Reviews

Masterminds (2016)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

It’s difficult to sell the potential enjoyment of a Jared Hess film to the disinterested, because the director’s work can be so aggressively quirky-for-its-own-sake & juvenile. Hess’s latest film, Masterminds, has been the most difficult sell of the director’s career yet, possibly in a very literal sense. His debut, Napoleon Dynamite, was a dirt cheap indie comedy that somehow stumbled into the kind of success that scores you decades-long merch sales in roadside truck stops & shopping mall novelty shops, despite being the director’s least interesting work to date. Titles like Nacho Libre, Don Verdean, and (my personal favorite) Gentlemen Broncos have mostly flown under the radar since, as have the projects of Hess’s wife & creative partner Jerusha. Not one of these examples has suffered the financial & distributive roadblocks of Masterminds, though. A harmless madcap bank heist comedy starring Zach Galifianakis & three Ghostbusters (Jones, Wiig, and McKinnon), Masterminds has struggled for at least two years to see the light of day. The film itself is very amusing to those already onboard with Hess’s lost-in-time awkwardness schtick, but also relatively unexceptional within the larger scope of his career. The fact that something so straightforward from Hess has taken this long to overcome its distribution setbacks (which included the financial collapse of Relativity Media), only to flop on its long-awaited opening weekend does not bode well for the director’s career at large. He can’t continue making these comfortable, mid-budget, non-flashy comedies and expect to survive in the current Hollywood climate, no matter how much I (and apparently very few others) happen to find them amusing. Not without bringing his content straight to VOD, at least.

I could make some sort of grand claim about how the virtue of honesty is what ties together the heart of Hess’s narratives or that his films are interesting in their application of a Wes Anderson visual craft to a gross-out Farrelly Brother aesthetic, but I’m not sure that’s what makes them work as comedies. What Hess brings to the table, besides the general quease of Sears family photo shoots, is the visual punchline. In Masterminds, the machinations of Zach Galifianakis’s hapless security guard being coerced into robbing a bank by his milquetoast seductress, Kristen Wiig, or her sleaze ball cohort, Owen Wilson, aren’t nearly as amusing as just the mere look of him. The Prince Valiant haircut, the full beard, the tight novelty t-shirts: Zach Galifianakis is the fashion version of a slapstick pratfall. Certainly, there are funny turns of phrase in the film (mostly delivered by Jason Sudeikis’s cold-as-ice contract killer) but no dialogue in the film made me laugh nearly as hard as just the distinctly awkward visual tableau Hess crafted with his vanity-free players. In many ways Kate McKinnon was perfect casting for this comedy style, as it’s the criticism she most often receives from her work in SNL. She doesn’t deliver jokes so much as that she is the joke, striking such a specifically strange, crazy-eyed image that no verbal play is needed to sell the humor. This might not be enough for some folks, but just the mere sight of her posing for wedding photos with Zach Galifianakis to an Enya song is personally all I need to guffaw.

The humor of Masterminds is, in the film’s own words, “dumber than a suitcase full of buttholes.” The “based on a real story” failed bank heist plot is amusing, but indistinct. Stray lines about a “fart transplant” or why boobs don’t bleed milk are certainly funny & Jason Sudeikis’s sociopathic assassin is hilariously out of place in this world of naïve dummies, but the film isn’t particularly memorable for any verbal or narrative touches. It’s Hess’s deft with the comedic image, whether McKinnon posing in a hideous wedding dress or Galifianakis chowing down on a goo-filled tarantula, that makes Masterminds a weird, dumb delight. It’s doubtful that Hess can continue to get away with constructing those awkward tableaus in perpetuity, given the lukewarm reception each of his films have received since his surprise hit debut (and his worst film to date, in my opinion), but for now I’m enjoying the weirdly wonderful results. Anyone else should be able to tell at a quick glance if they’re also going to be onboard, considering the visual nature of the director’s humor.

-Brandon Ledet

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

fourstar

I’ll admit up front that I’m a little more positive on Tim Burton’s post-Sleepy Hollow career than most, finding at least one enjoyable film from the director’s late-career releases (Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Big Eyes, Sweeney Todd, Frankenweenie) for every insufferable, uninspired one (Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dark Shadows, Planet of the Apes). Burton was on an incredible hot streak in his 80s & 90s run, delivering one incredible work after another, so there’s a lot of pressure on his 00s & 2010s output that makes it suffer under scrutiny. However, divorced from the context of his earlier work, this second phase of his career is at least at a 50/50 average for me, which isn’t so bad considering the careers of other big budget Hollywood directors on his name recognition level. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children isn’t likely to win over anyone who’s chosen to write off Burton’s post-90s work completely (his recent, aggressively tone deaf comments on racial representation in Hollywood casting aren’t likely to help either), but it is a damn good spooky children’s movie, joining the likes of Goosebumps & ParaNorman as great starter packs for kids who need an intro to a lifelong horror fandom. It’s a genuinely macabre affair that might be better accomplished in terms of visual craft than it is with emotional deft, but still stands as Burton’s best work since at least Sweeney Todd. Of course, I’m a little more forgiving than some on the current Burton aesthetic, so mileage may vary there, but if any other director’s name were attached to this film I suspect it would’ve been praised with far less scrutiny. The expectations resonating from Burton’s early work simply have way too much impact on the reception of his more current releases.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children & its YA source material are, essentially, goth X-Men for kids. Instead of mutant abilities, the kids have “peculiarities,” also contained in their genes, which more or less give them . . . mutant abilities. I guess the main difference there is that their peculiarities all have a sort of horrific sideshow quality to them: reanimating corpses, hidden jaws packed with sharp teeth, bodies full of bees, etc. It’s easy to see how Burton could want to merely luxuriate in this mansion full of little weirdos instead of chasing a plot, but Peculiar Children actually has a lot going on in its story structure. Cyclical time travel, intergenerational romance, mental disorder, alternative Holocaust narratives, and secret societies of shapeshifting demons who want to eat peculiar children’s eyeballs all swirl together to create one overwhelming kids-against-the-world conflict that admittedly trades in emotional resonance for large, complex ideas & haunted house imagery. Like with last year’s Crimson Peak, however, I was more than okay with swapping out emotional deft for visual craft here, especially since the visuals were so distinctly . . . peculiar. Samuel L. Jackson’s villain looks like a hybrid version of Don King & Nosferatu. A pair of masked twins recall antique photographs of 1900s Halloween costumes. A Harryhausen skeleton army wreaks havoc on a dayglow carnival funhouse. Stop motion monsters cobbled together out of babydoll parts & preserved animal corpses engage in a tabletop knife fight. A coven of dapper adults & long-limbed reptilian monsters devour piles upon piles of children’s eyeballs. Tim Burton may not be interested in self-reinvention with the imagery he delivers in Peculiar Children; he still delights in clashing a clean cut, sunlit suburbia with haunted house goth monstrosities. However, this film proves he’s still got the goods in terms of the strength & potency of the imagery he can deliver and any other shortcomings there might be in Peculiar Children comfortably rest on those laurels.

The more the scope of Tim Burton’s career becomes clear to me the more apparent it is that he’s almost exclusively a children’s filmmaker. Titles like Ed Wood & Sleepy Hollow are the outliers. Peculiar Children fits right in with Burton’s typical, imaginative creepshow for children aesthetic and I could very easily see a child growing up loving this movie the way I grew up loving Beetlejuice or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Kids have an easy time mentally luxuriating in fantasy spaces in a way adults don’t. Returning to Beetlejuice as an adult, the pace feels a lot more rapid than it did to me in the 90s and the movie flies by in a whir, whereas in my childhood it felt like an eternity. Peculiar Children will likely have the same effect on younger viewers. It delivers enough striking imagery & memorable set design that kids could mentally return to & stretch out its individual scenes in a way its two hour runtime couldn’t afford. A better, more deliberately paced version of this story might have stretched out over a franchise or a television series, but limiting it to a single film was a smart choice, one that will have implications on how children interact with it both onscreen & in their imaginations in the years to come. Even in its limited time span and overstuffed plot, Burton still finds the time to work in the doomed wartime narrative of The Devil’s Backbone and the places-as-ghosts concepts of a Toni Morrison novel, all while somehow maintaining the film’s firm footing as children’s media. If any other director had delivered Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, it’s likely it’d be held in a much higher regard as an ambitious work of high-concept time travel sci-fi horror for children. However, only Burton could balance all of that overreaching narrative with such specific, effective imagery & maintain its for-kids tone. This film stands as yet another reminder that its director may not be delivering at 100% at this point in his career, but he’s still capable of making some truly great films in-between the duds.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: The Funhouse (1981)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon, Alli, and Boomer  watch The Funhouse (1981).

Britnee: Carnivals are hell on earth. The image of crusty old rides, greasy funnel cakes, animal droppings, and dirt mixed together to create a nasty sludge is enough to send shivers down my spine, but the most terrifying part of carnivals is the crew. Unfortunately, carnival folk don’t have the most welcoming image in popular culture (killer clowns, evil magicians, etc.), and this is definitely apparent in horror films. Of all the carnival-themed horror film’s I’ve seen, Tobe Hooper’s extremely underrated horror flick, The Funhouse, is by far the scariest.

The Funhouse comes across as a run-of-the-mill B-movie because it follows the generic B-horror movie storyline; a group of teens get high and decide to get crazy & spend the night in their local carnival’s funhouse. It really doesn’t get cheesier than that, but somehow The Funhouse manages to be seriously scary. Of course, it has a handful of humorous moments, like when the carnival’s fortune teller, Madame Zena, gives a quick handjob to a deformed human-like monster in a Frankenstein costume or when the funhouse barker says in an absolutely ridiculous tone, “You will scream with terror, you will beg for release, but there will be no escaping, for there is no release, from the funhouse.” But honestly, the majority of the film is straight up disturbing. The gruesome murders that take place in the funhouse filled with horrifying animatronic clowns and evil dolls will haunt your dreams forever, or at least for a day or two.

Boomer, did you find The Funhouse to be a legitimately scary movie? Or do you think it falls more into the B-movie category?

Boomer: That’s an interesting thing to ask, because it begs the question of what exactly a B-Movie is, especially with regards to the Tobe Hooper oeuvre. Is Texas Chainsaw Massacre a B-Movie? Is Poltergeist? What’s the real difference between Funhouse and those two films that makes film scholarship so dismissive of it? Chainsaw is definitely a B-Movie by every objective measure: budget (a mere $300K), cast (all virtual unknowns, with the Edwin Neal having the largest pre-Chainsaw filmography, consisting entirely of dubbing voices for the American import of Gatchaman), and overall feeling of cheapness. Instead of B-Movie fodder that is remembered for its campiness, however, Chainsaw is generally regarded as a landmark horror movie for bringing terror out of the night and into the light of day, and its legacy holds up despite seven follow up films of various quality and dubious chronology (there are three sequels, then a reboot, a prequel to the reboot, then a sequel just to the original skipping all others, and an upcoming film about Leatherface’s teenage years). It’s easier to single out Poltergeist as a more traditional “prestige” horror film; having Steven Spielberg as producer lent the movie an air of credibility that neither Chainsaw nor Funhouse before it had had (and that Lifeforce,which followed in 1985, was certainly missing; even a script by Dan “I wrote Alien” O’Bannon wasn’t enough to cover the Cannon Films stench on that one, but I digress). I think the reason that Chainsaw is so widely praised is simply that it transcended the barriers of the conventional B-horror fillm to become something more fascinating and terrifying altogether. Chainsaw and Poltergeist are very Gothic at their core, with the latter heavily focusing on the brutishness of the wilderness outside of society and the uber-Gothic imagery of decaying homesteads with trapdoors and hidden rooms, and the latter focusing on pairing the very old-school Gothic concepts of hauntings and beings beyond human comprehension and pairing those ideas with the aesthetic of contemporary suburbanism.

Although I think that Funhouse is a B-Movie overall, just like the Hooper films that it is sandwiched between (minus the not-very-good Eaten Alive and the telefilm adaptation of Salem’s Lot), it certainly transcends the mold of similarly budgeted and marketed contemporaries. Often, the hallmarks of these films are that they were obviously churned out by a pulp writer with an idea that had not quite had time to mature, full of barely-realized characters and driven more by the need to reach certain scenes than weaving an organic story to get the viewer there. Funhouse can’t be described this way (in fact, if the Wikipedia page for the Dean Koontz [!] novelization based on Larry Block’s original screenplay is anything to go by, the original story idea may have verged on being overproduced); the progression of events is logical and cohesive, and although not every character could be considered three dimensional, they do all have different voices and motivations. More than that, Funhouse is also legitimately freaky at various points, and there’s an artfulness to the direction that elevates the film over other films of the same type and of the same era. Specific scenes that come to mind include the playfulness of the light coming through the fan vent in the scene where Liz meets her end at the hands of the monster, the recurring image of the Hammer Frankenstein monster that is first seen on a poster in Joey’s room before reappearing on the television downstairs and as the monster’s disguise, and the blowing wind that billows Amy’s hair in the final scenes, lending a surrealist element to the proceedings. It’s not Hooper’s finest or most memorable work, but it does show how Hooper’s eye can find something novel in even the most tired mises en scène. 

So why is the visually intriguing and memorable Funhouse, which was a moderately well-received success at the time of its release, so largely forgotten? What do you think, Brandon?

Brandon: I think that’s a fair question to ask of Hooper’s career at large, honestly. Before catching glimpses of Lifeforce & the completely insane-looking horror comedy sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre II in the recent Golan-Globus doc Electric Boogaloo, I personally had no idea who Hooper even was. I’ve seen & enjoyed his original Chainsaw movie & the loving 50s sci-fi homage Invaders from Mars by happenstance, but he was never familiar to me as a household name, despite the fact I that I’m an obvious sucker for the genre film territory he usually treads in. The Funhouse‘s forgotten place in the cult movie canon seems to be indicative of Hooper’s often overlooked career at large. I don’t know if it was the Canon Films documentary’s doing or just slowly spreading reports of how batshit Lifeforce (a movie I’ve been dying to catch up with myself) appears to be, but his name recognition seems to be growing in certain film geek circles over the past year. I was stoked when Hooper’s name appeared in the opening credits of The Funhouse (along with special effects master Rick Baker, who absolutely kills on the creature design here) so I’d have an excuse to dive further into his work. Six months ago I would have had no idea who he was or that Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Poltergeist were even directed by the same person.

Hooper’s general lack of recognition as a household name aside, The Funhouse‘s particular forgotten state might be somewhat attributable to its mode of instant familiarity. Like Britnee & Boomer both said, the film has a visually striking, memorably discomforting way of terrorizing its audience with its creepy dolls & its murderous carnie psychopaths, but there’s something oddly warm & nostalgic at its center that cuts through its overriding nastiness. The homages to old line monster movies (in the form of the aforementioned posters, television broadcasts, and Halloween masks as well as an early-in-the-runtime spoof of the shower scene from Psycho) nest the film in a long history of horror cinema tradition that somewhat eases the shock of its early 80s nastiness (the likes of which we recently saw in former MotM Alligator). You easily can see this adherence to horror tradition in the film’s basic plot. The idea of teens sleeping in a carnival funhouse overnight and being confronted by real-life monsters within feels as old as time to me. It might be that I’ve grown up in a post-The Funhouse era where that basic plot seeps into familiar-to-me properties like Goosebumps novels & Ghoulies II, but I suspect that its fundamental narrative scenario goes back even further than those titles. The traveling carnival setting of The Funhouse feels anachronistic for even the early 1980s. This movie feels like a live-action adaptation of an urban legend dating back to a time when the arrival of traveling carnivals & funhouses were the highlight of the year for little kids, especially in small towns, even those understandably freaked out by the carnies who ran them. I could see how drive-in era horror audiences would initially take delight in watching that urban legend play out onscreen, but then gradually forget that the movie ever existed because its basic premise had already been a familiar part of the greater cultural landscape for so long.

Where do you think The Funhouse fits into the arena of urban legends & oldschool horror titles, Alli? Is it more at home with its slasher genre contemporaries, seeing how our teens in peril are hunted down by real life human creeps after indulging in *gasp* marijuana & premarital sex, or does it call back to an older, more nostalgic tone overall?

Alli: Let me start this off by saying that I feel a little unqualified to talk about the slasher genre, since I haven’t seen that many. When the term “slasher genre” comes to mind, I think about earlier ones, Psycho and Peeping Tom, and also I guess some giallo fits in there somehow. But I don’t think of them in the “true slasher” sense, somehow.

So now that I’ve gotten that disclaimer out of the way, The Funhouse seems to fit pretty well in the slasher genre right down to the idea of the final girl, though it subverts it a little. Of course, all slashers share influences which definitely creates a sense of nostalgia. Very early on, there’s a play on the Psycho shower scene and as you guys all mentioned there’s Frankenstein references throughout. Also, I think the idea of a carnival based horror goes way, way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which I think there are strong arguments to be made for it being a very early example of the genre). So what I’m trying to say is that I think since the slasher genre itself is pretty timeless, nostalgia is inevitable. Then The Funhouse has the added whammy of a carnival background since as long as there have been carnivals and freak shows there have been urban legends about the horrors therein.

I mentioned about the idea of the final girl above and I want to expand that a bit more. Slasher movies traditionally have a girl as the survivor. She is usually the chaste one, who avoids drugs and alcohol. Amy at the beginning is the good girl. She is a virgin. She’s against going to the carnival and breaking the rules. But somewhere along the line, I feel like she drops the good girl act. In the bathroom during a conversation with Liz, she mentions that maybe she’s not saving her virginity. A little later on, she’s smoking marijuana. I guess I just feel like maybe she’s not quite pure, virginal, final girl material, unless it’s being comparatively chaste and drug free that gets you out of horror movies alive.

Britnee, what do you think of Amy as our protagonist? Do you think she meets the criteria for the Final Girl? Are there any other interesting plays on traditional horror tropes you noticed?

Britnee: When comparing Amy to the others in the group, I think that she’s an angel. She does give in to the ganja and isn’t the poster girl for virginity, but she’s still the most level-headed of the bunch. Buzz, Liz, and Richie (especially Richie) were all horrible people. Buzz is this ignorant macho-man that comes off as a total creep when he’s alone with Amy, Liz is a straight up bad friend, and Richie is an obnoxious, greedy little bastard. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised to see them each meet their gruesome deaths in the funhouse. Now that I’m thinking of it, the dumb teenager that gets violently killed is definitely a horror trope that is present in The Funhouse. Buzz, Liz, and Richie each meet have their one-on-one time with the killer, which is the most popular way for a bad teenager to die in slasher flicks.

Now as for Amy being the final girl, I do think that she meets the criteria. She’s got a good head on her shoulders (at least when compared to her friends), and when she comes face to face with the funhouse monster at the end of the film, she does everything in her power to defeat him. Amy is far from being a damsel in distress and she defeats the film’s male antagonist, so I would consider her to be final girl material. She really does have one of the most interesting final girl exits that I’ve ever seen. After she survives the hell of the funhouse, she walks silently into the carnival grounds and doesn’t utter a peep to the few people hanging around. Something about her exit from the funhouse just makes me think of her as badass heroine. It’s probably because she doesn’t crawl out of the building crying and screaming for help, as one would expect anyone to do when under those circumstances.

Boomer, I can’t figure out the importance of the creepy witchy woman that lingers in the background of the film. Her most notable scene was when she was in the bathroom with Liz and Amy, and she approaches them with her famous words, “God is watching you!” Do you think that the Bathroom Witch (Brandon gave her this name during the viewing) was underused in this film? Or do you think her presence was completely unnecessary?

Boomer: In my previous section, I mentioned the novel adaptation the film written by Dean Koontz; that book has its own separate Wikipedia page that outlines a more in-depth (and, honestly, needlessly complicated) plot that features a back story that involves a previous relationship between the carnival barker and Ellen, the religious alcoholic mother of Amy and Joey. I guess I spoiled myself on this question, because the issues of faith and evil seem to be more present in the book (and thus the original screenplay): Ellen and the barker were married and had an evil son, whom Ellen killed; she then had Amy and Joey, whom she religiously oppresses. The barker had Gunther with Madame Zena (yeah, think about that for a second), and believes that Gunther’s evil nature is Satan giving him an assist to exact vengeance on Ellen.

The religious overtones of the original story lead me to infer that this woman played a more significant role in the first draft and was largely cut. Part of Amy’s internal struggle in the novel is that her mother accuses of her of being evil, like a Margaret White who never really commits to a full-on closet-locking; being confronted by a Bathroom Witch who reminds Amy of her repressed doubt would have probably been a single moment in a larger appearance, although having all of that back story omitted from the final screen product does make this scene seem a bit inexplicable. Still, if this had been a story that was more grandiose in its treatment of generational evil, I think it would have traded the sleazy charm that it does possess for a bathetic melodrama; it’s better this way.

Brandon, if you could add a different back story for the film or otherwise weave in additional plot elements, what would you add to make the film better?

Brandon: If there’s anything missing or underutilized in the film I think it’s somewhere in the titular funhouse setting itself. The Funhouse does well enough in establishing a surreal, nightmarish tone without relying on any explicitly supernatural element. Even Gunther’s monstrous, Rick Baker-created appearance is explained to be a natural occurrence, one mirrored by the real life two-headed cows & mutated specimens in the carnival’s freak show. The audience sees the carnival from Final Girl Amy’s perspective, which establishes the otherworldly nightmare tone as she seems to be the only one among her gang of idiot teens who seems to notice how grotesque & off everything feels before the shit inevitably hits the fan in the funhouse. I appreciate that the movie keeps its terrors anchored in the real world. It’s a choice that helps maintain the film’s tangible danger & menace. However, I think a little more play with the laws of nature inside the funhouse might’ve benefited the film’s longterm legacy.

Horror films & funhouses were made for each other for obvious reasons: spooky atmosphere, ambiguity for “real” scary monsters to hide among the fake ones, ample opportunity for jump scares, etc. The Funhouse makes the most out of these obvious set-specific opportunities that it can, but I think it might’ve missed out on bending the rules of reality a bit within its funhouse setting. The bright colors, spooky lighting, and playful ambience of a funhouse already aims for a supernatural subversion of reality, one that could have justified some reality-bending trickery on-camera once the teens are being hunted down. I think The Funhouse works perfectly well as a straightforward slasher at a specific, bizarre setting and it does make good use of set-specific props in its final act, but I wouldn’t have minded a little supernatural surreality mixed in with its real world horrors.

Alli, do you think The Funhouse could have benefited from some supernatural horror once it reaches its titular setting, or did it benefit by keeping its horror explicitly “real”?

Alli: I was kind of relieved that it took it in a more real direction. It was really interesting to me that a lot of the scariest parts were the behind-the-scenes inner-workings of the carnival. Funhouses are generally not as exciting or as fun as the name implies. They’re generally cheap smoke and mirrors, but it’s that cut-throat cheapness that makes them actually terrifying. (Or maybe I spend too much time looking at rideaccidents.com) The inside is creepy for sure, but the final scene takes place underneath it all. The clanking of chains and whirling of fans are disorienting and disconcerting. The ghouls and ghosts that jump out while the thing is running are not as deadly or threatening as an angry fortune teller or carnival lackey. Even the monster wears a mask of another monster because the reality is more hideous.  I think the real world horror grounds this in a way that makes it fairly believable. Weirdos are scary: bathroom preachers, sideshow barkers, fetuses in jars. The Funhouse does a good job at preying on that.

I’m not trying to rule out the idea of a demon-possessed funhouse completely, but any time the supernatural is involved a movie really starts pushing it towards cheesy. What could have worked in the supernatural direction is more rumors in the set-up, like kids talking about real skeletons of past victims being used or ghosts of dead carnies cursed to wander forever from town to town waiting to spook unsuspecting teens. That sort of ambiguity added to the real life fright could have upped the ambience.

EPSON MFP image

Lagniappe

Boomer: I’d love to go back to Alli’s question about whether Amy is the Final Girl or just a final girl. Amy is an interesting candidate for this title, given that she’s very unlike the women who served to canonize this archetype. She’s neither chaste nor sober, and, minus the early draft inclusion of Ellen’s relationship with the barker, she has no connection to the killer. Still, there does seem to be an ineffable Final Girlness to her that belies her nonstandard status.

Britnee: Joey is the absolute worst. He is one of the most disturbingly creepy little brothers in the history of film. There’s a mysterious scene where Joey almost gets killed by a truck driver with a shotgun, and it’s the only time I slightly felt worried for his well-being. Well, that and the fact that he lives with an alcoholic mother.

Brandon:  Like Britnee, I mostly found Joey to be an insufferable little shit. After he scares his sister in the shower with the opening scene’s giallo/Psycho homage it’s difficult to feel any empathy for the detestable little scamp. However, I will admit that my Joey-hatred did fade a little once I realized how much worse the adults of his world are. Before we even meet the Bathroom Witch or see the worst of the barker & Gunther, we get Madame Zena yelling at (admittedly disrespectful) stoner teens, “Don’t come back or I’ll break every bone in your fucking bodies!” Every on-screen adult pounds back hard liquor. A tent full of working class men make a grotesque display out of ogling strippers that’s somehow just as much of a nightmare as the last-act teen hunt. A random trucker pulls over on the highway to point a gun at Joey, a small child, just so he can laugh in his face. Joey never earns likeability, exactly, but it’s at least a lot easier to understand why he’s such a shit once you get the full picture of the hate-filled early 80s hellscape he was raised in.

Alli: To go back to Joey: at the end we never really know too much of what happened to him, just that he was in some carnie’s trailer knocked out with a fever. They chase him down, catch him and drag him off. What exactly did they do to him off-screen? He may have been the definition of obnoxious little brother, but whatever happened in the meantime to him he probably didn’t deserve. 

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
November: Boomer presents Paperhouse (1988)
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)
January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

Vegas in Space (1991)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

Vegas in Space is an early 90s sci-fi cheapie distributed by Troma in which all characters are played by either drag queens or women. It took almost a decade to complete, was partially fueled by sex work & meth, and was filmed entirely in its star performer’s San Francisco apartment. You can feel all of those qualities in every shoddy fiber of what’s essentially a glorified home movie and, yet, there’s enough artistry in the film’s set & costume design and its central B-movie sendup gimmick to make for a fun, fascinating watch. Filmed in full glory Glamourama & staged on entirely hand-built sets, Vegas in Space looks the way a B-52s song sounds (“Planet Claire”, especially) & recalls a drag routine version of either Corman’s unreleased Fantastic Four adaptation or the cult television series Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It’s very rough around the edges, but it has style to spare as it lives by its pronounced motto “Glamour first, glamour last, glamor always!”

An all-male (including women in male drag) crew fly their space ship to the Planet Clitoris in The Beaver System in order to help solve a diamond heist caper. This proves to be a dangerous mission since “No males are allowed to touch down on Clitoris”, so the men disguise their gender by taking sex change pills, a transformation process that looks & sounds a lot like the female orgasm. Newly feminized & disguised as 20th Century showgirls, the men infiltrate the city of Vegas on the Planet Clitoris, “an oasis of glamor in a Universe of mediocrity.” They set themselves on saving the planet by entertaining for a slumber party and keeping their eyes peeled for a jewel thief who has stolen a precious object that keeps Clitoris from suffering dangerous earthquakes. The whole plot feels like something out of erotic fiction, but does serve as a loving tribute to real-life titles of 1950s space epics like Cat-Women of the Moon. There’s no sexual energy to its women-only “pleasure planet’ premise, despite what you might expect from a film written & performed by drag queens & there’s really no point to the space crew starting the film as men at all, really, except for pointing to its own central drag queen gimmick, since they readily adapt to the change & suffer no conflict because of it. For the most part, even the sci-fi aspect of the story doesn’t feel all-that necessary or fully-explored. Outside some cardboard spaceship & a few goofy ideas (like swapping out the term “warp speed” for “ultra space jumps”), the sci-fi setting is mostly an excuse for the film’s true bread & butter: outrageous costume & set design. Those aspects far outweigh any petty concerns like plot structure or a command of pacing, so you have to love their charms to ignore the film’s blindspots & land yourself on its wavelength.

Obviously, it would help if you love drag as an artform for you to appreciate Vegas in Space as art. Starring San Francisco personalities like Doris Fish, Miss X, and Ginger Quest, the film is billed as being “based on the party by Ginger Quest” in its opening credits and “the first ever all-drag queen sci-fi musical” in its liner notes. Now that latter point is up for debate, not only because it might not be the first ever, but because it features cis women among its many drag performers and doesn’t feel at all like a musical besides the fact that it does feature some music (as most films do), most notably the deliciously cheesy lounge number “Love Theme from Vegas in Space.” It may very well be, however, the first film adapted from a drag queen’s party theme (can you name another?), which is much more of an accomplishment in my book anyway. Vegas in Space mostly serves as a Doris Fish showcase, as the performer wrote, co-produced, starred, built the sets (including the miniature outer space cityscapes), did the makeup for her fellow crew members, and (if director Phillip R Ford is to be believed) partially funding the picture by turning tricks. Fish is a delightful personality to helm the picture as the once-male space crew’s captain, but I actually think she’s upstaged by fellow drag queen Miss X, who boasts a kind a gothy, bitchy, Violet Chachki vibe as the film’s would-be villain, The Queen of Police. Miss X‘s cruelty in forcing imprisoned shoplifters to harvest cotton candy and her palace on ”The dark side of the planet” show in glorious black & white) a choice that feels truer to the film’s drive-in era source of inspiration) are where Vegas in Space finds its groove, even if those moments were birthed by Fish’s work on the page. The film features some classic moments of painfully corny drag queen humor, like when The Queen of Police answers the question “Are there crimes here?” with a deadpan “Only crimes of fashion,” or when Doris Fish comments on the mission at hand “sounds like a cinch.” The all-female pleasure planet setting also affords the film plenty of opportunities to do what drag does best in the first place (besides showcasing killer costuming & makeup): poke fun at femininity as a social construct. In this particular case, it helps that here are “real” woman there who are in on the joke, too, especially at sillier moments like when the crew war using their “feminine intuition” to navigate their ship. In some ways Vegas in Space plays its premise a little too, for lack of a better word, straight, (I really cannot believe there is no lesbianism or any sexuality at all in this film), but it’s still delightfully corny & transgressive in the way most drag performances are by nature.

In a lot of ways Vegas in Space feels like what might happen if I tried to make a movie, from its dedication to bad taste to its overwhelming cheapness to its painfully troubled production history. Even if the film sounds exhausting to you or just not really your thing, I’d still encourage you to read director Phillip R. Ford’s lengthy making-of account of this film’s production, because it’s a fascinating mess. Vegas in Space required two years of filming & seven years of post-production, meaning Ford & his drag scene buddies more or less worked on the film for the entirety of the 1980s. Besides the behind-the scenes meth & sex work that color the film’s already plenty colorful aesthetic, there’s also a tragic air to its history as many of the performers involved didn’t live to see the final product due to its lengthy post-production period & the horror of the AIDS crisis in the gay community of that era. As a director, Ford brings a few interesting ideas to the table I especially appreciated: an opening credits scroll that mixed B-movie worthy shots of outer space with Vegas strip light bulbs, a psychedelic dream sequence that intentionally evokes the early stirrings of MTV, and his inclusion of earthquakes in the film’s central crisis that reflected the San Francisco scene where the film was produced (although I suspect that Doris Fish had enough input on all three points to deserve a co-director credit among her endless list of other duties). However, I think Ford’s greatest accomplishment here is in completing the project in the first place. As indicated in his account of the film’s production, this was a sprawling mess of a collaboration that’s nothing short of miracle to ever have been released at all (even if it means suffering through a disturbingly transphobic “bit” from Troma madman/cretin Lloyd Kaufman in its intro). I could see Vegas in Space maybe gaining traction as a cult-adored object or maybe a RuPauls’ Drag Race runway category (Vegas in Space Realness does have certain ring to it), but I think the film’s greatest accomplishment might be that it simply exists in the first place. Well, that and the glorious makeup & costume designs, especially the ones sported by one Miss X. They’re the film’s true artistry, as it should be in what’s essentially a drag queen’s unusually expensive home movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

“The eternal wonders of space & time. The faraway dreams & mysteries of other worlds, other life. The stars, the planets: man has been face to face with them for centuries, barely able to penetrate their unknown secrets. Someday, the barrier will be pierced. Why must we wait? Why not now?”

Judging by the above prologue, the 1950s writers behind Cat-Women of the Moon really wanted to fuck outer space. Like, all of it. The film’s phallic symbol space rocket searches the cosmos for something to “pierce” & “penetrate” from minute one, but the film doesn’t find a tangible target for its desire of interstellar sexual conquest until more than halfway into its measly 60min runtime. The titular cat-women of the moon, played by the less-than-infamous “Hollywood Cover Girls” don’t appear until more than a half hour into their own film. The movie mostly functions like a cheap version of a Planet of the Vampires or The Angry Red Planet, with a bewildered crew of astronauts exploring a strange alien terrain (this time not venturing any further then our own moon) and facing challenges presented by the life they unexpectedly encounter there. When these alien monster obstacles take the shape of meteorites & giant moon spiders the film remains fun & lighthearted, but more than a little indistinct. For some reason, it’s the hidden Dark Side of the Moon city of sinister women in black catsuits with a passion for misandry & ritualistic dance that distinguishes Cat-Women of the Moon as above average, 3D-era schlock. I just can’t place my finger on it.

The men of the doomed astronaut crew are outnumbered & made vulnerable when their only female member, the navigator, falls under the hypnotic spell of the lunar cat women and leads them to peril at the underground city where the sexed-up aliens dwell. Her strange directives are at first perceived as a “touch of space madness” and her crew is already in danger by the time her unwitting betrayal is revealed. The men of this lunar expedition (it’s not clear if it’s the first mission to the moon, but they’re certainly the first crew to breathe oxygen in a moon cave, which is something) sought to “pierce” & “penetrate” the mysteries of space and initially believe their buxom alien hosts to be a great conduit for that conqueror’s spirit. However, the moon women prove to be far more powerful than the Earth men could imagine, commanding abilities that include teleportation, telepathy, and hypnotism. While the men make plans to make love & swipe some precious moon gold, the cat-women plot to steal away their only female crew member & pilot their rocket ship back to Earth where all men will be killed or enslaved to make room for more lunar cat-women. There’s an interesting push & pull between the film’s posturing bravado & its villainous “We have no use for men!” misandry that makes this a really fun, almost anachronistic watch. This isn’t quite the man-bashing roadster gangs of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but it might be somewhere in the same ballpark in its own silly way.

It’s kind of incredible just how much of Kubrick’s 2001 blew this entire space-exploration B-picture genre apart, but the painted lunar backgrounds & tiny rocket ship models presented here are still beautiful & interesting in their own quaint way. The cat-women’s moon city in particular has a quality to it that looks like a cross between a chess board and a De Chirico painting in an interesting way. As you can tell by the film’s title, though, visual craft is far from what makes it interesting or distinct. Cat-Women of the Moon’s mix of man-hating sex kittens, gigantic spider puppets, hostile lunar terrains, and the men desperate to survive them is what makes the film a blast as a quick, cheap B-picture with a  killer titular hook. If watching something this unrepentantly silly & leering sounds a little exhausting at an hour’s length, I at least urge you to watch the film’s trailer below. Its promise of alien women who are “everlastingly beautiful … and without men for centuries!” just waiting to “lure men into the den of bloodthirsty moon monsters” is just as silly as anything that happens in the film, which it should be mentioned features red-blooded Americans carrying cigarettes & guns on the moon’s surface, as is their cosmos-penetrating right. I recommend the film for a cheap, schlocky thrill not too far off from a visually realized work of erotic fiction, but this two minute ad is also a work of art in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

A Town Called Panic: Double Fun (2016)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

threehalfstar

Double Fun isn’t exactly a sequel in a traditional sense, although it is the latest theatrical release in its franchise since the 2009 feature A Town Called Panic. Rather than standing as a feature length follow-up to its madcap stop motion comedy predecessor, Double Fun is a “one day only” (it actually screened over two days at Prytania Theatre) theatrical event that cobbled together several short films from the A Town Called Panic catalog to reach a very slight feature length as a loose anthology. As a trip to the cinema Double Fun was an amusing novelty, not quite living up to the manic brilliance of the original A Town Called Panic movie, but still functioning fairly well as a crash course in the Belgian cult television show’s surreal, maddening mode of crude stop motion animation & slapstick comedy. It was great to see something so aggressively trivial play out on the prestige platform of the oldest running cinema in New Orleans, but I wouldn’t necessarily call the experience essential (like I would have with Prytania’s 100 year anniversary screening of Cinema Paradiso last year).

The main bulk of Double Fun were two mid-length shorts, titled “Christmas Panic” & “Back to School Panic.” I usually detest watching Christmas-themed media out of season, especially when it’s sacrilegious to the still-approaching holy day of Halloween, but I’ll make an exception when it means watching the KaBlam!-style antics of Horse, Cowboy, and Indian on the big screen. Of the two 2016 shorts, “Christmas Panic” was noticeably inferior to the high concept insanity of “Back to School Panic,” but it was still amusing to watch the Panic gang rob both the kindly Santa Claus & the abusive jerk neighbor Steven in the name of the true Christmas spirit: greed. “Back to School Panic” was the true attraction of Double Fun, starting with a very simple plot of Cowboy & Indian trying to avoid having to return to the classroom and somehow winding up playing with a Being John Malkovich situation inside a farm pig’s mind. “Christmas Panic” was cute & the mini-shorts that buffered the two featured segments of Double Fun were a great glimpse into the humble beginnings of the franchise, with the de-evolution monsters of “Cow Hulk” especially standing out as a treat. However, if A Town Called Panic fans are to seek out just one segment of this theatrical event, “Back to School Panic” is the one that most stands out as exemplary of what makes this manic stop motion franchise so weirdly endearing.

Double Fun works best as a crash course in Panic if you have already seen the feature film, which is likely a much better starting point. The way the anthology is curated answered a few lingering questions I had after watching the absurdist feature film. My main ambiguity about whether the franchise was intended for children or stoned adults was somewhat resoundingly answered by the rowdy groups of young tyke attendees at the screening who met the series of shorts with transfixed silence & wholesome giggling. In a way it seems like the series is moving in a more kid-friendly direction in general, especially in making Horse more of a father figure to the increasingly childlike Cowboy & Indian and in softening the music cues. There’s still the requisite partying, alcohol, theft, violence, and manic tension that makes A Town Called Panic distinct as dangerous-feeling children’s media, but the shift was noticeable. Watching the 2016 shorts mix in with the shoddier quality of the series’ humble beginnings was also illuminating as a recent convert, as was hearing the English-language voice actors in the dubs, which took some getting used to, but felt like insight into how the show is typically packaged outside of Belgium.

If you’ve never seen A Town Called Panic before, I urge you to start with the 2009 feature, as it’s a great reminder of the wonders of stop motion as a medium, even when crudely executed. Double Fun is great supplementary material for the already converted, especially in the unreal sci-fi absurdity of “Back to School Panic,” but it’s not necessarily something you need to kick yourself for missing in its very brief theatrical run. If either of those storylines had been used as a launching point for a proper feature length sequel, however, I might be singing a different tune.

-Brandon Ledet

The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

hobbit

three star

campstamp

In the most basic sense The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a sequel that no one was clamoring for. Even the star of Snow White & The Huntsman, my beloved Kristen Stewart, declined to return for this second installment of a franchise practically no one loves. This film’s lack of critical hype or a vocal fandom was a little isolating for me, since I was actually a fairly solid fan of the much forgotten original film. As a low-key fantasy epic that called back to mid-80s productions like Legend, Labyrinth, and Ladyhawke, I found Snow White & The Huntsman to be a mostly satisfying experience. What really stood out, though, was the film’s visual flourishes, which bathed a wicked queen played by Charlize Theron in a milky white porcelain & transformed the evil mirror of Snow White folklore into a menacing humanoid made of dripping gold. In this way The Huntsman: Winter’s War could be understood as being simply more of the same. Anyone who brushed off Snow White & The Huntsman as a dull trifle (most people, I’m assuming) isn’t going to be won over or blown away by what they find in Winter’s War. However, fans of the original’s familiar fantasy realm setting & surprising knack for striking visuals in its villainy are likely to be pleased by the franchise’s years-late return. I was, anyway.

A ludicrously belabored, heavy-handed prologue narrated by Liam Neeson asks the question “What does a mirror show you? What do you see?” The answer is clips from Snow White & The Huntsman, apparently. It’s probably not a good sign that this late in the game follow-up feels the need to remind its audience that it’s not an original property, but I found myself entertained by the film’s strained way of setting up its own Kristen Stewart-free narrative. The prologue is so long & unwieldy that it feels as if Neeson is reading a decades-spanning bedtime story, which is far from the worst effect for a fairy tale, all things considered. By the time the setup is over with, Winter’s War simultaneously functions as a prequel and a sequel, retroactively introducing new characters into its already-established mythology so that it has a place to go in Snow White’s absence. I’m not sure knowing the exact plot of this film’s silly middle ground between Lord of the Rings & Game of Thrones is all that necessary for you to understand what you’re getting into. Winter’s War more or less boils down to a CG action adventure about opposing kingdoms’ quest to obtain & command the evil mirror of the first film, which looks like some kind of all-powerful golden gong. It just so happens that the monarchs of those kingdoms are both badass women.

Besides its undeniable knack for visual effects, Winter’s War mostly finds entertainment value in the strength of its casting. Charlize Theron returns as the golden evil queen of the first film, but this time she’s joined by a (somehow previously unmentioned) sister, played by Emily Blunt (hot off the heels of her roles in Sicario & Edge of Tomorrow). Here, Blunt plays a CG-aided Ice Queen who staffs her tundra-set fortress of solitude with a ferocious army of children she raises to be loveless killers. She trains these tiny tyke murderers to believe that “Love is a lie. It is a trick,” establishing her sole governing rule to be “Do not love. It’s a sin. I will not forgive it.” And, wouldn’t you know it, two of her miniature killing machines grow up to fall in love. One of them is America’s hunky but dim foreigner boyfriend Chris Hemsworth, returning from the first film, and he’s romantically paired with Fellow Beautiful Person Jessica Chastain. The two leads essentially live out a feature-length version of the ridiculous fight-flirting scene from Daredevil, interspersed with their attempts to thwart two evil queens from gaining the ultimate power represented in the mirror by destroying a litany of faceless foot soldiers with their gorgeous weaponry of golden liquids & CG ice shards. Edgar Wright’s pet doofus Nick Frost returns as a CG dwarf to offer some comic relief, but the less I say about that the better.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War boasts three badass women as its leads along with stunningly gorgeous costumes & visual effects, but is hopelessly saddled with goofy everything else. For every brilliant idea in its visual play (like a white porcelain version of the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans), there’s something equally silly waiting to drag down its artistic clout (like an early scene that depicts the most blatantly overwrought “You thought this was just a game?” chess match metaphor I’ve ever seen in my life). I might be the only person in the world who regrets not seeing this ridiculous display play out on the big screen, but I do believe with a little push in a more extreme direction, either towards more over-the-top camp in the performances or some R-rated gore in its fantasy violence, this film & its predecessor could have serious cult following potential. As is, you have to appreciate them for their low-key fantasy realm charm, the absurdity of their surprisingly game cast, and the perfume commercial menace of their imagery to buy what they’re selling. Personally, I’m a sucker for all three.

-Brandon Ledet

Krisha (2016)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

fourstar

As I mentioned in my less-than-thrilled review of Knight of Cups, I just don’t have the capacity within me to fall in love with a Terrence Malick flick. Yet, I keep returning to the director’s work because there’s so much promise in his raw material. Turns out the answer to this self-conflict might actually be to follow the career of Malick’s collaborators rather than to keep returning to a director that continually burns me. Tree of Life was one of my all-time most disappointing trips to the theater, but it did introduce me to the wonderful talents of actor Jessica Chastain & cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, both of whom I have been keeping a close eye on ever since. What’s even more surprising, though, is the out of nowhere talent of young writer/director Trey Edward Shults, who had worked on the sets of Malick productions Tree of Life, Weightless, Voyage of Time, To the Wonder, and *shudder* Knight of Cups, but just made his own debut film Krisha. In his very first feature film effort the young talent has, in my my mind, beaten Malick at his own game. Malick has an undeniable talent at constructing an image & a hypnotic tone, but his intensifying disinterest in narrative has left his films dull & meaningless experiences for me. Trey Edward Shults obviously paid close attention to how to evoke the potency of Malick’s raw material, but repurposes it for a clear, deeply personal narrative that makes its impact count for something. Krisha doesn’t always resembles the tone poem hypnosis of a Malick work, but when it chooses to use that cinematic mode as a storytelling tool it makes the impact count for more than any 30 seconds of a Malick film ever has in the past.

A lot of what drives home the impact of Krisha is the heart aching sincerity. The film’s central story is based on a real life tragedy in Shults’s family, stars his family, and is filmed in his parent’s home. This is an undeniably cheap-looking production, but the pain & anguish it reveals transcends its means. A woman returns to the cautiously open arms of her anxious family after a ten year separation & estrangement. There’s a mystery to the past trauma that has kept the estranged family member, Krisha, as an arm’s length black sheep, an ambiguous separation represented by the image of a deformed finger & the occasional tense accusation of her “selfishness” & “abandonment.” Although the exact circumstances of Krisha’s departure are never made explicitly clear, she does carry the faux-spiritual air of a recovering addict, calling her GPS “a lying bitch” in one breath & then claiming that she’s “working on becoming a more spiritual person” in the next. As the mounting tension of her tentative return to the fold escalates along with the stress inherent to orchestrating even the most congenial Thanksgiving meal, Krisha seems to be slowly barreling towards a relapse into abuse (both substance & familial), like a turkey slowly reaching the right temperature on an oven rack. The layering of tension in Krisha is methodical & deceptively casual. Once the pressure is released, however, it’s difficult to think back to a moment when the film felt at all civil or tightly contained. The Malickian looseness of the film’s final act is lightly suggested throughout, but once the Shults goes for broke with the tactic it almost feels as if the film had always been that way, just as its titular antagonist had never truly been “spiritual” or reformed.

Besides Shults’s strong command of image & tone, a lot of what makes Krisha stand out is the titular performance from his real-life aunt, Krisha Fairchild. Her stressed-out addict’s faux hippie costume of serenity & acceptance is a bravely difficult balance to toe, especially considering the metatextual factoid that she’s portraying a real-life member of her family. Krisha’s pathetic attempts to make herself useful in the kitchen or to personally connect with individual members of a family she does not know would be absolutely devastating if it weren’t coming from such a phony, selfish place. Other non-actors in the film give memorably great, effective performances, most notably a grandmother figure who makes the horrors of dementia feel way too real, but this is undeniably Krisha Fairchild’s show. The film opens with her starkly framed & vulnerably staring down the audience, somewhat similar to Thomasin in The Witch, and the performance gets no more vain or glamorous from there. It’s a truly unique mode of self-effacement for grim, unblinking, deeply personal art.

I may have been overselling the Malick vibes of Krisha a little too hard in my opening screed here, mostly based on the fact that I watched it so soon after Knight of Cups, a film it surpasses in intensity & impact with so few brushstrokes, not to mention that Shults had worked on both films. Without that connection you could surely find other works for easy comparison points. The arrhythmic score & cacophonous soundtrack of dogs barking & familial chattering recalls the insufferable sonic tension Paul Thomas Anderson punishes his audience with in Punch Drunk Love. The mood-evoking images of a turkey grotesquely getting prepared for the oven & general search for an open-ended, eerie tone brought me back to the terror in the ordinary established in this year’s surprise knockout punch The Fits. If you go into Krisha expecting a Malick derivative you’re going to be severely underwhelmed & agitated. Instead of copying the director’s feature length search of tone poem submersion in pure, disjointed imagery, Krisha uses that narrative approach as one of many tools in its back pocket, only to be wielded when it’s most useful.

For a first time filmmaker with an obvious eye for powerful imagery, Trey Edward Shults shows a surprising amount of restraint, saving his showier moments of technical prowess for when they best serve the story he’s telling. That story is a familial drama turned into a psychological horror of ambiguous, tension, one Shults & his family apparently had already lived through once off-camera. It’s a fascinating debut that far exceeds its obvious financial limitations and I’d much rather watch whatever the young talent has lined up next then another navel gazer of a slog like Knight of Cups, a film that’s only proven its value by inspiring better art in other works.

-Brandon Ledet

Drag Becomes Him (2015)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

One of my favorite aspects of the drag queen reality show competition RuPaul’s Drag Race is that the system works. A lot of viewers believe a (completely believable) conspiracy that the show’s winners are predetermined & cherry picked for success (yet another theory that supports my contention that drag & pro wrestling are essentially the same thing), but I don’t really care if that’s true. My favorite contestants on the show are generally the queens crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar (except maybe in the recent case of Kim Chi), which is good enough for me, no matter what mechanism produces that result. I was curious, then, when I discovered a documentary on Jinkx Monsoon, the winner of season 4, lurking on Amazon Prime, as they were my favorite contestant on their season of the show. Truth be told, Drag Becomes Him is an interesting doc whether or not you watch RuPaul’s Drag Race with any regularity. It’s essentially a portrait of an artist who happens to make it big in a crowded field of similar talents. Although ostensibly a vanity project, the film has very little vanity as it mostly shows drag performer Jinkx Monsoon in various stages of undress & overwhelming stress. It’s a low-key document of a significant time in the unglamorous life of a performer embedded in one of America’s most glamorous & most underappreciated art forms. And even as a standalone film divorced from Monsoon’s celebrity, Drag Becomes Him still commands an interesting, unique vision & narrative, a surprising feat for a film obviously crowdfunded & cheaply made.

Jinkx Monsoon states nakedly, both in a figurative & a literal sense, that they desire “to be known as an artist, not just a female impersonator”. A Seattle queen from a very artsy, performance-based scene (as opposed to the appearance-obsessed world of “pageant queens”), Monsoon has a kind of put-on, Old Hollywood demeanor that makes it difficult to differentiate between performer & character. A theater kid type who’s always “on”, Monsoon might be a bit much to have around as close friend, but they’re a joy to watch onscreen & seem to be very sweetly sincere in an art scene that seems prone to very jaded personalities. The film is structured around Jinkx explaining the basics of drag as an art form as they slowly apply makeup & accessories, making that awkward transition from looking like a Buffalo Bill-type psychopath while in half drag to becoming a larger than life persona. Simultaneously, a narrative emerges of both Monsoon’s personal life in a broken home & their professional career from performing at the age of 15 to cutting their teeth at local clubs to becoming an enterprise with several dedicated employees. Drag Becomes Him has the benefit of a wealth of footage from every stage of Monsoon’s career, but the way it juggles all of those narratives without seeming overburdened or reading like an A-B linear Wikipedia article points to a surprisingly adept team in terms of directing & editing. This is a small scale, low stakes documentary, but it’s one done exceedingly well.

One thing I did not expect form Drag Becomes Him was how wild Jinkx Monsoon would come across in their personal life. On RuPaul’s Drag Race they were kind of pigeonholed as a relatively tame personality in contrast with their competitors. Here, Jinkx does sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll as convincingly as any queen, getting stoned & partying in celebration in a newfound high point of their career (and deservedly so). The film has a completely different tone from Drag Race, skewing kinder & more gently sincere, but it does traffic in the same unapologetically gay headspace. The way it openly leers at masculine bodies is refreshing, since this kind of content can often be phonily de-sexed in order to put a wider audience at ease. Still, Monsoon’s life is far from one continuous, glamorous party and the film finds humor & fascination with the inconveniences of the logistics of drag: the indignity & discomfort of tucking, the machinations of taking a piss while buried under layers of clothing, typing while wearing cartoonishly long nails, etc. The only aspect of Monsoon’s life the film skips over is the narcolepsy revealed during their reign on television, which seems like a curious detail to avoid. Everything else is laid bare.

I don’t think you have to be a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race to enjoy Drag Becomes Him. The film carves out its own space entirely separate from the show’s very particular camp aesthetic. I was especially surprised by how it establishes a sort of digital pastel look all of its own that both serves its subject’s personality & helps distinguish the film as a work of art. I do think, however, that you’d be hard pressed to finish the doc without being at least somewhat a fan of Monsoon. They bare so much of their vulnerabilities as a real-life personality & their artistic sensibilities as a drag performer that it’s difficult to leave the film without feeling intimately connected. I entered Drag Becomes Him as a previous convert to all things Monsoon & I left as an even bigger, more dedicated fan. Jinkx is a talented artist & Drag Becomes Him makes a convincing, intimate case for how significant their art form can be.

-Brandon Ledet

A Town Called Panic (2009)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

I have a bad track record with modern CG animation as filtered through companies like Disney & Pixar and a traditional 2D, hand-drawn animation feature is increasingly difficult to come by, so stop motion might very well be my final refuge in animation as a cinematic medium. This might help explain why (besides them being lovingly crafted & emotionally devastating) titles like Mary and Max & Kubo and the Two Strings have stood out to me as some of the more memorable animated features of the last decade. The 2009 stop motion madcap comedy A Town Called Panic, adapted from a cult Belgian TV show of the same name, doesn’t aim for the same awe-inspiring depth & beauty of titles like Kubo. All things considered, it’s probably a lot more in line with the slapstick antics of something like Shaun the Sheep. However, its tactile visuals, which go out of their way to call attention to its stop motion format, and its manic comedy style make for a much more memorable, enjoyable experience than most of your standard talking CG animal features could. I’m not saying that A Town Called Panic is automatically “better” than all CG animation features because of its virtue as a stop motion work (at the very least, it’s highly likely that Zootopia will make my Top Films of 2016 list at the end of the year and it easily falls under that umbrella). I just find it remarkably easy to tap into the film’s headspace because I am in love with its methods, however crudely executed.

Stop motion studios like Laika pride themselves in pushing their medium to a technical extreme, smoothing out the movement of their figurines through CGI doctoring and striving to achieve grander, larger scale accomplishments in their films’ action sequences. A Town Called Panic is refreshing in the way it casually approaches the medium, intentionally drawing attention to the crudeness of its visual style. Its characters are simple figurines anyone could pick up out of a dollar store toy bag: a cowboy, an Indian, a horse. Their character names are just as simplistic: Cowboy, Indian, Horse. When they run from danger they have to hobble violently because of the limited movement of the plastic bases attached to their feet. There’s a world built around their overly simplistic shapes; pianos, cars, houses, and computers are designed so that they can be operated by horses. It’s not the intricately mapped out, multiscale world of Zootopia, however. It’s more like a children’s playset. I haven’t seen stop motion employed so casually & so conspicuously since KaBlam! in the 90s. The approach doesn’t necessarily read as lazy, though. It merely works as a reminder of how effective stop motion can be as a visual medium even when stripped down to its bare parts. The animation in A Town Called Panic is just complicated enough to deliver the physical comedy & whimsical absurdity of its story. It’s function over fashion, but in its kids’ playset simplicity the film does achieve its own aesthetic.

The plot is similarly bare bones. As with a lot of television series, especially comedies, A Town Called Panic plays like several TV episodes strung together instead of a traditional feature-length movie plot. Cowboy, Horse, and Indian are three roommates who’ve formed a strange, symbiotic domesticity within their household. Horse is the responsible adult of the house, while Cowboy & Indian are his goofball foils. They kick the plot into action when they forget Horse’s birthday & build him a barbecue as a last minute present. Through a mistake anyone could make, really, Cowboy & Indian order 50 million bricks instead of the mere 50 required to build the barbecue and decide to hide the bricks from the much put-upon birthday boy. For all of its manic energy & physics-bending absurdity, the best attribute of A Town Called Panic is its comedic patience. There’s a great payoff to the absurd visual gag of “hiding” 50 million bricks, but it’s a very slow, methodical reveal that relies on the strength of comedic timing even more than it does on situational humor. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a stop motion feature more confident with showing absolutely nothing happening onscreen in lingering shots so the impact of its long-game gags can pay off with greater comedic confidence. The setup of the bricks leads to many ingenious punchlines and episodic adventures, including an Atlantis-esque underwater colony, scientist kidnappers, and farm animal ammo in a territorial war. The absurdity is gradually, incrementally escalated, though. It’s a payoff that doesn’t arrive immediately, which is both surprising for a feature with such manic energy and impressive in terms of comedic confidence.

Overall, it’s difficult for me to pinpoint the exact tone of A Town Called Panic from the outside looking in. Is the franchise intended for children or stoned-out-of-their-mind college students? Both? It commands neither the cutesiness of Wallace & Gromit nor the dramatic ennui of Anomalisa, leaving it in some kind of stop-motion libido. Outside of a few details like alcohol consumption, marital infidelity, and the occasional potty language of words like “bastard” & “dumbass” it’s hard to say for sure that kids wouldn’t be able to watch it over parental concerns, but the humor isn’t exactly “adult” either. Its irreverence & whimsy recalls the stop motion comedy of Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo or Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it traffics in the crude simplicity of something like KaBlam!. Maybe if I were Belgian I’d have better context for A Town Called Panic’s target audience, but as an American Doofus & a stop motion fanatic all I can say is it’s very funny and I’m glad it exists. It’s rare to see a comedy in an medium brimming with so much minute-to-minute energy, yet patient enough to let longterm gags reach their full potential before payoff. This is a confident work of a very particular, unique mode of stop motion comedy & entirely deserves the traction it’s gaining as a cult curiosity on an international scale.

-Brandon Ledet