Like a lot of film nerds, my October ritual is to cram in as many new-to-me horror movies as I can before Halloween passes by. Outside of attending film festivals, Spooktober is my favorite time of year to share titles & takes with my online movie buds, but it can be an exhausting, self-defeating effort if you don’t find enough balance in your movie diet. You cannot watch 31 new-to-you slashers or 31 new-to-you zombie comedies without getting sick of the genre. So, that search for balance often sends me to the outer limits of what can comfortably be categorized as horror, which is where you find genre-defiant headscratchers like Medusa. A loose, dreamworld descent into hedonism & blasphemy, Medusa indulges in some Saved!–style Evangelical satire, purgatorial coma ward occultism, hints of Exorcist body possession, and violent street attacks from history’s least-cool girl gang. It only qualifies as horror because that’s the only genre that can accommodate its loopy nightmare logic. Thankfully, that edge-of-horror grey area is where the greatest movies ever made tend to dwell.
The thing holding Medusa back from achieving that greatness isn’t its resistance to categorization; it’s the high bar set by its fellow genre-defiant South American contemporaries like Good Manners, Ema, Bacurau, and Electric Swan. It’s visually striking throughout, relying on some tried-and-true neon lighting & synthpop aesthetic cues to trigger a pithy “Pure Cinema” Letterboxd review or two. There’s just not much that actually happens between its opening & closing bookends, when we meet a misogynistic Christian girl gang in a near-future Brazil and when they’re collectively possessed by the feminist spirit of a wanton woman who’s been wronged by their kind. Like the demonized, sexually liberated woman they fear so much, the movie effectively slips into a coma between those two points, lucidly dreaming about Evangelical vocal choirs, spon-con influencer videos, atheist dance parties, and sex in the jungle. It gradually emerges from that comatose delirium as feminism & hedonism spread through the woman-beating girl gang like an infection, culminating with the girls finally snapping out of it in high-pitched screams to the camera. I was anxious for them to wake up & reorganize the entire runtime, but I guess if I wanted to watch a sharper, more propulsive version of this story I could always just revisit Ema.
Comparisons to other recent South American genre-benders are easy to make here, since that industry has continued to share a post-Buñuel dream-logic approach to narrative structure, each film lightly surreal in its loose progress of events. The slow-motion music video loopiness of Medusa likely shares more in common with Jennifer Reeder’sKnives & Skinthan any of its localized contemporaries, though, and it often feels like a bigger-scale, slightly bigger-budget version of that American indie. It just also not any more coherent or streamlined. The runtime crosses the 2-hour barrier for no particular reason other than its dripping-IV momentum never allows for its badass images to flow to the screen with any urgency. Still, the Christian girl gang’s conversion to feminist liberators is a satisfying emersion from that pious, medicated dreamworld. It may not be the most finely tuned example of its kind, but it’s at least one of the few body-possession horrors you’re likely to find that isn’t just another riff on one of the usual suspects:Body Snatchers, The Exorcist, The Thing, etc. If you watch enough horror movies, that kind of novelty is invaluable, especially this time of year.
There are two immediately obvious reasons why the special effects horror comedy Monkeybone is worth revisiting in 2022: its director and its star. Henry Selick’s upcoming Wendell and Wild is his first feature film since 2009’s cult favorite Coraline, and it appears to be perfectly in rhythm with the stop-motion nightmares for kids that have defined his career. Not only is Monkeybone Selick’s only live-action film to date, but it also happens to feature another beloved 90s figure who’s making a comeback this year: Brendan Fraser, who’s soon to launch a Best Actor awards campaign for Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser is in his wacky, live-action Looney Tunes mode in Monkeybone, as opposed to the dramatic vulnerability mode he brings to films like Gods & Monsters and, presumably, The Whale. Trapped in a literal nightmare-world induced by a coma, Fraser’s comic book artist protagonist goes to war with his own cartoonish creations in a physical version of the Hot Topic mall-goth fantasyscapes Selick made his name on in A Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Tim Burton directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one made even more fascinating by the fact that it flopped hard on its initial release – investing $75mil on a $7mil payoff.
To my shame, I don’t want to spend much time praising what Selick nor Fraser achieve in Monkeybone. No, I want to praise Chris Kattan. I outright groaned when Kattan’s name showed up in the opening credits, expecting the SNL veteran to be voicing the titular, annoying cartoon monkey sidekick character as an extension of his Mr. Peepers sketches. It turns out that Kattan is totally innocent on that front; Monkeybone is voiced by John Turturro, the scamp. He’s also supposed to grate on the audience’s nerves, as evidenced by Fraser’s constant efforts to get him to shut up & go away every time he opens his obnoxious little mouth. For his part, Kattan doesn’t show up until about an hour into the runtime, playing the corpse of a gymnast who died in a horrific accident. Through convoluted cosmic circumstances that involve a deal with Death herself (played by Whoopi Goldberg, naturally), Fraser’s comatose cartoonist takes over the gymnast’s body mid-organ donation and flees the hospital into an unsuspecting world. Kattan’s physical acting as an animated corpse with a broken neck and organs plopping out of its open body cavity had me absolutely howling with laughter. It was the quickest I’ve ever turned around on a famous actor’s presence in a film, encountering Kattan’s name with dread, then finding his performance so deliriously funny that I almost threw up from the physical exertion. I suppose it’s also worth pointing out that another 2022-relevant actor played a major part of that movie-stealing gag: Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk as the perplexed surgeon who trails behind the undead gymnast, continuing to harvest his organs as they fall to the ground behind him. It’s sublimely silly.
As screechingly funny as Monkeybone gets during Kattan’s third-act zombie run and as wildly imaginative as Selick’s coma-induced Land of Nightmares set designs can be, its legacy mostly resonates with a what-could’ve-been melancholy. Selick might have become a household name if this film didn’t flop so spectacularly. Or at least we wouldn’t get his work confused with Tim Burton’s quite so often. Grimmer yet, Fraser, Kattan, and Rose McGowan (playing a humanoid-cat cocktail waitress, of course) have all gone public with stories of behind-the-scenes sexual abuse from major Hollywood players in the #MeToo era, haunting the film with questions of where their careers might have gone in a better world. In the aftermath of those revelations, Fraser’s getting his late-career comeback, McGowan’s become a self-appointed spokesperson for the movement, and Kattan has continued to live in relative, semi-retired anonymity (give or take an affectionate shoutout in this summer’s Nope). I don’t know that Kattan deserves the same red-carpet career revival as his co-stars, or if the actor would even be interested in a proper Kattanissance if it were an option. I do know this, though: his performance is absolutely the highlight of Monkeybone, somehow outshining all of the cheeky monkeys, cyclops babies, Guernica bulls, and Nazi Mickey Mouse prison guards that Selick packs into the frame. It would have been an interesting relic even without Kattan, creating an amusement park dark ride version of the kinds of grotesque cartoons that only aired on late-night Comedy Central in the 1990s. Still, Kattan’s late-in-the-game intrusion is what pushes it over the line from interesting to essential.
Our current Movie of the Month, the 1993 creature feature Stepmonster, is psychosexual-id horror for kids, very much of the Troll 2 & The Pitvariety – complete with monstrous “tropopkins” standing in for The Pit‘s “tra-la-logs”. It feels like producer Roger Corman trespassing on Charles Band’s territory in that way, recalling the straight-to-VHS kiddie horrors Band produced under his Full Moon sublabel Moonbeam. There’s a rhythm to Corman’s classic drive-in creature features that carries over to Stepmonster, briefly revealing the titular monster in an early attack and then steadily doling out “kills” (kidnappings, really) throughout the rest of the runtime to maintain the audience’s attention. Otherwise, this is pure Moonbeam; all that’s missing is a dinky Casio score from Charlie’s brother, Richard Band. That doesn’t mean it’s too generic to be unique, though. The tropopkin’s rubber-suit design reads as a human-sized variation of the Gremlins knockoffs that VHS schlockmeisters were making in this era (Ghouliesin Band’s case, Munchies in Corman’s), but by the time she’s wreaking havoc in her wedding gown—trying to consummate her marriage to Alan Thicke under the full moon—the movie achieves a kids-horror novelty all of its own. I’m not surprised to hear it wormed its way into its pint-sized audience’s subconscious through that kind of kindertrauma imagery, even if it has plenty of direct corollaries in Band & Corman’s respective catalogs.
It would be easy, then, to recommend further viewings in Corman & Band’s other kindertrauma horrors, but they’d likely be too monotonous when watched in bulk. What distinguishes Stepmonster from other Moonbeam & Corman productions is the monstrous stepmother angle succinctly headlined in its title, tapping into a very specific fear children have of the strangers in their homes who married their parents. It’s a long running tradition in the genre, dating at least as far back as the wicked stepmother villain of Cinderella. And since it’s Halloween season, it feels important to highlight some of the all-time great titles in that canon: the greatest evil-stepparent horrors of all time. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more iconic horror films about the monsters our parents married.
The Stepfather (1987)
Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time is the 80s slasher The Stepfather, a superlative indicated by its definitive title. Terry O’Quinn is the stepfather, a sociopathic serial killer who cycles through families like he’s updating his wardrobe, killing the old batch in cold blood instead of dropping it off at Goodwill. O’Quinn is an explosive volcano of white-man rage, barely suppressing his violent outbursts under a thin facade of Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best-style suburban Family Values. It is one of the all-time great villain performances, regardless of genre. There was already a bland, forgettable remake in the aughts, but the only other actor who could maybe pull this performance off is Will Forte, whose comedic version of bottled-up fury is a direct echo of the terror in O’Quinn’s piercing, hateful eyes.
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Something you’ll notice about all of these evil-stepparent horrors is that they’re all movies about real estate. Terry O’Quinn’s genre-defining killer is a local realtor. Alan Thicke’s oblivious dad in Stepmonster is an architect and land developer. And then there’s The Amityville Horror, in which a couple moves into a dream home they can only afford because the previous family who lived there was murdered inside. James Brolin stars as the stepfather substitute for Jack Torrance, driven mad by the Bad Vibes of the titular home to the point where he’s axing down the bathroom door to murder his family cowering on the other side. He starts off mildly resentful that his wife’s children call him “George” instead of “Daddy,” escalates to complaining “Those kids of yours need some goddamn discipline,” and eventually settles on “Those kids of yours need to be decapitated.” Overall, the original Amityville is quintessential mainstream 70s horror, in that it’s sometimes deeply chilling, often vaguely boring, and features a grotesquely overqualified Margot Kidder. It’s an essential entry in the evil-stepparent canon, though, not least of all because it’s about a valuable piece of cursed real estate.
Hellraiser (1987)
Enough about evil stepdads. Fans of Stepmonster deserve some iconic evil-stepmother villainy, for which I’ll direct them to Clive Barker’s cosmic horror masterpiece Hellraiser. The Hellraiser series is remembered for its demonic S&M cenobites Pinhead, Chatterer, Butterball, and—wait for it—The Female, but the scariest villain in the first movie is the stepmother figure, Julia Cotton. Julia is the last stepmother you’d want to have as a vulnerable teenage girl, even further down the list than the tropopkin bride of Stepmonster. Caught up in a torrid affair with your undead sex-pest uncle while neglecting your father, she lures strange men home from the bar for casual hookups, only to murder them with a hammer for her lover’s disgusting amusement. She doesn’t even come to your defense when your uncle hits on you, beckoning “Come to daddy” while wearing your father’s skin as a Halloween mask. “Hellraiser” is already a great title, but maybe this is the movie that should have been called “Stepmonster.”
To my shame, rewatching Hellraiser for this feature was the first time it really clicked with me as one of the all-time greats. I’ve always enjoyed it in parts but was trying to fit it in a Hellbound: Hellraiser II shaped box that did it no favors. Now I’m finally able to embrace the domestic melodrama at its core instead of looking past it for all the lurid, putrid filth that makes it spooky. All it took was a little soul searching about who qualifies as the worst stepparents in the history of horror, a list of which Julia Cotton deserves to rank near the very top.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Amicus anthology horror The House that Dripped Blood (1971), written by Psycho author Robert Bloch.
Every Halloween season, it’s customary for me to get suckered into at least one mediocre, mainstream horror that wouldn’t turn my head any other month of the year. This October, I was ensnared by Smile, which has been effectively guerilla-marketed at baseball games & Today Show tapings by attendees with creepy, direct-to-camera stares in a way that’s bound to catch anyone’s attention. A major studio horror from Paramount Pictures, it was the #1 movie in America its first couple weeks of release, less than a month after the similarly off-putting Barbarian led the box office its own opening weekend. The people are hungry for this kind of conventional, jump-scare driven horror right now, so Smile seems like as good as any state-of-the-union check-in on mainstream horror that I’ll likely find this year. In that Spooky Season context, it was perfectly cromulent.
When compared to the grim, grey days of 2016’s Mental Illness Metaphor horror Lights Out, Smile at least registers as a sign that the industry has improved. In terms of the two films’ depictions of mental health crises, those improvements are miniscule. Lights Out cruelly asserts that suicide is a heroic act for the mentally ill, so they will no longer burden their family. Smile softens that messaging to say the mentally ill should isolate themselves, so they don’t infect others with their mania. In this case, suicidal ideation is a curse passed from victim to victim like VHS tapes in Ringu, infecting each poor soul with a demonic presence that smiles at them so intensely they kill themselves, passing on the trauma-curse to whoever’s unfortunate enough to witness the violence. Between the grinning Depression Monster presence of The Babadook, the Snapchat filter smiles of Truth or Dare, and the chain e-mail curse distribution path of It Follows, Smile is made entirely of pre-existing building blocks borrowed from much more creative works. It’s basically a greatest hits collection of late-2010s horror tropes, the kind you’d expect to find on a Target end-cap CD rack.
The post-Hereditary trauma-monster trend forces Smile to participate in a mental illness metaphor it’s too vapid to tackle with any nuance. There are multiple scenes where uncaring therapists, boyfriends, and siblings line up to recite the dictionary definition of “trauma” to our cursed protagonist, explaining how they learned in their online research that mental illness can be . . . you guessed it, hereditary. Maybe the recent “elevated horror” trends from smaller studios like Neon & A24 have led the industry down a treacherous path, since more by-the-numbers chillers from major players like Paramount don’t pay enough attention to the meaning behind their scares to pull off these Trauma & Grief metaphors with any credibility. Still, artsy-fartsy mutations of the genre have at least helped steer the industry’s visual aesthetics into some exciting directions. We’ve finally left the greyed-out, fluorescent-lit dungeons that mainstream horror lurked in for the entirety of the aughts, emerging into lightness, humor, color, and atmospheric tension that’s been missing from the genre since at least the 1990s. Smile might not know why Ari Aster’s camera twists its establishing shots upside down, but at least it’s borrowing from something that’s more interesting to look at than Saw.
Of course, none of Smile‘s relationships to its horror contemporaries really matter in the moment. Its jump scares rattle; its trauma-monster creature design is memorably bizarre; and its constant rug pulls continually prompt you to question reality. That’s all it really needs to pull off to succeed at the one thing it’s supposed to do: entertain horror-hungry audiences its opening weekend in October. By next year, Smile will be replaced by another high-concept, low-creativity horror novelty from a major studio with a knack for attention-grabbing marketing gimmicks, forgotten to time by everyone who’s not a total nerd for this stuff. I just like thinking about what those disposable Halloween Season novelties indicate about the horror industry at large, because I happen to be one of those nerds.
We’re all familiar with Dr. Manhattan and how he exists everywhere at once now, right? Like, it’s not just comic book nerds; the meme(s) mean(s) that everyone knows the whole deal, right? So if I were to describe to you those three panels, but in each one, I’m saying:
It’s 1998 and my mom has rented The Stepford Wives for us to watch while my dad is out of town.
It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives.
It’s 2022 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives.
…you get the effect I’m trying to achieve, right?
Don’t Worry Darling is the sophomore picture of one Olivia Wilde, who delivered a stunner with her freshman flickBooksmart. I first saw the trailer before Men when I caught that in a May screening, and was captivated by it, and I’m glad to say that it delivered for me, even if it isn’t for others. Florence Pugh stars as Alice Chambers, who plays house all day in her gorgeous Midcentury modern bungalow located in a perfect little cul-de-sac. Each morning, she sees off her husband Jack (Harry Styles) as he and all of the other husbands in the neighborhood drive off to work in their pristine 1950s cars (I’m not a car guy and I guess there’s not a lot of overlap between car guys and this movie, since there would normally be a list of cars in the IMDb trivia by now, so your guess is as good as mine; I’m certain at least one was a Chevy and that’s all I’ve got). They’re all residents of a company town called Victory, and Jack and all of the men work for Frank (Chris Pine) on something called “progressive materials,” which is of course classified. The gals spend their days with housekeeping and idle leisure — shopping, spending long days creating perfect meals, drinking poolside, scrubbing bathtubs, keeping fit with ballet lessons from Frank’s wife Shelley (Gemma Chan), and making beds. Of course, it’s not the 1950s we know, and we’re tipped off by this from the film’s first moments, where we see the Chamberses hosting a party with an interracial couple (with the Loving V. decision still a decade away) and living in a desegregated neighborhood, as evidenced by the presence of Margaret (KiKi Layne) and Ted Watkins.
All is not peachy keen for everyone in Pleasantville, however, as Margaret is going through a difficult time. Some time before the start of the narrative, she believed that she saw a biplane crash in the desert hills that surround the town and went into the Headquarters’ restricted zone with her son to find it; only she came back alive, and Alice’s best friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde) in particular is judgmental of the whole situation. For Alice, however, things are perfect: she has her handsome husband, her perfect life, and her gorgeous friends, and he’s getting a promotion! That is, until she sees a plane crash over the ridge as well and, going to inspect it, comes upon a reflective, man-made structure that gives her a surreal vision. She awakens back at home, but it’s as if the veil of her reality has been pierced, and as more traumatic events take place in Victory, she begins having nightmares and hallucinations that affect her sense of reality. And, as you would expect, nothing is as it seems.
Almost five years ago, a new employee joined my company, and in his icebreaker, they were asked, If you could live in a fictional tv or movie world, what would it be? Their response? “Mad Men,” they said. “I really like the late 50’s and 60’s. I know the time is not fictional but the show is. I’m not a big fiction fan. That time period had the best designed cars, furniture, homes, fashion, etc.” I’ll leave aside that this person voluntarily said that they were not a “fan” of “fiction” (although woof), because I had my own collegiate phase in which I refused to read non-fiction and said of all non-fiction works, saying “They’re all the same, it’s all about white people having a spiritual experience at the expense of colonized peoples or some person thinking that they can’t climb a mountain only to realize that they can,” and then I would perform what is colloquially known as a “jerk off motion.” I get that I can be closed-minded too. But I was also completely agog that my new colleague sat down and watched Mad Men and the lesson that he absorbed from it was “Dan Draper is cool,” rather than “nostalgia without inspection is poisonous and insidious.” When I mentioned this to a friend, I was surprised to learn (as a person who ended up watching the show rather late into its run) that there was actually a fairly large misaimed fandom for the AMC show during its heyday. The lesson I took from that day is that some people are very easily won over by candy-coated Midcentury modernism, so much so that even when the text is blindingly obvious in its intent to convey the message that the past is always worse than you think. The show’s timeline overlapped with the lynching of Emmit Till and the assassination of MLK and intentionally so (it would often skip a year or two between seasons, so when a contemporary event fell within the scope of the narrative, you knew it did so with purpose), and that’s just the big picture stuff, not even getting into the social normalization of casual littering, child abuse, and just about every bigotry you can name. And yet some people only noticed the Noguchi coffee tables and the Coupes DeVille.
Supposedly, Pine’s character, the enigmatic Frank, is based on self-titled “public intellectual” Jordan Peterson (not the one who’s a MEN.com exclusive), the Canadian social media personality who subsists on a diet of nothing but meat and who exercises by stre-e-e-etching to find something new each day in the media to take personal offense to, and then makes his indignation about black mermaids and She-Hulks the subject of his personality while calling other people “snowflakes.” If he is a stranger to you, bless you, summer child, and look no further into the existence of this man. If he sounds slightly familiar, it may be because he went on a recent multi-site frothing-at-the-mouth/crying tour because Sports Illustrated put a woman on the cover that didn’t make his dick hard. Some of that is lost when casting sends over Chris “Kirk but a Chad” Pine to stand in for a man who looks like a ghoul on a good day. I can see how that intent may have been clearer in the script, given that Frank has created an environment in which the strict 1950s gender roles of breadwinner/homemaker is enforced in more ways than simply socially, and it’s not just that he owns the whole company town like Hank Scorpio, but his endless pablum of radio-delivered doublespeak sounds exactly like the purposely dense nonsense talk of Peterson. Where it fails is in the fact that Pine, with his lantern jawline, piercing eyes, and taut abdominal muscles, doesn’t look like Jordan Peterson; he looks like a movie star. And while those who have seen the movie and know its twist could argue that Frank might not really look as good as he appears to us, given that another character is seen as their un-idealized self at a different point, but I’d also argue that the difference between the “normal” and the “idealized” versions of that character are minimal (Janey Briggs looked more different in her before-and-afters).
I made two notes immediately after watching this movie. The first, “People want to live in Mad Men and it sucks,” I think we’ve already discussed in detail above. The other, “Trying to recapture ‘the glories of the past’ and all of the purported good thereof also sucks.” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as the opening line to The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It is perhaps the greatest malady of modern man that he is still so susceptible not only to lies about an imagined “better” (or worse, “great”) past, so trapped within the limited horizon of their self-awareness that they can’t seem to understand that there is no going back to “innocence” because “innocence” isn’t a time in the past, it’s a time in your past, that continuum of moments that all took place prior to the day you realized that something you didn’t realize you had was gone, and maybe had been gone for a long time.
Within Don’t Worry Darling, the Victory Project is the modern incel’s fantasy about what they’ve been tricked into believing about the past. Narratively, it’s so similar to the Stepford chronicles from which it cribs heavily that it wouldn’t be something novel enough to comment upon if it weren’t for just how beautiful and expressive everything is. Cinematically, the movie is breathtaking, with shots of an impassable desert, an impossible community, and all of the furniture, architecture, and style that harkens back to a time that never really existed. There are a few pacing problems on occasion, but special style points must go to the crew for all the work of blurring the lines about how much of what we see we can actually trust. As Alice starts to experience hallucinations and surreal nightmares, the imagery is effective and fascinating. I can only hope that the 5-star “Harry is hawt” reviews from children can do enough to balance out the 1-star “hur hur feminists will like watching this movie with their cats” reviews from CHUDs to ensure that people decide to, uh, do their own research and make up their own minds.
To me, one of life’s simplest pleasures is going to the movies during the day, especially when it’s a weekday and there’s virtually no one else around. Of course, it’s pretty rare to be the only person or party in the theater; in my life, it’s only happened twice: when I was in the seventh grade and my mom picked me up from school early for a doctor’s appointment and then we went and saw Mission to Mars together, and on a recent Friday that I had taken off of work for a reason that fell through, so I went to a bunch of estate sales and then to see Barbarian. I have one friend in particular who absolutely refuses to watch movies during the day; she feels like it’s a waste of daylight and, hey, she’s certainly entitled to her opinion and whatever relationship she chooses to have with my longtime nemesis The Sun. For me, I love the experience of going into a dark theater and going on a complete emotional journey, only to stagger out into the daylight afterwards a changed person. It makes me feel like one of the Pevensie children stumbling back out of the wardrobe after a lifetime as royalty in another place, or Captain Picard when the Ressikan probe made him live a whole life in “The Inner Light” (or any of a hundred other examples, really). To be honest, that’s the closest thing I think we have to real magic in this world, other than magnets.
TW: Sexual assault.
Barbarian didn’t really change me. I didn’t come out of it a different person like I did when I stumbled out into the sun after seeing Mission to Mars twenty years ago (I’m not claiming it was a positive change) orTrue Stories in re-release five years ago. But it was a lot of fun and mostly maintained my attention. Written and directed by Zach Cregger, formerly of The Whitest Kids U’ Know and in his first directorial outing since his much-derided freshman feature Miss March, the film stars Georgina Campbell, who appeared in both the excellent Broadchurch and the well-received “Hang the DJ” episode of Black Mirror. Campbell is Tess, a woman visiting Detroit to interview for a research assistant position for a documentary filmmaker. She finds herself in an unenviable and stressful position when she discovers that the house she has rented on AirBnB is already occupied: by Keith (Bill Skarsgård), who claims to have booked the same house on HomeAway. They verify that they have the same (unmonitored) phone number for the property manager and Keith shows Tess his confirmation email. Tess is understandably less than enthused about the situation but is unable to find alternative accommodations, and ultimately she acquiesces to sleeping in the bedroom of the house while Keith takes the couch. She awakes in the night to find her door open and startles Keith awake, but the night is otherwise uneventful. She attends her interview and it goes well, and her presumed future employer warns her not to stay in the neighborhood that she’s in any longer than she has to. Back at the house, she has a frightening encounter with an unhoused person before accidentally locking herself in the basement while looking for toilet paper. While waiting for Keith to come back so that he can help her, she discovers a hidden door and a secret room, which terrifies her. Keith does come back and assist, but insists on seeing the room for himself, and eventually stops responding to Tess….
From there, we jump from the dark basement to sunny California to meet our third lead, sitcom star AJ Gilbride (Justin Long). He’s living the dream, or so he thinks, when he gets a call from two studio executives, who inform him that he’s just been #MeToo’d and that his accuser’s story will be front page news the following day. A survey of his finances leads him to consider selling some property, and the first place that he can think of is the house he owns in Detroit, so he flies back to Michigan (unwisely leaving the state, giving that it makes him appear that he’s fleeing) and enters the house, finding evidence that the house may still be occupied. We also learn that the home once belonged to a man named Frank (Richard Brake), who took up residence there during or before the 1980s, and that Frank was a serial kidnapper among the least of his crimes.
Barbarian is a weird little picture. In his article “The Search for this Year’s Malignant,” Brandon makes a connection between this film andDon’t Breathe, which ranked fairly high on my list of top films for 2016 while being completely absent from everyone else’s, and I was also thinking about the two films in conversation with one another while sitting in the (empty, empty) screening of Barbarian. Both use the veritably post-apocalyptic vibe of many of the city’s neighborhoods to increase the overall sense of unease, but Barbarian makes the decline of the city a part of its text: when we see Frank leave his house to get, eh, “supplies,” it’s not merely his house that is in pristine condition, but the neighborhood as a whole. He drives a huge, American-made car and has an interaction with the next door neighbor that reveals Frank’s neighbors are planning to sell their house and move soon, since the wife is worried that they won’t be able to sell it the next year (Frank, for his part, ominously claims that he will never leave). Frank’s house in the present day is likewise well-maintained, but now it sits in the middle of a huge radius of homes that have fallen apart from disuse, squatting, fire, and neglect, which Tess, who initially arrived at night, discovers in the morning light. That change between the neighborhood of yesterday and today didn’t happen overnight, and Frank’s neighbors’ economic concerns about the future are proven absolutely right. Reagan himself is mentioned on the radio, the reminder that the ruin that Tess witnesses was the result of one of America’s most productive (and unionized) cities being crippled by his administration’s shift of power to the wealthy and the immediate movement by the wealthy to move manufacturing out of the American economy. The choice of Detroit isn’t a coincidence or merely intended to cash in on the city’s degradation, but a part of the framing.
At its core, the film is a treatise about interpersonal interaction, most importantly how men treat women (more on that in a minute), and to a lesser extent, how people in general are treated by the system. The inciting event is the fault of the real estate agency that manages AJ’s Detroit property, as they fail to monitor their listings properly and allow a house to be booked through two different services; later, when Tess and Keith meet, the agency remains completely unresponsive and have no emergency contact information available for customers. Even when AJ comes back to the city and assumes that there are squatters in the house because of the luggage that he finds, the agency is unhelpful, can’t confirm when the last guests left, and cite that they only send cleaning services before the next guest (which, given that it’s been weeks, indicates that they’re not making sure that there are no corpses or bags of garbage getting septic in there even under normal circumstances); it’s enough to make one daydream about a Terry Gilliam picture about navigating the bureaucracy of short term rentals. More importantly, as in real life, the police here are not only useless, but obstructive. Although we don’t see it, given that the woman who interviewed Tess expressed concern about where she was staying, it’s reasonable to think she would have probably been concerned enough about not being able to contact her the following day that she would have asked for a welfare check-in, even if she didn’t file a report. But there’s no indication that anyone has been looking for her, and a later interaction between a character trying to get help and the police results in the officers treating said person like an addict and a troublemaker, and that’s not even getting into the dispatcher’s apathy when Tess is chased by a threatening figure.
Each of the three men who own or occupy the house over the course of the film represents one of the ways that men treat women. Frank is clearly the worst, as he casually lies his way into a woman’s home in order to unlock a window for later abduction like a character in a Thomas Harris adaptation. I won’t get into what exactly is happening in that basement in the 1980s, but it’s sickening, and the trophies that he keeps in the form of VHS tapes are labelled with chillingly inhuman descriptions of women who are deprived of even the dignity of their names, reduced to “gas station redhead” and “grocery brunette (biter).” At the other end of the spectrum is Keith, a genuinely decent person who knows—on a conceptual level—what women “deal with” on a daily basis, going so far as to notice that she didn’t take a cup of tea that he made her and then, when offering her wine later, makes it clear that he wants to make sure she sees him open it. Keith knows what Rape Culture is, and although he’s genuine, he’s also still a Nice Guy, living so fully and comfortably within certain privileges afforded him by his maleness that he’s shocked to learn that there are even more precautions that Tess undertakes than he knows about. And although the banal evil of real estate apathy may have kicked off the events of the film as we see them, it’s Keith’s cat-killing curiosity about the creepy basement room despite Tess’s very rational statement that they need to leave that causes the rest of the film to happen. Even a nice guy is still a guy. In the space between Keith and Frank, not the “middle” per se but on that spectrum, is AJ. He almost definitely did what he’s accused of doing, and his denials of what happened, which he attempts to explain away as his having had to “convince” his accuser, don’t even seem to be convincing to himself when he recites them (the situation most reminded me of the accusations leveled against Aziz Ansari a few years back).
I won’t lie and say that I never got bored during this one. A friend who saw it on a different day said that it felt like a Netflix series, and as Brandon pointed out in the above-linked article, the sketch-like segments don’t always pay off equally. The reveal is more functional to me than exciting, and there were a few moments when I was surprised the film hadn’t ended yet. I wish that the film had included a few more comedic beats during the long stretches of drama, because when Barbarian is funny, it’s very funny; the bit where AJ discovers a creepy kidnap room in his basement and immediately researches whether he can include it in the square footage for the real estate listing is, frankly, inspired – and comes back around in an important way. Cregger demonstrates a real ability to set the mood (one of my favorite bits of visual storytelling is when the dryer with the sheets in it has completed its cycle, but Tess and Keith are still enjoying each other’s company), but I would love to see him break it just a little more.
Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror films about evil professionals who terrorize on the job, starting with Peter Weir’s made-for-TV domestic thriller The Plumber (1979).
0:00 Welcome
01:30 The Peanut Butter Solution (1985) 06:38 Kalifornia (1993) 10:45 Eyes Without a Face (1960) 12:30 Desert Hearts (1985) 14:15 Smile (2022) 17:40 Intimidation (1960) 20:35 Monkeybone (2001)
27:34 The Plumber (1979) 51:51 Dr. Giggles (1992) 1:05:23 Ice Cream Man (1995) 1:18:55 One Hour Photo (2002)
I have no idea how long the term “kindertrauma” has been lingering in online media discussions, but I have been seeing it a lot lately. It’s a useful, succinct description of a very specific phenomenon that means a broad range of things to a broad range of people. Kindertrauma movies are the movies that scared you as a young child, before you developed enough media literacy to fully understand what you were seeing. It’s the snippets of films that replayed in your childhood nightmares, distorted exponentially out of proportion the further you got away from the source. My own half-remembered kindertrauma clips were the janitor’s closet prison of The Lady in White, the bicycle surgeons of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the cotton-candy cocoons of Killer Klowns from Outer Space . . . all from movies my daycare owner’s teenage daughter happened to tape off the TV. For a lot of Millennials, images from the Canadian cheapie The Peanut Butter Solution ranks high on that list. It’s kindertrauma royalty.
The Peanut Butter Solution is just one of dozens of children’s films produced for the Canadian series Tales for All, but it’s the one that enjoyed the widest international distribution and the one that boasted the most baffling out-of-context images. It has all the gravitas of an Afterschool Special—right down to its dinky Casiotone score—but it’s a total nightmare for the young & unprepared. It’s a charming tale of local winos who died in a late-night squat fire while trying to keep warm, then befriend a local schoolboy as ghosts. The boy is so freaked out by the squat’s charred wreckage that he’s scared bald (a condition his doctor diagnoses as “hair ’em scare ’em”), so the ghosts have to coach him on how to get his mojo back with a secret hair-growth recipe passed around among undead drunkards. Only, he puts in more peanut butter than the recipe calls for (to help it stick better to his scalp, duh), so his hair starts going freakishly long, practically a foot a minute. This, of course, leads him to being kidnapped by his ornery art teacher, who imprisons dozens of his fellow classmates in an underground sweatshop that transforms his hair into magical paintbrushes. Any five-minute stretch of the film is enough to fire up the imaginations of kids who happened to catch it out-of-context on cable in the 80s & 90s, sticking to the backs of their minds like so much Skippy brand peanut butter (who paid for their prominent ad placement in the titular scene).
The Peanut Butter Solution is driven by the kind of little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between “Hansel & Gretel” and The Pit. It pretends to hold educational value for its pint-sized, impressionable audience, warning of the dangers lurking in abandoned buildings, strangers’ trucks, and overactive imaginations. It’s heart’s not really in that, though, and any attempts to make sense of its internal logic is just a path to madness. This wonderfully deranged tale is only truly interested in connecting the dots between a random assemblage of low-intensity menaces that freak kids out: teachers, bullies, the homeless, pubic hair, etc. It obviously couldn’t get away with adapting the standard “I dreamed I was naked in class” nightmare that a lot of kids have, so it stripped its protagonist naked in the only place that wouldn’t compromise its PG rating . . . and then it goes even weirder places.
Kindertrauma movies are obviously hyper specific to the eras when their freaked-out audiences were young children. Titles like Willy Wonka and The Wizard of Oz are iconic enough that they’ve inspired nightmares for entire generations of children for decades, but I feel like it’s the much smaller, more disposable media that qualifies as proper kindertrauma – the kind of cheap-o nightmare fuel that doesn’t stick around long enough to become culturally familiar, so it just privately burns in your brain for decades as low-heat nightmare fuel. I’ve seen a lot of those titles for the first time as a fully formed adult— Stepmonster, Paperhouse, Return to Oz, Troll 2, Gooby, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, etc.—but it’s always clear when you spot them; you can always tell “This warped someone’s brain as a kid.” They’re rarely this unpredictable, though. They’re also rarely this distinctly Canadian, considering that The Peanut Butter Solution happens to feature Céline Dion’s first two songs recorded in the English language. Even if you weren’t traumatized by it as a small, soft-brained child, it’s still a total Canuxploitation nightmare.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month BoomermadeAlli,Brandon, and Britnee watchStepmonster (1993).
Boomer: Did you ever have one of those movies that’s stored so far down in the back of your brain that it just haunts you? I don’t know how old I was the first time I saw Stepmonster. I know that it was on TV, the Disney Channel specifically, and that it must have been during one of their free preview weekends. With this having a 1993 release date, I’m going to peg it at 1994/1995, when I was (I’m going to date myself here) seven. I think if I were even marginally older, this movie would never have lodged itself so deeply in my brain. There were countless tiny images from this movie lodged in my brain that I knew originated here: the guy from the Michael Bay Aaron Burr milk PSA running a comic book store, our young protagonist standing in a demolished living room holding a bat, that super cool monster and what she looked like in a wedding dress, and (most distinctly for some reason) Alan Thicke playing the violin. There were even other images that, if I imagine my child mind as a kind of filing cabinet, had fallen out of the Stepmonster file and gotten stuck in the back of the drawer, summoned up very occasionally by an unexpected mental misfire and with no real idea of their origin: a goldfish skeleton being spat out of a jewelry box, John “Gomez Addams” Astin dressed as a priest and smoking, a woman falling downstairs in her wedding dress, and what I guess we could call “the PG-13 Body Double sequence.” It’s also the movie that prompted me to ask my mother what “phlegm” was. For years, I couldn’t track this movie down. It was out of print, didn’t seem to have held any interest for any library in any place I lived, and never showed up on the shelves of any Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul that I frequented. Three years ago, the Alamo Drafthouse on S. Lamar was hosting a VHS swap meet, and there it was: Stepmonster. As someone who was a VHS apologist and hobbyist for a long time but one who only ever built his collection out of thrift store finds and hanging around dying rental stores like a carrion bird in the last days of the independents, I paid the most I had paid for a cassette after 2003: a whopping $5. “It’s rare,” the man behind the folding table had said. And I knew he was right.
And then it sat in my collection. I knew it would make its way to Movie of the Month one day. After all, this movie was all but lost media, right? Out of print, out of sight, out of mind. I just had to wait until my month fell during spooky season, and in 2022, it was finally time. Vexed to nightmare, this rough beast’s hour has come round at last. I only hope it was worth it.
Here’s the plot breakdown for our readers at home, accounting for the lack of widespread availability: Todd (Billy Corben) is a normal kid with an active imagination: he hates violin lessons, spends maybe too much time reading comics, and loves baseball. He’s at the age where it’s common to butt heads with your parents, but he’s having a particularly hard time with his father, George (Alan Thicke). George is an architect whose rationalistic, detail-oriented nature is reflected in his inability to fully communicate with his son, and an inability to disguise his frustration with his progeny’s fantasies and impatience for Todd to grow out of what he thinks is a phase. Truthfully, he spends an awful lot of time policing his son’s reading habits and taking away his comics, and not nearly enough time making sure Todd isn’t being a peeping little pervert vis-a-vis his spying on teenaged neighbor Wendy (Ami Dolenz). When Todd’s mother, Abby (Molly Cheek), goes missing in the woods, George seems to waste no time in getting remarried, as a mere six months later, he’s engaged to the titular stepmonster, Denise (MotM alum Robin Riker), a lovely woman for whom George was building a woodland cabin when Abby went missing. The immediately suspicious Todd sets out to find out what Denise is about, and although he immediately discovers that she’s a “tropopkin,” a scaly comic book monster, he’s unable to convince anyone else of this and is forced to set out to break up his dad’s engagement before the two get married on the summer solstice.
This is a movie that is clearly an attempt by producer Roger Corman to horn in on some of that sweet cash that his old frenemy Charles Band was making via his sub-Full Moon family imprint Moonbeam, famous for Prehysteria and Magic in the Mirror. The difference is that, despite the general melange of filth of a regular Charles Band production, those Moonbeam films are still kid-friendly, and the two I named are rated PG and G respectively. But that Corman sleaze just doesn’t wash off, and you can see it in the way that Stepmonster misses the mark with both its PG-13 rating (making it only recommended for viewers who are older than the protagonist in a film that can only really appeal to kids just a little younger) and its Pit-like choice of having our lead be a peeping tom, through whom the audience is presumably supposed to vicariously live. It’s a weird, unmistakably Corman touch. When Todd’s grandfather (George Gaynes, of Altered States and Police Academy) first says the word “horny” at the breakfast table and then recites the old adage about buying the cow, I was surprised that this was something that the Disney Channel used to air, and was only further dumbfounded by just how many times Todd aims his telescope at Wendy’s window. It makes for a tonally bizarre viewing, as the attempts to make this appeal to adults just make you a bit discomfited. The film still bothers to do some clever things, like having the father and his bride-to-be hammering that real estate sign on the inside of the literal white picket fence (because she’s not really intending to sell the house anyway, just eating the family and retreating back to her cave). One could try to argue that this was aiming for a slightly older demographic than middle schoolers, but this is completely undercut by the fact that the mother is discovered alive and well at the end, for a laughably happy ending.
What did y’all think? Devoid of any nostalgia factor, what were your thoughts? Is Todd too creepy to root for? Is George too dumb to live? Do we love Denise?
Brandon: No matter what rating the MPAA slapped on this thing, this psychosexual id horror is clearly aimed directly at kids. It’s very much of the Troll 2 & The Pit variety in that way, complete with the “tropopkins” standing in for The Pit‘s “tra-la-logs”. I also noted that this feels like Corman trespassing on Charles Band’s territory, so we appear to be on the exact same page this round. There’s a rhythm to Corman’s classic drive-in creature features that carries over here, briefly revealing the (step)monster in an early attack and then steadily doling out “kills” (kidnappings, really) throughout the rest of the runtime to maintain the audience’s attention. Otherwise, this is pure Moonbeam; all that’s missing is a dinky Casio score from Charles’s brother, Richard Band. That doesn’t mean it’s too generic to be unique, though. Denise’s monster design reads as a human-sized variation of the Gremlins knockoffs that VHS schlockmeisters were making in this era (Ghoulies in Band’s case, Munchies in Corman’s), but by the time she’s running around in her wedding gown the movie does achieve a kids-horror novelty all of its own. I’m not surprised to hear it wormed its way into its pint-sized audience’s subconscious through that kind of imagery, even if it has plenty of direct echos in Band & Corman’s respective catalogs.
What I am surprised to hear is that this aired on The Disney Channel. I’ve only watched exactly one Disney Channel Original Movie in my lifetime (Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century), but from what I’ve observed of that channel’s programming from afar, it’s usually severely asexual, presenting an entire universe hostile to the vaguest suggestion of sex. While little Todd isn’t quite as creepy as Jamie in The Pit, he is preoccupied with sex, to the point where the movie is just as much about his sexual curiosity as it is about fears of step-parental intruders. Beyond Todd’s inappropriate sexual fascination with his teenage babysitter neighbor, the movie is also weirdly hung up on the consummation of his dad’s marriage to Denise – something Denise is delaying until their wedding night as part of a full-moon blood ritual. I have to assume it’s that exact sexual undercurrent that landed the film its ludicrous PG-13 rating, since the monster attacks are relatively tame in their suspense & gore. Or maybe it was Todd’s passionate line-delivery of “Eat my shorts, you bloodsucking, bat-faced witch!” that pushed it over the line. Either way, I love that Corman and Band (and, in this case, special guest producer Fred Olen Ray) were making these inappropriate-for-children kids’ movies in the VHS era, and there’s something especially delicious about one of them sneaking its way onto the squeaky-clean Disney Channel lineup.
Alli: I started out thinking, okay, this is just one of those bizarre PG movies that came out, had some really weird scenes that stick in your mind, and disappeared into the ether. Then, I nearly choked on my drink as the grandpa said the word “horny”. This film immediately dips right into creepy 80s sex humor (despite it’s 90s release date), going from 0-100 in very little time. Sure, there was already Denise emerging out of the woods in that tight dress with no bra, but it was fairly tame before that “horny” line. A good ol’ family horror comedy romp.
With that in mind, once we got to Todd being a peeping Tom and photographing Wendy without her knowledge, and the grandpa letting it happen, I definitely lost some sympathy for the kid and his family. Not that I was really backing Denise either. Sure, she’s cool, using her sexuality as a weapon to ensnare this clueless, uptight man in order to make more tropopkins and then eat him and his weasel son, but I just wasn’t into her whole “Let’s get the kid labeled as crazy” attitude. The real heroes in this story are Phlegm and Wendy! Wow, I love them so much. Corey Feldman steals the show as the goofy bad boy Phlegm, while Wendy has got everything under control. I kept expecting Phlegm to be more of a key character than he was, like maybe he had a rare comic book issue that would save the day. Still, it was at least nice that his band’s equipment was part of the scheme that saves this undeserving family in the end. Likewise, Wendy does not receive enough credit as the hero of the story: digging through the trash, sticking by the kid even after his creepy photos, and giving said creepy kid rides all over town.
Even with the creepy main character and his bizarrely messed up family that only consists of his dad, his dad’s in-laws, and a monster, I thought this movie was a lot of fun. Like Boomer said, there are images that are going to stick with me for a long time, especially the tropokin in the wedding dress (so great) and the kid standing on top of a Marshall stack swinging a baseball bat at a bat monster. I was definitely on its sense of humor’s wavelength. I’m so glad Boomer found this rare media and could share it with us.
Britnee: When we make our Movie of the Month selections, Brandon is very diligent with ensuring that no one (other than the Swampie presenting) has watched the selected film. When asked if I ever watched Stepmonster, I was 110% sure I hadn’t. However, once Alan Thicke hit the screen, 15 years of suppressed memories were unleashed. I was immediately reminded of a goldfish skeleton being spit out of a box . . . I had seen this movie before! But I honestly remembered only fragmented images without being able to identify any sort of plot or characters, so it’s like I watched it for the first time. The Movie of the Month tradition is still going strong!
Funky children’s films from the late 80s/early 90s are sort of my jam. The crappy effects, nonsensical plots, and adult themed humor is a perfect combination. Trash for kids! I love how there’s been mention of Prehysteria and Magic in the Mirror in the conversation because those are absolutely fantastic films that are in the same realm as Stepmonster (the ultimate Band, Nicolaou, Corman trio). Needless to say, I thought this movie was a blast! Dad and Grandpa were such strange goobers who I found to be hilarious. They’re sort of these stereotypical “all-American” characters that say and do weird things that caught me off guard (like the aforementioned “We all get horny, Georgey Boy.”). However, the true star of this show was Denise. She’s the closest to a human version of Greta the Gremlin that we will ever get and great at being the perfect evil stepmother/tropopkin. All of those witty remarks and monster transitions are so good. My favorite scene is when Denise transitions into her true tropopkin form while chatting with the psychiatrist (Edie McClurg!).
Lagniappe
Britnee: The tropopkin makeup effects are incredible. Makeup effects artist, Gabe Bartalos, has made his mark on many classics, such as Frankenhooker, Leprechaun, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, and you guessed it, Gremlins 2: The New Batch. He’s definitely up there with Swampflix’s favorite special effects master, Screaming Mad George.
Alli: The grandpa is such a weird person. He dislikes so many decisions his son-in-law makes but backs them anyway. He tells his grandson about tropopkins but doesn’t seem to be the source of the kid’s love for comics, since he’s never taken him to the comic book store before. Also, he played major league baseball? I don’t normally like to nitpick or search for plot holes, but he really is a true enigma.
Brandon: I really liked the choice of presenting the tropopkins as “real life” creatures from the pages of Todd’s EC horror comics. Corman & company obviously routed most of the budget to Denise’s creature design, so it was smart to borrow some on-the-cheap visual style from classic horror comics to give the movie some life between her effects shots. Besides, it reminded me a lot of the EC horror stylings of Tales from the Crypt & Creepshow, which were the exact kind of age-inappropriate media I was sneaking past my parents’ censorship as a kid.
For anyone who’s desperate to watch Stepmonster but isn’t close enough friends with Boomer to borrow his personal VHS copy, there’s currently a low-quality scan of the film uploaded to YouTube in glorious 480p (courtesy of user myx360games, a true champion of cinema).
Boomer: I spent a truly inordinate amount of time trying to figure out exactly when Stepmonster would have aired on Disney Channel. One would think that old TV listings would be the easiest thing in the world to find, but as it turns out, not so much (unless you’re going to go down to the library and dig through microfiche). I couldn’t find any dates or any Disney Channel schedules from the likely years at all. However, while we’re here, I wanted to go ahead and speak out in favor of this great video from YouTube channel Yesterworld, which provides a pretty good rundown on the history of the channel, including some great historiography of the “free preview” years. YouTube channel Pop Arena, as part of their ongoing project to chart the show-by-show history of Nickelodeon (after five years, they’re up to 1990), did a great video about Nickelodeon precursor Qube that happens to function as a great delineation about the creation of cable television as well; it can be found here and is a great companion piece to the video above.
Swampflix 