has only declined in the five years since, especially as it has become the go-to, defining example of mainstream horror’s current “legacy sequel” trend. Not only does the Halloween reboot have to answer for its own revisions of Laurie Strode & Michael Myers lore, but it also now carries the weight of horror nerd complaints against more recent offenses like 2019’s Child’s Play, 2021’s Candyman, and this year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s also been reduced to a scapegoat trendsetter for the Trauma Metaphor Horror wave that has followed in its wake, while artsier, standalone titles like Hereditary & The Babadook have maintained much steadier, more prestigious reputations in the same context. It doesn’t help, of course, that Green has diluted his Halloween legacyquel with two follow-up films that have only alienated the Michael Myers purists even further as the series stumbled along. I opted out of the David Gordon Ween discourse when Halloween Kills opened to white-hot angry reviews last year, but now that his theatrical mini-series is over and the online vitriol has been directed elsewhere (mostly at Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which is practically a legacy sequel to Stepford Wives), it finally felt safe to return to Haddonfield to see how his take on Halloween has evolved.
Personally, I was really impressed with Green’s “original” Halloween in 2018, and I still think it holds up well when considered in isolation. Regardless of its role as a harbinger for the next five years of mainstream horror trends, it still a really scary movie about self-fulfilling prophecies and obsessive thought spirals. Okay, yes, Laurie Strode is haunted by the same metaphorical Trauma Monster that stalks most modern horror heroines (this time in a road-worn William Shatner mask), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any dramatic complexity to how that internal battle with trauma plays out. We’re told that in the 40 years since Laurie was hunted by the infamous killer Michael Myers in the John Carpenter original, she’s been mentally stuck in the events of that one night in a way that has defined & limited every other minute of her life. Faced with senseless violence from a heartless, near-catatonic killer, Laurie has attempted to make sense of her life’s story by convincing herself it’s fate that she will have a final showdown with Michael once he inevitably escapes captivity. It’s the same way that doomsday preppers always appear to be looking forward to the apocalypse they supposedly fear. So, when Michael does escape, Laurie (along with other Michael-obsessed weirdos like “The New Dr. Loomis”) does everything in her power to make sure she & Michael have their “final” showdown in her D.I.Y. death-trap compound at the outskirts of Haddonfield, even though that’s exactly what she’s been dreading for decades. Michael just mindlessly kills whatever’s in striking distance; Laurie is the one that makes the confrontation happen, totally unaware that she’s willing the fight into existence. It’s chilling.
Green’s Halloween trilogy loses its way in the 2021 sequel Halloween Kills, which zooms out the scope of Michael’s function as a Trauma Monster from his effect on Laurie to his effect on Haddonfield as a community. I choose to interpret the word “kills” as a noun here, since this second entry is a feature-length montage of Michael slashing his way through the streets, homes, and pubs of Haddonfield while Laurie recovers from their “final” showdown on a hospital bed, listening in from the sidelines. Michael proves the point of the 2018 film’s self-fulfilling prophecy arc by making no effort to visit Laurie’s hospital room; he just lumbers from kill to kill in the most mindless fashion ever seen from a slasher villain. If Halloween Kills is “about” anything outside the monotonous rhythm of those murders, it’s in how the community of Haddonfield tries to make sense of Michael’s senseless violence by making themselves the collective hero of the “story.” I very much appreciate Halloween Kills‘s disgust with small-town America’s fetish for gun-toting vigilantism, given how many ordinary, ill-equipped Haddonfieldians approach Michael with deadly weapons—the same way real-life gun freaks dream of personally intervening in active-shooter crises—and are immediately destroyed for their trouble, either by Michael’s knife or their own petard. It’s just a shame the movie is spread too thin across Michael’s hometown to ever truly feel scary. Its larger scope means that it keeps intercutting between the tension of individual scenes so that we’re never properly immersed in any one of them. It doesn’t really matter that its political assessments of small-town America are goofily unsubtle; it could have easily gotten away with that if it weren’t so scatterbrained.
After the frantic scrambling of Kills, the more sincere, dramatic approach of Halloween Ends can’t help but feel like a relief. With his final entry in the series, Green returns to the low-key indie dramas that first earned him name recognition before he started making major studio slasher sequels & stoner comedies. Halloween Ends may not be as Great as the first film in its trilogy, but it’s at least coherently structured and (mostly) functions as its own standalone movie, which is an embarrassingly low bar that Halloween Kills does not clear. It’s also custom-designed to alienate & infuriate die-hard horror fans the same way that Halloween III: Season of the Witch was when Carpenter was still actively involved in the franchise, since it also does not focus on the senseless killings of Michael “The Shape” Myers. Instead, we follow an equally iconic horror villain: Cory, the lonely mechanic with a troubled past. Cory is dubbed “the new Michael” by the surviving citizens of Haddonfield, who essentially radicalize him into becoming a mass murderer in their continued attempts to make a clear, sensical narrative out of Michael’s mindless violence. Meanwhile, Cory keeps The Old Michael as a pet in the sewers below Haddonfield and “feeds” his bullies to the hibernating killer the same way little Jamie feeds his bullies to the “tra-la-logs” of The Pit. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are frustrated by the tonal & narrative inconsistencies between each of Green’s Halloweens, but I do love that there’s still room in a post-MCU world for individual movies in a big-budget franchise to take unique directions from each other – even if it’s strange to get that from a series with a consistent creative team at its core. Cory’s story isn’t nearly as compelling nor as scary as Laurie’s, but at least Green & company found a way to make Halloween intimately personable again after the aimlessness of Kills.
The bigger problem is not the inconsistency across this series; it’s that it didn’t need to be a series at all. Laurie Strode’s story is so neatly contained & emotionally impactful in the 2018 Halloween that there’s no reason for her to return for two more entries. Kills feels lost by comparison, aimlessly wandering the streets of Haddonfield in search of a new emotional hook. To its credit, Ends finds that new hook (by conjuring a new central character out of thin air), but it has no chance of fully standing on its own, since Laurie is still hanging around Haddonfield, distracting from its new sense of purpose. After Cory’s own storyline is neatly wrapped up, Laurie steps back in for another “final” showdown with Michael, as if they’re ultimate fight to the death was meant to be, undoing all the good work of Green’s “original” Halloween. After two entire films of Laurie hanging around a hospital room (Kills) and absentmindedly narrating her memoir (Ends), that last minute return to her vendetta with Michael can’t help but feel like an afterthought that dilutes the impact of both her story and Cory’s. That’s largely what makes Halloween ’18 a great film and Halloween Ends an okay one. And the purposeless ambling of Kills only makes them both look stronger by comparison.
Our current Movie of the Month, the 1993 creature feature Stepmonster, is psychosexual-id horror for kids, very much of the Troll 2 & The Pitvariety – complete with monstrous “tropopkins” standing in for The Pit‘s “tra-la-logs”. It feels like producer Roger Corman trespassing on Charles Band’s territory in that way, recalling the straight-to-VHS kiddie horrors Band produced under his Full Moon sublabel Moonbeam. There’s a rhythm to Corman’s classic drive-in creature features that carries over to Stepmonster, briefly revealing the titular monster in an early attack and then steadily doling out “kills” (kidnappings, really) throughout the rest of the runtime to maintain the audience’s attention. Otherwise, this is pure Moonbeam; all that’s missing is a dinky Casio score from Charlie’s brother, Richard Band. That doesn’t mean it’s too generic to be unique, though. The tropopkin’s rubber-suit design reads as a human-sized variation of the Gremlins knockoffs that VHS schlockmeisters were making in this era (Ghouliesin Band’s case, Munchies in Corman’s), but by the time she’s wreaking havoc in her wedding gown—trying to consummate her marriage to Alan Thicke under the full moon—the movie achieves a kids-horror novelty all of its own. I’m not surprised to hear it wormed its way into its pint-sized audience’s subconscious through that kind of kindertrauma imagery, even if it has plenty of direct corollaries in Band & Corman’s respective catalogs.
It would be easy, then, to recommend further viewings in Corman & Band’s other kindertrauma horrors, but they’d likely be too monotonous when watched in bulk. What distinguishes Stepmonster from other Moonbeam & Corman productions is the monstrous stepmother angle succinctly headlined in its title, tapping into a very specific fear children have of the strangers in their homes who married their parents. It’s a long running tradition in the genre, dating at least as far back as the wicked stepmother villain of Cinderella. And since it’s Halloween season, it feels important to highlight some of the all-time great titles in that canon: the greatest evil-stepparent horrors of all time. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more iconic horror films about the monsters our parents married.
The Stepfather (1987)
Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time is the 80s slasher The Stepfather, 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.
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Something you’ll notice about all of these evil-stepparent horrors is that they’re all movies about real estate. Terry O’Quinn’s genre-defining killer is a local realtor. Alan Thicke’s oblivious dad in Stepmonster is an architect and land developer. And then there’s The Amityville Horror, in which a couple moves into a dream home they can only afford because the previous family who lived there was murdered inside. James Brolin stars as the stepfather substitute for Jack Torrance, driven mad by the Bad Vibes of the titular home to the point where he’s axing down the bathroom door to murder his family cowering on the other side. He starts off mildly resentful that his wife’s children call him “George” instead of “Daddy,” escalates to complaining “Those kids of yours need some goddamn discipline,” and eventually settles on “Those kids of yours need to be decapitated.” Overall, the original Amityville is quintessential mainstream 70s horror, in that it’s sometimes deeply chilling, often vaguely boring, and features a grotesquely overqualified Margot Kidder. It’s an essential entry in the evil-stepparent canon, though, not least of all because it’s about a valuable piece of cursed real estate.
Hellraiser (1987)
Enough about evil stepdads. Fans of Stepmonster deserve some iconic evil-stepmother villainy, for which I’ll direct them to Clive Barker’s cosmic horror masterpiece Hellraiser. The Hellraiser series is remembered for its demonic S&M cenobites Pinhead, Chatterer, Butterball, and—wait for it—The Female, but the scariest villain in the first movie is the stepmother figure, Julia Cotton. Julia is the last stepmother you’d want to have as a vulnerable teenage girl, even further down the list than the tropopkin bride of Stepmonster. Caught up in a torrid affair with your undead sex-pest uncle while neglecting your father, she lures strange men home from the bar for casual hookups, only to murder them with a hammer for her lover’s disgusting amusement. She doesn’t even come to your defense when your uncle hits on you, beckoning “Come to daddy” while wearing your father’s skin as a Halloween mask. “Hellraiser” is already a great title, but maybe this is the movie that should have been called “Stepmonster.”
To my shame, rewatching Hellraiser for this feature was the first time it really clicked with me as one of the all-time greats. I’ve always enjoyed it in parts but was trying to fit it in a Hellbound: Hellraiser II shaped box that did it no favors. Now I’m finally able to embrace the domestic melodrama at its core instead of looking past it for all the lurid, putrid filth that makes it spooky. All it took was a little soul searching about who qualifies as the worst stepparents in the history of horror, a list of which Julia Cotton deserves to rank near the very top.
Swampflix 