Do Revenge (2022)

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It probably comes as no surprise that I am a man whose limited social media use includes following the Twitter accounts of several Buffy-related content producers. I used to follow the one and only Mrs. Sarah Michelle Gellar on Instagram until I got sad that her manager was making her do the same branded social media content that fame bottom feeders like Patreon-less YouTubers and people who make cakes that are 80% fondant are doing; I felt like Sideshow Bob shivering upon learning that “TV’s bottomless chum bucket [had] claimed Vanessa Redgrave.” No judgment on our adulated SMG, of course; I love her like Broadway queens love Patti LuPone. I’m just saying everybody needs to go stream BTVS on Hulu like, right now, so that she never has to do another one of those unless she actually wants to. So, of course when I heard that Her Excellency was going to be in a new movie that was being billed as the high school version of Strangers on a Train, and that I didn’t even have to leave the house to see it, well, of course I was going to. 

At 28 minutes into Do Revenge, the traditionally attractive Drea (Camila Mendes, of Riverdale), having convinced gawkishly gorgeous Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to do revenge with her, gets excited: 

Drea: First we have to fix (pulls Eleanor in front of a mirror) … this. We have to do—

Eleanor: Please don’t say “makeover.” 

Drea: —a makeover! Yay! (jumps up and down)

Eleanor: (with vocal fry) Feels problematic.

Drea: It is, but it’s fun!

Do Revenge presents itself as a pretty conventional movie, and in many ways it is, despite its winking self-awareness that it’s trafficking in cliches. Prior to this scene, when Eleanor is offered a tour of her new high school, she responds “I mean, as a disciple of the ’90s teen movie, I would be offended if I didn’t get one.” It’s borrowing from a deep, deep well: high school-set literature adaptations, the sharp wit and ear for dialogue that permeates the mean girl movie canon, and revenge thrillers. The film opens with narration from Drea, who fills us in on how, from humble beginnings, she has clawed her way to the top of the social hierarchy at Rosewood Country Day, an elite private high school in the Miami area. “They all want me as a friend or a fuck,” she says. “I’m worshipped at Westerburg and I’m only a Junior.” Wait, no, shit, that’s Heather Chandler. The words are different, but the speech is the same: it’s the end of her junior year, and she’s done something or other with Teen Vogue. Her friends are mostly vapid hangers-on, and although she thinks of herself as a scrappy underdog, she’s just an Alpha Heather with good publicity. She’s also dating star student Max (Austin Abrams), a weaselly little rich boy who happens to be class president. Since they won’t be seeing each other, he asks her to send him a sexy video, which is then leaked to the whole school. She ends up painted as the aggressor when she punches Max in the quad, and it nearly costs her the scholarship she depends on. 

Humiliated, Drea spends the summer friendless, working at a tennis camp for rich girls, a group that includes Eleanor. When the girls there also get  their hands on the “leaked” video, Eleanor names Erica (Sophie Turner) as the distributor, and is impressed with how swiftly Drea ruins Erica’s life, planting cocaine on her and remaining calm in the face of Erica’s furious accusations. When Drea has car trouble at the end of the summer, Eleanor drives her back, and they bond, with Eleanor relating a particularly traumatizing story about being outed as queer by a girl she had a crush on, who also told gossipy lies about Eleanor being a predator. Eleanor also happens to be transferring to the same school as the girl who bullied her, which is also Rosewood Country Day. On the first day, Max gives a speech which appropriates the language of resistance in order to distance himself from accusations that he was the one who leaked Drea’s video, shames the people who shared and viewed the video, and humiliates Drea by making her stand up in the assembly. He also announces the formation of the new school club “The Cis Hetero Men Championing Female-Identifying Students League,” which is to be exclusively male and straight, for men to become better allies (I fear I’m underselling the intentional tastelessness and invoked odiousness here, but he’s just awful). Eleanor and Drea run into each other again in the bathroom, and agree to each do the other’s revenge: Drea will get close to and socially destroy Carissa (Ava Capri), the girl who outed and started rumors about Eleanor, and Eleanor will get close to Max and help Drea get her own vengeance, and then they act out the scene transcribed above.

You might be asking yourself where Sarah Michelle Gellar is in all of this; she’s the headmistress of the school who’s heavily invested in Drea’s academic success. Although her scenes are too few, too brief, and too infrequent (although every single entrance made me gasp and say “She looks amazing“), her presence is felt throughout the narrative, and that’s not just me singing her praises. All our favorites are here, blended into a pastel smoothie: one part Mean Girls if Janis Ian used to be Regina George; one part Jawbreaker if Vylette’s makeover was arranged by Julie in order to get back at Courtney; two parts Heathers if Veronica allied herself with Betty Finn instead of Jason Dean; there’s even a little zest of that scene in Cruel Intentions where Reese Witherspoon distributes copies of Ryan Phillipe’s catty little journal to the whole school, except this time it’s copies of Max’s data that proves he’s faking his apparent progressivism, from the top of his stupid earrings to the tips of his “masculinity reimagined” painted nails. And I’m not just projecting that; both movies use Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” for goodness’s sake. And that’s not even getting into the (frankly inspired) choice to have the school uniforms uniformly look like Cher Horowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard Easter attire (which gives the whole thing a D.E.B.S. flair). It’s like a greatest hits album, right up until the moment that it suddenly isn’t anymore: well-worn and funny until everything gets turned on its head. I won’t spoil the very Patricia Highsmith twist here, but it disrupts the complacency with the familiar into which the audience has been lulled in a clever way. You thought that just because there was a scene in this movie where someone gets a tour of all the school’s cliques like in She’s All That and Ten Things I Hate About You that it meant you were going to ride the whole thing out in your comfort zone, but there’s something fresh and new here, too. 

I’m not really sure what demographic this movie is aiming for, but I’m in it. A few years back, I asked about the decade’s successor to the legacy of the Heathers -> Jawbreaker -> Mean Girls pipeline and nominated New Year, New You as the heir apparent, but there’s something new and fun here. This one is also theoretically aimed at the contemporary teen market, what with the inclusion of Riverdale‘s own Betty with Cabelo, Outer Banks hunk Jonathan Daviss, Alisha Boe from Thirteen Reasons Why, and Stranger Things actresses Hawke and Francesca Reale. (After the recent and dreadful He’s All That, I can only presume that the rest of the cast is filled with TikTokers and former Disney sitcom children.) At the same time, the soundtrack, like the films from which the narrative cribs, is very 90s focused. Aside from the aforementioned Fatboy Slim, the soundtrack also features tracks from The Cranberries, Meredith Brooks, Harvey Danger, the Symphonic Pops, and even The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, if you can believe it. Drea and Eleanor first bond while the dulcet tones of Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going To Be?”, and, because someone wanted to make me happy specifically, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.”  And yet there’s also more contemporary music like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish (although the simple fact that I, a man in my thirties, knows them could mean that they are no longer cool).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Beyond (1981)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Lucio Fulci’s surrealist horror whatsit The Beyond (1981), set at the gates of Hell just outside New Orleans.

0:00 Welcome

02:22 Halloween Ends (2022)
09:14 Halloween II (1981)
14:10 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
16:22 Hellraiser (2022)
19:10 Bride of the Re-Animator (1989)
24:38 Smile (2022)
29:09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
33:20 Dark Glasses (2022)

46:09 The Beyond (1981)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lux Æterna (2022)

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Something finally clicked in my brain during the opening 20 minutes of Climax where I’m now on-board with everything Gaspar Noé is putting out.  It’s not the most dignified position to be in, I know, but I like to think it’s because Noé is hitting a new visual & emotional maturity in his recent work – not that I’m backsliding into a juvenile edgelordism that would make his usually flashy, trashy ways appealing. This year, Noé has released a pair of cursed sister films that stretch out De Palma’s signature split-screen sequences into feature length.  In Vortex, that side-by-side framing is used as a somber visual metaphor for the ways an aging couple can live separate, isolated lives in a shared, intimate space.  In Lux Æterna, Noé drops the thematic pretense and instead simply deploys the split-screen format to actively attempt to melt the audience’s minds.  It’s the most authentically “psychotronic” movie I’ve experienced in a while, a signal that Noé still has a little Enter the Void pranksterism left in his bones even if time has softened his sharpest edges.

Lux Æterna opens with arthouse actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beatrice Dalle casually chatting about the cultural misogyny that overlaps between the modern film industry & Old World witch trials.  We then see that misogyny in action. Dalle struggles to exert directorial control over a chaotic film shoot of a ritualistic witch burning – featuring other film fest regulars Abby Lee, Karl Glusman, and Félix Maritaud as self-parodic caricatures.  As Dalle’s authority is constantly undermined by her cast & crew, all semblance of a functional workplace falls apart horrifically and spectacularly, recalling other recent feature-length stress-outs like Black Bear, Birdman, and Her Smell. Only, Noé uses that familiar set-up to conjure a vivid vision of Hell, likening the scenario to Häxan more than to other behind-the-scenes film set dramas.  This culminates in a stunning technical breakdown of the set’s LED screen backdrop, which flashes alternating strobes of red, green, and blue in a blinding finale designed to be suffered more than enjoyed.  In Lux Æterna, filmmaking is witchcraft, in that pure-evil supernatural forces can be summoned from the most mundane rituals, and women are always the ones who are burned.

In Vortex, Noé reckons with the pains & limitations of his body, particularly the ways his heart & brain will inevitably fail him after years of hedonistic drug abuse.  Here, he reckons with the pains & limitations of his profession. Lux Æterna is a horror film about the stress of behind-the-scenes film set squabbling, a nightmare about a bad shift on the clock.  Since it was sponsored by the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, though, it still has to make those shifts from Hell seem cool, and it ends up being just as much an aesthetic celebration of strobe lights, leather jackets, and sunglasses worn indoors as it is a workplace nightmare.  It never returns to the laidback mood of its opening, where two badass women chat about movies & witchcraft, but even its eye-scorching conclusion is beautiful & hip in its own vicious way.  It’s an all-around stunning experience, one that mercifully lasts less than an hour to spare the audience unneeded suffering.  It also helpfully opens with a warning for anyone vulnerable to epileptic fits, so make sure to consult your doctor before subjecting your brain.

-Brandon Ledet

She Will (2022)

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2022 has gradually shaped into Dario Argento’s comeback year, something I never dared to expect from the 82-year-old Italo horror legend.  The low-key giallo revival Dark Glasses is Argento’s first directorial credit in a decade and easily his best in twice as long.  He was also shockingly great as the lead performer in Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, his first acting credit outside cameo roles & narration tracks.  Of all the various ways Argento’s comeback year has taken shape, though, the least surprising has got to be his in-name-only producer credit on She Will, cosigning a younger artist’s work.  Not only is Argento making movies again; apparently, he’s also entering his “Wes Craven Presents” era.

That stamp of approval goes a long way in Charlotte Colbert’s debut feature, especially since it’s an indictment of the macho, abusive brutes who occupied every director’s seat when Argento first started making artsy horror pictures in the 1970s.  Is Malcolm McDowell’s pretentious, villainous abuser-auteur supposed to be a stand-in for Jodorowsky, for Polanski, for one of Dario’s fellow giallo greats?  It doesn’t matter much, since the film is less about his behind-the-scenes crimes than it is about his victim’s delayed revenge.  Alice Krige headlines as an ice-queen film actress whose star has faded; she channels her lingering resentments from that child-actor abuse on McDowell’s sets into a witchy, supernatural revenge.  The mechanism of public #MeToo callouts simply isn’t enough; only black magic evisceration will do.

I very much vibe with She Will‘s burn-it-all-down political anger, so it’s a shame I couldn’t also vibe with its filmmaking aesthetics.  Between its ominous shots of the woods and Krige’s mutually destructive relationship with her young nurse (helping her recover from a double mastectomy), it just ends up playing like a watered-down, VVitch-ed up version of Saint Maud.  It’s well considered thematically, like in how the soil at Krige’s Scottish health retreat is enriched by the ashes of locally burned witches, strengthening both her skin and her witchy powers.  Its most exciting ideas are just presented in the limpest nightmare-sequences around, with time-elapse nature footage edited together in the Elevated Horror equivalent of an Ed Wood montage.  I almost want to say the film is worth it for Krige’s performance as the icy lead, but truth is she had a lot more to do in this same register as the mentorial witch in Gretel & Hansel.  There just isn’t much to see here that hasn’t been covered by its sharper, more vivid contemporaries.

Regardless, I still think a “Dario Argento Presents” project is, by default, a more exciting turn for the actor-director-producer’s late career phase than an actual Dario Argento film.  Dark Glasses is only interesting within the context of his larger catalog and can only feel like a faint echo of former glories.  By contrast, throwing his name by newcomers like Colbert helps them get platformed at film festivals like Overlook and streaming services like Shudder, where She Will has earned a lot more sincere praise than I’m giving it here.  It’s an investment in the future of horror filmmaking instead of a victory lap for its faded past, which according to this film was a lot more spiritually & morally bankrupt than we’ve ever fully reckoned with.

-Brandon Ledet

Occhiali neri (Dark Glasses, 2022)

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You knew that this was coming, reader. You knew it in your bones. I knew it in my bones, too. It’s been ten years since the release of Dracula 3D, and I think it’s safe to say we all assumed that this was a retirement, despite the sporadic vehement statements/threats that Sandman (not that one) really was going to come out some day, just you wait and see. It’s also been nearly seven years since I completed my review of the (at the time) entire Dario Argento canon. Now, in the year 2022 C.E., the master has returned, as he’s brought his daughter with him!

And he’s still up to his old tricks, as his latest film Occhiali neri (Dark Glasses) starts with—you guessed it—the murder of a sex worker! Some time later, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), a different young call girl, is attacked by the same serial killer one night after leaving a client’s home. She manages to get into her car and escape, but he pursues her, ultimately forcing Diana into a tragic collision with another vehicle. Diana is rendered blind while the driver of the other vehicle dies instantly and the other adult passenger, the driver’s wife, is rendered comatose. Only their elementary aged son Chin (Andrea Zhang) walks away without injury, and is placed into a Catholic orphanage for the time being, although he slips away and finds his way to Diana, who takes him in. As Diana slowly adjusts to her new life with the help of Rita (Asia Argento), a teacher who specializes in training the recently blinded to adapt to their new situation, as well as her faithful seeing eye dog Nerea, she gets the feeling that the man who forced her off the road and took her sight is still stalking her. And she’s right! 

Dark Glasses is fine. It’s certainly not the exciting return to form that one would expect when they hear that Argento is back, although that also doesn’t mean that it’s lacking in all the Argentoisms you’ve come to know and perhaps even to love. You’ve got your decapitations just like in Profondo rosso and over half a dozen others, you’ve got your totemic animals just like in Phenomena and Pelts, and you’ve even got my personal favorite, the intergenerational investigative duo, as in the aforementioned Phenomena as well as Non ho sonno, and this one even returns to the “child helps a blind person investigate” set-up from all the way back in l gatto a nove code. Were you wondering if there would be a plot cul-de-sac? Not to worry, there is, and it involves snakes nesting in a river! Ironically, one of the Argento conceits it doesn’t have is eye trauma; we are told explicitly that Diana’s blindness is caused by swelling in her brain from the accident, not any physical damage to her actual eyes. This movie even synthesizes the dog attack from Suspiria with the end-of-movie saved-by-a-service-animal twist of Phenomena into something fun and gruesome, even if it fails to be exciting and memorable. That having been said, it takes more than just a remix/medley of those old ideas to make a great movie, and this movie isn’t “great.” But then again, if you’re a real Argento fan, you know that this is true for his entire body of work, especially since 2001 (and that’s being charitable mostly because I rank Non ho sonno higher than most); for every Suspiria, Tenebrae, and L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, there’s a Do You Like Hitchcock?, a Giallo, and an Il cartaio. I’m not trying to be a grumpy goose here, but when I read this vitriolic reviews for a movie that’s a perfectly fine little slasher that wouldn’t be out of place among the director’s nineties output (and would have been the best of them in that era), it’s like, don’t come crying to me unless you’ve actually managed to make it all the way through Le cinque giornate, ok? 

The strangest thing that’s happening here is that there’s a real cognitive dissonance to watching an Argento movie in which everyone has smartphones. I remarked on the podcast recently about how the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading is very much an unintentional period piece, with the way that it treats online dating, obsessive Blackberry use, and the Russian threat, and how strange it is to see media made during the era in which the arbiters of narrative were still trying to grapple with omnipresent mobile device usage (think Elaine on Seinfeld—rightfully, in my opinion—explaining that it’s rude to engage in a long phone call while on public transportation). Argento’s body of work skips all of that pretty much completely, since Il cartaio is the last film of his to engage with technology in a meaningful way, coming from the era of horror movies with the plot element of “live broadcast of murders” that was so prevalent in the mid-aughts, and then his next films either ignored technology or Victorian period pieces. Here, suddenly, mobile devices are omnipresent, but they do very little to change the narrative. Likewise, Diana at one point purchases Chin a (device which is similar to but legally distinct from a) Nintendo Switch, which is relevant to that scene and that scene alone, before it is never mentioned in the narrative again. 

I’ve been watching a lot of Murder, She Wrote this year (R.I.P. Angela and Ron) and it’s fun to watch as the series progresses how the writers on that program used the rapidly changing technology of the era in their mysteries, as Jessica Fletcher starts out with a typewriter before getting a word processor and finally a desktop computer to do her writing on, despite pushing back against the march of tech progress every step of the way. Sometimes the usage of the technology of the week is accurate, sometimes it’s inaccurate in a way that makes it clear the writer felt that using new tech gave them carte blanche to make the machinery do whatever the narrative called for, and sometimes I have no idea if what they’re saying modems and Telexes are capable of was accurate at the time or not. It encapsulates the three ways that an aging creative demographic can incorporate and understand (or misunderstand) how technology works and what it can contribute to this story. Here, we get a scene in which Rita teaches Diana how to use her new smart phone, which is programmed with specific accessibility features that are meant to accomodate people without sight. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a PSA in the middle of your movie about that sort of thing, but when we’re talking about a mystery thriller, the audience is primed to expect that this will come back into the narrative at some point, but it never does. Things that are foreshadowed are elements that could be in a film set any time in the past fifty years or more: Diana’s seeing eye dog being trained to defend her, or her joking to Chin that there’s no point in having a gun to protect her since she can’t aim it only for her to end up having to use one later. 

I guess that what I’m saying is that this film didn’t need to be set in the present. There’s not really anything in it that pegs it to 2022; even the CCTV footage that the police watch after one of the other murders doesn’t reveal anything more than you might see when people review security tapes on Diagnosis Murder or even some episodes of Columbo. This is meant as a term of awe and not mockery: Dario Argento is an old man. Yes, Clint Eastwood just directed Cry Macho last year at 91 and yes, Manoel de Oliveira was 104 when he directed O Gebo e a Sombra, but we can’t expect the Italian Maestro to start putting out a movie every 28 months like he did when he was a young man. If he’s only got a few films , or even one film, left in him then I would honestly much rather see him do some more period pieces, but this time, set them during the era in which he was most active as a director. If Dark Glasses had been set in 1978 of 1983 instead of 2022, it would automatically be much more interesting, and would have an unmistakable feeling of invoking the creator in his prime, not just in the audience but perhaps in the man himself. It’s not too late. 

All of that aside, Dark Glasses is as unpretentious as it is unremarkable, which means that like most movies which fail to either be massive Marvel moneymakers or Cats-level career crashes, will fall through the cracks, despite being a long-awaited return from an undisputed master of the genre. If you’re not in a film-loving market like I am in Austin, it probably never even screened near you and went straight to Shudder, where the user comments and ratings trend negative and a little redpill-y. But if you, like a lot of horror fans, love a tight 75-90 minute slasher flick, then Dark Glasses has your Friday evening covered. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #171: Fight for Your Life (1977) & Video Nasties

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Welcome to Episode #171 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror films banned by British censors on the infamous “Video Nasties” list, starting with the racial-tensions home invasion thriller Fight for Your Life (1977)

00:00 Welcome

01:15 Twister (1996)
07:15 The Other Side of the Underneath (1972)
12:45 Sissy (2022)
14:45 Deadstream (2022)
17:00 Medusa (2022)
19:40 Evilspeak (1981)

23:21 Video nasties
34:45 Fight for Your Life (1977)
49:45 Don’t Look in the Basement (1973)
1:15:20 Flesh for Frankenstein (1974)
1:28:50 The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Hellraiser (2022)

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It used to be that Hellraiser movies went straight to VHS.  Now they go straight to Hulu.  Most entries in the decades-running cosmic horror franchise are remembered as late-night, ill-advised video store rentals, the kinds of disposable novelty horrors you’d squeeze in between viewings of titles like Ice Cream Man & Dr Giggles.  In 2022, the series has been upgraded to prestige television instead, with David Bruckner’s Hellraiser playing like the HBO series version of Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart.  The new Hellraiser is unrushed, low-lit, and plotty.  It’s shot in the same bespoke-leather browns as Nü Gössïp Gïrl, offering the same post-CW melodrama as this year’s The Batman.  It might be television, but it’s at least high-quality television, which means it eventually reaches some euphoric highs once it’s done wrapping up an overlong prologue – like that new show your coworker insists gets great three seasons in if you just stick with it.

Hellraiser achieves a gruesome delirium once it fully lets loose, so it’s a shame all the elaborately gnarly images from its final half hour are in service of such an overall restrained, somber drama.  It could have been a real stunner if it just lightened up a bit, both literally & figuratively. Considering that Bruckner’s previous films The Ritual & The Night House weren’t exactly lighthearted romps either, it’s clear he delivered exactly what he was hired to here, so it might just be an awkward pairing of auteur & source material.  Bruckner continues his participation in the modern Metaphor Horror trend with a story of a recovering drug addict whose illness drags her friends & family into a symbolic hellworld.  Instead of being drawn to the Hell Priest’s puzzle box as a painful gateway to horny transcendence, she sees it as an easy score to pawn off for drug money and, later, as a weapon to be wielded against the fake friends & BDSM demons it unleashes.  I’m not sure what the point of making a Hellraiser film is if you’re not interested in the ways prurient desire and the overlap of pain & sexual pleasure can lead to personal destruction, but I guess Bruckner fills the time well enough with his own preoccupations with Trauma Metaphors and expansion of the puzzle box’s “Lament Configurations” lore.

After a full hour of place-setting & narrative justification, the new Hellraiser finally reconfigures into its best self: a haunted house free-for-all.  While the original 1987 picture is a domestic melodrama that mostly plays out in a cramped attic, Bruckner sets his cenobites loose in a gigantic Eyes Wide Shut mansion, with plenty of darkened corners for the freaky little fuckers to hide behind.  All of the new cenobites are exquisitely designed; Jamie Clayton is a stunning presence as Nü Pïnhead; and there are enough “degloving events” to gross out even the most jaded gore hounds.  You just have to push past a lot of modern muck to get there, from the sexless, humorless addiction metaphor at its core to the eye-scorchingly bright ad breaks that violently disrupt its murky prologue.  This might be the best Hellraiser movie in decades, but it’s just as indicative of the worst horror trends of its time as the direct-to-video sequels that feature cenobites growing camcorders & CD players on their heads.  The industry just happens to be in a good enough place right now that television-level mediocrity is still relatively top-notch.

-Brandon Ledet

Medusa (2022)

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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’s Knives & Skin than 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.

-Brandon Ledet

Monkeybone (2001)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Stepmonster (1993)

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Our current Movie of the Month, the 1993 creature feature Stepmonster, is psychosexual-id horror for kids, very much of the Troll 2 & The Pit variety – 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 (Ghoulies in 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.

-Brandon Ledet