Reviews

Humane (2024)

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All of David Cronenberg’s children are now out there making Cronenberg movies.  Eldest daughter Cassandra has several assistant-director credits that include the Cronenberg classic eXistenZ, and a slow trickle of high-style, high-concept sci-fi horrors have established son Brandon as a buzzy provocateur of his own right over the past decade.  Now, Caitlin Cronenberg has entered the family business with her debut feature Humane.  Set in a near-future America that’s struggling to keep its remaining citizens alive after Climate Change disaster, Humane‘s central hook relies on a government program that incentivizes voluntary euthanasia as a means of population control.  The government has rebranded suicide as a heroic act of “enlisting” in “the war” against humanity’s extinction, littering the streets with propaganda posters that valorize impoverished parents who sacrifice themselves to brighten their children’s future with a hefty payout.  It’s the kind of post-Twilight Zone thought experiment where the characters are more symbols than people, representing various social ills and grotesque points of view that help flesh out the central thesis more than flesh out their internal lives.  In that way, Humane is maybe more indebted to the Canadian horror tradition of the Cube series than it is to the Cronenberg family legacy, give or take a couple last-minute indulgences in dental & bodily gore that cater to the true Cronheads out there.  However, the film is surprisingly juicy if you’re invested in the larger Cronenberg nepo baby project, given that one of its major driving forces is catty, extratextual humor about spoiled brats who live in their famous father’s shadow.

Because it is a relatively cheap, made-for-streaming production, Humane cannot afford to depict the wide-scale Climate Crisis devastation that has accelerated America’s violent disdain for its own citizens.  Instead, the movie shoehorns all of the political hot topics its premise touches on (class, racism, immigration, MAGA populism, COVID denialism, environmental collapse) into rushed conversations during a single-family dinner, only hinting at the wider scale misery of the world outside their home in gestural images (UV-deflecting umbrellas, bureaucratic death squads, newscasts warning of an imminent draft for the “war”).  Peter Gallagher stars as the family figurehead: a retired, wealthy news anchor who invites his children to his home for dinner, where he announces that he and his wife plan to enlist as an act of self-sacrifice.  His children loudly rebel, squabbling with their father about the narcissism of his decision as an act of familial PR and squabbling amongst each other about who deserves what share of their imminent inheritance.  The movie takes a fun turn at the top of the second act that further isolates & escalates the fervor of that familial argument, and I refuse to spoil that twist here even though it arrives fairly early in the runtime.  What’s much more important is the obliviousness & selfishness of the nepo babies who both loathe and profit from their father’s legacy, weaponizing phrases like “What would Dad think?” to knock each other down in their vicious fight for dominance.  It’s darkly funny enough on its own merits to make Humane worth seeking out when it hits Shudder this summer, but it feels even more essential once you start extrapolating what it indicates about Caitlin Cronenberg’s home life (as filtered through collaboration with producer & screenwriter Michael Sparaga).

Not everyone will be interested in watching a feature-length subtweet about Cronenberg family gatherings, but I appreciated how Humane‘s rich-people-problems humor lightened up its political speculation about our planet’s grim future.  I felt similarly about Brandon Cronenberg’s latest film Infinity Pool, which balanced out its broader satirical sci-fi premise about wealth-class privilege with the director’s extratextual nepo baby handwringing about imposter syndrome and writer’s block.  Cronenberg’s kids could be making exact photocopies of their father’s legendary body horrors, but they’re instead undercutting that impulse with some acknowledgement & self-interrogation of their own creative, privileged circumstances.  They’re also just having fun.  I found Infinity Pool perversely hilarious and Humane surprisingly playful, especially in scenes featuring Enrico Colantoni as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat who interrupts the family dinner with plans to collect the bodies the government was promised.  It’s a small film with big ideas, not allowing its Canadian TV production values to get in the way of its thematic ambitions.  It’s also self-consciously silly, though, affording comedic actors Jay Baruchel & Emily Hampshire equal opportunity to play morbid court jesters alongside Colantoni as Gallagher’s rotten, ungrateful children.  There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I hope Caitlin Cronenberg gets to leverage her last name for more high-concept satires in the near future.  The only shame, really, is that we weren’t privy to the real-life dinner conversations that likely resulted after her family saw an early cut.  They’re fun to imagine, at least.

-Brandon Ledet

Challengers (2024)

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I don’t really understand sports. I’m not talking about the rules of various games or what have you, but the appeal—Wait! Don’t go! I promise this isn’t just another one of those “guy who tries to be funny on the internet does a tired ‘I think I’m better than people who like sports’ thing to be relatable to other disaffected millennials” thing. This has nothing to do with in/out-group mentality or sport/anti-sport tribalism. I’m confessing something here. See, I understand competitiveness, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of seeing me at trivia can attest. I personally hate sweating, and I don’t understand the appeal of feats of athleticism that are specific to “sport” as an inscribing factor; I’m never interested enough to watch some kind of strong man competition where an overrepresented number of kilt-wearers (for some reason) chop down trees and haul them up an incline, but I do understand that as a thing that would be of interest, as a viewer or a participant. People who find meaning in devoting their life to the pursuit of athletic achievement are so different in the way that their minds work that they are as inscrutable to me as an alien would be. 

Obsession, on the other hand, is something that I do understand, and that, more than tennis, is what’s at the heart of Challengers. The film opens and closes in 2019, during a “challenger” match between Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) in New Rochelle, observed by Art’s wife, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). It’s clear that there’s more than just this win on the line, and we learn about the complicated relationships between these three through a series of flashbacks. Thirteen years earlier, Tashi Duncan was the hottest thing in tennis – Adidas sponsorships, scholarship to Stanford, nothing on the horizon but bigger and better things. After successfully trouncing her sore-loser opponent at the Junior U.S. Open, she meets Patrick and Art, “Fire and Ice,” who had their own big win playing doubles that same day, at a party in her honor. They both come from some amount of wealth while she does not; we don’t know the extent of the Donaldson family’s finances other than that both boys have attended a tennis-focused boarding school together since age twelve, while the Zweig’s money is implied when the shoreside mansion at which the party is held is noted to be smaller than Patrick’s family home. Later, back at the hotel, the trio drink and things get steamy, with Tashi making out with both boys at once and then pulling back to watch them make out with each other. She agrees to give her number to whichever boy wins against the other the following day. 

In the intervening time between 2006 and 2019, the three of them grow closer and then further apart at different intervals. Patrick and Tashi date long distance while she’s at Stanford, as is Art, while Patrick attempts to go straight into the pros. When he comes to visit and see one of Tashi’s matches, she gives him unsolicited advice about his tennis playing beforehand, and he storms off on her and doesn’t come to see her play; Tashi ends up with a career-ending injury, possibly because Patrick’s absence got in her head. This drives a wedge between Patrick and not only Tashi, but Art, too. In 2019, Tashi and Art are a coach-and-player power couple, but the line between their time together at Stanford and the reunion with Patrick at the challenger match in New Rochelle isn’t a straight one. The frenetic energy of tennis is deliberately evoked in the way that the narrative frenziedly moves around in the timeline and pings back and forth between different characters’ perspectives, showing us secrets being created, kept, and discovered, all while the soundtrack jumps from utter silence to pulsing house music and back again. 

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. Before going to the theater, some of the critique I read was about the film’s length, which is a complaint that I, eternal champion of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, practically never agree with. I did feel the length of this one (I feel the need to say “no pun intended” here given the homoerotic nature of the text) though, and when I walked out, I wasn’t sure if I had seen a good movie or a very stylishly crafted but shallow erotic sports fantasy. In the intervening time, I think my ruminations on it led me to give it more credit than I initially did. For one thing, and not to knock any of these performers, but this is a movie where the characterization comes through more in the editing than in the performance. O’Connor’s character is one that lets him emote more, his devil-may-care attitude letting him get away with smirking and scheming, while Tashi (and Art as he spends more time with her) spending her whole life stoically, as serious as a heart attack. As a result, Zendaya is called upon to be stone-faced for a lot of this, especially in the framing narrative. We get more about her character in the opening when she is watching the match, her head following the ball in tandem with everyone else in the stands, until she stops watching the game and starts watching the men, and then focuses in on one of them, than we do in many of her more dialogue-heavy scenes later in the film. Tashi is driven throughout, but there’s a stark contrast between her playfulness prior to her injury and the way that she’s eternally guarded for the rest of her story. She’s effective at compartmentalizing and disguising her bitterness, and while the narrative affords her few opportunities to drop that wall, Zendaya is able to do it with a subtlety that seems effortless. 

I’m a big fan of both Call Me By Your Name and director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, despite my extensive reservations about the latter. I don’t know that this one is really in the same league as those two films, both of which could arguably be named one of the greatest pictures in their respective genres. It does feel of a piece with them, though, even if I can’t say that this one has the same immediately apparent artistic merit that they do. It’s not bad; not at all. That the non-linear narrative is so clear and easy to follow is praiseworthy, and it cleverly mimics the spontaneity of moving between memories that, for whatever reason, are linked in our personal histories. It’s fun, but the things that make it interesting and exciting are the same things that capture my attention in music videos or this video edit. On the night that I saw it, I texted Brandon to say it felt like an elevated David DeCoteau movie in large swathes, but I’ve come around on it a little and can see that an artistic decision was made here: to make a sexy drama about hot people, and use that basis to play around with some cool drone footage and go into the tennis ball’s POV and make people feel like they’re at the club. It’s not a bad impulse.

I’m reminded of something that Brandon wrote about last year, when we were talking about how directors who have had the mixed fortunes to start their directing careers with what would be the magnum opus of any of their peers: Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and I would add Guadagnino to this list and stand ready to nominate Julia Ducornau the next time she puts something out. I’m probably the biggest proponent of his work around these parts, but I’m not ashamed to fly this flag. In the link above, Brandon talks about how far into his career Hitchcock was able to get before he started making what we think of as the biggest hits of his canon, but I’m reminded of a bit of trivia about Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Psycho, perhaps the most enduring of the auteur’s work in the public consciousness, was a project that he actually made on the cheap and with a large portion of the crew carried over from the weekly series. There are several episodes in the seasons leading up to the filming of Psycho where you can see a few trial runs for things that Hitch would do in later films. The episode “One More Mile to Go” is the most obvious as it gave the old man, who directed the entry, the opportunity to try out some of the camera tricks that he would use to build tension when Marion Crane is pulled over in Psycho’s first reel. Challengers feels like an episode (or several) of a theoretical Luca Guadagnino Presents, where he’s given a couple of new techniques a shot so that he can use that skill to make the best possible version of a story that, unlike this one, is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon (sorry, I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately). Challengers may be one of the things that helps him crack the code of how to make the filmmaking equivalent of overlaying audio onto satisfying kinetic sand or Subway Surfers footage, while making it cinematic art. That’s something to see, even if it wasn’t really for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Beast (2024)

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There’s something warmly familiar about the premise of two destined-to-be-together characters cyclically falling in love across past & future lives through reincarnation, but I can’t immediately name many concrete examples.  There’s a somber melodrama version of it in The Fountain, a cartoony alternate-universe version in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and a bodice-ripping romance version in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I’m certain there’s a much longer list of titles I’m forgetting.  However, I’m also certain that I’ve never seen that dramatic template distorted in the way Bertrand Bonello distorts it in The Beast, the same way he distorts the terrorism thriller template in Nocturama and the zombie outbreak template in Zombi Child.  The Beast is a sci-fi fantasy horror about a woman who falls for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of her past & future lives, and all that changes across them is the temporal context in which he sucks.  During the Great Paris Flood of 1910, she is seduced out of a loving marriage by the horny, handsome pest.  In the 2010s, he stalks her as a creepy incel with a low-follower-count YouTube Channel, planning to make an example out of her as revenge on all the women who’ve sexually rejected him despite being a Nice Guy.  In the 2040s, the specifics of how he sucks are mysterious until the final moments, as the doomed couple are estranged by an isolating, unemotional society dominated by A.I.  She does fall for it again, though, and the cycle continues.  Usually, when you say a couple was “meant for each other,” you don’t mean it in a Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote kind of way, but there’s something darkly, humorously true to life about that romantic dynamic that makes for a refreshingly novel use of a familiar story template.

Léa Seydoux stars as the Wile E. Coyote of the relationship, helpless to find her puppy-eyes suitor attractive in every timeline even though he consistently destroys each of her lives.  George MacKay is her Roadrunner tempter: an arrogant nerd who pursues her across centuries even though he’s cursed to “only have sex in his dreams.”  Their centuries-spanning relationships qualify both as science fiction and as fantasy.  The 2040s timeline is used as a framing device in which our future A.I. overlords offer to “cleanse our DNA” of residual trauma to make us more efficient, emotionless workers; it’s through this cleansing procedure that Seydoux relives her past flings with MacKay and learns no lessons through the process.  The crossover between timelines is also confirmed by multiple psychics, though, both of whom warn Seydoux to steer clear of the fuckboy loser to no avail.  They also explain that their mystic practices are only considered supernatural because science has not yet caught up with the real-world logic behind their effectiveness – a gap that has presumably been closed by the A.I. machines of the 2040s.  In every version of her life, Seydoux is plagued by an overbearing sense of dread that something catastrophically awful is going to happen (in an allusion to the Henry James novel The Beast in the Jungle), and she is always right.  After all, in order to live multiple lives you have to die multiple deaths.  Whether that premonition is related to the natural disasters that coincide with MacKay re-entering her lives or simply to MacKay himself is up for interpretation, but either way he’s physically attractive enough that she never learns the lesson that his physical presence is bad news.  It’s like a cosmic joke about how someone always falls for the same loser guys despite knowing better, taken literally.

The Beast is one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure is intended to be taken entirely seriously until the second act, when Bonello tips his hand by making you watch clips from Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.  Its closest reference points are crowd-displeaser genre exercises from esteemed film festival alumni: Assayas’s Demonlover, Petzold’s Undine, Wong’s 2046, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, etc.  It builds its own micro mythology through visual motifs of pigeons, babydolls, and seances that can feel meaningful & sinister in the moment but read like generative A.I. Mad Libs screenwriting when considered as a whole.  Bonello is clearly genuine in the ambition of his scale, crafting a story that requires him to convincingly pull off costume drama, home invasion, and sci-fi genre markers all in the same picture, depending on the timeline.  He’s also constantly poking fun at his own project, though, something that’s indicated as soon as the film opens in a chroma-key green screen environment as if he were directing a superhero film in the MCU.  Sometimes the dolls are creepy; sometimes they’re M3GAN-style jokes about uncanny robotics.  The pigeons foretell the immediate arrival of Death, but it’s also hard not to laugh when one attacking Seydoux is scored as if it were a flying hellbeast.  Like all of Bonello’s previous provocations, The Beast was designed to split opinions, but I thought it was a hoot.  It can be funny, scary, sexy, or alienating depending on the filmmaker’s momentary moods; the only constant is the male entitlement of the central fuckboy villain, which is only effective because he’s such a handsome devil.

-Brandon Ledet

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine (2000)

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The streaming era has democratized film distribution in many ways, offering direct user-uploaded platforms like YouTube & Vimeo to publish your work for a worldwide audience alongside lower-tier streamers who are hungry to fill their libraries with cheap-to-license titles like Tubi, Hoopla, and PlutoTV.  Good luck getting anyone to actually watch your work, though.  Because there are so many platforms for low-budget productions, the likelihood that an audience will stumble across your particular no-budget movie in the endless #content wilderness shrinks every year.  There are some ways that the scarcity of earlier eras was healthy for the independent filmmaking landscape, if not only because it was a lot more likely that your film would get noticed outside your local friend-circle bubble.  For instance, a digi-SOV sci-fi novelty from Korea could break out of the genre film fest circuit to reach an international audience and land a belated review from luminary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum despite being shot on home video equipment in empty alleys & warehouses.  The try-hard edginess of Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine tested my patience as soon as I read its title, but there was something about its “Let’s put on a show!” no-budget earnestness that made me weirdly nostalgic for a recent bygone era.  Nowadays, you have to be Steven Soderbergh if you want your handheld digi-cam experiments to earn a sizable audience for anything longer than a TikTok clip.  So, even when I was wincing at the grotesque ribaldry that Teenage Hooker wanted me to find humorous, I still found myself compelled to pour one out for the D.I.Y. cyberpunk gore hounds who’ve been left behind by the cruel march of time. 

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine is SOV genre trash about an underage sex worker who’s murdered by her schoolteacher then brought back to life by a mad scientist as a killer cyborg on a revenge mission.  Because the movie is only an hour long (and bookended by at least ten minutes of opening & closing credits), there isn’t much else to divulge beyond that one-sentence premise.  All I can really do here is spoil its one great idea: the strap-on machine gun our undead heroine uses to shoot her teacher dead from crotch level in the final scene.  Everything before that final act of criminally horny violence is either a goofball non sequitur (like an impromptu dance break when the evil teacher first discovers his student turning tricks in an alley, disturbing his mother’s sleep) or a home movie level restaging of more substantial, professional work (including a cosplay version of the cyborg-construction imagery of Ghost in the Shell).  Had the entire movie been a revenge rampage in which the main weapon of choice was a cyborg’s killer strap-on, this would still very likely be making the rounds as a must-see cult film for dorm room stoners everywhere.  Instead, it’s just outrageous enough of a stunt that you can see how it briefly held audiences’ attention in the early 2000s.  There’s little scene-to-scene cohesion in its hurried shaky-cam tours through the back alleys of Seoul, but every few scenes there’s a detail that’ll perk you up in your seat: nighttime sunglasses paired a schoolgirl uniform, sex set to Benny Hill-style novelty jazz, a bed that is also a lightbulb, etc.  It’s the kind of movie where the protagonist is shot in the chest, exposing the wires inside, just so you can turn to your nearest bro and shout “Whoa, her tit exploded!” between bong rips.

I mostly had a good time with Teenage Hooker despite my dorm room days being decades behind me.  Its humor is flat, its sex is sour, and its comic book stylization can be a little embarrassing for an adult audience … and yet, there’s something mesmerizing about its digi-cam cinematography that makes it a thrilling watch.  The absurdly wide fish-eye lenses and the handheld jerkiness of its framing—combined with the late-90s record store staff-picks soundtrack—gives it the instant cool cred of a vintage skateboarding video, a relic of a time long gone.  I dare say there’s even a Wong Kar Wai quality to the digital red, yellow, and green hazes of its fluorescent-lit color palette.  There are dozens of Japanese genre titles from this era that I would recommend someone check out before prioritizing Teenage Hooker (the playful handheld camera work of Hideaki Anno’s Cutie Honey and the vicious, supernatural schoolgirl violence of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club both immediately come to mind), but the D.I.Y. production values and the Korean context of this specific title do make it tempting to root for as an underdog.  Even now, while we’re living under the illusion that every movie ever made is affordable & accessible, I had to access Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine through Archive.org, since it wasn’t commercially available through any official means.  At least that low-quality, heavily pixelated transfer accentuated the early-2000s nostalgia of the presentation, recalling a time when it would take 20 hours to download no-budget schlock like this through a torrent tracker – a time when no-budget schlock like this was enough of a buzzy online attention-grabber to be worth that all-day wait.

-Brandon Ledet

Singapore Sling (1990)

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It took a couple weeks of diligent blog posts & podcast recordings to review all thirteen screenings I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, of which the major highlights were local premieres of Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow.  Overlook recaps are never complete if you only cover what movies you saw at the fest, though; it’s just as important to report on the movies you took home from the fest, thanks to the consistent, essential presence of boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome as an on-site vendor.  I pick up killer genre obscurities from the Vinegar Syndrome table every year, mostly because I’m prompted to select titles I’ve never heard of before by their striking cover art and by the curational nudging of a knowledgeable sales rep.  I’ve left past Overlooks with blind-buy purchases of Nightbeast, The Suckling, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street – all bangers.  This year’s highlight purchase was a recent in-house restoration of the 1990 Greek sexploitation thriller Singapore Sling, a movie that jumped out at me through the striking black-and-white S&M iconography on its slipcover and that over-delivered on the debauchery that graphic promises.  Equal parts horror, noir, and pornography, it’s gorgeous high-art smut: the exact qualities Vinegar Syndrome regulars search for in the label’s extensive catalog.  It’s almost unbelievable that it’s a new release for the company, since it feels just as perfectly calibrated to their brand as early, signature VS titles like The Telephone Book.

There are three separate narrators in this sordid domestic drama, all of whom directly address the audience in stage-play soliloquy.  One is the titular Singapore Sling (named after a cocktail recipe, the only scrap of identification that can be found on his person); he’s a macho noir archetype who’s taken hard to alcoholism as his years-long search for his beloved, vanished Laura has proven fruitless. Tracking Laura’s ghost to a mysterious, remote mansion, he meets our other two narrators: the dominatrix owner of the estate and her childlike nympho daughter – a mother-daughter duo who are introduced to the audience roleplaying as the missing Laura and engaging in incestuous, fetishistic sex with the aid of a strap-on dildo.  You see, they most definitely killed the missing woman, along with dozens of unnamed servants buried in a mass grave under their home’s flower garden, because they are wealthy and thus depraved.  Like all noir protagonists, our POV character is doomed as soon as he stumbles into the web of these femmes fatales.  They immediately beat him into concussion, tie him to a bedframe with ropes & leather straps, and take turns raping him while teasing out whether he’s aware of their similar abuse of the mysterious Laura.  Speaking of which, the name “Laura” is repeated by all three players with feverish, orgasmic frequency, and it eventually proves to be a direct allusion to the classic 1940s Otto Preminger noir, complete with out-of-context references to Laura’s broken lake house radio.  Whether you ever thought the noir genre could use a little sprucing up with proto-torture-porn sensibilities is dependent on your personal interests as an audience, but I can at least say I’ve never seen that exact combination before.

Singapore Sling is incestuous femdom erotica filtered through the filmmaking aesthetics of classic Universal monster movies.  The father figure of the family home is dressed up like the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and stored in the attic as an artifactual sex object.  The women of the house keep some traditional BDSM restraints & tools lying around, but they also incorporate perplexing electrical equipment seemingly borrowed from the set of James Wale’s Frankenstein into their “play” (i.e., rape & torture).  Its black-and-white horror sensibilities are warmly familiar, but its rape-fantasy logic feels genuinely dangerous outside the context of privately read erotic fiction, which is only slightly eased by it being played as a taboo freak-out instead of a pure turn-on.  I haven’t felt this shameful while falling in love with a movie since I first watched The Skin I Live In, and its cheeky provocations don’t feel all that out of line with Almodóvar’s general schtick.  I haven’t yet seen any other features from director Nikos Nikolaidis, but it appears that shock & provocation are constant in his work, evidenced by the 2011 documentary of the Vinegar Syndrome disc that features a montage of his actresses pissing & vomiting in a wide range of violent, sexual scenarios.  Here, pissing & vomiting are their versions of cumshots, and their concussed captive has no choice but to lie back and take it until there is a chance to escape.  I have no reference for where Nikolaidis was positioned in the Greek cinematic imagination in his time, but I do see direct evidence here that he was at least influential on currently ascending Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, from the outlandish incest of Dogtooth to the fruit-flavored masturbation and classic-monster visual cues of Poor Things.

There’s almost no way to recommend Singapore Sling without sounding like a carnival barker luring rubes into a geek show.  Indeed, the film does have a Spider Baby quality to its “Get a load of these freaks!” premise, which never expands beyond hanging around a decrepit mansion with sexual deviants until everyone involved is fucked to death.  For all of its kink & gore, though, it’s a strangely calm, quietly eerie affair, mostly scored by the soft meditation-app rain patter of the “sick and sad” world outside the mansion walls.  It’s not the kind of kill-a-minute splatstick horror that punctuates every sequence with an active disemboweling; it’s the kind of off-putting, degenerate horror that collects the organs from a disemboweling to arrange into sensual tableaux, decorated with victims’ jewelry for perverse beauty.  That stomach-turning disorientation is better experienced than described, which makes this an ideal blind-buy home video experience.  It’s easily my favorite film I’ve picked up from Vinegar Syndrome’s merch table at Overlook, where I consistently gamble on titles without the hive-mind knowledge of the internet informing my purchases.  Relying only on the box-cover artwork and the guidance of Staff Picks at that table is the closest I get to the vintage video store experience in this post-Blockbuster Video world (at least until Future Shock Video gets a storefront going in the not-too-distant future, many many bus rides away). I look forward to it every year almost as much as I look forward to the official selections on the Overlook program. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Telephone Book (1971)

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I don’t know that most people decide what podcasts to listen to based on which are most “useful” to them, but I still want to report that Justin LaLiberty’s guest episodes on Brian Saur’s Just the Discs Podcast are the most useful the medium has ever been to me.  Shortly before every Vinegar Syndrome flash sale, Saur will interview LaLiberty (longtime Letterboxd champion and current Director of Operations for VS partner label OCN Distribution) about what titles Blu-ray collectors should scoop up while prices are low.  These conversations are always overflowing with great recommendations for high-style, low-profile genre films I would have never heard of otherwise, and it’s the kind of podcast I listen to with a notepad on hand.  To that point, one title LaLiberty has repeatedly promoted on these Just the Discs eps is the 1971 sexploitation comedy The Telephone Book, to the point where purchasing it felt mandatory (especially since its softcore lewdness pretty much guarantees it’ll never land on a major streaming service).  In general, Vinegar Syndrome has been particularly proud of this discovery & release, using it as a touchstone representative of the distro’s brand: vintage schlock & porno that has more cultural & artistic value than its reputation would suggest.  Having now finally seen it, I totally get it.  It’s a masterpiece of messy, sweaty, independent filmmaking – the exact kind of forgotten curio movie nerds are always hoping to rescue out of the bargain bin.

The Telephone Book is a freewheeling, semi-pornographic arthouse comedy about the divine art of dirty phone calls.  It’s grimy, street-level New York City filmmaking at its most playfully absurd.  Sarah Kennedy stars as an impossibly bubbly 18-year-old nymphomaniac who wastes away horny afternoons sweating alone in her NYC apartment.  Her bedroom boredom routine is violently disrupted at the start of the film by an anonymous dirty phone call from a man in a nearby photobooth, who announces himself under the alias John Smith.  Shocked that the call is the most satisfying sexual experience of her young life, she’s determined to track down the mysterious John Smith in the phone book listings, which guides her through a series of decreasingly satisfying sexual escapades around the city.  The film quickly devolves into a sketch comedy format from there, with isolated performances from 1970s theatre powerhouses William Hickey & Jill Clayburgh standing out among the more generic perverts of NYC.  Then, the momentum of the search for the phonebooth John Smith comes to an abrupt stop when he physically shows up at the scene of the crime, entering our nympho heroine’s apartment disguised in a pig mask.  Most of the rest of the runtime is comprised of his explanation of how he got so good at making dirty phone calls, playing out like the killer’s confession at the end of a slasher.  Then, he repeats the act that drove his victim insanely horny in the first place, melting down what remains of reality with the filthy sound of his voice.

The climactic dirty phone call is so ecstatically perfect that it cannot be convincingly depicted onscreen.  Instead, scenes of the second phonebooth call are intercut with the pornographic images bouncing around in Kennedy’s head, illustrated as crude bathroom-graffiti sex cartoons and explosive warzone audio.  The entire movie plays like a filthy collage in this way, right down to the graphic decor of our heroine’s bedroom, which looks like if the cut-and-paste wallpaper of Daisies was made entirely of porno mags (matching the general vibe of watching Věra Chytilová adapt articles out of Screw magazine).  War photography stock footage illustrates John Smith’s confession of power & guilt as his demented madman ravings get lost in the weeds of fascist American militarism and simulated space madness.  Cutaway interviews asking men why they make dirty phone calls to strangers recall the candid street interviews of Funeral Parade of Roses in their frequent plot disruption.  I’ve seen a few American titles that share DNA with The Telephone Book‘s oversexed, anarchic satire (and I really mean just a few – particularly Bone, Putney Swope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), but it’s all played with a tone & visual style that would feel much more at home in an artsy European film fest environment.  I don’t know that anyone’s out there dying to see Al Goldstein’s cheesecake sexuality filtered through the collagey French New Wave sensibilities of Agnès Varda, but if you’re out there, there is exactly one movie that might hit the spot.

As a vintage sexploitation time capsule, The Telephone Book is most illustrative in how it turns phonebooths and phone books into fetish objects of its era, splashing them with the cold water of a dial-a-prayer 900 number service for counterbalance.  Sarah Kennedy’s performance as a Sexy Baby archetype with a girlish voice & body but a monstrously voracious sexual appetite is also a marker of its time.  At one point, she watches then participates in the filming of an orgy as if she were a child observing then entering a petting zoo, fascinated by but detached from the action.  It’s difficult to say whether that characteristic was intended as pure macho fantasy or a pointed satire thereof, but it is undercut by the inclusion of Clayburgh’s more mature, jaded performance as her sultry bestie.  Clayburgh exists only in phone calls with Kennedy, never bothering to take off her sleeping mask while receiving head or loading her revolver in bed, only removing it once the phone sex with John Smith heats her up to an unbearable degree.  John Smith himself (a masked Norman Rose) is where the political satire of the picture creeps in and dismantles the entire illusion of the cutesy nudie cutie it could’ve been without him.  His confession and repeated phone call in the back half are so brilliantly staged that they make you want to immediately start the movie over again to reexamine sillier elements you might have dismissed as smut & fluff in the opening stretch.  That’s partly what makes it such an ideal movie to own on disc, the same way its psychedelic porno breakdown makes it an ideal Vinegar Syndrome disc in particular.

-Brandon Ledet

Both Ways (1975)

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Long before New Queer Cinema directors like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki were praised for their confrontational depiction of queer sexuality onscreen in the 1990s, there was already a strong, decades-long independent filmmaking tradition of doing just that in hardcore gay pornography.  At least, that was the central thesis of Liz Purchell’s archival work in the Ask Any Buddy project, which is where I first heard of Jerry Douglas’s 1975 bisexual romance thriller Both Ways.  Although the review of Both Ways on the Ask Any Buddy podcast was less than glowing, it still felt like a necessary purchase when I ran across a used DVD copy of the film in a Minneapolis record store, since its X-rated onscreen sex meant I’d unlikely be able to access it on any mainstream streaming service in the near future (which is the exact kind of false scarcity logic that’s led me to collect a modest stack of vintage porno titles like Pink Narcissus, SexWorld, Bijou, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street).  On its surface, Both Ways is a fairly straightforward—pun unintended—porno drama about a closeted bisexual man living a double life, but between the director’s commentary track on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, the supplementary insight from the Ask Any Buddy pod, and the plot’s last-minute swerve into Hickcockian violence—okay, pun obviously intended that time—it ends up feeling like a surprisingly substantial work of outsider art.

The first sounds you hear in this Golden Age porno is a child giggling as his father tickles him on a carnival Ferris wheel.  Gerald Grant stars as a straight-laced family man: a Harvard graduate (which he’ll remind you of frequently) who’s built a tidy suburban life for himself as a high-powered lawyer and a loving father of a young son.  All is not well in the bedroom, though, as his sexually neglected wife, played by Andrea True (likely the most famous member of the cast, due to her disco hit “More More More”), confronts him for being distracted by a secret affair outside the house that she can’t quite figure out.  She’s correct, of course, as her husband has been sneaking around with—shocker of all shockers—a Yale student played by Dean Tait.  Now, you might expect that vintage pornography about a closeted bi man’s infidelity would mean double the variety of onscreen sex, but it really just doubles the amount of couples bickering.  This is the kind of porno-chic relic that speeds through rapid edits of sex scenes so it can really dig into its domestic melodrama, making for a shockingly sincere representation of male bisexuality for its era … until it takes a wild swerve into psychological thriller territory.  After all of its cheeky humor about collegiate rivalry between Harvard & Yale and all of its sentimental homelife drama in which the father figure constantly buys his cavity-sweet son handfuls of balloons, Both Ways gets really dark in its final twenty minutes, making for a chilling ending to something that’s ostensibly supposed to heat couples up on a naughty date night.

In filmmaking terms, Both Ways is surprisingly playful for a hardcore porno.  Douglas does a lot to mirror the domestic scenes in both of our antihero’s competing relationships, even going as far as to symmetrically pose his actors in front of wall-hung mirrors to drive the point home.  During early domestic squabbles where both couples recount how they first met and during a later pornographic montage of the cheating husband alternating between his two partners in two separate beds, the threesome’s body language is exactly copied in direct contrast to underline how little meaningful, physical difference there is between the two relationships.  Douglas also plays around with insert shots of artificial exteriors to simulate intimate dialogue when characters are navigating the world outside their bedrooms, shooting his actors against a surreal blue-void “sky”.  He also tries his best to ground this tale of extramarital romance within the context of Free Love looseness, setting a major couple’s spat at a swingers’ wife-swap orgy and meticulously framing a lit joint at the center of a male performer’s buttcheeks.  Other visual details & directorial choices are more inscrutable, such as the frequent cutaways to a frumpy housekeeper during the aforementioned wife-swap, the repetitive focus on yellowed copies of New York Times headlines to mark the timeline of the couples’ pasts, and the Ivy Leaguers’ obsession with ceramic beer steins – which only become more noticeably bizarre the more they become directly involved in the scene-to-scene plot.  It’s all baffling in its distraction from the presupposed purpose of hardcore pornography, but it also all adds to the feeling that this is a personal, thoughtful, creative project for Douglas instead of a quick cash grab between writing his off-Broadway stage plays.

I’m fond of Both Ways despite all of its lopsided plotting and its confused representation of Normal male bisexuality.  Even after the domestic melodrama gives way to crime-thriller psychology, the movie still has an oddly light tone to it, present both in the generic funk-guitar background music and in the nosy investigations of a local antiques dealer who mistakes the husband’s sneaking around for living a double life as an undercover Commie spy.  It may not be the artistic pinnacle of Golden Age pornography, but it does function as a clear, standalone example of how porn from that era has unique cultural value as independent filmmaking.  If nothing else, it’s difficult to imagine any mainstream Hollywood studio dramas of that time depicting male bisexuality with so much candor (even if it is easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this film choosing to conclude with the exact same act of domestic violence).  I got the sense that the reason the Ask Any Buddy crew were less enthused about Both Ways in their much better-informed review is that Jerry Douglas had previously contributed to a much more accomplished bisexual porno as the writer of Radley Metzger’s Score, which makes this one suffer by comparison.  I cannot personally speak to that comparison, as I have not yet scored a copy of Score while killing time in second-hand media stores on vacation, but I also never expected to find Both Ways through that method either, so never say never.

-Brandon Ledet

Deep Cover (1992)

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There was a period of time in my childhood when I was convinced that Laurence Fishburne is the greatest actor alive.  Decades later, I’m once again being swayed to believe that superlative, except now my supporting evidence has less to do with his work in the high-premise sci-fi films The Matrix & Event Horizon than it has to do with his more complex character work in Bill Duke’s Deep Cover & John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood.  Fishburne was well rewarded in his 1990s heyday, including an Oscar nomination for his brutish portrayal of Ike Turner in What’s Love Got to With It? and an Independent Sprit Award for Best Male Lead in Deep Cover.  To my knowledge, Event Horizon earned no Oscar buzz to speak of in 1997, which would have disappointed me to know at age 11.  Since then, Fishburne has slipped into the Great Actor void, mostly working in TV and in IP extenders when studios should be churning out a new Awards Bait star vehicle for him every year the same way we pamper other living greats like Glenn Close, Annette Benning, and Meryl Streep.  It’s a shame, especially once you get cynical about how other Black legends like Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, and even Deep Cover director Bill Duke have been left to simmer on the same Hollywood backburner.

It might seem naive to discuss an undercover cop thriller like Deep Cover in these prestige-acting terms, but it really does give Fishburne a lot of room to show off.  If nothing else, it somehow finds an entire new layer of self-conflict to the moral dilemma of a cop having to commit crimes to stop them, despite the already long-bald tires on that trope.  We open with a flashback to the cop’s childhood trauma on A Very Shane Black Christmas, when his addict father was gunned down in front of him while robbing a liquor store for gift & drug money.  The rest of the movie is set in the New Jack City 1990s, where Fishburne’s childhood trauma under the violence & desperation of addiction has curdled into furious disgust with the crack epidemic that has rattled Los Angeles.  In order to take down the white ghouls at the top of the ladder who supply drugs to the Black community, Fishburne allows himself to be recruited to go undercover as one of their business partners.  In the process, he gets especially close to a scummy yuppie lawyer played by Jeff Goldblum, whose “condescending infatuation with everything Black” makes their already volatile workplace relationship even more explosively tense.  Most of Fishburne’s conflict is internal, though.  He is handling, selling, and profiting off the one evil he has dedicated his life to avoiding, and every moment of that hypocritical turmoil weighs heavy in his angry, self-hating eyes.

Deep Cover is currently in print as a Criterion Collection Blu-ray, but it entered my house as a 20-year-old thrift store DVD.  That dichotomy is a perfect snapshot of where it lands on the prestige/trash spectrum, stealthily operating as a high-style art film that’s gone undercover as a thriller-of-the-week marquee filler.  Bill Duke’s directorial instincts deserve just as much credit for its impact as Fishburne’s acting chops, updating classic noir tropes for Spike Lee’s America.  Fishburne’s overly verbose narration track is classic noir at least, and Duke’s vision of Los Angeles is one where every alley spews a volcano of mysterious urban steam into an atmospheric haze of neon reds & blues (often alternating from the tops of passing cop cars).  The editing rhythms are chopped into jerky stops & jumps, feeling more DJ’d than traditionally spliced.  Its aesthetic indulgence in post-MTV style only gets more intense from there the further its characters lose themselves in the momentum of cocaine psychosis – a style that eventually came full circle when the movie was marketed with a tie-in music video featuring Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre.  It’s a cool video promoting a very cool movie, but what I ended up cherishing most about Deep Cover was the amount of screenpsace it reserved for watching one our greatest living actors be great at acting.  It’s shocking how few other movies afford Fishburne the same generosity.

-Brandon Ledet

Civil War (2024)

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The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns.  That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect.  Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart.  Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics.  That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography.  Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths.  It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.

Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses.  Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states.  Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics.  The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity.  They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that.  Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures.  They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.

There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide.  Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement.  They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal.  As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera.  It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny.  It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust).  However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent.  Nor does it really need to.

Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater.  Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures.  If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature.  The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests.  If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap.  It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given.  Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it.  Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.

-Brandon Ledet

Santa Sangre (1989)

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I’ve never had much enthusiasm for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s two signature films—the notoriously brutal acid Western El Topo & the psychedelic tableaux The Holy Mountain—despite the immense visual beauty both films convey as a collection of still images.  Jodorowsky is undeniably impressive as a visual stylist, but whenever he asserts full auteurist control over a picture, the visuals just kinda sit there, purposeless and without clear progression.  I suspect, then, that the reason Santa Sangre stands out as the director’s best work is because he did not have that authorial control as the sole writer-director.  The project was brought to Jodorowsky as an already fully formed idea by two Italian filmmakers: schlock giallo screenwriter Roberto Lioni and, more notably, Claudio Argento, who’s most famous for producing films directed by his older brother Dario (including the Argento classics Inferno & Tenebre).  Those two external voices do little to rein in Jodorowsky’s wildly expressive, surrealistic visual style, but they do help anchor it to a more familiar, generic narrative structure that gives it a much sturdier shape.  The imagery in Santa Sangre is just as gorgeous as anything you’ll see in The Holy Mountain, but it’s driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. 

Santa Sangre is a fine-art sideshow that finds ecstatic melodrama in the backstage lives of traveling carnies.  In the early flashback sequence that establishes the dramatic stakes, there’s little stylistic difference from what might happen if Werner Herzog attempted a 1980s remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks (a possibility you can only effectively imagine by watching Herzog’s forgotten 2000s melodrama Invincible).  Strongmen, clowns, strippers, dwarves, and trapezists are shot with a confrontational, near-documentary candor that walks just up to the line of “Get a load of these freaks!” gawking, but invests in the sincere, scene-to-scene drama of their humanity enough to mostly get away with it.  The modern-timeline scenes set in a mental institution are even shakier in the tightrope they walk between honesty & exploitation.  It doesn’t help that horror is an inherently exploitative medium in the way it others the mentally ill and physically disfigured for cheap scares, a tradition this particular title leans into by mirroring the plot of Hitchcock’s Psycho.  In the flashback timeline, a young circus-performer child watches in horror as his mother’s arms are severed by his brutish, drunken father.  In the present, he escapes from an insane asylum to act as his mother’s phantom arms, wearing painted nails and voguing like Willi Ninja as part of her new, altered stage act . . . and, of course, violently murdering anyone she singles out as a target, despite his squeamishness for violence.  This perverse pantomime of Mommy Issues psychosis culminates in an all-timer of a twist ending that I will not dare spoil here.

There’s something deeply, spiritually honest about movies that act as circuses.  Both artforms are a kind of cheap-entertainment spectacle that can convey pure, illusionary magic if the audience is willing to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the show.  Some of the best scenes in Santa Sangre are just straightforward documentation of circus performers’ acts, costumes, and bodies, with Jodorowsky’s eye searching for ethereal beauty in their makeshift D.I.Y. glamor.  It’s Argento & Lioni who provide a linear structure to support that beauty, though, and you can feel their influence in Santa Sangre‘s many Italo horror cliches.  First of all, you don’t get much more giallo than borrowing your plot structure from Hitchcock – Psycho or Rear Window especially.  Then, there’s the intense color gels & neons that mark the modern timeline of Santa Sangre but are not present in Jodorowsky’s previous works.  The real signifier, though, is the framing of the first modern-day murder, in which a woman is stabbed to death by a disembodied arm wielding a knife, the killer’s identity obscured just off screen. It’s all classic giallo fare, right down to the awkward English dubbing and the sensational but nonsensical answer to the central mystery of the murders.  I’m not exactly sure why Argento sought out Jodorowsky to direct this film instead of collaborating with Dario or Umberto Lenzi or Michael Soavi or whatever Italo schlockteur was around & looking for a paycheck.  It was a smart choice, though, as the director’s attempts to elevate the carnival setting into a fine art gallery show combine with the producer’s assembly line horror filmmaking rhythms to craft something truly special that neither collaborator would ever achieve again on their own.

Generally, Jodorowsky movies are more interesting to think about in the abstract than they are to actually watch, which is why the unfinished-project documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is the context where his name is most often repeated in modern discourse.  Santa Sangre is the major exception to that conundrum.  It may be just as exploitative & ableist as an actual carnival sideshow, but it’s also a work of tremendous beauty & emotional sincerity.  It would be difficult to claim that a movie that goes out of its way to include depictions of forced prostitution, elephant dismemberment, and child torture via tattoo needles is not on some level mining empty shock value out of its setting & drama.  The characters’ pain through surviving that outrageous violence is heartfelt, though, and the beauty of Jodorowsky’s photography protects the story from devolving into pure miserablism.  Besides the narrative similarities to Psycho & Freaks, the movie also includes direct allusions to the James Wale classic The Invisible Man, another example of horror filmmaking’s highwire balancing act between cheap visual spectacle and sincere emotional torment. It’s a shame Jodorowsky didn’t work with by-the-numbers horror producers more often. The genre’s readymade narrative familiarity & eternal marketability might have really bulked up his relatively small filmography, both in quantity and in quality.

-Brandon Ledet