For the second year in a row, I found myself wildly out of sync with 2022’s announced list of Oscar nominees. Even though I watched over a hundred feature films released in 2021, only three of them were nominated in any category – even the lowly technicals. It used to be that I’d seen at least a dozen without trying. And of the three films I had seen, only one registered as anything especially praiseworthy. I like the idea of Cruella as a superhero movie for gay children, but as Disney’s attempt at “a punk film” it’s embarrassing. Dune was pretty, lavish, and competently made, but it was also my least favorite kind of literary adaptation: the kind that’s pinned down by obligation to its source material, never managing to take off as its own unique thing. Surprisingly, Power of the Dog is the one Oscar nominated title I had already seen that I was impressed by, even though I don’t usually care much for Westerns. It was one of Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2021, after all. Looking at the 38 feature films nominated for statues this year, I felt totally out of sync with what titles the film industry has deemed Important. Or maybe it was just another sign of the pandemic scrambling everything up to the point where there is no clear zeitgeist right now. Hard to tell.
Knowing that I’ll end up watching the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony live on TV with or without having seen any of the films nominated, I again used the Oscars an excuse to catch up with some of last year’s high-profile releases that had slipped by me. And so, here’s a ranked list of movies I recently watched because they were nominated for Oscars – each with an accompanying blurb. I only watched movies that I had a genuine interest in seeing; I would have found no pleasure watching Belfast or Don’t Look Up just to shit on them, so I didn’t bother. It was partly an excuse to check out a few titles I meant to catch up with anyway, and partly an excuse to gawk at all the sparkling evening gowns at this week’s televised ceremony. Enjoy.
Parallel Mothers
Nominated for Best Actress (Penélope Cruz) and Best Original Score
I guess you could complain that this isn’t anything new from Almodóvar, but since he’s specifically returning to the exquisite melodrama flavors of Volver & All About My Mother, it’d be like complaining about eating strawberry ice cream for a third time in two decades. It’s still delicious and a rare treat! I especially love this as an acting showcase for Cruz and as a political parable that manages to feel elusive of a 1:1 metaphor but still furious over a very specific issue. A huge step up from the muted navel-gazing of Pain & Glory in my book.
Drive My Car
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi), Best International Feature, and Best Adapted Screenplay
I’m always unclear on how critical consensus rallies so quickly around a single, seemingly arbitrary title, but it’s nice when the beneficiary turns out to be this damn good. A patient, complex drama for adults, routinely landing direct stabs to the heart without ever making a big show of it. I generally consider myself a low-brow audience, so it feels significant that the big moment that made me cry was someone performing Chekhov in sign-language.
The Worst Person in the World
Nominated for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay
I’m an easy sucker for a story about a woman who is an absolute mess, but even so this feels like one of the best entries in the “Girl, same” canon since Fleabag. Visually playful & morally tricky enough to avoid feeling pedestrian or overlong, even though it’s sometimes stuck halfway between a Sundancey romcom & a solid season of television.
Summer of Soul
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature
I was prepared to dismiss this for allowing contextual talking-head interviews to overpower the music festival it’s documenting, but the editing is so persistently sharp and exciting that it justifies the interruption. I’d still love a full-footage box set release, but the truth is I’d probably treat it like background noise for laundry days, and this overview is something much more pointed & emotional.
Nightmare Alley
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design
The most a movie has felt like an unofficial entry in the Tim Burton Batman canon since the 2003 Willard remake, which I mean as a compliment. It’s easy to miss the extravagant carnival setting of the first hour once you leave it for the big city, but the pure noir pastiche that follows is grim & gorgeous enough to overcome that loss. A lot of people seem to have retracted their love for del Toro in recent years, but I’m still buying tickets for the dark ride every time it passes through town. This one isn’t his best; it’s still pretty great.
Licorice Pizza
Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), and Best Original Screenplay
I’m surprisingly super conflicted about this movie depending on whose coming-of-age story it is. As a story about the adorability of teen-boy confidence I’m intensely icked out by it. As a story about a twenty-something’s self-destructive resistance to growing up, I find it oddly moving & dark. And since PTA is careful to balance everything evenly between those two POVs, I didn’t walk away with any easy answers or summations about that tonal conflict, which might’ve been the point. All I can really say with any certainty is that these images look nice but the 1970s look sad & gross.
The Lost Daughter
Nominated for Best Actress (Olivia Colman), Best Supporting Actress (Jessie Buckley), and Best Adapted Screenplay
Part of me wants to say that trimming this down a half-hour would help sharpen the tension, but you’d probably lose some of the eeriness of its beach vacation purgatory setting in the process. Either way, it works better as a thorny drama about Difficult Women than as a psychological thriller, which is totally fine (except that only one of dual genres builds to something). Great performances all around; it’s just missing a climax.
Flee
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Best Animated Feature, and Best International Feature
Probably uncool to say, but I couldn’t get over how ugly & lazy the actual animation looked in this. As an oral-history document, its content is obviously much more important than its form, and the narration is vital, heartbreaking stuff no matter how it’s illustrated. Still, I was way more personally, emotionally engaged in the moments of archival footage than I was looking at its Flash animation style (the expressive A-ha music video flourishes were effective, though).
House of Gucci
Nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling
I regret to report that Jared Leto is the best part of this movie. It’s too silly to be so well behaved otherwise, so the overly committed excess of his Italian caricature is the only performance that feels appropriate for the occasion. Fun fashion & ridiculous accents all around, but there’s only one goofball in the cast who truly understands the assignment (or at least perfectly misunderstands it).
Spencer
Nominated for Best Actress (Kristen Stewart)
I hate to say it, because I’m generally a fan, but Stewart’s performance is the only reason this did not work for me. The retro couture, ghostly imagery, and suffocating tension are all consistently effective, but she’s the anchor of every dramatic beat and it all just rings as phony. It feels like a Kate McKinnon parody instead of the genuine thing, which didn’t bother me so much when Natalie Portman channeled Jinkx Monsoon in Jackie but here feels like it’s running away from the laidback cool of Stewart at her best and the gamble just didn’t pay off.
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 Britneemade Hanna,Brandon, and Boomerwatch Tatie Danielle (1990).
Britnee: I’ve always had a fondness for mean old ladies. When women age into their 70s and 80s, there’s a social expectation for them to be sweet and nurturing. A frail, wrinkled woman with a loose grey bun carrying a tray of fresh baked cookies for visitors is the “sweet old lady” image that we’re all too familiar with, and I truly hope I never fall into that mold. My great grandmother was one of my favorite people because she was known for being a rude, gaslighting troublemaker. As she aged into her 80s, she would complain about her self-diagnosed diabetes while sneaking cake at any chance she got, and she would tell everyone how her children didn’t want to take care of her while they were waiting on her hand and foot. And she would say it all in French! I’m so glad that there is a film that captures her essence (in a more exaggerated way): the 1990 French black comedy, Tatie Danielle.
Auntie Danielle (Tsilla Chelton) is the ultimate mean old lady. She’s an elderly widow who loves to torment just about everyone who crosses her path, especially her elderly housekeeper, Odile (Neige Dolsky). Auntie Danielle calls Odile “a whore” while making purposeful messes for her to clean up, steps on flowers she plants in her flowerbed, and guilts her into getting onto a ladder to dust a chandelier, which is the last thing she ever cleans as she falls off of it and dies. With no one to help with her day-to-day routine, Auntie Danielle divides her estate between her great-niece and great-nephew, then moves to Paris to live with her great-nephew and his family. She brings her shenanigans with her, and they eventually begin to realize what a terror she is. When they have guests over, she implies that she is neglected. She refuses to eat her great-nephew’s wife’s cooking, but she sneaks pastries at any chance she gets. When taking her great-nephew’s youngest son to the park, she abandons him to find sweets and makes her way back home without him. These are just a few of the increasingly horrible stunts that she pulls.
Her family desperately looks for someone to stay with Auntie Danielle while they go on a family vacation in Greece, and at the last minute, Sandrine (Isabelle Nanty) shows up to save the day. Auntie Danielle soon realizes she’s met her match as Sandrine doesn’t put up with her shit. At all. The two gradually bond through a very bizarre love-hate relationship that is unexpectedly heartwarming and a blast to watch.
Brandon, what are your thoughts on Auntie Danielle’s bad behavior? Was it hard to watch or did you enjoy her cruel antics just as much as I did?
Brandon: There are a lot of things that are hard to watch in this movie, but most of them have to do with larger cultural circumstances of elderly abuse & abandonment. Since visitations from her family are rare enough to be a major event and she spends most of her alone time commiserating with a portrait of her dead husband Edouard, you get the sense that Auntie Danielle got to be this awful purely through her isolation from the world outside. As she’s shuffled off to apathetic nursing homes or the care of a physically abusive grannysitter (who does eventually become her friend after a couple harsh slaps to the face), it’s clear that the elderly have plenty of good reasons to be sour & misanthropic. Because she’s an intensely spiteful little shit, she often weaponizes everyone’s sympathy for her frailty & isolation in old age as a way to punish her supposedly ungrateful family, posing herself in a wrecked, shit-smeared apartment where the only available sustenance is cans of dog food so that they look like total monsters (a set piece that’s so visually over-the-top in comparison to the rest of the film that it could’ve doubled as an art installation). Her spitefulness being a result of culture-wide cruelty & disinterest in the elderly does make the film a tough watch in patches, especially once you realize how much better she can be as a person by simply making one friend, Sandrine.
All that said, yes, I was delighted by Auntie Danielle’s cruel antics. With the exception of a few casually racist, homophobic, and misogynistic insults she tosses around just to inflict maximum harm, it’s fun to cheer on her miserable misbehavior. Tatie Danielle often plays like the geriatric counterpoint to Problem Child, wherein the titular scamp is such an absurdly awful little shit that you can’t help but cheer on their misanthropic pranks. The main difference is that Problem Child is an 80min Hollywood comedy that’s scored by endless replays of “Bad to the Bone”, while this is a two-hour French film with an ironic air of buttoned-up sophistication. Both are great, though, and both rely on the humor of their antiheroes transgressing against ageist expectations of proper social etiquette. If the POV character was Auntie Danielle’s nephew or wife, this might’ve been a nightmare comedy of manners about how careful most adults are to not hurt the feelings of their sour, Conservative elders despite receiving none of that consideration in return. Instead, we see the world through Auntie Danielle’s beady little eyes, and so it’s fun to watch her expertly fuck up the daily lives of her boring, phony family. I was particularly delighted in how much disdain she shows in her great-grandnephew despite him being an adorable cherub of a child – abandoning him at a public park so she can enjoy some ice cream in solitude. Delicious.
If there’s anything that justifies Tatie Danielle‘s pretentions as a sophisticated European drama, as opposed to a wide-appeal goofball comedy, it’s in Auntie Danielle’s uneasy friendship with Sandrine. They have a very complicated relationship as bitter kindred spirits that transcends the generational warfare of every other character dynamic, and it’s the one part of the film that does not play into its Problem Child for Miserable Old Biddies novelty factor. Hanna, what did you think of how that relationship develops and where it goes? What would the movie be like without it?
Hanna: I loved Auntie Danielle’s relationship with Sandrine! I thought it redirected the tone of the film in a really interesting, refreshing way. The first 45 minutes or so are chock full of her passive-aggressive and outwardly aggressive barbs, and I assumed the film would follow a straightforward escalation of interpersonal violence between Auntie Danielle and her ill-prepared friends and family. I was as shocked as she was when she met her match, and there’s a special kind of joy that springs up from their commiseration as cruel, selfish women (I could not stop laughing when they abandoned that poor dog on the street). I also love how their relationship shows a real element of tragedy in Auntie Danielle’s character. Although she’s delightful to watch, she’s not all that sympathetic, and I couldn’t really relate to her beyond an exercise in wish fulfillment of my most petty urges and grievances. Once she finally does find a kindred spirit (beyond her deceased husband) in Sandrine, she isn’t really sure how to extend herself beyond giving money to Sandrine and monopolizing her time, which ultimately drives Sandrine off. Auntie Danielle seems like the kind of person who needs exactly one friend, then sabotages any relationship she forms as soon as the other person shows any interest in anything besides her. As strange as it may sound, it was kind of touching to watch a real desire for connection wrapped in jealousy creep into her petulant nastiness.
I also thought that Sandrine’s character gave a little glimpse into who Auntie Danielle may have been (or wanted to be) as a younger woman. Like Britnee mentioned, it was inspiring to see a model of feminine expression that was totally divorced from the feminine ideal of compassion and selflessness, and I appreciated the fact that we got a representation of that kind of freedom across two generations. Of course, bad manners can also isolate you from the world until you find your rotten soulmate. Boomer, do you think Auntie Danielle is a subversive model of womanhood that we should strive for? Does this film damn Auntie Danielle and Sandrine’s bad behavior, or offer it up as an appealing alternative?
Boomer: I think that, overall, I had a very different reading of the film than everyone else. I should note right out of the gate that, even as a child, I couldn’t stand Problem Child, Clifford (the 1994 one with Martin Short, no big red dogs in sight), Dennis the Menace, or any other movies that were about monstrous children, with the sole exception of Drop Dead Fred. When I was a kid, because we lived in a trailer that was pretty far out in the country and therefore outside of any real restrictions on fireworks, my parents hosted a church gathering for New Year’s Eve when I was 5 or 6. We were pretty poor at that time, and there were probably about 5 families, all with at least one kid, and I remember with great clarity the way that the kids from church—all of whom lived in real houses and had real closets full of name brand non-Big Lots toys, and who didn’t have to share half of that space with a Rainbow D4C—absolutely destroyed my tiny bedroom and the very few things that I owned and cherished and which weren’t hand-me-downs from my older cousins. There was bed jumping and book tearing, one of them shot an arrow into my wall with a toy bow, and a precious balsa wood model that was a gift from my grandmother that Christmas and which she and I had built together was smashed into a dozen pieces which were then ground into the cheap, ugly carpet. It was an utter nightmare. To me, there’s nothing funny about seeing children engaging in wanton (and costly) acts of destruction, and I know that without context that makes me sound like an insufferably stodgy old coot, but I think the fact that I actually enjoyed Drop Dead Fred both as a kid and in my most recent viewing just a couple of years ago illustrates something about me: the destruction that Marsha Mason’s mother character in Drop Dead Fred has to deal with is deserved. She’s a horrible mother: restrictive, cruel, and criminally unfit, up to and including killing a child’s imagination because she tracked mud into the house, and then later dragging her now-adult daughter to a child psychologist when she exhibits unusual behavior. All John Ritter wanted was a family, and all Charles Grodin wanted was to marry Mary Steenbergen, which is totally reasonable.
What’s strange to me, then, is that I find Auntie Danielle to be, well, not sympathetic, but at least fun to watch. We actually know very little about what her life was like before the film starts, other than that at some point in the past she was married, she has not only the wealth that her stately home manifests but also her stipend from her husband’s military service, and that she employs a maid, whom she regularly abuses. Anything else that we suppose about her life prior to that point is purely assumed and projected, and at this moment we’re all bringing to the table our own lived experience of COVID purgatory, which I think is coloring those perceptions and presumptions in a way that’s altering our feelings about Danielle and her situation. Of course, my reading of Danielle is also purely speculative, but I don’t think that there’s any real indication that she was ever a nice person, or that her temperament is the result of being isolated. To me, her disdain for her family reads as innate and not retaliatory; she mentions in passing that they rarely come to visit, but she doesn’t bother reading the mail that they send her, and despite being perfectly fine until almost the moment that they walk through the door, she retreats to bed and pretends to be ill in order to hasten their departure. Her neighbors seem to be on friendly enough terms with her servant Odile and ask after Danielle, so she could have a social life if she wanted, but she’d rather ruin pretend to be nice and then mock her neighbors behind their backs with snide faces. She destroys Odile’s hard work with the flowers and also torments her by interrupting the older, dottier woman in the middle of a thought until she completely disrupts anything Odile may be thinking about. Danielle pesters the poor woman about cooking something for the family but also makes the process of doing so as difficult as possible by acting like a petulant child every step of the way by delaying the grocery trip for as long as possible, hiding the grocery money in her pocket (and accusing Odile of stealing it), refusing to get out of the car at the bank, and then encouraging her dog to bite the elderly maid. Their conversation about Danielle’s continual pestering about the chandelier indicates that she’s been giving Odile a hard time about the fixture for some time, indicating to me that she’s been trying to make this “accident” happen for a long time. She’s cruel to the point of monstrosity, needling her niece about the fact that her younger boyfriend is a commitment-phobe, lying about her food tastes so that she can find fault in everything that Catherine cooks and causing her to fret about the possible deleterious health issues that could be causing Danielle to lose her appetite (while secretly gorging on pastries), and even spying on their marital relations. I don’t see any indication that she was ever a nice person or that there’s even a reason that she is the way that she is.
She’s just evil and she loves it. And I loved watching it.
I would fundamentally disagree with the statement that Danielle’s family is phony, however. As noted above, I’m normally only able to stomach this kind of thing if the person whose life is being ruined had somehow earned karmic retribution, but that’s not the case here. I find her treatment of them despicable in the abstract despite being comical in action; beyond all of the people Danielle mocks or passive-aggressively torments in passing, we spend a lot of time with this family, and while I won’t argue with the point that her nephew’s family is dull, they seem completely genuine and well-meaning to me. They certainly are boring, in an Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike” way, and there’s a different version of this movie where they’re dissatisfied with the banality of their urban lives and their cantankerous aunt comes and shakes them out of their doldrums, but Tatie Danielle is not that movie. The parents have an active, fidelitous sex life, and they take no issue with their older son’s exploration of traditionally feminine art forms or try to police or interfere with the closeted activity that is going on under their noses. The younger son never acts like a spoiled brat or expresses frustration about having to give up his room for Danielle and only wants to spend time with her. I even interpret their loving treatment of their elderly family dog as an explicit metaphor for both their willingness and suitability to take care of an aging loved one to the very end (especially in comparison to Danielle’s willingness to send her well-trained dog to live with someone else, without a backward glance or even another thought). It’s not their fault that Jean-Pierre has the misfortune of being the one of the last two living relatives of a woman who gets off on making other people miserable.
I’d also fundamentally disagree with the concept that anything that happens to Danielle in this film is abusive or uncalled for; although I had a moment of abject horror in the moment when Sandrine slaps her across her face, as it’s a shocking act of violence, Danielle’s behavior to that point—not merely thoughtless but actively unkind, dishonest, and child-endangering—earned that small measure of recompense, and more. I do find it odd that Sandrine, the biggest foil to our villain protagonist, appears so late in the film, arriving right at the 65-minute mark, at which point we’ve spent nearly 40 minutes in the Billard family home (Odile’s tragic fall happens at minute 25 precisely). When she did, I started to think that this film would simply be a kind of picaresque of this delightfully awful woman ruining the lives of all who have the bad luck to touch her, but instead Sandrine gives her a taste of her own medicine. When she seems to fret over the treatment of the elderly in nursing homes, but it also seems like a proverbial light bulb is going off over her head, because she immediately starts to manipulate the emotions of everyone around her by reciting those horrors as if they are happening to her when she is the abuser: she lies to her family about how Odile treats her, including supposed physical beatings, and then sets the woman up to injure herself; she expresses worry about being abandoned in her later years, then abandons both a preschooler and an elderly dog in the park, with only one of them making it home; she destroys the Billard apartment with feces and fire and eats dog food solely so that she can turn public sentiment against her unlucky family on a societal scale. And the moment she finds herself in a home, it’s not the staff there who are cruel to the little old ladies (although they probably could stand to do a little less daytime grab-assery), it’s Danielle who menaces the other septuagenarians.
Danielle is an artist and her medium is hate, and I don’t think that the film damns or praises Danielle or Sandrine, and I’m not sure it would work if it really did either. Danielle’s hard to live with, but that makes those of us in the audience instinctively want to stay on her good side, so when we’re alone with her in a scene as she makes faces at a closed door or behaves like a child, we feel like we’re in on the joke and on the inside of that mean girl bubble. It would be impossible to take a person of such intense hypocrisy and callous malice and make that person aspirational in a completely unironic way, but by keeping us on the inside of that bullying for so long, it makes it harder to condemn her either, especially when she has a genuine emotional connection for what’s likely the first time since Edouard died, if not the first time in her life. It’s more documentarian than that, and it makes no moral judgments. I’ve certainly said a lot about how detestable her behavior is, but I also couldn’t look away or stop laughing.
Lagniappe
Britnee: When Catherine answers the telephone, she takes off her massive clip-on earrings. This happens a lot, and she always makes it look so elegant. Cracks me up every time!
Hanna: As much as I liked the twists this story took, I was all in for the passive-aggressive biddy relationship between Auntie Danielle and Odile in the beginning. I would have loved to see a version of this movie that starts when they move in together and escalates into old lady mayhem.
Boomer: I actually don’t think that Danielle ever loved Edouard. This is probably my biggest presumption about what we’re supposed to think about Tatie Danielle’s life before the film starts, but I think that they married when she was very young and he was perhaps … not. The vignette photograph that Danielle has of him looks positively Edwardian; I did some research to see if I could determine if he was wearing a uniform from WWI or WWII, since Danielle doesn’t specify, but I can’t be certain. This painting is of a French officer’s uniform and is dated 1940. Assuming that Danielle, like her actress Tsilla Chelton, was born in 1919, and given that she has no more recent pictures of him than 50 years prior, it seems like Danielle married a man in his 30s or 40s when she was twenty or so, and he died shortly thereafter. My personal headcanon is that Danielle has simply had half a century to forget that, when he was alive, she hated him and got her jollies making him unhappy, too.
Brandon: For the first half-hour of this, I was starting to worry that the social isolation & systemic cruelty of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was making me as miserable & misanthropic as Auntie Danielle. I could hear my own constant, cynical complaints about how stupid & ugly the world has become echoed in her hatred for every human being in her eyesight. Then she joked that her family member was “silly” for “dying of the flu” in response to news of a lethal viral outbreak, and I was reassured that I’m actually not this terrible . . . yet. Once I get callous about COVID deaths, I’ll know I’m in trouble.
Welcome to Episode #155 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the films & career of Austrian button-pusher Michael Haneke, starting with his 1989 debut The Seventh Continent. Enjoy!
00:00 Welcome
05:17 Jeen-Yuhs (2022) 11:30 The Batman (2022) 16:16 Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) 21:44 Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) 23:40 Sister Act (1992)
29:35 The Seventh Continent (1989) 52:00 Benny’s Video (1992) 1:09:50 The Piano Teacher (2001) 1:31:40 The White Ribbon (2009)
Starting last year, we have entered a new, revolutionary era for the movie-making division of Motern Media, with shockwaves that will rattle the bones of independent cinema for at least the next decade to come. Motern megalomaniac Matt Farley has announced plans to complete & distribute two feature films a year for the foreseeable future, collaborating with longtime filmmaking partner Charles Roxburgh to match the overwhelming pace of Farley’s music production in their backyard movie output. That personally imposed two-films-a-year metric would sound too ambitious to be sustainable for an amateur auteur if it weren’t for Farley’s deep public record of superheroic stubbornness. Between his 22,000+ song catalog, six-hour marathon concerts, conceptual triple albums, and outright spiteful takeover of the Sufjan Stevens “50 States” project, Farley unleashes an unrelenting flood of self-published #content at a pace unmatched by any Online Era artist I can name. The only time he’s announced an ambitious creative project without fulfilling his initial goal is when he & Roxburgh planned to produce a septology of Druid-themed movies shot on a digi-camcorder in the woods, but wisely cut the project short when it was “only” a quadrilogy (still an impressive feat). And, who knows, maybe this new two-film-a-year production metric will force Motern’s hand in delivering the final three parts of The Druid Cycle after all, picking up where they left off with Druids Druids Everywherein 2014. They’ve got to run out of fresh ideas at some point, right? Right?!?
The first pair of films from this new, revolutionary era in Motern Cinema offers both a wild deviation from the norm and a nostalgic return to basics. It’s obviously much easier to get excited about the outlier, so I’ll start there. Releasing it direct-to-Vimeo in 2021, Farley & Roxburgh present Heard She Got Married as their version of a “straight forward psychological thriller,” a wild tonal departure from their classic tongue-in-cheek creature features. Instead of playing his usual stock character of an outsider artist who never “made it”, Farley leads as a has-been rock star who moves back to his hometown “in The Tri-Town Area” to adjust to a post-fame life. The film is as bizarre as ever in its hyper-specific character details (including a local weirdo who is fixated on convincing strangers to taste his homemade hotdogs), but it’s an all-growed-up, oddly sinister maturation of the Motern template. The Motern family of recurring players are getting old, and there’s a darkness to their nostalgia for the sunnier days of their rambunctious youth, summarized by the line “We all had a good time when we were kids, but it’s over.” When Farley’s has-been rock star investigates the suspicious behavior of his psychotic mailman, it’s played as a sad, petty distraction from his real work of growing up & moving on – as opposed to previous heroic investigations of small-town threats like the Riverbeast, the Gospercaps, and the creep with the killer foot. It’s disarming to see Farley & Roxburgh mine such a dark tone out of the exact character dynamics they usually play for laughs, especially since the movie ends on a sincere psych-thriller twist instead of an absurdist punchline.
Premiered at a couple isolated screenings in 2021 and now widely available on Blu-Ray through Gold Ninja Video, Metal Detector Maniac is more of a business-as-usual effort from Motern than its sister film. It delivers all the novelty songs, adorable locals, 1-on-1 basketball, and preposterous horror villainy you’d expect from a Farley/Roxburgh horror comedy. Metal Detector Maniac was initially intended to be a sincere throwback to video store-era horror schlock, but in the writing process it devolved into a goofball satire dunking on the absurdity of academia. Farley co-stars with longtime Moes Haven bandmate Tom Scalzo as college professors who get distracted from their academic research by a self-assigned “citizen sleuth” investigation of a suspicious metal detector hobbyist who lurks around the public park. Unlike with the similar maniac mailman investigation of Heard She Got Married, the metal detectorist’s devious behavior is a non-sequitur that only occasionally distracts from what’s really on Matt Farley’s mind: petty grievances over the cushiness of tenured university jobs. Metal Detector Maniac is mostly an excuse for Farley to complain about the ridiculous racket of paid sabbaticals, university presses, and inspirational “pre-writing” sessions that he’s locked out of as a self-published artist. A no-budget horror about a maniac with a killer metal detector is a hilariously incongruous platform for these bitter, detailed complaints about professorship, which is the exact kind of the-monster-doesn’t-matter approach Farley’s applied to his creature features in the past. It strikes a much more routine, expected tone than Heard She Got Married as a result, but another scoop of ice cream is still a scoop of ice cream: a familiar delight.
As a pair, these two new Motern releases are most essential in the way the document both extremes of Matt Farley’s prolific, bifurcated music career. The bumbling “citizen sleuth” professors of Metal Detector Maniac specifically study the practice of spontaneous, improvisational songwriting, intellectualizing a “Don’t think, just make art” ethos to the adoration of their students and the skepticism of their colleagues. By contrast, the tonal change-up of Heard She Got Married is echoed in the earnestness of its soundtrack, consisting of Farley’s sincere rock n’ roll anthems instead of the improv novelty songs that score his horror comedies (and pay his bills). In-the-know Motern fans will distinguish Heard She Got Married as a MO75 film and Metal Detector Maniac as a Moes Haven film, but I’m not sure that level of Matt Farley obsessiveness is necessary (or even healthy). At most, the only pre-requisite homework required to fully appreciate these delirious sister films is spending an hour watching Farley’s classic self-portrait Local Legends, which is one of the greatest films of the 2010s anyway. Of this pair, Metal Detector Maniac is more likely the title that holds up on its own without prior Motern Media familiarity, but I’m also too deep into the cult indoctrination process to make that call anymore. All I can say for sure is that both films are included on the Gold Ninja Video release of Metal Detector Maniac, and they both signal that the Motern filmmaking method is still going strong as we enter the 2020s – whether Farley & Roxburgh are trying out new things or sticking to what’s already proven to work. Which is good news, since they’re planning to double their catalog of movie titles over the next few years regardless of audience appetite.
Our current Movie of the Month, 2012’s I Declare War, is a darkly comic fantasy thriller that illustrates a children’s game of Capture the Flag as a gritty war story. Unfortunately, it’s one of our rare Movie of the Month selections that did not hit home for me, personally. Its premise is fun enough, and I was mostly charmed by its low-budget backyard filmmaking aesthetics, but the overall vibes are just . . . off. Specifically, I was tripped up by some of its more dire #edgelord one-liners, and I’m not sure that it ever escalates its high-concept premise beyond its initial novelty. Then again, that novelty was in playing children’s playground imagination fantasies as a straight war film, and that’s just not my genre. I found myself alternating between boredom and annoyance for most of its runtime, which is typically how I react to even well-respected war movies, so it might actually be successful as the genuine thing.
As disappointed as I ended up being with I Declare War as a finished product, I still think there’s a fun germ of an idea in its central conceit. It’s just also one that you can see executed in better, earlier films. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month (or at least the idea of it) and want to see more films where children’s playtime war games are treated with the severity of a genuine war epic.
Son of Rambow (2007)
Maybe the reason I Declare War made me squeamish was that the cast of kids are so unashamedly gross. They have the talk-shouting acting skills of a Disney Channel Original, but they also take transgressive delight in cussing and making 4-chan level jokes about blowjobs & altar boys. It’s off-putting. By contrast, I was thoroughly charmed by the 2007 twee comedy Son of Rambow, in which the kids are rambunctious but sweet in their fictional battlefield mischief. Like I Declare War, Son of Rambow is guided by a childlike sense of imagination, as indicated in its tagline “Make believe, not war.” The difference is that the kids in Son of Rambow are adorable little scamps, while the kids of I Declare War are gross little internet trolls. It may be a less authentic depiction of childhood personalities, but it’s a lot easier to stomach at feature length.
In Son of Rambow, two mismatched British schoolboys bond while making a D.I.Y. sequel to First Blood with a camcorder in the woods. Their bootleg Rambo sequel recalls the cutesy backyard-moviemaking aesthetics of similar comedies like Brigsby Bear & Be Kind Rewind, focusing more on the anything-can-happen chaos of a child’s imagination than the grim logistics of real-life warfare. While the kids of I Declare War are obsessed with the traditional war-epic plot machinations of the movie Patton, the kids of Son of Rambow toss in whatever spur-of-the-moment whimsies pop up in their playtime: ninjas, flying dogs, killer scarecrows, whatever. You’ll either find their playtime antics cloying or wonderful depending on your relationship with twee whimsy. Either way, it offers a sweet counterpoint to the bitter battlefield grotesqueries of I Declare War.
Child’s Play 3 (1991)
Maybe it’s wrong to soften the harsh reality of warfare with twee whimsy. Maybe a proper alternative to I Declare War would have to sweeten its bitter truths with a different kind of genre-bending novelty. Child’s Play 3 is at least more somber in its approach to children playing soldiers in the woods, in that it’s set in a somewhat realistic military academy where young kids are forced to play make-believe that they’re adult killing-machines. Its most direct connection to I Declare War arrives in the third act, when their traditional wargames simulation is made tragically lethal – their guns’ paintball ammo swapped with actual bullets. Of course, the novelty in that premise is provided by the mischievous villain who supplied that live ammo: the supernatural killer doll Chucky.
To be honest, even Child’s Play 3 sticks a little too close to traditional war movie genre tropes for my tastes. Having to spend even 90 breezy minutes in its drab military school setting feels like being punished alongside Andy for crimes I didn’t commit. Chucky does a lot to break up the monotony of that rigidly uniform setting, though. It’s easily my least favorite of the original Child’s Play trilogy, but it’s late enough in the series that Chucky fully comes into his own as a mainstay slasher villain, quipping his way through every kill with fun catchphrases & cheap one-liners. Also, my boredom with its war-film tropes is rewarded with a last-minute trip to an amusement park in an incredible finale. That’s more than I can say for I Declare War, which never leaves its D.I.Y. military bases in the woods.
3615 code Père Noël (aka Deadly Games, 1989)
The ideal neutral ground between the cutesy whimsy of Son of Rambow and the military-school machismo of Child’s Play 3 is likely the 1989 French home-invasion thriller Deadly Games, making it the perfect counterpoint to I Declare War‘s playground wargames tedium. The problem is that it’s blasphemous to watch Deadly Games any month but December, since it’s explicitly a Christmas film. In the movie, a spoiled rich child plays macho protector to his empty mansion against a psychotic invader who’s dressed as Santa Claus (whom the boy mistakes for the real deal). To eliminate this threat, the boy suits up as a miniature Rambo, armed with an endless arsenal of high-tech gadgets & children’s toys to weaponize against the killer Santa. He treats his mission with the deadly seriousness of a real-life war skirmish, which is good, because the adult Santa very well might kill him.
Director René Manzor was reportedly pissed that his film was “plagiarized” by the massive 90s hit Home Alone, and it’s easy to see the connections between the two films’ shared boobytrap defense systems & Christmas Eve home-invasion premises. However, whereas Home Alone‘s boobytrap antics are played for broad slapstick humor, Deadly Games is deadly serious about the threat its enemy encroachment presents. The child’s response to the invading Santa Claus is charmingly imbued with playtime imagination, especially in his plastic weapons of choice. The severity of the resulting battle is genuinely thrilling, though, even more so than most actual Rambo movies. It skillfully toys with the exact boundary between childhood whimsy & wartime brutality that I Declare War clumsily aims for, but no self-respecting adult should watch it any sooner in the calendar year than the day after Thanksgiving.
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 monthBoomer made Hanna,Brandon, and Britneewatch I Declare War (2012).
Boomer: Some things are quite different now than they were just over a year ago when I first saw I Declare War, and many things are still the same. Our president is no longer a racist orange man; he’s a racist white man. Our government is in continuous perpetual danger, and the country is being ravaged by COVID-19, either again or still, depending on your point of view. And, despite promises that delivered an election to the Democrats (in spite of endless attempts to stop people from voting, attempts to stop votes from being counted, and stop the results from being ratified), we’ve all still got the same student loans that we did the first time I popped this DVD into a player. We’re living in a dying empire on a dying planet, so why not live a little? Sometimes we just have to get away using the “utility of one’s imagination,” as the creators of this film call it.
I wrote up a more detailed plot synopsis when I watched Declare the first time, but in brief, this is a film about a dozen or so (mostly) boys playing a war game. Sticks and logs are guns and bazookas, if you’re hit you’re down for a short count that ends with either a “grenade” “kill” or with the countdown concluding and the “injured” “soldier” getting the opportunity to escape. The game ends when one team captures the other’s base. The film deliberately plays with the intermix of children and the violence of death-dealing machinery; in fact, in the commentary, writer Jason Lapeyre was specifically interested in “the violence of what they’re doing versus how innocent they look in their childhood clothes,” counterposing presumed integrity of a guileless, wholesome childhood with the bloodiness of how kids actually imagine their world and the casual cruelty that comes from the as-yet-undomesticated id and developing frontal cortex.
Lapeyre used to play this game, essentially, during his own youth; we’re even given a specific reference to 1986, which I think tells us more about the film and its creators that it first appears to. LaPeyre cited in one of the two commentaries that he’s frequently asked where the idea for the film came from, and he confirmed that these rules are derived from his own neighborhood play. “I did this a lot as a kid,” he says, before elaborating that he grew up as an army kid who had a decommissioned bazooka in the basement. He also says that he was sick and tired of inaccurately portrayed children, and that he wanted to make a film in which kids would be seen as they really are. But I don’t know if that’s quite correct.
Lapeyre is writing from the point of view of someone who never experienced school shootings on a massive scale the way that the kids in this movie would have (presuming they live in the U.S.; there’s a scene with an American $50 bill that actors laugh about in their commentary, since this was filmed in Toronto). I was 11 years old when Columbine happened, and that was just a few years before the beginning of the War in Afghanistan, which, hey, that ended since I first wrote about this movie 14 months ago! It only lasted 20 years of mine and everybody’s life, with production of this movie in 2011 taking place right smack in the middle of it, and the film releasing in 2012, the same year that America really and truly (if unofficially) gave up on even symbolically attempting to end that kind of mass murder. Would kids in 2012 actually see themselves in the characters of I Declare War in a way that transcended the age gap between themselves and the writer?
For what it’s worth, kids responded well to an early cut that was shown at a local school, according to both commentaries, and the kids who participated in the actors’ commentary (which is 8 of them) share feedback that they got from classmates after the film came out. Among the students who were surveyed, they were told that male students were unhappy with the “unrealistic” nature of the dynamic between boys and girl in the movie, while the female students disagreed and advised it was “very true to life.” So we have some secondhand information about how kids in 2012 reacted. But still I wonder, what about kids in 2022? Do we even think that the response to the film from the kids in 2012 is representative? Brandon, what do you think?
Brandon: I suspect this film’s best chance at finding a long-term audience is if it gets passed down through generations of schoolyard recommendations amongst kids. I’ll be up-front in saying that, as an adult, it did not work for me at all, but that’s mostly because I found the humor disgustingly juvenile. In Movie of the Month terms, I did not hate it quite as passionately as I hated Live Freaky, Die Freaky!, but its weakness for #edgelord one-liners did remind me a lot of what made that film such a miserable watch. You’d think that I Declare War’s main focus would be the stark contrast of watching young cherubic faces launching bullets & grenades at each other. Instead, it seems fixated on the contrast of feeding those younglings offensive quips about blowjobs, “retards,” rape, race, and God’s sexual orientation. I believe that juxtaposition between sub-Disney Channel actors and offensive-for-its-own-sake humor was intended to be genuinely funny, and so I believe its best chance of actually landing a few chuckles would be among 12-year-olds who still think cussing is excitingly naughty. Somebody‘s out there keeping South Park on the air in its 120th season, anyway, and I hope it’s not actual adults.
To be fair, most children do have a grotesque, offensive sense of humor, especially in this middle school age range when they’re testing the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable. That’s at least realistic to children “as they really are”. I just don’t think the movie has much to say about that pimply Reddit edgelord sensibility, or it at least doesn’t say enough to justify the cruelty of its one-liners. Part of the problem might be that its central conceit of depicting a few unremarkable middle schoolers’ game of Capture the Flag as a brutal war epic is a pretty thin premise, one the movie is unsure how to escalate after the initial novelty settles. The imagery of children operating deadly weaponry is upsetting (although, I suspect the same kids who would find its edgy humor funny would superficially find that imagery “badass”), but it doesn’t really evolve in any significant way between the first & last time it’s depicted. All of the dead-air between the budget-torching effects shots of the actual warfare has to be filled with something, and I just don’t think the dialogue they filled it with added all that much to the larger metaphor.
Maybe I’m being a little harsh on this movie because of my larger biases against the war film as a genre, including the movie Patton that the kids idolize as the pinnacle of the artform. I Declare War at least feels like a genuine war film in that I alternated between being bored & annoyed by it for most of its runtime, and I likely would not have finished watching it if it weren’t for the obligations of this discussion. Hanna, I’m not sure what your relationship with war films are at large, but how well do you think this film succeeds as an example of the genre? Since its main novelty is in playing childhood war games “straight”, how did it do?
Hanna: There are some exceptions, but I’ve subconsciously avoided the majority of movies in the canon of great war films. I hung out with a lot of guys in high school who were orgasmically obsessed with WWII and its various implements; they were (almost) exclusively the only people I knew who watched war movies, and they were also the types of guys who laughed at the “Get some!” scene from Full Metal Jacket on repeat. Their attitude instilled in me a kind of mental revulsion that surfaces every I consider watching, for instance, Saving Private Ryan (which I understand is a great film that I should have seen by now). Most of the war movies I like make me feel desperately horrified by the existence of war (Come and See) or the absurdity of geopolitical power struggles (Dr. Strangelove). I Declare War didn’t really do either of these things for me, but I thought it was fine. Unfortunately, I don’t think it could really speak to the modern attitude towards violence or the current state of warfare. Also, like Brandon, I was totally turned off by the shithead kid dialogue.
I did think there was something kind of interesting about the risk of harm increasing as the sophistication of the weapons de-escalated. I actually wasn’t affected much by the images of kids walking around with cannons and guns (maybe this reflects poorly on me and my generation); the carbine rounds and the bloody grenade splatters play more like video game effects, and they don’t mean much to the kids beyond the passing annoyance of being stunned or forced to trudge home. In comparison, the rocks that Skinner throws at P.K.’s spy and the stones he slowly piles on Paul’s stomach are weird, intimate weapons of torture that buck up against the pre-established order of the War rules; the other kids never retaliate in kind with the sticks they’ve bundled up into guns. I can appreciate a reckoning between splashy, cinematic war gore and the ugly impulse to injure another human out of anger or a bid for power. The issue is that young people have greater access to the types of weapons in I Declare War than they’ve ever had in concurrence with rising social isolation and violent ideologies. It’s become a non-event for modern Skippers to take out their misdirected aggression with guns instead of rocks. At the same time, modern warfare is becoming increasingly automated, which is terrifying in a completely different direction.
Like I said, I do think this film had potential, but it didn’t push in the directions I was hoping it would go, and it was really hard for me to get past the dialogue and acting. I also thought some of the character choices were really strange, especially Caleb, a “Native Guide” caricature with a beautiful husky and virtually no lines. Britnee, did these kids’ performances work better for you than they did for me? If not, did you find anything more substantial beyond these characters?
Britnee: These kids are so annoying. Some of them, specifically Quinn and Jessica, we’re way too old to be “playing pretend” at this level. It gave me so much second-hand embarrassment, especially when Jessica would talk about France. The dialogue between the cast was pretty dull, and it’s hard to tell if that’s because they suck at acting or if they suck at playing war. The only character that I thought was likeable was Kwon, but it was super hard to watch the only Asian friend get treated so terribly, both in the game and by the other kids in general. He was actually pretty funny and made me chuckle a few times with the way he delivered his over-dramatic lines.
My lack of enthusiasm for war movies and war games (real-life, board games, video games) is most likely why I didn’t dig I Declare War all that much. I kind of wished that the boundaries of the film were pushed further. For instance, what if some of the kids would have gotten seriously injured (burned up, broken leg, etc.), but they had to finish the game before getting help? It was a little too PG and reminded me of one of those videos about the value of friendship that I used to watch in religion class (those horrible after-school classes you take when you’re raised Catholic but go to public school). I can just hear the teacher saying, “You see, P.K. wasn’t really a good friend to Kwon, now was he?”
Lagniappe
Boomer: A few notes from the commentaries that I thought were interesting: the director mentioned that the light level in the forest caused all of the kids’ eyes to dilate, making them wider and more innocent, which was purely unintentional but made for an interesting effect. If you want to recreate the blood balloons from the film, the balloon has to be filled with paint and then shellacked for that perfect burst. In the adult commentary, the directors and producers note that Eric Hanson, who played Kenny (the kid at the beginning with the paint-blackened eyes), “had a really sincere insanity about him” and that he was “clearly unhinged.” In the commentary that the child actors did, Hanson noted “Shooting that gun was the most manliest moment of my life.”
Brandon: It’s funny how ungenerous I can become as an audience once I sour on a film. Usually, I’m charmed by the limitations of low-budget backyard movies with high-concept premises, but in this case, they only added to my annoyance. Whenever I caught a glimpse of an adult crewmember in the blurry background or the visible lines of a child-actor’s microphone battery pack, I found myself getting angry at the filmmakers for being “lazy” instead of cutting them a break. I can almost guarantee that those same minor mistakes in a goofy rubber-suit monster movie set in those same woods with this same budget would have made me smile instead of grimace.
Britnee: The x-ray effect that showed the lighter in Kwon’s pocket was so much more advanced than the laser eye special effects for Joker. That made me laugh a lot.
Hanna: I know this would totally defeat the purpose of the movie, but I feel like I would have actually loved it if the violence was more in line with Joker’s laser eye explosions (and if all the dialogue was rewritten). If the children were, for instance, acting out a fantasy war by hurling magical fireballs at each other rather than grenades, I would be delighted. This would be more akin to the war games I played as a child. It’s still violence, though! It’s just much more depressing to watch children acting out their violent impulses by pretending to use tools that actually exist for the purpose of killing.
Next Month: Britnee presents Tatie Danielle (1990)
I’ve been long-overdue for a nostalgia-check rewatch of the 1998 Godzilla film, directed by notorious Hollywood dingus Roland Emmerich. Since it was the first fully American Godzilla production, the hype leading up to that film’s release was immense and—a child at the time—I bought into all of it: the tie-in Saturday morning cartoon, the rap-rock soundtrack CD, the Taco Bell-exclusive merchandise, all of it. The film was a critical flop and a commercial disappointment, but I was young enough (and offline enough) to remain blissfully unaware of its reputation as the biggest embarrassment to-date in Godzilla’s 30+ film franchise. That tainted rep has been difficult to ignore in recent years, though, as other 90s Kid™ nostalgia traps like Mortal Kombat,Space Jam, and Spice World have enjoyed retroactive critical appraisal from goofball Millennials (myself included, on all three counts) while Godzilla ’98 has maintained its cultural standing as one of the worst blockbuster misfires of all time. I had to revisit the film to see for myself whether it was the monstrously entertaining creature feature I remembered watching as a kid or the putrid, bloated travesty everyone else reports it to be. As per usual, the truth is that it falls somewhere between those two extremes.
The 1998 Godzilla isn’t especially horrendous nor especially great by any particular metric; it’s passably entertaining for a goofball blockbuster spectacle marketed almost exclusively to children. I honestly believe that the film would’ve been remembered fondly if it had just been a dinosaurs-attacking-NYC movie instead of dragging Godzilla’s name into its CGI buffoonery, since the creature’s legendary run with Toho set an expectation it was never going to meet. A $100mil Roland Emmerich production was never going to sincerely grapple with the post-nuclear emotional devastation of the original 1954 Godzilla, nor was it ever going to indulge in the wildly imaginative free-for-all of weirdo outliers like 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah. It basically just uses the Godzilla name as an excuse to stage one-off, city-crushing gags with a square-jawed T-Rex that has practically nothing to do with the creature’s post-War Japanese origins. I can see how that half-hearted appropriation of the Godzilla legacy was insulting to adult fans of the original Toho series, but I can also personally report that it did not matter at all to the dipshit 12-year-olds the movie was marketed to, at least not while we enjoyed watching a CGI NYC get smashed up real good by a giant dino. In retrospect, both sides of that level-headed critical divide were likely exaggerated responses to what the film could and did deliver.
The reason I’m suggesting that Godzilla ’98 might’ve fared better as a dino invasion movie is because that’s where it’s heart clearly was anyway. It borrows practically all its ideas, images, and musical cues from the first two Jurassic Park movies, announcing its intention to outdo the iconic Spielberg series in an early teaser ad that showed Godzilla’s gigantic foot crushing the museum-residing skeleton of a T-Rex. It recreates the first Jurassic Park‘s raptors-in-the-kitchen sequence, its street race T-Rex chase, and even its gender-reveal pregnancy twist – all ported over to the city-invasion context of The Lost World. Tri-Star Pictures could’ve saved a lot of money and a lot of critical grief if it had just set gigantic dinosaurs loose in modern Manhattan instead of bothering to license the Godzilla name. The film is basically an overly expensive mockbuster version of what Jurassic Park had already accomplished, except with a novelty urban setting that adds a fun new bubblegum flavor to the mayhem (like the gag where the central group of heroic New Yorkers drive a Yellow Taxi cab directly out of Godzilla’s mouth onto the Brooklyn Bridge). What’s amusing about Godzilla‘s function as a shameless Jurassic Park knockoff is that it was a big enough production to inspire its own parasitic mockbusters – copies of a copy.
Enter notorious schlockteur Charles Band, whose long-running exploitation enterprise Full Moon Features was no stranger to producing straight-to-VHS, proto-Asylum mockbusters of legitimate Hollywood films. Smelling chum in the water as soon as Godzilla‘s production was announced in the mid-90s, Full Moon rushed to establish a kaiju-themed sub-label called Monster Island Pictures, offering kid-friendly, straight-to-VHS alternatives to the incoming Roland Emmerich behemoth. As the major-studio Godzilla film failed to produce its own sequels, Full Moon’s Monster Island Entertainment also failed to sustain itself long-term – throwing in the towel after just two films. It’s safe to say that neither 1996’s Zarkorr! The Invader nor 1998’s Kraa! The Sea Monster had much of an impact of the pop culture landscape at large, only registering with the naive, kaiju-hungry children who happened to rent them from video stores at the height of Godzilla fever. In retrospect, however, they hold a kind of vintage kitsch appeal as lost 90s Kids™ relics. They’re the exact kind of real-deal VHS schlock ephemera that now gets ironically spoofed in retro throwbacks like PG: Psycho Goreman but rarely get revisited in earnest. I couldn’t help but fall further down that Godzilla mockbuster rabbit hole myself, though, especially since they’re also the exact kind of cultural runoff that’s readily streaming for free on Tubi.
Although Kraa! The Sea Monster was the Monster Island Entertainment title released the same year as Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, Zarkorr! The Invader is the one that feels like its direct knockoff. The titular Zarkorr is a gigantic reptile with magical fire breath and metal-on-metal roars, which makes him pretty indistinct as a Godzilla alternative. All the film’s city-crushing monster action is fairly limp as a result, despite the inherent cuteness of a rubber-suit dragon creature stomping down a dinky miniature of Newark, NJ. Thankfully, the film does indulge in plenty of goofy Charles Bandian bullshit outside of those tedious monster attacks, even if it’s not quite enough to make up for the giant-reptile mediocrity. Its on-the-ground humans plot involves a gone-postal mailman who’s selected by an invading alien race for a kaiju-themed experiment specifically because he’s the most Average man alive. As a test of humanity’s collective wit & resolve, its most unremarkable specimen is alone tasked with the destruction of the dragonlike Zarkorr, who’s stomping his way to the man’s shitty New Jersey apartment for an inevitable showdown. The Charles Band-specific novelty of that set-up is in the presentation of the aliens’ message, which is delivered by a doll-sized Valley Girl teenager on a set with jumbo-scaled prop kitchenware. That familiar Full Moon obsession with dolls & miniatures doesn’t do much to jazz up Zarkorr’s mediocre kaiju mayhem, but it’s at least a momentary distraction from the tedium.
Monster Island Entertainment didn’t really go off the rails with its Godzilla mockbusters until 1998’s Kraa! The Sea Monster, which feels more like a pilot for a Power Rangers-style action series than it does a proper kaiju film. Its plotting is deliciously, deliriously inane. A space warmonger named Lord Doom (costumed to look like Marvel Comics’ Doctor Doom, naturally) sends the kaiju-scale fish monster “Kraa The Warbeast” to Earth to steal the planet’s warmth so his own homeworld doesn’t freeze into oblivion. Earth’s only protectors are a small crew of Power Rangers-style space cops who lurk just outside of orbit but cannot reach the planet’s surface due to a malfunctioning spaceship. They have no choice but to enlist on-the-ground help from a wisecracking crab creature with an obnoxious Italian accent, their only nearby agent who can pitch in to stop Kraa before it’s too late. The kid-friendly punchlines and visual gags are just as eyeroll-worthy in Kraa! as they are in Zarkorr!, but the fanged-fish kaiju design and deranged Full Moonian plotting go much further in distinguishing it as a stand-alone novelty. If it weren’t for its rushed-to-market 1998 release date and its Monster Island Entertainment production title, you might not even recognize it as a Godzilla mockbuster; it’s its own uniquely goofy thing, which is more than you can say about Emmerich’s extensively market-tested Jurassic Park knockoff.
The most sublime moment in this entire trio of photocopied kaiju novelties can, of course, be found in Kraa! The Sea Monster. During the first monster attack, Kraa takes the time to destroy a building that prominently features a billboard advertisement for the 1998 Godzilla, starting with a close-up shot of the better-funded film’s iconic logo before it’s ripped to shreds by the rubber-suited fish monster. In another meta-referential visual gag, Kraa! The Sea Monster spotlights a theatre marquee advertising a screening of Zarkorr! The Invader. The best any of these three films could hope to accomplish is as a memorably goofy byproduct of corporate synergy. I had fun revisiting a few individual gags in the 1998 Godzilla film, but none are as fun to think about or revisit as the film’s extratextual tie-in marketing, where Godzilla squares off against the likes of Puff Daddy, Charles Barkley, or the Taco Bell chihuahua to cash in on the momentary kaiju craze it stirred up in American pop culture. As a shameless exploitation filmmaker of the lowest order, Charles Band inherently understood the novelty value of that kind of pop culture cross-over synergy, something his Monster Island Entertainment sub-label pushed to its goofiest extreme with Kraa! The Sea Monster. None of these movies are essential viewing, but Kraa! is the one that’s the most honest & playful with its kaiju mockbuster appeal. To match those dubious creative heights, Godzilla ’98 would’ve had to fully commit to a Jurassic Central Park premise it was too timid to openly indulge.
1. Titane — Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Rawis a greasy, Cronenbergian nightmare we didn’t want to wake up from: a darkly comic body horror about a serial killer who’s impregnated by a Cadillac and finds herself hiding out with an aging firefighter, disguising herself amongst his cartoonishly macho employees. It’s a nuclear gender meltdown with no clear sense to be made in its burnt-to-the-ground wreckage, finding unlikely refuge in the violence of pure-masc camaraderie & social ritual. At times overwhelmingly explicit and unflinchingly fixated on its own gory violence, but also a heartwarming tale of unconditional love.
2. Pig — Not at all what you’d expect from a Nic Cage revenge thriller about a disgruntled chef’s John Wick-style mission to recover his stolen truffle pig. An understated execution of a preposterous premise, refusing to behave either as a sober return-to-form showcase for the often-mocked actor or as fodder for his infinite supply of so-bad-its-good YouTube highlight reels. It’s its own uniquely beautiful, tenderly macho thing, with more to say about the beauty of a thoughtfully prepared meal than the peculiar flavors of Cage’s screen presence. Its heart is big, genuine, and forgiving, which is why it’s so moving despite its funhouse mirror reflection of the Portland culinary scene.
3. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar — A delightful throwback to a very specific type of airheaded buddy comedy that rarely gets made anymore (think Romy & Michelle, A Night at the Roxbury, Dude Where’s My Car?, etc.), especially not with this level of grandeur in expensive set pieces and show-stopping musical numbers. And it’s even rarer to see that comedic spotlight shone on middle-aged women: a demographic who don’t often get to enjoy the spotlight in anything, even goofy comedies. We’re already hoping for sequels.
4. Saint Maud — A horrific illustration of how traditional stories of sainthood & martyrdom would play out through a modern, critical lens. An intensely strange character study of a woman of newfound, uninformed, fragmented faith: a personal belief system she obsessively devotes herself to, holding others to the strictures of her singular ideology even though no one on Earth could possibly know what’s going on inside her mind. And what’s in there is fantastical: orgasmic visions of God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, atheist souls in desperate need of saving, and an attempted act of self-canonization that’s almost too harrowing to look at directly.
5. The Green Knight — A gritty, modernized illustration of an Arthurian quest — one that’s willing to critique the myths of yore, but not so much that the magic is lost. The modern atmospheric horror treatment does wonders for the fantasy genre, apparently; it really sells the tension & dark magic. The moments of onscreen sorcery are dreamlike & metal as fuck, making for an unlikely new Christmas classic.
6. Bo Burnham: Inside — As a “comedy special” this pandemic-era video diary can be hit-or-miss joke by joke. The songs are great, though, and by the time it fully devolves into panicked video art about Internet Age despair it’s undeniably substantial. It perfectly captures the feeling of reality itself crumbling around us as we remain in isolation, unable to tell what’s real and what’s not in our increasingly fake modern world.
7. The French Dispatch — Film nerds often complain about how visually lazy studio comedies are, so here’s a movie packed with Hollywood Celebrities where every scene is overloaded with gorgeous visuals and hilarious jokes. The anthology format affords Wes Anderson carte blanche to cram even more visual details & gags into the frame than usual, making for a texturally rich text. If his previous films are beautifully decorated cakes, this one is a full banquet.
8. The Power of the Dog — Jane Campion’s unnerving take on the Western genre conveys a masterful command of tone & form. And even if Westerns aren’t usually your thing, it’s still a relatable story about that one dipshit bully in your family whose sudden death would instantly improve the lives of everyone you know.
9. Lapsis — A high-concept, low-budget satire about our near-future gig economy dystopia. It doesn’t aim for the laugh-a-minute absurdism of Sorry to Bother You, but it’s maybe even more successful in pinpointing exactly how dispiriting it feels to live & work right now. It’s also incredibly smart in identifying what kind of radical labor movements we need to build to topple the power imbalances workers suffer under, offering a solution instead of just dwelling on the problem.
10. Mandibles— Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist comedy about bumbling criminals who adopt & corrupt a gigantic housefly so it can join them in acts of petty theft. A laugh-out-loud gem that’s smarter and more imaginative than the Dumb & Dumber-era Farrelly Brothers movies it recalls. And yet, it’s somehow just as hopelessly, delightfully stupid.
1. Titane – My favorite film of 2021! I’m sure it will end up on everyone’s list in the Swampflix crew because it’s very “Swampy”; it just fits the mold of movies we love. What initially seems to be a wacky film about a homicidal woman who was impregnated by a car turns out to be a movie about gender identity and unconditional love.
2. Willy’s Wonderland– My favorite version of Nic Cage is the silent and violent Nic Cage that gave us Mandy, which I wholeheartedly believe is one of the best films of all time. He does it again in Willy’s Wonderland, but this time, he’s fighting against a crew of Chuck E. Cheese style animatronic characters possessed with the souls of satanic cannibals. It is a high energy ride from beginning to end, and I really dug it.
3. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar – This was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a very long time. It felt like a throwback to those late 90s/early 2000s comedies that were just pure stupid fun. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are my new comedy queens, and I hope that they get to make a ton of sequels. I am forever grateful for having this movie come into my life during this god-awful pandemic.
4. Malignant – A new horror icon is born! This felt like a b-horror movie from the 70s or 80s with a dash of nu metal horror from the aughts. The nightmare that the film opens with morphs into a completely unexpected plot twist that literally made me scream. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
5. The Night House – This is one of the most unique horror films that I’ve ever seen. There are subtle hints dropped here and there that are enough to give you some explanation of all the spooky stuff happening, but nothing prepares you for the ending. It’s so damn smart.
6. Pig– The second Nic Cage movie on my list, but it’s miles away from being in the same bucket as Willy’s Wonderland. He’s such a complex actor! Pig is a very quiet “revenge” film that tugged at all my heart strings and reminded me how beautiful a perfect meal could be.
7. Swan Song – There aren’t many LGBTQ+ films with elderly main characters, which is a pity considering these individuals have been through hell and back in their experiences. Swan Song is a film that focuses strictly on its main character, an elderly gay hairdresser portrayed by Udo Kier. Kier is best known for playing supporting roles, but he is a force to be reckoned with in this lead performance.
8. The Woman in the Window – Yes, the reviews are terrible, but I just couldn’t stop watching this trashy Hitchcockian thriller. It’s a total blast! I had so much fun and found so much comfort watching this movie. It reminds me so much of silly thrillers from the 90s; it’s just missing Michael Douglas.
9. Saint Maud– The ending of Saint Maud had everyone talking, and it was indeed worthy of the attention. However, what really stuck with me was the relationship between Maud and Amanda. I still go back and forth in my mind trying to figure out what it really meant. Such a haunting film for so many reasons.
10. Gaia– The only eco horror film that I watched in 2021. Gaia was so good that I felt satisfied with keeping it that way. It’s an atmospheric masterpiece. Plus, there’s spooky mushroom people!
11. The Power of the Dog – What a wonderful yet unnerving film. I went into this not expecting much, and I was completely blown away. I guess I’m into Westerns now?
12. False Positive – The second-best pregnancy horror of 2021 (the first being Titane). It has a very interesting way of exploring how scary it is to be pregnant with no control over your body. Also, I can’t believe how amazing Pierce Brosnan is at playing a villain.
13. Old– I love trying to figure out the puzzles in M. Night Shyamalan movies, and I wish the world could be blessed with a few of these every year. Old delivers exactly what you’d expect from a Shyamalan movie, and that is 100% a good thing.
14. The Green Knight – My new favorite Christmas movie! It’s a medieval tale with A24 horror stylings that make for a unique work of art.
15. Mandibles– This goofy French buddy comedy about a really cute giant fly is just as fun as it sounds. It’s a total gem of a movie that offers some big laugh out loud moments.
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