Reviews

Ingrid Goes West (2017)

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Anyone who engages with some form of social media is aware by now that there is a massive gulf between the personae we present online and our True Selves. By skewering LA hipsters who cultivate online celebrity through carefully curated Instagram profiles, the dark comedy Ingrid Goes West isn’t necessarily revealing anything its audience isn’t already aware of. The titular protagonist of that work, however, is a relatively fresh look at how that artificial cultivation of an online Personal Brand affects its consumers, specifically those suffering from mental illness. Ingrid Thorburn, miserably brought to life by Aubrey Plaza, is a character as worthy of study as Robert DeNiro’s Rupert Pupkin or Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates. In a lot of ways, Ingrid Goes West falls short of being worthy of that performance, which updates the classic-tragic Lead Role Psychopath for the online stalker era in both a darkly humorous & incredibly tense way. The story that forms around Plaza’s turn as Thorburn isn’t afforded nearly as much nuance as the character herself, but her onscreen presence is alone enough to justify giving the movie a look.

Ingrid Thorburn begins her tragic saga in isolation, with only the cold glow of her smartphone holding her hand through a recent loss & the raw emotional compulsions of an obvious chemical imbalance. She frantically scans Instagram profiles for a point of contact out there in the great social void, desperately hanging on for dear life to any kind word or signal of acknowledgement. Her obsessions with individual Online Personalities are intensely focused, requiring just as much meticulous planning for stalking & befriending as her targets afford selfies & squared-off photographs of avocado toast. Her obsession du jour in this particular episode is an LA socialite (Elizabeth Olsen) who’s so wrapped up in her online persona that she builds a profession around advertising products on her feed. It turns out that there’s a vulnerability to constantly updating your location & minute-to-minute activities online, not least of all that your online followers can become your literal followers “in real life.” The even bigger danger, though, is in having people interpret your online hyperbole as actual sincerity. There’s a huge difference between advertising that a breakfast spot sells The Best Avocado Toast In The World and telling another human being “You’re so funny. I love you so much. You’re amazing. You’re my favorite person I’ve ever met.” When you’re dealing with human emotions, especially ones as pronounced as Ingrid Thorburn’s, that kind of disconnect from sincerity & authenticity can be dangerously cruel, especially when your victim discovers you’re not really “friends.”

There are theoretically better versions of this same story where the thriller aspects are highlighted & Ingrid becomes a kind of social media assassin who drags her obsessions down to her level or where LA charlatans & phonies are comedically lampooned for being heartless demons. Instead, Ingrid Goes West floats halfway between those extremes in a noncommittal way. There’s some incisive criticism of Los Angeles Bohemia in subtle digs at its barely-concealed racism or the unspoken expense of its “rustic” mason jars & potted succulents lifestyle. Ingrid badly wants to be an avocado toast kind of girl, but she’s much more at home eating McDonald’s out of the bag; there’s a wealth class difference in that distinction. The movie’s much stronger in its intense thriller beats, however, drumming up more visible thirst in Ingrid’s eyes than Sofia Coppola even dared to conjure in her recent remake of The Beguiled. You’re never sure if Ingrid wants to eat, fuck, or Single White Female her obsessive targets and the movie’s strongest moments are in accentuating the delicate intensity of that unspoken desire. It will often diffuse the danger of her real world stalking with a comedic sing-along to K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life” or the charming presence of Straight Outta Compton‘s O’Shea Jackson Jr., who plays the world’s most patient man (& biggest Batman enthusiast). I’m not sure looking to Ingrid Goes West for insightful satire on cellphone addiction or the inauthenticity of social media posturing is ever nearly as satisfying as watching Ingrid Thorburn dangle from a thin thread while she tries to land herself a lifelong bestie as if she were shopping for clothes online. Aubrey Plaza does a fantastic job of making that precarious intensity a memorable, worthwhile viewing experience, but it is somewhat of a shame that the movie it supports couldn’t match that performance in its extremity or specificity.

-Brandon Ledet

Kuso (2017)

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How do you feel about the idea of watching Parliament Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton play a doctor who cures a patient of their fear of breasts by allowing a giant cockroach to crawl out of his ass & puke a milky bile all over their face? Your answer to that question should more or less establish your interest level in the gross-out horror comedy Kuso, in which that visual detail is just one minor curio in the larger freak show gestalt. The film swirling around that moment is packed with kinky sex involving hideous boils, plucked chickens that swim like fish, faces smeared in semen & shit, and psychedelic mixed media collage art depicting entire galaxies of tits & leaking anuses. It’s almost as if the script were written by SNL’s Stefon on an especially gnarly robo-trip. With his debut feature as a director, Steve Ellison (who produces music under the monikers Flying Lotus & Captain Murphy) has made a Pink Flamingos for the Adult Swim era, a shock value comedy that aims to disgust a generation of degenerates who’ve already Seen It All, as they’ve grown up with the internet. Most audiences will likely find that exercise pointless & spiritually hollow, but I admired Kuso both as a feature length prank with Looney Tunes sound effects and as a practical effects visual achievement horror show. As George Clinton’s puking mutant ass-roach indicates, this film is decidedly Not For Everyone, but I was personally amused.

The secret to what makes the frantic energy of Adult Swim staples like Tim & Eric and The Eric Andre Show even endurable is that episodes typically last only ten minutes at a time instead of comedy television’s half hour standard. Stretching out that same mania to a 90min feature has been a struggle for past attempts like Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, which are brilliantly entertaining in spurts, but tend to push attention spans to the limit at full length. Kuso is smart to break down its psychedelic freak show into a series of interconnected vignettes to preempt this audience fatigue, adopting the Everything Is Connected horror anthology formula of Southbound or Trick ‘r Treat. Set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles after a cataclysmic earthquake, the film details the sordid lives of the mutated survivors, who all sport hideous boils as trophies for their perseverance. This narrative is laid out by an opening freak-jazz spoken word performance from backpack rapper Busdriver, threatening to deliver a La La Land of the Damned style musical. The stories within that structure are populated by familiar comedic faces of the Adult Swim era: Anders Holm as a shit-sniffing school teacher, Tim Heidecker as a toilet-dwelling date rapist, Hannibal Burress as a transdimensional pothead monster. Like with Pink Flamingos, their individual stories are go-nowhere pranks that don’t amount to much more than the shock of seeing a nude Heidecker hump a lump of flesh that resembles the gaming consoles from eXistenZ or two young lovers share a semen-slathered kiss. However, the audacity & the consistency of tone within its overall sense of post-apocalyptic world-building amounts to something remarkable, if not just remarkably grotesque.

One major aspect of Kuso that’s likely to get overlooked in discussions of its more scatological interests is how refreshing it is that the film is conspicuously black. The grandnephew of John Coltrane and himself a producer of hip-hop beats, Ellison sets the rhythm of this psychedelic freak fest both to the frantic energy of improvisational jazz and to the laid-back stoner vibes of modern laptop rap. Although viewers may be horrified by the image of what crawls out of his ass, George Clinton is perfectly at home within this universe, bridging the gap between those two aesthetics & serving as the patron saint of Kuso‘s particular brand of psychedelic blackness. That perspective is always underrepresented on the horror landscape, but it’s even more rare with this subgenre of extreme, gross-out horror. Ellison maintains a great sense of humor throughout the work as well. In one scene Burress’s transdimensional pot beast responds to the criticism, “This is garbage,” with a flippant “Eat ass, this is art.” He has a point, too. The intricate collage animation & grotesque puppetry that support Kuso‘s freak show delicacies with a solid visual foundation suggest a kind of grand ambition that far outweighs any problems with pacing or flat comedic bits. Kuso feels like a 2010s echo of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in that way; it’s maybe not entirely successful, but it’s incredibly ambitious in the way it reaches to forge new art forms out of unapologetically black modes of expression.

If you’re only going to watch one transcendent gross-out horror this year, I still say make it the far more successful We Are the Flesh. Kuso‘s worth giving shot as an uglier, goofier follow-up, however, especially if the first sentence of this review hasn’t already sent you running. Luckily, for your disgust & convenience, both titles are currently streaming on Shudder.

-Brandon Ledet

eXistenZ (1999)

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As I proudly count Videodrome as one of my all-time favorite films, I have no excuse for how long I’ve put off watching its kissing cousin, eXistenZ. Like how all Cronenberg horrors are driven by unspoken, cerebral fear, maybe I was subconsciously worried about seeing one of my most loved works lessened in its cultural update from cable television moral outrage to video game paranoia. eXistenZ even opens with a murder executed through an organic firearm made of bone & teeth, which picks up right where the flesh gun assassination conclusion of Videodrome leaves off. I wasn’t at all disappointed by my experience with eXistenZ, however. The film didn’t tarnish my appreciation of earlier Cronenberg works like Videodrome, but rather enhanced them by providing better context for the director’s career at large. Not only does a Cronenberg spin on the video game paranoia explored in less-horrific titles like The Matrix & TRON have an instant appeal to it, but eXistenZ also serves as a great bridge between the cerebral body horror of the director’s early career and the cold philosophical comedies he’s been making since the mid-2000s.

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as a hotshot virtual reality game developer who’s workshopping her greatest work to date, eXistenZ. The focus group testing of the game is disrupted when an assassination attempt is made with the aforementioned bone gun, leaving the developer/artist vulnerably injured. A marketing nerd played by Jude Law then finds himself operating as a makeshift bodyguard, whisking the developer away to safety while a vaguely-defined They (a paranoid conspiracy theory combination of both anti-gamers & gaming corporations) chase the pair down. Reality blurs as the two new “friends” delve into multiple levels of games within games to ensure the safety of both eXistenZ and its creator. There are no TRON-like digital landscapes around to give away what is “reality” vs what is eXistenZ, so the movie mostly amounts to a colossal mind fuck of Cronenberg needling his audience into a paranoid questioning of the validity of every character & every story beat. His version of a virtual reality future is much grimier & more organic than most similarly-minded sci-fi, works that tend to vizualize their own futurescapes with crisp lines & sanitized spaces. Cronenberg’s horrific vision is not the reality presented by the gaming systems, “meta flesh game pods” that plug into players’ spines through an umbilical chord & a puckered asshole of an outlet, or “bio-port” in the movie’s parlance. The writhing game pods, which look like gigantic human ears with clitoral nobs, make technology itself to be a literal horror, which really essentializes the paranoia films like The Matrix & The 13th Floor labor to communicate.

It’s interesting that no character in eXistenZ ever once says the term “video game,” yet we know exactly what medium Cronenberg is targeting. The glowing flesh cell phones & casual acceptance of virtual reality as a commonplace technology suggest a distant future where video games are a long-obsolete artform, but not so distant that the anus-like bio-ports & umbilical chord connectors that make gaming possible are acceptable to everyone. eXistenZ gleefully taps into the sexual taboo of female on male penetration, lingering on moments when Jennifer Jason Leigh has to lube up & enter Jude Law’s bio-port for stabs of psychosexual unease. Cronenberg sets up a fictional work where ours is “the most pathetic level of reality,” but the biological technology necessary to transcend it is a source of bottomless horror. Much like with Videodrome, he uses that bodily unease to open the film to metacommentary on the value of his own art. While Videodrome explores the violent & sexual urges titillated by a shifting media landscape, eXistenZ focuses on the nature of artificial realities created in individual movies, calling into question what qualifies as “real.” Characters detach from their in-game personas to critique the quality of the dialogue they’re compelled to say & what value a scripted sex scene has on their characterization. eXistenZ feels like the beginning of Cronenberg coldly playing with philosophical humor in conspicuously artificial environments, an aesthetic that became full fledged by the time he made more recent titles like Cosmopolis & Maps to the Stars. The joy is in watching him achieve that aesthetic through the technology-paranoid body horror tools of his earliest classics before abandoning them entirely.

From the continuation of Videodrome ideology to its dream logic sci-fi mindfuckery to the surprise of seeing a large chunk of the Last Night cast reassembled for a gross-out horror, I was always going to be predisposed to enjoy eXistenZ. It felt almost as if I were destined or scripted to watch & enjoy the film, a fate I delayed for as long as I could, but did not avoid indefinitely. As I’m wrapping up this review, I’m feeling a phantom itch where my bio-port should be, which is the exact kind of reality-questioning paranoia I hope to catch from all of my Cronenberg fare. If Jennifer Jason Leigh enters any room I’m in for the remainder of my life I’m going to let out an uncontrollable scream.

-Brandon Ledet

The Country Bears (2002)

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Imagine if the infamous The Band documentary The Last Waltz was remade as a dramatic film where every actor was created by the animatronic technicians behind the Chuck E. Cheese house band. Now rework that premise into an 88 minute live action Disney comedy and you have the delightfully nightmarish flop The Country Bears from 2002. Much like other blatantly commercial misfires of pop culture past (Mac & Me, Super Mario Bros., Howard the Duck, Monster Trucks, etc.), The Country Bears‘s main draw is the disturbing novelty of its character design, the titular bears. The movie is too short and too ramshackle for the absurdity of its animatronic country musician bears to ever wear off, so every wiggle of their roboticized ears and every flicker in their dead robo-bear eyes registers as a crime against Nature. What distinguishes The Country Bears from other nightmarish misfires of shameless commercialism, however, is that its various goofs & gags can actually be genuinely funny on top of its overall surrealist novelty. Directed by Animaniacs writer (and Pinky & The Brain creator) Peter Hastings, the film is somehow successful as a straightforward kids’ comedy (for the kids who don’t wake up screaming later that evening, at least).

Our protagonist and audience surrogate is a preteen bear robot voiced by Haley Joel Osment, who opens the film asking human parents (including Steven Tobolowsky), “Am I adopted?” over the breakfast table. His human brother, a generic teen bully with early 00s frosted tips, is befuddled that his parents tell a white lie in that moment and that no one seems to care that Beary Barrington is a bear, taking it into his own hands to tell the truth. This inspires Beary to run away from home on a road trip to the concert hall where his all-time favorite band, The Country Bears, used to play regularly. Discovering that the robo-bear version of The Greatful Dead is currently broken up and the concert hall is in danger of being demolished, Beary vows To Get The Band Back Together in order to save the historic space that stands as his bear culture mecca. The plot is mostly a series of set pieces from there as he collects bear musicians voiced by Stephen Root, Toby Huss, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt (in a disturbing bear form the producers are hoping you’ll find sexually attractive), etc. for the climactic, day-saving concert. Standing in the way of success is a demolition-happy real estate developer played by an especially deranged Christopher Walken and a set of idiot cops tasked with bringing Beary home to his “family.”

Watching these hideous robo-bears play their giant guitars, banjos, and harmonicas, it’s easy to fantasize about how much better this film could be with a punk or metal soundtrack than it is with the lackluster country pop served up here. There is something subversive about dedicating something so visually bizarre to a wholesomely American artform, though, and no matter how bland the music gets, the bears never stop being fascinating to look at, whereas if this film were made in the last five years they’d be rendered in grey mush CGI. As the winking-at-the-audience cameos from unexpected celebrities like Queen Latifah, Wyclef Jean, and Elton John pile up, the movie’s normalized commercial sheen becomes even more bizarre in juxtaposition with its hideous character designs & zany Animaniacs humor. Sped-up bus chases, cops getting beaten senseless by automated car washes, musical arm pit farting, and old lady diner patrons pulling saxophones out of nowhere amount to the logic of a music video or a Saturday morning cartoon, which makes the VH1 Behind the Music-inspired premise all the more ridiculous. The film never pauses long enough to allow you to wonder how this human/bear society functions socially or why Beary Barrington would have a Nine Inch Nails poster on his bedroom wall. The whole thing just barrels through diners, weddings, car washes, dive bars, and music video shoots toward the inevitable, day-saving concert climax. It comes and goes so quickly and with such bizarre enthusiasm that I barely had time to notice that I was constantly smiling throughout.

-Brandon Ledet

Brigsby Bear (2017)

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There was a time before DVRs, streaming, and even VCRs when watching television was a more communal activity. The idea of a “water cooler show” that everyone discusses in the days after it airs is still alive & well, but in the early days of broadcast viewing there was a more distinct cultural phenomenon of everyone watching the same show at once. When I was a kid my two religious appointment-viewing shows were The Simpsons & Saturday Night Live, two cultural behemoths that shaped my comedic brain while simultaneously doing the same for snarky kids & juvenile adults everywhere who I virtually shared a television set with, but never met. Brigsby Bear taps into that exact communal phenomenon and turns it into a horror show. What if there weren’t millions of other people watching The Simpsons at the exact same time as me? What if, in fact, I was the entirety of the show’s intended audience? What if instead of it being a show meant to entertain a massive amount of people it was instead produced as propaganda to warp my (and only my) developing mind? In Brigsby Bear, the answers to these questions are darkly funny & informed by awkward, whimsical quirk, but also lead to some fairly earnest, heartbreaking discoveries about abuse, therapy, community, and art.

SNL’s Kyle Mooney stars as the victim of such an elaborate betrayal, a thirty-something man-child who was raised as the sole superfan of the fictional television show The Brigsby Bear Adventures. The show, which chronicles the space-traveling adventures of its titular bear, was meant to raise him from when he was a small child until his current state as an emotionally stunted adult. As a result, it has the appearance of Teletubbies or Barney style kids’ television with the complex lore of a sci-fi series that has lasted hundreds of episodes over the course of decades. Along with enforcing propaganda about “only trusting your family unit” and how “curiosity is an unnatural emotion,” the show also teaches him increasingly complex math problems & provides a window of mental escape within his horrifically insular surroundings. Beginning where Room winds up in its third act, Mooney’s over-sheltered protagonist ends his lifelong confinement to a small space where television is his only contact with the outside world to explore a new world where “everything is really very big.” The problem is that in order to be integrated into a larger, more conventional society, he must leave behind his memorabilia altar to the almighty Brigsby and adjust to a new life where a show that only he’s ever seen is no longer being produced on a weekly basis; he’ll never know how The Brigsby Bear Adventures ends. His only choice, then, is to complete Brigsby’s character arc himself in a final, self-produced movie that will satisfactorily conclude the only story he (and only he) has ever cared about once & for all.

If Brigsby Bear were made in the snarkier days of the Gen-X 90s, it would be unbearably sarcastic & mean. Although it’s a darkly funny film that builds its narrative around a fictional television show that stars an animatronic bear & adheres to an Everything Is Terrible VHS aesthetic, it’s instead remarkably earnest, with genuine emotional stakes. Along with Mooney (who co-wrote the screenplay), Brigsby Bear features several sketch comedy performers (Matt Walsh, Andy Samberg, Beck Bennett) who somehow sidestep snark to hold their own dramatically with more traditionally earnest players like Greg Kinnear, Claire Danes, and Mark Hammill. Only Tim Heidecker is allowed to fully ham it up in his single scene cameo as an objectively shitty action star. Everyone else plays the material straight, allowing the absurdity of the scenario to speak for itself. Mooney anchors the film by adjusting the socially awkward, overgrown teens he usually plays in sketches to convey a hurt, scared man-child who is unsure how to adjust to the expanse of the modern world, so he buries himself in his work, recalling outsider art projects like Marwencol or Henry Darger’s Realms of the Unreal. By crudely learning the art of filmmaking so he can complete the fictional saga of a space alien bear wizard, he finds his own place in society, making friends & learning to cope with an unbelievably tough adjustment along the way. It’s just as touching as it is strange.

I never thought I’d see the best parts of Room & Gentlemen Broncos synthesized into a single picture, but what’s even more impressive is that Brigsby Bear manages to be both more emotionally devastating & substantially amusing than either individual work. 2017 was the year Kyle Mooney made me cry in a comedy about an animatronic bear, a time I never knew to expect. My only real complaint is in the frustration of knowing that I can’t be locked in a room to watch a few hundred episodes of The Brigsby Bear Adventures myself. Regardless of how it was created to manipulate a single viewer/victim, its existence could only do the world good. Like an inverse of the haunted VHS tapes of The Ring, everyone who watches The Brigsby Bear Adventures is emotionally brought to life and I sorely wish I could count myself among them.

-Brandon Ledet

Let’s Be Evil (2016)

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After sitting through this awful flick, I immediately set to scouring the internet to see if there were other people who were as befuddled by its needlessly incoherent ending as I was. Instead, I kept finding references that claimed Let’s Be Evil was very positively received among critics, and I can’t imagine that for the life of me how this is possible. We here at Swampflix are generally pretty forgiving of flaws, and a look back through the archives will show a multitude of reviews where we overlook a film’s cheapness, histrionic acting, and poor plotting in order to exalt something that we find praiseworthy. That being said, the fact that anyone, anywhere, got anything positive out of this film is incomprehensible to me.

The film follows the narrative of Jenny (Elizabeth Morris, who was one of the film’s writers and is not a professional actress, and boy does it show), a woman whose mother is suffering from a deteriorating disease. Jenny has taken a job as a kind of camp counselor/teacher’s aide for a strange underground (literally) project that involves minding groups of genius children as they work with augmented reality glasses on various scientific… things. Like most of the film, this is never satisfactorily explained. She’s joined by Antigone/”Tiggs” (Kara Tointon) and Darby (Elliot James Langridge), who are as bland and underwritten as Jenny is. There’s some sexual tension that’s surprisingly difficult to follow, but the real point of this subterranean setting is that it requires all of the characters to wear the aforementioned special glasses in order to see, and allows the director to shoot a fair number of scenes in the first person, as if through these lenses.

This gimmick is not a bad creative decision in and of itself, but the story that is strung together in order to pave the way for this conceit to take over the film’s aesthetic “vision” is not only bad; it’s boring. There’s a kernel of an interesting narrative device here, but the shepherding of the plot toward the use of the goggles doesn’t congeal as a sensible narrative. The opening scene, in which a man is shot in his shower so that his daughter can be kidnapped, leaps off the screen with its visual dynamism, but the film takes an immediate nosedive in cinematic quality. By the time that the goggles are introduced, the dimly lit underground corridors and visually uninteresting classrooms are all that fill the screen for the rest of the run-time, and they’re incongruous with the tense, freaky atmosphere the film seems to think it’s creating.

To be honest, I sometimes worry that I give too much about a film away in my reviews (especially after a friend confronted me about spoiling Anomalisa for him, which is why the spoilers in, for instance, Pet have great big blaring signs around them), but I can’t really help it; it’s the academic in me. There’s not really a risk of that happening with this film, though, because protracted sections of the film pass in which nothing of consequence happens. Of course, saying that gives the impression that there are sections of the film in which something of consequence happens, but that’s not entirely accurate either. Over the years, if I’ve learned anything about myself, it’s that I can’t stand a fever dream movie with no point to it (see also: Spontaneous Combustion) as opposed to the use of confusion as a functioning stylistic choice (see also: Paperhouse); Let’s Be Evil doesn’t qualify for this criticism exactly, but it comes close enough to warrant mentioning, as the film builds to a “crescendo” of nonsense that might be meaningful if the film made any sense at all, but it instead treads water in a slowly-moving stream, before going over a waterfall that comes out of nowhere. Don’t bother. If you’ve ever seen movie in which a person crawling through air vents and watched someone playing a first person shooter for ten minutes before, you’ve already seen this and seen it better.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

ARQ (2016)

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I love bottle movies. There’s something that appeals to the wannabe filmmaker in me that is totally enraptured by films that take place almost entirely in one location, from independent horror cheapies that far exceed expectations like Housebound, higher profile haunted house flicks like Burnt Offerings, and high concept claustrophobic pieces that are successful beyond expectations, like Paranormal Activity and Alien. Of course, with that, you also end up with a lot of direct-to-video–and occasionally wide released–garbage fare starring the director’s family, friends, and fellow church-goers (i.e., not actors), and sometimes you end up with something that straddles the line, like Beyond the Gates, which is a movie that’s obviously low-budgeted but uses that to its advantage to make a pretty charming movie.

You’ll notice that all of the movies mentioned in the above paragraph are horror movies, and there’re a few reasons for this. First and foremost, horror movies are generally the cheapest to make and easiest to market, making their production a great entry point for first-time filmmakers (as mentioned in the DVD interviews that accompanied Sole Survivor, one of my first reviews for this site). There are plenty of housebound (no pun intended) family or personal drama films produced this way, but the occasional Repulsion that slips through the cracks is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time, you end up with something tedious and poorly edited that ends up on Red Letter Media’s The Wheel of the Worst, waiting to be mocked.

Netflix in particular has really embraced this with their original films, with movies like Hush and I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. This is probably more for budgetary reasons than for any ideological reason, but it’s working for them and I don’t foresee them putting a stop to this soon. This is also the case for ARQ, a sci-fi time loop thriller starring Robbie Amell (The Flash, the remade The Tomorrow People) and Rachael Taylor (Jessica Jones).

The film opens as Renton (Amell) catapults awake in a room with blacked-out windows, next to Hannah (Taylor). Moments later, the door bursts open and three masked and armed men enter to drag the two of them to Renton’s basement, where they are bound. The three men identify themselves as Sonny (Shaun Benson), Father (Gray Powell), and Brother (Jacob Neayem), and demand that Renton hand over his currency. Through expository dialogue, we learn that Renton used to be a military engineer for Torus Corporation, where he worked on development of a perpetual motion machine that was intended for use as a generator. Torus has become a de facto government opposed by a disorganized rebellion known as the Bloc, which the home invaders claim to be aligned with. When Renton is killed, he awakes back in bed with Hannah, again and again, using his knowledge from each previous cycle in an attempt to break free.

It’s an interesting premise, if not an original one. Starting with Groundhog Day, and although it was codified in a comedy film, it’s become a fairly standard science fiction narrative, popping up in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, Doctor Who (naturally), and even Supernatural. Its use is so common that a week before I watched this movie it was the centerpiece of the most recent episode of Dark Matter, which, as always, subverted and played with the idea in a refreshing and fun way. ARQ is likewise a fresh take, but it’s mired down by too much front-loaded world-building exposition, with terminology being introduced early and not explained for 30 minutes, which is a major problem in a film that barely crosses the finish line at 88 minutes total. There’s certainly something interesting about the universe that this film inhabits, but its presentation is hamstrung by poor choices about what plot elements should take precedence. Consider that the shows mentioned above played with this plot structure and managed to be intriguing and elicit investment despite the potential for repetitiveness in a mere 42-46 minutes; ARQ feels like it’s treading water long before it hits that minute mark.

Amell may not be the strongest actor in the world, but the performance he turns in here is bland and generic; any handsome face could fill this role. This may not be a mark against him, however, as Taylor was one of the subtler (but no less meaningful) strengths of Jessica Jones and she’s barely more than a cardboard stand-up here. One must conclude that the problems are probably in the directing and editing and not in the performers, although a more subtle actor in the role of Renton may have salvaged some of the films more bathetic moments. As it stands, the film is discomfiting in that it feels rushed and cluttered with exposition, and not in a good way. It’s worth a watch for people interested in bottle movies, or in Groundhog Day loop scenarios, but offers little else.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Batman & Robin (1997)

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It’s been two decades since the release of Batman & Robin and its director, Joel Schumacher, is still doing an apology tour in the press, begging forgiveness for his sins against the Batman brand. I do not understand the need. Much like how Tim Burton’s Batman vision didn’t escape its Studio Notes prison until its second installment, Batman Returns (the greatest Batman film to date), and Christopher Nolan’s second Batman effort, The Dark Knight, similarly improved on its own predecessor, Schumacher’s personal imprint on the Batman series didn’t reach its purest form until the director’s second effort. With Batman Forever, you can feel Schumacher steering the ship away from Burton’s gloomy freakshow back to the live-action cartoon days of Adam West in Batman: The Movie (’66). There’s too much Burton hangover looming in that film for it to feel like its own work, however, leaving a compromised vision not at all helped by the energy imbalance of hyperactive child Jim Carrey and comatose bore Val Kilmer. With the follow-up, Schumacher was allowed to completely cut loose, reportedly directing action sequences with megaphone instructions to “Remember! This is a cartoon!” during shoots. Audiences expecting more weirdo Burton gloom violently rejected Batman & Robin when it first hit cinemas in 1997, but I believe time has been kind to its charming dedication to Adam West silliness and Saturday morning cartoon aesthetics, not to mention its more prurient interests. I have no doubt that a rowdy 2017 midnight movie crowd would have a great time with it as an over-the-top Batman-themed comedy, which is exactly how it was originally intended to play.

The #1 roadblock audiences seem to have with enjoying Batman & Robin is the casting of George Clooney as the Caped Crusader. My guess is that after the Reclusive Weirdo Who Disguises His Voice When In Costume interpretations of the character from Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and Kevin Conroy, the world wasn’t quite ready to see Batman as the swashbuckling goofball he had been portrayed as in earlier adaptations. Clooney only tackles Batman as the Movie Star Handsome billionaire cad Bruce Wayne and does little to differentiate that presence from his night-time, in-costume persona. That approach maybe less faithful to the character’s dual nature in the comic book source material (I don’t know or care), but it’s not all that different from the more openly-winking Adam West interpretation of the character or, perhaps more accurately, how Batman was brought to life in 1940s serials by Lewis Wilson & Robert Lowery. Besides, even Batman & Robin seems largely disinterested in what Clooney’s Dark Knight brings to the table. Has Batman ever been the most interesting character in his own movies? Why wish for more of a brooding Keaton staring into his fireplace in the dark or more Christian Bale trying to out-gruff Aidan Gillen in his disguised tough guy voice when you can enjoy the simple pleasures of a Handsome Movie Star hamming it up with an ensemble cast of campy weirdos? Schumacher borrows a page from Batman Returns and floods the screen with wacky side characters who fall both in the Good Guys camp (Chris O’Donnell as hot-to-trot boy toy Robin & Alicia Silverstone as a Cher Horowitz-flavored Batgirl) and the Bad Guys camp (Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze & Uma Thruman as Poison Ivy). Clooney mostly just looks pretty and stays out of the way, which is more than I could ever ask for in a Batman performance.

Batman & Robin makes no attempt to hide that Batman himself is not the main attraction. George Clooney’s name is billed second to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s at the top of the credits. When the Batman logo appears it immediately freezes over, visualizing Mr. Freeze’s command of the spotlight. Excepting the disposable scenes of family drama at Wayne Manor, Batman & Robin mostly details Freeze’s plan to literally put Gotham on ice, a plot he hopes to enact with the help of botanist-turned-terrorist Poison Ivy and a nonstop onslaught of sweet, delicious puns. Much like with Schwarzenegger’s career high roles in titles like Commando & Total Recall, his impact as the top villain here is hinged on lizard brain word play (courtesy of screenwriter Akiva Goldsman). He taunts Batman & his bat-crew with some of the world’s most chill, ice-themed one-liners: “Stay cool, bird boy,” “Let’s kick some ice!,” “Cool party!,” “Ice to see you!,” etc., etc., etc. If you do not understand the basic appeal of that kind of pun-heavy joke writing, which is very much rooted in comic book tradition, you cannot be helped. Mr. Freeze sports a cartoonish character design, being kept frozen with “a crypto suit powered by diamond-enhanced lasers.” The character also serves as a rare crossroads where Schwarzenegger’s talents as a chilling 80s villain & a yuck-em-up 90s comedian kids think is cool can co-exist in full self-contradictory glory. Uma Thurman’s anarcho crust punk botany activist turned dive bar drag act is much less interesting as a villain, but there’s more than enough Arnold screentime to make up for any deficiency there. If Schumacher’s main objective was to bring Batman back to its over the top cartoon, pre-Burton Gloom roots, he more than covered it between Clooney’s Handsome Hero and Schwarzenegger’s Goofball Goon. Everything else was just lagniappe.

Subverting its welcome return to a time when Kids’ Stuff was treated like Kids’ Stuff, Batman & Robin also stands as the most aggressively queer major studio superhero film to date (with Bryan Singer’s sexless X2 standing as its closest competition, I suppose). I’m not sure how many out, gay directors have had a crack at major studio superhero properties (I’m guessing the answer is Too Few), but Schumacher took the opportunity to play up Batman’s queer kink potential to its most PG-acceptable extreme (how the film instead got saddled with a PG-13 rating, I’ll never know). The opening sequence of quick cut closeups is a Russ Meyer-esque assault of Batman & Robin’s leatherclad bodies as they suit up: nips, butts, crotch, butt, nips. Later, when Silverstone first gears up in her Batgirl costume, her leather clad posterior is immediately covered with a heavy cape, the same leering attention completely drained from the moment. Poison Ivy gets a fair amount of kink play in herself, dragging her power bottom sub Bane around by the leather collar & iron clad chastity belt and setting up her headquarters in a day-glo bathhouse. Any man who dares to kiss Ivy, the only sexually available woman in the movie, immediately dies by the toxins in her poison lips and Robin’s line, “You’ve got some real issues with women, you know that?” begins to feel as if it applies to the movie at large. Schumacher seems conspicuously disinterested in his female characters, which might help explain why Thurman’s performance as Ivy feels a little flat and why Silverstone’s Batgirl has a perfect Tom of Finland beard stubble ring of car exhaust when she removes her bike helmet after her big motorcycle chase scene, essentially wearing masculine drag. While waiting for a cure for his frozen wife, Mr. Freeze spurns the advances of Poison Ivy & his closest female crony, dismissing the come-on “I’m feeling hot,” with the quip, “I find that unlikely.” Bruce Wayne has a supermodel beard he only interacts with at public events and is only attracted to Poison Ivy whenever drugged by her weaponized pheremone potion. He mostly just focuses on his masculine relationships with Robin, the Boy Wonder, & Alfred, The Butler. Ultimately, Schumacher’s explicit, deliberate repurposing of Batman as a queer kink icon is mostly relegated to those early leering shots of leatherclad bat-nipples & bat-butt, but since that perspective is an underrepresented minority in the genre, its potency as a novelty cannot be undervalued (and it does unintentionally spill over into other aspects of the work).

I get the sense from the Christopher Nolan & Zach Snyder takes on Batman that the two directors were almost apologizing for the goofier aspects of the material. Tim Burton’s definitive adaptation at least understood the camp value lurking under Batman’s gloomy sheen of vigilante orphans brooding in black leather. I’m by no means a Schumacher fanatic in a general sense, but I appreciate how weirdly personal he made the return to that barely-buried camp. Every frame of Batman & Robin is excessively stylized, like a superhero comic book version of Michael Bay’s Armageddon (which I mean as a compliment). Looney Tunes sound effects, gigantic diamonds so cartoonish they look like clip art, sky surfing, ice-skating goons, a dinosaur bones display that roars in pain when it’s knocked over, Mr. Freeze’s (oddly pun-free) meta-commentary about how he hates “when people talk during the movie”: every decision projects the feeling of a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. I suppose someone had to eventually make a movie specifically targeted at queer children who aren’t yet entirely sure why Batman makes blood rush to their crotches and if that’s the only worthwhile thing Schumacher ever achieves in his lifetime, at least he filled a niche. What’s beautiful about it is that he got a major studio to foot the bill. Whenever a Coolio cameo or an American Express ad placement (“Never leave the Bat Cave without it,”) or a moment of well-aged special effects spectacle interrupt Schumacher’s leering at Clooney’s bat-ass or Schwarzenegger’s steady stream of super cool ice puns, the film’s strange crossroads of Art & Commerce becomes amusingly absurd. Movies this blatantly commercial are rarely as bizarrely cartoonish or as deliriously horny as Batman & Robin. It’s time we ask Schumacher to stop apologizing for making Batman silly again and instead congratulate him for making him so subversively weird.

-Brandon Ledet

Speed Racer (2008)

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It can be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment a movie’s reputation crosses the line dividing underrated gem and overrated misfire, but the live-action Speed Racer reboot is getting dangerously close to crossing that threshold. After a string of cult hits with Bound, The Matrix, and V for Vendetta, the Wachkowskis got their first taste of massive critical & financial failure when Speed Racer flopped in wide release. In development under several creative teams since 1992 and racking up a budget well over the $100 million mark, the project was likely doomed from the start, but what the Wachowskis delivered was far more bizarrely energetic & personally enthusiastic than what you’d typically expect from major blockbusters that suffer similar growing pains. Speed Racer’s green screen vision of a live-action hyperreality where everything from future sport car races on impossible Hot Wheels-style tracks to pancake breakfasts in a small suburban home feels equally, eye-bleedingly cartoonish is an intense sugar rush of weird ideas I wish even half of all summertime blockbusters could stack up to. The problem is this enthusiasm amounts to an unwieldy, 140 minute long story that’s more epic in length than it is in scale, shoveling that visual sugar into audience’s mouths by the truckload instead of the spoonful. As much as I empathize with dedicated fans of the film who wish to counteract the disregard for this weirdo visual energy by hailing it as a masterpiece, I have to admit that the film is ultimately Too Much of itself. Its cumulative effect is impressive, but exhausting.

Emile Hirsch stars as the titular Speed Racer, a suburban racecar driver who struggles to live in the shadow of his presumed-dead brother, Rex Racer. Speedy has a team of helping hands hoisting up his legacy (as all racecar drivers do), including a parental power couple played by John Goodman & Susan Sarandon and a ride or die love interest played by Christina Ricci. Outside a subplot concerning the death/disappearance of Rex Racer & the not-so-secret identity of the mysterious outlaw Racer X, the story mostly concerns Speedy’s struggles with fame as he’s called up to the big leagues by major corporate sponsors. A dichotomy between small, wholesome racing families and massive big money corporations is drawn as Speedy is asked to participate in a rigged system where racecar driving is treated like pro wrestling: scripted sports entertainment. I don’t have a mind specifically geared to care about cars, but the video game landscapes where these races are staged are a beautiful sight to behold. Speed Racer can often devolve into a jumbled mess of flashback-corrupted timelines and go-nowhere Gags For The Kids involving a goof-em-up chimpanzee, but its story about a young upstart toppling an evil corporation through a pure, passionate dedication to his sport is certainly infectious, especially when paired with this kind of sci-fi, Rollerballish futurism. I’m not sure early scenes detailing Speed Racer’s childhood troubles adjusting to schoolwork & literally competing with his brother’s memory have to be nearly as extensive as they are, but they do help establish the heightened, color-intense surreality of a child’s imagination that commands the film’s overall aesthetic. In terms of plot, Speed Racer‘s major flaw might be that there’s too much of it, possibly a result of adapting pre-existing manga & anime source material for s standalone feature.

I don’t mean to sound overly negative on the Wachowskis’ aggressively strange, admirably overreaching cartoon vision. I was entirely sold on Speed Racer as an ambitious, singular work of world-building through simple CGI, the way Steven Chow features often impress me in their unembarrassed embrace of the artform. The way characters feel entirely separate from their background environments (which feature the most artificial-looking Nature exteriors since Douglas Sirk) is very much in tune with the art of comic book panels & anime action sequences, maybe more so than any other live-action film outside Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. The way the film clashes a wholesome, nostalgic worldview represented in old-timey racing footage from the silent era and line readings of “Jeepers!” & “Cool beans!” against a ludicrous future overrun by segways & impossible superhighways is a beautifully rendered aesthetic I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in a film before. I totally agree with Speed Racer apologists & devotees who contend that the alternate reality fantasy the Wachowskis crafted here should not have been dismissed outright (the way I readily dismissed their sci-fi adventure epic Jupiter Ascending without blinking). What keeps me from hailing the work as a overlooked masterpiece, though, is the way that fantasy is made to be exhausting by something as easily fixable as the film’s length. After about 80 minutes of Speed Racer the film had offered an incredible cartoon hyperreality the world has never seen before. The only thing it can do for the hour that follows, however, is offer more of what you’ve already seen. As delighted as I was by any of the film’s in-the-moment surprises (one gag involving a weaponized beehive in particular had me choking on my wine), the film’s overall effect was just Too Much of a Good Thing. If Speed Racer were an hour shorter I’d likely be joining in the praise of it as an overlooked masterpiece. As is, I can only appreciate it as a fascinating, sprawling mess of deliciously bizarre, enthusiastic ideas that long outlive their welcome.

-Brandon Ledet

Pink Flamingos (1972)

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Although it’s the title that’s immediately conjured whenever you mention the name of my favorite filmmaker, I had somehow allowed Pink Flamingos to slip in my estimation over the years. Hairspray may be John Waters’s most popular film (and thus, according to Waters himself, his most subversive), but it’s arguable that Pink Flamingos is his most iconic. If a casual cult movie fan hears John Waters’s name, Pink Flamingos will usually be their go-to reference point, typically followed by an offhand remark about Divine, the greatest drag queen who ever lived, eating dog shit in its infamous epilogue. When I started a Divine-inspired Mardi Gras krewe with fellow Swampflix contributors earlier this year, we relied heavily on the film’s icon status to establish our visual aesthetic; we paraded a flamingo-adorned flag pole and handed out fake piles of shit as our signature throws. Still, my tone when discussing Pink Flamingos has become increasingly dismissive & apologetic in recent years. I love Waters’s films so much (with Desperate Living & Serial Mom being personal favorites) that I feel an ingratiating need to downplay his most monstrously juvenile work’s significance in his ouevre so as not to scare people off from giving his other, less shock value-dependent works a proper chance. After seeing Pink Flamingos‘s trial run predecessor Multiple Maniacs at last year’s New Orleans Film Fest and recently re-watching the trashterpiece on the big screen for the third or fourth time in my life with an appreciatively rowdy crowd at the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art (on my birthday!), I’ve been forced to reassess that apologetic stance. Basically, what I’ve been saying is bullshit. Pink Flamingos is a perfect work of fine art trash cinema, one of the most hilarious comedies ever made.

Much like in Multiple Maniacs, Divine plays herself in a boisterous love letter to her own drag persona. Instead of running an illegal sideshow, however, she’s embroiled in a tabloid-documented war for the title of The Filthiest Person Alive. She has a fairly solid claim to that throne too. Living in a secluded trailer with her two sexual deviant children and her egg-addicted mother (a top-of-her-game Edith Massey), Divine cultivates a kind of Quentin Crisp celebrity; she’s famous for being famous. This infuriates a married couple who are her only true competition for the Filthiest People Alive title, Raymond & Connie Marble (David Lochary & Mink Stole, respectively). The Marbles go out of their way to cultivate a reputation for Filth, forcing hitchhiking teens into slavery & impregnation so they can sell the resulting babies to lesbian couples on the black market. They taunt Divine directly by sending her human shit in the mail & reporting her birthday party celebrations to the police (who the revelers immediately eat & kill, naturally). Eventually, these pretenders to the throne’s “attacks on her divinity” get to be too much for Divine to ignore and the two factions come head to head in a race to see who can execute whom first. Of course, plot is entirely besides the point in this kind of bad taste comedy, which more or less extends the sideshow structure of Multiple Maniacs for a second, more depraved runthrough. Inane conversations about eggs, Divine shoplifting beef under her dress, and even the infamous dogshit conclusion all amount to more than anything that could be considered a plot point. It’s essentially a loosely connected strand of sketch comedy vignettes, a hangout film of the damned.

Waters was still a young, hungry filmmaker where he made Pink Flamingos. You can feel that green, eager-to-shock energy in his need to wear his influences on his sleeve. Movie posters adorn the walls of the Marble home; Russ Meyer’s fetish for classic cars & giant tits are echoed openly at every opportunity; the theme from the Jayne Mansfield film The Girl Can’t Help It soundtracks the shoplifting scene at the deli. Still, Pink Flamingos feels astoundingly ahead of its time considering the hippie-flavored Free Love vibes that dominated most counterculture in the early 70s. Waters’s mean freak proto-punk monstrosities, with their leopard print clothes & brightly dyed hair, are a total anomaly. Sometimes that reverence for exploitation cinema shock value can devolve into an amoral ugliness, such as in a hard-to-watch rape scene that involves the real-life death of a chicken (that the crew reportedly grilled & ate after the shoot) & a cry to free one of the key members of The Manson Family. Mostly, though, the so-called Dreamlander crew’s pre-punk ethos is expressed in transcendently silly, aggressively progressive ways: singing buttholes, go-nowhere diatribes about eggs, trans women flashing the camera, a D.I.Y.-flavored disinterest in formalism or good taste. Every time I see Pink Flamingos projected for an audience there are just as many disgusted walkouts as there are people laughing themselves to tears. As the film will be half a century old in just a few years and Waters’s penchant for Filth has been filtered through the mainstream thanks to decendents like the Jackass crew & the Farrelly Brothers, that’s no small feat. The film is just as funny, filthy, grotesque, and vividly punk now as it’s ever been.

The NOMA screening I recently attended merely just projected the same DVD transfer of Pink Flamingos I own at home (on a significantly smaller screen than where it usually plays at The Prytania). Yet, seeing it with that disgusted/delighted art museum crowd was an essential reminder of exactly how transgressive (and gut-bustingly funny) this nasty slice of trash cinema still feels with a modern audience. I need to stop downplaying its place in the Waters ouevre. Pink Flamingos is damn funny and, if punk still means anything culturally in the 2010s, damn important.

-Brandon Ledet