Reviews

The Final Terror (1983)

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twohalfstar

The general rules & confines of the slasher genre are so obvious & so rigid that they can be easily & recognizably spoofed in genre send-ups like The Cabin in the Woods & last year’s The Final Girls with no explanation needed. Like those titles, The Final Terror similarly seems dedicated to collecting & mimicking every slasher cliché imaginable, but it does so as a generic participant in genre tedium instead of as a self-aware parody. The film includes an escaped mental patient, a group of horny stoner young’ns being hunted in the woods, a killer with mommy issues, out-of-towners being punished for ignoring local superstitions, you name it. Usually, when a non-satirical slasher gathers this many influences from titles like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp in one place, they have to rely on the brutality & inventiveness of their kills to stand out as memorable in any particular way. Oddly enough, The Final Terror is near-bloodless, yet still very nearly distinguishes as a memorable work despite its wholehearted commitment to genre cliché. There’s a grimy, misshapen quality to the film that makes it strikingly odd, almost to the point of recommendation. Almost.

The Final Terror makes its requisite excuses to get its young, vulnerable people to the woods (a contrivance that hasn’t changed much in the three decades since, if you consider recent examples like Blair Witch) through a long-winded setup for an indistinct camping trip. The only personality that stands out at as at all memorable is the local guide to the terrain, a seething ball of rage bus driver & local guide named Eggar, who seems to be infected with whatever anger bug maddened the campers of Sleepaway Camp. Eggar yells as his customers about anything & everything: smoking weed, having girlfriends, telling scary stories by the campfire. Teen stuff. The movie begins relatively body-free until two campers are murdered while/for boinking, another genre hallmark, and it becomes almost too obvious that Eggar would be the killer (shown onscreen only as a disembodied arm & knife). That is, until it becomes clear just how much The Final Terror is dedicated to ripping off the twists & turns of the most famous film in its genre. If you’re looking for a slasher with any semblance of narrative subversion or mystery, this is not the place to start. For all intents & purposes you’ve already seen this film before, maybe even many times over.

It’s hard to say that anyone has actually seen The Final Terror, though, to be honest, since even its best VHS-quality transfers are drowned in fuzzed out, standard definition darkness. One potential victim complains while being hunted in the nighttime woods, “I can’t see a thing!” and I couldn’t help but wholeheartedly agree. Then there’s the curious case of the title, which makes absolutely no sense given the film’s nature as the first and last entry in its non-franchise, only adding to its overall indistinct nature. A more honest title might’ve been Corpsethrower, given how more of the onscreen scares consisted of already-dead bodies suddenly entering the frame than actual for-the-camera kills.

Still, despite all of its dedication to genre-faithful tedium, I found myself rooting for The Final Terror to succeed. There’s just too many weird details in the film for it not to stand out as something worth championing. A character starts to fight back & play war games with the killer while tripping on mushrooms & mumbling about Vietnam. He explains, “If you want to survive this, you’re gonna have to start looking & thinking like the forest” and convinces his fellow campers/victims to don Rambo camouflage & crawl through the mud. I also enjoyed the way the film pulls its campers away from the relative safety of their cabins into the expanse of the wilderness, as well as stray details like its Psycho-esque crossdressing, its jars full of body parts, the presence of a pre-fame Darryl Hannah, and a particularly shrill rendition of “Three Blind Mice.” All that was missing to make the film recommendable were some brutal and memorable kills.

The opening & closing murders of The Final Terror are achieved through crude booby traps, one even made of soup can lids & tree branches. If the camping-themed Rube Goldberg kills were more frequent, bloody, and ridiculous, there’s no doubt that The Final Terror would stand as a cult favorite for greedy slasher lovers everywhere. It already had a (less grotesque) Cannibal Holocaust quality to its grime & shoddiness. It already knew how to mimic genre standards like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp (perhaps to the point of its own detriment). It just needed to follow through on the promise of its homemade murder traps to escape its lowly status as a cookie cutter slasher with bad lighting and an indistinct title.

-Brandon Ledet

Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

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three star

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If most people had access to a single trip in a time machine, they’d likely use it to do some kind of good deed: saving a life, preventing a tragedy, correcting a mistake, etc. If I could take a single trip in a time machine, I’d waste it on something stupid, namely getting drunk with Ed Wood & attending a screening of Devil Girl from Mars. So much of Devil Girl from Mars feels like standard Ed Woodian fare that I suspect the infamous weirdo schlockmeister would’ve gotten a kick out of the film & perhaps been inspired by it to make something truly astounding. Devil Girl from Mars takes the same lofty, but empty stage play dialogue of Plan 9 from Outer Space & marries it to the same absurdly cheap, but highly memorable sci-fi visual effects. Yet, the film feels oddly flat & uninteresting for long stretches in a way that Ed Wood’s sci-fi work could never be accused of. As is, Devil Girl from Mars is an interesting trifle with a killer high camp villainess. If it had the aggressively inane guiding hand of an Ed Wood behind it, it might’ve been a trashterpiece. It already had the building blocks on hand.

Part of what makes Devil Girl from Mars so interesting, oddly enough, is also exactly what makes it dull: a false air of sophistication. A British production adapted from a stage play, the film aims for the heady B-picture space of a Village of the Damned or The Earth Dies Screaming, but falls far short of the mark. The dialogue is just as inane & inconsequential as any other 50s sci-fi cheapie you can conjure, but it’s given the utmost respect & reverence in a way that makes for both a curious watch & a disappointing slog, depending on who’s talking, human or devil girl. The stage play machinations of gathering various archetypes (an escaped convict, a lady barkeep, a square jawed alpha male, a wise professor, etc.) holed up at an isolated inn are belabored to the point of exhaustion, as if there was confusion about what kind of movie drive-in audiences would want to see: a stuffy parlor drama or a high camp sci-fi train wreck. Luckily, there’s enough of the latter to make Devil Girl from Mars worthwhile, but just barely, as the two halves of the film seem to be at war with each other.

The key to the entertainment factor in this film is, duh, the Martian devil girl herself. Our titular antagonist is dressed like an S&M take on Darth Vader, commands a lazily-constructed robot in the shape of a refrigerator, and flies around in an adorably shoddy UFO miniature. The people of Earth (or at least the people of the tavern) take her word for it that she’s from Mars without any semblance of doubt, based entirely on her sleek space dominatrix uniform, presumably. She boasts at length about her invisible force fields, her killer robot, the mental superiority of the Martian people, and rambles about the 4th dimension, the War of the Sexes, and a newly-invented organic metal; the tavern folk listen in bewilderment. I love the audacity of rambling off these giant ideas while sticking to the most bare bones cast, set, and effects imaginable. Yes, the killer fridge-bot shoots deadly laser bullets, but its arms lay limply at its sides; the film felt no need to animate them. The titular devil girl zaps men with her own atomic age ray gun, but when they disappear there’s no skeleton or goop left behind; there’s no visual effect as they fade away, only the cheap trick of removing them from the frame.

Devil Girl from Mars is mostly recommendable for the ridiculous camp of its central villain, but should be approached with patience, as it takes its mediocre dramatic setup just as seriously as its goofy sci-fi horror camp. An airplane is zapped out of the sky before the opening credits even have a chance to roll (take that, Sully), but otherwise it takes a while for the men to gather & grumble in the tavern before they’re tortured by the film’s space dominatrix & her robot sub. There’s a few stray lines that make their ludicrous bickering amusing (“I’m a scientist! I believe what my brain tells me to believe,”) but for the most part it’s too dry to be funny & too inane to be prestigious, resting somewhere in a B-movie limbo. With an Ed Wood behind the wheel, both halves of these films would shine together as one ridiculous whole, but until I get the chance to waste a trip in a time machine to make that happen we just have to settle on celebrating the good & forgetting the bad in this one. If you watch the film & Ed Wood’s name is in the credits or attached to a remake, you’ll know that my mission was a success.

-Brandon ledet

I Married a Witch (1942)

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It’s very cliché to say that a film is “ahead of its time,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe René Clair’s comedy, I Married a Witch. For a film that debuted in the early 1940s, it’s got a very different style of humor when compared to other comedies that came about during that era. When I think of films of the 1940s, I think of Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Meet Me in St. Louis, so watching a film that is about a resurrected witch that preys on a soon-to-be-married man just feels so scandalous!

The film begins with a good old fashioned witch burning in Salem, Massachusetts. Jennifer (Veronica Lake) and her father are outed as witches by Jonathan Wooley (Fredric March), causing them both to be burned at the stake. Jennifer doesn’t let Jonathan’s crime go unpunished as she places a curse on his family that will cause all the Wooley men to have unsuccessful marriages. After a hilarious montage showing generations of Wooley men suffering from the curse, the film flips to a present day scene (1942). One of the descendants of Jonathan Wooley, Wallace Wooley (Fredric March…again) is having a party to celebrate his upcoming marriage to his fiancé, Estelle (Susan Hayward), as well as his candidacy for governor. During the grand event, lighting strikes a nearby tree where the ashes of Jennifer and her father were buried centuries ago. The lightning strike causes both witches to be resurrected in the form of clouds of smoke. As they’re floating around outside of the party, Jennifer realizes that Wallace is a descendant of Jonathan, and she decides to torment him by making him fall in love with her. She eventually gets a body, and the shenanigans begin. After she has several unsuccessful attempts at making Wallace fall in love with her, she conjures up a love potion because, well, that’s just what witches do. Her plan completely backfires when she accidentally drinks the potion, causing her to fall head over heels for Wallace. Needless to say, everything still works out as planned because Wallace does eventually fall in love with Jennifer. This movie isn’t called I Married a Witch for nothing.

Lake is absolutely hilarious in her role as Jennifer. She’s totally a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but in the best way possible. Wallace is a stereotypical vanilla politician, and Jennifer is possibly the bubbliest witch in the history of cinema. Watching the two interact is so comical that after seeing this film numerous times, I still catch myself laughing out loud. But it’s Jennifer’s father, Daniel (portrayed by the hilarious Cecil Kellaway), that reigns supreme as the funniest character in the movie. He too eventually gets a body, but he spends a good part of the film as a cloud of smoke that finds himself trapped in various bottles of liquor. There are also several scenes where he is too drunk to perform spells, and he eventually loses his body and gets trapped in a liquor bottle for all eternity. This is why I will forever refer to him as the funniest, drunkest witch dad to ever grace the silver screen.

I Married a Witch is entertaining from beginning to end, and what I love most about this movie is that it is completely re-watchable. I’ve seen the film numerous times and it has yet to lose its charm.

-Britnee Lombas

The Dressmaker (2016)

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fourhalfstar

I don’t enjoy Westerns. They do nothing for me. It’s a frequent complaint I have, a well-respected genre that just completely shuts off my brain, and I have a difficult time falling in love with even the most modern updates to the format like Bone Tomahawk & Hell or High Water that are reported to be reinvigorating examples of the genre’s merits. To play directly into the “Actually, it’s really a Western if you think about it” critical cliché, The Dressmaker felt tailor made to shut my stupid mouth on the subject. The film, which is at once a violent camp comedy and a heartfelt melodrama, plays like 90s-era John Waters remaking Strictly Ballroom as a revenge tale Western where lives are destroyed by pretty dresses instead of bullets. If I were ever going to fall in love with a movie that could even vaguely be considered a Western, this formula would be my personal ideal. It’s violent, it’s campy, it’s unpredictable, it’s commanded by the female gaze; The Dressmaker is everything I love about cinema at large crammed into the mold of a genre that usually puts me to sleep.

Trading in the dusty roads of the American West for the dustier & more desolate landscape of a small Australian town in the 1950s, The Dressmaker may not have the authenticity in setting required to automatically qualify as a Western, but its intent within the genre is unmistakable. Kate Winslet, as fiercely talented & beautiful as ever, rides into town (on a bus instead of the traditional horse) to blaze a path of earth-scorching revenge for a past betrayal. A mother who doesn’t remember her and a community who has shunned her as an alleged murderess distort the facts of a childhood trauma she can’t quite piece together until the dust fully settles. Instead of establishing her dominance with a six-shooter, she fires off her sewing machine, crafting fashion so eye-meltingly gorgeous that the town that once conspired against her is powerless under the influence of her needle. They attempt to put an end to her coup by bringing in a hired gun seamstress as competition, but Winslet’s needle-slinging protagonist consistently proves to be the best dressmaker the town has ever seen. She will not rest until she knows the truth about her own past and everyone in her path is draped in her finery – dead, or alive & ruined.

There’s so much to love about The Dressmaker, but its most cherishable quality is its minute-to-minute unpredictability. The film has obvious fun with the general structure of a Western & plays with camp tones of an absurdist comedy, but it zigs where you expect those genres’ tropes to zag and much of its third act is an anything-goes free-for-all where the only thing that’s certain is that Kate Winslet is a badass and you’d be a fool to vex her. In the same film where Hugo Weaving plays a crossdressing sheriff with a John Waters mustache and enough room is set aside for a shameless drunk to heckle Sunset Boulevard, there’s also a romantic throughline that makes a boy toy out of Liam Not-Thor Hemsworth, pitch black revelations of rape & domestic abuse, accusations of witchcraft, jaw-to-the-floor wardrobe gazing (duh) and just about any other tonal left turn you can conjure. It has the small town melancholy of a The Last Picture Show, the over-the-top cartoon pomp & costuming of Death Becomes Her, and the in-cold-blood retribution of Westerns I can’t name because I usually sleep through them, sometimes before the title card. The Dressmaker is more than everything I wanted it to be. In a way it was also just everything, full stop.

Please don’t let all of this talk of violent Westerns & high camp cartoons steer you from watching this film, because it has so much more to offer outside those contexts. Regardless of genre, it’s a fascinating work in its rarity as an aggressively feminine revenge tale, one that feels so foreign in its isolated Australian Mortville setting & its worlds away from Hollywood tone that it’s almost operating in a realm of magic. The only other film from 2016 I could compare its general vibe to is the modernist Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship, but even that breath of fresh air can’t match the excitement & satisfaction of The Dressmaker’s consistent novelty. It’s a wholly unique experience, the kind of cinematic idiosyncrasy we’re all hoping to find when we go to the movies. The more I reflect back on it, the more I feel lucky to have seen it at all.

-Brandon Ledet

The Greasy Strangler (2016)

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fourstar

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How do you feel about anti-comedy? Do properties like Comedy Bang Bang or The Eric Andre Show or Xavier: Renegade Angel annoy or delight you? Your answer to that question is largely going to determine your reaction to the anti-humor horrors of The Greasy Strangler, which essentially applies the ethos of Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie to a creature feature format. Within seconds the antagonistic humor of this dirt cheap indie horror establishes itself as the definition of not-for-everyone, but it shouldn’t feel too out of step for folks who’ve spent enough time following Adult Swim’s ever-evolving line-up over the years. Personally, I found The Greasy Strangler to be an amusingly perverse provocation, one that works fairly well as a deconstruction of the Sundance-minded indie romance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who disliked the film for being cruel, grotesque, or aggressively stupid. Those claims would all certainly be valid. As a nasty slasher by way of Eric Warheim, however, that’s just a natural part of a very unnatural territory.

This is not a murder mystery. In the very first scene a father confesses to his live-at-home son that he is, in fact, The Greasy Strangler. This is a man who eats & drinks copious amounts of grease with every meal. He dips his hotdogs in tubs of grease. He asks questions like, “Why not put a little grease in your java?” At any inquiry of his grease fetish he retorts incredulously, “You probably think I’m The Greasy Strangler, don’t you?” in a tone that’s effectively a de facto confession. His son, who looks like a strange, sad hybrid between Jeffrey Tambor & Dawn Weiner, spends a lot of time around his greasy, murderous pop. He prepares most of his meals, lounges nude around the home with him, and assists in his (fraudulent) disco tour business, but doesn’t suspect at all that his father might be the local grease-covered serial murderer until deep in the third act. Such is the deliberate stupidity of this film.

As a creature feature, The Greasy Strangler undeniably delivers the goods. Although a decidedly camp-minded comedy, it boasts a truly hideous, horrifying monster that’s sickening to behold. What I find much more unique, however, is the way the film satirizes and sets aflame the modern indie romance genre. The color palette & social awkwardness of titles like Juno or Napoleon Dynamite or whatever their post-aughts equivalent would be is meticulously recreated here, but put to a grotesque effect. This is quirk employed for pure evil. Seemingly the only woman in this pastel horror show universe somehow enters a love triangle with The Greasy Strangler & his sad sack progeny. The world’s most upsetting prosthetic genitals continually bump ugly in what would usually play as a “star-crossed lovers find love in a world where they don’t belong” plot. The romance of The Greasy Strangler is just as upsetting & difficult to watch as its monstrous kills. The film pretends to strive for meticulous twee preciousness, but it doesn’t take long for its corny façade to crumble and the film becomes queasy in an entirely different, much more upsetting way.

Like with most (if not all) comedies, your tolerance & appreciation of The Greasy Strangler will depend greatly on your sense of humor. This usually goes doubly true in the case of anti-comedy, which is aggressively antagonistic in its reliance on repetition & inanity to the point where being annoyed is supposed to be part of the appeal. This film is built with several ready-to-go drinking game options, considering the ungodly number of times it forces you to watch the titular killer run his naked body through an automated car wash and the even more numerous, Gertrude Stein-esque utterances of phrases like “bullshit artist.” As someone who enthusiastically enjoyed the film, but expects plenty of dissent on that reaction, I have to offer the laziest critical advice imaginable: watch a trailer first. The Greasy Strangler’s advertising has been exceptionally blunt & honest about the film it’s selling and I feel like a two minute clip is more than enough to determine if this will be worth your time. I got everything I wanted out of it as a Tim & Eric-style slasher with a satirical edge in its approach to romantic indie quirk. That’s not going to ring true for everyone, but comedy is one of the most divisive genres around, so that’s to be expected.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

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We here at Swampflix watch horror films year round, which is what makes it easy to slap together our annual Halloween Reports. Horror dominates our Movie of the Month selections and our topics for The Podcast. It’s a genre we return to eagerly & frequently no matter what the season. Still, there’s something particularly special about the ritual of watching horror films every October, a month-long celebration of the macabre. As often as we participate in this ritualistic horror binge, though, we rarely step back to think about what the ritual actually means. What’s the significance or the satisfaction of watching all these fictional victims, usually oversexed teenagers, die on camera in all of these ludicrous ways, whether at the hands of a somewhat realistic serial killer or by supernatural monster? The 2012 meta horror comedy Cabin in the Woods, delivered by Joss Whedon & close collaborator Drew Goddard, strives to answer that question on a philosophical level. The film is at once a celebration of the horror genre as a cruel, ritualistic blood sport that serves a significant purpose in the lives of its audience and a condemnation of that very same audience for participating in the ritual in the first place. An ambitious, self-reflective work of criticism in action, The Cabin in the Woods in one of the best horror films I’ve seen in recent years, not least of all for the way it makes me rethink the basic structure & intent of horror as an art from in the first place.

In essence, The Cabin in the Woods is two separate, competing films at once. One film is the most basic teens-hunted-by-zombies picture you can imagine, except equipped with the stagey nerd humor Whedon’s built his career around. The other film is a glimpse into the writer’s room & packed cinemas that would cruelly put those teens in zombie peril in the first place. A remote, NSA-reminiscent science lab is in the midst of an annual ritual where they lure a group of unsuspecting teens into a controlled environment (complete with the titular cabin) and influence them through chemicals & electronics to live out basic horror archetypes (the jock, the nerd, the whore, the fool, the final girl), effectively leading lambs to the slaughter. They’re horror directors in this way. Their predetermined, controlled environments are essentially genre tropes, horror convention. When they drug the victims of their rat maze to increase their libido or lower their intelligence they’re essentially writing their doom into a live-action screenplay. Curiously enough, they serve as the audience as well as the creator, watching enraptured as their victims are cruelly murdered and even, in a scene more or less lifting directly from Heathers, casually partying while someone is brutally assaulted in the background. It’s a high concept dynamic that not everyone will be game for, but it’s one that leads to some surprisingly smart, bleak self-analysis. As much as I enjoyed other recent meta horror comedies like The Final Girls or John Dies at the End that approached similar thematic territory, there’s a dedication and a follow-through to The Cabin in the Woods that I believe to be unmatched by its genre peers.

Something I greatly resect in this film is its openness about what it’s doing. The film begins from the perspective of the science lab, where a lesser work would’ve saved the artificiality of the environment for a last second reveal. The best part about The Cabin in the Woods is that it tips its hand so early, leaving the only true mystery to be when, exactly, its two competing films are going to meet and how much of a disaster it will be. The film is patient with the payoff of those two worlds clashing, but also so thorough and so ambitious with its follow-through that waiting for the hammer to fall is actually a large part of its appeal. A straightforward zombie picture set in the woods would’ve rang formulaic & hollow, no matter how much Whedon’s spin on the dialogue attempted to set it apart, to the point where a go-for-broke third act reveal of the influence of the science lab would’ve played like a cheat. Instead, we get a full-length reflection on how the two films interact, a dynamic that has a lot to say about how horror audiences interact with film in general. It’s pretty rare to see something that confident & dedicated play out on the screen, no matter what genre.

I can comfortably say I’m far from the biggest Whedon fan. His Avengers work is fairly decent (and it’s cool to see him writing for a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth as an idiot jock here), but I’m not the right kind of pop culture nerd who wistfully daydreams about the good ol’ days of Firefly or Buffy. I’m ambivalent. If The Cabin in the Woods were merely one of those Whedon productions that take place in an alternate universe where teens & 20 somethings always have something clever to say, I wouldn’t have been onboard, which is probably why it took me so long to watch it in the first place. I don’t know if it was the collaborative effort with Goddard (who, sadly, hasn’t helmed another film before or since) or what, but Whedon’s usual schtick is still detectable here, except put to a career-high effectiveness that actually makes his dedication to cleverness count for something. The way The Cabin in the Woods dismantles horror tropes and holds a (two-way) mirror up to the audience who would typically eat them up is, without question, pure brilliance. I can’t think of a better film to recommend during the Halloween season, when binging on formulaic horror is at its peak ritualistic significance. The places this film takes you in its third act alone will add clarity & perspective to your horror watching habits in a way most films could only dream of, all while delivering a satisfactory dose of the very tropes you lust after as a bloodthirsty audience. I could see making screenings of this movie an annual ritual of its own, if not only to hold onto the way it enhances enjoyment of the other, less mindful horrors I’ll be watching anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Missile to the Moon (1958)

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With recent remakes like Ben Hur, Blade Runner, and Ghosbusters, it’s easy to get into the mindset that reboot culture has recently gotten out of hand, but the truth is that it may have always been out of hand. Consider the case of Missile to the Moon. This throwaway sci-fi B-picture is a five-years-later remake of the ludicrous camp oddity Cat-Women of the Moon. Delivered by the same indie production company that made the much more fun original, Missile to the Moon merely added more moon monsters & extraneous plot lines to Cat-Women of the Moon’s exact narrative structure and casually slapped on a new title. It’s what we folks in a post-Dark Knight world would call “a gritty reboot.” Whatever you want to call it, its existence feels entirely unnecessary, especially once you start splitting hairs over the film’s baffling decision of what to keep from its source material & what to discard.

I’ll try not to waste too much time on a plot description here, since Missile to the Moon largely resembles hundreds of other B-movie space pictures & standalone episodes of serials like Roy Rogers. A rocket ship (picture the most generic toy rocket ship imaginable; you’ve got it) travels to the moon through some dangerous meteorite turbulence and once the crew lands on the alien terrain they face mysterious dangers posed by lunar monsters. In Cat-Women of the Moon these monsters only included a gigantic moon spider & a misandrist society of alien women determined to steal the crew’s rocket ship & use it to take over Earth. Missile to the Moon repeats this dynamic with only a few slight changes: the spider puppets look a little better; they’re joined by entirely unneeded Styrofoam rock monsters; the cave-dwelling women are no longer misandrists. That last point, of course, is what sucks a lot of the fun out of the source material’s dynamic. Instead of a man-hating city of women dressed in black catsuits, we get a vague harem of one or two alien baddies who are a little power hungry, but mostly in desperate need of a man’s loving company. Boring.

Much like with the case of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! dry run Motorpsycho!, Missile to the Moon is only interesting as a comparison point to a far better work that shares its basic dynamic. In the original film the lone female member of the astronaut crew is a navigator with a key role central to the plot. In the remake she’s a stowaway & a scientist’s fiancée, not even as central to the plot as a pair of escaped convict ruffians who also wind up on this lunar expedition. Her biggest concern is that the moon women might lure away her future husband, which leads her to mutter catty things like “If I knew there was going to be this much competition, I would’ve undressed for the occasion.” In Cat-Women of the Moon the titular aliens function in villainous peace & harmony; here they have petty, jealous fights over space idiot love interests who say endearing things like “Don’t think, honey. Just be beautiful.” There’s even an added moment of threatened sexual assault, you know, to liven things up. All the transgressive elements of the original are stripped from its derivative follow-up in favor of some barely-better special effects, increased violence, entirely unnecessary rock monsters, and a few baffling tweaks to the details, like swapping out the moon gold of the first film for the radically different treasure of moon diamonds. Whatever.

Everything about Missile to the Moon is secondary. As a remake, it feels purposeless and only interesting in the schlocky shadow of its predecessor. As a sci-fi horror cheapie in its own right it doesn’t even look as interesting as the other half of its double bill: Frankenstein’s Daughter. Just about the only moment of joy I got from the film was the cattily jealous fiancé asking of her leading man, “Do you think I’m prettier than that girl?” mere moments after watching her fellow crew members die a grisly death. And even the humor of that moment points to the film’s central problem: a complete lack of the playfully transgressive misandry of its predecessor.

-Brandon Ledet

The Vampire’s Coffin (1958)

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I think I partially didn’t enjoy this one because I wasn’t aware that it’s a sequel to El Vampiro, which is supposed to an extremely influential classic horror. The Vampire’s Coffin probably would have made more sense and I’m sure a lot of the questions I had about the plot would have been cleared up had I seen the original. I’m going to assume this was a case of the uninspired sequel money-grab. Given all of that, the plot is still a little bit of a convoluted mess, most of which is gleaned through vague dialogue.

Dr. Saldivar breaks into a grave yard. The doctor is there on a scientific mission: to steal the corpse of a vampire, Count Karl de Lavud, and study it. Dr. Mendoza has already experienced the vampire’s wrath along with Marta, a nurse at the hospital. Marta previously was the object of the vampire’s undead desire.  When the coffin is brought to the hospital, Mendoza is outraged and makes Saldivar swear not to let Marta know that Count Lavud is back. It gets more needlessly convoluted than that and works in a wax museum, cabaret dancing, and confused police officers.

A lot of problems in The Vampire’s Coffin can be boiled down to budget and bad writing. The movie is obviously a low budget production, or at least by the standards of Hollywood in that era. There are only four settings. The soundstage sets are obvious and under-dressed. The vampire’s bat form is very clearly on a wire and there are no other attempts at fantastical effects. Instead of a true horror, it comes across more as a Mexican drama with a vampire thrown in. The romantic subplot seems to have more focus than the consequences of having a revived vampire running amok.

While it’s pretty cool to see the vampire myth happen somewhere other than Europe or America, I think the cheap movie cheese outweighs that. Between the ineffectual vampire, fake bats on strings, and obvious bare sets, The Vampire’s Coffin is just another bad sequel.

-Alli Hobbs

The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

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fourstar

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Sometimes efficiency is the most impressive quality a movie can boast, especially in the case of schlocky genre fare. From the outside looking in, The Earth Dies Screaming might not appear to be much. As an alien invasion sci-fi horror from the drive-in 60s that barely clocks in at an hour’s length, it’d be easy to dismiss the film outright as a filler title on some indistinct double bill. The film is far more interesting than its pedigree would lead you to believe, however, and one of its best qualities is that it recognizes the limits of its somewhat slight premise and chooses to stick to the point. The Earth Dies Screaming smartly avoids overexplaining the exact scope & nature of its murderous alien threat and instead uses the mystery & minute to minute deadly obstacles posed by its otherworldly dread to propel the plot forward through several unexpected gear shifts until the whole thing’s over before you know it. The film may look cheaply made & hastily produced, but you gotta respect that kind of genre flick efficiency.

Although you can pinpoint other genre films that have utilized individual elements of The Earth Dies Screaming for more fully realized conflicts, this particular cheapie achieves a very specific aesthetic by gathering all of those elements in a single, well-tuned vehicle. I kind of feel like the genre film equivalent of a fine wine snob while watching this one, detecting hints of 28 Days later, The Village of the Damned, and The Night of the Living Dead with a strong The Day the Earth Stood Still undertone rounding out the bouquet. In the film’s dialogue-free five minute opening most of the world’s population is seemingly struck dead by a mysterious gas, later revealed to have been released by a malicious alien race. Planes, trains, and automobiles crash as their individual pilots are strewn about, lifeless. The few survivors in a rural England town find themselves isolated form the world with no radio or television broadcasts seemingly able to make it through the chaos. The horrors don’t end there, though, as an army of killer alien robots is deployed to sweep the streets of any temporarily lucky survivors and, just in case that wasn’t enough, they’re followed by an undead, mindcontrolled zombie hoard. The alien threat of The Earth Dies Screaming is one thing after another, a continually shifting obstacle course that pummels its audience and its victims with just the right rhythm to remain surprising & just the right runtime to never outwear its welcome.

I guess there might be some kind of lesson at the heart of this film about the best attribute of humanity being in comradery. Our would-be victims (ranging from a drunken cad to a young pregnant woman to an all-American alpha male, all strangers) find their best chance of survival in their ability to solve their differences & work together as a unit. That aspect of the film’s formula is faint at best, though, especially when compared to more heavy-handed message pieces like The Day the Earth Stood Still or nuclear paranoia monster pictures like Godzilla or Them!. Here, the alien threat has no real discernible intent outside pure malice. There’s no source or ending for the attack and instead of worrying about context the film instead eats up its runtime with details like its robots’ Touch of Death executions & its zombies’ whiteout contacts. In the age where big budget action franchises have no foreseeable end in sight & follow a carnival act trajectory of promising the next big thing down the road without ever having to deliver a self-contained product (much like pro wrestling or, better yet, those films’ comic book source material), there’s a satisfying quality to this kind of genre filmmaking simplicity that’s more than a little refreshing. Despite what’s promised in this film’s (undeniably badass) title, the Earth could actually use a lot more of this contextless, go-for-broke efficiency.

-Brandon Ledet

Demon (2016)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

threehalfstar

Weddings can be overwhelming, dizzying affairs. This is especially true of the larger productions where a few cases of hard liquor & an overly-expansive list of guests mix to create an emotional powder keg of celebration & exhaust. Think back to the wedding scene in Goodfellas, lines of happy Catholic Italians lining up to dispense money & kisses to Henry’s new bride to the point where her head is spinning. The Polish horror film Demon turns that nauseous energy into a full-blown nightmare. Demon is ambitious in its themes, playing the past atrocities of WWII as a ghost that haunts Poland, a country-sized burial ground, and building its story around the undead spirits of traditional Jewish folklore. At the same time, though, it can be easily understood as a very conventional haunted house ghost story, one that plays out over a single night of the celebratory Party Out of Bounds mania of High-Rise. Audiences more in tune with the history of Poland’s tragic WWII horrors or the intricacies of the dybbuk in Jewish folklore might get a lot more out of Demon than I did as an outsider, but the film is still effective enough as a traditional ghost story without that insight. Its dizzying wedding setting in particular helps set it apart in that regard.

A young outsider joins a community of Polish Jews by marrying into the fold. While clearing the grounds of an old property his bride-to-be inherited from her deceased grandfather, he uncovers a literal skeleton from the past. It’s a discovery that changes him & his relationship with his new homeland in profound & disturbing ways. As a wedding ritual increasingly devolves into drunken, celebratory madness, our protagonist also loses hold of his own stability, both physical & spiritual. Strangers party in slow motion to an eerie score while the groom continually returns to the burial site he mistakenly uncovered. In his obsession with the grave he gradually becomes something new, something very ugly & very dangerous. Demon plays off the Body Snatchers-esque fear of never truly knowing your spouse as well as traditional genre film hallmarks like demonic possession, haunted spaces, and body horror. However, it avoids any clear cut, straightforward resolutions that usually accompany that territory. The mystery of what, exactly, is happening might in fact be too slow of a reveal, to the point of distraction, even if it never actually reaches a clear destination. Still, the film’s mix of otherworldly dread with manic, drunken celebration & Old World superstition is enough to make it an arresting experience overall.

There aren’t a lot of specific elements in Demon where I can say you won’t find its genre thrills anywhere else, but I do believe the lead performance by Itay Tiran as the doomed groom is one that required a lot of ambition and a lot of naked bravery. The only other performance in the horror genre I can liken it to is Isabelle Adjani’s iconic turn in the cult film Possession (which was also helmed by a Polish director, appropriately enough). Both roles ask their performers to play several different people in one: the unsuspecting spouse, the inhuman raving lunatic, and the in-transition middle state of the body contortionist. The tunnel scene in Possession is a rare moment of dramatic physicality that you won’t find in many other performances, horror or otherwise, no matter how vulnerable. Tiran somehow approaches that same naked, savage, maddening vulnerability in Demon, no small feat, and his starring turn is a lot of what makes the film feel special, if not entirely unique.

Representing Jewish folklore in horror cinema dates as far back as The Golem in the early 20th Century, but it’s still somewhat of an infrequent occurrence. The way Demon weaves its ancient narrative into modern Polish anxieties over the ghosts of past wars is fascinating and open-ended enough to be engaged with as an art film rather than a formulaic genre picture. Still, the film works just fine in a conventional horror context as well, telling an effectively unnerving ghost story against the Party Out of Bounds structural backdrop I have such a soft spot for. The film’s real world & fantastical horrors clash with the celebratory fantasy of its wedding setting remarkably well, represented visually in the mixture of its crisp formal wear with the grime of its natural forces: dirt, mud, rain, wind. The cheery visage of a wedding ritual is cinematically transformed into the eerie nightmare of demonic ritual, one that seemingly summons an overwhelming force of Nature & an inescapable ghost of the past to tear down the national façade of healed wounds & a guilt-free future. Demon might not be the most original or the most terrifying horror film you see all year, but its thematic ambition, the distinctive mania of its setting, and Itay’s lead performance all are sure to haunt you well after you leave the theater, maybe even for longer than the more eccentric films it casually resembles.

-Brandon Ledet