Reviews

Frankenstein (2025)

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In the Iliad, Patroclus gives a speech about the two jars that sit before Zeus, and from them he dispenses upon humans either gifts or detriments. I like to imagine Guillermo del Toro sitting in one of the enviable throne-like pieces of film memorabilia that fill his home (which he calls “The Bleak House”) and sitting with two jars before him from which he makes his films. One is labelled “Cool,” and it is from this vessel that he dispenses all of his clever ideas, slick visuals, and fascinating character work. From the other, which is labelled “Corny,” he pours in many of the things that his deriders cite as his weaknesses, which is unfair; the resultant cocktail between the two is what matters, and sometimes the stuff that makes it corny is the stuff that makes it great. Not this time, though. 

When I texted Brandon (who has a more positive take that you can read here) after leaving the theater with a message that was, essentially, “Oh no, I didn’t like it,” that thread continued into the next day as we discussed that eternal del Toro combination of Corny vs. Cool. Brandon likened it to native English-speaking critics have taken note of actors’ tendencies to go broader in Pedro Almodóvar’s films “of late,” whereas Spanish-speaking critics have stated that this is a matter of perception and that all of his films are like that, it’s just not clear when it’s not in English. And he’s not wrong; we had a similar discussion about Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 being a more “obvious” and less subtle picture than Parasite and how we may simply be viewing them through different lenses unintentionally. For me, however, nothing in any of the performances here is a problem, as they’re all appropriately grave. Of special note are Charles Dance and David Bradley, the former essentially playing Tywin Lannister again (and it’s pitch perfect as always) and the latter playing very strongly against type as a kindly old man, rather successfully. For me, it’s the other choices that make this one feel too tonally inconsistent to be as immersive as it ought to be. 

The film is structured as the novel is, with a wraparound story in the glacial north in which a ship captain finds Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) on the ice and takes him aboard, where the dying man tells his story. Raised by a mostly absent surgeon father (Dance) who was domineering and abusive when he was present, young Victor doted on and was doted upon by his mother (Mia Goth), whose dark hair and eyes she shared with her son and which Victor knew his father despised. When Mrs. Frankenstein dies giving birth to a boy, William, Victor quickly gets relegated to second favorite child, and there’s an abyss between silver and gold, which is exacerbated by Victor’s belief that his father allowed his mother to die; the boys are split up as children following the death of their father and don’t see one another again until adulthood. Victor takes his name literally and seeks to find victory over death, and when we see him as an adult, he is before a hearing at medical school regarding his ghoulish and grisly reanimation attempts. In attendance is Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), whose niece Elizabeth (Goth again) is engaged to William (Felix Kammerer), and who uses this as an excuse to see Victor and offer the virtually limitless resources his war profiteering has given him to fund Victor’s experiments. In all of this, Victor meets Elizabeth and is utterly taken with her, and he begins to engineer reasons to keep her and William apart, and although she is interested in his friendship, she rejects him utterly when he confesses. Amidst this, Victor has been preparing his lab and his patchwork specimen. 

Once the monster (Jacob Elordi) is brought to life, Victor at first seems interested in teaching his creation life, but when the being only manages to learn the word “Victor,” Frankenstein becomes impatient and starts to abuse him. After a chance meeting between the creation and Elizabeth and William, Victor floods his laboratory tower with kerosene and destroys it, his last minute regret and attempt to save his “son” leaving him mangled and in need of prosthetic limbs. Interspersed throughout this narrative, we’re also checking in with the ship that Victor is aboard and where he is recounting this story; although the captain believes that they are safe due to the monster having disappeared beneath the ice following a prolonged attack sequence, he reappears and eventually makes his way aboard, where he begins to tell the story from his perspective, and how he sought his vengeance. 

There was a little too much of this film that feels like it was shot on The Volume, and I was disappointed by that. This makes sense for the opening sequence, wherein a mass of sailors are attempting to break the ice which has frozen their ship to the surface, only to be set upon by an apparently unkillable monster who goes down hard (and not permanently). It makes less sense when we’re talking about the courtyard outside of Frankenstein’s tower, which sees enough use that it would be a great practical location. Get some styrofoam, carve out some clefts, age it to look like stone, and get a little atmosphere up in this place. Worse still is the tower’s entryway/foyer, which would have looked so good if it had been done practically, but instead kind of looks like someone tried to recreate the Valkenheiser mansion from Nothing But Trouble using the software that rendered the barrel sequence from The Hobbit: Whichever One That Was. The reason for this, of course, is that we need to be able to fill that space with dozens, if not hundreds, of kerosene canisters so we can have our big explosion; that is to say, it has to be disposable, and it looks like it. 

It wouldn’t be so out of place if the attention to detail in other places, like Victor’s laboratory filled with previous experiments, which looks like a del Toro dream workshop. The dungeon in which the creation is held is also strikingly imagined, and I like that quite a bit, and we spend enough time in the captain’s quarters that we get to get a real sense of it, and it feels real. Beyond set design (when they bothered), the costume designer went to town on crafting a series of elegant gowns for Mia Goth to wear. They’re all hoop skirts and several have relatively simple sewing designs, but they’re all composed of shimmering fabrics in beautiful patterns like peacock feathers, all in a green hue. Each one is utterly sumptuous, and if there is to be awards buzz about Frankenstein, I hope it’s for this if nothing else. 

Thematically, the film’s structure holds up. The biggest throughline within the film is fatherhood, as one would expect. Victor’s father is a cruel man who thinks himself fair; he married his wife for her dowry and estate and never really thought through what he would do once this was accomplished, other than to attempt to mold his son in his own image through a childhood that is all stick and no carrot. He’s successful, as Victor himself never seems to have given a moment’s thought to what to do with his creation once he bestows it with life, and when his “son” learns slowly, he beats the poor thing just as he was beaten, except with a rage in place of his own father’s placid disappointment. Both sons demonstrate their defiance in exactly the same way, by taking the instrument of “discipline,” Victor taking up the riding crop his father uses while challenging his father to admit to either being fallible or killing his wife, and the creation taking the bar that Victor holds and bending it with his superhuman strength. That’s all well and good, and it works. But what doesn’t are some of the more spectacle-oriented elements. When Victor destroys the tower, there’s a legitimately tense scene of his terrified big baby boy trying to escape, but once he’s out of his chains, it’s all CGI fire and Avatar bodies flying down a 480p chute. It made me think of the “sleigh ride of friendship” that the human lead and the Predator have at the end of Alien vs. Predator (derogatory). Why does it look like this? 

That mixture of corny versus slick is hard to get right. Sometimes, you can get it right in the wrong amounts and make something like Pacific Rim, which gets a mixed response from the general public but becomes an utterly pivotal Defining Work for a subset of diehard fans. Sometimes, you get it right in the right amounts and you get something that’s cheesy but beloved by most, like The Shape of Water. Sometimes you just get it absolutely perfectly right, and Pan’s Labyrinth emerges. Look, I made a (highly subjective and admittedly corny) chart:

This one just didn’t work for me. That doesn’t mean it won’t work for you, though, or that there’s anything wrong with it, objectively. At its length, it might actually function perfectly as a two-part miniseries, split down the middle between Victor and the creature’s stories; it might give you a chance to savor it a little and feel less browbeat by it. It certainly isn’t going to stop me from seeing whichever concoction del Toro mixes next. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bugonia (2025)

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Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit. 

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training. 

Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she? 

If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising. 

Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang. 

There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

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A little over ten years ago, I went to the beach with a friend and their family. Their older brother had two children at the time: a baby and a toddler, the latter of whom was just starting to express herself in fun and interesting ways. It was her first time at the beach, and she grew frustrated with the ceaselessness of the waves as they knocked her down while she tried to remain upright, at one point turning to the water and saying “Stop!” This caused the girl’s father to chuckle, saying, “The ocean’s not going to stop, baby.” The imagery of waves and water is everywhere in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, from the instigating factor of the plot being a flood in therapist Linda (Rose Byrne)’s apartment, prompting her to move herself and her daughter to move into a seaside motel, to at least one Hokusai print appearing on Linda’s wall, and a midcentury modern wave-shaped lamp standing behind Linda late in the film, as if threatening to overtake her. Later in the film, one of her patients, a woman named Caroline (Daniel Macdonald) who abandoned her baby in Linda’s office, sprints off along the beach; it’s unclear if Caroline is planning to end her own life or if she’s just continuing to run from her problems, but the action does seem to inspire Linda to at least consider releasing herself from her mortal coil and letting the sea take her. After all, the waves are never going to stop. 

The tides that batter Linda for most of the film are largely metaphorical. Linda’s daughter is afflicted with some kind of illness that makes her extremely averse to consuming food, and her dietary intake is supplemented by a subcutaneous feeding tube on which Linda believes the girl has become overreliant. The pediatrician overseeing the daughter’s care needs the girl to hit a certain milestone weight by a specific date in order for discussions about removing the feeding tube, and when the two butt heads over treatment the doctor is less than sympathetic as Linda has been missing important group sessions. Linda’s already drowning in all of this as her husband is away for months at a time, and he drastically underestimates the extent to which being the sole caretaker for their chronically ill daughter while also maintaining her own psychiatry practice is absolutely drowning Linda, even before she’s forced to move into a motel. She’s feuding with her daughter’s doctor, she’s fighting with the parking attendant at the clinic, and once she gets to the motel, there’s immediate beef between her and an unsympathetic Gen-Z clerk (Ivy Wolk) who trolls her for seemingly no reason. It’s here that she also meets James (A$AP Rocky), the motel’s superintendent, who is the only person in her life who seems willing to cut her a break, even if Linda has been so engulfed by an endless odyssey of conflict and misery that she’s too prickly to accept his overtures of friendship. 

James is the only man in this movie who isn’t awful. We spend some time in a few of Linda’s own sessions with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), and although it’s clear that she’s exceeded some important clinical boundaries—notably, it’s an utterly bizarre choice to select one of your office colleagues as your clinician—he’s clearly completely checked out and offers little to no support despite his willingness to accept her money. Disinterested as he may be, he’s a mirror for Linda in relationship to one of her own patients (Lurker’s Daniel Zolghardi), who is clearly sexually and romantically fixated on her; he communicates his desires for her, “I dreamed that you and I kissed,” in almost the exact same way that she floats her own inappropriate affection for her therapist to him, couching it in a story about how she dreamt about the two of them. It’s these two characters and the aforementioned parking lot attendant who appear on screen, but some of the most revealing characters are the ones who exist solely or primarily as disembodied voices. 

We watch as Linda struggles with trying to compel her landlord to get his shit together and repair the hole in her ceiling, a job that ends up being much less time-consuming than expected once things finally start moving, the landlord offering excuses over the phone. Another phone-only character is the husband of Caroline; when Linda calls him as Caroline’s emergency contact when the baby is intentionally left in her office while Caroline escapes, he’s confrontational in a way that’s clearly born not out of concern for his wife or child and purely about the fact that he’s having to deal with the situation at all, stating over and over again “I am at work.” This echoes through to Linda’s husband, who is an off-screen presence for most of the film’s runtime. He checks in only periodically to obliviously sling more guilt at his wife in an escalated tone; her exhaustion is his exasperation. He ineffectively attempts to micromanage the wrong things from afar when what Linda needs is actual assistance and support in the here and now. When he finally appears on screen at the end, he manages to pin up all of the loose ends that Linda couldn’t rather efficiently, especially in regards to getting the hole in their apartment’s ceiling repaired. In that moment, I personally felt the wave of anxiety forsaging the inevitable conversation of See, now was that so hard? and You really needed me to do all of this for you? that Linda would be subjected to. Her husband actually being present for a single day managed to help get things back on track would be proof not that what she needed was actual support but proof that she was just not trying hard enough, when in fact she is worked to the bone. 

Beyond the discussion of the metaphorical (and potentially literal) engulfment that Linda endures, this is a fantastically shot film. We are never more than a few feet from Byrne for the entire film, sometimes swaying back and forth with her as she totters about, as if we’re on these late night pot-smoking escapades with her (she smokes copiously). The movement of the camera itself is part of the feeling of this headlong rush into wave after wave of setbacks. That commitment to verisimilitude doesn’t stop the film from leaning into some slight potential magical realism as Linda occasionally perceives something metaphysical happening within and around the hole in her ceiling when she checks in on the (lack of) progress. Much of this is left up to individual interpretation, of course; there’s a single moment in which Linda raises her hand to touch some motes of dust or light and asks, softly, “Mom?”, and that alone is something that everyone in the audience is going to interpret differently. There are other great framing choices that are made about what we are allowed to see and what’s kept out of the camera’s field of vision, beyond just the choice to make several characters angry men on the phone. The most notable of these is that Linda’s daughter’s face is concealed from the camera, existing as kicking feet in a carseat or hands that crumble toast so that it never reaches her mouth. It’s an interesting choice, and one I look forward to hearing different interpretations of in the discourse to come. 

Byrne is absolutely stellar here, and it’s not to be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Battle Royale (2000)

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The J-horror classic Battle Royale is one those high-concept movies with such a clear, concise premise that it’s a convenient cultural reference point even if you’ve never seen the full picture yourself. Like Gaslight, Catfish, and The Bucket List, it’s the kind of clarifying text that defines a simple idea that’s since been extrapolated & mutated beyond the point of attribution. I had never seen Battle Royale before this year, but I’ve long-known its logline premise thanks to its lineage of dystopian YA descendants in major studio titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and, most recently, The Long Walk, each of which have been likened to it. Any movie wherein a group of teenagers in a fascistic near-future are pitted against each other in a lethal game of survival is going to be reflexively likened to Battle Royale, and it was starting to get embarrassing that I had not seen that film myself despite it being such a consistent reference point in that genre. Sometimes, though, procrastination pays off. This year’s 25th anniversary of the film inspired a theatrical re-release, where I got to see it for the first time big & loud, in all its gory, sadistic glory.

Having only known this film as a point of inspiration for the Hollywood YA thrillers to follow, I wasn’t especially shocked by its preference for melodrama over bloodshed – only spraying the screen with teen blood as dramatic punctuation between long scenes of heart-to-heart confessions & betrayals. As a species, teens tend to have Big Feelings about anything & everything, so it makes sense that they’d spend more time getting teary eyed about having to tear each other apart for survival than actually doing the tearing. Even the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk reads more like the teen-boy melodrama Stand by Me that it does a bodycount horror flick, and it’s got a reputation for being the more brutal version of The Hunger Games series (with which it shares a director in Francis Lawrence). Where Battle Royale gets more vicious than its Hollywood derivatives is not so much in its escalated gore, but in its prologue’s establishment that these kids already know & love each other before they’re forced to kill. Like The Long Walk, it’s an unlikely story about the value of true friendship instead of the expected story about selfish teenage violence. However, the young men of The Long Walk become fast friends after they’ve already been locked into their own respective survival game, starting off as strangers. In Battle Royale, the friendships & alliances go back for years before the story starts, which makes each lethal betrayal all the more sickening.

A class of Japanese high schoolers are mysteriously gassed while riding a school bus, waking on a small island wearing identical metal collars. Disoriented, they receive a crash-course orientation from a former aggrieved teacher (genre cinema heavyweight Beat Takeshi) and a kawaii pop idol, who appears only on a rolling AV Cart. The ultimate goal of the game is simple; the high schoolers must kill each other within 72 hours until only one survivor is left. The rules of how to accomplish that goal get a little trickier, involving explosive collars to punish conscientious objectors, volunteer players who appear to be violent gangsters from outside the class, rotating areas of the map that are temporarily forbidden to discourage stationary hiding, etc. The singular weapon that each student is provided varies wildly in effectiveness, ranging from knife to gun to binoculars to pot lid. That arbitrarily assigned hierarchy and the rules of combat appear designed entirely to keep the game moving & entertaining, as if the film were being broadcast on national Japanese television instead of closed-circuit security monitors. Every kill is even punctuated with an onscreen rolling body count that feels as if it were made for a live-feed audience, not the dweebs in the theater. That one change in broadcast scope might be the only place that later works like The Hunger Games might’ve improved on the Battle Royale premise, even if they pulled that detail from Stephen King novels like The Long Walk & The Running Man. The most Battle Royale touches on the entertainment media of its time is during the AV-cart orientation scene, in which a cutesy pop idol directs her audience to log onto http://www.br.com.

As with all films in this genre, this is primarily a story about a younger generation suffering the violent fallout of mistakes made before they were born. Beat Takeshi’s failed, disgruntled teacher is a pitch-perfect villain, seething with resentment for his young, captive victims while also reaching out to them for his one chance at genuine human connection. His hard exterior crumbles in a spectacularly pathetic display when the kids storm his compound to find his amateur, Henry Darger-esque painting of his favorite student winning the games – a nauseating tribute to her childish innocence, to which he no longer relates. Meanwhile, most of the kids in the game do their best to get by sharing resources and scheming a way off the island. They pass around food, medicine, and hacking skills when they’re supposed to be passing around bullets & live grenades. The rules of the game are unfairly stacked against them, though, and all it takes is a few trigger-happy outliers to set the mass murder in motion. The kills in Battle Royale are frequent and comically graphic, setting a dizzying rhythm in its Grand Guignol grotesqueries that propels the scene-to-scene momentum well after the rules & players are fully established. A few off-island flashbacks distract from the gore & drama at hand, but the biggest break in format is saved for the finale, when the surviving teens escape to the streets of modern Tokyo and have to live in the larger world adults have made for them, which feels equally as bleak as the game it parallels. Given how frequently this same story template has been repeated in the 25 years since Battle Royale was first released, it’s likely fair to say the generation that followed didn’t leave the world much better off for their own children either. Take care of each other out there, while you still have a choice.

-Brandon Ledet

Demon Pond (1979)

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A late-70s Japanese folk horror about a demonic dragon that lurks underwater, threatening to drown a nearby village that won’t do its bidding, sounds like film bro catnip — the kind of zany, go-for-broke genre freak-out that the smelliest twentysomething in your life makes their entire personality for a couple years before moving on (see: 1977’s House). In practice, 1979’s Demon Pond is much more delicate than that. Its titular demon is a whispered-about, metaphorical presence that never graces the screen. Its vintage Moog score lilts and swells instead of hammering the audience with analog synth coolness. Its heroic fights against the otherworldly spirits that haunt the human world are staged as the ceremonial ringing of a bell. It yearns more than it burns, getting more wrapped up in doomed romance than doomed society. If you want the zany, go-for-broke genre freakout version of Demon Pond, check out something like Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare. Here, the yokai are quiet observers of human longing & misery, their supernatural antics held at bay by calm waters & a ringing bell. The film gingerly holds the audience in its palm like a flower petal, until it crushes us in the vengeful fist of its climax.

Although adapted from a traditionalist kabuki stage play, Demon Pond structurally mimics the basic story template of folk horror cinema like The Wicker Man, The Wailing, and The Last Wave. These are stories in which a Big City outsider stumbles into a rural town with its own mysterious, supernatural traditions that ultimately leads to his demise (and often to the wide-scale destruction of everyone around him). In this case, a schoolteacher on vacation pretends to be studying the small village he’s visiting as a casual tourist, when he’s in fact searching for a dear friend who disappeared from his life three years prior. He finds that friend married to an alarmingly delicate, ethereal woman who’s so childlike in her innocence that she seems alien to the human world. Indeed, her earthly presence is reflected in a magic-realm doppelganger that only the audience can see: a spiritual priestess who lords over the local yokai, bound to an ancient agreement that they will not flood the nearby village as long as the humans on-site ring the temple’s ceremonial bell three times a day. An academic collector of local folk tales, the teacher’s lost friend has taken up the lifelong duty of ringing said bell to save the thousands of villagers who would drown if the area floods. Meanwhile, the villagers have long dismissed the bell business as ancient superstition, but they’re starting to suspect that the strangers at the edge of town are the reason they’re suffering the unreasonably long drought that’s threatening their livelihoods. The race to see which superstition will win out (i.e., whether continuing to ring the bell or slaughtering the outsiders will fix the village’s water woes) is a one-track race to doom, inevitably leading to the village being sunk to the bottom of the titular pond.

Part of Demond Pond‘s delicate nature is due to its queer angle on gender & romance, resulting from the casting of stage actor Bandō Tamasaburō in the dual role of Yuri/Yuki, bell-tender/princess. Tamasaburō was specifically trained in the kabuki art of onnagata: male actors who play overly dramatic female roles. He performs the fragile softness of Yuri and the all-powerful romantic fury of Yuki with a heightened, drag-like attention to gender cues that adds to the stagecraft artifice of the film’s fantasy realm. It also adds a subversive texture to the central romance between the ringers of the temple bell, something the movie leans into heaviest when it draws out the couple’s intimate mouth-to-mouth kiss into elaborate choreography & blocking worthy of an early-MTV music video. Meanwhile the aquatic-yokai princess Yuki is most pained by her bell-bound agreement to not flood the village because it keeps her apart from a neighboring prince she yearns to marry. She eventually comes to welcome the flood, as it would free her to love as she pleases, making poetic proclamations like, “How blissful to dissolve in the stream of affection. Let my body be crushed to pieces. Still my spirit will yearn for him.” That’s some high-quality yearning right there, especially since its cinematic adoption of kabuki theatricality drags it into the realm of tragic queer love.

For most of its runtime, Demon Pond floats somewhere between the isolationist folk-tradition dread of The Wicker Man and the garish high-artifice spectacle of The Wizard of Oz. Then, it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence here or there unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else. When the yokai “creatures of mud” (humanoid catfish, crabs, frogs, etc.) emerge from the pond grounds to summon the fabled flood, they’re represented in costuming befitting of community theatre or a well-attended Halloween soiree. When their bell-bound princess emerges, however, her otherworldly magic is represented in purely cinematic double-exposure techniques truly befitting of an underwater spirit. When the village inevitably fails to ring her bell and floods in the consequences of its own inaction, director Masahiro Shinoda (and special effects wizard Nobuo Yajima) go full tokusatsu spectacle, crushing the village under a heavy flow of water with the same might & scale of a Godzilla rampage. Whereas most later Godzilla pictures would indulge in kid-friendly pro wrestling drama, however, Demon Pond‘s spectacle is instead a tragic expression of nuanced, adult conflicts. Its superstitious villagers are paradoxically desperate for water but afraid of a pond. Its doomed-lover outsiders are paradoxically resentful of those villagers but feel responsible for keeping them alive, undrowned. The entire local structure at the edge of the Demon Pond hangs on a precarious balance, one so delicate it can be thrown off by a single bell tone. When it all comes crashing down, you feel the weight of that tragedy pressing directly on your heart. It hurts.

-Brandon Ledet

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

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It’s been over eight years since I first saw Something Wicked This Way Comes, the 1983 Disney Pictures adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, when we covered it for “Movie of the Month” in July of 2017. In looking back over what I wrote, it seems that at the time I was most interested in communicating how the film differed from the novel and allowing my cohort to get more into the meat of what the film meant to them. In that discussion, there’s mention of the fact that this film works best on VHS, but I recently got to see the digital, full screen version that was just added to streaming at the beginning of this month, and it was virtually a brand-new experience for me. I’m not sure if it was because the tape I had was substandard or I was suffering with some kind of mind-numbing flu at the time of my initial viewing, but this felt like a brand new movie to me, as if I had never seen it before, and I felt the need to revisit it in writing as well. 

I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an “80s kid horror syllabus” lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it. The film is told from the point of view of an adult Will Halloway, about the final days leading up to his fourteenth birthday on Halloween, sometime in the 1950s. The young Will (Vidal Peterson) tells us early on that this is really the story of his father, Charles (Jason Robards), and the way that his father saved Will and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) from a dark and mysterious force that appeared in their small midwestern town of Green Town. This evil is mostly represented in the forms of carnival proprietor Mr. Dark (a delightfully malevolent Jonathan Pryce), his brutal right hand man Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fisher), and the enigmatic “dust witch” (Pam Grier) who charms men to their doom. 

I mentioned it way back when, but Something Wicked (the novel) undoubtedly had an effect on Stephen King’s Needful Things, so much so that the latter work bears as much similarity to this film as, say, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass does to King’s own work. What I was struck by on this watch was how much it must have also influenced IT, given that the narratives both revolve around young children on the cusp of adolescence who resist the machinations of an intangible force of evil to which adults are blind (or blinded). The difference is that in IT, Pennywise seeks to consume the fear of children because their fears are much more concrete than those of adults and thus are something it can manifest while its supernatural powers make it nearly imperceptible to adults while, in Something Wicked, Mr. Dark’s mystical offers to the adults of Green Town are specifically aimed at the regrets that age has wrought on them. It’s telling that his offers are mostly lost on Will, a boy with two loving parents (even if his father is in poor health) and who has experienced only one traumatic event, while Jim, a boy living with a single mother because his father disappeared years ago and who can’t wait to grow up, is much more susceptible to Dark’s machinations. Jim and Will represent the two sides of fantasy; while Will still has the childlike imagination that inspires play, Jim’s daydreaming is maladaptive and, thus, makes him more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by Dark (and darkness). 

In that above-linked “Movie of the Month” discussion, there was a general consensus that Mr. Dark and his legion were preying upon people’s selfishness, but I see something different in it now. For some, their temptation may be related to something that we could call weakness—Miss Foley, once the town’s greatest beauty and now an old spinster, desires her youthful grace vainly; Mr. Tetley the cigar-peddler has piddled away his money on lottery tickets greedily; Mr. Crosetti the barber desires the company of a woman as apparently the only single man in a town of married women lasciviously (although I think the last of these is arguable). But I think maybe we were all operating under our own youthful blindness back then, because we failed to identify that what Dark was offering wasn’t the opportunity to indulge in a variety of selfish, carnal desires but to overturn the regrets of the past. This is made most manifest in two characters: Mr. Halloway (naturally, as the main character), but more blatantly in the form of the town’s bartender, Ed, played by real life amputee James Stacy. Ed is a strange figure, as he still wears his old football jersey around the town and can’t stop talking about the good old days, and if he were still an able-bodied man, we would pity him for being the kind of guy who peaked in high school and never shuts up about it. As it is, since he has lost an arm and a leg, we are sympathetic both to his fond remembrances of the past as well as the ease with which he is seduced by Dark’s promise of making him “whole” again. This reveals that there’s more than mere selfishness (or vanity, greed, or lust) at the heart of Dark’s bargains, but the false promise of a life without regret, and sets up the offer that he makes to Mr. Halloway. 

This is a wonderfully clever bit of narrative misdirection. Mr. Halloway’s greatest regret isn’t that he’s not wealthier or younger, but that his being a relatively older father and thus not being strong enough to save Will when he was swept up in a current at a riverside picnic means that he failed his son. Halloway’s regret lives outside of him; it’s in the way that his son panics and tries to run from the adult conversation about what happened that day at the river. Dark can only perceive that Halloway desires to be young and strong again, and his offer to return his youth to him fails not just because Halloway isn’t calloused and heartless enough to give up his child for a few more decades but because Dark can’t see that Halloway’s heartache exists in relation to another person. Turning the clock back for the elder Halloway won’t magically erase his failure to save Will from drowning (allowing the drunken and long-disappeared Mr. Nightshade the opportunity to be the unsung hero), and won’t mystically restore what fractured between father and son that day on the riverbank. The irony is that what Dark offers and what defeats him is the same: regression. He can only offer Halloway the chance for mystical rejuvenation by regressing him to an earlier age, but it’s Halloway’s regression to the state of childlike optimism that starves the carnival, since it feeds on negative emotions, allowing a chance for Dark to hoist his own petard aboard the aging/de-aging carousel. 

This film is also a visual marvel. Now that it is widely available again, it’s entering The Discourse, and I’ve seen several neutral(ish) criticisms that the film is wonderful “despite” that the “visuals don’t hold up.” I would disagree wholeheartedly, as I don’t think that the representations that we see on screen were ever meant to fully evoke “reality.” As the malevolent train rolls into town, eerie wisps of smoke are drawn over the frames, and this same smoke attempts to capture the two boys later in the film, but it was never really meant to be smoke, it was “smoke” in a more ephemeral sense. Several vistas are clearly matte paintings with the occasional distant, twinkling light in them, but it’s only “unconvincing” if you expect the film to perfectly reproduce a landscape, and I feel that the film informs us that we shouldn’t be expecting that from the first moments, when the adult Will tells us via narration “This is really the story of my father and that strange, leaf-whispery autumn when his heart was suddenly too old and tired and too full of yearning and regrets, and he didn’t know what to do about it.” This is the old home town through the eyes of a child, and what most modern viewers mistake as the “fakeness” of the images used to convey this narrative is an externalization of the mysteriousness of the world to a boy on the cusp of young adulthood, inevitably putting him on the path to being a man whose regrets will crystallize into something manipulable. It’s expressionistic, like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or Metropolis, or the non-narrative “fictional” interludes in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. To hold Something Wicked to a standard of photorealism is to miss the point utterly, and the film’s visual beauty lies in the way that it plays with this self-mythologizing of one’s own childhood, the way that the real becomes the surreal in mind and memory. 

I can’t recommend a revisit (or a first-time watch) of this one more highly, especially in these twilight hours of the spooky season (or, depending on when this goes live, in the dawning days that follow it). Even if you, like me, watched this one once upon a time and weren’t entranced by it, give it another shot. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Return to Oz (1985)

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My first obsession as a child was with Oz. The MGM musical has been a part of my life for so long that I can’t recall the first time I saw it, as its entrance into my life predates my earliest still-retained memories. I can recall the first time I saw any other Oz-related media, however, as I can still remember—even if distantly and vaguely—a Christmas that we spent at my grandparents’ cold New Jersey apartment when I was four years old. They had HBO, and in the early hours of the morning, with the scent of Community Coffee (which we always brought to my grandparents when travelling, as well as several containers of Tony Chachere’s, both of these being luxuries they couldn’t obtain in the north) and my grandmother’s Marlboro Reds in the air, I watched an episode of an animated series featuring Dorothy and company. This was a revelation to me, that there was more Oz to know, and I immediately started to devour as much of it as was available. I was reading by age five and although the early 20th century diction of the Oz books was somewhat difficult to parse, most of the versions available at my library were illustrated, and this was enough for the early years. But what affected me even more than the Judy Garland film was its long distant Fairuza Balk-starring sequel, Return to Oz, which was exactly the kind of proto-horror that my young brain was attuned to. 

Return to Oz opens in Kansas, where the reality of post-tornado living is dreary and dire (and, given the age that I was when I first saw it, likely felt familiar to me in the wake of Hurricane Andrew). It’s nearly winter and the new house isn’t complete, and while Dorothy excuses Uncle Henry’s tendency to stare into space with his feet up, Aunt Em knows that it’s PTSD, even if the terminology doesn’t exist yet. Still, she’s more concerned with young Dorothy’s mental state, given that the little girl no longer sleeps through the night (when she sleeps at all) and is insistent that her imaginary journey to fairyland and the friends she made there are real. Em’s desperation to do the right thing for her niece leads her to leave the girl in the care of a doctor named Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his severe-faced nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) overnight, where they promise that the newly discovered “science” of electroshock therapy will cure all of Dorothy’s ills. A storm comes in the night that allows Dorothy an opportunity to escape, which she does, although she ends up falling into a river; climbing aboard some floating debris, she falls asleep, only to discover that she has awakened near Oz, and is in the company of Billina, one of her chickens, who has not laid an egg since the tornado. 

Dorothy quickly discovers an Oz in ruins. Although she finds the old house she first arrived to Oz in, there’s no Munchkin village nearby; the yellow brick road she travelled for much of the first film is in a state of advanced disrepair; the Emerald City’s brilliant gemstones have vanished as the city’s architecture lies in ruins. Worse, the city itself is ruled by the Wheelers, a pack of feral Klaus Kinski-looking men who travel on all fours on legs that end in squealing wheels. Hiding from them, she finds “the royal army of Oz,” which consists of a single individual, a mechanical man named Tik-Tok who is awakened via a series of wind-up keys. The inhabitants of the city have all been turned to stone by magic, with only Tik-Tok having survived this transformation unharmed by virtue of not quite truly being alive. He’s only the first of Oz’s inhabitants to join Dorothy’s new adventuring party, however, as she also soon collects Jack Pumpkinhead—a Jack o’ Lantern/scarecrow hybrid brought to life in order to scare the witch Mombi (Marsh again)—who governs the empty Emerald City as regent for the Nome King (Williamson again). The final member of the group is the “Gump,” a loathsome creature that Dorothy and company build out of old furniture and assorted attic garbage and bring to life via the same magic powder as Jack was in order to escape Mombi. Adventure awaits! 

Although it may not be the most valuable element of media made for children, I do think one of the things that makes a piece of kid-oriented art have some sense of staying power is the extent to which it encourages imaginary play. A kid who loves The Land Before Time will get just as much pleasure out of going to the playground and pretending to be Littlefoot with their friends as they would out of rewatching the movie. I vividly remember running around in my front yard with my mom as a kid, sometimes on all fours, shouting “To the meadow! To the meadow!” in recreation of a scene from Bambi; the Little Golden Book Scuffy the Tugboat encouraged me to get outside in the rain and play with my own toy boat, and my mother still uses “There’s enough to float Scuffy” as a descriptor of how much rainfall she gets when I call her. Even more so than The Wizard of Oz, The Return to Oz capitalizes on this inherent hunger that children have to create the magical out of the mundane, and it does so using the same extratextual decision that Wizard did—that Oz contains “echoes” of the real world—in a more deliberate way. In the earlier film, this was much more explicitly a way of telling the audience that Dorothy’s adventures were just a dream all along, that her companions were the farmhands and the witch was Mrs. Gulch, translated into her fantastical dreams. As an official sequel, Return follows that same narrative choice, but more subtly and arguably more fantastically. Besides the obvious correlation between Worley/the Nome King and Wilson/Mombi, we also see Dorothy’s “inspiration” for Tik-Tok in the form of the shock therapy device, and she’s given a tiny jack o’ lantern by another patient (who is the spitting image of the missing Ozma, princess of Oz, who also happened to be Jack Pumpkinhead’s “mother”). 

This is something that all children do, applying personality to toys and items and giving them voices and roles in their imaginary play. Even if kids don’t pick up on that being what’s happening in the film, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t unconsciously get absorbed and make their internal worlds just that much more magical. That’s not even counting the number of kids who realized that they could imagine returning to a fantasy land in disarray as a new adventure to play out, following the yellow brick road once more, but one that’s twisted and broken. What if I pretended I was in NeverNeverLand, but without Peter? What if Fantasia needed another Bastian to give the Empress a new name? What if Narnia fell? (Admittedly, Prince Caspian opens in the ruins of the Pevensie’s castle Cair Paravel and The Last Battle features the actual end of Narnia, but you get what I’m saying.) 

I’ve spent enough time praising the film for its potential to inspire imagination, which, while valid, isn’t praise for the film as a text unto itself. Every time I watch Return, I discover (or rediscover) something new to love about it. For one thing, this is a film that I never really thought of as being funny when I was a kid, but there are one-liners and jokes aplenty that will no doubt appeal to any adults in the audience (one of my favorite smirkers is Dorothy’s reply to Jack’s confusion that Tik-Tok might still be able to talk after his “thinking” spring had run out, which is to say that “It happens to people all the time”). My favorite thing about the film is the presence of the copper kettle-like Tik-Tok, who was always my favorite character in the books as well, with the eighth book in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz (specifically the one with this less-than-honest cover) being read no less than fifty times in my childhood. He’s just adorable. I love him. Billina is perhaps the second best non-human actor in the film, a Henson Company creation that’s such a perfect recreation of a Buff Cochin Bantam hen that there are moments where I know she’s a puppet and others where I know she’s a real chicken, but there are many more where I could not tell you if she’s “real” or not to save my life. 

If the general public remembers this one at all, it’s usually negatively in comparison to their memory of the MGM picture, or they remember this one specifically for being on the scary side. While Wizard’s Wicked Witch of the West scared generations of children, this film had multiple frights that play out over the course of the film. The escape from the sanatorium is notably frightening, as the nurse screams into the pouring thunderstorm for Dorothy and her benefactor to return before they fall into a river and nearly drown. The Wheelers are scary, with their squealing wheels (inspired by the squeaking gurneys in the Kansas portion, naturally), and several of them are turned to sand and desiccate before blowing away when they fall into the Deadly Desert while pursuing Dorothy and friends. The Nome King’s death as he becomes more rocklike before crumbling and melting away in a hellish fire, his stone skeleton frozen into a screaming death face before it eventually crumbles, is also noteworthy, as is much to do with the Nomes and their kingdom in the first place (their faces moving about in stop motion on various rock faces remains impressive to this day). But the most memorable scene is one that I would argue remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema, including horror made for adults. At one point in the film, Dorothy must sneak into the chambers of Princess Mombi, which she has already seen contains dozens of glass-fronted cabinets containing the detached (but still living) heads of various Ozian women, which she changes to suit her mood as easily as changing hats. She awakens Mombi’s original head, which then begins chanting her name in a guttural, almost unearthly voice, as all the heads around her scream and Mombi’s headless body rises from her bed to attack. It’s fantastic!

It’s only a matter of time before this film gets lumped in with its intro-to-horror brethren as fodder for slop content along the lines of “CaN yOu BeLiEvE they showed THIS MOVIe to KiDs!!?!” that I’ve started to see pop up online. (Newsflash: if you’re under a certain age, you may not realize this, but art used to be created for multiple groups to enjoy and get something different out of because we didn’t all have individual devices programmed to shovel unchallenging, hyper attuned, algorithmically-driven, intellectually incurious fodder into our brains every waking hour). Enjoy it now before the internet tries to ruin it for you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Death Metal Zombies (1995)

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One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.

You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.

The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.

-Brandon Ledet

El Vampiro (1957)

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Between watching the infinite sequels to The Mummy & The Invisible Man and a few one-off Gothic horrors like 13 Ghosts and The Undying Monster, I’ve seen a lot of classic horror relics this month, mostly running from the 1930s through the early 1960s. There may be more exciting, grotesque monstrosities to be found in later decades like the splatter-fest 1980s or the neon-bathed horrors of the now, but there’s something about the black-and-white scare pictures of old that call to me every Halloween season. It’s purely a matter of decor. I love spending time in the old dark houses, spooky castles, and foggy moors of the classic horror milieu, the thicker the artificial fog the better. It’s simply the most Halloween-appropriate set decoration you can find in cinema, alternating between sound-stage surrealism and department-store deadstock. That’s at least what was on my mind while watching the 1957 vampire picture El Vampiro, which I purchased on DVD while traveling in Mexico. El Vampiro doesn’t achieve anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred other vampire pictures; it comfortably sits at the exact midpoint between first-wave Universal Monster movies and their later Hammer Horror echoes. And yet, because it’s so over-decorated with Spirit Halloween Store set decor, it’s exceptionally well suited to Halloween season programming. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space, with servants on staff. Every single object in the frame is stubbornly ooky-spooky, regardless of logic or necessity, which is exactly how horror cinema should be decorated this time year.

It’s not entirely fair to say El Vampiro lacks narrative or imagistic innovation. The film is often credited for a couple major contributions to the classic horror canon. Mainly, its financial success kickstarted the Mexican horror cinema boom of the 1960s that led to more memorably outlandish works like The Brainiac & Santos vs The Vampire Women. More improbably, it’s also credited for being the first vampire picture to feature the stereotypical elongated canine fangs, as the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula was fangless and the fanged Christopher Lee version had not yet materialized. Surprisingly, the film’s titular vampiro is not a version of Count Dracula, but rather an entirely new bloodsucking gentleghoul. Germán Robles stars as Count Lavud (Conde Karol de Lavud, to be more accurate), a Dracula Type who keeps his coffin in a spooky old Mexican estate, adorned with the aforementioned cobwebs. His screen presence is clearly inspired by the iconic Lugosi version of Dracula, as he hides his lower face under a lifted cape with the same dramatic mannerisms, inviting bright studio lights to illuminate his hypnotically handsome eyes. Like all versions of Dracula (and its copyright-infringing Nosferatu offshoots), his monstrous motivations are also mostly a matter of real estate: in this case wooing ownership of his new spooky castle abode away from a grieving niece who doesn’t yet know she was born into a vampire bloodline. All other traditional vampire lore is present here too. The vamps don’t appear in mirrors; they’re ill at the sight of a crucifix; they sleep through daylight in coffins lined with their home soil; etc. Amusingly, Lavud also frequently transforms into a flapping rubber bat that flies around the haunted house set in an effect you’d more likely see in Bela Lugosi’s poverty row pictures like Devil Bat or Return of the Vampire than anything produced by a major studio like Universal.

If there’s any notable variation on the old school vampire picture here, it’s in the way women play a central role in the story. Not only is most of the runtime ceded to the distraught niece’s gradual realization that she was born to a vampire clan, but her surviving aunt is a Count Lavud convert who works on the bloodsucker’s evil behalf while he lurks in the shadows offscreen. Every time Aunt Eloise (Carmen Montejo) appears, she’s accompanied by a howling wind that guarantees her a dramatic entrance, even if most of her job is gaslighting her niece into sticking around on a series of domestic sets fit for a televised soap opera. While those two women’s quiet power struggle takes up most of the runtime, however, Germán Robles is very clearly the star of the picture. After transforming into a bat and draining a sleeping woman of her blood beneath the opening credits, he then disappears until about halfway into the film, when he re-emerges from his coffin to great musical fanfare and makes direct, hypnotic eye contact with the audience. It’s Robles’s commanding screen presence as the handsome, clean-shaven vampire that is mostly credited for the film’s success, as well as the success of the many Mexican horror cheapies that followed in his wake. After reprising the Count Lavud role a year later in The Vampire’s Coffin, Robles continued to ride that wave in subsequent horror novelties like The Castle of the Monsters, The Blood of Nostradamus, and even my beloved The Brainiac. From the few titles I’ve seen in that 1960s Mexican horror wave (mostly ones starring world-famous luchador Santo), El Vampiro‘s garish sense of Halloween season decor also continued in the films to follow. It makes for a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, especially recommended if you’ve already exhausted all of the Universal & Hammer titles that routinely get a lot more international attention this time of year.

-Brandon Ledet

The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

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A longtime Swampflix favorite, the 1983 Jack Clayton-directed Ray Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes has been unavailable for home viewing since at least as far back as 2017, when we first covered it for Movie of the Month. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. As of this October, it’s finally been added to Disney+ for anyone interested. Back when we first discussed Something Wicked, Brandon talked about that film in conversation with another Disney-funded Kiddie Horror picture, The Watcher in the Woods, which still remains unavailable online. Since Something Wicked wasn’t available to borrow from my local library or from my local video rental place and could only be found on Disney’s proprietary streaming service, I was curious how hard it would be to find The Watcher in the Woods, and lo and behold, it was easier for me to lay hands on it in the physical world than it was online. Deciding that it would make a good “Bette Davis handles a spooky jewelry box” double feature with Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it was the perfect time to check it out. 

Teenage Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) and elementary-aged Ellie (Kyle Richards) are American sisters whose composer father (David McCallum) has been tasked with putting on an opera in England. This leads to them renting a large, old home from the reclusive Mrs. Aylwood (Davis), whose daughter disappeared roughly three decades before. Mrs. Aylwood rarely rents out the home, but Jan resembles her long-missing daughter Karen, and so she opens the house up to the Curtis family. Even before the ink on the lease is dry, strange things begin to happen; Jan sees images of a blindfolded girl in reflections and Ellie learns things that she shouldn’t know and, when asked where she heard these facts, attributes the knowledge to her new puppy, Nerak (Karen backwards, obviously). Jan strikes up a budding relationship with handsome neighbor Mike Fleming (Benedict Taylor), from whom they get the puppy, and Ellie’s writing of “NERAK” in the dust on a barn window leads Mike’s mother to confess that she was there the night that Karen disappeared, along with two other teens, Tom Colley and John Keller. The three of them were doing some classic “secret society at midnight in the old chapel” shenanigans when lightning struck the building and set it ablaze, causing the great bell to fall where Karen had been standing. Only Tom Colley looked back and saw that she wasn’t there when the bell fell, and no remains for Karen were ever found. Can Jan convince several adults that some entity, the titular unknown watcher in the woods, is trying to help Karen get home? 

This movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Although most old television broadcast schedules are long gone now, this isn’t so for the Disney Channel, which allowed me to pin down the actual date that I saw this film for the first time: October 27, 1995, when I was eight years old. This review may very well go up on the thirtieth anniversary of that date, and in all those decades, I’ve never forgotten it, with some of its images haunting me to this day. I didn’t remember much about the ending, given that it’s a bit overcomplicated (the fact that Disney rushed release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bette Davis’s first film role only for the film to be panned, resulting in quickly pulling the film and reshooting the ending, tells you all that you need to know), but I’ve never stopped thinking about poor Karen in that mirror. There’s something truly, deeply haunting about this film, and I’m surprised that its contemporary reception was so poor (and I’m talking about the release of the currently available “complete” version). Maybe it was simply that people really weren’t ready for a family brand like Disney to release a film that was this scary; this was, after all, several years before the creation of the PG-13 rating, and it premiered at the beginning of the decade when it would become more commonplace for children’s media to be intentionally frightening, at least in small amounts. The world that The Watcher in the Woods premiered in was one that was still a few years out from E.T. the Extraterrestrial, The NeverEnding Story, Return to Oz, and even Something Wicked This Way Comes, so maybe it was simply a little too ahead of its time. Hell, it even presages The Evil Dead a little, as this contains what may be the earliest use of the Sam Raimi-style “tracking camera.” Shots from the point of view of the villain (although in this case there’s no real “villain” to speak of and the titular watcher is ultimately a benevolent presence, even if some of its actions create dangerous situations) are nothing new, but the low-to-the-ground “Deadite view” hadn’t really taken off yet, and this film has that several times. 

In reading about the film and older reviews of it, I was struck by the many mentions of the unimaginative shooting, and I find that surprising. The film effectively captures a melancholy mood through many images of the woods surrounding the Curtises’ temporary home, and even when the kids are excited to discover a pond, it’s not exactly a cheerful sight, all fog and murky water. The house is effectively spooky, and the other environs that we see, like the ruins of the chapel and the inside of Tom Colley’s shack, are also rendered very effectively on screen. It may simply be that in an era where most media is shot so flatly and with so little attention to cinematic craftsmanship that I’ve become accustomed to gobbling up slop, so that when something that would have been considered the basic minimum needed to create atmosphere seems revelatory to me. Regardless, this is a nice little intro-to-horror for any kid who might be interested, even if the wrap-up and conclusion won’t stick in their minds. If you’re looking for something in the same vein that’s a little more adult, try satiating your Bette Davis sweet tooth with Burnt Offerings.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond