A Newcomer’s Guide to the Fast & Furious Franchise

April 10, 2015 / swampflix / 37 Comments

As I have previously explained, I am a recent convert to the Fast & Furious universe. Despite the 15 year run of the franchise’s cultural ubiquity, I’ve somehow managed to avoid ever seeing a Fast & Furious movie in full until a few weeks ago. Sure, I’ve seen them playing as background noise in various bars & living rooms over the years, but I’ve never bothered to watch a single picture from front to end. When the series first got started I was a gloomy teenage snob who wouldn’t be caught dead watching such mindless machismo, but something happened in the years since: I grew a sense of humor. And while I was working on that, something else happened: the series seemingly got exponentially ridiculous with each sequel. It’s rare these days for any genre film outside of slasher flicks to earn six sequels, but here we are in 2015 with a car racing movie reaching its seventh installment this month: Furious 7. The ads for that seventh installment finally brought me to my tipping point. Furious 7 promised to be so deliciously over the top that when I first saw the ad in the theater I finally felt compelled to catch up with the entire series, an urge I followed voraciously in the past few weeks.

It turns out that the story of the Fast & Furious franchise is the story of an ever-ballooning budget. The 2001 debut installment cost $38 million to make, while in 2015 a Fast & Furious movie costs $250 million. The first three or so Fast & Furious movies serve mostly as cheap cultural relics, time capsules of bad taste in the early 00s. As the budget continued to expand (along with Vin Diesel’s delightfully long winded musings on the nature of “family”) so did the scope of the action sequences and the feeling that the franchise had actually started to pull its own weight as a unique intellectual property. During this transition the focus of the films also deviated from its street racing roots and instead pursued what it self-describes in the latest film as “vehicular warfare”. The street racing of the early films are mostly gone, but far from forgotten as the series has become completely wrapped up in its own mythology, pretending that the past was more significant than it was and pushing what it can do in the present to any & all ridiculous heights allowed by the strengths of an ever-sprawling cast & budget.

Listed below, in chronological order, are all seven feature films in the Fast & Furious franchise as seen through my fresh, previously uninitiated eyes. Each entry is accompanied by brief re-caps of its faults & charms, but also has its own individual full-length review, which you can find by clicking on the links in the titles themselves. If you are also looking to get initiated into the Fast & Furious world yourself, but wanted to skip the franchise’s humbly trashy beginnings, I highly recommend watching the fifth, sixth, third, and seventh installments (curiously enough, in that specific sequence).

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

The very first installment of the Fast & Furious is mostly effective as a baseline measurement for the series. It was exactly what I had expected from the franchise as a whole: rap-rock era machismo way more concerned with cartoonishly fast cars, gigantic guns, and impressively elaborate action sequences than its superfluous plot about an undercover cop. It features such macho trademarks as rap metal, backyard grilling, lipstick lesbianism and, of course, extensive street racing. In this earliest installment the cars move so fast that light warps around them like spaceships in old-line sci-fi, their roaring engines overpowering the sound design & the inner workings of their nitrous oxide systems becoming a fetishistic focus for the CGI. The Fast and the Furious is entertaining enough as a mindless action flick & a trashy cultural relic, but it doesn’t even approach the peak ridiculousness achieved in later installments. It does have its campy moments, though, even if they never reach a fever pitch.

MVP of the cast: The stunt-casting of Ja Rule, who’s neither fast nor furious enough to earn a threesome in a street race.
Most curious detail: The fact that somehow no one on the California street racing scene seems to think it’s fucked up that their drag race competition is called “Race Wars.”

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t necessarily much better or worse than its predecessor, but functions more like an echo. It hits the same plot points as the original (undercover policing, sports cars reaching warp speed, Paul Walker’s half-assed modes of seduction, etc.) with just a few basic casting substitutions distinguishing the two films. The strange thing about it is that the repetition doesn’t feel like much of a problem. It’s okay that both The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious share so much in plot & sentiment because plot & sentiment are inessential to the films’ central draws: absurdly intricate action set pieces, a fetishistic love of sports cars, and charmingly dated ideas of cool. 2 Fast 2 Furious may be an exact structural photocopy of the first Fast & Furious installment, but it has such a deliriously lighthearted approach to the intense violence of its reality (a quality that made 80s action films the golden era of the genre) that it’s difficult to be too hard on it critically. Nearly all of the actors except Walker are substituted for new faces (an appropriately shirtless Tyrese Gibson & a Chicken-N-Beer era Ludacris make their welcomed debuts here, though their comic dynamic isn’t fully developed until later installments,) and there’s a complete absence of rap rock, lipstick lesbianism, and backyard grilling, but 2 Fast 2 Furious is still essentially a shameless retread of its precursor. However, it’s one that finds a way to make its more-of-the-same formula entertaining despite the familiarity.

MVP of the cast: The wise-cracking, often-shirtless sex god Tyrese Gibson.
Most curious detail: A not-so-sly reference to Ludacris’ hit song “Move Bitch” is made during a street race, but by a character who is not played by Ludacris.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

The third installment in the Fast & Furious franchise is not a particularly unique film when considered on its own merit, but it is very much an outlier in the series it’s a part of. The first two Fast & Furious films are undercover police thrillers about trust & family and the criminal world of California street racing. Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, is about a high school reprobate’s struggle to find The Drift within. The Drift, in case you somehow didn’t already know, is the ability to more or less drive sideways, something Japanese teens are apparently very good at. The Drift also serves as some kind of metaphor for growing up or taking responsibility or something along those lines (with a direct reference to The Karate Kid for full effect), but one thing’s for damn sure: it has nothing to do with the world of the Paul Walkers, Vin Diesels and Tyrese Gibsons of the first two films. There’s a hilarious last minute cameo that attempts to tie it into the rest of the series, but for the most part Tokyo Drift is a free-floating oddity, just sort of . . . drifting out on its own, disconnected. It was more than fair that die-hard fans furiously asked “Who are these people?!” upon its initial release, since the answer to that question doesn’t arrive until a post-credits stinger four films later. However, even though it was hated in its time, it’s a genuinely fun bit of trash cinema about the spiritual virtues of sideways driving, one with almost no regard for rest of the franchise at all.

MVP in the cast: The stunt casting of (Lil) Bow Wow, who plays a wisecracking sidekick that winks at the camera, delivers one-liners like “Japanese food is like the Army: don’t ask, don’t tell,” and refers to the Mona Lisa as that lady who’s smiling all the time.
Most Curious Detail: I’m pretty sure that during the opening race a smashed porta potty splashes digital feces on the camera lens.

Fast & Furious (2009)

The fourth Fast & Furious film attempts to pull the series’ act together by working as retroactive franchise glue, bringing back characters that had been absent since the first film & connecting them to Sung Kang’s Han, a very important player from Tokyo Drift who (spoiler) is supposed to be very dead. The problem is that after these first ten minutes of retroactive narrative, Fast & Furious loses its sense of purpose. Setting the undercover police intrigue in the Dominican Republic, the film offers the franchise a new location, but not much else. For the most part, the action is standard stuff you’d expect in any action franchise: Vin Diesel hanging dudes out of windows by their ankles, Paul Walker chasing criminals down back alleys in his tailored federal agent suit, lots of tumbling cars, etc. The best moment, action wise, is when Diesel does a controlled slide (Tokyo style) under a tumbling 18 wheeler, but that takes place during that saving-grace opening set piece. The main thing it’s missing, however, is a sense of fun. Fast & Furious is just so unnecessarily dour, especially after the cartoonish excess of Tokyo Drift. After herding the narrative cats of the first three installments, the movie becomes exceedingly difficult to love. It does serve as a necessary bridge to better movies down the line, but when considered on its own, it’s not really worth its near two-hour runtime.

MVP of the cast: Han, resurrected through a receding timeline, not-so-seamlessly (but very much amusingly) sets up the franchise’s ever-shifting chronology in an exchange where he answers the line “Time for you to do your own thing,” with “I heard they’re doing some crazy shit in Tokyo . . .” They’re doing some crazy shit indeed, Han. First of all, they’re driving sideways.
Most curious detail: The film seems to have a strange fascination with GPS displays. The GPS imagery plays well into the series’ video game aesthetic, but really, it’s GPS; who cares?

Fast Five (2011)

There’s a lot of killer action movie surface pleasures scattered all over Fast Five (especially in its opening train heist set piece), but that’s not what makes it special. What distinguishes the film from its pedigree is Vin Diesel’s Dominic’s sudden conviction that his gang of ragtag criminals and former cops is a “family”. As far as the franchise goes, the “family” in the first four films act like distant cousins who might see each other once a decade. Suddenly, in Fast Five it’s genuinely moving when Dominic talks about how his father taught him about the importance of backyard grilling, how a family always sticks together, and so on. It’s not a perfect film; it could’ve allowed more screen time for newcomer The Rock & (I can’t believe I’m saying this) more street racing, not to mention that a ludicrous post-credits stinger has the gall to bring the dead back to life without explanation, but it was a huge step forward for the Fast & Furious series as a collective. Five films in, all the separate elements are finally clicking as a cohesive action movie unit. Where most extended franchises gradually unravel over the course of their sequels, this is one that took that time to find itself and cull its own “familial” mythology.

MVP of the Cast: Here we are introduced to Hobbs, played Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who could only serve as a improvement to virtually any motion picture, because he is a perfect human being.
Most Curious Detail: An all-star crew of the gang/”family” members from the first four films are assembled here in the single best team-building montage outside of MacGruber. There’s some truly over the top, jaw-dropping spectacle in the opening train heist and a closing sequence involving a bank vault, but something about that montage feels like the first moments of the series coming into its own.

Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

Fast & Furious 6 plays right into the franchise’s ever-increasing concern for tying the series together into a cohesive whole. The gang started properly functioning as a unit (or a “family,” if you will) in the fifth film, but this is where individual members of the Fast & Furious family become eccentric cartoon versions of themselves. They begin to get wrapped up in their own distinct mythologies the way the series as a whole got wrapped up in itself in the start-of-a-new-era Fast Five. Now that the “family” has come together as a tight unit, they’ve finally found a way to go truly over the top. The ridiculous caricatures and ever-expanding budget for the action sequences (which include a return to extensive street racing here, which had become surprisingly absent) are what make Fast & Furious 6 feel like a far cry from where the series began, but it’s not what makes the film important. As Vin Diesel’s Dominic would put it, it’s all about family. “Family” is what matters. If you’re on board with the series at this point it’s strangely satisfying to see the film’s major triumph be the gang coming together for a climactic backyard cookout, Coronas proudly lifted in the air. Fast & Furious 6 makes the audience feel like part of the “family”, like we’re all in for the silly ride together. Everyone involved has seemingly gotten comfortable with how ridiculous the series is and found their own ways to make it work as its own unique action franchise, with Vin Diesel standing tall as the most comfortable of them all. It’s adorable.

MVP of the cast: The heart really is in those “family”-obsessed Vin Diesel pep talks. Part of what makes it so convincing is that it feels like he truly believes it.
Most curious detail: The film’s central conflict is with a rival gang who, as Tyrese Gibson describes in an especially hilarious monologue, poses as the gang’s doppelgangers, because they do not believe in family and instead treat their criminal schemes like a business.

Furious 7 (2015)

Furious 7’s charms depend greatly on the six films that precede it (this marks the first time that the Tokyo Drift storyline is firmly in the temporal rearview), but it uses that well-established history to its advantage as a launching pad for its larger-than-ever set pieces and relentless fan service. To a newcomer the barrage of seemingly insignificant callbacks could feel superfluous at best and grotesque at worst, but for a fan (even a recent convert such as myself), they’re pleasantly familiar. That’s not to say that a pair of fresh eyes would have nothing to enjoy here. At a remarkably brisk 137 minutes, Furious 7 is packed to the gills with action movie surface pleasures that reach new heights in its “vehicular warfare” that will dazzle even the uninitiated. However, anyone who has made it this far into the Fast & Furious ride (or at least tuned in after the not-so-great fourth one) is likely to feel an affinity for the series that not only excuses, but emphatically embraces its trashy, trashy charms as well. It’s sure to please the franchise’s established fans as well as gather some new ones along the way. There really is just so much movie here that anyone who enjoys loud, obnoxious action films in any capacity is likely find something to latch onto.

MVP of the Cast: Paul Walker’s transformation from a “sandwich crazy” undercover cop to an action movie legend was a gradual one that has now sadly come to a close. It’s always a bummer to watch a family member go, but Furious 7 does a great job of giving him a proper send-off.
Most Curious Detail: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson puts his pro wrestling past to good use in a moment that includes him reviving his signature “Rock Bottom” move from the Attitude Era.

Lagniappe

The Fast and the Furious (1955)

A 1950’s car racing cheapie from Movie of the Month vet Roger Corman, The Fast and the Furious is far from the legendary director’s most interesting film, but it is only the second title (out of hundreds) that he produced and the first title ever produced by American International Pictures, the film company that helped make him a b-movie powerhouse. The film has very little connection to the much-more-infamous Paul Walker series outside of the purchase of its title rights, but that purchase was most certainly worth every penny. It’s a damn good title. Good thing they decided not stick with the much less compelling original name for the film, Crashout. Filmed in just ten days, The Fast and the Furious is one of many examples of Corman’s superhuman ability to make a surprisingly watchable picture on a tight budget, even if it isn’t a particularly memorable one. It does share some incidental similarities the Paul Walker franchise of the same name, like felons getting mixed up in car racing, racers inspecting/admiring each other’s gear, the featured inclusion of female racers, and (most incidentally of all) mentions of Coachella, California. Both Corman’s film and the 2000s franchise also have a tendency to mix corny comedy in with their criminal intrigue as well as an over-reliance on dated effects (whether they be CGI or driving scenes filmed in front of a projector). Corman’s The Fast and the Furious is by no means essential viewing, but it is an interesting footnote to the trashy cultural powerhouse that followed nearly 50 years later.

Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)

An MTV-produced slice of Asian-American ennui & teen criminality, Better Luck Tomorrow is the feature film debut of director Justin Lin, who made a cohesive whole out of the Fast & Furious franchise with his take on the third, fourth, fifth & sixth titles. The connection to the Fast & Furious universe is mostly tangential here, depending solely on the presence of a high school age Han, who first entered the picture in the oddball entry Tokyo Drift. Han is played by Sung Kang in both Better Luck Tomorrow as well as every Fast & Furious film directed by Lin. Although the connection is tenuous, it’s amusing to watch Lin’s debut and imagine the character’s origins here, not to mention that the film itself is an enjoyable indie crime drama with a killer soundtrack that features Le Tigre, Bonfire Madigan and Emily’s Sassy Lime. There are obviously no direct references to Fast & Furious to be found in the film, but there is the coincidental inclusion of this throwaway line: “We had the run of the place. Rumors about us came fast and furious.”

Turbo-Charged Prelude (2003) & Los Bandaleros (2009)

There have been two officially-released “short films” meant to serve as primers in-between the Fast & Furious features. The nearly dialogue-free short Turbo-Charged Prelude follows Paul Walker’s Brian through an evading-the-law montage that adds essentially nothing of value to the series, but instead plays like a music video for an overlong rap instrumental. I did like that it ended with the phrase “2 Be Continued . . .”, but that was its sole bright moment. The Vin Diesel-penned & directed short Los Bandaleros was a slightly more significant, portraying a Dominican getaway for Dominic & Letty in a sequence that doesn’t involve fast cars or explosions and even misses an opportunity to plug Coronas during its backyard cookout. There are some interesting musings on the prison system as the new slavery and yet another attempt to bridge Tokyo Drift to the rest of the series through Han, but the short is mostly a sweet, low-stakes tryst between Dominic & Letty that receives a vague callback in Furious 7, but really isn’t worth its 20min runtime for that connection.

-Brandon Ledet

Marabunta Cinema: Eight Feature Films & Six Television Episodes about Killer Ants

April 7, 2015April 7, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

When I first reviewed the 1974 oddity Phase IV, I noted that the film was very different from what I would have expected from a sci-fi movie about killer ants. When I pictured the film in my mind I imagined the gigantic monster insect movies from the 1950s, when everything from leeches to adorable bunny rabbits were blown out of proportion by atomic radiation and turned into Godzilla-type suburban threats. Phase IV turned out to be a much stranger film than I pictured, but my hunch wasn’t far off. The 1954 creature feature Them! is widely credited as the very first of the 1950s nuclear monster movies as well as the first “big bug” movie ever. Them!, like Phase IV, also happens to be about murderous ants. It turns out that the tiny pests have served as an endless source of cinematic fascination over the past 60 years, racking up eight feature films and several television episodes since Them!’s initial release. There are definite patterns & tropes common to the way killer ants, often called “marabunta,” are portrayed in cinema, but the quality of the tactics & results vary greatly from film to film. Them! & Phase IV certainly represent the apex of the killer ants genre, but they don’t capture the full extent of its capabilities.

Them! (1954)

If Them! is the very first nuclear monster & big bug movie of the 1950s, it was an impressively prescient one. So many of the films that followed borrow so much from its essential elements that it basically serves as a Rosetta Stone for the marabunta genre. For instance, the film opens with a child in danger. A young girl, newly orphaned, roams the desert alone, in a state of shock after witnessing her family being murdered by “Them! Them! Them!” (a titular line she shrieks in horror when prodded for details). Children in danger is a surprisingly common theme for a lot of the marabunta films to come, along with the desert setting, and their roots are established in Them!’s opening minutes. Other tropes, like attempting to destroy the hive by attacking the Queen’s chamber, the use of nature footage as a scientific lecture on ant behavior, the ants’ high-pitch squeaks, and the blaming of pollution (in this case nuclear fallout) as the cause of the ants’ size & behavior would be frequently echoed in the 60 years that followed. What was most prescient of all, however, was just the basic concept: killer ants. No killer bug movies (as we know them) preceded it, but plenty followed and Them! is truly the pioneer of them all.

When I first imagined what Phase IV might be like, I was actually imagining Them! I pictured late night, black & white schlock (in the same vein as The Brainiac or Frankestein Meets the Space Monster) about giant killer bugs with an atomic age metaphor attempting to justify its true purpose: giant ant models, hairy like gorillas & eager to kill. When a scientist opines in the final scene, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict,” it feels more like an afterthought than anything else. The gigantic ant models were obviously a point of focus for the filmmakers and it paid off well. They look fantastic, never to truly be topped by the killer ant films that followed. It’s also a testament to Them!’s quality that the tension building atmosphere in its first act is still strikingly effective despite modern audiences knowing what the “they” in Them! are long before they grace the screen. Them! may be the standard execution of what a killer ants movie would look like, but it’s extremely well crafted for its pedigree and deserves to be respected as a pioneer in the natural horror genre at large, much less marabunta cinema.

Ant size: “They” are gigantic.
Fire delivery method: In almost all of the marabunta movies, the ants are attacked with fire through various methods. This practice, like many other tropes mentioned, can be traced back even to the original marabunta movie, Them! In Them!, fire is initially delivered to the giant ants through bullets & rocket launchers, but it’s the use of flame throwers that ultimately save the day, as will become a popular choice as the genre marches on.

The Naked Jungle (1954)

If Them! is the Rosetta Stone of marabunta cinema, The Naked Jungle is the furthest outlier, the most difficult film to read in the context of the genre. Released the same year as Them!, The Naked Jungle refuses to play along with its killer ants compatriots even in the most basic terms of genre. Instead of working within a horror context, The Naked Jungle is an old-fashioned big studio romance epic where the killer ants are a natural disaster not very distinct from a flood or a landslide. The movie is mostly a vehicle for (a mostly shirtless) Charlton Heston & (a similarly undressed) Elanor Parker, who star as a South American cocoa plantation owner and his mail order bride (shipped to him via New Orleans!) whose personalities are too big & too stubborn to mix cohesively. Their initial hatred of one another is palpable in quips like “I’m trying not to irritate you.” “I noticed that. I find it irritating,” and in a key exchange when Heston is upset that his new bride is a widow instead of the virgin he requested and she retorts “If you knew more about music, you’d know that a piano is better when it’s played.” This dynamic, of course, gradually shifts from hostile to sensual and the sweaty (it is South America, after all) tension between the two drives a lot of the movie’s runtime.

Then, in the last third of the film, the ants arrive. Millions of ants. Not the gigantic, atomic ants of Them!, but rather a hoard of regular army ants, marabunta. They’re described in the film as “40 square miles of agonizing death” that operates as an organized, trained army. The initial horror of the ants picking a skeleton clean is a bit goofy & melodramatic, but once you get to the real shots of real insects crawling all over actors’ very real skin, it actually gets pretty disturbing. Some of the painted backdrops & dialogue in The Naked Jungle are unfortunate. Its depictions of native savages that depend on Heston’s white man knowledge to survive are especially disappointing. However, it’s a mostly enjoyable movie that, thanks to Heston & Parker’s love/hate dynamic, feels like a Tennessee Williams play drowning in marabunta, which distinguishes it from every other film in the genre.

Ant size: Regular.
Fire delivery method: There’s some torch tossing & explosives use, but the fire that matters the most in The Naked Jungle is the fire burning in the two leads’ loins.

Phase IV (1974)

I’ve already dropped almost 700 words on Phase IV, so I’ll try to keep it brief here. It’s almost as much of an marabunta outlier as The Naked Jungle due to its reluctance to adhere to a traditional monster movie format. However, instead of framing itself as a romance epic, Phase IV is posited as psychedelic sci-fi. Droning, loopy synths accompany the movie’s expertly manipulated nature footage to create a strange world where ants evolve at astounding rates, learning to systematically destroy their predators (including humans, of course), dismantle electronics and weaponize reflected light. In most films listed here, the nature footage is less-than-seamlessly integrated into the plot by means of scientific lectures or Ed Wood-esque asides, but in Phase IV it’s integral to the film’s narrative. The extensive, close-up ant footage provides a disturbing authenticity to the film’s story of an insect takeover. In a lot of ways the ants in Phase IV are much more convincing actors than their human co-stars.

There’s some campy appeal to the pseudo-science of Phase IV’s bleep bloop machines and (its somewhat prescient) hazmat suit aesthetic, but the film is for the most part genuinely successful in being a sci-fi creep-out. The killer, droning synths are a large part of this success, as they add an otherworldly atmosphere to the already alien-looking close-ups of the marabunta. Also unnerving is the film’s somewhat open ending, which was cut short by the film studio for its pessimism & psychedelia. The threat of the ants in Phase IV feels truly insurmountable and, well, it very well may be.

Ant size: Regular.
Fire delivery method: No fire at all, which very well might explain the pessimism of the conclusion. In fact, the ants deliver fire of their own when they all-too-wisely convert a pick-up truck into a homemade bomb.

Empire of the Ants (1977)

If Them! & Phase IV are the prime examples of the heights marabunta cinema, Empire of the Ants is an entertaining sample of its depths. With production, direction, and visual effects all provided by shlock peddler Burt I. Gordon, Empire of the Ants shares a lot with the (much more fun) killer rabbits movie Night of the Lepus, both good & bad. For example, the exact dimensions of the ants fluctuate from scene to scene, depending on the technique used to make them appear large (which includes over-sized props and rear projection trick photography). That variation in the ants’ exact size & shape does wonders for the film’s camp value, but the dialogue that surrounds it (including a performance from why-are-you-here? Joan Collins) deflates a lot of its charms. It also doesn’t help that there are no killer ants in the first third of the film, so the dialogue is all you have to chew on. Much like with Night of the Lepus, Empire of the Ants has a disturbing habit of playing into old-fashioned genre clichés, but in this case it tips the film firmly in the direction of pure boredom. It’s incredible that Empire of the Ants was released three years after the much more experimental Phase IV, as it feels like an ancient dinosaur by comparison.

As far as hitting the marabunta genre touchstones goes, Empire of the Ants is fairly sufficient. It gets the nature footage requirement out of the way as soon as the opening prologue, with an off-screen narrator warning the audience, “This is the ant. Treat it with respect, for it may very well be the next dominant lifeform on our planet.” Much like with other marabunta movies, the ants were mutated into their monstrous form through radioactive waste, there’s a reliance on a hazmat suit aesthetic to lend the film sci-fi authenticity, and there are a multiple shots taken from the ants’ perspective, or “ant cam” if you will. In this film, the ant cam is represented as concentric circles, as opposed to the honeycomb look employed in Phase IV, but the effect is more or less the same. There are even some innovations to the marabunta genre in the plot’s focus on the queen ant’s obedience-inducing hormones that command humans to do her evil bidding. I also appreciated Empire’s pedigree as a shameless Jaws knock-off, with not so subtle nods to the Spielberg film’s infamous score in its soundtrack. Despite how entertaining all that sounds, however, Empire of the Ants mostly feels like a slog, struggling to recover from the opening segment where the dialogue endlessly drones on about valuable real estate and all kinds of other who-cares nonsense. As a collection of alternately impressive & inept practical effects, it’s an entertaining mess; as a feature-length film it’s a chore.

Ant size: Gigantic, but seemingly fluctuating from scene to scene due to the varied methods of Gordon’s visual effects.
Fire delivery method: Explosives used to blow up the sugar mill where the ant queen prefers to dine. Pretty smart.

Ants! (1977)

Ants! (also known as It Happened at Lakewood Manor & Panic At Lakewood Manor) stands as the first example of killer ants gracing the small screen, a format they’ve been unable to escape for nearly 40 years running. A made-for-TV movie starring Suzanne Somors, Ants! is an admittedly awful film, but one with enough melodrama and laughably bad acting to make it work as a campy pleasure. It plays like a Lifetime Original Movie about a family struggling to hold onto their hotel resort in the modern business word (with swarms of killer ants playing mostly as an afterthought). In addition to the new television format, Ants! also introduces the marabunta genre to a new plot structure, framing its story as more of a disaster movie (like Towering Inferno or Airport 1975) than a creature feature (like Them!). The ants that plague Lakewood Manor are treated collectively as a natural disaster (something only hinted at before in The Naked Jungle), not an aggressive hoard of tiny monsters. As explained by a mid-film science lecture (again, with accompanying nature footage) this widespread disaster was created by the ants’ exposure to increasingly strong pesticides. According to the film’s resident killer ants expert, “We’re the ones that forced them to live in a toxic world,” which prompted the ants to absorb our pesticides and weaponize them as their own poisons. His audience’s horrified reaction to this news? “I don’t like it.” The film’s ridiculous dialogue saves it from the doldrums of Empire of the Ants, even though Empire had much better practical effects for its marabunta. If only they had combined those two elements, we’d have a veritable cult classic on our hands.

As cheesy as the dialogue is in Ants!, the sheer swarms of insects that accumulate actually make for an unnerving climax. The characters’ plan to survive the natural marabunta disaster is to remain motionless, allowing the bugs to crawl all over their skin. It’s legitimately terrifying (and more than a little gross) and I hope the actors were well compensated, even if those were sugar ants. There was also a return to endangered (and, for the first time, harmed) children in Ants!, something that’s rare in any horror film and hadn’t graced the marabunta screen since the likes of Them! On the cultural relic front, there’s an unexpected appearance from Brian Dennehy and it’s surprisingly entertaining to watch ants crawl all over Susanne Somers. Ants! is far from the most memorable film in its genre, but it does have its own corny charms as a made-for-TV trifle that features bugs crawling over a Three’s Company castmember’s half-dressed body. Blech.

Ant size: Regular
Fire delivery method: A flaming, hand-dug pool of gasoline meant to keep the ants at bay.

MacGyver: “Trumbo’s World” (1985)

What can I say? I’ve never seen a MacGyver episode before “Trumbo’s World” so I have no idea how its quality compares to others. MacGyver’s preposterous, makeshift gadgets were amusing, there was some hilarious pseudo-science in lines like one describing a substance as nitroglycerin’s “chemical kissing cousin”, I genuinely loved the nifty soft synth soundtrack, and there were a couple great one liners like when MacGyver drowns a gang of “bad guys” and quips, “Chances are, those guys are all washed up.” For the most part, though, I still consider myself more of a MacGruber guy at heart. There just wasn’t much here worth going out of your way for, especially since the episode plays like a cover version of The Naked Jungle.

At first I thought the similarities to The Naked Jungle were incidental, due to the shared setting of a South American wilderness and, of course, the swarms of killer ants, but as the coincidental resemblance started to build I began to notice exact images borrowed wholesale from the Heston-Parker romance epic. The plantation-owner-refuses-to-leave-without-a-fight plot, the fleeing animals, the increasingly uncomfortable (still, 30 years later) depictions of native savages were all way to close to The Naked Jungle to be pure coincidence, but then exact footage lifted from the film, including both ant attacks and action shots of Heston-from-behind, sealed their connection. I’m not sure if all MacGyver episodes are cover versions of old movies hardly anyone remembers, but I’ve definitely seen the likes of “Trumbo’s World” before—and not that long ago.

Ant size: Regular, same as The Naked Jungle.
Fire delivery method: Flame thrower. Solid choice.

Skysurfer Strike Force: “Killer Ants” (1995)

In sharp contrast with the I’ve-seen-this-all-before familiarity of “Trumbo’s World”, the animated television show Skysurfer Strike Force plays like nothing I’ve ever encountered in my life. Its 1990s Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic is certainly familiar to me, especially as a decorated survivor of such dire properties of that era as Street Sharks and Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys, but there’s still something special about Skysurfer Strike Force’s lunacy in comparison. It’s one of those total shit-shows whose basic concept is difficult to capture in critical description so I’ll just urge you to see it for yourself in the YouTube clip of its intro and this Wikipedia-provided plot description: “The show featured five heroes, named the Skysurfers, which protected the world from the vile Cybron and his bio-borgs. The Skysurfers used technologically advanced watches that transformed them from their casual clothing to their battle attire and weapons, similar to the Choujin Sentai Jetman. During the transformations, their cars transform into rocket-powered surfboards that they can ride in the air.” It’s wickedly entertaining in its unnecessarily complicated mythology & complete detachment from reality.

As promised in its succinct title, the episode “Killer Ants” finds Skysurfer Strike Force joining the marabunta genre. Early in the episode gigantic ants (as in the size of dogs, not elephants) attack an unsuspecting truck driver on a mysterious late night highway, foreshadowing the evil Cybron’s world-domination-scheme-of-the-week. You’ve got to hand it to Cybron; for a cyborg supervillain he’s got some fresh ideas. Must be the stolen computer-brain. His plot to rule us all with killer ants was conceived as the perfect crime, as everyone would assume the ants were a natural disaster that he himself could not be blamed for. Pretty smart, as well as a wholly unique approach in the marabunta genre. The episode adds other unique details like the ants communicating through vibrations (instead of the usual pheromone route in other titles) and that instead of being killed when eventually conquered, they’re made to perform as circus animals. Skysurfer Strike Force may on the surface seem to be a half-assed children’s show bankrupt of any nourishing value, but it’s actually packing an excess of ideas & face-value virtues that add a surprising amount of new developments to both the marabunta & half-baked 90s children’s cartoon genres.

Ant size: Gigantic, but not too gigantic. Mid-sized giant ants.
Fire delivery method: Rocket launchers & tanks.

Goosebumps: “Awesome Ants” (1998)

Goosebumps gets by on charm more than it does on fresh ideas, bucking the unexpected quality jump in Skysurfer Strike Force. A live action television show based on the popular children’s book series, the Goosebumps fits snuggly among the ranks of several sub-X Files monster of the week children’s properties of the 90s—shows like Eerie, Indiana & Are You Afraid of the Dark? In the episode titled“Awesome Ants” the monster of the week is, you guessed it, gigantic killer ants. Ordered through the mail from a nefarious back-of-a-magazine company, a child’s ant farm science project gets out of control when he overfeeds his population (despite a pamphlet’s specific warnings not to, of course). The resulting killer ants are surprisingly well visualized, using a multi-faceted, Empire of the Ants kind of approach that combines over-sized props and green screen gimmicks to create the menace. This is all mildly amusing here or there, but what really sets this episode apart from any other installment in the marabunta genre is its wicked, Twilight Zone conclusion where (spoiler) the kid wakes to find himself as part of a human farm run by even larger ants, the tables having been turned. I gotta admit, that’s pretty “awesome”.

Ant size: Gigantic, and then even more gigantic.
Fire delivery method: None, which again might explain why the ants won.

Legion of Fire: Killer Ants! (1998)

Starting with the Suzanne Somers melodrama Ants!, marabunta cinema has seemingly been banished to television purgatory for its sins of repetition. Not helping the case for the genre at all is the made-for-TV snoozer Legion of Fire: Killer Ants! (also known simply as Marabunta). Legion of Fire was not made for just any TV, mind you; it was made for late-90s Fox, which has to be the most tasteless era of television in this writer’s (admittedly limited) memory. Getting some of that trademark Fox Attitude (as well as the nature footage trope) out of the way early, the film opens with the gall to claim that “This is not science fiction. This is science fact. The story you are about to see could happen tomorrow.” It could. It most likely never will, but I guess it could. It already takes some considerable hubris to posit a made-for-TV monster movie starring “Skinner” from X-Files & “that dude” from Caroline in the City as “science fact”, but the claim becomes even more preposterous as soon as the first kill, which features a newlywed couple on a hike being physically dragged into the depths of an over-sized ant pile. Nice. Even in its opening minutes Legions of Fire can’t decide if it wants to be a believable scare film about South American ants (likened to the era’s similarly-feared “Africanized bees”) or an absurd sci-fi monster movie. Frankly it fails to be entertaining as either.

Legion of Fire’s dialogue is mostly of the dull, Empire of the Ants variety, with a couple isolated gems like “I never met a bug I didn’t like,” and “And my mom used to say that being an etymologist would be boring . . .” There’s also some limited camp value in a few action scenes like when an (endangered!) child is dragged into a hive or a pilot thrashes about as if the film’s CGI ants are actually eating his face, leading to one of the most slowly-progressing helicopter crashes I’ve ever seen in a movie. Speaking of the CGI, Legion of Fire’s most depressing development is that the golden era of practical effects is firmly in the rearview, giving way to shoddy CGI ants carrying even faker-looking human body parts on their not-real-at-all backs. It’s no surprise, then, that the most fun the film has with its premise is in the practical effects when the killer ants drag people into the gasoline filled holes meant to set the colony ablaze, followed promptly by explosions. If I could pick out one thing Legion of Fire needed more of, it’s people being dragged into holes and then exploding, not Windows screensaver-quality insects “crawling” all over some nobody’s horrified face. Legion of Fire is a disheartening low point for the marabunta genre, easily the most unimaginative feature film in the bunch—even if it is “science fact”.

Ant size: Regular, but seemingly fluctuating from scene to scene due to the cheap CGI.
Fire delivery method: Flame throwers & exploding, gasoline-filled holes.

The Bone Snatcher (2003)

The Bone Snatcher was a promising improvement from the dire viewing experience of Legion of Fire (which is one I hope to never repeat), but it’s an ultimately disappointing film when considered in its own right. It was the first & only marabunta movie not made for television in the near-three decades since Empire of the Ants, but since it was released straight-to-DVD it’s somewhat of a hollow victory. The Bone Snatcher is an Alien-esque creature feature that opts more for tension building than it does for a body count, which is a frequent mistake for low-budget horror. Look, everyone loves Alien, but there’s a reason why it’s one of the most memorable horror/sci-fi films of all time. It’s an extremely well made and handsomely budgeted film that a lot of independent horror movies just aren’t going to be able to replicate. The Bone Snatcher’s failed attempt at Alien-levels of tension instead of a high body count gore fest is particularly disappointing because the film’s creature looked so cool and was obviously cheap to film (thanks to CGI). There just wasn’t enough of it onscreen to make the film recommendable.

The creature in question here is a gigantic sasquatch-looking specter that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be a collection of highly-organized killer ants that collect to form a single gestalt being, a “bone collector” if you will. The title of “bone collector” is afforded to this ants-monster through its affinity for using the remains of its victims as a structural support for its gigantic, undulating body. Sometimes the bone collector even wears the face of its victims (literally), which is disturbing enough even when that face isn’t spitting out a stream of ants. The unnerving & clever physical attributes of the bone collector itself made want to love the film that surrounded it, but there’s just not much there to love. Borrowing some of the hazmat suit & militaristic desertscape aesthetic from marabunta pioneers like Phase IV, the film has a little bit of spooky atmosphere to work with, just not enough to carry the film on its own.

There are also some new touches added to well-established marabunta tropes, like picked-clean bones (common as far back as The Naked Jungle) now being stained red from blood and the ant cam POV (offered in Empire of the Ants & Phase IV), now looking like a sepia-tone brethren of the Vin Diesel sleeper Pitch Black. There’s also some disturbing gore that arrives with the appearance of the bone collector, including skin being carried off by endless floods of ants and muscle melted off the bone by their toxins. The problem is that it’s too little too late and much of the film’s action is pushed off until the final half hour of the runtime. The tension-building atmosphere is competent, but not nearly entertaining enough to carry a film whose best quality is its creature design. If the film had let its freak flag fly and given the titular bone collector more time in the sun it could’ve been something really special. Instead it was mostly a well-intentioned bore with a few admirably disturbing ideas.

Ant size: Regular, but coming together to form a gigantic gestalt creature.
Fire delivery system: None. The bone crusher’s victims opted for stabbing instead, probably due to limited resources.

Atomic Betty: “Atomic Betty Vs the Giant Killer Ants” (2004)

If Legion of Fire is the moment when CGI unfortunately makes for lazy live-action filmmaking in the marabunta genre, Atomic Betty is where it similarly sinks animation. Taken at face value, I appreciate that there’s a children’s show (and we’re talking super-young children) within which a female moppet of a superhero periodically saves the world from 50s style B-movie plots, taking her assignments from a talking fish. If there were an actual 1950s movie called Atomic Betty Vs the Giant Killer Ants you’d be safe to bet I’d be eating that schlock up greedily. As a lazily-animated, mid-2000s cartoon the prospect is less tantalizing. There’s really nothing of interest added to the marabunta genre here. Betty is told by her fish boss that there are some killer ants on the loose (made gigantic by “multi-plasma nectar”), she flies over, and then puts a stop to the threat post haste. I hope it was riveting for its pint-sized target audience, but for our purposes here it doesn’t have much to add to the marabunta genre, outside of maybe the “multi-plasma nectar”. I’ve never heard that one before.

Ant size: Gigantic, duh. It’s right there in the title.
Fire delivery method: None. Nothing of interest here at all.

The Hive (2008)

There was a truly disheartening quality to the arrival of the CGI slog Legion of Fire. It felt in a lot of ways like the party was over, like it was the end of an era where campy practical effects can save an otherwise hopeless affair like Empire of the Ants from devolving into sheer boredom. The Bone Snatcher teased the possibility that the marabunta party was indeed still raging on, putting the CGI to good use by creating a physically impossible gestalt monster out of millions of computer-generated insects. There just wasn’t enough of the monster on screen to fully make it an essential piece of marabunta cinema. Made just five years later, The Hive seemingly learned from that mistake, pushing the ridiculousness allowed by CGI to its full limits, throwing out as many ridiculous ideas as it can, given the time & budget. Where The Bone Snatcher held back on the on-screen ants and mistakenly attempted atmospheric tension, The Hive knows its limits and offers as many cheap thrills as it possibly can while it lasts.

The most surprising thing about The Hive’s likeability is that it was not only made-for-TV, but it was made specifically for the Syfy Channel, which has a long record of offering bland, empty CGI schlock that features long stretches of boring dialogue and a few short scenes of sci-fi action. The Hive, by contrast, bends over backwards to entertain. It might not be the most unique film listed here, but it borrows so much from so many sources that it’s a very fun experience, one that feels well informed of its marabunta ancestry. For example, just like in other marabunta films, The Hive features children in danger, but it goes a step further by featuring the youngest endangered child yet: a baby. In the opening scene a baby is successfully eaten by a swarm of killer ants. It’s quite the introduction. The movie also plays off of the hazmat suit trope and includes the genre’s required nature footage (this time with mixed with news reports about rampaging swarms of killer ants). Best of all, it returns to the collective, gestalt creature of The Bone Snatcher, but this time the ants form all sorts of shapes: tentacles, constellations, functioning computers, and most entertaining of all, a gigantic ant made of tiny ants.

The Hive survives on the charms of its excess. It just has so many dumb ideas: liquid nitrogen cannons, ants controlling people’s minds, an evil corporation called Thorax Industries, and the idea that the marabunta are controlled by an insect spirit from outer space (seriously). Most important of all, though, it has an excess of ants, easily the most ants out of any film listed here, so many ants that they just fall from the sky in solid blankets of ant rain. Legion of Fire felt like the death of marabunta cinema, while The Hive felt like its unexpected (and so far unanswered) rebirth. It was the rare occurrence in cheap horror where CGI allows the film to push itself do so much more, instead of getting by on doing less.

Ant size: Regular, except for that gigantic one made of regular ones.
Fire delivery method: Flame throwers & a suicide bombing

Phineas & Ferb: “Gi-Ants” (2012)

Just as formally inconsequential as Atomic Betty, Phineas & Ferb at least one-ups the computer animated competition in the freshness of its ideas. In the episode “Gi-ants” the titular stepbrothers gather their neighborhood cronies (I really know so little about this show) together to come check out their latest quixotic scheme (again, so little): a gigantic ant farm that the kids can tour as a sort of museum. The purposefully-created “gi-ants” in this ant farm never become murderous despite their incredible size. Instead, their presence is menacing only because they mutate at an alarming rate, evolving from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one to their own Industrial Revolution to the information age to total transcendent enlightenment (which I doubt is what’s next for us), all in the space of a single afternoon. The episode just barely qualifies as part of the marabunta genre if you squint at it the right way, but it was the most recent example I could find as well as being a mostly harmless, cute diversion with a couple unique ideas. I especially appreciated how far they pushed the idea of rapidly evolving ants, first introduced in Phase IV, to a ludicrous point where the insects transcended space-time. That was nifty.

Ant size: Gigantic. Giant. Giant ants. Gi-ants. Oh, I get it.
Fire delivery method: Not necessary; the ants have evolved past the stage of petty human wars, instead opting to travel to the next dimension or outer space or something along those lines.

Lagniappe

It would be fair to assume that over eight feature films and six television episodes the marabunta genre would be exhausted for new ideas, but there are some glimmers of hope for unexplored territory in projects like The Hive and The Bone Snatcher. If anyone’s looking for a fresh angle for their own killer ants movie, I’m going to offer you an idea on the house: humans transforming into ants once bitten, like the pseudo-zombie transformations in films like Black Sheep (2006) & Zombeavers. There were at least three films on this list (Phase IV, The Bone Snatcher, and The Hive) where I suspected that a poisoned human was going to make the full transition into humanoid ant, but they never reached their full marabunta potential. For those who would claim that there’s no fresh territory left for marabunta cinema, I offer that concept as the next frontier.

I also would like to note that I did not include Antie from Honey I Shrunk the Kids on this list because Antie was a true hero whose name shouldn’t be soiled by the likes of killer marabunta. For a full length eulogy recognizing Antie’s bravery & accomplishments, I suggest reading the “Remembering Antie” piece from MTV.com. If there are any other killer ants you think I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll be sure to hunt them down.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Blood and Black Lace (1964)

April 1, 2015May 5, 2015 / swampflix / 31 Comments

Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made James & Brandon watch Blood and Black Lace (1964).

Britnee:
Mario Bava’s celebrated Italian thriller, Blood and Black Lace, is a landmark in horror cinema and one of the earliest giallo films in existence. It’s also considered to be the first “body count” horror film, so we can thank Bava for all of those campy, raunchy 80s slasher flicks. Watching this film is like taking a walk through an art gallery. It’s chock-full of rich colors, eerie scenery, deep shadows, and impressive camera angles. The outstanding cinematography alone is a good reason to watch the film. I have a special place in my heart for this Bava masterpiece and I’m so thrilled to present it as April’s Movie of the Month.

Blood and Black Lace is set at a fashion salon in Rome that is full of beautiful, young models, but there are quite a few secrets hiding beneath all of their glamour and charm. The models begin to be brutally murdered by a faceless killer (once a very important diary goes missing) and when I say brutal, I mean brutal. These gruesome murder scenes are very bold and in-your-face, which was not very common for films in 1964, but the murder scene shots are executed in such a way that they are breathtakingly gorgeous. After re-watching the film with the Swampflix crew, I realized how the models in the film were more like movie props than actual characters, much like the multicolored mannequins they were surrounded by in the salon. They lacked personality and character development, but I think that’s something that Bava did intentionally.

Brandon, do you agree that the ill-fated models were merely props? If so, what do you think Bava was attempting to convey by doing this?

Brandon:
What are models if not moving, breathing mannequins? I think you’re absolutely right to believe Bava was drawing that connection. Aside from their individual reactions to the discovery of the first victim’s diary, there isn’t much to distinguish one model from another outside their looks. The fact that he chose fashion modeling as the movie’s backdrop in the first place is not only calling attention to the fact that most of the movie’s charms are in its stylistic flairs, but also that the characters are mere mannequins in motion, personality-free objects meant to put Bava’s visual fashion on display. Even the film’s killer, whose face is entirely flat & featureless, is used as a prop here. The killer’s look is about as close to a mannequin as one could get. Bava makes no bones about the fact that his characters are there as both plot devices & living, breathing decoration.

As much as I would like to argue that he made the female characters especially featureless as a comment on sex politics (this is a world where it’s totally cool to call your lover a “little idiot” after all), I believe there’s a much simpler explanation for the women’s lack of character development: misdirection. The 50 years of murder mysteries that followed Blood and Black Lace may have somewhat prepared us as a modern audience for the final couple of twists at the end of the film, but Bava does pull off a clever bit of misdirection with his characters. By leaving the women somewhat blank (although they are awfully interested in that diary) he allows them to fade into the background a bit, never to be considered as suspects in the murders. Later, when the murders continue despite the male characters all being jailed at once it feels like a shock that a woman might be involved. And then it gets even more confusing when the most likely female suspects begin to drop off like flies. Blood and Black Lace may be rightfully remembered most for its intense visual style, which heavily influenced many giallo films to come, but its central mystery cannot be completely discounted as a major draw to the film.

James, do you think that Bava finds a good balance between paying attention to the film’s whodunit murder mystery & its visual eccentricities, or does one overpower the other?

James:
I definitely think that Bava’s visual style overshadows the movie’s central murder mystery but agree with Britnee that this was mostly intentional. The long tracking shots, oblique camera angles, and lurid lighting choices were, for me, far and away the most noteworthy aspects of the film, with the police procedural and central mystery seeming secondary. Although, it must be noted that the effective twist ending does make up for some of that. As I dug around for information on the influential director, I came across this quote that confirms that Bava felt the same way. In regards to Blood and Black Lace, Bava was “bored by the mechanical nature of the whodunit and decided to deemphasize the more accepted cliches of the genre”.

Instead of developing complex characters or an intricate plot that was central to these kind of films in the past, Bava focused on pushing the genre to its limits by stepping outside the accepted boundaries of sex and violence. This seems to further the case that Bava not only invented giallo films, but also slasher flicks, which are basically whodunnits with lots of murder and sex. Blood and Black Lace has plenty of both and what I really appreciated about the film was how it mixed these lowbrow, sensationalist tendencies with high art, something Dario Argento was a master at as well.

Britnee, what do you think of the way Bava mixes lowbrow with highbrow?

Britnee:
Personally, I think Bava did an exceptional job making the film’s uncultured components ultra chic and sophisticated. Blood and Black Lace is a refined slasher flick that pairs well with fine wine and fancy cheeses. When I first viewed the film, I couldn’t figure out why the production was so classy and not the sloppy, morbid mess that I expected it to be. Now, I have a much better idea of the reason why this film is so tasteful. The choices that Bava made for the visual aspects of the film transforms what could’ve been a just another crude horror movie into a literal piece of art.

Speaking of visuals, color plays such an important role in Blood and Black Lace. I noticed that there is a particular color that is prominent with some of the victims, and the color is present in the lighting, props, costumes, etc. For example, Tao-Li wears a lot of white clothing and is killed wearing white lingerie in an all-white bathroom. We didn’t really intend to have our Movie of the Month choices connect with one another, but there is a definite connection between The Masque of the Red Death and Blood and Black Lace when it comes to the color-coding that takes prominence in each film. I don’t believe that The Masque of the Red Death film had any impact on Blood and Black Lace because both films were released in 1964, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the colored rooms in Poe’s famous tale influenced Bava’s masterpiece.

Brandon, since you are the expert on The Masque of the Red Death, I was wondering what you thought of this connection? Is there even a connection between the two films at all?

Brandon: Like you said, the two works were released more or less as contemporaries so it’s less likely that one influenced the other and more just a coincidence that both Corman & Bava had an intense interest in rich, saturated color schemes. It’s obviously possible that Bava could have been influenced by Poe’s classic tale (I know that one was a stand-out favorite for me as a teen, even when it was assigned reading in countless English classes), but the connection might be more simple than that. By the mid-60s Technicolor film prints had more or less fallen out of fashion with major studios (because of the time & money involved, if nothing else) but both Masque & Black Lace are holding on to the saturated color associated with the Technicolor technique. Once a practical process used to bring vibrant color to early films, Technicolor was later used by Bava & Corman, among others, as more of an artistic aesthetic.

Bava’s exploitation of the rich color of Technicolor prints was put to great artistic effect in horror classics like Blood and Black Lace, The Whip and The Body, and Planet of the Vampires. It’s a stylistic choice that not only visually connects it to The Masque of the Red Death, but also establishes it as an early touchstone of the giallo genre. It’s not at all surprising that one of the final Technicolor transfers was used by Bava-descendent/giallo legend Dario Argento to produce his best known film, Suspiria. Bava’s attention to color in Blood and Black Lace is echoed through almost every giallo film that followed it, especially in Argento’s work.

James, besides the rich, saturated colors in Blood and Black Lace, what other elements of the film do you see passed down to the giallo movies that followed it?

James: The technical aspects of Blood and Black Lace are the easiest to spot in the gaillo films that followed. Dizzying cinematography, off kilter camera angles, bizarre framing, and violent close ups are used almost universally by other gaillo filmmakers, though few apply the surreal art house flair so effectively as Bava and Argento. I suspect Bava’s art house tendencies are also the reason for the film’s disorienting, somewhat disjointed murder mystery, another element I’ve seen in a genre that focuses more on style than plot and character development. Blood and Black Lace‘s lurid mix of eroticism and horror has also influenced countless films in and outside of the gaillo genre, the paranoia surrounding a masked killer preying on beautiful women being a recurring theme in gaillo and slasher/splatter movies of the 70s and 80s.

Lagniappe

Brandon: The one thing I’m surprised we didn’t touch on yet was the music in the film. Although the stylistic violence, the mentions of cocaine abuse, and the intrigue of the murder investigations suggest a morbid affair, the score relies on a very swanky brand of lounge music that makes the movie feel a lot goofier than it would look on paper. The disparity between the swanky score & the severity of the plot is apparent from the get-go, with the actors/characters being introduced in the opening credits as if they’re starring in a particularly violent 60s TV show about police investigations instead of a proto-slasher art film. It eventually fades into some more mood-appropriate chamber music late in the film, but the generally lighthearted nature of the Blood and Black Lace‘s soundtrack is just as strange of a detail as its brutal-for-its-era violence or Bava’s penchant for saturated colors in his lighting.

Britnee: Blood and Black Lace is really all about the visuals. Ingenious camera work and the innovative use of vivid colors steal the show and outshine all other aspects of the film. The plot isn’t horrible by any means, but it’s definitely not the backbone of this movie. Actually, I enjoyed the weak plot because it draws more attention to the film’s groundbreaking visual elements, and this serves as a reminder that there’s more to a film than just its storyline. Kudos to Bava for being brave and thinking outside of the box.

James: Considering that Blood and Black Lace was released in 1964, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to call the movie groundbreaking. The way the film focuses more on the gruesome killings than the characters and its unsettling erotic violence must have shocked audiences in the 60s, but it set the precedent for the next 20 years of horror films (at least). I was really drawn to Bava’s mixture of art house theatrics and lowbrow subject matter and admire his technical chops and over the top stylistic tendencies. Blood and Black Lace was a great introduction to an influential director, and I can’t wait to delve deeper into Bava’s filmography.

Upcoming Movie of the Months
May: Brandon presents Crimes of Passion (1984)
June: James presents Blow Out (1981)

Ingmar Bergman & the Silence of God

March 30, 2015September 15, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

In our conversation about March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, James pointed out that the film’s central struggle with faith in God & acceptance of death would over time become a recurring theme for its director, Ingmar Bergman. He said the film “tackles one of the deepest and most disturbing questions of existence: Why, in the face of so much evil, does God remain silent? The Silence of God is a theme Bergman would explore in later films like Through a Glass Darkly and Cries & Whispers but in those films he found more nuanced ways to get his message across. In The Seventh Seal, by contrast, Bergman strips away everything in the story that doesn’t embellish the allegory, making it feel almost like a sermon. And as with most sermons, the effect the film has on you depends greatly on if you are on board with its message.” Although James is right that The Seventh Seal does have the feeling of a sermon in the conviction of its central message, it’s somewhat strange that such an assertive message would be a question: Why does God remain silent? The questioning of one’s faith is such an uneasy, intangible theme that it’s a peculiar one to repetitively, emphatically broadcast from a cinematic pulpit.

It turns out that Bergman was so vocal about the question of faith & God’s silence because it was a struggle he experienced personally over the course of his young life. Raised as the son of a Lutheran minister (who at one time served as chaplain to the King of Sweden), religious faith was exceedingly important to Bergman’s upbringing. As he grew into his own, he gradually shed the piety of his youth, but it was a troubled transition. As religious discussion was a significant aspect of his upbringing, due to his father’s profession, Bergman also openly & frequently discussed his own questioning & eventual disregard of his faith in his own profession: filmmaking. The themes of God’s silence in the face of intense suffering and the indifference of death were repeated in his work long after The Seventh Seal. The most thorough exploration of this theme, however, came very soon after in what is commonly known as his Trilogy of Faith.

The unlikely trio of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence weren’t initially conceived as a spiritual trilogy, but as they were released consecutively and each share a similar philosophical exploration of God’s absence, even Bergman himself later conceded their significance as a set. As James already explained, his modes of religious exploration would become subtler in these post-Seventh Seal efforts, but not by much. They are still fairly straight-forward in their intent, just more abstract in their tactics. Bergman’s particular brand of religious self-doubt still functioned as honest, agnostic sermons in the Trilogy of Faith, but the question became even more hurtful and muddled as the implications of its consequences became more widespread.

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Although Bergman’s message may have been more understated in his Trilogy of Faith films than in The Seventh Seal, all films in the trio do share the Movie of the Month’s compact, intentionally artificial staging. Working with small casts & spatially limited settings, Bergman gives his explorations of religious doubt the figurative severity of a staged play, where images & dialogue feel grandly symbolic due to their isolation. Through a Glass Darkly, my personal favorite in the trilogy, is the most constricted of all, limiting the entire physical scope of the film to the interactions of four family members retreating on a small island. One character even refers to the intensity of this isolation (as well as a larger, less tangible sense of confinement) directly, saying, “I wonder if everybody feels caged in. You in your cage. I in mine. Each in his own little cube. Everybody.” Besides the caged-in feeling, the religious musings, and inclusion of Max Von Sydow, the movie also depicts a staged play within the film, just as The Seventh Seal noted its own artificiality by including the traveling performances of Jof & Mia.

The main difference between the two films is that Jof & Mia’s familial love were shown as a form of Earthly divinity, an admirable way to confront life & death. In Through a Glass Darkly, familial love is also divine, but in a decidedly twisted way that suggests that incest can “burst reality open” and create a direct path to God. Indeed, God does make an appearance of sorts in the film, but his presence is even more unsatisfying that his silence. He appears as a grotesque display that calls into question his very existence and the division of reality & divinity as well as anxiety-caused mania & good mental health. If the Trilogy of Faith is Bergman shouting a message of self-doubt from a cinematic pulpit, Through a Glass Darkly is the best on-film representation of that doubt, as it leaves so many questions intentionally unanswered.

Winter Light (1962)

Speaking of pulpits, Winter Light begins & ends with sermons in the church of a seemingly desolate community. If Bergman’s cinematic explorations of his religious doubt are to be understood as a sort of therapy in which he sheds the baggage of his son of a preacher upbringing on film, you can’t get much closer to a direct statement than Winter Light. Hell, this sample prayer for the film asks the questions about as directly as you can: “God, why have you created me so eternally dissatisfied? So frightened so bitter? Why must I realize how wretched I am? Why must I suffer so hellishly for my insignificance?” In the face of these questions God, of course, remains silent. Winter Light is the only film in the trilogy that directly references the phrase “God’s silence” and it’s that blunt attitude that makes it so arresting.

The insular nature of the small community, the Max Von Sydow role, and the philosophical fretting all connect Winter Light with The Seventh Seal & Through a Glass Darkly, but it’s the staged performance within the film that distinguishes it. The subversion here is that the staged performance is the protagonist pastor’s sermons. The rituals of performing his duties as pastor have become an empty performance to the protagonist, who has become removed from his closeness to God. When patrons ask him to quell their own concerns of faith, he only reinforces them, saying that the complete absence of God makes more sense than his existence because man’s cruelty would need no explanation. There’s a directness to these meditations that are somewhat obfuscated in Bergman’s other cinematic questions of faith, as reflected in an extensive scene where a character reads a letter directly into the camera, making intense eye contact with the viewer as she speaks. We can also feel Bergman’s gaze from the other side of the camera through much of the film, as if he was speaking directly to us about his doubts and his eventual agnosticism. This directness is almost entirely absent in the final, most elusive film in the Trilogy of Faith, The Silence.

The Silence (1963)

The most intentionally obfuscated title in the trilogy, The Silence feels like Bergman finally letting go of his nervous handwringing over shedding his faith in God and breaking free to explore the questions raised by the consequences of that divine absence: If there is no God, then what is the point of morality? In fact, what is the point of anything? Stripping the dialogue & setting down to a barebones production, The Silence, of course, raises these questions with no intent to answer them. It’s tempting to read into the film’s hotel setting as a metaphor for our temporary stay in the world or a mother’s indifference toward her son as a metaphor for God’s silence or the two sisters’ clashing personalities as representative of different basic human attributes, like youth & old age or piousness & sensuality, but it’s unclear specifically what Bergman meant to say through these individual elements or if he had anything specific to say at all.

In Through a Glass Darkly, the staged play within the film resulted in the uncomfortable unearthing of a familial conflict between a father & his children. In Winter Light, the staged play was a pastor treating his sermons like a pointless ritual, the words having lost their meaning, which in a way was Bergman himself unearthing a familial conflict with his own father. In The Silence, a central character goes to see a staged play as well, but is distracted by a couple having public sex in the theater seats. The meaning of the play takes a backseat role to a completely different kind of performance, one concerned with more immediate, bodily pleasures. Although Bergman had explored the self-doubt of faith before in The Seventh Seal and he would again in titles like Cries & Whispers, the Trilogy of Faith feels like he is not only shedding the importance of religious faith in his personal life, but also in his work. At first he struggles with big, philosophical questions about God & family, but by the time he reached The Silence it felt like he had broken free of those concerns. They were no longer his sole mental occupation, but rather a doorway that opened him up to other big questions, liked the ones asked about personal identity in the brilliantly strange Persona. Freed from the weight of religious fretting, Bergman was able to expand the scope of his films exponentially, but it took many titles released over several decades to get there and the work he put in to achieve that freedom was in compelling in its own right, including some of most accomplished films of his career, like Through a Glass Darkly and The Seventh Seal.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, visit our Swampchat discussion of the film, and explorations of its thematic similarities with Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and its surprising differences with Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Play the Battlefield Earth (2000) Drinking Game

March 28, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 is exact kind of film that’s benefited by a drinking game. A visually repulsive, verbally repetitive sci-fi box office bomb, it’s a movie that plays best with a rowdy crowd at the end of a drunken night. The film’s overlong, mindless action gets to be a bore without a talkative midnight movie crew to fill in the empty space, but every moment John Travolta’s hideous mouth is moving is a blessing. One not-Travolta character notes early in the film, “They told me this planet was ugly, but this has got to be one of the ugliest crapholes in the universe.” The movie itself is undeniably one of the ugliest crapholes in the universe, sharing a similar Burning-Man-in-space vibe with its temporal peer Ghosts of Mars, but that’s only part of the draw for camp-hungry audiences. It’s the absurd repetition of nonsensical, pseudo futuristic buzzwords that make the film a fun watch and a great candidate for a drinking game.

The Three Drinking Prompts

1. Drink every time a character says “leverage”. Leverage is more or less the theme of the film, so I honestly expected this one prompt to be more than enough. It turns out, however, that a lot of the “leverage” in Battlefield Earth is visually represented and it takes a little while before the verbal “leverage”s start popping up. Just so you don’t get bored (or worse yet, sober!) before the leverage ball gets rolling, you’re going to need a couple more prompts.

2. Drink every time a character says “man-animal”. Despite my expectations, this prompt is twice as effective as “leverage”, racking up over two dozen instances in just two hours. Of all the inane, repetitive phrases in the film, “man-animal” is both the most inane and the most repetitive, which is no small feat. So, be careful with this one, ya lowly man-animals.

3. Choose your own prompt. Abiding by the Rule of Three, it would feel wrong to not provide players a final prompt, but there’s just so much empty, pseudo futuristic jargon to choose from that I’m going to leave the choice up to you. So choose your third prompt from this list of Battlefield Earth-approved gibberish: “kerbango”, “demon”, “Greener”, “Psychlo”, “Clinko”, “cycles”, “credits”, “pictocameras”, “crap”, “knowledge machines”, “rat-brain”, “planetship”, “mine the gold”, “breath gas”, “gas drone”, “piece of cake”, and “blow the dome”. All terms listed should be more or less effective, but if I had to make a recommendation I’d go with “rat-brain”. It just pairs so well with “man-animal” . . . and cheap beer.

A Warning: Choosing to make your third prompt either unnecessary Dutch camera angles or unnecessary barn door camera wipes may result in alcohol poisoning. There’s just too many of both for it to be a healthy choice.

As always, play safe, ya rat-brained man-animals! And go get yourselves some leverage.

-Brandon Ledet

Bergman vs. Corman: Death vs. The Red Death

March 17, 2015September 15, 2015 / swampflix / 2 Comments

In our Swampchat discussion of March’s Movie of the Month, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, I pointed out how great of a one-two punch the movie was in combination with February’s Movie of the Month, Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death. As a double feature, the two movies feed off each other well thematically, especially in their contemplation of an uncaring, inevitable Death. Even Roger Corman himself saw the similarities in the films’ subject matter, which lead to him delaying the production of Masque for years. According to Wikipedia, he was quoted as saying, “I kept moving The Masque of the Red Death back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind.” The films do have a similar doom & gloom aesthetic in their personifications of Death in the time of a plague, but the differences that ultimately make their connection “artificial” are very much fundamental in nature. The Seventh Seal and The Masque of the Red Death are connected by a plague and by Death’s portrayal as a living character, but both Death’s personality and the social effect of a plague on its suffering population are strikingly different in the two films.

Both The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death rightfully portray Death as an inevitability, but the personality traits they assign him are almost directly oppositional. In The Seventh Seal, Death allows himself to be amused. The movie’s iconic chess match, while a stay of execution for Antonius Black, is nothing more than a diversion, a light entertainment for Death. Death later continues his playful bemusement with Antonius by posing as a priest and taking his confession. Death has a sly sense of humor in this exchange, albeit one with a morbid result. In Corman’s Masque, The Red Death wouldn’t be caught alive participating in such tomfoolery. The Red Death is very much a professional in his duties, carrying the impartial poise of a courtroom judge in his interactions with Prince Prospero. The only time he allows himself to react to Prospero’s schemes is when the prince begs mercy for the captive Francesca and even then his reaction is only mild surprise.

The plagues that accompany Death & The Red Death are more or less interchangeable, but there’s an essential difference in Corman & Bergman’s interpretations of the victims’ reactions to the hardship. In both films the plagues are met (at least by some) with a form of naïve celebration, a kind of a party while the ship goes down. In The Masque of the Red Death, this party is a disgusting display, a vilification of opulence. Wealthy party guests assume they are above The Red Death’s inevitability merely by the merit of their breed & fortune. Considering themselves invincible, they shut the poor out of the gates of Prospero’s mansion and party their final hours away in excess. Their thirst for a good time while others suffer is a vile impulse that Corman represents disapprovingly and Vincent Price skillfully amplifies with gusto. As James first said in our Swampchat on The Seventh Seal (and which I later explored in my comparison of the film to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), the central couple “Jof and Mia who, while maybe naïve, fully embrace life, family, and art despite the dread and despair that surrounds them. As Jof, Mia, and Mikael are the only characters to survive the film, I think Bergman is trying to say that the only way to conquer the fear of death is to truly embrace life, which makes the film, in my eyes, an ultimately uplifting one.” In Bergman’s viewpoint, celebration in the time of Death is a human ideal. While the celebration in Masque is a hateful sin, the one in The Seventh Seal is a life-saving virtue. Bergman even pushes the idea further by having Jof receive visions from beyond this mortal realm. In some ways his naïve celebration of life is downright divine.

The surprising thing about the differences between Death & The Red Death is that they’re somewhat counterintuitive. As a superficial assumption I would think that The Seventh Seal, a black & white art house drama from Ingmar Bergman, would have been the film that portrayed Death as a somber executioner and the party that surrounds him a crime against man. I would also expect that The Masque of the Red Death, a Vincent Price horror film helmed by camp legend Roger Corman, would be the film that portrayed Death as a playful prankster and the celebration of life that surrounds him a moral asset. Instead, the two films find their respective art house pensiveness & over-the-top camp in other characters & plot devices, the trivial elements that bind them as a pair used for entirely different ends. Although their connection is primarily artificial, our back-to-back discussions of The Seventh Seal & The Masque of the Red Death will forever link them in my mind anyway, both for the ways they are superficially the same and in the considerable ways they differ on a fundamental level.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, visit our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s exploration of its thematic similarities with Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

-Brandon Ledet

Counterpoint: In Defense of Honeymoon (2014)

March 16, 2015March 16, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Reading over James’ review of last year’s Honeymoon, I was a little surprised by how dismissive it was. Sure, Honeymoon was far from the most original horror film ever made, but as a low-budget creep-out I found it to be fairly effective. James started his review by comparing the film to how he would imagine an arranged marriage: “Forced into it, you look for the positives and hold out hope that it might end up working out, only to end up completely disappointed.” There are a few reasons I find that statement unfair. For one thing the film was very much low-profile, so it’s hard to imagine anyone being “forced into it.” I’m more interested, however, in exactly why the film left him disappointed: the fact that he had seen the same story told before.

Fans of horror should be more than familiar with a little repetition. Themes, images, music cues, and plot structures are copied so liberally in horror that it has one of the longest lists of subgenres out there (including the likes of “slashers”, “creature features”, “giallo” and so on), each complete with its own genre-trappings & clichés common to nearly every film under its umbrella. James’ central disappointment with Honeymoon seemed to be that the film did not surprise him on a plot level. When I had previously written about the film on this site, I compared its my-wife-is-not-my-wife story to both Slither and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It didn’t especially bother me that I had seen similar (and admittedly more surprising) versions of Honeymoon before, because all three films were so stylistically diverse. One thing I particularly liked about Honeymoon was how understated the central bodily invasion was in comparison to the fever pitch ridiculousness of Slither and the widespread panic of Body Snatchers. Honeymoon is a story we’ve seen told before, sure, but rarely this intimately or realistically, with the victim forgetting to batter French toast or awkwardly saying “take a sleep” instead of “take a nap” as the early signs that something is horribly wrong.

James’ secondary complaint was that “the first third of Honeymoon is almost entirely the two [newlywed protagonists] fawning, staring longingly into each other’s eyes, and discussing their future. It is as tedious as it sounds.” I believe the sickening tedium of young love was an intentional effect here, especially considering that the film was set so early in a marriage instead of at a later stage. Throughout the early flirtations in the film it’s revealed that the young husband doesn’t really know his new bride well at all. He’s surprised by her boating abilities, stories from her past involving the place they’re vacationing, and her opposition to having children. Early in the film he even asks her “Who are you?” in a playful way. Later, after the life-altering/body-snatching event in the woods, he again asks “Who are you?” with a much more terrifying intent. There’s also a connection to the way he playfully threatens to tie her up in bed while they’re flirting and the way he forcefully ties her up in the scene James describes as “a flurry of gore that had the other people I was watching it with cover their eyes”. I think a lot of the point of Honeymoon was that although the couple was in the sickeningly sweet PDA part of their relationship at the beginning of the film, the marriage was already troubled. Jealousy, distrust, and a general lack of knowledge of each other were already major problems for the couple before that fateful meeting in the woods. When James notes that late in the film “Paul, terrified, starts to believe Bea is no longer the person he married,” he’s right, but I’m not sure Paul ever had a firm grasp of who it was he married in the first place, which is a scary thought with or without the gorey, supernatural context.

Honeymoon’s resolution may be “predictable”, but I disagree that the film that ramps up to it is “underwhelming”. It’s more that it’s a low-key, intimate take on an old story, one with new things to say about the ways young love can be scary. One of the best things about horror as a genre is the way old tropes can be reconfigured into new ideas and I think Honeymoon does just that in an admirable way, even if it’s not a home run. To be fair, I’m making a somewhat superficial distinction here between the movie being “not great” or “pretty good, actually”, but I feel it’s an important distinction all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Bergman’s Image of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

March 11, 2015September 15, 2015 / swampflix / 7 Comments

In our Swampchat discussion about Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal last week, James pointed out that “the film is now remembered mostly for its historical significance and that iconic image of Death, parodied in movies like Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Last Action Hero, rather than its substance.” It’s no wonder to me why. There’s more than one way to be a cinephile after all. Some folks gravitate toward the artier side of cinema, preferring to grapple with life’s big questions about art and morality and death every time they pop in a movie. Others are more escapist in their tastes, seeking out mindless films that that are less confrontational & more purely entertaining in both story & style. I would like to think that most people are somewhere in the middle, like a cinematic version of a Kinsey scale, appreciating both the heftiest art & the trashiest pleasures in varied amounts. Folks who are watching Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey aren’t necessarily interested in confronting the nature of death & “The Silence of God” in those 90min, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t appreciate a reference to a more “important” film that does. In fact, acknowledging the existence of an art house classic in a dumb, time-traveling stoner comedy can only enhance the film’s gleeful stupidity by way of comparison.

As a sequel to a deliberately lowbrow buddy comedy, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey could have easily been an uninspired retread. Instead of taking the expected step of having the time-traveling goofballs collecting historical figures to pass a college course (as opposed to the high school course they pass in the first one), Bogus Journey readjusts the franchise’s plot to make room for “fully full-on evil” robot doppelgangers, space aliens, God, Satan, and the rock band Primus. Mixing practical effects & overreaching set design with then-impressive CGI, the film aims to achieve a lot more than sequels to hit comedies generally do. One of the film’s most impressive ambitions of all is its eagerness to interact with Bergman’s daunting The Seventh Seal.

On the surface, Bogus Journey & The Seventh Seal are unlikely bedmates. One is set in the future; the other in the past. One features deviously evil robots as its antagonists; the other an indifferent Death. One is a stoner comedy about winning over bodacious babes; the other art house cinema that tackles “The Silence of God”. However, the two films share an oddly similar moral. As James stated in our conversation about The Seventh Seal’s central couple, “Jof and Mia who, while maybe naïve, fully embrace life, family, and art despite the dread and despair that surrounds them. As Jof, Mia, and Mikael are the only characters to survive the film, I think Bergman is trying to say that the only way to conquer the fear of death is to truly embrace life, which makes the film, in my eyes, an ultimately uplifting one.” If Jof & Mia are naïve, Bill & Ted are barely mentally functional. They are constantly cheerful (even while being murdered) and their central message of “Be excellent to each other” is not at all dissimilar to how Jof & Mia escape The Seventh Seal unharmed. I’m not sure if Ingmar Bergman would have seen or enjoyed Bogus Journey before he died but if he did I would hope he would at least appreciate the film’s central philosophy.

That’s not to say that Bogus Journey gets everything right about The Seventh Seal. In Bergman’s classic Death only participates in the film’s iconic chess match as a diversion, an amusement that allows the protagonist Antonius Black to delay his inevitable fate. In Bogus Journey, Bill & Ted challenge Death as the ultimate wager, the fate of their souls hanging in the balance. The gag involving Death losing to the boys in Battleship, Clue, electric football, and Twister is pretty damn hilarious, but does sort of miss the point of the chess match in The Seventh Seal entirely. Bill & Ted also visit both Heaven & Hell in the film, which I’m not sure are places that exist in The Seventh Seal’s worldview and Death takes more of the position of the butt of jokes than the menacing, but playful figure he is in Bergman’s film. When the boys give Death a wedgie and exclaim “I can’t believe we just melvined Death!” it’s a far cry from the character’s opposing presence in The Seventh Seal. That’s okay, though. It is a dumb comedy after all.

Attempts at defining the meaning of life and the nature of death couldn’t be more varied than they are in The Seventh Seal and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. What’s more interesting than their differences, though, is the common moral they share, namely that we enjoy this good thing before it’s gone and above all else we should “be excellent to each other.” Whether you want that message packaged in a somber, black & white art film or an endearingly idiotic stoner comedy can vary depending on taste & mood. Either way, it’s an admirable message all the same and it’s awesome that Bogus Journey used a reference to Bergman’s character design for Death (which I earlier described as “somewhere between a mime & a wizard”) to bridge the gap between those two aesthetics.

For more of March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, visit last week’s Swampchat on the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Pop Music Cinema & That Thing You Do! (1996)

March 10, 2015March 29, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

After spilling what most likely already amounts to way too much ink on pro wrestling movies, we here at Swampflix decided to collect all of our reviews & articles about the “sport” on a single page titled Wrestling Cinema. As time has gone on it’s become apparent that we have more than wrestling on our minds. We also like movies about pop music. From Björk to ABBA to KISS, movies about or featuring musicians are apparently a source of fascination for us, so we’re starting a Pop Music Cinema page to give those movies their own home as well. To commemorate the birth of our Pop Music Cinema page, I’d like to revisit one of the most delightful examples of the genre I can remember: 1996’s That Thing You Do!

The first feature film written & directed by America’s goofy uncle, Tom Hanks, That Thing You Do! is remarkable both in its effortless charm and in its perceptive mimicry & satirization of pop music clichés. The only film that’s maybe covered more pop music ground in the twenty years since its release is 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The difference is that Walk Hard, while gust-bustingly funny, is poking fun at the pop music biopic & all of its genre-trappings while That Thing You Do! proudly wears the costume of the pop music biopic, playing some jokes at its expense, but mostly honoring it through homage. It toes a fine line between honoring & making fun, between nostalgia & derision, between parody & the real thing. Tom Hanks wrote & executed a very funny, perceptive script with his first feature, something that he failed to do a second time with his back-to-college midlife crisis comedy Larry Crowne just five years later.

Part of what makes That Thing You Do! work so well is its succinct accuracy. Framed as the biopic of a single American, Beatles-imitating one hit wonder group, the story is more the biopic of every American, Beatles-imitating one hit wonder group. It follows the entire birth, rise, and fall life-cycle of the fictional group The (one hit) Wonders. The film opens with the band writing their signature song & trying to agree on a name for their group. They then win a local talent show that leads to a steady gig at a restaurant near the airport where their fan base swells to the point where they decide it’s time to cut a record. An upstart manager takes an interest in the band, gets their song played on the radio, and books touring gigs that eventually lead to them losing touch with the friends, families, and lovers they leave behind in their small town. The band bombs their first major concert, but lands an incredible record deal anyway and begin to tour with much bigger acts, groups they’ve idolized for years. While on tour their hit song climbs the Billboard charts in the inevitable climbing-the-Billboard-charts montage. They land opportunities to appear in movies & television until their popularity reaches a breaking point where their egos are far too oversized for the band to continue. They then dissolve & separate, the band of their dreams now a pleasant, but distant memory as they assume new identities as studio musicians & has-beens. As Tom Hanks himself says in the film, “It’s a very common tale.”

As cynical of a take on pop music as a business as all that sounds, the film is still remarkably celebratory. There’s an infectious nostalgia for the mic’d handclaps, groovy wardrobes, and shoddy Gidget movies of yesteryear. The hit song at center of the film is legitimately enjoyable, which is a great advantage since it plays at least a dozen times throughout the runtime- the same way you’d expect to hear a hit song repetitively on the radio. The cast (which includes Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, Liv Tyler, Giovani Ribisi and a brief early glimpse of Bryan Cranston) is thoroughly likeable. Even Steve Zahn, who can grate on me in large doses, is nothing but charming as the world’s only lead guitarist who can’t seem to get laid. His brand of smart-ass comedy is the funniest it’s ever been; the way he sells lines like “A man in a really nice camper wants to put our songs on the radio!” are among the best moments of his entire career. It’s as if the entire cast and, by extension, the film itself borrowed Tom Hanks’ likeability as if it were a pair of shoes. The main protagonist, played by Tom Everett Scoott, borrowed so much that he even eerily looks like he could be Hanks’ offspring.

That Thing You Do!‘s central message seems to be encapsulated in the line “Ain’t no way to keep a band together. Bands come and go.” It’s smart to recognize, however, that when a band is in full glory it can be a magical thing. The ecstatic look on girls’ faces as The Wonders play on television, the excitement musicians feel when meeting their idols & living their dreams, and the inevitably sappy true-love conclusion to the story all make the fleeting, somewhat meaningless success of a pop group seem like the most important thing in the world. That Thing You Do! showed me that you can be critical of how a thing works on a fundamental level while still finding a deep appreciation for its benefits. It also taught me that Tom Hanks can be terrifying when he’s acting mean. It’s not the most important film about pop music ever made, but it is an immensely enjoyable one & it’s one that has a lot to say about what the genre means as an art form. I’m sure as time goes on that we’ll cover many films that have a lot to say about the genre as well. The nature of pop music seems to be be an endlessly fascinating subject for both folks behind the camera and the rest of us here in the audience.

-Brandon Ledet

The Magic, Mystique, and Merchandising of KISS on Film

March 10, 2015March 29, 2015 / swampflix / 5 Comments

One thing is for certain in regards to the rock band KISS: they’re far better businessmen than they are musicians. That’s not to say they’re particularly bad musicians or they don’t have at least a few great pop tunes (I’m personally partial to “Love Gun”); it’s more of a testament to how great they are at selling themselves as a product. The range of KISS merchandise is staggering. In addition to standard rock n’ roll commodities like t-shirts & guitar picks, the band sells everything from beach towels & throw pillows to baseballs, oven mitts, garden gnomes, pinball machines and air fresheners featuring their likeness. This dedication to branding not only made relatively harmless songs about partying seem downright demonic to unsuspecting parents in the 70s, it’s also given the band a strange longevity in the pop culture landscape. No matter how ugly KISS are (both morally & physically) without their makeup or how boring they are without the glam rock showmanship covering up their underlying mundanity, their flare for merchandising makes them an ever-present powerhouse. Their two forays into feature films, 1999’s Detroit Rock City & 1978’s KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, are merely an extension of that keen, pragmatic business sense. KISS on film is not all that much different than KISS on lunchboxes or KISS on lava lamps, all things considered.

The 1999 film Detroit Rock City was my first major exposure to both KISS as a band and KISS as a product. As a young teen misanthrope with an unfortunate affinity for nu metal (it was a different time, folks) I was firmly in the film’s target demographic. Conceived & filmed around the same time as That 70s Show, Detroit Rock City works with a very similar visual language: glorifying the era’s outsider teen ennui while also nostalgically celebrating its more commercial curiosities like vintage K-Mart fashion & disco. I identified with the film pretty deeply at the time. In what basically amounts to a standard stoner comedy/road trip movie, four members of a KISS cover band embark on individual journeys to score tickets to their favorite group’s show in the KISS mecca of Detroit. The characters aren’t nearly as likeable as I remembered (their fondness for the word “fag” is definitely a turn-off), but it’s easy to see what drew teen me to the film. Along their journey to The Concert of Their Lives, the four bumbling fools satisfy typical rebellious teen urges like getting laid, smoking weed, and telling their parents to fuck off. The stoner gags are fairly effective as far as those things go and there are several good turns from a few actors of note. A young Edward Furlong sells menacing teen angst uncomfortably well. Natasha Lyonne is beyond fabulous as a party-hungry disco queen. Character actress Lin Shaye steals the show as an obnoxiously uptight & overeager Christian mother. There’s a lot to love about Detroit Rock City even when the four main characters aren’t themselves loveable.

One thing Detroit Rock City does very well is sell the legend of KISS. Lin Shaye’s overprotective mother leads a conservative protest group called Mothers Against the Music of KISS. She’s the type that proclaims rock n’ roll to be “The Devil’s Music” and has no doubt that KISS is Satan’s favorite group among the worst of the worst. She genuinely, foolishly believes the band’s name to be a sly acronym for “Knights in Satan’s Service”. This attitude, of course, makes the band all the more attractive to her teenage son, who worships KISS in his every waking moment. In addition to the KISS cover band he drums for, the protagonist Jam is the exact kind of kid who collects KISS belt buckles, posters, drumsticks, and so on (behind his mother’s back, of course). The film really does make the band feel like a supernatural phenomenon, like the greatest thing that has ever happened to popular music or maybe even to modern society as a whole. KISS is not just a band to the four main characters; it’s an identity. It’s a personal rebellion that gives them a sense of purpose & sets them apart from straight-laced normals who can’t get it through their thick skulls that “disco sucks!” Like all false idols, no band could ever live up to that level of importance & mystique, so the movie smartly limits the amount of screen time KISS gets in a film designed to constantly remind you about how awesome they are. Detroit Rock City’s killer 70s soundtrack is era-defining, including cuts from The Runaways, T. Rex, Thin Lizzy, Edgar Winter, Black Sabbath, David Bowie and The Ramones. KISS does make up nearly half of the soundtrack, but they’re never allowed to overpower it. As much praise as the band receives during the film’s 90min runtime, they only physically appear at the climactic concert in Detroit, which is the exact opposite of other band-worship films like, say, ABBA: The Movie. It’s an effective tactic, as it affords the band a mysterious, magical charisma.

In 1978’s made-for-TV feature KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, the band’s charisma is literally magical. During the opening credits KISS soars through the air, playing loud rock music over footage of amusement park rides. They then fade to the background during a fairly dull stretch of rising action involving a mad scientist who narrow-mindedly sets his sights on dominating an amusement park instead of the world at large. When the band returns it’s in glorious fashion: they descend from space, shooting laser beams from their eyes and breathing fire while lightning dances around them. Apparently KISS can read minds, burst through walls, roar like lions, and master martial arts maneuvers that would make Batman envious. In KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, the band members aren’t merely Peter, Paul, Gene and Ace. They’re Cat Man, Star Child, Space Ace and The Demon. Although the mad scientist plot starts slowly, it pays off by affording the magical foursome the opportunity to fight opponents like android werewolves and Frankenstein’s monster. It also allows for strange details like a not-so-subtle Star Wars nod in some androids’ light-up swords and strange magical talismans that provides the band their special powers.

After seeing how extensively KISS was worshiped by their fans (or “The KISS Army”, if you will) in Detroit Rock City it’s satisfying to see them act as literal deities in Phantom of the Park. The only problem is that it’s hard to imagine that The KISS Army would have enjoyed the film at all, because it not only tries to appease them, but also tries to win over their parents. Scenes showing the band’s gentler side in heart-felt ballads, gags about an animatronic barber shop quartet, and an onslaught of corny one-liners all do a huge disservice to the band’s mystique. Only “The Demon” Gene comes out unscathed & still menacing while the rest of his bandmates are portrayed as truly good dudes under all that scary makeup. Personally, as a fan of cheese & schlock, I enjoyed how awful & miscalculated the humor was in Phantom of the Park. It’s just hard to imagine the bong water-soaked, KISS worshiping teens of Detroit Rock City feeling the same way, considering that the band’s demonic powers are used for good instead of party-minded chaos in the film. I imagine the band’s younger fans were over the moon for Phantom of the Park; I just can’t say the same about stoner teens.

Even for those who aren’t fans of KISS’s music, both Detroit Rock City and KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park are surprisingly watchable. It’s fascinating to an outsider how an okay-at-best party band branded themselves through mysterious lore and on-stage theatrics as fire-breathing, laser-shooting gods of rock n’ roll. As a stoner comedy, Detroit Rock City is an amusing glimpse into the late 90s’ nostalgic fascination with 70s cool. As a family-friendly, made-for-TV creature feature about robot werewolves and a band from outer space, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is entertaining enough as how-was-this-even-made shlock. Together they help paint a picture of a rock group that was incredibly adept at brand-awareness, self-lore, and merchandising. KISS may not be the greatest musical act on record or on film, but they might very well be the best act on golf club covers, lip balms, snow globes and Christmas ornaments. That’s certainly a feat within itself.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

Lists & Articles

A Newcomer’s Guide to the Fast & Furious Franchise

Marabunta Cinema: Eight Feature Films & Six Television Episodes about Killer Ants

Movie of the Month: Blood and Black Lace (1964)

Ingmar Bergman & the Silence of God

How to Play the Battlefield Earth (2000) Drinking Game

Bergman vs. Corman: Death vs. The Red Death

Counterpoint: In Defense of Honeymoon (2014)

Bergman’s Image of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Pop Music Cinema & That Thing You Do! (1996)

The Magic, Mystique, and Merchandising of KISS on Film