Reviews

Deathgasm (2015)

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fourstar

At the height of heavy metal’s popularity in the 1980s there was a ridiculous mini-trend of horror movie releases that capitalized on parents’ fears & teens’ transgressive love of the genre. Films like Trick or Treat (the one with Ozzy, not the 2007 anthology) & Shock ‘Em Dead answered paranoid questions like, “What if rock & roll groups are hiding Satanic messages in their records in order to subliminally corrupt our children & turn them into murderers?” with a resounding “Hell yes! That would be bitchin’.” The only problem with these films is that they had the distinct POV of an outsider looking in. They’re fun films, but they’re lacking a self-awareness about the world of metal, playing more off assumptions about the subculture than its actual, true-life nature.

2015’s New Zealand horror comedy Deathgasm, on the other hand, openly displays the insider knowledge of a true metal nerd’s overactive imagination. Not only does it continue the Kiwi traditions of films like Peter Jackson’s classic splatter fest Dead Alive, but it uses that gore-soaked past to deepen & improve 80s heavy metal themed horror schlock like Shock ‘Em Dead. This is the kind of film where D&D jokes fit snugly among casual discussions about metal’s endless list of subgenres– sludge, grind, death, black, etc. Deathgasm holds an obvious reverence for metal as both an artform & a lifestyle, but it’s also more than willing to poke fun at the subculture’s peculiarities, like the incongruity of ultra macho types wearing corpse paint (make-up) & metal nerds’ tendency to pine after potential love interests  from afar rather than, you know, actually talking to them. It also has a metal head’s sense of gore-soaked humor, going way over the top in its cartoonish violence & brutality.

At the beginning of the film, metal mostly serves as a form of escapism for miserable teens with social anxiety. At school & in public the central crew of nerd protagonists are constantly bullied into feeling like shit, but metal transports them to a mythical world (imagine the abstract mountaintop album art from the genre’s typical record covers) where they’re powerful & adored. Metal’s transcendent source of power becomes more literal as the nerds pull together to form a band called DEATHGASM (“all capital letters because lower case is for pussies”), playing a formed of blackened thrash with song titles like “Intestinal Bungee Jump.” Through their idolization of a defunct band wickedly named Haxan Sword they discover an ancient scroll of sheet music for a doom metal song that magically summons The King of Demons (a supernatural force bent on world domination) when played on a guitar. Instead of accepting the resulting gore-drenched apocalypse that ensues, DEATHGASM fights back, destroying The King of Demon’s loyal army of . . . demons with everything at their disposal: axes, chainsaws, drills, car engines and, of course, sex toys.

On the surface, Deathgasm has a lot more in common with the chaotic 1980s horror franchise Demons than it does with zombie fare like Dead Alive. It’s just that the films’ eye-gouging, throat-slitting, head-removing, blood-puking mayhem is played almost entirely for grossout humor instead of the discomforting terror inherent to films like Demons. This is especially apparent in the gore’s juxtaposition with rickroll gags & the goofy image of kids in corpse paint enjoying an ice cream cone. The horror comedy of Deathgasm is far from unique, though. What truly makes the film stand out is its intimate understanding of metal as a subculture. It’s easily the most knowledgeable movie in that respect that I’ve seen since the under-appreciated Tenacious D road trip comedy Pick of Destiny. I mean that as the highest of compliments. The difference there is that Pick of Destiny (besides being relatively violence free) got a lot of the attitude right, but didn’t have bands with names like Skull Fist, Axeslasher, and Beastwars on the soundtrack. Deathgasm not only looks & acts the part; it also sounds it, which is a rare treat. \m/

-Brandon Ledet

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

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fourstar

After watching Trauma and seeing the premonitions of failure in Dario Argento’s later works that the film possessed, La Sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome) was surprisingly refreshing in its successes. That’s not to say that Syndrome is perfect; there’s a lot wrong with this movie, including multiple sexual assaults, a killer with impenetrable motivations, some really bad effects, and disturbingly dark sexual politics. If you can overlook those problems, there’s a decent mystery here and a fresh twist, even if it is predicated on a skewed sense of gender dynamics and a warped understanding of trauma. This review, like this movie, is quite triggering with regards to sexual assault, so be warned. Also, spoilers.

Anna Manni (Asia Argento, appearing in one of her father’s films for the second time) fled her small home city at an early age to escape her unhappy family life; now, she’s a police inspector in Rome. She is involved in an unfulfilling romantic relationship with her partner Marco (Marco Leonardi, of Cinema Paradiso and Once Upon a Time in Mexico), which has become increasingly strained as the two investigate a serial rapist who has recently begun to murder his victims as well. Anna’s detective work leads her to Florence, where she receives an anonymous tip that leads her to the world-famous Uffizi Gallery. She is overcome by the titular syndrome, a psychosomatic reaction to an intensely profound experience (usually exposure to art) with physiological effects, and faints, splitting her lip and experiencing a bout of amnesia.

Of course, this is not made evident at the outset. The film opens with the unidentified Anna at the Uffizi Gallery, where she is “transported” into Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel, as the waves in the painting suddenly move and she finds herself flying over the CGI water before falling in and kissing a fish with a human-ish face (which is never explained). While I don’t think it was a bad idea to obfuscate the narrative from the outset, necessarily, this is a strange scene that doesn’t set the mood for the rest of the film, and I would argue that failing to express a thesis for such a prolonged time before the plot appears is one of the film’s failings.

Anna faints after the Icarus weirdness and is helped to her feet by a handsome man, whom she will later learn is named Alfredo Grossi (Thomas Kretschmann). Having lost her memory, Anna finds her hotel using the room key in her pocket. That evening, she enters another fugue state during which a reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch dissolves and she passes through it into a memory of one of the serial rapist/killer’s crime scenes, where we learn why she was in Florence. Then, suddenly, she’s back in her hotel room where the rapist is revealed to be Alfredo, who assaults Anna.

Let’s not mince words here: this is a deeply, deeply fucked up scene. This is by far Argento’s darkest movie, and I don’t say that lightly. Criticism of Argento’s early work often referenced a perception of his work as being misogynistic and glorifying both sexual objectification and sexual violence. In those works, however, any sexual assault was only referenced or alluded to, while here the rape is shown, in detail, with physical violence including punches and slashing. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the rape that is later revealed to be a motivating factor for the killer is referred to as a crime that occurred ten years prior and depicted only in the artwork of a demented hermit painter. The closest that his earlier work has come to this was in the flashbacks that motivated the killer in Tenebrae, in which he was physically assaulted on the beach and a beautiful woman molested him with the red heels that would become his obsession. There was a quiet understatement in those earlier works that is not present here, with its horrifying first person points of view of both victim and assailant, and the scene feels like it goes on forever. It’s exploitative, frankly, even before you take into account that this character was portrayed by Argento’s daughter. or the fact that it will happen again.

Afterwards, the drugged Anna awakes during Alfredo’s next crime and watches as he murders his next victim, which he seems to do solely for Anna’s viewing. She flees and returns to Rome, where her boss, Inspector Manetti (Luigi Diberti), places her under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Cavanna (Paolo Bonacelli) and recommends she spend some time with her family. Anna visits her father (John Quentin), and reminisces with her brothers about how her mother used to take her to the nearby museum to look at the art, where she experienced Stendhal Syndrome for the first time. She also cuts her hair and begins dressing in men’s traditional clothing, affecting a more masculine look as she trains as a boxer and begins creating paintings of her own, all of them of a screaming face. Alfredo tracks her down, and after assaulting her again and leaving her handcuffed and tied down to a mattress for several hours, he returns, but she is able to overtake him and exact some Rasputinian revenge: first she shoots him, then beats him, and breaks his neck, before throwing him into a river.

Anna returns to Rome, her personality further affected as she now wears a long blonde wig to cover scars from her assault and dresses only in white dresses. It is at this point that the police learn Alfredo’s identity, but Anna remains unconvinced that he has been vanquished. She strikes up a relationship with a Frenchman named Marie, an art student. When he, too, is murdered, the police search for Alfredo begins again.

There are a lot of problems here, foremost among them the representation of rape and sexual assault mentioned above. The revelation that Alfredo truly is dead and has been dead for weeks while the murders continue reveals that Anna’s repeated traumas have caused her to become a killer as well, and she ultimately reveals that Alfredo’s body is dead but he remains inside her. One way to read the implication of this is that the fractured psyches of victims of assault eventually lead them to become violent and psychopathic as well, which is just awful. It’s almost impossible to defend this choice either, especially when combined with other problematic elements here; for instance, one of the earlier rape victims that Alfredo left alive is interviewed by Anna, and she compares her assault, favorably, to sex with her boorish husband. There are huge sections of this narrative that are reprehensible at best, and that’s undeniable.

There are visual problems here as well. I’m not sure if the problem was a result of a bad transfer in the edition that I watched (it was a Troma DVD, after all), but the whole film looks like it was shot on video, which has the overall effect of causing it to feel both dated and cheap. It also reduces the impact of the artwork that’s shown throughout the movie, as it’s hard to imagine anyone being affected by the artwork when everything looks like a flat, bargain brand imitation rather than the real thing. Syndrome also has the distinction of being the first Italian film to use CGI, and Argento’s reasoning behind which images he chose to utilize this new technology to create are baffling. The CGI waves that emerge from Icarus actually look quite good, especially for a movie from 1996, but CGI is also used to follow a couple of pills that Anna swallows down her throat, for no apparent thematic reason. There are a few such scenes, where the images are unnecessary and silly looking, and as such are terribly distracting.

There’s also the fact that Anna, at such a young age (Asia was 20), seems far too young to be as professionally accomplished as she supposedly is. Further, there’s a general problem regarding whether or not Stendhal Syndrome is anything more that pseudopsychology. Still, this is a movie that’s quite good, in spite of all of its ethical and mechanical issues. The nonlinear narrative is at first confusing, but works better on reflection, as Syndrome acts as a kind of film version of a painting. What separates art and sculpture from prose, film, drama, and music is that those media incorporate time as an element of the story, progressing in a more or less linear fashion from beginning to end. Paintings and sculptures do not have this luxury, and thus must evoke an emotional rapport and create a rhetorical space through a still image, implying motion with static visuals. Syndrome, in many ways, acts as a series of set pieces that are presented out of order, and must be ordered after viewing. You cannot read The Night Watch from left to right like a sentence; you first see the figures highlighted by chiaroscuro, and then focus on other faces, or the figures’ clothing. Syndrome is much the same, and the attempt to recreate this kind of experience on film is laudable in its audacity and its success. I simply wish that they appeared in a movie that was praiseworthy for the content of its story as well, and that didn’t work so hard to make the audience feel Anna’s violation so viscerally and exploitatively.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)

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three star

I’m usually pretty harsh on the kind of computer-animated children’s features that’re flimsy excuses for ensemble casts to earn a relatively easy paycheck doing voiceover work. I am, however, also very weak to the powers of pandering. For all of the Madagascar 2‘s, Angry Birds: The Movie‘s, and Minions films I’ve skipped (and will be skipping) over there’s always one or two CGI animations that drag me to the theater. I checked out Pixar’s Inside Out earlier this year, for instance, because its inner-world design looked fascinating in a dream-logic kind of way. That, however, was actually a pretty good movie. What’s much more shameful is that I couldn’t resist the recent Adam Sandler cartoon Hotel Transylvania 2. By all accounts Hotel Transylvania 2 is the exact kind of hokey CGI ensemble cast animation dreck I typically avoid. Still, I was too weak-willed to pass up a famous monsters-themed comedy featuring several SNL alumni, not to mention Steve Buscemi as a werewolf & Mel Brooks as an aging Borscht Belt Dracula. I am admittedly powerless against that formula, regardless of the film’s quality.

It’s hard to say for sure if Hotel Transylvania 2 is better or worse than its predecessor. Its lack of ambition in terms of storytelling are pretty much on par with the first film, which was centered on a *gasp* human being winning his way into the heart of Dracula’s daughter & finding his place in a social circle consisting entirely of famous monsters. That small bit of world-building already taken care of, the second film at least has a lot less leg work to do, which is a blessing. There are some interesting ideas at play here about how the young lovebirds are treated as a “mixed couple” in both of human & monster societies (despite both being blindingly white) and the ways their first child together struggles to find a sense of identity in one of the two worlds. The rest of the film is sort of a loose jumble of disconnected thoughts on gentrification, social media addiction, a Luddite’s place in the modern world, and so on. The race metaphor in the human-monster relations is half-cooked at best and doesn’t amount to much more than ludicrous statements like, “Maybe you’ve let humans into your hotel, Dad, but I don’t think you’ve let them into your heart.” Whatever. Let’s be honest, I was mostly there for the former SNL staff & the monster-themed puns, something that the film was obviously also more invested in as well.

As far as former-SNL cast members go, Hotel Transylvania 2 hosts voice performances from the likes of Adam Sandler (duh), Andy Samberg, Molly Shannon, Dana Carvey, Chris Katan, David Spade, Chris Parnell, and Jon Lovitz. The movie was also co-written by TV Funhouse creator/all-around comedy genius Robert Smigel (not putting in his best work, but still). That’s not even mentioning contributions from non-SNL comedians Nick Offerman, Megan Mullalley, Rob Riggle, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, and, of course, Mel Brooks. As these things generally go, it’s a fantastic cast put to minimally effective use. The movie may be monster-themed, but it definitely tends more towards cute than scary. The bats look like kittens & a baby vampire with bright red curls for hair isn’t likely to appear in any child’s nightmares. The most horrific the film gets is in the (humorously) blank expressions of the hotel’s zombie staff. I appreciated a couple of the film’s isolated punchlines, like a version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” that goes, “Suffer, suffer, scream in pain. You will never breathe again,” calling back to the first film’s “Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna bite the head off a bird.” For the most part, though, the jokes are worth maybe an occasional light chuckle (whenever they’re not vaguely homophobic, an unsavory line of humor Sandler can’t seem to resist even in his children’s media). Even the decades-old Al Lewis travesty Grampire: My Grandpa is a Vampire has a better grasp on portmanteau than this film’s less satisfying concoction “Vampa”. It’s no matter. I got what I wanted out of Hotel Transylvania 2: former SNL staff, hokey monster puns, and a werewolf Steve Buscemi. If that’s not enough to hold your interest for a feature (and it really shouldn’t be; I’m weak), I highly recommend instead tracking down the much-superior-in-every-way 2012 Laika production ParaNorman for all of your animated monster movie needs.

-Brandon Ledet

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

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three star

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I’ve happily managed to avoid seeing any of the Paranormal Activity films until now (with ease, I might add), but a convenient showtime & a free ticket recently changed that for me. My first Paranormal Activity film ended up being the sixth in the series and you know what? It was actually pretty enjoyable. A found footage ghost story set during Christmastime 2013 (a temporal detail that adds essentially nothing to the equation), The Ghost Dimension is a fairly straight-forward collection of jump scares & spooky happenings. It’s a film that never dares to stray from its basic, by-the-books formula, but I have to admit that the formula kinda worked for me. Nothing about the film’s over-reliance on the idea that children are creepy or its assumption that all Catholic priests are prepared at a moment’s notice to wage metaphysical war on demons is anything new in terms of ghostly horror movies as a genre, but those tropes exist for a reason. They’re good for a cheap, easy lark. I could see how six films into the franchise someone could tire of Paranormal Activity‘s over-simplified ghost genre formula, but since I was just looking for a pleasant slice of generic horror, I was well satiated.

I’m guessing that what most distinguishes The Ghost Dimension from its five predecessors is the attention paid to the camera that records the film’s ghostly events. An old, bulky VHS camcorder from the 1980s (yes, that decade’s aesthetic is now antiquated enough to be spooky, as evidenced by the V/H/S franchise), this special piece of recording equipment has a built-in lens that allows it to pick up the, um, paranormal activity that plagues the film’s haunted house. It’s spirit photography made easy. At first, the film’s central pair of protagonist brothers don’t’ know how seriously to take this discovery. The iconic hipster asshole of the pair jokes while filming his paranoid brother, “My camera’s picking up something! It’s a dipshit.” Tripping on psilocybin mushroom doesn’t help the paranoia factor, especially once the brothers start diving into the box of VHS tapes that arrived in tandem with the camera. Much of The Ghost Dimension works this way, like a scary version of those hopelessly useless YouTube “reaction videos” people seem to be endlessly churning out lately. At one point, the brothers end up filming themselves watching themselves watch the haunted VHS recordings. It’s quite silly. What’s much more interesting, of course, is what’s actually on the tapes themselves: the home tapes of two young girls being raised/manipulated by a cult called The Midwives. That’s right. They’re a 1980s coven of devil-worshipping child care witches. In other words,, they’re total badasses. Too bad they get a pitiful amount of screentime.

No matter. Things pick up once the non-hipster-mustache brother’s little girl gets recruited by this cult through some space-time tampering in order to do the bidding of a wicked demon named, you guessed it, Toby. Once the little girl is in cahoots with Toby she transforms into a little Satanic badass– burning Bibles, biting priests, and burying rosaries in the backyard. By the time she’s talking to ghostly beings on the other side of mirrors & opening a physical portal to the titular ghost dimension, I was totally on board with what she was selling. Too bad her pesky parents get in Toby’s way & try to muck up his plans with their “innocent” little girl. There’s a surprising amount of ghostly action to be found in the film as these modern Toby/little girl shenanigans clash with the 1980s timeline of The Midwives coven, the world crashing in around them as they join forces.

What I thought I understood about Paranormal Activity as a franchise leading up to The Ghost Dimension was that the films required a lot of patience. It seemed that to attempt a “realistic” aesthetic (and to save money) the earliest films in the series were a slow burn of security footage-style still cameras & Paris Hilton night vision. The Ghost Dimension is much more kinetic that I expected based on this assumption. It’s packed to the gills with violent jump scares & images of Toby taking form by gathering a gestalt of black spiritual particles that’re pretty much the philosophical opposite of Dust in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The film is relentlessly dumb & resistant to reason. For instance, why would the parents move their daughter out of the house immediately instead of videotaping her & lightly suggesting that she stop talking to Toby? Why does Toby show up on the 2013 recordings, but not on the 1980s VHS tapes that were presumably captured with the same equipment? Why would someone, when fleeing from an interdimensional demon, shout to their spouse, “Stay upstairs! Lock the door!” as if it would make a difference? How could a bulky camera from thirty years ago seemingly manage to have a 24 hour battery life? These are silly questions to ask of such a silly movie. Continuity & basic logic aren’t nearly as essential to The Ghost Dimension‘s trashy charms as the simple pleasures small children acting creepy, CGI ghosts reaching for the audience in fits of 3D format gimmickry, and good, old-fashioned cheap jump scares. Perhaps after five similar films this wasn’t enough to hold the attention of returning audience members (there was a lot of iPhone scrolling & open conversation at my screening, despite it being opening night), but as a newcomer I was pretty well entertained.

-Brandon Ledet

The Satanist (1968)

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onestar

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Hooboy, this one was a stinker. Directed by Zoltan G. Spencer (nee Spence Crilly), The Satanist is a B&W horror nudie (a kind of subset/cousin of the genre of nudie cuties that Brandon has been writing about of late) that was released in 1968 and was thought to be irretrievably lost after its last screening in 1971; film archivists generally agree that only five prints of the film were ever made, and the single surviving print was unearthed only a year ago. It has been screened only two or three times since then, including at the Forgotten Film Festival in Philadelphia last summer, and most recently at the Alamo Ritz for the Halloween season. Unfortunately, of all the missing films out there in the world that are begging to be found, this is one whose discovery doesn’t enrich the world all that much.

The plot follows a writer who has recently experienced a nervous break and is, under orders from his doctor, trying to get some stress-free rest in the country with his beautiful wife, Mary. In short order, the two meet their neighbor Shawna, a “student of the occult” whose home is decorated with “numerous” “arcane” objects. The writer sees an apparition of a topless woman in a mirror, but does not share this with his wife, chalking it up to his nervous exhaustion. Later, he returns to Shawna’s home and spies through her window as she feels up another woman before turning into a man and engaging in softcore intercourse with her. His wife catches Shawna attempting some rite with his glasses (topless, of course), and the two decide to leave, but feel obligated to attend a party that Shawna had invited them to before they discovered her witchy ways. Obviously, this is a bacchanal during which the writer is tied up and forced to watch as Mary becomes the bride of Satan, as each man in attendance dons a ridiculous-looking ram’s head and thrusts vainly in the general direction of her nethers. The film then ends with the writer back in the frame story, where he sits in a wheelchair stating that it is up to you, the viewer, to determine whether or not his experience was real or the result of his mental breakdown. Of course, his doctor sure does look an awful lot like Shawna, doesn’t she?

There is nothing that could save this movie, not even an ending that mocks The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. At only 64 minutes, this movie feels as if it is hours long, and there’s nothing to do for long stretches of it while topless women roll around in relative chastity with hairy, mustachioed men. There’s no exchange of dialogue at all in the film, as all lines are delivered by the writer in voiceover, expositing here and explaining there, and any fun that comes from the film is in the pompous verbosity and overwrought delivery. Even the titles for the director’s later works, like Terror at Orgy Castle and Sister in Leather, are more automatically engaging than this film. There are monologues here that are begging to be sampled and looped, but that does not make up for the long stretches of screentime that are devoted to titillation. Even as an esoteric, forgotten piece of cinema, this is one to avoid.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Crimson Peak’s Giallo Treats

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A lot has been made about the genre mashups to be found in Guillermo del Toro’s most recent foray into horror: Crimson Peak. As Erin mentioned in her review, the film boasts an oldschool horror vibe that longingly looks back to the infamous Hammer horror productions of the 50s & 60s, while also recalling the romantic parlor dramas & ghost stories of the Victorian era. Indeed, those points of reference are worn proudly on the film’s sleeve. It’s impossible to look at the ancient, spooky, castle-like haunts that plague the film’s three central characters (played by Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Waskowska) without conjuring thoughts of the Hammer horror style. The romantic, Victorian ghost story aesthetic is referenced by Mia Wasikowska’s protagonist directly (along with apt name-checks for Jane Austen & Mary Shelly for good measure) because she herself is writing one & submitting it for publication. Something I could not stop thinking about while I was watching Crimson Peak, however, (and I’m sure I’m far from alone) was the stylistic influences of the Italian giallo genre of the 1960s & 70s, particularly the work of Dario Argento & Mario Bava.

While the narrative of Crimson Peak is much more closely related to the Hammer horror classics & Victorian ghost stories mentioned, the film’s visual palette & style-over-substance mentality are deeply rooted in giallo. I’m not talking the traditional murder mystery giallo films where the genre gets its name (though there certainly is a good bit of that), such as Bava’s Blood & Black Lace, but more of the spooky witchery in works that came later, like in Argento’s Suspiria. The most easily recognizable giallo element at work in Crimson Peak is the film’s lighting. Stark red, blue, green, and yellow lights clash in the film’s internal spaces as if Bava himself were alive & running del Toro’s lighting on set. Also present is Argento & Bava’s love of a gleaming straight razor just begging to slit a throat, as well as a masked, gloved, mostly offscreen killer shrouded in black-clad secrecy until the last-minute reveal. The giallo influences get more specific from there– be they the creepy dolls from Deep Red, Phenomena‘s fascination with close-up shots of insects, or the image of characters spying through keyholes, which is so prevalent in giallo that it appears in two of the genre’s recent pastiche tributes: Amer & The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.

What’s most striking about Crimson Peak‘s giallo heritage, though, is just as elementary as the Mario Bava lighting, but also important enough to be referenced in the film’s title: blood. There is a ludicrous amount of blood in this film. Just ridiculous. It flows from the sink & the bathtub faucet. It seeps through the floorboards & runs down the walls. Characters cry blood. They cough it up. Snow is blood-red in Crimson Peak, as are the film’s beautiful CGI ghosts. I should mention here that most of this “blood” is actually the red clay that rests below the trio of central characters’ haunted household. The effect is, of course, intentional, allowing del Toro to fill the frame with absurd amounts of a thick, blood-red substance (stored even in gigantic bloody vats in the house’s basement/workroom), without relying on a supernatural source for it. It can be no mistake either that the film’s blood-red clay is much more akin to the vibrant hue you’d see in an acrylic paint or a ripe tomato. Giallo films were particularly fond of this cartooonish style of stage blood as well, tending to shy away from the more brownish hues of the real stuff.

So, if you happen to have any buddies out there who are huge giallo nerds & haven’t yet shown an interest in Crimson Peak (is that possible?) it might be worthwhile to shoot them a recommendation. The film’s tendency to value visual style over narrative substance should fit in snugly with their tastes, as should its over-the-top lighting & untold gallons of crimson blood. Of course, the film will play even better if these hypothetical giallo nerds also have a taste for Hammer horror & Victorian ghost stories. I’m sure there’s a great deal of overlap on that Venn diagram & the movie will eventually find a sizeable cult following, even if it currently isn’t doing so hot at the box office. It genuinely deserves it, if nothing else, just based on its visual accomplishments alone.

-Brandon Ledet

The Thing (1982)

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I’ve greatly enjoyed every John Carpenter movie I’ve ever seen, save maybe a couple nu metal-era misteps like Ghosts of Mars. As much as I love the director’s landmark films & his soundtrack work, though, there are still a few major titles from Carpenter that I haven’t yet made the effort to catch up with. That’s why it was a godsend that the Prytania Theatre is dedicating the October schedule for its Late Night movie series to Carpenter’s work, culminating at the end of the month, of course, with a screening of Halloween. As I mentioned in my recap of the theater’s recent screening of Cinema Paradiso, The Prytania is a century-old New Orleans institution, the oldest operating cinema in the city, a fine venue for seeing great films for the first time. It was where I first saw Jaws, their frequent selection for America’s favorite holiday: Shark Week. When Robin Williams passed away last year it was where I first saw Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. And, most recently, it was where I finally watched John Carpenter’s masterful monster movie The Thing, screened on the first truly cold night of the year (how’d they plan that?), so that you could feel a fraction of the chill of the film’s Antarctica setting in your bones. Technically, it’s still fall outside, but when Kurt Russell gripes in the film, “First goddamn week of winter,” it was easy to empathize. All that was missing was a shape-shifting alien & a bottle of Jim Beam.

The Thing is essentially a 1950s Roger Corman monster movie taken to its most logical & most pessimistic extremes. In fact, the short story the film is based on had been previously adapted into an actual 1950s creature feature (and would later be resurrected for an episode of The X-Files & a cheap CGI trifle of a remake). A practical effects masterwork, The Thing‘s titular creature is just as ambiguous in form as it is in name. It’s a grotesque, rapidly evolving mess of undercooked biology, calling into mind the hot mess of vaguely defined monsters in the back half of 1981’s psychological horror Possession. The thing arrives on Earth via a disc-shaped, Millennium Falcon-esque UFO in the opening credits with very little detail provided for its origins. A complicated “organism that imitates other life forms,” the thing is alien in every sense of the word. It transforms in ways that are shocking & disgusting because they don’t make sense in the context of anything we’ve ever seen or understood in biology. Even in cinema, we’ve seen dogs used to create tension or terror, but never by splitting their faces open to reveal a mass of spider-like tentacles. We’re used to monsters killing for sport or nourishment, but not so much a creature that infiltrates a species through physical imitation, like a disease. Cellular activity found in corpses, blood that actively avoids extreme heat, half-cooked human imitations that look just about almost right except for long claw-like hands that resemble gigantic, deep-fried softshell crabs: the thing is far beyond human comprehension of basic biology, constantly opening compartments of itself like horrific Russian dolls to reveal more & more layers of ambiguous terror. Too often sci-fi horror models the designs of its creatures around what we already know. The Thing‘s creature might be the most alien alien to ever grace the screen.

Finding themselves face to face with this unknowable threat is an all-male crew of scientific researchers isolated in Antarctica for the winter. Even as scientists our protagonists have a difficult time making sense of the thing. Kurt Russell’s character exclaims early on, “I don’t know what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird & pissed off, whatever it is.” Once the thing infiltrates their ranks & starts imitating human lifeforms (a computer model helpfully explains, “Possibility that one or more crew members are infected: 75%”), everyone becomes suspect. The group of goofs, once prone to drunkenly playing computer chess, rollerskating to Stevie Wonder, and smoking six-paper joints in the lab, soon has to ask of each & every team member, “How do we know he’s human?” The notorious scene of extensive, pointless, paranoid violence in Carpenter’s They Live (“Put the glasses on! Put ’em on! “) is drawn out here to a full length narrative. Nearly every member of the crew is an affable goof, so it’s a very tense atmosphere in which at least one of them is not what they seem, but instead is a shape-shifting mess of mismatched body parts & gore.

I’m not sure of the exact reason The Prytania is spotlighting John Carpenter this month (not that I would complain if they did so every October), but it does feel like kind of the perfect time to do so. After scoring his own films for decades, the director just released his first studio album, Lost Themes— complete with his first music video & live concerts. Screening They Live earlier this month was a fitting tribute to the recently deceased “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, as it was easily his best work outside the wrestling ring (and I’m bummed to say I missed it). Even in a more general sense, the current cinematic climate is adoringly looking back at the Carpenter aesthetic & it’s all too easy to see echoes of his work in films as recent as The Guest, It Follows, and Cold in July. In other words, everything’s coming up Carpenter.

If I only catch one film during this mini-Carpenter Fest, I’m glad I at least got to experience The Thing for the first time on the big screen. The movie’s visuals are on par with the best the director has ever crafted. The strange, rose-colored lighting of emergency flares & the sparse, snow-covered Antarctica hellscape give the film an otherworldly look backed up, of course, by the foreign monstrosity of its titular alien beast. The film’s creature design  is over-the-top in its complexity and I sincerely hope every single model made for the film is preserved in a museum somewhere & not broken into parts or discarded. Also up there with Carpenter’s best work is the film’s dark humor, not only in Kurt Russell’s drunkenly cavalier performance, but also in the absurdity of the film’s violence & grotesqueries. It played very well with a midnight, BYOB audience. The only thing that’s missing here from Carpenter’s typical masterworks is one of his self-provided, glorious synth soundtracks, but with a pinch hitter like Ennio Morricone stepping in to fill the void, it’s near impossible to complain. The Thing is a perfectly crafted creature feature, one that even satisfies art cinema tastes with a resistance to tidying up its ambiguity in a bleak, mostly open conclusion. It’s by no means a stretch to rank it among the best of Carpenter’s works & I’m grateful to The Prytania for providing the opportunity to see it large, loud, and (in the spirit of the film’s isolated crew of scientific researchers) more than a little drunk with a live audience at a late hour. It was special.

-Brandon Ledet

Desperate Living (1977)

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fourstar

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Full disclosure: I may have implied I knew more about the John Waters canon than is strictly accurate in my review of Polyester. The truth is that I saw (the intentionally filthy and shocking) Pink Flamingos and Mondo Trasho in high school eleven years ago, and have randomly seen both Cry Baby and Hairspray a few times each, although even I, with my limited knowledge, know that these two are not really indicative of Waters’s body of work (a friend once told me that Cry Baby is a straightforward representation of the genre that Hairspray was meant to satirize, which seems accurate to me). I also once started watching Pecker, but the VHS broke about thirty minutes in, so I can’t speak to that movie, really. That was my entire experience with the Waters oeuvre until a few weeks ago, and I may have made some not-quite-accurate generalizations in my previous review. Feel free to point out my errors in the comments!

In the meantime, it was my pleasure to see Desperate Living, Waters’s 1977 picture starring Mink Stole as decoy protagonist Peggy Gravel. Peggy was recently released from a mental institution, and now her frayed nerves mean that she’s having trouble readjusting to family life as she shrieks and screams her way around her home until she and her housemaid Grizelda (Jean Hill) accidentally kill Peggy’s husband Bosley (George Stover, of Blood Massacre). The two of them then flee town and, after an encounter with a policeman (Turkey Joe) who forces the two women to give him their underpants and kiss him (gross), end up in a shantytown called Mortville, where many vagrants and fugitives make their home under the cruel rule of Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey), a nightmare Disney queen who forces her citizens to obey her every whim, no matter how silly or dangerous. Peggy and Grizelda take shelter in a ramshackle building–like all buildings in Mortville other than Carlotta’s palace–owned by Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), a genderqueer former wrestler, and her sexy girlfriend Muffy St. Jacques (real life Mafia moll Liz Renay). When Carlotta’s daughter Coo-Coo (Mary Vivan Pearce) tries to run off with her lover, a garbage collector who resides within Mortville’s nudist colony, Carlotta has her guards kill the man. Peggy, who has “never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing,” joins Carlotta in her quest to kill all of Mortville with an unholy elixir consisting of rabies and rat urine.

Desperate Living starts off in a more objectively humorous place than the film ends, as we follow Peggy’s histrionic reaction to some normal (and some questionable) child behaviors before Grizelda smothers Bosley with her massive rear end. Once the action leaves the Gravel household, however, all sorts of horrible things happen that require a certain appreciation for filth-as-comedy. Firstly, the encounter with Sheriff Shitface is objectively disturbing, as he sexually assaults two women at gunpoint; once in Mortville, the whims of Queen Carlotta are more subdued if more deadly (forcing everyone to put their clothing on backwards and walk in reverse motion is harmless, even if her orders of execution are creepy). Still, there are a lot of laughs to be had here if you are in the right mood, and there’s also a lot of fetish fuel if you’re into that sort of thing (Ed Peranio’s striptease as Lieutenant Williams manages to be both silly
and sexy), what with all the mesh shirts and leather pants floating around. Still, this is not a movie for the weak of stomach, or anyone who would find the detachment of a vestigial phallus odious. Recommended for lovers of the weird.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Burnt Offerings (1976)

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fourstar

Dan Curtis is most well remembered as the creator of gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (poorly remade as an irreverent fish-out-of-water comedy starring Johnny Depp in 2012), but  remembrance of his legacy should also include his direction of 1976’s horror film Burnt Offerings. A kind of haunted house flick, the story concerns a run-down neoclassical manor home and the spell that it casts over a hapless family in order to rejuvenate itself.

The owners of the mansion are the wheelchair-bound Arnold Allardyce and his sister Roz (Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart, prominently featured in the film’s trailer but in what amount to extended cameos). They are delighted when the Rolf family, consisting of father Ben (Oliver Reed), mother Marian (Karen Black, whom Curtis directed the previous year in Trilogy of Terror), and twelve-year-old son Davey (Lee Montgomery, future heartthrob of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun), express interest in renting the house. Of course, for the low rental price of $900 for the whole summer, there is one caveat; the family must care for the ancient Mrs. Allardyce, a recluse who requires only that meals be left outside her door thrice daily. Ben is resistant at first, but Marian, already affected by the house, insists, and the trio, along with Ben’s elderly Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis), arrive at the mansion the following week.

Things seem to go well for a while. Davis is a particular treasure as the wisecracking Aunt Liz, and although Marian becomes more withdrawn (becoming obsessed with Mrs. Allardyce’s collection of photographs and listening to a music box for hours on end), the rest of the family bonds on their vacation. Things begin to take a turn for the worse as Ben starts to have nightmares about a creepy, grinning chauffeur (Anthony James) he encountered at his mother’s funeral as a child, and his roughhousing with Davey in the pool takes on a dark turn as he feels compelled to drown the boy. Soon, the lively Aunt Elizabeth grows ill and dies while the house continues to become less decrepit. Ben ultimately tries to flee the grounds with Davey, but forces conspire to block his way, as his hallucinations of the evil chauffeur begin to appear even in his waking states. When the pool once again tries to drown Davey, Marian’s spell is briefly broken and she agrees to flee with the rest of the family, but the house will not let them go so easily.

A forgotten treasure, Burnt Offerings shares more than just its genre with Poltergeist: they also both share a PG rating. Although it’s still a bit of a shock to think about Spielberg’s haunted house movie being given such an age-inappropriate rating, it’s easier to see how the creepiness of Burnt Offerings slipped under the radar. There are no ghosts in the Allardyce house; the house itself seeks to feed upon the life force of its inhabitants, and very little explanation is given as to how or why the house came to be this way. In a more modern movie, the audience would likely be forced to deal with an unsatisfying origin story for the house’s hunger, but the lack of context actually adds to the horror factor; unanswered questions often leave a stronger impact than unfulfilling answers, and Offerings is a movie that understands that. The only thing that could conceivably be called a specter is the grinning chauffeur, who is effectively unsettling despite never performing any malicious actions. Who is he? Nobody, really, just a creepy guy that Ben encountered as a child and who left an impact on him, which is a nice touch. He’s not affiliated with the house except in the way that he relates to Ben’s unspooling sanity, and he actually stands out as one of the creepier boogeymen that have haunted horror films of the past, calling to mind the Thin Man from the Phantasm series.

Further, the way that the house uses its occupants to act out violence against each other is also quite scary. The tension builds slowly in this film, starting first with images of life and renewal (a dead potted plant suddenly has a green leaf, a burned-out light bulb begins to work) before more outrageous elements occur (gas leaks in locked rooms, dilapidated siding and roof tiles flying off of the house and being replaced by fresh fixtures). If the film had spent less time establishing the Rolfs as a happy family before tearing them apart, the escalation of terror wouldn’t work half as well as it does, and I can’t believe such a great film has faded into relative obscurity. It’s definitely worth tracking down and enjoying.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Masters of the Universe (1987)

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threehalfstar

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I was a huge He-Man fan as a kid. Huge. The biggest. My light-up, plastic He-Man sword that made electronic clashing noises when you banged it against imagined enemies & inanimate objects was a prized possession. That is, until I moved onto the next well-marketed obsession: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, WWF, whatever. It’s curious that although I watched the cartoon religiously & loved my plastic sword that bellowed “By the power of Greyskull!” when you pressed the right button on the handle, I somehow never watched the He-Man movie (not that I can remember, anyway). Promised by infamous schlock producers Golan-Globus to be “the Star Wars of the 80s”, 1987’s Masters of the Universe bombed. Hard. Critics hated it. It failed to make a profit. It still, nearly three decades later, holds a mere 17% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. In short, the film was & remains a failure.

Well, at least Golan-Globus & the Canon Group got the Star Wars claim partly right. Sure,  the film was far from the technical marvel, financial goldmine, or cultural landmark that Star Wars was, but Masters of the Universe at least made its best effort to mimic the visual style of the George Lucas classic. While the film was at it, it was also keen to borrow some visual ideas from Jack Kirby. And the covers to oldschool fantasy novel paperbacks & story records. The resulting aesthetic is a fascinating mix of bleep-bloop sci-fi machines & the medieval sorcery of skulls, magical crowns, and wizard staffs. Masters of the Universe excels most in costume in set design. Yes, you can see constant Star Wars reminders in the format of the opening credits & costuming (“These soldiers aren’t Star Trooper knockoffs! They’re uniforms are black! They’re different!”), as well as Skeletor’s irrefutable Darth Vader vibes, but there’s oh so much more going on. Besides the medieval wizardry adding an extra layer of visual cool (I’m serious!) to the Star Wars appropriation, the film is also bold enough to take the freakshow on the road. He-Man (played by a perfectly cast Dolph Lundgren) & his three intergalactic cohorts take a trip through a portal (somewhat resembling God’s anus) that results in their arrival in 1980s California. By the time Skeletor & his cronies arrive in a morbid parade procession in downtown Los Angeles, bent on world domination, the film reaches its full potential as a goofy trifle trying to modernize/cash in on that Star Wars magic.

The reasons why large stretches of the He-Man movie are set in America, even outnumbering the scenes set in the fictional land of Eternia, don’t really matter. There’s a MacGuffin called “The Cosmic Key” (presumably the same one that provides motivation for pro wrestler Stardust) that lands He-Man & his crew in California, but it honestly doesn’t amount to much significance. Masters of the Unvierse is far more entertaining if you clear your mind of plot-related concerns & focus on the ridiculous visual feast laid before you. For instance the question of why He-Man would bring a sword to a laser fight isn’t nearly as satisfying as the cartoonish spectacle of He-Man weilding a sword in a laser fight. The exact reasons why Skeletor’s third act acquisition of grand galactic power would transform his costume into a golden, intergalactic, imperial ensemble that feels like the best Jack Kirby knockoff to ever grace the silver screen don’t matter nearly as much as the image itself, which is a wonder to behold, however brief.

Similiarly, it would be smart for dedicated fans of the He-Man cartoon (if they’re still out there) to disregard all plot & character details they remember from the television show. Instead of the all-powerful Sorceress’ gigantic eagle headdress, she wears a complex crystal crown. There’s no mention of He-Man’s gigantic feline sidekick Cringer/Battle Cat. Nor is there any mention of He-Man’s “true” identity, Adam, which is really just He-Man wearing more clothes than usual (not that his own parents can recognize him in his skimpy costume). Gone also is He-Man’s awful Prince Valliant haircut. It’s kind of interesting what elements do remain of the original cartoon, however accidental. Many of the episodes of the original show consist largely of He-Man & pals searching for one thing or another instead of actually battling Skeletor & his evil gang. In the movie, this search happens to be a pursuit for the Cosmic Key. Curiously, what also remains from the show is the oddball sexuality seeping through the characters’ skimpy costumes & penchants for sadomasochistic torture. Very early in the film it becomes apparent that Masters of the Universe is just as interested in He-Man’s pectoral muscles as Russ Meyer would’ve been if they happened to be gigantic breasts. There’s also a scene where our hero (who Liz Lemon would almost certainly refer to as a “sex idiot”) is getting beaten at Skeletor’s command that I’m pretty sure has inspired a new fetish in me: laser whips.

However, a lot of what makes Masters of the Universe a fun watch, besides the surprising high quality of its set & costume design as well as its visual effects, is when it disregards its source material & basic reason completely. For instance, once The Cosmic Key is in the hands of a bonehead Californian musician, its keys are revealed to have musical tones to them that allow it to be played like a synth. Because of this detail, it’s rock & roll that saves the day just as much as, if not more than, He-Man. With some goofy rock & roll/medieval space wizard culture clashes like this, combined with roles filled by Lundgren, Billy Barty, and Courtney Cox, as well as some super cool villains that include a humanoid lizard, a werewolf-looking beast thing, a humongous bat, and their space age Rob Halford friend, Masters of the Universe makes for a really goofy picture. The visual accomplishments occasionally elevate the material, but it’d be untruthful to sell the film as being good for anything but a lark. Fans of shoddy Star Wars knockoffs, 80s cheese, and Jack Kirby cosplay are all likely to find something of value here. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about the He-Man film as I used to be about my toy He-Man sword (how could I be?), but I ended up enjoying it far more than I expected.

-Brandon Ledet