Lists & Articles

Krewe Divine 2018

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Last year, a few members of the Swampflix crew decided to finally grow up and get serious about Mardi Gras. We collectively shed our annual personal crises about what themes to include in our Fat Tuesday costuming by pooling our resources to pray at the altar of a single cinematic deity: Divine. Arguably the greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of one of our favorite filmmakers, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.

Our initial krewe was a small group of Swampflix contributors: site co-founders Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas, podcast co-host CC Chapman, and repeat podcast guest Virginia Ruth. This year we were joined by local drag performer Ce Ce V DeMenthe, who frequently pays tribute to Divine in her performances. There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2018 excursion, our second year in operation as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe:

Eat shit!
❤ Krewe Divine ❤

John Woo Goes Hard, Goes American

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

There seem to be two distinct markers for the creative decline of the Hong Kong action cinema glory days that started in the mid-1980s: the handing over of Hong Kong to mainland China in 1997 & the movement’s biggest directors transitioning into helming Hollywood blockbusters, also in the mid-1990s. Up until Alli presented Hard Boiled as a Movie of the Month selection I was only familiar with John Woo’s work after these two declines in quality. Titles like Face/Off & Mission: Impossible 2 have a kind of slickly-produced charm to them, but are nowhere near the quality of action spectacle offered in Woo’s Hong Kong heyday. The interesting thing about Hard Boiled, though, is that it finds John Woo on the cusp of both transitions. Hard Boiled may be the director’s most often-cited work from his Hong Kong glory years, but it arrived just before his transition into a Hollywood big shot, which would steer his career for the remainder of the 90s. This means it’s also his final contribution to Hong Kong cinema before the handover to mainland China after 50 years of British colonial rule, a transition many mark as a downfall for the region’s action cinema boom. His first foray into American action cinema kept the spirit of his Hong Kong years alive, though, so much so that I often get its title mixed up with Hard Boiled’s. Like so many Hong Kong directors gone mainstream, John Woo began his Hollywood career helming a Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle, this one titled Hard Target. Watching the film in retrospect, it’s initially difficult to see what Woo brings to the picture that you wouldn’t find with any nobody American director, but then the intense kineticism & absurdist tone of his Hong Kong work take over as it barrels towards a blissfully chaotic climax. This cusp before Woo’s creative decline, where he effectively goes hard, is possibly his greatest sweet spot.

Hard Target has more than an American sensibility & a recognizable action star going for it in the way of making Woo’s style palatable to me specifically; it’s also set in my home city. In the opening sequence a homeless man is being hunted with a crossbow in The French Quarter, eventually succumbing to the steel-tipped arrow on the banks of the Mississippi River. Some details in this sordid take on New Orleans are a little iffy, like everyone’s weirdly thick Southern accent (whereas local Y’at accents have a cadence all to their own) or that a man being hunted on Bourbon Street would ever be turned away for refuge, as those bars never really close in real life. By the time Wilford Brimley’s cartoon Cajun invades the screen, though, the discrepancies become highly entertaining instead of eyerollingly awkward. I also have to admit that the film’s overall estimation of New Orleans as a heartlessly hedonistic city that world allow rich white men to openly hunt the homeless in the streets for sport (in a modern retelling of “The Most Dangerous Game”) is harsh, but fair. The scenario that allows this absurd evil where it’s “the pleasure of the few to hunt the many” is a little oddly structured, as it’s a police strike that leaves the city temporarily lawless. You’d think corruption and collusion among the police force & the wealthy hegemony would drive the plot instead of this weird anti-union political bent, but there’s still some interesting class politics at work in the film all the same. In its most poignant moment, a hunted homeless man desperately pleads for help from Bourbon Street tourists, who coldly turn their backs on him as if he were begging for pocket change. Most of the film’s local flavor is used as a conveniently novel backdrop (majestically so in the case of a climactic shootout in a Mardi Gras parade float warehouse), one I’m always tickled to see onscreen. However, that tourist-begging sequence actually has a sting of truth to it as a jab to New Orleans’s uglier side as a hedonistic playground for tourists that doesn’t give a shit about its own ailing population.

Of course, for most American audiences (since, mathematically speaking, most Americans have never lived in New Orleans), the main window into Woo’s appeal offered in Hard Target was his handle on the action. Jean-Claude Van Damme is meant to hold our hand through this cultural exchange as our action hero, although Woo makes him just as (charmingly) goofy as Chow Yun-Fat’s jazz clarinet enthusiast appears to be in Hard Boiled. Contextualizing his Belgian accent as a result of being a Cajun drifter, JCVD stars as the hilariously named Chance Boudreaux. A former medaled Marine who’s now desperately strapped for cash, Chance is introduced as a bizarre set of images: a single earring, a pronounced mullet, a slurped-up bowl of gumbo, etc. Just as cheesy jazz bar noodling follows around Tequila in Hard Boiled, Chance is scored with consistently cheesy blues guitar-riffing at every appearance. Early in the film, you get the sense that Woo’s directorial style has been significantly damaged in its exportation to America. It seems as if only his corniest stylistic impulses had made the jump, with none of the over-the-top action spectacle that contrasted them. Once the film leaves the city limits to meet Wilford Brimley’s Cajun caricature in the swamp, Woo’s personal touch becomes much clearer. Stunts, explosions, gunfire, motorcycles, and hard asses biting heads off snakes fill the screen in a nonstop, absurd cacophony strung together from a mind-bogglingly long parade of individual camera setups. What easily could have been a forgettable JCVD cheapie with a vague point to make about class politics and our casual disregard for the homeless transforms into a beautiful, explosive indulgence in over-the-top hyperviolence. The difference between John Woo and his American counterparts was that he went all in on action spectacle, where others would pull back & leave room for the audience to breathe. The problem is that American movie studios were much less accommodating to that violent fervor than the financiers that he was used to working with in Hong Kong.

As you might suspect, the reason Woo’s touch for over-the-top spectacle doesn’t initially come through in Hard Target is that American movie studio tinkering was holding him back. Universal Pictures executives had zero confidence in Woo (an unease they pinned entirely on a language barrier) despite his reputation for delivering all-time classic action vehicles like Hard Boiled. It took recognizable, bankable names like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sam Raimi (who was hired to hang around on set “on standby” to take over direction in case Woo “couldn’t handle” the production) to vouch for his genius for the studio to give him any creative control. Beyond that, 1990s MPAA censorship was much stricter on violence than its Hong Kong equivalent, so Woo had to make extensive cuts to Hard Target’s onscreen bloodshed to secure even an R rating. He smartly got around this hurdle by saving most of the absurd ultraviolence for the film’s Mardi Gras warehouse climax, making it count where he could. Still, you can feel early in the film how the softer edges on the violence (along with the shortened 90 min runtime, which leaves little room for elaborate action set pieces) stifled what made a John Woo film special in the first place. Hard Target is a deliciously silly action vehicle for JCVD’s brand of macho violence, maybe even one of his best, but it isn’t nearly as overwhelming in its creative heights as Hard Boiled, the Woo film that directly preceded it. As a pair, the two Hard films demonstrate exactly how Woo’s sensibilities were dulled & distorted in his transition to the American studio system, leaving the glory days of Hong Kong’s action cinema heights firmly in his rearview. The comparison is perhaps unfair to Hard Target, which eventually excels in an American action cinema context once it warms up, but it does help illustrate what was so spectacular about Hong Kong action’s heyday and what was lost in its slow 1990s fadeout, thanks both to American influence and to the culture of Hong Kong itself fading away.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, the John Woo action cinema classic Hard Boiled, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Hard Boiled (1992)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Alli made Britnee, Brandon, and Boomer watch Hard Boiled (1992).

Alli: Modern action cinema is full of shaky-cam, grit, chaotic set pieces, and giant robots (nothing against giant robots, they’re just the sparkling vampires of the contemporary action film). Sometimes a single film features all four of these and it’s a mess. Every summertime action movie season, 90% of the films are trash (in the bad way). I know we can’t expect a Fury Road every year, but there’s a certain daring artfulness and style missing from the movies that Hollywood churns out year after year.

To be fair, action films are difficult to calibrate. With too many explosions & gun shot scenes and not enough character development, they’re just silly. Too few kapow!s and they’re boring. No tension and they’re a flop. They need the perfect balance of fun and danger to excel as cinematic junk food.

John Woo, while he has made his share of flops, is one of action cinema’s greats, and Hard Boiled is his masterpiece. It’s a perfect blend of style and tension. He manages to keep the stakes just as high as the amount of fun. The sequences of explosions and stunts are beautifully choreographed, displaying the influence of kung fu movies that Honk Kong is historically known for. The characters, while classic tropes, are compelling, with even small side characters being afforded a life of their own. It manages to follow the blueprints laid down by the movies before it, while also exploring new territories.

A hard-boiled cop,”Tequila” (Chow Yun-Fat), and his partner go on a stake-out in a tea house to take down gun-smuggling gangsters. The tea house is full of pet birds (a tradition called bird-walking) and shady underworld types. When the stake-out descends into a extraordinarily violent shootout in a flurry of feathers and bullets, Tequila’s partner is killed. He swears revenge. Against his boss’s orders, he tracks down those responsible and with the help of a deep undercover cop, Alan (Tony Leung). Together, they take the entire enterprise down in one final battle. That violent climax happens to be staged inside a hospital, where there’s an underground gun cache. Patients are killed, babies are saved, and of course the whole thing is blown up spectacularly.

I only briefly mentioned the side characters, but my favorite is “Mad Dog,” played by Phillip Kwok. He’s a motorcycle-riding, badass henchman. At some point he loses an eye and the eye patch only makes him look cooler. Brandon, what did you think of Mad Dog? Do you have any other favorite characters?

Brandon: “Mad Dog” is definitely a clear stand-out among the film’s legion of baddies. Compared to his heartless crime boss, who is coded to be Pure Evil merely for being the only player around with Caucasian features (a common theme in eternally typecast Johnny Wong’s career), Kwok’s eye patch-wearing motorcyclist is a relatively complex character who evolves as the film progresses. When his diabolical De Facto White Guy boss demands that he put innocent hospital patients, including babies, in harm’s way during the climactic gunfight, he refuses to oblige out of a sense of human decency. That means a lot in the greater story about an illegal arms business gone mad, where money means more than lives and no human obstacle is sacred. Hard Boiled is very economical with its characterizations, presumably out of necessity. Tequila’s self-contradiction as a tough guy cop who plays jazz clarinet, Alan’s in-too-deep psychological breakdown expressing itself through his origami hobby, and even Mad Dog’s eye patch-wearing leather demonry all have a pro wrestling quality as personality traits; you have to instantly know via visual language who is Good and who is Bad to leave room for the much more complex & fully-developed action set pieces to flourish. Mad Dog & Alan are allowed (to borrow a wrestling parlance) face-turns in their respective roles, which makes them more interesting than other, more static villains & side characters, but they’re still (as Alli points out) classical archetypes. Even with far less screen time, Mad Dog makes more of an impression than Alan does, though, mostly because he just looks cool

My favorite side character in the film gets even less screen time than Mad Dog, but to even greater effect. It’s the chubby little baby Tequila partners with in the climactic gunfight. In an action sequence so iconically bonkers it features heavily on the film’s poster despite having fuck all to do with arms dealing, Tequila & his fellow cops have to save a nursery full of newborn babies by smuggling them out of the hospital window in the middle of a chaotic gunfight. I rolled my eyes a tad at the way the perpetually sidelined Lady Cop is finally given something to do (besides receiving flowers) in this scene, only for it to be the domestic work of caring for children. That unease is more than compensated for, however, when Tequila pairs up with one baby in particular who was left behind in the flaming hospital. Chow Yun-Fat’s comedic rapport with this fat-cheeked baby is adorable, especially in contrast to the bursts of gunfire he has to interrupt to soothe the baby with coos & a novelty rap song (!!!). The baby isn’t just an adorable mascot in this scene, either. He gets actively involved in the violent mayhem by putting out Tequila’s clothes fire with his piss, effectively saving the day. Even without this absurdist touch, Hard Boiled would’ve been instantly recognizable as an over-the-top action classic, but that exchange really helped seal it for me, which makes the chubby piss-baby an easy pick for MVP.

Britnee, since character development is somewhat secondary to Hard Boiled‘s complex set pieces & stylized violence, I’d like to know which action sequences stood out to you as favorites. Besides the bird cafe & hospital shootouts Alli & I already mentioned, there’s a nonstop flood of mayhem that spreads throughout all corners of Hong Kong: public libraries, warehouses, shipping docks, etc. Was there any one set piece that stood out to you as a particular highlight?

Britnee: I have never seen an action film with this much . . . well, action. The shootout scenes seemed to last forever and the effects were top-of-the-line. Needless to say, there’s too many action sequences to choose from. The almighty hospital shootout scene is probably the most memorable in the film for me, mainly because I can’t think of any other action film that has such a violent scene set in a hospital. Staging so much violence in such an innocent background seems almost taboo, and I think that Woo did his best to make sure that viewers were on the edge of their seat for that sequence. I mean, newborn babies were dangling from a cloth outside a hospital window while the hospital itself was blowing up.

The hospital sequence may have been awarded Most Memorable, but I have to say that my favorite action set piece is the one in which dear Uncle Hoi is killed in the warehouse. I still can’t figure out how all those explosions and gunshots could occur in such a small space with so many survivors. It’s almost as though the characters in this scene were immortal; they were able to withstand untold amounts of gunfire and explosions. Not only was the action mind-boggling, but my favorite moment in the entire film occurs in this sequence. Amidst all the chaos, a motorcycle that is engulfed in flames plows through the crowd. I remember this moment being in slow motion, but it’s possible that the slow motion occurred only in my mind. My jaw dropped and a long “whoaaaa” fell out. It was so beautiful and terrifying at the same time, much like this movie as a whole.

There is a scene in Hard Boiled that I haven’t been able to shake since watching it a few weeks ago. It’s the final scene in which Alan is throwing his origami cranes into the ocean from his sailboat. Prior to this scene, Alan shoots himself in the stomach to give Tequila a chance to shoot Wong. Part of me feels like he really didn’t die because he would be smart enough to wear a bulletproof vest, considering the situation. Alan jokes with Tequila about leaving everything behind and starting anew in Hawaii a couple of times throughout the movie, so I wasn’t sure if that’s what was actually happening in the final scene or if this was Alan’s ghost fulfilling his dream.

Boomer, what is your take on the film’s ending? Did Alan really die? Or did he survive the gunshot?

Boomer: I like that this is left intentionally vague but tempered by heavy allegorical imagery that permeates the film’s final scenes. We see Da Chief setting Alan’s file aflame in his office, just as we saw the docket for the previous killed-in-action undercover officer burned, a kind of memorial for a fallen friend. I don’t think that Alan was wearing a vest, though. We did see what contemporary Kevlar vests looked like in the final battle when the more heavily-armed police forces arrive at the hospital; they turn these armaments into makeshift baskets for some of the last few infants left behind in the maternity ward, and we see these same officers get eaten up by bullets shortly thereafter. As much as I want the ending to mean that our handsome hero Alan is alive, I get the sense that the interpretive element of the presentation is not as ambiguous as it was in, for instance, The Psychic. Per his conversation with Tequila, each of Alan’s origami cranes represents a man that he had to kill, both in the line of duty and to maintain his cover. While these deaths were all of evil men engaged in the gun trade, they weigh heavily on his conscience. Alan also mentions that Hawaii is a place he has never seen, a kind of paradise to which he’s hoping to achieve entry by passing through the crucible of his assignment. As he drops each paper bird into the ocean at the end, it is as if Alan is letting the sins he committed fall away from him into the ether as he sails toward whatever lies next for him.

We can assume that the film has a Taoist perspective, given that Tequila makes his entreaty for reconciliation with Teresa and a new apartment to a shrine of Guan Yu. Even with that in mind, the various different sects of Taoism are notoriously disunified in their different perspectives on death and the afterlife, so even thoroughly researching the topic doesn’t yield particularly useful information. Although Alan would be traveling eastward to reach Hawaii from China (in fact, he’d be going almost due east, given that there’s barely one degree of latitude difference between Hong Kong and Honolulu), a cursory internet search hasn’t helped me locate a specific correlation between eastward travel and enlightenment or the afterlife in Taoism. Religions informed by Christianity do hold the east—the cardinal direction, not the region—to have religious significance, however. Most cathedrals are cruciform in construction (see the Pisa Cathedral for a good example), with the “upper” part of the cross lying on the eastern end so that the congregation faces eastward, in the presumed direction of Christ (“For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” -Matthew 24:27, KJV). It may just be my Western biases slipping through, but it feels like there’s a significance to Alan traveling east in (presumed) death, but I could be reading too much into it.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that Alan could have survived. He’s definitely made of sterner stuff than other men, given that he takes a glancing shotgun blast to the back earlier in the film and survives. He also already survived a gunshot wound to the abdomen, as we see him tending the wound in his undershirt aboard the houseboat. We also know that he has implausibly good aim, as shown when he was able to slip a lighter into Fox’s pocket and then shoot him in such a way that the bullet was deflected from killing him by that same tiny piece of metal. Like I said: it’s up to one’s personal dissection, and my personal affection for Alan (and Tony Leung) means that I want the final shot of him embracing a new day to be a real event and not metaphorical, but the interpretation that he is dead is a much more rich vein, at least in my opinion.

Alli, you mentioned that you were a fan of Mad Dog, and I too liked that his character was multidimensional, especially in comparison to some of our “good” characters. Which characters, if any, do you feel simply don’t work (or pale in comparison to Mad Dog), and why? What would you improve about them to make them more lifelike or believable?

Alli: I am not a big fan of the character John Woo wrote for himself here. Supposedly this character was a late addition intended to help develop Tequila more, since many of his scenes playing jazz and pursuing his romance with Teresa were cut. The idea was that if John Woo was in a scene, why would he cut it? Though, I do get a director wanting to appear in a ridiculous movie that even from plot alone is a magnum opus. We didn’t need to watch Tequila seek advice from his bartender at the jazz club. The advice wasn’t even all that useful. It just felt like an unnecessary detail that added to the clutter. It’s understandable why in a movie with a cool badass like Mad Dog and the dreamy Alan going through moral dilemmas and tough choices, Chow Yun-Fat would want a character who doesn’t just ignore his boss’s orders and his girlfriend’s wishes, but I feel like there were better ways to handle that. The Mr. Woo scenes are a little too on the nose.

It’s hard for me to talk about this movie without comparing it to Die Hard. Both deal with rogue cops single-handedly taking down massive conspiracies and criminal organizations. Both are packed with iconic action sequences. Also, when it comes down to it, I think their main characters are extremely similar. John McClane isn’t really developed any more than Tequila until the action gets started, when we get a sense of his smug sense of humor and hear the “yippee ki yay.” In the same way, I think we see more of who Tequila is when he’s being a cop: smashing gangsters’ car windows, independently dropping into a warehouse full of baddies to shoot up the place, and, once again, the rap lullaby.

I’m sure there’s a ton of other Die Hard comparisons one could make, since they’re two of the finest action movies ever made, but I’m going to stop there for now. Brandon, are there any other movies you’d compare Hard Boiled to? Are the any movies heavily influenced by it that you’ve seen? What do you think of Hard Boiled‘s place in the action genre as a whole?

Brandon: The question of influence is a difficult one to detangle (except in blatant cases like the action spoof Shoot Em Up borrowing its baby-themed shoot-out concept wholesale), since Hong Kong action cinema drew heavy influence from its American counterparts before leaving its own mark on that industry in a kind of creative ouroboros. Since John Woo himself has since become an American cinema icon, the easiest points of comparison might be to look at his own work. Hard Boiled is weirdly positioned as the final film in Woo’s catalog before the two distinct markers critics usually cite as the downfall of Hong Kong’s action cinema heyday: the exodus of the movement’s most prominent directors to Hollywood and the handover of Hong Kong itself from British rule to mainland China in 1997 . With his following film, the JCVD vehicle Hard Target, you can already see the way American sensibilities (particularly the MPAA’s attitude towards violence) diluted Woo’s creative voice. By the time he directed pictures like Face/Off and the rap-rock opera Mission: Impossible 2, almost all of Hard Boiled‘s mesmerizing hyperviolence had completely evaporated, leaving only the over-the-top cheese behind. As a result, I’ve always shrugged off the suggestion that John Woo is an easy pick for the all-time greatest craftsman in action cinema. His American pictures maintain his playful absurdism, his obsession with white doves, and his excess of individual camera setups within a single action sequence (complete with slow-motion pauses for detail); they’re even (for the most part) really fun to watch. They don’t ever approach the intricate genius in craft or the blunt force brutality of Hard Boiled, though, and I feel like an idiot for avoiding seeing Woo’s work from his Hong Kong glory days for so long because of that slow American decline.

Britnee, what was your first experience with John Woo as a director? I’m assuming it was a 90s American picture as well. How did it compare to your experience with Hard Boiled?

Britnee: Hard Boiled is actually the first John Woo film that I’ve fully seen. I swear, I’m always late to the party for everything. When I was a kid, I saw parts of Face/Off and Hard Target thanks to the TNT and USA channels, but I don’t really remember much about either movie. Not knowing John Woo’s work is actually exciting to me, though. This is an entirely new world of action films that I can throw myself into. After looking at the decent-sized list of films Woo has directed, I noticed a good number of Hong Kong works. I’m curious to see if any of them are on the level of Hard Boiled, which would be freaking amazing.

I was a little nervous about being able to keep up with Hard Boiled when I realized it was an action film entirely in Cantonese. Having to pay attention to subtitles in an action-packed movie makes the film seem more like a chore than an enjoyment. Ultimately, I was somehow able to understand what was going on without really paying attention to the subtitles. It’s not that there was a lack of verbal interaction between the characters, either. I think credit goes to a blend of excellent acting and directing.

Boomer, did you have a similar experience with the subtitles?

Boomer: About two months ago, some friends and I were binging on all the Pop-Up Videos we could find on YouTube. One of these was the video for “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. There’s a point in that one where the song is playing, the subtitles say something different from the lyrics, and there’s a simultaneous “informational” pop-up; while watching it, it was like my brain blew a fuse for a second because it was impossible to keep up with every piece of information being presented. I think there’s definitely a danger in this kind of sensory overload in any action film, let alone one that is not in a language the viewer speaks. On the other hand, editing and tone are actually more important to an overall understanding of a film than even the dialogue is, and a good director, like Woo, knows how to use the languages of dialogue and the rhetorical space of visuals & editing to convey ideas. Film theorist Lindsay Ellis actually discusses this in the first entry of her fantastic series of video essays in which she uses the Transformers series as an easy textual representation of certain filmic ideas like affinity/contrast of continuum of movement.

Ellis asks: why is it so hard to remember what happens in those terrible movies? One answer is that there is a constant disruption of the continuum of movement between shots. When the eye has to move from one part of the screen to another when the shot changes, that is contrast of continuum of movement; a good director uses this intentionally in order to disorient the viewer after a period of relative visual stability. When it’s used constantly, however, it only serves to induce anxiety and confusion and prevents the film from coming together in a logical, sensible way. It effectively offsets what we call “persistence of vision” and baffles the mind, just like the aforementioned Pop-Up version of “Everybody Hurts.” I had this experience myself when I was 20 years old and went to see Transformers in theaters; I had gotten an eye infection the week beforehand, and was wearing an eyepatch at the screening. I still clearly remember parts of the film where the action was so intense and nonsensical that, through a single eye, the screen essentially went blank. The fact that this happens in a film in my (and our) native tongue is telling; there was no language barrier, but the film was still incomprehensible.

In general, though, competent directors know better than to try and hit more than one center of the brain at once, even if they only learn this skill through osmosis. In any given action scene, the protagonist will generally throw out a one liner either immediately before (“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”) or after (“Welcome to Earth!”) taking action. Only a very poor director would attempt to have their lead recite a lengthy screed at the same time that dozens of weapons dealers storm a factory. Even in something like Wrath of Khan, in which Khan gives a recitation of the “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee” speech from Moby Dick, that dialogue doesn’t play out over footage of two starships shooting at each other; the invective is delivered in close-up. Not every director is competent, of course, and I’ve definitely seen a film or two that was confusing because of an editorial failure and not as an intentional device (Tribulation comes to mind), but Hard Boiled doesn’t fall into this category. And, hey, if you could follow the movie without dialogue, more power you.

Lagniappe

Britnee: I love how there wasn’t a lot of unnecessary lovey-dovey stuff in Hard Boiled. I hate when action films bring in a ridiculous love story because it always takes away from the adrenaline high that I get after a good combat scene or two. There’s a light touch of romance between Tequila and Teresa, but it’s not enough to be a major plot point. Alli mentioned that a couple of romantic scenes between them were cut, and I’m so glad that they were.

Alli: I have watched this movie so many times and I still for the life of me have no idea why the lead’s nickname is Tequila, especially since throughout the film he’s only shown drinking gin & tonic. I don’t know if I like it better that it’s not explained or if I really wish we had the answer to that.

Boomer: Alli, look away in case you want to preserve the mystery of Tequila’s nickname, but . . . he’s not drinking a G&T. That’s a tequila slammer, which is notable for the way that it’s mixed (slamming it).

For interested parties who want to know more about how the brain accepts and interprets information, both musically and not, I can’t recommend the video essay “The Mozart Effect” by Sideways enough. In it, he talks about the areas of the brain that are affected by speech-as-sound, subvocalization, and why certain sounds/music are more conducive to certain activities.

Brandon: My apologies for bringing up pro wrestling a second time in this conversation (my WrestleMania tickets must be eating a hole in my brain), but something else about films from Hong Kong legends like John Woo & Tsui Hark remind me of another wrestling term: the sell.

The stunts pulled off in Hard Boiled and its ilk are so convincingly dangerous that I often have a difficult time watching the screen out of fear for the actors’ safety. The fact that Hong Kong action stars were often pressured to do their own stunts instead of leaving the work to professional doubles makes the experience even more nerve-racking. It’s entirely possible that these were super safe sets and the danger onscreen was just “sold” especially well by the performers, but it’s still difficult to watch at times. Even professional wrestlers, who are often accused of being in a “fake” business, frequently get injured . . . or sometimes worse. I won’t deny that this sense of real-life danger is uniquely thrilling, though. It’s one of the many things that distinguish Hard Boiled & its Hong Kong contemporaries from their American counterparts.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Brandon presents Suicide Club (2001)
April: Britnee presents Magic in the Mirror (1996)
May: Boomer presents Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)

-The Swampflix Crew

Swampflix’s Top Films of 2017

/ swampflix / 22 Comments

1. Get Out – Jordan Peele’s debut feature displays an encyclopedic knowledge of horror as an art form as it pushes past discussion of explicit racism to explore the awkwardness of microaggressions, the creepiness of suburban culture, and the fetishization and exotification of people of color. It’s a staggeringly well-written work that has convincingly captured the current cultural zeitgeist, becoming instantly familiar & iconic in a way few movies have in our lifetime. It’s a horror film that families should watch together, especially if you have some of those white “I’m not racist, but” family members. Let it flow through you and inform you about the daily experiences of people of color in our country. Let it teach you a lesson about the power of cell phone video as a liberator, and about the frequent hypocrisy of white liberalism. Let it be the light for you in dark (and sunken) places. Let its truth live in you and affect your daily life, teaching you to recognize the toxicity within yourself. Live it.

2. mother! – A sumptuous movie with haunting imagery, strong performances, an excellent cinematic eye, and an amazing cast. A movie about which it’s impossible to be apathetic but completely acceptable to feel ambivalence. A beautiful, messed up, literally goddamned movie that might just be the most important major studio release of 2017.  mother! demands discussion & analysis in a way most major studio releases typically don’t. The important part of that discussion is not whether you are personally positive on the film’s absurdist handling of its Biblical & environmentalist allegories or the way it makes deliberately unpleasant choices in its sound design & cinematography to get them across in a never-ending house party from Hell. The important thing is recognizing the significance of its bottomless ambition in the 2010s Hollywood filmmaking landscape.

3. Raw – The debut feature from director Julia Ducournau is one of the more wonderfully gruesome horror films of 2017, but it’s also much more tonally & thematically delicate than what its marketing would lead you to believe.  A coming-of-age cannibal film about a young woman discovering previously undetected . . . appetites in herself as she enters autonomous adulthood, Raw is actually pretty delicate & subtle, especially for a remnant of the New French Extremity horror movement. Although there are plenty horror elements at play, the movie also works as a dark (dark, dark) comedy. It’s gross, but it’s also hilarious, and surprisingly endearing.

 

4. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore – A movie about getting justice for yourself and fighting the assholes of the world, this is the sweetest tale of revenge that ever was. Part Coen Brothers, part Tarantino, but uniquely its own thing, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore deftly balances itself between romcom and gritty revenge flick. Melanie Lynskey’s mission of principle— not in search of compensation, but for the simple demand that “people not be assholes”— boasts an absurd, intangible goal and the movie itself never shies away from matching that absurdity in its overall tone, but impressively still keeps its brutality believably authentic. It vacillates between grave-dark humor and truly grotesque outbursts of violence, but it also demonstrates a wealth of heart and subversiveness.

5. The Shape of Water – A vision of hope & empowerment. Revisionist justice for the monster in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Guillermo del Toro’s latest is emotional comfort food for the outcasts, downtrodden, and misfits of the world. A brutal, lushly shot fairy tale, The Shape of Water is a beautiful love story between a disabled woman and an aquatic humanoid. It’s also a powerful punch in the face of the fascist ideologies that are infiltrating our daily lives bit by bit, especially in seeing the world’s true, institutional monsters overcome by an alliance comprised of the “other”: a “commie,” a woman of color, a woman with a physical disability, an older queer man, and their sexy fishman accomplice.

6. Split – A near-borderless playground for James McAvoy to villainously chew scenery. He does so admirably, fully committing to the film’s morally dodgy, but wickedly fun D.I.D. premise. Split is a thriller that makes you feel the fear and anxiety of the protagonist (The Witch‘s Anya Taylor Joy), whom McAvoy holds hostage. That horrible trapped & confused feeling overwhelms even as the film descends into gleefully trashy genre tropes that don’t at all deserve the attention to craft M. Night Shyamalan affords them.

7. IT – Steven King’s novel IT is a lengthy screed about friendship and the loss of innocence upon the road to maturity, a book that holds the record for “Product Most Obviously Created by a Coked-Up Lunatic.” It’s not King’s best work, but last year’s film adaptation finds the kernel of perfection in it and brings it to life. Many were quick to compare it to the terribly boring TV miniseries adaptation from 1990, but the film is a major improvement on that attempt. Loaded with jump-scares and legitimately terrifying sewer clown action, IT was the best true-horror film of the year, an excellent wake-up call to the value of mainstream horror filmmaking done right. While indie filmmakers search for metaphorical & atmospheric modes of “elevated” horror, IT is a declarative, back to the basics return to Event Film horror past, a utilitarian approach with payoffs that somehow far outweigh its muted artistic ambitions, which tend to lurk at the edges of the frame.

8. Logan – A somber meditation on age, obsolescence, loss, and death, this R-rated X-Men film’s throat-ripping hyperviolence offers a legitimate glimpse into the grim future of Trump’s America. It also breaks new ground as a superhero narrative that finally tries its hand in genre contexts outside the action blockbuster. This is a neo-western set in a dystopian, dusty, economically depressed future in which life is cheap, crossing the border into Mexico is an ordeal, and Canada provides asylum to those on the run from an authoritarian government that hates them because they are different, all while said government not only condones but supports the imprisonment of and experimentation on children of color and treats Mexico like its dumping ground. It’s perhaps the starkest look into our likeliest future that came out all year.

9. The Lure – Gore has never been so glamorous! The Lure beautifully mixes fairy tale lore with glitterful violence and a fantastic synth-heavy soundtrack to deliver a mermaid-themed horror musical that’s equal parts MTV & Hans Christian Andersen. Far from the Disnified retelling of The Little Mermaid that arrived in the late 1980s, this blood-soaked disco fantasy is much more convincing in its attempts to draw a dividing line between mermaid animality & the (mostly) more civilized nature of humanity while still recounting an abstract version of the same story. The film somehow tackles themes as varied as love, greed, feminism, addiction, body dysmorphia, betrayal, revenge, camaraderie, and fluid sexuality while still maintaining the vibe of a nonstop party or an especially lively nightmare.

10. Marjorie Prime – The best hard sci-fi film of the year is a deeply introspective and meditative piece on the nature of grief, memory, loss, and family. Love and grief have a profound effect on the way that our memories evolve and devolve and undergo a metamorphosis as we age. The ravages of time on the human body and mind also contribute to our imperfect personal narratives. This serene, philosophical stage play adaptation about artificial intelligence dwells on these themes at length, mostly to the sounds of distant waves crashing and softly spoken dialogue. Marjorie Prime is the most quietly elegant film listed here, but it’s also the most philosophically rewarding in its reflections on memory, truth, and the erosive nature of time.

Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here & here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Ken Russell’s Streamlined Modernization & Perversion of Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Ken Russell’s 1988 film adaptation of the 1911 Bram Stoker novel The Lair of the White Worm is often criticized for being an adaptation in name only. Critical consensus is that Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm maintains only minor details of Stoker’s original premise and the most the two works share is a common title. It’s true that Russell’s adaptation strays much further from its source material than 1922’s Nosferatu does in its faithful, but copyright-infringing bastardization of Stoker’s Dracula novel. The film The Lair of the White Worm is not a blasphemous, in-name-only adulteration of a sacred text, however. Bram Stoker’s White Worm novel is incoherent pulp. It’s a tawdry mess of a work written late in the author’s life, long past when his mental facilities were at their sharpest. Russell modernized and drastically altered basic components of the late author’s work, but he was much more faithful to the source material than what’s typically acknowledged. There’s even a prideful title card that proclaims, “Screenplay by Ken Russell from the Bram Stoker novel” to boastfully acknowledge their posthumous collaboration. Russell did not disrespectfully diminish a well-loved literary work. The filmmaker streamlined and enhanced an imperfect, misshapen novel that had been largely (and perhaps rightfully) forgotten by time by accentuating its most worthwhile aspects. He transformed a painfully slow read into a wildly fun horror film.

Although Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm is a mid-length novella, it reads like a rambling epic that drones on for thousands of pages. Its story is essentially a simplistic rehashing of Dracula, in which a naïve outsider intrudes on a world of supernatural menace while conducting entirely unrelated, mundane business. Instead of providing legal service for suspiciously inhuman royalty like the solicitor Jonathan Harker in Dracula, The Lair of the White Worm’s naïve outsider, Adam Salton, is thrust into contact with similarly inhuman gentry by neighborly proximity. During a routine getting to know the attractive neighbors visit, Salton finds two wicked figures tormenting the innocent women of the house. One of these figures, Sir Caswall, is a weak carbon copy of Count Dracula. Although his apparent vampirism is never made explicit he physically resembles Bram Stoker’s most infamous creation and shares Dracula’s passion for hypnotizing women, this time under the guise of practicing “mesmerism.” The second tormentor, Lady Arabella, is more of a creation original to this novel. Lady Arabella is gradually revealed to be a shape-shifting “worm” (skewing closer to a giant snake or a dragon than an earthworm) known to feed on locals who dare encroach on its territory. While Dracula touches on the danger of female sexuality, Lair explicitly refers to our villainess, Lady Arabella, as a “cocotte”, French for prostitute. Despite her Anglo-Saxon good looks, a dangerous fiend like Lady Arabella could “infect” respectable English women with her serpentine (and independent) ways and seduce men to their ruin.

Furthering the Dracula parallels, a Van Helsing-type (Sir Nathaniel) helps Adam concoct a plan to destroy the worm’s pit below Diana’s Grove, but instead of confronting the villainous Arabella and Caswall on their adjacent ancestral lands, Adam and his wife Mimi bafflingly run around the countryside in an effort to avoid the villains. Lady Arabella is responsible for her own destruction by running a wire directly from the kite to her own well in hopes of lurig Caswall into her clutches. The villains’ fate is sealed by a random lightning strike that ignites dynamite meant to destroy the pit below Arabella’s property, where the worm is known to feed. It’s as if the lightning were a direct punishment from God or, more likely, Stoker had no idea how to wrap up a mess of a plot he had dug for himself.

Russell’s screenplay adaptation cleans up the mess Stoker made by combining and excising characters to essentialize what makes it distinct from being yet another Dracula. One major change was combining the Dracula and Van Helsing archetypes of Sir Caswall and Sir Nathaniel into a single character. Portrayed by a young Hugh Grant, Lord James D’Ampton is a destined hero ordained by heritage to destroy Lady Sylvia Marsh (Lady Arabella in the Stoker version) once she’s revealed to be a shapeshifting, killer “worm.” D’Ampton remains a “mesmerism” enthusiast, but in the way of a snake-charmer, a skill willed to him through family to aid in his task of hypnotizing and slaying the titular worm beast. Two major villains tormenting Derbyshire, England is one too many for a work this simple; Russell was smart to remove the most Dracula-reminiscent one of the pair. His other character changes are basic modernizations meant to update Stoker’s outdated material to a 1980s setting. For instance, the naïve Adam Salton character (now named Angus Flint and portrayed by Peter Capaldi) is an archeologist, not newly-landed gentry. This style of modernization did require some major changes in terms of character traits, however. Russell removed the bizarre racial fixations Stoker focused on in his novel. In particular, Stoker exhaustingly others an African immigrant servant to Sir Caswall and a biracial female love interest for their cultural and (worse yet) supposed biological differences. Oolanga is framed as an obviously evil character. He writes, “But the face of Oolanga, as his master at once called him, was pure pristine, unreformed, unsoftened savage, with inherent in it all the hideous possibilities of a lost, devil-ridden child of the forest and the swamp—the lowest and most loathsome of all created things which were in some form ostensibly human.”  Meanwhile, Mimi Watford is compared favorably to her white, but passive & tragically doomed cousin as an exotic, fiery beauty: “Strange how different they are! Lilla all fair, like the old Saxon stock she is sprung from; Mimi almost as dark as the darkest of her mother’s race. Lilla is as gentle as a dove, but Mimi’s black eyes can glow whenever she is upset.” Russell excises this aspect of the work entirely by casting white actors in their roles and diminishing the parts they play in the central story. There is both a shrewdness and a cowardice to Russell’s avoidance of the uncomfortable racial issues at the heart of his Bram Stoker source material, but it’s ultimately an improvement that helps declutter the work just as much as removing the redundant, Dracula-reminiscent villain.

Russell had to polish and streamline Stoker’s original vision to craft a fun, watchable horror movie out of the rubble, but the novel plays directly into the auteur’s pet obsessions. At the heart of Stoker’s novella is a deep-seated fear of female sexual autonomy, detectable in the sexual imagery of Lady Arabella’s phallic “worm” form and the vaginal cave where that monster feeds. Russell was well established as a sexual provocateur by the time he adapted Lair of the White Worm in 1988. Transgressive works like Crimes of Passion and The Devils had already allowed the director to indulge in blatant depictions of the perceived horrors of autonomous female sexuality in a way Stoker’s much earlier novel could only subtly imply. Streamlining The Lair of the White Worm’s most exciting components allowed Russell more time to exploit the Cronenbergian sexual menace inherent to the character of Lady Arabella (Lady Sylvia). He wastes no time revealing that she is a shapeshifting, humanoid snake, unlike Stoker who saved her mysterious villainy for much later in his novella. Before actress Amanda Donahue is even depicted spitting venom or baring comically oversized fangs, she is costumed wearing cowls and headscarves that accentuate her reptilian nature, affording her the silhouette of a bipedal cobra. This allows more time for Russell, who was never one for subtlety, to indulge in the character’s over-the-top sexual villainy. Her consumption of young, innocent locals is made explicitly analogous to sexual desire and is even tied to an elaborate sex ritual that involves a giant, sharpened phallus (a favored instrument of death for Russell, as indicated by its inclusion here and in Crimes of Passion). The director’s screenplay may play loose with the details of its source material, but there’s enough of Bram Stoker’s influence detectable to see why he was drawn to it. Russell maintained the mesmerism hypnosis of the novella, but made it a psychedelic side effect of Lady Sylvia’s venom (in imagery directly pulled from his previous works Altered States and The Devils). Russell latched onto Stoker’s subliminal sexual anxiety, but elevated it from subtext to the forefront. He even held onto the Dracula-reverberating aspects of the novel by accentuating the comically oversized, vampire-like marks Lady Sylvia’s snake bites leave on her victim’s necks. Russell made major changes to the novella, but in a way that was more of a personalized distillation than a disrespectful dilution.

Besides cleaning up its loose ends and blatant character-based redundancies, Ken Russell improved The Lair of the White Worm by making it fun, memorable, and genuinely unnerving. Many movie adaptations of literary works are derided as lesser echoes of superior source material. Russell, by contrast, altered a near-forgotten work for the better. As Stoker’s original The Lair of the White Worm was never considered to be an especially well-written or even well-conceived literary work, the decades-late, culturally updated revision had to come from a genuinely enthusiastic place as a reader. Ken Russell was himself no stranger to critical consensus that his work was over the top, messy pulp and saw some of his own perverse passions in Stoker’s little-loved final novel. His adaptation may have been more dedicated to bringing out those auteurist similarities between their two minds than it was to faithfully mimicking Stoker’s work, but given the lowly place where the novel started that’s something of an honor.

-CC Chapman

Alli’s Top Films of 2017

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

It has been a year, both good and bad, mostly bad, but it’s the worst years that inspire some of the best art. Or at least that’s the bit we’re all told, as suffering artists. There were a lot more original stories of note for me this year, rather than remakes and book adaptations, so there may be something to that.

It being a rough year for me, though, which meant I fell behind, and because of that I’m keeping my ranked list short at 5.

1. The Shape of Water – It’s a tragedy to me that the monster in Creature from the Black Lagoon got treated so badly. It’s an injustice that scientists would resort to killing and maiming a creature instead of just trying to avoid and passively observe it in the hopes of understanding it. The Creature always deserved better, and I’m so glad that I’m not the only one who thinks so. The revisionist justice of this movie is emotional comfort food for me.

Besides the Creature getting a better ending, The Shape of Water also serves as a countercultural rallying cry. The outcasts, downtrodden, and misfits work together to foil the plans of the establishment. Working class women, the lowest paid of anyone in America, actually get back at condescending bosses. Del Toro gives us a vision of hope and empowerment.

The cast is fantastic! Michael Shannon is horrifying. Sally Hawkins sweetly plays a mute rebel. Octavia Spencer gets a great role as a proud black woman in the time of the Civil Rights movement (when many proud black women made a difference and provided a strong backbone to the movement, only to be unfortunately overlooked). Doug Jones, though. He has played some of the most iconic del Toro roles: the Faun and Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth and the ghosts of Crimson Peak. Now, he will forever be known as the sexiest fish man onscreen.

I already knew I would love this movie just from del Toro’s name alone. He is one of my favorite currently working directors. The art he creates is lush and fantastic. He has a way of preserving the fun and excitement of fairy tales while also never letting his audience forget that there’s a real terror to them. With The Shape of Water he hands us another original modern fairy tale with a bittersweet ending, because he knows exactly what people like me want: a beautiful love story between a disabled woman and an aquatic humanoid.

2. Get Out – What can I say? So many writers have written so many pieces that offer better words than I could.

I’m glad that it didn’t just focus on the horrifying explicit racism, but the neoliberal hypocrisy that comes from the wealthy elite “nice white people.” The awkwardness of microaggressions, the creepiness of suburban culture, and the fetishization and exotification of people of color all help it succeed not only as a political movie, but also as a horror. The final act is a bloody catharsis that reminds me in many ways of the famous Anansi “get angry” monologue from the TV adaptation of American Gods:

Angry is good. Angry gets shit done. You shed tears for Anansi, and here he is, telling you you are staring down the barrel of 300 years of subjugation, racist bullshit, and heart disease. He is telling you there isn’t one goddamn reason you shouldn’t go up there right now and slit the throats of every last one of these Dutch motherfuckers and set fire to this ship!

American media has been rightly political in recent years. Get Out is another wonderful commentary on how weird and messed up the good old USA is.

3. mother! – I’ve always had mixed feelings about Aronofsky. I hate Requiem for a Dream, but absolutely love Black Swan, as Brandon and I discussed in the Swampflix Podcast episode about “ballet horror.” I went into mother! knowing it was one of those movies that elicits extremely polarizing reactions. I tend to be in the love it camp when it comes to those, and this was no exception.

It’s full of religious allegory, sure, but it also plays out like the absolute worst anxiety dream ever. I felt so personally offended by all the rude guests Mother had to deal with. The sink isn’t braced!! You weren’t invited! Just leave already!! Then the movie just totally breaks down into bonkers chaos, with literal bombshells and mobs. It’s all so gorgeous and frustrating.

I like the audacity of pointing out the wrongs and bizarreness of the Bible in an often heavy handed and overly dramatic movie. (I mean, what is the Bible itself if not heavy handed and overly dramatic?) The mother is so often referenced in Christianity, but where is she? The women of the Bible are so taken advantage of. It’s not right. Not in their own homes.  As the titular character played by Jennifer Lawrence screams at the godlike character of Javier Bardem, “YOU’RE INSANE!”

Really, that one line sums up the whole beautiful, messed up, literally goddamned movie.

4. I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore – Superhero movies are everywhere and, because of that, vigilante justice is normalized to a certain extent. We cheer when robbers and thieves actually get caught and put in their place by Spider-Man or Batman or whoever else decides to focus on small criminals that day. Realistically, going after bad guys and taking them down is terrifying and scary, yet we’ve all had the temptation to put a bike thief or burglar in a headlock. This movie is about giving into that, getting justice for yourself, and fighting the assholes of the world.

Part Coen Brothers, part Tarantino, but uniquely its own thing, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore elegantly balances itself between romcom and gritty revenge flick. Melanie Lynskey strongly carries this movie on her back. She somehow doesn’t even get outshined by Elijah Wood playing an awkwardly sweet “sword guy” with a dog named Kevin! The chemistry between the two of them is sweet and wonderful here. The concept of revenge is dissected and not glamorized at all. The gory violence, raging criminals, and shady underbelly of the world are put on full display.

The world is a horrible place, but if you have a katana-swinging nerdy neighbor with a rat tail, it’s probably going to be A-Okay.

5. Ingrid Goes West – Is there a more relevant movie to the times that will soon be completely obsolete and irrelevant? iPhones, Instagram aesthetic, self-made social media personalities . . . What will the future think of our preoccupation with that culture? A charming fixation on the New or beating a dead horse with a stick? Either way, the cynical approach Ingrid Goes West takes is a new direction and tone, not the wariness and fright of Unfriended or other social media based horror.

Instead of following the victims, we follow Ingrid, Aubrey Plaza, an Instagram obsessed stalker who just wants to be friends with and be like the popular girls. So much so that she assaults a girl and has a stay at an inpatient facility for her mental health. Shedding some of her usual deadpan delivery, Plaza opens up at points and shows true vulnerability. Ingrid is not an easy character to empathize with. She’s manipulative and pathetic, but like all of us she has problems. It’s hard not to observe her flaws and see them as exaggerated versions of your own insecurities and needs. Plus, the people she aspires to be are the intolerable rich hippie types who curate their own Instagram aesthetics: found object art, mason jars, “sun bleached” hair, and airplants. It’s hard to feel sorry for try-hard rich kids who attempt to look “just thrown together.”

At times Ingrid Goes West feels like another, “damn kids with their phones” rant, but honestly we all know people like the ones in this movie, and we all wish they would just get off Instagram for a minute (at least).

Honorable Mentions

Movies I desperately want to talk about but couldn’t quite rank:

The Little Hours – Aubrey Plaza is on a roll. I hope she never stops. Although here, Kate Micucci steals a lot of the spotlight.

I can’t say too much about this movie other than it’s ridiculous, hilarious, and made a lot of Catholics upset. My favorite scene is where a few nuns get drunk and start singing.

A Ghost Story – Problematic as hell, of course. Brandon has every right to hate it and people have every right to judge me for appreciating a lot of it. I hate the choice to work with Casey Affleck. I hate him and his male entitlement, and honestly him being in this movie feels totally unnecessary. Luckily, most of the time his face is covered with a sheet. And he barely gets any dialogue. Yes, he scares off a hardworking single Latina mother by breaking all her plates. Yes, it’s sort of pretentious on top of all of that.

But it’s extremely emotionally manipulative and I feel like that bears saying. At the end, I even thought it was good. I like the concept of a ghost being a loser who can’t let go, stuck in a fixed point. I like the idea of the classic image of a ghost in its burial shroud as the costuming. Also, in the end, he was the negative vibes of the house he desperately wanted to stay in, so it feels revelatory to watch this jerk bro silently face infinity itself. I like to imagine when he gets the note at the end of the movie it just says, “My boyfriend is a jerk.”

I wish this movie had been made with a different cast and a different sort of ghost. Why not the ghost next door even?

It Comes At Night – Speaking of anxiety dreams! I have in the past suffered from a bunch of different parasomnias, including but not limited to: night terrors and sleep paralysis. I typically try to avoid movies that play off of those, but this one is just too good and too spooky. I found a little bit of the acting to be off and I still think the ending is a little weak, but it’s well worth the watch if you want a slow burn creep-out.

-Alli Hobbs

Brandon’s Top Genre Gems & Trashy Treasures of 2017

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

1. Power Rangers – The last thing I would have expected from a superhero origin story that’s simultaneously a reboot of a 90s nostalgia property and a long-form Krispy Kreme commercial is that would bring a tear to my eye, but it happened several times throughout the latest Power Rangers film. Long before Power Rangers is overrun with alien sorcery, robot dinosaurs, and corporate-made donuts, it shines as a measured, well-constructed character study for a group of teenage outsiders longing for a sense of camaraderie, whether terrestrial or otherwise. Isolated by their sexuality, their position “on the spectrum,” their responsibility of caring for ailing parents​, and their past bone-headed mistakes, the teens who eventually morph into the titular Power Rangers are a broken, lonely lot. Still, this is a nostalgia-minded camp fest that’s not at all above cheap pops like briefly playing the 90s “Go Go Power Rangers” theme during its climactic battle. Its greatest strength is in the tension between those tones.

2. Monster Trucks – The rare camp cinema gem that’s both fascinating in the deep ugliness of its creature design and genuinely amusing in its whole-hearted dedication to children’s film inanity. It isn’t often that camp cinema this wonderfully idiotic springs up naturally without winking at the camera; it’s a gift to be cherished.  Monster Trucks feels like a relic of the 1990s, its existence as an overbudget $125 million production being entirely baffling in a 2017 context. It may be a good few years before any Hollywood studio goofs up this badly again and lets something as interesting-looking & instantly entertaining as Creech see the light of day, so enjoy this misshapen beast while you can.

3. IT – An excellent wake-up call to the value of mainstream horror filmmaking done right. IT is an Event Film dependent on the jump scares, CGI monsters, and blatant nostalgia pandering (even casting one of the Stranger Things kids to drive that last point home) that its indie cinema competition has been consciously undermining to surprising financial success in recent years. What’s impressive is how the film prominently, even aggressively relies on these features without at all feeling insulting, lifeless, or dull. While indie filmmakers search for metaphorical & atmospheric modes of “elevated” horror, IT stands as a declarative, back to the basics return to mainstream horror past, a utilitarian approach with payoffs that somehow far outweigh its muted artistic ambitions, which tend to lurk at the edges of the frame.

 

4. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2/ Thor: Ragnarok – Apparently, all of the MCU’s tendencies to squash auteurist voices with a collective House Style go out the window when they launch their franchises into space. Hip nerds James Gunn & Taika Waititi were both allowed to deliver the most aggressively bizarre, personal entries in the MCU yet with their respective space operas. Thor: Ragnarok‘s Planet Trash buffoonery (complete with off-the-wall contributions from eternal freaks Jeff Goldblum & Mark Mothersbaugh) was particularly idiosyncratic, like Pure Waititi doing Flash Gordon in the best way. Gunn’s film is much more emotionally grounded, somehow pulling off a genuinely touching climax after two full hours of cartoonishly violent, darkly comic id. Both works deserve kudos for excelling as intensely creative, memorable feats in blockbuster filmmaking.

5. XX –  Four concise, slickly directed, but stylistically varied horror shorts that each take chances on premises rich enough to justify an 80 minute feature’s leg room, but are instead boiled down to digestible, bite-sized morsels. As a contribution to the horror anthology as a medium & a tradition, XX is a winning success in two significant ways: each individual segment stands on its own as a worthwhile sketch of a larger idea & the collection as a whole functions only to provide breathing room for those short-form experiments. On top of all that, it also boasts the added bonus of employing five women in directorial roles, something that’s sadly rare in any cinematic tradition, not just horror anthologies.

6. Logan – There’s a lot to be excited about here: a superhero narrative that tries its hand in genre contexts outside the action blockbuster (even though I’m not particularly a fan of Westerns), the throat-ripping hyperviolence, a Wolverine Who Cusses, a Lil’ Wolverine you can fit in your pocket, etc. What really won me over in Logan, though, was how deeply weird the movie felt. Aesthetically, the closest reference point I could conjure for its mixture of childlike imagination & dispiriting grime is Terry Gilliam’s Tideland, which is a much more challenging vibe than what we’re used to seeing in superhero fare. The fact that it (accidentally) offers a legitimate glimpse into the future of Trump’s America in the process makes it all the more bizarre & worth seeking out.

7. The Fate of the Furious – The Fast and the Amnesious is a universe without a center. It’s a series that continually retcons stories, characters, and even deaths to serve the plot du jour. That’s why it’s a brilliant move to shake up the sense of normalcy that’s been in-groove since the fifth installment in the series by giving Daddy Dom a reason to walk away from his Family, whom he loves so dearly.  F. Gary Gray brings the same sense of monstrously explosive fun to this franchise entry as he did to the exceptional N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. He strays from past tonal choices and character traits, but ultimately sticks to the core of the only things that have remained consistent in the series: there’s no problem in the world that can’t be solved by a deadly, explosion-heavy street race and even the most horrific of Familial tragedies can be undone by a backyard barbeque, where grace is said before every meal and Coronas, um, I mean Budweisers are proudly lifted into the air for a communal toast. There’s something beautiful about that (and also something sublimely silly).

8. Free Fire – In its earliest, broadest brushstrokes, Free Fire is disguised as a return to the over-written, vulgar shoot-em-ups that flooded indie cinemas with their macho mediocrity in the years immediately following Quentin Tarantino’s first few features. Thankfully, things get much stranger from there. What’s fascinating is the way High-Rise director Ben Wheatley pushes a bare-bones premise, which is essentially a feature-length shoot-out, past the point of mediocre Tarantino-riffing into something much more transcendently absurd. By the film’s third act, its stubborn dedication to a single, bombastic bit becomes so punishingly relentless that it’s sublimely (and hilariously) surreal. It’s the shoot-em-up equivalent of a parent forcing their child to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. I’m not sure I ever want to see a gun fired in a movie again.

9. Wheelman – There weren’t many action movies last year leaner & meaner than this direct-to-streaming sleeper. The heist-gone-wrong plot is lizard brain simple, leaving plenty of room for the slickly edited camera trickery & city-wide mountain of paranoia that drive the film’s action. It’s as if the opening getaway sequence of Drive was stretched out for a full 80 minutes and packed to the gills with explosively dangerous testosterone. The majority of the film is shot from inside a car, even the conflict-inciting bank robbery, so that the audience feels like they were shoved in the back seat against their will and taken on a reckless ride into the night.

10. Atomic Blonde – One of the more bizarre aspects of this Charlize Theron action vehicle is the way it hops on the 80s nostalgia train, yet somehow its pop culture throwbacks feel oddly curated and not quite part of the Stranger Things & Ready Player One trend. Set on both sides of The Berlin Wall in 1989, the film’s estimation of 80s pop culture include references like David Hasselhoff, Tetris, skateboarding, grafitti, neon lights, etc. In one indicative scene, Theron beats up a horde of faceless goons in front of a movie screen at a cinema that happens to be projecting Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Atomic Blonde is a weird little nerd pretending to fit in with the popular kids. As nerdy as its 80s pop culture references can be, though, its basic pleasures are universally apparent. This is a summertime popcorn picture that banks on the central hook that its audience will never tire of watching Charlize Theron beat down men while wearing slick fashion creations & listening to synthpop. It’s not wrong.

11. Girls Trip – An unashamedly maudlin comedy about adult sisterhood that drowns its audience in melodramatic cheese in its reflections on motherhood, religious Faith, adultery, betrayal, and falling out of touch with loved ones. Also one of the bawdiest, most aggressively horny comedies of the year, with a turn from breakout star Tiffany Haddish steering the ship out of Hallmark Channel waters towards the prankish filth of Divine’s turn in Pink Flamingos every opportunity she’s allowed at the helm. These two warring halves– the raunchy & the sentimental– make for a wholly unpredictable, tonally chaotic summertime comedy with gleeful participation in overt, oversexed filth that plays directly to my raccoonish tastes.

12. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – Objectively speaking, this  horrible excuse for a space opera is a colossally goofy embarrassment. But I think I loved it? Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element somewhat passes as a normal movie if you squint at it from the right angle. This spiritual follow-up never had a chance, thanks largely to its titular lead. Dane DeHaan pretty much delivers a feature-length Keanu Reeves impersonation as the space-traveling swashbuckler Valerian, doing as much as he can to suck all the fun out of the film’s weirdo indulgences in grotesque creatures & alien planet dreamscapes. The movie persists as a misshapen good time anyway and I was oddly won over by DeHaan’s charisma vacuum as the story recklessly barreled along, despite myself.

13. Happy Death Day – Its defining gimmick may be dutifully reimagining the 1990s comedy Groundhog Day as a violent teen slasher, but what’s most surprising is that the slasher end of that gimmick is very much tied to the second wave slasher boom that arrived in the nü metal days of the late 90s & early 00s. Happy Death Day‘s depictions of PG-13 acceptable violence echo the big budget action & comedy beats that tinged post-Scream slashers like Urban Legend & I Know What You Did Last Summer. There’s a masked killer who murders our (deeply flawed) protagonist dozens & dozens of times on her birthday as she relives the same time loop on endless repeat, but outside a few jump scares & moments of horror tradition teen-stalking, the film doesn’t truly aim to terrorize.  Repetition allows the doomed sorority girl to adjust to her supernaturally morbid predicament and Happy Death Day gradually evolves into a girly (even if mean-girly) comedy that employs horror more as a setting than as an ethos.

14. Friend Request – When this dirt cheap supernatural slasher was first released in its native Germany, it was originally titled Unfriend. To avoid confusion with the modern found footage classic Unfriended (known as Unknown User in Germany), the title was later switched to Friend Request in its move to the US. This uninteded comparison does Friend Request no favors, really, as it’s the Bucky Larson: Born to be a Porn Star to Unfriended’s Boogie Nights, the Corky Romano to its Goodfellas. As the sillier, more formulaic entry into the social media-age technophobia horror canon, the film only stands a chance to excel as a campy, over-the-top novelty. Thankfully, as an airheaded jump scare fest about a Faceboook witch, it delivers on that entertainment potential (in)competently.

15. Death Race 2050 – Not much more than an R-rated version of straight-to-SyFy Channel schlock, but makes its cheap camp aesthetic count when it can and survives comfortably on its off-putting tone of deeply strange “bad”-on-purpose black comedy. Much more closely in line with the Paul Bartel-directed/Roger Corman-produced original film Death Race 2000 than its gritty, self-serious Paul W.S. Anderson remake, Death Race 2050 is a cheap cash-in on the combined popularity of Hunger Games & Fury Road and makes no apologies for that light-hearted transgression. The original Death Race 2000, along with countless other Corman productions, surely had an influence on both the Mad Max & Hunger Games franchises and it’s hilarious to see the tirelessly self-cannibalizing film producer still willing to borrow from his own spiritual descendants for a quick buck all these years later.

16. Alien: Covenant -Instead of aiming for the arty pulp of Prometheus, Covenant drags the Alien series’ newfound philosophical themes down to the level of a pure Roger Corman creature feature. This prequel-sequel is much more of a paint-by-numbers space horror genre picture than its predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a quality that ruins its premise. Through horrific cruelty, striking production design, and the strangest villainous performance to hit a mainstream movie in years (it really should be retitled Michael Fassbender: Sex Robot), Covenant easily gets by as a memorably entertaining entry in its series. If it could be considered middling, it’s only because the Alien franchise has a better hit-to-miss ratio than seemingly any other decades-old horror brand typically has eight films into its catalog.

17. Kuso -How do you feel about the idea of watching Parliament Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton play a doctor who cures a patient of their fear of breasts by allowing a giant cockroach to crawl out of his ass & puke a milky bile all over their face? Your answer to that question should more or less establish your interest level in the gross-out horror comedy Kuso, in which that visual detail is just one minor curio in the larger freak show gestalt. With his debut feature as a director, Steve Ellison (who produces music under the monikers Flying Lotus & Captain Murphy) has made a Pink Flamingos for the Adult Swim era, a shock value comedy that aims to disgust a generation of degenerates who’ve already Seen It All, as they’ve grown up with internet access. Most audiences will likely find that exercise pointless & spiritually hollow, but I admired Kuso both as a feature length prank with Looney Tunes sound effects and as a practical effects visual achievement horror show.

18. The Babysitter – McG might finally found a proper outlet for his directorial style’s music video kineticism: bubblegum pop horror. The director’s tacky, over-energized breakfast cereal commercial aesthetic tested audiences’ patience in his Charlie’s Angels adaptations. The unbearably dour Terminator: Salvation proved that tonally sober seriousness would never be his forte either. The straight-to-Netflix horror comedy The Babysitter might be proof, however, that there is a perfect place in this world for McG’s hyperactive tastelessness. Essentially Home Alone 6(?!): Invasion of the Teenage Satanists, The Babysitter turns the cheerleader uniforms, spin-the-bottle games, and babysitting gigs of horny teen archetypes into a screwball comedy of violent terrors, an excellent backdrop for the tacky live action cartoon energy of McG’s crude, auteurist tendencies.

19. The Book of Henry – An unintended camp pleasure, entirely due to the unfathomably poor writing behind Naomi Watt’s mother figure, whose complete deferment to her 12-year-old son for every single adult decision is comically bizarre. In the film’s funniest moment, Watts’s protagonist is visibly frustrated that she can’t ask her son Henry for permission to sign medical documents because he’s in the middle of having a seizure. Her narrative trajectory of gradually figuring out that maybe she shouldn’t get all of her life advice from a precocious 12-year-old, not to mention a (spoiler) dead precocious 12 year old, is treated like a grand scale life lesson we all must learn in due time, when it’s something that’s already obvious from the outset. It’s also a scenario that only exists in this ludicrous screenplay anyway. She’s the most ridiculously mishandled adult female character I can remember seeing since Bryce Dallas Howard’s starring role in Colin Trevorrow’s last abomination, Jurassic World, another performance I’d place firmly in the so-bad-it’s-good camp.

20. Pottersville – Plays a lot like a Christmas-themed, kink-shaming episode of Pushing Daisies, with its plot’s overarching sweetness more or less amounting to It’s a Wonderful Yiff.  I wouldn’t suggest entering Pottersville if you’re not looking for a campy, tonally bizarre holiday comedy, but its novelty subversion of the Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie formula is both deliberate and surprisingly successful. Considering that Michael Shannon stars as an undercover Bigfoot hoaxer drunkenly attempting to infiltrate a community of small town furries in a modern retelling of It’s a Wonderful Life, I have to assume everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing in achieving this aesthetic imbalance. You don’t stumble into that kind of absurdity completely by mistake no more than you can accidentally wander into yuletide yiffing.

-Brandon Ledet

Britnee’s Top Films of 2017

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

1. Raw – The debut feature from director Julia Ducournau is hands-down my favorite film of 2017. What I adore the most about this coming-of-age cannibal film is that its terrifying plot feels so real. The main character, Justine, was so relatable to me, even though our lives are vastly different. The way she is able to portray her emotions when encountering new, unfamiliar social situations while trying to figure out her internal struggles was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in a fictional character. Aside from the emotional side of the film, Raw also has some of the coolest/grossest gore scenes of the year. This is definitely not one for those with weak stomachs.

2. Split – James McAvoy is one of my all-time favorite actors because he gives every performance his all, and that’s exactly what he does in his lead role in Split. It’s a thriller that’s able to make you feel the fear and anxiety of the protagonist, whom McAvoy holds hostage. That horrible sense of feeling trapped and confused overwhelmed me to the point that I had to remind myself that I was in my own bedroom, where I do most of my movie-watching. Like with most M. Night Shyamalan films, Split is an endless puzzle. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, you get slapped in the face with an ending that is guaranteed to blow your mind.

3. Get Out – This is a horror film that families should watch together, especially if you have some of those white “I’m not racist, but” family members. Get Out is the perfect blend of horror, comedy, science fiction, and tear-jerking moments, so there’s a little something for everyone. The sound of a teaspoon stirring in a ceramic teacup has haunted me just as much as the film’s surprise ending.

4. IT – Loaded with jump-scares and legitimately terrifying sewer clown action, IT was the best true-horror film of the year. Many were quick to compare it to the terribly boring original television miniseries, but the film is completely different in the best way possible. For a film that centers on a killer clown, the spooky clown scenes are sparse; but when they occur, they are absolutely terrifying. This was the only film I saw last year in 3-D, and it was on of my most memorable 2017 film experiences for sure.

5. Okja – The silly CGI super pig Okja completely stole my heart, weird farts and all. Okja is a wild ride filled with themes relating to food production and animal rights, but it never loses focus on the main point of the story: the friendship between a young girl and her pet/best-friend. I watched Okja with my dog (who looks a bit like Okja), and I squeezed her so tight for some of the tear-jerking scenes. It’s amazing how a CGI super pig has made me question many of my life choices.

6. The Lure – This was the last film I watched in 2017, as it was featured at Brandon and CC’s New Year’s Eve movie-watching extravaganza. It was nothing short of a blessing. Gore had never been so glamorous! When it comes to movies about mermaids (possibly my favorite “mythical” creature), they’re either fairy tale-like or violent; The Lure is able to beautifully mix the two into a swirl of Polish horror insanity. Oh, it’s also a musical packed with loads of fantastic synth-heavy music that I immediately fell in love with.

7. mother! – The hype for mother! was just as enjoyable as the film itself. Advertisements branding the film as the “most controversial movie of the year” were around every corner, but when the film actually came out, people began to shit on it so hard. That’s when I became even more interested in watching it! It received a lot of criticism for containing very obvious allegories, but that’s one of the qualities I enjoyed the most, as it added to its unintended silliness. The bottom line is that mother! is just a lot of stupid fun and has a pretty sick scene at the end that shouldn’t be missed.

8. The Babysitter – This Netflix original teenybopper horror-comedy about a satanic babysitter is just as amazing as it sounds. The Babysitter is a satirical throwback to 80s teen horror, loaded with vibrant colors, fun musical numbers, and hilariously violent death scenes. Of all the movies in my top ten, I have watched The Babysitter the most. It’s just a fun movie to throw on after a long day of work.

9. Hounds of Love – Not only is this the title of my favorite Kate Bush album, but it’s also one of my favorite films of the year! Hounds of Love reminds us that human beings can be complete monsters. The film is loosely based on the Australian Moorhouse murders, and it does a great job of depicting the real-life tragedy that involved the capture and torture of a young woman by a sadistic couple. This is one of those movies that would be difficult to watch more than once, but as a true crime fan, I can’t rave about it enough.

10. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore – If you’re wondering what Elijah Wood has been up to lately, he plays a dorky rat-tailed neighbor to Melanie Lynskey in I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (possibly the longest movie title of the year). The film follows the eccentric Batman and Robin-like duo on their quest to get stolen goods back from a group of dangerous criminals. It’s the sweetest tale of revenge that ever was.

-Britnee Lombas

The Horrors of Adolescent Female Bodies & Bonding in Jennifer’s Body (2009)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

At first glance, the 2009 horror film Jennifer’s Body doesn’t fully display the feminist credentials that would be expected from a film of its pedigree.  After the critical and commercial success of Juno, Academy Award Winner for Best Screenplay, it may have been a surprising career move for in-demand screenwriter Diablo Cody to follow up her modest independent debut with a 20th Century Fox-distributed horror film starring famed sex symbol and Michael Bay muse Megan Fox.  Karyn Kusama could also have been accused of slumming it as the film’s director, given the prestige of her own debut film Girlfight, a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner.  As collaborators on the picture, however, Cody and Kusama were able to covertly deliver a subversive feminist horror film in Jennifer’s Body, despite the oversight of the male-dominated business of major studio filmmaking that backed the project.  Jennifer’s Body has the look and feel of countless other slickly-produced major studio horrors from the mid to late 2000s.  Its mixed reviews and underwhelming box office returns posit it as a misfire for 20th Century Fox, one with no more vital feminist or cultural subtext than any other 2009 horror mediocrities, like Saw VI or the Friday the 13th remake.  Jennifer’s Body’s expensive production values, studio-driven marketing, and employment of Megan Fox in its titular role distract from the feminist subtext of the story it tells, but it’s still a work driven by two behind-the-camera female artists who are directly exploring subjects specific to the modern female experience.  Specifically, Jennifer’s Body utilizes the destructive power of pubescent female bodies and the intensity of adolescent female friendships as direct sources for its horror, something that may not be immediately apparent on the surface.

One of the ways Jennifer’s Body subverts audience expectations of a major studio horror film starring the often-objectified Megan Fox is by incorporating the actor’s objectification into its text.  As suggested in the title, the film is specifically about her body, not her soul or unique personality, which was pointed out by A.O. Scott in his review for the New York Times.  This focus on Megan Fox’s physique was attractive to 20th Century Fox’s marketing machine, who completely misunderstood the intention of Cody and Kusama’s work.  Shockingly, the studio suggested that Fox promote Jennifer’s Body by participating in online chat rooms through popular pornographic websites to appeal directly to the men who might be pruriently compelled to see her onscree.  The idea was shot down before it was ever suggested to Fox in sincerity, but it does exemplify the types of marketing schemes she was asked to participate in after becoming an object of desire in Michael Bay’s Transformers series.  Jennifer’s Body does not ignore the celebrity baggage that comes with casting Fox in its titular role, but rather incorporates it into its basic composition.  In the film, a bumbling nerd played by Amanda Seyfried ogles Jennifer’s body just as much as the heterosexual teen boys in their high school class, even though she is Jennifer’s best friend and not just a casual admirer.  The friendship between the two central characters, Jennifer (Fox) and the playfully-named “Needy” (Seyfried), is depicted to be just as horrifyingly intense as the film’s explicit acts of supernatural violence, but there is also clearly a sexual attraction component built into their dynamic.  Jennifer is universally desired by her peers the way Fox was presented as an object of desire in the real-world media at large (including among this film’s own marketing team) and that intense allure instigates most of the film’s horrific dangers.

Being widely sexually desired is only the start of the terror lurking in Jennifer’s body.  Like with many coming of age horror films set in teenage environments, the film relies heavily on the real-world body horrors associated with puberty and the developing body.  Unlike the film Ginger Snaps, which uses the traditionally masculine metaphor of werewolf transformations to represent its own female puberty body horror crisis, Jennifer’s Body notably adopts the myth of the succubus, which is historically coded as feminine.  Both films apply the tropes of curse and possession not only to the horrors of werewolves and succubi, but to the specifically female condition and the burgeoning sexuality of their protagonists. Ginger’s monstrous form just happens to be a werewolf, which less specifically coded to be female than the succubus.  In most folklore, the succubus is a female demon that drives men insane and into poor health through coerced and repetitive sexual intercourse, essentially functioning as a deadly seductress.  Jennifer’s transformation into a succubus is presented in Jennifer’s Body as involuntary, much like the body horror ritual of puberty. After pursuing a traveling rock band as a hopeful groupie, Jennifer is forced into the role of a live sacrifice for the band’s Satanic ritual, which is botched when they discover she is not a virgin.  A lesser film might have focused more heavily on the grotesqueness of the band’s attitudes towards female sexuality in this moment and spent much more time gleefully depicting their comeuppance, but Jennifer’s Body is mainly concerned with the fallout of Jennifer’s subsequent monster transformation than any kind of traditional revenge narrative.  Becoming a succubus is a side effect of the band’s failed ritual and the symptoms of this transformation show largely in the ways puberty normally manifests in teenage, cisgender female bodies.  The typically ebullient Jennifer is drained of energy, thin-haired, oily-skinned, and just generally not her meticulously perfect Megan Fox self after her transformation into a succubus.  As a metaphor for pubescent transformation, her newfound life as a succubus has robbed her of the power she once enjoyed as the most attractive girl in her high school class.  She does find new, dangerous power in the demonic sexual energy the transformation affords her, however.  Picking on the “nice guy” social outcasts who treat her like an unobtainable sex symbol from afar, Jennifer discovers that she can regain her power and her gorgeous looks by seducing and literally feeding off male victims, which magically restores her vitality and sex appeal. Jennifer may have “preyed” on men prior to her transformation, but her curse creates an extreme situation where her behavior is more horrific and she becomes even more physically attractive (both to the audience and to her subsequent victims).  As with many horror films, Jennifer’s Body leans heavily on the transgression of teenage sexuality as an instigator and justification for its onscreen violence.  The film subverts this trope significantly by having this newfound, dangerous sexuality tragically forced upon its titular killer by the men around her as opposed to something she chose for fun or to satisfy curiosity.  Her newfound sexual potency is no more of a choice or a boon than the horrors of puberty and the male gaze, whether it makes her more powerful or not.

Since pubescent body horror is often explored through monster movie metaphors in high school-set horror films, Jennifer’s Body is much more unique as a feminist horror work in the way it explores the terrifying intensity of adolescent female friendships.  As the protagonist, Needy describes her relationship with Jennifer as long-term “sand box love,” meaning they have been best friends since they were young enough to play in sand boxes together.  The introduction of pubescent hormones and sexual relationships with boys drives the usual wedges between them you’d expect from a coming of age teen girl narrative, but Cody and Kusama focus more on the intensity of Needy and Jennifer’s relationship itself than what would typically be explored in a male artist’s version of the same narrative.  Jennifer and Needy are overly sensitive to each other’s actions and opinions.  Skepticism and disgust over each other’s chosen sexual partners drives most of their verbal conflicts, but mainly because they are unhealthily possessive of each other’s bodies.  They emotionally bully and abuse each other in subtle, long-term ways that feel more appropriate of a decades-old bad marriage than a friendship between teenagers.  This only gets worse once Jennifer’s murderous impulses as a succubus seem to specifically target male partners Needy has expressed romantic interest in, either verbally or through body language.  This tendency is more than just a petty tactic to display the dominance Jennifer’s traditional beauty affords her over Needy; it’s also designed to provoke a detectable reaction out of her, the way an emotional abuser looks for satisfaction in visible proof that they hold power over their victim.  In turn, Needy attempts to claim power over Jennifer’s body by offering to “cure” her of the succubus “curse,” at least in the original screenplay.  In a deleted scene, Needy appeals to Jennifer’s sense of morality by pointing out that her newfound powers come with an unfair cost: a sizable body count.  Jennifer retorts that she’s not killing people, just boys, whom she does not value as anything but playthings and sources of power.  Although casual sex is substituted with murder in this scenario, the exchange is clearly coded as Needy trying to exert control over Jennifer’s choices in how she relates to sexual partners and uses her own body, which is essentially none of Needy’s business. Jennifer and Needy are unhealthily obsessed with one another, which is an aspect of adolescent female friendships that isn’t often explored in any mass media, much less major studio horror films.

The most glaring wrinkle in the subtle, nuanced ways Jennifer’s Body explores the horrific intensity of female adolescent friendships is in how the film depicts queer desire.  Needy’s awe of Jennifer is apparent as soon as the first scene of the film and she often leers at her friend’s physical beauty from the same distant admirer vantage point as the heterosexual boys in their high school class.  It’s only natural, then, that her queer romantic desire of Jennifer would be explicitly addressed onscreen at some point in the film.  It’s not at all an extraneous or tongue-in-cheek intrusion on the story.  Cody and Kusama play much of the central characters’ relationship as sincere melodrama, which Kusama describes on a recent episode of Switchblade Sisters as “the nightmare of obsessive relationships between girls [that] can make or break you,” a genuine conflict that’s meant to be taken even more seriously than the film’s often humorous demonic kills.  That’s why it’s so bizarre that the same-sex kiss shared between Needy and Jennifer feels so passionless and seeped in the male gaze.  Shot with the over-the-top production values of a music video, their single kiss as a pairing is treated as a moment worthy of pornographic leering from the audience instead of a genuine dramatic beat within the context of the story.  It’s as if the salacious businessmen of the film’s marketing team had stepped into the director’s chair for a single shot, drowning out Cody and Kusama’s voices with a heap of studio notes on how best to sell the romantic exchange as a sexual commodity.  What’s even more alarming is the way Needy and Jennifer’s kiss is immediately followed by a moment of what’s often described as “gay panic.”  It’s possible to read Needy’s freaked-out reaction to her out of nowhere sexual encounter with Jennifer as an extension of her general horror with the changes brought on by her best friend’s body (and its corresponding body count), but by recoiling in fear from the brief exchange she pushes the film into participating in a harmful homophobic trope that persists in media at large.  The real shame of that stumbling block is that the queer desire shared between Needy and Jennifer is a legitimate facet of the script that does deserve onscreen exploration.  In the film Heavenly Creatures, the two young female protagonists’ budding sexual obsession with one another, which is notably not played for titillation, is also a means of exploring class issues and socio-economic envy.  By contrast, the homoerotic scene in Jennifer’s Body is played for pure audience arousal, with none of the thematic weight it easily could have carried.  It’s embarrassingly mishandled in a way that exemplifies the studio tinkering that muddled the film’s feminist themes in a myriad of ways, from conception to post-production marketing.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Jennifer’s Body manages to subvert the expectation of major studio horror filmmaking with meaningful feminist themes.  Not only does a collaboration between Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama already suggest the likelihood of that accomplishment, but the film also telegraphs its intent by borrowing its name from a Hole song and opening with the line, “Hell is a teenage girl.”  Still, it’s a miracle that a film this heavily subjected to major studio influence could extend its feminist worldview beyond the surface level power of a female monster violently destroying the men who ogle her.  The expected tropes of coming of age body horror, punishment for transgressive sexuality, and revenge for unwanted sexual advances are all incorporated into Cody’s screenplay, but the film still carves out its own thematic space in the horror landscape by focusing on the intense female friendship between its two leads.  As many boys as Jennifer kills in her quest to restore her energy and make her hair shiny again, none are ever as significant to the dramatic plot as her relationship with Needy, a long-term obsession that extends beyond romance into an entirely different, terrifying realm.  The bond between adolescent female friends drives just as much of the tension in Jennifer’s Body as the kills and the horrors of puberty.  That dynamic is not the flashiest or most immediately apparent aspect of Jennifer’s Body; it’s often overwhelmed by the demonic kills and leering at Megan Fox’s physique that would typically be expected of most major studio horrors in the film’s position.  It’s what makes the film unique as a feminist text, however, and its positioning as the heart of the film was entirely intentional on the part of Cody and Kusama. They knew what they were doing, even if the studio behind them did not.

-CC Chapman

The Fame-Economy Afterworlds of Wings of Fame (1990) & The Congress (2014)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

It’s become a kind of unofficial tradition that I find an excuse to rewatch & write about the 2012 sci-fi film The Congress every year of blogging. I first reviewed the film in our inaugural year as a website. I then returned to it to explore its continued relevance in the shifting Hollywood landscape last year, finding it just as potent it as I had the first time, if not more so. Now, in year three, Boomer has introduced a Movie of the Month selection to us with unignorable thematic connections to The Congress, though its approach to the same topics is much more subdued. The 1990 Dutch film Wings of Fame presents a version of the afterlife where immortality is determined by cultural longevity; dead historical figures & celebrities mingle in a shared, surrealist space where their level of adoration among the living determines their status on the other side. The Congress alters that formula by allowing the living to buy into & borrow that fame immortality, essentially ruining their lives on Earth by assuming the guise of a celebrity in a fantasy space. Both works are wonderfully bizarre, though I’d argue The Congress is both flashier & more complex in its reflections on fame economy surrealism.

Part of the reason The Congress feels more memorably bizarre than the delicately philosophical Wings of Fame is that it leans heavily into the surrealist juxtaposition of seeing many incongruent celebrities onscreen at once. Where Wings of Fame notably stocks its cast of “famous” dead celebrities with archetypal placeholders instead of real life historical figures, The Congress overwhelms the audience with multiple copies of Jesus Christ, Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe and anyone else you can imagine. It accomplishes this by setting its fame economy afterworld in an “animated zone,” a brightly colored Max Fleischer fantasy space that posits the film as a Cool World/Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-style live-action/animation hybrid. The live-action lead-up to that surrealist free-for-all can be just as measured as anything in Wings of Fame, though, with Robin Wright starring as herself in the not too distant future as introduction to the world (not unlike Peter O’Toole playing a Peter O’Toole type in Wings of Fame). Hollywood executives pressure Wright to sell her likeness so she can be digitally inserted in any part they choose, even long after she’s dead, sealing her immortality as a movie star. Just a few decades later, “regular” people can buy into that celebrity themselves, taking on her identity in the “animation zone, extending the film’s celebrity-outliving-your-body themes into even more bizarre, speculative territory that feels increasingly relevant to modern celebrity culture every passing year.

In Wings of Fame, being an unfamous nobody means you fade into a greyed-out mist of anonymity, drifting directionless for eternity. The Congress, being made in a time where a celebrity’s digital likeness can be sold & recreated independent of a physical performance, puts a lot more thought into how the unfamous nobodies among the living could pay to participate in the glamorous luxury of fame. The Congress is the flashier, more currently relevant film of the pair, but Wings of Fame is more philosophically reflective on how fame can outlast the body. The Congress only introduces that concept briefly before focusing on the intricacies of how fame has evolved as in industry, a commodity that co be bought, sold, rented, and loaned. I’m not sure that I’ll return to Wings of Fame as often as I apparently feel compelled to return to The Congress, since its broader approach to the fame economy afterlife feels a little less relevant to our specific relationship to modern celebrity as a 2010s audience and more tied to a larger philosophical provocation. In tandem, the pair offer an unlikely surrealist fantasy that visualizes fame’s function as immortality currency in literal terms. The difference is that Wings of Fame’s version of that dynamic is reflective on how fame has functioned through all of history, while The Congress depicts a future we still haven’t fully arrived at, but inch closer to every passing year.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the delicately surreal afterlife puzzler Wings of Fame, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this comparison to its less restrained Harmony Korine counterpoint, and last week’s look at the strange ways its meta Shakespeare & romantic rivalry themes extend into Shakespeare in Love (1998).

-Brandon Ledet