Reviews

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

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fourhalfstar

I was at first a little overwhelmed by the idea of a N.W.A biopic stretching out for a 147min runtime, but as I was watching Straight Outta Compton in the theater its length gradually began to make total sense. It’s an incredibly thorough biopic, digging not only into the cultural & political climate surrounding the group’s origins, but also the aftermath of their falling out & disbanding. Even at 2.5 hours, not everything was covered & large swaths of historical accuracy were tossed aside in favor of a tight narrative & an indulgence in a killer 90’s aural & temporal vibe. Straight Outta Compton is not a particularly great example of a historical document, but damn if it didn’t achieve an incredible Cinematic Aesthetic in every scene, somehow managing to squeeze out a great biopic with exactly zero deviations from the format (unlike more experimental films like Love & Mercy). The cinematography, provided by longtime Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique, confidently supported the film’s surface pleasures (including an onslaught of still-great songs & pandering nostalgia) to the point where any & all faults were essentially irrelevant. When a sample wraps up the music video portion of the end credits by proclaiming “Damn, that shit was dope!” (the very same sample that concludes the song the film’s named after) it was difficult to disagree.

Because stories ultimately belong to those still around to tell them, the film’s narrative is undoubtedly bent towards the stories of Ice Cube & Dr. Dre, who are both credited as producers here. In a lot of ways they use the film as a sort of redemption piece, reshaping their personal history to include a reconciliation with departed group member Eazy-E, who lost his life to HIV-related health complications at a young age. The real-life tale as long as I’ve known it has been that the group never truly resolved their very public feuds (a deeply ugly mess of shoddy contracts, legal disputes, and diss tracks) while Eazy was still alive. The movie version cleans that mess up in an unbelievably tidy way perhaps more fit for the likes of a made-for-TV TLC biopic, but that tendency towards a clear A-B narrative feels entirely intentional. There’s a scene late in the film where Cube confronts Eazy for calling out his acting debut Boyz n the Hood for being “an afterschool special” & Eazy responds “I like afterschool specials.” The simple, clean redemption story Straight Outta Compton tells doesn’t feel at all far from that sentiment.

So according to this romanticized, cleaned-up folklore, Dre was the group’s seminal producer, Cube was responsible for its best writing, and Eazy held down the majority of the raw talent, street cred, and business acumen. Folks like MC Ren, DJ Yella, and The D.O.C. are not only sidelined, but sometimes they’re even downplayed as lesser talents to make the film’s holy gangsta rap trinity shine all the brighter. Yella, for instance, shoulders most of the blame for Dre’s involvement in the Prince-influenced, sexually ambiguous funk days of the Worldclass Wreckin’ Cru & other club gigs that required him to wear sequins & play mindless party records. Ren gets the real short end of the stick here, though, verbally thrown under the bus as an inferior lyricist that couldn’t hold down the crew after Ice Cube’s departure. As a fan of the group’s entire output (and Ren’s solo records for that matter), these claims sting a little, but just as the fudging of the Eazy redemption story makes for a clearer narrative, dissing Ren in the script does actually make sense story-wise (even if it’s a shame that he only raps a total of three verses in the entire film to make more room for Cube, Dre, and Eazy).

If the film didn’t capture the entirety of the group members individual nuances, it at least got the imagery down. Actors Corey Hawkins & O’Shea Jackson, Jr. look & sound incredibly similar to the roles they’re playing (Dre & Cube, respectively), with Jackson having the distinct advantage (and possible awkwardness) of portraying his own father. New Orleans native Jason Mitchell pulls the hat trick of not only looking & sounding like Eazy-E, but also outshining his fellow cast members as a damn good actor, bringing to life what turns out to be one of the group’s more interesting & complicated characters. R. Marcos Taylor & speaking of Love & Mercy, Paul Giamatti (playing infamous record industry tyrants Suge Knight & Jerry Heller) aren’t nearly as visually accurate in their roles as the film’s villains, but they do provide an all-too-believable menace to their scenes that allow them to get by more as archetypes than carbon copies. The only actor who looks jarringly out of place here is a brief appearance by an absurdly inaccurate Snoop Dogg, but that’s more than made up by the likeness of the rest of the cast, an appearance from a Tupac lookalike so accurate he could’ve been a hologram, and clips of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video shown at the end credits to remind you just how detailed the film’s attention to visual preciseness was.

Visual & historical accuracy aside, director F. Gary Gray should get a lot of credit here for creating a wildly entertaining biopic with exactly zero deviations from the genre’s format. This is a movie that somehow makes room to capture our current cultural 90s fetishization, ludicrously timely reflections on race-based police brutality that are sadly just as potent now as they were in the days of Rodney King, and an extended gag that calls back to the infamous “Bye, Felicia” line in Gray’s debut film (and original collaboration with Ice Cube) Friday. Instead of calling into question N.W.A’s more unsavory attributes, namely their misogyny & homophobia, Gray just lets them play themselves out. Misogyny is on display in hedonistic, music video style pool & hotel parties where women are treated like party favors (sometimes literally tossed around like objects) & homophobic rants are allowed to be voiced in Ice Cube’s infamous diss tracks & Eazy’s reaction to his HIV diagnosis. Straight Outta Compton makes no moral judgements about its subjects, but rather just more or less portrays them as they were.

There’s some glorification inherent to the biopic format here & a lot of ground was breezily glossed over (including contributions from names like Vanilla Ice, Bone Thugs, Above the Law, and J.J. Fad), but it’s unwise to nitpick too many of Gray’s decisions here, since the final product is so enjoyable & packed-to-the-gills as is. It’s not only successful as an aurally & visually beautiful slice of N.W.A fan service, but it’s also a great primer for younger folks who mostly know Ice Cube as an actor & Dre as Eminem’s buddy who peddles expensive headphones. Even as a longtime fan, I learned a thing or two along the way (most excitingly that Eazy-E once dined with President George H. W. Bush). Gray competently captures the social & political climates that gave birth to his infamous subject as well as the context of their dissolution’s aftermath (even if he intentionally fuzzes up the details in-between), but the story he tells in Straight Outta Compton is mostly remarkable in how fun & rewatchable it is without at all straying from its biopic format. He used an already well-established narrative structure as a bottle to capture the lighting that was what the made the group so special & their songs so endlessly listenable to this day. That’s no small feat & the final product ended up being one of my favorite trips to the theater all year.

-Brandon Ledet

l gatto a nove code (aka The Cat o’ Nine Tails, 1971)

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three star

Speaking of l gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails) in the book Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Argento himself referred to his sophomore follow-up to 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as one of the his least favorites from his canon. Released just 51 weeks after Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails is a weaker effort, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it is more grounded and follows a more linear narrative than Argento’s previous film. Where Plumage was impressive in that it already exhibited so many of Argento’s stylistic eccentricities, Cat almost seems like an earlier work, with mostly monochrome environments and a drab color scheme; whereas Plumage was populated by bizarre characters and situations (I still can’t get over the hermit painter who raised cats for food), Cat is much more straightforward.

The film follows Franco “Cookie” Arnò (Karl Malden), a blind retired reporter and caretaker of his young niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis). One night, he overhears a man in a car discussing blackmail; the next morning he learns that a nearby genetics research facility, the Terzi Institute, was broken into, but there is no evidence that anything was stolen. Still later, Lori tells Arnò that she recognizes the man from the car, Dr. Calabresi, as the victim of an apparent rail station accident, as this makes the front page. Arnò reaches out to Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), a journalist whom he previously met when Giordani was investigating the Terzi break-in, and discusses his suspicions: Calabresi was involved with the break-in, and he was killed in order to prevent his blackmail from coming to light. The photographer who captured the supposed accident is also murdered, garrotted and then slashed, as is Calabresi’s fiancee once she uncovers evidence that names the killer. Giordani strikes up a sexual relationship with the adopted daughter of the Terzi Institute’s founder, and Arnò sends Lori away as attempts to kill the two journalists mount.

Cat trades Plumage’s psychological reason for the killer’s murder for a physiological one, as the killer is hypothesized (and ultimately revealed) to have a genetic mutation of the chromosomes, possessing XYY genes. The belief that this mutation leads to a predisposition toward violence has long since been disproven; it cropped up in the trial of Richard Speck (who was later found to have standard XY genes anyway), and still floats into the public consciousness from time to time, even featuring in an episode of Law & Order, long after everyone should have known better. This would seem to discredit the film’s premise, but modern sentiments can allow us to read the text as the killer learning of their condition and committing violent acts not because of their predisposition towards violence, but because knowledge of their genetic make-up allows them to act out in ways they could not before, essentially giving the murderer a reason to act on their desires, rather than an impetus for said desires. Still, it does date the movie in a way that other Argento films are not.

The performances here are stronger than in Plumage, but that does not always a great film make. Karl Malden is a stand-out, which should come as no surprise considering that his resume boasts On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Patton; his performance as Arnò encourages sympathy but not pity, and it’s impossible not to enjoy his screen presence. Catherine Spaak is underutilized as Terzi’s daughter, and it’s unclear if her coldness on screen is a result of a lack of talent for the craft or a deliberate stylistic choice. Even my brief synopsis above mentions her only in passing, as her contribution to the mystery is an obvious red herring; she could be removed from the film altogether, and this change would have virtually no effect on the outcome. Franciscus, for his part is well cast, and his range is greater than Plumage’s Tony Mustante, making Giordani a more compelling figure than Dalmas was; compare the scene in which Dalmas fends off the advances of an aging antique dealer in Plumage with the subtlety on display when Franciscus’s Giordani pursues a potential lead to a gay social gathering. He is clearly discomfited, but only on the personal level, not in the abstract, which is not only a mark in the actor’s favor but the director’s, as it demonstrates a positive departure from the way that homosexuals and other “deviants” were portrayed in Plumage.

Also telling is the way in which the murders are committed. As I wrote in my Plumage review, there has been no small amount of scholarship devoted to the sexual overtones of the slasher genre, with predominantly female victims and phallic murder weapons; here, however, the murders are committed with the specific goal of hiding information, and the victims are men as often as (or perhaps more than) they are women, and the woman who is killed onscreen dies in the same manner as the men: fully clothed, with her dignity, via strangulation (although her murder is, admittedly, more brutal and drawn out than those of Dr. Calabresi or the photographer). There are no scenes in which a woman becomes hysterical when trapped by the killer, or in which there is a component of lasciviousness. In fact, Lori, despite being a child, plays a very important role in noticing and gathering information that Arnò cannot because of his lack of sight. I honestly would have preferred to see more of this, as the older man/young woman mystery-solving duo is one of the elements that I love so much about my personal favorite Argento film, Phenomena, which we will be getting to eventually. Although Lori ends up becoming a hostage, this is less because of her sex and more because of her age, and it’s a bit of a surprise how much more progressive this film is than Plumage, especially since less than a year passed between the two movies’ premieres.

Cat isn’t a bad film; it has a great cast, a good mystery, and some great moments. Unfortunately, although this is a film not lacking for substance, its blasé cinematography is nothing new, and it lacks the stylishness that sets Argento apart from the herd (and the ending is so abrupt you’ll wonder if you missed something). Although I recommend the film for fellow Argento fanatics, and horror/slasher fans in general, home video releases of the film are generally abysmal. It seems that not a single VHS release escaped being trimmed, for censorship (of violence and homosexual themes) or to fit the length of tape in a videocassette, as was the case with JTC’s release. Despite advertising itself as being “fully restored,” Diamond Entertainment’s DVD release actually contained the same cut as earlier mangled VHS releases. Anchor Bay’s DVD of the film, which was what I watched, at least contains the full film; ironically, for a film with a disabled hero, there is no release of this film that would work for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers. Fans like me, who prefer to watch Argento’s films in Italian with English subtitles, are unable to do so–the only subtitles are translations of onscreen text. Blue Underground recently released a Blu-ray of the film, but I don’t know if this oversight has been corrected. Still, if you have the time, opportunity, and a copy of the film in its entirety, it’s worth a watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Subtle Terror of Babe 2: Pig in the City vs the Straightforward Terror of Pigs (1972)

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Although the idea of talking pigs in children’s media is not at all uncommon, Babe 2: Pig in the City is distinctive from its verbal swine brethren at the very least in its eagerness to terrify its pintsized audience. The only live-action talking-pig children’s movie that even comes close to Pig in the City on the terror scale is the 1999 made-for-TV adaptation of Animal Farm & even that horror show is softened a bit by the kindly wise voice of Kelsey Grammar. For more true pig-themed terror you have to look beyond Pig in the City‘s kids’ movie genre & venture into the seedy world of adult horror cinema. Horror flicks like Razorback & Chaw typically look for menace in the wild boar instead of the domesticated pig, which is a little besides the point here. 1972’s Pigs (alternately titled Daddy’s Deadly Darling) is about as literal you can get in the quest for pig-themed horror, delivering exactly what you’d expect, for better or worse, from a grindhouse exploitation film about flesh-eating pigs distributed on home video by infamous schlock-peddlers Troma.

There are of course innumerable, immediate differences in what you’ll find in these two wildly different features. The pigs in Pigs don’t talk (or think much for that matter). They’re also the main source of the movie’s terror, whereas in Pig in the City Babe is a unifying force that helps a hodgepodge gang of animals buck against the terrors of the outside world. Also, while Babe 2 is an adventurous film that explores expansive, otherworldly landscapes, Pigs rarely leaves the disgusting slop of its sty. That’s not to say, however, that they’re entirely separate form one another, at the very least thematically speaking.

Pigs is entirely faithful to its 70s schlock format, perhaps even painfully so. In its opening minutes, for instance, it powers through the rape-revenge plot of typical 70s exploitation fare in a (thankfully) breezy bout of exposition that does little more than get the requirement out of the way early. The Horror Movie Victim, Lynn, stabs her father to death after an attempted rape and is committed to a mental institution when she fails to cope with what happened. Thus completes her brisk transformation into an Escaped Horror Movie Crazy. Once on the lam, Lynn finds herself vulnerably alone in a seedy small town (much like how Babe is abandoned among reprobates in The Big City) where she quickly takes up a waitressing job at a bar owned by a fellow Horror Movie Crazy, who happens to have the curious hobby of murdering people & feeding their corpses to his pigs. There is an occasional subversion of schlock tropes here in that his flesh-eating pig farm is treated like no mystery & that instead of sizing Lynn up as a potential victim, he forms a makeshift family with her, essentially becoming her new father figure. Other than that, Pigs plays out almost exactly as you’d expect based on its genre & date of release.

Reading between the lines, there’s a surprising amount of connective tissue here. Both Pig in the City & Pigs have a strangely psychedelic quality to them that disorients their audiences. Pig in the City is, of course, more graceful in this effect, using a wide-angle lens POV of a child’s eye to overwhelm the screen with clowns, fires, confetti, and Nazi-esque dogcatchers. Pigs is much cruder in its psychedelia, assembling bizarre montages of pigs squealing while the heroine-murderess Lynn loses her mind. As the pigs feed on human corpses, their mouths soaked in blood, quick jump cuts & strange sound collages throw the viewer off-balance in unexpected ways, especially considering how cheap (in every meaning of the word) the film can be.

What’s even more surprising is the two films’ shared narrative focus on how familial bonds can be formed from the unlikeliest of sources, whether they be a roving gang of starving animals or a pair of mentally unhinged sociopaths who feed anyone they consider a threat to their pet pigs. The focus on familial bonds may be a result of the pig’s historical role as a farm animal & the farm’s domestic tradition (it’s a theme that’s certainly echoed in all of the non-Babe, pig-themed children’s media I’ve seen as well) or it could just be a simple coincidence. Either way it’s a theme that connects seemingly unreconcilable films otherwise related only through their live action pig subjects & the fact that they’re terrifying. If there’s ever a remake of Pigs (and anything’s possible in today’s remake market, mind you) it could up that terror factor even more by giving its flesh-eating pigs the power of speech. Especially if it keeps the squeal-laden freakout montages. There’s a lot a film like Pigs could learn from Babe 2, but a talking pig that also eats human flesh really sounds over the top in a way that I can get behind.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, George Miller’s Babe 2: Pig in the City, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s exploration of how it serves as a key to understanding Miller’s strange oeuvre.

-Brandon Ledet

Casting By (2013)

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threehalfstar

One of the most disingenuous things about the way we talk about cinema is the idea of the auteur. Directors have so much input on so many aspects of each production that it’s tempting (or at least convenient) to discuss a film’s merits based on the work of a single person, when it really takes hundreds of contributors to complete a picture. Films are one of the most collaborative forms of art our there, requiring the blood, sweat, and tears of a wide range of people to achieve success. There are many roles in film production that don’t get their proper due, but according to the documentary Casting By the most egregiously overlooked position of all is that of the casting director.

Casting By follows the history of the casting director credit in the film industry by focusing on the career of Marion Dougherty, a legend within the field. Among countless other household names, Dougherty can be credited for at least partially helping to launch the careers of Warren Beatty, James Dean, Robert Duvall, John Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Peter Falk, James Caan, John Travolta, Gene Wilder, Glenn Close, and the list rolls on infinitely. Due to the endless list of celebrities who owe at the very least a kind word or two about Dougherty for helping get their foot in the door, Casting By is packed to the gills with great little Hollywood anecdotes about an industry that’s known for refusing to change its ways (including an especially raw one from Richard Donner that had me on the verge of tears) & a woman who doesn’t take no for an answer. Dougherty not only has an immense talent for spotting potential stars in the raw, but she also stubbornly refuses to accept the roles women & people of color are relegated to in Hollywood’s margins. Casting By is not a particularly flashy documentary in any formal way, but it is one that serves the noble purpose of preserving an often overlooked legacy on film.

One of Casting By‘s strongest stances is a call for an Academy Award category to honor the work of the casting director & it makes a pretty strong case. There’s even a quote from Marty Scorsese, who has worked closely with Marion Dougherty many times in the past, early in the film that claims that casting is more than 90% of making a movie. It’s hard to argue with that point, especially when the film delves into the early days of studio contracts when on-retainer actors would play parts whether they were right for them or not, just because they were there. Dougherty came up through the time of New Hollywood, helping to define what it was exactly that a casting director does. She would help steer directors & studios into finding the right actor for the job, instead of the more traditional typecasting of actors based on physical appearance alone.

It’s a shame that there still isn’t a casting director Oscar to this day & Dougherty hasn’t at the very least been awarded an honorary Acadamy Award herself. Although Marion Dougherty has struggled for decades to earn the respect that casting directors deserve & to break up the boys club of film production in general, she has received few accolades for her work. It’s only right that Casting By serves as a document of her legacy, laying out in plain, simple words just how important she has been to the shape & climate of American film & just how vital the role of casting director that she pioneered is to the motion picture landscape.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)

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threehalfstar

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In my initial review I faulted the Norwegian horror comedy Dead Snow for keeping its Nazi zombie antics under wraps until far too late in its runtime. There was plenty of over the top cartoonish gore to be had in the film’s third act, but for some reason the it pretended that the audience didn’t know exactly what was coming (despite the prominence of Nazi zombies all over its advertising) & kept its monsters concealed in the dark for as long as possible. Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead ditches the first films’ reluctance to immediately devolve into blood-soaked chaos & instead opts for a constant barrage of Army of Darkness-type gore gags from front to end. Even the opening sequence’s recap of the first film’s plot is little more than a flimsy excuse to rehash all of the gore that’s already come as a primer for the entrails, severed limbs, and copious gallons of blood soon to follow.

Despite its eagerness to please on the gore front, Dead Snow 2 surely has its own problems. In addition to occasionally uncomfortable caricatures of hot nerd girls & sexually ambiguous Eurotrash, the film also has a tendency to self-referentially pat itself on the back. Martin Starr’s turn as a self-proclaimed zombie hunter (read: nerd fantasy fulfilment in the flesh) is often a mere conduit for the movie to proclaim its own uniqueness, going so far as to explicitly say in the dialogue that they’re inventing a new zombie genre. This may be awkward, but in a lot of ways it’s difficult to disagree. Red vs. Dead is far from the by-the-numbers retread of films like Wyrmwood. I can at least personally attest to having never seen Nazi zombie surgeons, Nazi zombie priests, magical Nazi zombie arms grafted onto still-human hosts, or gasoline syphoned through a corpses’ intestinal track in a movie before, much less all in the same picture.

As awkward as Dead Snow 2 may be at times, it’s difficult to deny that it’s thoroughly more entertaining than its predecessor. Even the bro-culture politics & self-referential zombie genre discussions have their roots in the first entry, so it’s difficult to get too down on its crudeness on that front. A non-stop gore fest about Nazi zombies attempting to reclaim their stolen gold & completing long-forgotten marching orders from Hitler himself is not the place I would typically look for a moral beacon  or an absence of hubris anyway. This is a live-action cartoon in which undead Nazis mercilessly disembowel the living from the opening minutes until they’re finally stopped in their tracks just before the end credits. Even when they dismember children or the handicapped (very rare targets for horror films, for obvious reasons) it’s easy to dismiss the cruelty of that behavior in the context of the film. I mean, they are undead Nazis after all. If you can stomach (or even frequently seek out) this kind of blindly brutal, played-for-laughs mayhem in your genre films, there’s no doubt that you’ll have fun with the buckets of blood Dead Snow 2 sloshes at the screen. In my case, I enjoyed it even more than the first one, which pretended a little too hard to be more tastefully restrained that it truly was at heart. With the second entry, taste has thankfully gone out the window entirely.

-Brandon Ledet

John Dies at the End (2012)

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fourstar

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I wrote a couple months back that the recent coming of age comedy Dope was a sort of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for 90s hip hop geeks & bucket hat enthusiasts. A snarkily overwritten, but genuinely sincere & visually expressive comedy for video game & manga-addled teens, Scott Pilgrim has become an unofficial benchmark for young adult media with highly specific target audiences. Viewed from that perspective, John Dies at the End can be understood as a Scott Pilgrim descendant for teen schlock junkies, a comedy specifically aimed at young B-movie nerds. That is, if John Dies can be understood at all.

The trick to appreciating John Dies at the End is allowing yourself to get on its wavelength & roll with the out of nowhere punches. The film does adopt a helpful interview & flashback story structure to vaguely rein itself in, but it’s mostly a loose collection of horror movie tangents that take on subjects as wide & as varied as zombies, alien invasions, exorcisms, demons, the Apocalypse, abandoned malls, heroic dogs, white rappers and alternate universes. The doorway to these swirls of madness is a mysterious needle drug known as “soy sauce”, the only real connective tissue to the film’s off-the-wall proceedings.

The episodic structure of John Dies would lend itself quite nicely to a Joss Whedon-esque television series, but in its cinematic form it feels much like a long string of practical jokes, cheekily playing with audience expectations at nearly every turn. Whether it’s a mustache suddenly taking winged flight or household objects transforming into floppy cocks, much of John Dies‘ humor is derived from the mischievous element of surprise. There are a few genuinely funny (and surprisingly vulgar) turns of phrase in the dialogue, like in the line “A toast to all the kisses I’ve snatched . . . and vice versa”, but it’s generally the film’s “Everything you know is wrong” edict that drives most of its amusement.

Just like how Scott Pilgrim felt authentic to its video game & manga roots, John Dies at the End is smart to stick to what makes B-movies great. Besides its genuinely eccentric weirdness, the film also boasts a tendency towards practical effects & grotesque creatures befitting even films like Possession or the best works of Cronenberg. John Dies even backs up its Scott Pilgrim connection by depicting the titular character playing guitar in a rock band, a trope also cringingly echoed in Dope. If any of the three films I’ve cited in this (admittedly loosely connected) genre appeal to me directly based on my personal tastes, John Dies at the End is an easy favorite. It’s overenthusiastic chase for a B-movie aesthetic is firmly in my wheelhouse & I ended up enjoying the film quite a bit once I gave into its purposefully messy charms.

-Brandon Ledet

Razorback (1984)

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threehalfstar

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An Australian horror film about a supernaturally enormous wild boar, Razorback should not be worth much more than its value as an 80s creature feature, but there’s something oddly special about it, especially in its visual palette. Although it is by all means a run of the mill horror film, at least narratively speaking, it also excels in monster movie mayhem & dreamlike visual trickery. Its skeezy tale of big city folks from New York being tormented by dangerous, near-feral Outback locals is far from extraordinary in the context of its genre & can often be downright repugnant in its cruelty. Still, Razorback endures as a unique oddity. The true draw of the film, of course, is the titular razorback, a gigantic beast whose remarkably horrific screen presence makes for one of the best cinematic monsters I’ve seen in a good while, but there’s also a much stranger undercurrent of psychedelia backing the boar up with a beyond-ominous atmosphere that helps the film outshine its mundane dedication to the horror tropes of its era.

The wild boar star of Razorback is far from the kind of cinematic swine you’ll find in titles like Babe or Gordy. It’s a disgusting, vile monster of a beast, tearing apart homes & vehicles and snatching up babies & women with wild abandon, his menacing tusks threatening to gore everything in site. There’s a certain amount of typical low budget monster movie concealment that keeps the razorback in the dark, hiding him in shadows or depicting action from a boar cam that captures his POV, but whenever he’s afforded screen time he shines as a grotesque menace. Given the unlikability of most of the film’s local brutes, it’s almost tempting to sympathize with the boar in all of his horrific magnificence. There’s even a scene where the hideous bastard prevents a near-rape, almost shining as an unlikely hero, but that sentiment is severely undercut when he immediately devours the would-be victim.

Even the schlockiest of horror flicks rarely can survive on the strengths of their monsters alone & although Razorback boasts some surprisingly effective creature horror, it’s the movie’s general atmosphere that makes its special. The film has an otherworldly eye for Australian wilderness, illuminating the setting’s wide open landscapes with strangely colored lights, animated skeletons, and humanoid pig faces. Just as a dehydrated traveler would hallucinate in the Australian wild, Razorback‘s visual eye is a horrifically detached-from-reality trip through a dangerous landscape ruled by dangerous reprobates & and ripped apart by a supernaturally dangerous boar that ties the whole thing together in a neat little creature feature package. It’s an alarmingly wild film (especially considering its strict adherence to genre tropes) that’s definitely worth a look next time you want to take a trip into the more sordid, but oddly psychedelic depths of the natural horror genre.

-Brandon Ledet

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

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threehalfstar

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When I was a kid, I looked forward every week to the articles on TV Guide’s website from the Televisionary and FlickChick (better known as critic Maitland McDonagh). These proto-blogs were where perplexed readers who had reached the outer limits of their personal research could ask what this film or that TV show was that featured that thing–you know that thing–and finally get an answer after years of trying to recall. “What was that movie with the kid living in the walls?” Bad Ronald. “What was that series with the girl whose dad was an alien and she talked to him through a crystal?” Out of this World. “What was that movie that was like Blair Witch Project but, like, from the 70s?” The Legend of Boggy Creek.

I was lucky enough to take in a viewing of this 1972 oddity at the Alamo Drafthouse last night, projected from the last known extant 35mm copy, loaned to the theatre by its owner, a certain director you may have heard of named Quentin Tarantino. Boggy Creek is a curious entry into the canon of 1970s horror flicks. Like Blair Witch, which was made nearly 30 years later, the film is shot largely as a documentary, featuring interviews with individuals who encountered what became known as the Fouke Monster, a three-toed, vaguely sasquatchian cryptozoological beast that supposedly roamed (or perhaps still roams) Fouke, Arkansas and the surrounding waterways. The film was made by a relatively amateur director, Charles B. Pierce, who had made a series of commercials for Texarkana-based trucking firm Ledwell & Son Enterprises before borrowing $160,000 from the company to produce Boggy Creek. Surprisingly, the film became the 11th highest grossing film of 1972, netting $20 million(!) dollars. More people saw Boggy Creek in theatres than Hitchcock’s penultimate outing Frenzy, or Peter O’Toole’s Man of La Mancha, or the film adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five. In fact, were it not for the surprise mainstream popularity of Behind the Green Door–a movie that is literally pornography–Boggy Creek would have cracked the top ten, not a bad legacy for an independently produced flick about one town’s personal Bigfoot.

Boggy Creek is not an excellent movie, but it is obviously a labor of love and was made by someone with an untrained but doubtlessly cinematic eye. There are lovingly framed shots of a child fleeing across a field from the howling in the night, accompanied by voice-over from the film’s narrator: “I was seven years old the first time I heard him scream; it scared me then, and it scares me now.” The omnipresent narration of the film, some of it framed as the recollections of an adult who lived in Fouke as a child and some of it having a more documentarian distance, is one of the odder elements, but it contributes to the feeling that this is not a work of fiction–and many of the people interviewed in the film would argue that it is not, recalling individual interactions and inexplicable events. Some of these interactions are recreated on screen, and although the Fouke Monster, a furry creature with hair hanging down in its face, looks silly to the modern eye, it nonetheless is effectively discomfiting, and by the end of the film feels like a real creature that you might see dart across a dark highway while driving at night, or be caught washing its feet in a stream by a wandering hunter.

The last third of the film is taken up with an extended reenactment of the monster’s two-night assault on a multi-family household. This is the most captivating section, and it feels like it was spliced in from a very different film, although it would likely not work as well as it does without the backstory provided by the more Direct Cinema elements of the first two-thirds. There are certain parts of this segment that are somewhat repetitive, but there are some legitimate scares and shocks in it, so it works. There are other sections of the film that can charitably be described as “padding,” but these also yield something memorable. Pierce wrote and performed two songs for the film; one, which is either titled (or should be titled) “The Ballad of Travis Crabtree,” plays over a montage of said teenager (who was also the film’s key grip) checking traps and engaging in standard rural lifestyle activities. The second is a lovingly crafted ballad about what it must be like to be the only monster in the world, and whether that life would be terrible lonely or not. It’s an undeniably silly excursion that’s treated with complete sincerity, which is the best way to describe the film overall. It’s a slow burn, but it finds its fun in both camp and otherwise, and is a great testament to how one person can create a career out of finding one narrative and following it through to its end.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Gift (2015)

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three star

In a lot of ways The Gift is a tricky film to review. Due to its suspense thriller genre, it’s at the very least difficult to discuss too much of the film’s plot without ruining the surprise of some of its bigger twists, so I’ll try to tread lightly there. What’s even more complicated about this thriller in particular, though, is that I enjoyed the majority of its run time, but the last couple of narrative twists in the concluding few minutes left me feeling deeply uneasy. So much of The Gift works, but the little that doesn’t makes a huge, uncomfortable impact. If the overall quality of a thriller relies on the strength of its twists, it’s tempting to allow the last few minutes of The Gift poison the generally likable film that precedes them, but that feels more than a little unfair to me.

Here’s a short list of things that work in The Gift: the imagery, the tone, the tension, the acting, and the brutal reflection on how cycles of teenage bullying don’t stop on graduation day. Much of the credit to the film’s success goes to the performances from the three leads. Joel Edgerton (who also writes & directs here) brings the quiet menace of an abused, but sadly loyal puppy dog on the verge of biting back to his role as the film’s would-be menace, Gordo. Rebecca Hall affords an unusual amount of intellectual competence & believable fragility to her role as the Typical Horror Movie Victim, Robyn. Jason Bateman carries most of the weight here, though, nimbly navigating a role that requires him both to be a befuddled everyman & (as the film’s advertising already spoiled, freeing my hands here) a vile, immature highschool bully that never outgrew his abusive ways. Bateman’s turn as Simon truly is the film’s bread & butter, calling into question the means by which a teenage bully can translate their brutality into adult situations, namely in professional & domestic arenas.

Most of The Gift unravels the power dynamics of Simon’s & Gordo’s shared past through Robyn’s perspective, which is where the film shines brightest. There’s a stark simplicity to the movie’s visual palette that makes for a sleek-looking thriller. Sliced apples, pills in a kitchen sink, traditional horror film reds emanating from brake lights, and a sly reference to The Shining (there’s a hospital room numbered 237) all overpower the film’s cheaper elements, like last minute plot twists & dog-exploiting jump scares. It’s when the perspective shifts from Robyn’s POV to Simon’s in the third act that The Gift wavers a bit. It’s difficult to determine if the audience is supposed to empathize with the lifelong bully in the final half hour or indulge in his comeuppance, but honestly neither effect is all that satisfying, so it ultimately doesn’t matter.

I’m firmly on the fence with how all of The Gift‘s individual elements play out in its conclusion, but there’s plenty to enjoy in each moving part as isolated components (especially in the visual starkness & the effective performances from its three leads) before they’re uncomfortably misused. I liked most of the film, but I definitely left the theater with a lingering, bitter taste in my mouth, which I guess isn’t the worst way a movie can affect you, all things considered. It’s unlikely that The Gift will have much box office staying power or be making any Best of 2015 lists as the year winds down, but it does have enough going for it that it could potentially make for some decent Netflix viewing whenever someone’s in the mood for a mostly well-executed thriller starring a bitterly unlikable Michael Bluth. There are certainly worse fates than that.

-Brandon Ledet

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970)

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fourhalfstar

The trailer for L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, better known in the U.S. as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, explicitly references Alfred Hitchcock, who supposedly said that Dario Argento, “That Italian fellow,” was beginning to make him nervous. Plumage was the first film directed by Argento, who was already relatively well known as a screenwriter, and the reference to the Master of Suspense in the film’s advertising is well placed, as the traces of Hitchcock’s influence are all over this film like fingerprints at a murder scene; this is not a criticism, per se, but it is nonetheless true. Specifically, I found myself thinking of Psycho from the film’s first onscreen murder, which featured no flesh to blade contact and instead focused on slashing motions and splashes of blood. The connection to that most well known of Hitchcock’s works moved from subtext to text at the film’s conclusion, which featured a voice-over from a mental health professional explaining the psychological motivations of the killer, just as the 1960 film had used an expert to explicate Norman Bates’s madness.

If one must steal, it’s smartest to steal from the best, and Argento’s homages did not end with Hitchcock, as he also lifted the appearance of the killer in Plumage from fellow Italian horror master Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. I mention all this not to imply that Plumage is a retread of other, better films; in fact, Plumage would be an excellent movie at any point in a filmmaker’s career, and the fact that it was Argento’s first feature is, frankly, astounding. There is a lavish attention to detail in composition, color, and framing that is already on display in this freshman effort, and although he would refine this palette over the course of his career (at least until his latter day works, which leave much to be desired), there is a rawness, a viscerality, to those elements here that works in the film’s favor. Plumage is just as much a precursor for and inspiration of the slasher genre as Psycho, precognitions of a style and type that were freshly emerging from the depths of the subconscious and which would be codified a few years later in John Carpenter’s Halloween. And, to a modern audience, Plumage has something that neither of those films has: a surprise ending that hasn’t bled into the mainstream via pop-cultural osmosis, meaning that you, dear reader, are much more likely to find a surprise here.

The film follows handsome American Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante, most recognizable to a modern audience as Nino Schibetta from the first season of Oz) as he prepares to return home from Rome, where a series of young women have been murdered, to New York with his model girlfriend, Giulia (Suzy Kendall). Walking home from collecting his paycheck for a completed project, he passes an art gallery wherein he witnesses a struggle between Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi) and a figure clad in a dark latex jacket and hat. She is stabbed, and Sam is trapped in a glass enclosure when he attempts to help. The police arrive, and suspicion is cast on both Sam and Monica’s husband, gallery owner Alberto (Umberto Raho); Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) initially confiscates Sam’s passport, but eventually realizes that he is innocent when Sam becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Sam’s investigation leads to being stalked, objectified by an aging antiques dealer, attacked by a former boxer with a heroin habit, and fed cat meat by a mad hermit painter, but he eventually finds the truth… in a surprising place.

There are some moments in the film that are distinctly odd or unsettling when compared to modern sentiment, although I must admit I cannot be certain whether this dissonance is the result of cultural differences between nations or eras. Morosini has Sam view a line-up of perverts, whose crimes include such heinous items as contributing to the delinquency of a minor alongside presumably consensual “sins” as sadomasochism and sodomy; it’s a scene which is ultimately pointless, and its inclusion is puzzling. There is undoubtedly a sexual undercurrent to all slasher films that feature, completely or simply in large part, victims of a feminine persuasion; that has been discussed in many essays by more academic minds than mine, but suffice it to say that this is present in this film as well, although the revelations of the film’s final third call into question some of the assumptions that could otherwise be made about the sexual politics of this specific film. In order to preserve the viewing experience, I won’t get into that here, but I will say that the sexual violence of the film is no more intentionally titillating than that of Psycho, and is relatively tame by current standards. More disappointing, in my opinion, is the utter victimization of Giulia when she is trapped in her apartment by the killer; she is utterly helpless, and she does make several stabs (pardon the pun) at defending herself, but her hysteria while doing so reflects the contemporary sexism of the era a lot more clearly than when the killer rips a victim’s undergarments off.

All in all, Plumage is an excellent movie, and well worth tracking down if you get the chance. There are several different versions floating around, but the differences between them are minor and inconsequential; I recommend the two disc release from Blue Underground for its faithfulness to the 35mm print and the wealth of special features. The film has a rapid pace that horror movies of the era are not generally known for, and the kind of attention to cinematic technique that most films in general fail to capture. It’s a classic for a reason.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond