Candyman (2021)

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Now that the Delta Surge is receding and local vaccination numbers are looking robust, I’m personally getting comfortable with returning to movie theaters.  Anecdotally, I’m also seeing larger crowds testing those same waters than I did this summer when I briefly showed up masked & vaccinated at the local multiplex just before Delta sent me right back into my turtle shell.  Luckily for me (and unluckily for movie theaters), the film distribution pipeline hasn’t yet caught up with that return of consumer confidence, which means there hasn’t been a flood of major new releases to wash out the big-ticket movies I missed in the past few months of extended seclusion.  So that’s how I got to see Nia DaCosta’s Candyman reboot on the big screen in the weeks leading up to Halloween, even though it was initially released in the summer.  By now, professional critics and terminally online horror nerds have already talked the merits & faults of Candyman ’21 to death (and the bee-swarmed mirror realm beyond it), so I expected there was no room left for discovery or interpretation in my late-to-the-game viewing of the film.  And yet, I was pleasantly surprised by the new Candyman despite my tardiness – both in how much I enjoyed it and in how well it works as a direct, meaningful sequel to the Bernard Rose original.

I remember hearing a lot of chatter about how the new Candyman is blatant in its political discussions of the continued gentrification of Chicago, but I somehow missed that those discussions are linked to an ongoing, generational trauma echoed from events of the original film.  This latest update could have been justifiably titled Candyman 4: Candyman, since it directly recounts and expands the lore of the original film through audio recordings & shadow puppetry.  By the end, we’ve seen & heard several characters from the original cast dredging up the most painful details of that shared past, landing DaCosta’s film more as a “reboot” than as a “remake” despite the expectations set by its title.  However, rather than developing Candyman lore by transferring the Candyman character to exotic cultural locales (New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebrations in Candyman 2 and Los Angeles’s Day of the Dead celebrations in Candyman 3), DaCosta instead expands the boundaries & definition of Candyman himself.  Building off his body’s occasional form as a gestalt of bees, Candyman is explained to be a buzzing hive of various tormented Black men throughout American history instead of just a single murderous ghost with a hook for a hand.  He’s a symbol for Black pain fighting its way from under the boot of this country’s long history of racist violence, and the terror in this particular chapter is in watching our troubled-artist protagonist get absorbed into that history despite his mostly charmed life.

Personally, I don’t mind that the new Candyman is transparent in its political messaging & metaphor.  It’s at least conceptually sturdy in how it chooses to examine the generational & cultural echoes of trauma, which is a much more rewarding mode of “haunting” for this particular horror icon than it would’ve been if he latched onto another lone victim like Helen Lyle.  Its art gallery setting is a brilliant choice in that paradigm, as it both functions as a physical symbol of gentrification and as an open forum where heady ideas about art & symbolism are totally justified.  Candyman is first summoned by white art snobs in a gallery showing of political Black art that they do not take seriously (beyond its economic value), presenting him as a significant yet volatile form of Black representation in popular media.  If there’s any lesson taught in his re-emergence and his eventual absorption of the painter who gives him new life on canvas, it’s that the pained, racist history that he represents should not be evoked lightly.  DaCosta seems careful not to revive Candyman for a cheap-thrills supernatural slasher; she wants to genuinely, directly contend with what place he holds in the larger pop culture zeitgeist.  I believe she finds plenty of worthwhile political substance to contend with there, so I don’t understand the supposed virtue of being subtle about it.

My only sticking point with the new Candyman, really, is how often it shies away from depicting onscreen violence.  The greater cultural & political violence that Candyman represents is sharply felt when the film is viewed as a whole, but individual kills are often obscured through mirrors, wide-shots, and physical barriers in a way that often undercuts their in-the-moment effect.  It plays like a PG-13 television broadcast of an R-rated film, except in this case the network forgot to bleep the cusses.  DaCosta is way more concerned with the meaning behind Candyman than she is in the physical consequences of his presence, which makes the film feel like it was intended for an audience who appreciates the social commentary aspect of horror without all that icky horror getting in the way.  She totally nails the eeriness & tension that a good horror scare can build, especially in her expansion of the buzzing bee & mirror realm imagery that made Candyman iconic to begin with.  She just also seems disinterested in (or maybe even politically opposed to) the cathartic release of an onscreen kill shattering that tension to shards.  At its most visually upsetting, Candyman makes room for the slowly-building body horror of a bee sting that festers beyond control.  Mostly, it’s upsetting in its concepts & politics, which isn’t going to satisfy most audiences looking for the latest, most exciting big-screen scares.  I’m honestly surprised I was satisfied with it myself, violent catharsis notwithstanding.

-Brandon Ledet

Lamb (2021)

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It’s difficult to define what qualifies something as Movie Magic, but the dark fantasy film Lamb is electric with it . . . for its opening half-hour.  The first of the film’s three “chapters” builds all its magical-realist tension on our curiosity over what, exactly, is going on with its titular child-creature and the lonely farmer couple who raise it as their own.  Isolated on an Icelandic farm with only sheep to break up the monotony of their quiet, daily chores, a married couple adopt a newborn lamb and swaddle it as if it were a human baby.  We peer into the lamb’s crib wondering what’s going on under those tightly wrapped blankets, what makes it any different from the other lambs who’re routinely born in the barn. We’re invited to look into the eyes of the older sheep on the farm, anthropomorphizing their intellectual & emotional responses to the humans who feed & shepherd them.  The longer we stare, the more they begin to look like expressive, reactive puppets instead of natural creatures, blurring the line between documentary footage and Movie Magic.  The loss of that boundary sets up an endless realm of possibility in what’s going on with the one lamb the couple has decided to raise inside their home, the one that the camera obscures so that our own imagination can fill in the details.  Then, when the baby lamb is shown in full, the magic vaporizes.

My heart sank in Lamb‘s second chapter when it had to stop obscuring its centerpiece creature.  Conceptually, I am onboard with this low-key fairy tale about an isolated couple’s desperation to be parents despite the lingering pain of past attempts, but the practicality of visualizing the human-lamb hybrid they adopt onscreen is a mood-killer.  Specifically, it’s the choice/necessity to supplement its practical effects with CGI that really zaps the Movie Magic out of the picture.  This is the kind of film that really needs the tactility of the Babe animatronics or even the surreal stop-motion of Little Otik to work. Instead, we see a tactile human body toddle across the screen with a cheaply animated CG head superimposed on top of it, never convincingly integrating with the physical world it supposedly occupies.  In close-up, when the lamb-child is napping or quietly observing her adoptive parents, she’s perfectly believable as a real, tangible creature that has magically appeared in the couple’s lives – which is why her more obscured presence in the first chapter works so well.  It’s when the camera pulls back to show her hybrid body structure in full that the spell is instantly broken, leaving Lamb with all the Movie Magic of a Geico commercial.  And since this film isn’t working with a Babe-level Hollywood budget, I’m convinced that the only way to fix it would have been to crudely superimpose her parents’ heads onto different actor’s bodies to level the uncanny playing field.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to Lamb besides the magic of its titular creature-child.  It’s a quiet, unrushed film with very little plot or dialogue.  If you can’t gaze in wonder at the little lamb baby for all three chapters, there isn’t much else to do except wait for the credits (or hope for a scene where the lamb’s “mother” timidly asks her husband “Did . . . did you have sex with our sheep?”).  For a more truly magical narrative about an isolated, troubled Icelandic couple in which human actors dance with unconvincingly animated CG animals, I’d recommend watching Björk’s music video for “Triumph of a Heart”.  There’s way more heart, humor, chaos, and magic in those five minutes than there is in this entire two-hour snooze.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Wailing (2016)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the menacingly ambiguous Korean horror epic The Wailing (2016).

00:00 Welcome

01:20 Frenzy (1972) on the Horror VS Reality podcast
06:06 Til Death (2021)
09:55 Scare Package (2020)
19:19 Rose Plays Julie (2021)
23:15 Zola (2021)

26:26 The Wailing (2016)

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

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

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It’s impossible to distinguish which version of Ed Wood I think of as a personal hero: the alcoholic crossdresser who lived a tough life as an underappreciated outsider artist or the much sunnier, apocryphal version of him presented in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic.  Either way, Ed Wood is undeniably a great film (despite how some of its casting choices may have aged), second only to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure as Burton’s career best.  It was surely my first exposure to Wood’s art & legacy, priming me for a genuine appreciation of the kind of enthusiastic D.I.Y. filmmaking most modern audiences mock as “so bad it’s good” schlock. Before Burton’s loving, reformative biopic polished up Ed Wood’s reputation, his biggest claim to fame was being posthumously burdened with a Golden Turkey “Award” for The Worst Director of All Time in the 1980s – mainly for his career-defining opus Plan 9 from Outer Space.  Personally, I don’t believe Wood was capable of making The Worst Film of All Time.  Wherever his work may have suffered from improper funding or technical ineptitude, Wood vastly overcompensated with a chaotic, personal passion for the artform.  Despite being locked out of proper studio filmmaking channels, Wood’s stream-of-consciousness writing style and delirious sense of self-confidence led to some of the most spectacularly bizarre self-financed genre pictures of his era.  The actual worst movies of all time are dispassionate, impersonal, unmemorable bores – movies Ed Wood was incapable of making.  Whether I only believe that because of his myth-making biopic is something I’ll never be able to fully decipher; I happened to be born late enough in the game that Burton’s hagiographic version of Wood reached me before the dweebs at The Gold Turkey Awards could poison my brain.

Plan 9 from Outer Space was never my personal favorite Ed Wood flick (that meager honorific belongs to Glen or Glenda), but it’s easy enough to understand how it became his most widely known.  If nothing else, its gleeful genre-nerd mashup of Atomic Age sci-fi tropes, celebrity vampires, graveyard-set zombie attacks, and pro wrestling monsters is enough of a pop media overload to distract from what it lacks in financing or technical skill (as if those weren’t also a highlight in their own way).  Whereas Glen or Glenda was a self-portrait of his life as a closeted crossdresser, Plan 9 is a self-portrait of his life as a genre movie fanboy.  Both films were written in a manic, straight-from-the-id haste due to their budget constrictions, exposing the bargain bin auteur’s naked psyche without petty concerns like narrative logic or good taste blocking the view.  Originally titled Graverobbers from Outer Space, the film’s basic concept of space aliens commanding an army of Earth’s undead was always going to be a mash-up of Atomic Age sci-fi & zombie movie tropes.  It’s the way Wood crammed his social circle of Hollywood “weirdies” into that basic genre mash-up that really explodes the film into post-modern delirium.  Without explanation or internal justification, this aliens-and-zombies novelty picture suddenly involves celebrity vampires Bela Lugosi & Vampira, a guest segment of the locally televised astrology program Criswell Predicts, and the gargantuan pro wrestler Tor Johnson – all essentially playing themselves with no real relation to the alien graverobber plot.  The film was pitched to independent investors as a way to cash-in on then-recent newspaper reports of UFO sightings in Hollywood.  Instead, it mutated into a collection of all the assorted pop culture ephemera that made Ed Wood fall in love with Hollywood as an aspiring, underfunded filmmaker; all that was missing was a few cowboys airlifted from a serial Western.

Besides its genre-melding collection of aliens, zombies, vampires, and pro wrestlers on a single graveyard set, I think the main reason Plan 9 is more popular than Glen or Glenda is that it moves at a slower, quieter pace.  It’s perfectly calibrated for MST3k-style live commentary in that way, making it a much likelier candidate for drunken Midnight Movie screenings and “so-bad-it’s-good” mockery.  Glen or Glenda pummels the audience with a scatterbrained editing style & an overbearing narration track that leave little room for any individual image or idea to be scrutinized before it moves on to the next.  By contrast, Plan 9 is in no rush to get anywhere, feeling more like a Halloween-themed hangout film than a proper creature feature.  There’s plenty of time for audiences to point & laugh at the visible strings that hold up its model-kit UFOs, or the cardboard cut-out gravestones that tip over whenever bumped into, or the lighting’s alternation between night-day-night settings within a single scene.  It’s the kind of “bad movie” that invites the audience to feel superior to the material at hand, which is especially attractive to teenage cynics who are first starting to get into low-budget schlock.  I’m getting to the point in my life where that above-it-all MST3k mockery no longer appeals to me.  These types of unskilled, underfunded novelty films read more to me as quirky Outsider Art than they do some kind of subprofessional embarrassment.  By that standard, Ed Wood is truly one of the greats, having made several D.I.Y. messterpieces that were personal to his interests as an artist & as a Hollywood weirdo but still endure as crowd-pleasing party films a half-century later.  The experience of watching Plan 9 from Outer Space is too fun for it to be “the worst” of anything, no matter how clumsy Wood was in his rush to get something on celluloid before his budget ran dry.

I’m grateful to the Tim Burton biopic for introducing me to Ed Wood as a filmmaker and a personality.  I’m even more grateful to Rhino’s mid-90s Deluxe Ed Wood Boxset of the films covered in the Burton version of his story, collecting Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 from Outer Space on three VHS tapes bound in a fuzzy pink angora slip case.  I lost track of my copy of that boxset years ago, as I let go of the tape-eating VCRs that were collecting dust on my TV stand.  It’s been easy enough to buy those films individually on DVD in the decades since, but they’re long overdue for the cleaned-up HD restoration treatment that so many low-budget genre films are lavished with on the niche Blu Ray market these days.  The pink angora slip case is optional, but it gets stranger every year that the unholy trinity of American schlockteurs—Wood, Wishman, and Meyer—are all missing from the vintage media restoration market.  I wonder if my genuine appreciation of Ed Wood’s art is solely a result of growing up in the exact 1990s sweet spot: after Burton rehabilitated his earlier reputation as The Worst Director of All Time and Rhino had released his Greatest Hits as an easily accessible boxset presented in an up-to-date format.  That was almost three decades ago; we’re long overdue for another Ed Wood career refresher, starting with a proper physical media release for the movie that made him infamous.

-Brandon Ledet

Delicatessen (1991)

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One of my most rewarding viewing projects for the website this year was a chronological rewatch of the Alien series.  Not only did it help justify an ancient purchase of a Blu-Ray boxset I acquired years before I even owned a Blu-Ray player, but it also helped solidify the Alien saga as one of the very best horror franchises around.  There is no such thing as a bad Alien movie.  Their 40+ years of pop-media terror has spanned from philosophical reflections on the origins of humanity to dumb-as-rocks creature feature blockbusters – each worthwhile in their own special fucked up way, if not only for boasting one of the most continually upsetting monster designs in the Classic Horror canon.  While my appreciation for the series as a whole grew tremendously during that binge, I can’t say many of the individual movies rose or fell in my personal rankings or esteem.  There were only two exceptions: the dumb-fun teen horror AvP: Requiem and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s live-action cartoon Alien: Resurrection, both of which are far more fun & imaginative than uptight horror nerds are willing to give them credit for.  I’d even place Resurrection as the second-best film of the franchise (and I did!), bested only by the subliminal nightmare fuel of Ridley Scott’s original.

The truth is I’m always a sucker for Jeunet’s grimy aesthetics & cutesy twee bullshit.  Even when he deviated into the tropes & trappings of a traditional war epic—a genre that usually bores me to sleep—with A Very Long Engagement, I still greedily ate it up with a spoon.  Obviously, though, it’s when Jeunet mucks about with horror & sci-fi genre templates that I’m especially hopeless to his sepia tone charms.  To that end, I had a lot of fun returning to his debut feature, Delicatessen, after falling back in love with Alien: Resurrection all over again.  My tastes are basic enough that the chaotic twee romcom Amélie remains my favorite Jeunet film overall, but if he only made cannibal comedies (Delicatessen), big-budget creature features (Resurrection), and dystopian steampunk sci-fi (City of Lost Children), I’d be forever chuffed.  With Delicatessen, Jeunet premiered as an already fully-formed auteur, indulging in the exact improbably whimsical romances, monochromatic fantasyscapes, and vaudevillian comedy traditions that would carry throughout his career.  He just had to squeeze them all into a guaranteed-to-be-financed genre template, the same way he later had to adapt those same quirks to the American blockbuster template in Alien: Resurrection.  It’s hilarious in both cases how little of his personality he’s willing to give up to satisfy the expectations of the genres he’s working within, making for the exact kind of high-style, self-indulgent filmmaking I always love to see in horror.

Delicatessen is a (non-musical) Sweeney Todd-style comedy about an apartment building full of starving weirdos who turn to cannibalism as a desperate response to Post-War rationing.  Jeunet’s eternal muse Dominique Pinon arrives as the building’s new super, unaware that the butcher/landlord plans to kill him to replenish the residents’ meat supply as soon as he’s done fixing up the squeaks & leaks and repainting the ceilings.  A heavy dust storm of war-ravaged buildings drapes the sky outside the apartments, so that everyone feels trapped inside, living in an exponentially quirky microcosm.  That dusty coating antiques the film’s setting with the same Universal Horror & German Expressionist throwback aesthetics you’ll see in other traditionalist weirdos’ films like David Lynch’s The Elephant Man or Guy Maddin’s everything.  For the most part, though, Jeunet is not especially interested in the terror or tension of old-school horror, just the surrealist headspace those traditions tap into.  People may be chopped up & eaten by a small-minded, isolated community of weirdos, but this is hardly The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Most of the runtime is eaten up by twee-as-fuck dalliances like Pinon’s ill-advised romance with the butcher’s daughter, or their depressed neighbor’s Rube Goldberg suicide contraptions, or the last minute heist plot meant to sneak Pinon out of the building unchewed.  It looks grim & sinister at all times, but it’s all very silly & cute.

The one stroke of pure genius in Delicatessen is Jeunet’s casting of Dominique Pinon as a former circus clown, complete with black & white television broadcasts of his act with his former partner, a chimpanzee named Mr. Livingstone.  The image of Pinon’s wonderfully bizarre face slathered in vintage clown makeup is initially terrifying, fitting firmly in the film’s old-school horror traditionalism.  At the same time, Jeunet only uses that imagery as excuse to launch into the twee whimsy that interests him as a storyteller – including romantic sequences of Pinon wooing his neighborly crush with vaudevillian clown routines, sentimental heartbreak over the loss of Mr. Livingstone, and the eerie theremin-like sounds of Pinon playing a musical saw.  I always appreciate when a horror film manages to be genuinely scary, but that’s not usually what I’m looking for in the genre.  What I most love about horror is that it’s one of the only mainstream cinematic spaces left where creators are allowed to indulge in pure personal obsession & id with no regard for sensibility or logic.  Judging by Delicatessen & Alien: Resurrection, Jeunet doesn’t seem especially interested in the psychological terror or cathartic violence of horror, but rather takes advantage of the freedom the genre’s commercial viability affords him as a total weirdo with his own pet obsessions & personal quirks audiences & financiers won’t put up with in other contexts.  I applaud him for it.

-Brandon Ledet

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

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In retrospect, I was being redundant when I described last year’s The Twentieth Century as feeling like “watching Guy Maddin direct an especially kinky Kids in the Hall sketch that stumbles out into feature length in a dreamlike stupor.”  That assessment still rings true, but I could’ve lightened my wordcount by just saying it felt like “watching a Guy Maddin movie”.  I’m used to seeing playful flashes of violence & vulgarity in Guy Maddin’s work, but something about Matthew Rankin’s kink-soaked debut doubled down on both in a way that really spoke to my juvenile sensibilities.  It turns out my oversight was in comparing The Twentieth Century to the statelier, well-respected Maddin of recent years, the one who’ll interject a Sparks music video about a man’s addiction to “derrieres” in the middle of his narratives but will stop short of fixing his camera on an ejaculating cactus for a minutes-long visual gag.  Guy Maddin was once a young button-pusher himself, though, something that should have been obvious to me even before I made the time to watch his own early-career kink comedy Cowards Bend the Knee.  It turns out I was just a few years too late in my Guy Maddin appreciation to catch him in his prime as a juvenile provocateur.

In Cowards Bend the Knee (or The Blue Hands), Guy Maddin reimagines (and improves!) the silent horror classic The Hands of Orlac as a kinky sex comedy about hairdressers, prostitution, abortion, hockey, and revenge.  Instead of a morally simplistic body horror about a concert pianist who becomes murderous when his hands are surgically replaced with a serial killer’s, Maddin abstracts his version in a Russian nesting doll story structure that’s long been familiar to his features.  We start with scientists examining a sperm specimen under a microscope, revealing in close-up that the sperm cells are hockey players competing on ice.  The star player is Guy Maddin as “Guy Maddin,” the team captain and son of the distinguished announcer who calls the games.  He’s pulled aside from his championship victory celebrations by a distraught girlfriend who’s just discovered she’s pregnant, which leads the couple to a hair salon & brothel that triples as an illegal backroom abortion clinic.  Maddin leaves his girlfriend mid-abortion for the madame’s beautiful daughter, who will not let him touch her body until her father’s death is avenged.  Her plan for retribution, of course, involves her father’s severed hands being surgically attached to her new lover’s body to guide his way.  Also, his old girlfriend is now a ghost who works at the salon.

Like all of Guy Maddin’s movies, Cowards Bend the Knee is deliberately aged & battered to look like an authentic curio from the earliest years of silent cinema.  Images often stutter & repeat in harsh jags as if the projector is struggling to feed the deteriorating film from reel to reel.  That antiqued image quality offers a great contrast to the shameless sexual fetishism of the film’s winding Greek tragedy plot.  Despite its title’s mention of legs, this is a film that’s fixated on the perversity of hands in particular.  From the more obvious kink acts like incest, fisting, and female-dominant wrestling to the unexpected eroticism of a haircut, the film presents the shape & use of hands as if they were the filthiest appendages on our bodies.  And maybe they are.  Maddin even accentuated the film’s sexual transgressions by premiering it as an art instillation where viewers watched each six-minute chapter as individual vignettes through key holes, as if peering into a bedroom (or a sex dungeon).  It’s all very silly and tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also surprisingly thoughtful & genuine in its presentation of sexual fetishism and the way its magnetic pull can lead you to making desperate, self-destructive decisions.

The Saddest Music in the World taught me that Guy Maddin is a goofball prankster despite his work’s formalist exterior.  Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary taught me that he’s a bit of a luddite with a loving eye for the tones & textures of German Expressionist horror.  The Forbidden Room taught me that he works best in short-form vignettes that pulls the audience deeper into exponentially smaller worlds.  All of those aspects of his work were already firmly set in stone as early as Cowards Bend the Knee, but that one still taught me something about him that made me fall even further in love with his art: he’s also a filthy pervert.

-Brandon Ledet

Titane (2021)

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Julia Ducournau’s coming-of-age cannibal horror, Raw, was a ferocious debut – one that was misinterpreted as a pure gross-out body horror when it’s actually something much slipperier and difficult to pin down.  Beyond all Ducournau’s obvious strengths as a visual stylist & provocateur, I really loved how resistant that film was to being saddled with a 1:1 metaphor.  In a time when so much modern horror functions as on-the-surface parables about hot topics like Trauma, Grief, and Gentrification, it’s refreshing to chow down on a movie that’s impossible to tether to a single, concise message.  Raw is clearly about some kind of youthful, sinister awakening & appetite that extends beyond the literal consumption of human flesh, but any attempt to summarize its full meaning feels reductive & inadequate.  I think that’s wonderful.  And I’m even more impressed that Ducournau doubled down on that ambiguity in her follow-up to Raw, the same way that Jordan Peele left a lot more room for interpretation & discomfort in Us than he did the tightly written metaphor machine of his own debut, Get Out.  Like Us, I suspect Titane will be more divisive than Raw precisely because it’s messier and more difficult to encapsulate in a single interpretation; also like Us, I think it’s an improvement from Ducournau’s debut for that exact reason.  All I can really articulate myself is that I loved squirming my way through this distinctly macho, thematically elusive nightmare.

Titane follows a stone-cold serial killer’s journey from despising all of humanity to learning how to love & depend on at least one other human being.  She starts off as a car-show stripper who shares more intimacy & eroticism with the machines she grinds on than with her fellow dancers or family at home.  Her favorite ways to blow off steam are to murder strangers and have sex with hotrods.  I will not recap the details of her fairy tale journey once her cover is blown and she’s left running from the law, but I will say that she does begrudgingly stumble into a genuine social connection with another emotionally steeled loner in her travels.  There’s a pithy, reductive way to discuss Titane as a movie “about” found family, but that barely scrapes the surface flesh of this prickly beast.  If there’s any thematic organization to the dark fairy tale realm Ducorneau explores here, it’s in her antiheroine’s immersion in a world of pure machismo.  Strippers, flames, fistfights, car engines, and steroid-injected muscle brutes carve out the film’s aggressively macho hellscape, while all the Cronenergian body horror that unfolds within is a hardening & a grotesque mutation of AFAB bodily functions.  As with the perpetually underseen & underappreciated The Wild Boys (the very best movie of the 2010s), Titane is a nuclear gender meltdown with no clear sense to be made in its burnt-to-the-ground wreckage.  It’s a thrilling experience in both cases, both of which find unlikely refuge in the violence of pure-masc camaraderie & social ritual.

Titane directly calls back to distinct images & motifs from Raw that reinforce Ducorneau’s voice as a fully formed, new-to-the-scene auteur: under-the-sheets writhing, silently suffering fathers, itchy skin, and even a small role for Raw‘s central anti-heroine, Garance Marillier as Justine.  It’s her films’ discomforting ambiguity that really excites me about what’s she’s capable of, though.  When she wants to convey the excruciating experience of relating to a fellow human being, she doesn’t externalize that social dysfunction as a metaphorical monster; she instead contrasts how disgusting & pathetic our bodies are against the slick efficiency of shiny chrome car parts – framing the machines with a fetishistic beauty rarely seen outside of a Russ Meyer or Kenneth Anger film.  So, what does it mean within that thematic paradigm when the human body starts gushing motor oil?  Your guess is as good as anyone’s, which is exactly why this is great cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #144 of The Swampflix Podcast: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark

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Welcome to Episode #144 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss the heyday, return, and possible retirement of TV’s all-time greatest horror host: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

00:00 Welcome

02:00 Malignant (2021)
09:55 White of the Eye (1987)
13:45 Titane (2021)
18:15 Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

22:33 Elvira’s 40th Anniversary, Very Scary, Very Special Special, Especially for You (2021)

48:58 Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988)
1:00:18 Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Untitled Horror Movie (2021)

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It makes sense that the next evolution in Scary Movie horror parodies would take aim at the “screenlife” genre.  The only other major developments in the past couple decades of horror filmmaking are much more difficult to mock in a joke-a-minute comedy:  the slow-moving dread of elevated “A24 Horror”, the politically conscious “social thrillers” that have followed in the wake of Get Out, the big-budget reboots of iconic horrors from foreign markets or the distant past, etc.  It’s not that our recent horror trends are unimpeachable; they’re just tricky to parody in any succinct, recognizable way.  Meanwhile, screenlife movies (found footage thrillers framed through the POV of a laptop screen) like Unfriended, Sickhouse, Spree, and Searching have very clearly defined aesthetics & tropes that can easily be mocked for cheap-shot humor.  As a huge fan of screenlife filmmaking as a distinctly modern aesthetic, I was stoked to see someone take aim at such an obvious parodic target.  That’s why it’s such a shame this early attempt at a screenlife parody is an unfunny dud.

Untitled Horror Movie is a COVID-era production in which five L.A. actors (all playing parodies of L.A. actors) separately filmed their contributions to a central script.  Those exact production conditions led to last year’s excellent British indie horror Host, which is clearly one of the very best films produced in the screenlife genre to date.  Meanwhile, Untitled Horror Movie does absolutely nothing interesting with the limitations of its production except to constantly point them out to the audience by casting actors as actors.  Instead of coordinating a clear, linear script between each contributor, the-film-within-the-film asks each actor to read the exact same lines as each other in overlapping edits that make no sense in tandem.  They’re supposedly collaborating on making a screenlife horror film together in their downtime between filming seasons of the fictional TV show that employees them, but their shared line readings imply they’re all playing the same character in the script-within-the-script.  When we take breaks from those screenlife horror samples, it’s only to hear actors squabble about agents, auditions, movie studios, and co-writing credits.  It’s all very lazy & confused, and I have no clue how recognizable performers (including Kal Penn and Never Have I Ever‘s Darren Barnet) were roped into something so uninspired while the best films in this genre are often populated by talented nobodies.

Maybe my issue here is that I’m looking for Untitled Horror Movie to joke about the tropes of its genre, when it’s much more interested in the lifestyle tropes of the vain, vapid L.A. actor.  Even then, the only performer that comes halfway close to being funny here is Katherine McNamara’s schticky exaggeration of the industry’s blonde-ditz archetype, and you can never get past the sense that she’s a poor substitute for Meredith Hagner’s performance as Portia on Search Party.  The only commentary it has to offer on screenlife genre filmmaking is to shoehorn the word “meta” into every other scene so that its premise and title appear to be much cleverer than they actually are.  The film-within-the-film is met with a bidding war between Lionsgate & Netflix for a robust distribution deal.  Meanwhile, this real-life movie was first presented in a livestream premiere and then sold its streaming rights to some sub-Tubi ad platform called Plex.  There is a ton of potential in the screenlife horror parody as a concept, and this leaves all of it on the table for something much less distinct.  Hopefully someone else scoops up the idea for a much funnier movie with a clear parodic POV.

-Brandon Ledet