Welcome to Episode #8 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our eighth episode, Brandon interviews local filmmaker Tim Wolff about his gay Mardi Gras culture documentary The Sons of Tennessee Williams (2011). Also, James makes Brandon watch Roy Andersson’s Swedish black comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015) for the first time. Enjoy!
Production note: The dreamy guitar musical “bumps” between segments were also provided by James.
-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet
Self-described as a “non-science fiction, not quite realistic, and not strictly historical film” and a “comedy of anxieties” Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (sometimes distributed under the ridiculous title Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future) is both just like & completely unique from every zany comedy title that immediately comes to mind. It’s easy to see echoes of the film’s sense of flippant, whimsical humor in works as varied as Monty Python, Scooby-Doo, and ZAZ comedies, but at the same time I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before. I’m not sure how many Soviet Russian slapstick comedies the average American movie buff watches in their lifetime, but this was a first for me.
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession is remarkable for its ability to dabble in the same visual play & artistic pranksterism as titles like the infamous, surreal Czech comedy Daisies while maintaining the accessibility of a sketch comedy show or a weekly sitcom. It’s about as fun as any crossroads between camp & high art as you’re ever likely to see and it’s one that boasts an unlikely specificity & context due to its USSR setting. Rarely is a comedy this artistically rich so recommendable for its entertainment value & basic humorous appeal to audiences who would normally turn up their noses at the idea of watching a hoity-toity foreign film outright. I could easily see it sitting among the works of folks like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson as the perfectly attractive gateway drug to drag youngsters into a life of art cinema geekery. Basically, I’m saying I greatly enjoyed this film as an adult, but really wish someone had shown it to me in high school. It would’ve saved me a lot of time in helping define & develop my own cinematic tastes.
The film’s plot is an exercise in cartoonish artificiality. A scientist/inventor risks losing the attentions of his beautiful actress wife by constantly hammering away at his latest project: a time machine. On the first, disastrous operation of his “apparatus”, the scientist opens the wall to his apartment to a hundreds-years-old castle setting and, through machinations not worth describing in detail, winds up swapping the places of his landlord, Ivan Vasilievich, with the 16th century dictator Ivan the Terrible. The landlord has a difficult time adjusting to his new digs. He’s initially mistaken for a demon by his newfound contemporaries before he disastrously assumes the throne of Ivan the Terrible in disguise (in addition to sharing a name & similarly predatory occupations, they also share an exact likeness). The “real” Ivan the Terrible, by contrast, does fairly well in the modern world. After briefly struggling with confounding inventions like recorded music, lightbulbs, and racy pin-ups, he somewhat comfortably settles into a world that still finds his demanding, violent attributes disconcertingly appealing. While the befuddled scientist struggles to return both Ivans to their proper places in time, the film bifurcates itself into being both a fish out of water comedy in modern times & a violent comedy of errors in ancient ones. It’s all very silly.
It’s difficult to describe the plot of Ivan Vassiliech without making it sound like a very thin, minimal work. Indeed, even certain gags within the film feel like something out of Benny Hill sketch or a mimicry of silent-era hamming. What’s most incredible about this film to me is in the way it distinguishes itself in the details. Its central time-bending apparatus is bizarre mess of sciency vagueness that makes Rick Moranis‘s goofy shrink ray in Honey I Shrunk the Kinds look downright realistic by comparison. Visual techniques like alternating between color and black & white film and mixing live action photography with animation heightens the film’s consistent playfulness to its own unique artform. The shattered fourth wall & movie-within-a-movie meta structure leads to inspired gags like the “real” Ivan the Terrible auditioning for a leading part in a movie about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan Vasilievich is flexible enough to both impress the idea with its meticulous, color-coded set design & to inspire guttural laughter with lines like “Please don’t put me to death, kind sir!” It’s an old-fashioned song & dance comedy that leaves enough room for genuine awe in its majestic Russian castle settings, which are used almost like a playground. Even the would-be bummer of a cop-out ending is significantly softened by the very polite concluding title card of “Ciao! Thank you for your attention.”
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession hits that perfect sweet spot of smart, well-crafted cinema that’s also eager to please & easy to digest. As soon as the first watch I felt like it had already been in my life for decades, like a fuzzy memory triggered by a particular scent. That kind of instant familiarity is difficult to come by, especially with a product this silly & this finely tuned.
-Brandon Ledet
I’d love to live in a world where Vincent Price is considered “the world’s greatest actor”, but not like this. Not like this. Theatre of Blood is a puzzling meta horror vehicle for Price, both striking in the range it allows for the B-movie legend to chew scenery (plus its gore grotesqueness his films don’t usually approach) and disappointing in its lackluster execution. By all means, this gimmicky revenge thriller should be the exact kind of genre trash that has me head over heels, especially considering how unhinged Price manages to be in his lead performance, but by the end I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for what I had seen. This is decent schlock, but it had the opportunity to be much more significant than that. I didn’t hate it, but I really wanted to love it.
Price stars here as “the world’s greatest actor”, Edward Lionheart, a true thespian of the stage who refuses to take on any role unless it’s the lead part in a Shakespeare production. Fans agree that he is truly the world’s finest performer, but theater critics lock him out of all accolades due to his Shakespearean limitations. After a failed suicide attempt the bitter actor comes seemingly from beyond the grave to make each critic individually eat their own words (and, in one particularly brutal case, their own dogs) by killing them in elaborate ways that recall Shakespeare’s most notable works. There’s great subtext here about Vincent Price himself getting revenge on his own critics for brushing off his work as genre schlock by proving he’s at ease with difficult classical works, but for the most part the film is only exciting for its dozen or so brutal murders, which reportedly required six gallons of fake blood to bring to the screen.
What most confuses me about Theatre of Blood is its 96% approval rating on the Tomatometer. The film was a personal favorite for Price because he enjoyed being able to make money performing various Shakespeare monologues instead of pure horror cheese, which is totally understandable (if not more than a little sad). The truth is, though, that when Price isn’t performing these soliloquies or murdering his critics for an audience of Mortville bums, the film gets very one-note & boring, playing at best like a televised police procedural. It’s likely that people had fun with the film’s very campy tone & I’ll admit that the novelty of a grindhouse-esque work from Price that manages to be this silly is enjoyable in & of itself. I especially love its alternate title, Much Ado about Murder, as a note of exceptional goofiness. However, the film has nothing on similar revenge-minded works from the actor’s catalog like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, so there’s an oppressive cloud of seen-it-all-before hanging over the production. It’s at best on par with his other middling 70s meta horror, Madhouse, which isn’t too great of a position to be in at all.
Theatre of Blood is a serviceable Vincent Price flick probably best enjoyed in YouTube clips compiling its various gimmicky kills instead of watching its rough around the edges totality. As a critic, saying this might be inviting Price to rise from beyond the grave to smite me, but I’m okay with that. There are surely worse ways to die.
-Brandon Ledet
Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.
Where 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is referenced in Life Itself: On pages 88 & 395 of the first edition hardback, Ebert mentions that the film’s infamous, evil A.I. robot was built at his alma mater, writing “Chills ran down my spine when I first heard the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey announce that it had been born in the computer lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana.” He also mentions on page 153 that 2001 was one of the biggest “event” films of his early, formative years as a professional film critic.
What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Kubrick’s universe, and the space ships he constructed to explore it, are simply out of scale with human concerns. The ships are perfect, impersonal machines which venture from one planet to another, and if men are tucked away somewhere inside them, then they get there too. But the achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick’s actors seem to sense this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe.” -from his 1968 review for the Chicago Sun Times
“The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, ‘2001’ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.” -from his 1997 review for his “Great Movies” series
“Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” – Ancient proverb
The arthouse space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey is madman auteur Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus. Or, wait, maybe that’s The Shining. Or maybe Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick boasts too many crowning achievements to definitively rank any particular one as king beast, but 2001 certainly inspires that kind of lofty thinking, just in mere acknowledgement of its grand scale ambition. It’s a film that attempts to encapsulate the totality of time– past, present, and future– and does a fairly successful job of it. Its iconic scenes of space epic obfuscation have in time become so seminal that they now almost feel cliché, considering the one million and ten times they’ve been referenced & parodied in later, lesser works. This film is an unimaginable technical achievement for 1968, however, and I’m still scratching my head over the practicality of how some of it was accomplished through practical effects. Because each scene in the film is so overly-familiar to the public lexicon at this point, it’s near impossible to tell if I’ve actually watched it from front to end before. I do distinctly remember falling asleep to it once or twice in high school at the very least. As majestic & awe-inspiring as any particular achievement in 2001 can be, the film is also a slow, plodding, dialogue-light downstream drift that dares you at nearly every turn to lose focus & nod off. This is more or less the definition of challenging cinema. It takes a determined effort to stay on board for the journey, but the destination’s rewards are bountiful.
The funny thing for me on this most recent watch was that the movie I always think of as being 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie where a crew of astronauts are murdered by an evil A.I. named HAL 9000, is just one segment of many in the film’s cinematic patchwork. 2001 functions almost like a horror anthology, with each of its four separate segments providing only a small window into its larger narrative. Each section of the film is dominated by the throughline talisman of the monolith, but they each stand as rigidly divided works of art, just in the same way Kubrick allows nearly every shot of the film to hang in the air like an isolated, precious object worth examination. 2001 is an art gallery just as much as it is a narrative motion picture.
In the first segment the film takes poetic license with evolution & the Dawn of Man and depicts the all-important monolith teaching humanity’s primate ancestors how to use tools, a development that immediately leads to the world’s first coldblooded murder. In the second segment a second monolith is discovered by astronauts on the moon and its effect is largely shrouded in mystery, other than the signal it projects that points to Jupiter. As this film was released just one year before the real moonlanding (an event some eccentrics believe Kubrick himself had a part in “faking”), the mysterious terror of this piece points to modern anxiety about what comes next on the frontier of scientific discovery. The third segment answers that question loud & clear, proposing that our near future will be dominated by pompous A.I. robots with murderous intent. The closing segment, beautifully titled “Jupiter & Beyond the Infinite” is a somewhat-open-to-interpretation trip though religious transcendence, a gateway into the next step in our evolution. The lucky astronaut who endures that final chapter’s monolith as a test subject emerges on the other end as some sort of unknowable space fetus. The future of humanity is left open-ended here, but given that all previous monoliths in the film were directly followed by murder, the outlook is just as chilling as it is majestic.
Much like how the monoliths transformed the state of humanity at several points throughout the film, 2001 transformed the state of sci-fi adventure media. Long gone are the days of Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers, although they would later return with 2001-esque special effects in George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise. The HAL 9000 segment of 2001 functions somewhat like a genre film if you squint at it the right way, but the other 3/4s of the picture are so gloriously obscured & open-ended that Kubrick’s version of a space adventure is a much stranger, more artful beast than the examples that preceded it. There is a clear narrative progression here in the evolution of humanity, but the source, nature, and purpose of that evolution is so immense & mysterious that the “odyssey” of the title is more figurative than it is literal. I’m sure Arthur C. Clarke’s novelized version of this story (which he wrote for the film as a collaborator) is much clearer than what’s onscreen, but I feel like any concrete, extraterrestrial explanation of what transpires would cheapen the movie’s poetry. The aliens in this film may as well be an all-knowing god or The Will of the Universe, considering the immensity of what’s onscreen. I left the film with few solid answers and took delight in that ambiguity.
Not everyone feels that way. Ebert noted in his “Great Movies” review of the film that there were several walkouts during the 1968 Los Angeles premiere he attended. Most notably among the miffed was an especially exasperated Rock Hudson, who was visibly livid that the couldn’t pin down the film’s exact plot. Indeed, 2001 feels determined at every turn to spurn its audience, like an ornery mechanical bull in a dive bar (except one bucking in spectacular slow motion). This is a film that will either bore or terrorize you depending on how game you are for its journey. As much as I loved it as an immersive cinematic experience I’ll even admit that a couple dialogueless shots where the soundtrack was dominated by heavy breathing & mechanical whirs tested my patience a great deal. I’d even go as far as to say it got on my nerves. That’s not to say this is humorless, highbrow work without a touch of pedestrian entertainment value, though. I think the shock of starting the film among the unevolved primates was something of a sly joke, maybe even serving as Kubrick’s way of poking fun at human folly & hubris. Hal 9000, however creepy, is subtly funny in its own cold, biting way, even downright bitchy in intonations of phrases like “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Frank.” There’s even an honest-to-God, outright gag in the film where a character perplexedly reads a long list of instructions for a zero gravity toilet.
Of course, humor & genre thrills are not likely to be anyone’s biggest takeaway from 2001. For those who can stay on board for its demanding runtime, glacial pace, and deliberate obfuscation, the film delivers a perfectly crafted, near-flawless glimpse into the unknown, which is a rare treat for any kind of art, much less a cinematic space adventure. The violence on display here ranges from blind rage to cold calculation, but never for a minute feels exploitative. The visual effects & smooth, spinning camerawork are dizzying achievements of technical prowess, but feel more purposeful than showy. An old-fashioned overture & intermission feel entirely earned given the scope of the film’s ambition. I’m not sure if 2001 is Kubrick delivering a passionate work of narrative art so much as a perfectly calibrated machine that begs to be gawked at as it functions with divine precision. Either way, it’s a real beaut.
Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)
Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)
Next Lesson: Cool Hand Luke (1967)
-Brandon Ledet
June’s Movie of the Month, Alligator, is an early 80s creature feature about a baby alligator named Ramón who grows mythically gigantic after being flushed down the toilet & feeding on a cruel science experiment’s cast-off corpses of animal subjects he finds in the Chicago sewers. Ramón is a fascinating monster in many ways. He not only embodies the urban legend of alligators living out of place in the sewer systems of major American cities; he’s also the size of a dinosaur and has an uncanny ability to hunt down & exact revenge upon the heartless people who’ve wronged him & other discarded animals. Still yet, one of the strangest aspects of Alligator‘s titular monster is that he’s indicated to be named after the little known, late painter Ramón Santiago. How or why that association between the gator & the painter was made is a total mystery.
Britnee wrote in our Swampchat discussion on Alligator, “During the scenes in David’s apartment, there are prints on the wall by Ramón Santiago (obvious inspiration for the alligator’s name). I was unaware of Santiago’s work prior to noticing the prints in the film, and I have to say that this guy has some phenomenal art. […] According to Santiago’s website, he stated, ‘My paintings are what dreams are made of.’ I would say that’s a pretty accurate description of his work. Unfortunately, I haven’t stumbled across an Santiago gator paintings yet.” Indeed, Google search results for “Ramón Santiago alligator” don’t lead any Santiago depictions of gators or even any discussions of the 1980 horror film in question (except for our own). At what point, exactly, was Santiago brought in as inspiration for our reptilian antihero Ramón? The artist could theoretically have served as a point of inspiration for director Lewis Teague or screenwriter John Sayles, but he could just as easily have been brought in as a sly visual joke by the set designer. There’s not a lot of evidence or context to point this connection in any solid direction.
Although there are no Santiago paintings of gators we were able to hunt down & the artist’s unlikely inclusion in the film might’ve been a question of set design or clever prop, it’s easy to see how his work fits into the Alligator universe on a very basic aesthetic level. Santiago’s work is dark & brooding, the exact same muted & grimy color palette of the gator Ramón’s urban environment. There’s also a magician’s touch to the painter’s work that is simultaneously a little corny & vastly mysterious, a combo of sentiments I could also assign to the gator Ramón’s artistry: chomping people to bits for crimes against animalia. The two Ramóns, painter & gator, are artists who largely go unrecognized for their accomplishments (pretty pictures & spectacular violence, respectfully). At first glance their work can appear a little common or even silly, but there’s a dark, mysterious soul lurking underneath he surface in both cases that makes them oddly fascinating in an unexpected way.
Until the greater mystery of the two Ramón’s true connection (if any truly exists) is cracked, here are a few of their works juxtaposed for your own consideration.
![alligator4[1]](https://swampflix.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/alligator41.jpg?w=300&h=169)
For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1980 creature feature Alligator, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.
-Brandon Ledet
“I wanted the audience to get to know the guy, to get attached, so that when the situation that happens to him happens, it’s not just like you read it in the paper, you know what I mean? When you know somebody as a human being you know that life means something.” -Ryan Coogler
Director Ryan Coogler has got to be one of the most exciting young filmmakers working today, right? I went into last year’s explosive boxing world drama Creed as a mildly curious Sylvester Stallone fan & left a wildly enthusiastic fan of Coogler’s touch. There’s an intimacy, violence, and empathy to that film that it had no right to carry as the seventh installment of a franchise that’s been barely limping along the last few years/decades. Ryan Coogler & Michael B Jordan gave off some Scorsese-De Niro vibes in the symbiotic way they commanded that film, a partnership they plan to carry over into the upcoming MCU episode Black Panther. What really blows my mind now is that Coogler & Jordan had already teamed up once before Creed, which apparently wasn’t even their best work to date.
Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s debut feature, is the best of the director’s work so far, a truly haunting film that’s blunt in its intent, yet delicate & measured in execution. The film follows the final hours of Oscar Grant, a real life victim of police brutality who was wrongfully gunned down on New Year’s Day in 2009 at a San Franciscan rail car station. Although it’s doubtful that the Coogler & Jordan collaborative legacy is anywhere near its end, their first outing together might long prove to be their most effective. Fruitvale Station makes extremely bold choices not only in its subject, but also in decisions like including real footage of Oscar Grant’s final moments & post-burial aftermath as bookends to his story. In a way, the film’s intent to familiarize an outside audience with a faceless victim of police violence has a gentle edge to it, but the real-life footage of Grant’s tragedy/murder chills audiences to the bone before the film can even get there. As you follow a young man unknowingly marked for execution on his final day on Earth you’re never allowed to forget that he was a real person who really lived & really died in this senseless way. The result of that opening assault is never-ending, forever haunting.
So, what does Oscar Grant do for his last day alive? Not much. He plans a dinner to celebrate his mother’s birthday, spoils his kid, parties with other New Year’s Eve revelers, and tries his damnedest to hold onto a dead end job so he doesn’t have to return to a life of selling dope. It’s so eerie to watch someone act so casually on their last day breathing, especially when the film’s mood shifts from introspection to celebration minutes before Oscar is handcuffed & shot in the back for getting into a mostly harmless fight. There might be some artistic liberties Coogler takes with Grant’s exact story (such as a touching encounter he has with an injured street dog), but they serve a larger purpose: showing Oscar for the normal dude he was & explaining how he was murdered by police explicitly for being a young black man in the wrong place & time. A lot of this same territory was later covered by last year’s fierce satirical comedy Driving While Black, but even that triumph of political filmmaking is outshined by the day-in-the-life portrait Coogler & Jordan construct here.
Tragically, typifying examples of police murder cases like Michael Brown & Eric Garner have only grown in numbers since Oscar Grant was needlessly shot in the back in 2009. With each passing year Fruitvale Station becomes an even more powerful & necessary work. I’m glad to see Coogler move on & make bigger Hollywood productions as his career quickly progresses, but I hope he uses some of that newfound capital to return to the potency of his debut sometime in the future. It’s no small feat to reveal to the audience exactly what’s going to happen in your opening scene & then deliver a tense, heartfelt drama minute to minute in its wake despite that inevitability. Fruitvale Station cuts you deep with a real life tragedy in its opening gut punch, but then somehow lures you into a casual comfort before devastating you by repeating the exact same act of senseless violence in its final moments. It’s a tense, pointed work from a young director who surely has plenty more coming & I’m excited to see where he’s taking us next, even if the destinations are as grim as they are here. Especially then.
-Brandon Ledet
Fail to fall in love with The Lobster within the first 45 minutes & you’ll be transformed into the miffed geezer complaining that he had just seen “the stupidest movie of [his] life” while standing next to me at the world’s most telling critical forum: the post-screening urinal. Personally, I enjoyed the film, but it took a lot of willingness to give into its off-putting deadpan style to get there. Here’s a list of things you have to be okay with seeing depicted to enjoy The Lobster: high-concept absurdism, twee preciousness, animal cruelty, romanceless intercourse, abrupt & ambiguous conclusions, heartless violence, purposefully awkward & stilted acting, a muddled mix of sci-fi & fantasy, the world’s strangest rape joke, and Colin Farrell. You still with me? A lot of the elderly folk I shared a theater with last Saturday morning weren’t, making this one of the most disharmonious screening I’ve been to since listening to the genre-minded horror hungry grumble at The Witch. Just like the film’s central premise promises/threatens, there’s a lot of pressure to fall in love with The Lobster against the near-insurmountable odds or else your personal experience could turn quite ugly, even beastly.
As is true with a lot of high-concept sci-fi & fantasy, I mostly enjoyed The Lobster as an exercise in world-building. In the film’s dystopian reality, being romantically unattached is punishable by law. Only couples are allowed to live in The City. Single people are forcibly enrolled in a program at a resort hotel that attempts to pair them off in life-long romantic bonds. Failure to fall in love within 45 days results in being turned into an animal of their choice through surgical procedure. More time can be added to their stay at the resort by hunting down defecting loners who chose to live in isolation in the wilderness. Seemingly, no one is truly happy. There’s a fierce, biting allegory to this premise that combines the most effective aspects of sci-fi short stories & absurdist stage play black humor to skewer the surreal, predatory nature of the modern romance landscape. It takes a certain sensibility to give into The Lobster‘s many outlandish conceits, but it’s easy to see how the film could top many best of the year lists for those able to lock onto its very peculiar, particular mode of operation, despite the sour word of mouth at the post-screening urinal. It’s basically 2016’s Anomalisa, with all the positives & negatives that comparison implies.
Just like Anomalisa, The Lobster is difficult to connect with on a personal, emotive level due to the distancing nature of its befuddled protagonist & its high-concept conceit. (Both films also boast the two of the awkwardest sex scenes I’ve endured in years, but that’s another matter.) I would say that the central problem with high-concept allegory is that it cuts into the audience’s ability to empathize with a film’s romance & humanity, but that’s not always true. Just look to Spike Jonze’s Her for a work that has its cake & eats it too in that regard. The Lobster is purposefully distancing & impersonal. It intentionally takes the audience out of the story at every given opportunity to gawk & scoff at the absurdity of modern romance. I know that I personally would’ve been more enthusiastic about the film’s rewards if it injected a little more heart into its satirical black comedy reflections on the predatory nature of romantic coupling, which didn’t even match the somber not of Anomalisa in terms of genuine emotion. Not everyone will feel that way, though, and a great deal of folks will perfectly enjoy The Lobster on an intellectual level without needing to engage with it on an emotional one.
Sci-fi romance horror has become a pet favorite subgenre of mine lately, best reflected in titles like Possession, Spring, and The One I Love. The Lobster does the genre one better & injects an unhealthy dose of black humor into the formula. A lot of my favorite moments in the film are when it pushes the surreality of its central premise into the familiar territory of a solid comedic gag: masturbation punished with a bread toaster, a Zero Theorem-esque headphones dance party in the woods, the idea that certain species are endangered because most people choose to become dogs, an over-the-top fairy tale narration that pokes fun at the absurdity of needless voice-over, etc. I also respect the film greatly for not shying away from the consequences of its cold, bloody violence, despite what you might expect from its tightly controlled Wes Anderson/Michel Gondry-type meticulousness & whimsy. The Lobster sets the tone early with an opening gun shot, a vindictive act of violence that chills the room before its absurdist humor has a chance to warm it up.
Still, I can see what the wheezing geezer at the urinal was getting at when he complained that the film, particularly the ending, was a letdown. The Lobster is not a romance for the ages titled The Lobsters or a yuck-em-up comedy titled My Brother the Dog, though it could’ve easily gone in either direction. It’s an uncompromising, absurd trudge through ennui & romantic dread, one that makes very little effort to bring the audience along for the deeply somber ride. It takes a leap of faith to enjoy the film. I enjoyed it a great deal myself, but I’ll admit that I was also a little miffed at the way it wore the “Not for Everyone” tag like a badge of honor every chance it got. I get where you’re coming from, angry urinal critic. I understand.
-Brandon Ledet
I’ve been on something of a silent horror tangent lately,which has lead me to watching some really striking works of early cinematic achievement, but nothing comes close to the (literal) insanity on display in the Japanese film A Page of Madness. The film plays like a cold splash of water or an open-handed slap to the face. From the first frame on, its wild, chaotic mode of loose story telling and terrifying black & white cinematography feels entirely anachronistic for the time of its release. A whirlwind of rapid edits, bizarre imagery, and an oppressive absence of linear storytelling make A Page of Madness feel like a contemporary with, say, Eraserhead or Tetsuo: The Iron Man instead of a distant relic of horror cinema. It’s an early masterwork of disjointed, abstract filmmaking and it’s one that was nearly lost forever, considered unobtainable for nearly four decades before a salvageable (and significantly shortened) print was re-discovered.
A Page of Madness opens with a flood of, well, madness: storm water pours; train engines roar; a woman dances in a ceremonial gown on a set that is simultaneously ethereal & industrial. The film pulls back here to reveal its hand. The woman dances for no particular audience. She’s wearing a hospital gown, not a fine piece of luxurious fabric. She is a patient in a mental ward, not entirely sure of what place or time she occupies. The audience isn’t sure either. We’re introduced to her husband, who poses as a janitor at the hospital in hopes of setting her free. His attempts to make himself or their former life together recognizable to her are in vain. His attempts to stage a prison break ultimately end in ultraviolent futility. Everything else in between is up for interpretation as a tornado of screaming babies, wild dogs, creepy masks, and crosshatched jail cell bars tear across the screen. From beginning to end A Page of Madness is smeared, stretched, mirrored, sped-up, and doubled over. The result is downright maddening, like Häxan by way of Hausu.
This film is way more expressionistic & chaotic than what I’m used to from cinema’s silent era. It takes a very one-note, stubborn view of mental illness that lacks any semblance of modern nuance in the subject, but the play it gets out of interpreting its mental patients’ hallucinations in a visual language is awe-inspiring even by today’s standards. The overall aesthetic feels akin to turning on a flashlight in pitch black darkness only to be startled by the haunted house terrors lurking within. Very early on the film intentionally relates itself to jazz by throwing images of the then-young art’s instruments in with the rest of its kinetic collage, a very apt act of self-awareness. Its great feat is in the way it consistently disrupts your sense of location and temporal setting. Jail cells & external spaces bleed together, as do the past & present. It’s all delightfully, horrifyingly dizzying.
A lot of A Page of Madness‘s obfuscation is a likely result of its modernized form. When screened in Japan in the 1920s, the film was accompanied by live storytellers who would clarify characters’ inner dialogue & general intent in a way that’s missing when watching the film in your living room. Without that embellishment, the film’s total lack of intercut dialogue cards leaves the audience to drown without a lifeline. Its hypnotic soundtrack recalls a particularly noisy Xiu Xiu experiment stretched thin & hammered out of shape, which is not likely what original audiences experienced either. Also, the film’s missing footage might’ve softened its abstraction to a degree (although some historians suspect director Teinosuke Kinugasa himself might’ve shortened & sped up the film to enhance this effect once he re-discovered his lost print).
All of this speculation is ultimately meaningless, however. The version of A Page of Madness we do have today is immaculately abrasive & I wouldn’t change one confusing frame of it. I doubt any other silent horror I’ll watch will match its sheer memorability, but I’ll gladly welcome the challenge of any film that’s willing to try.
-Brandon Ledet
I’m calling it now, folks. The Human Centipede 3 is the single least enjoyable motion picture I’ve ever seen in my life. I pray that never changes. This is a franchise that’s been known for its vile, misanthropic humor & shameless navel-gazing since its meme-like inception in the late 2000s, but I’ll admit to actually enjoying the first couple titles in what’s likely to remain cinema’s least prestigious trilogy of all time. Unfortunately for my eyes (but perhaps fortunately for my soul), I could not carry that mild enthusiasm into the third and, as the merciful title promises, hopefully final work.
I assume most people who would bother reading this review in the first place would be fully aware of the franchise’s central conceit, so I’ll do my best to spare you the (literally) shitty details here. Instead, here’s a brief overview of its, um, artistic trajectory. First Sequence, released wide in 2010, boasted the tagline “100% medically accurate.” In a way, it’s difficult to argue the point. It’s a small, quiet torture porn horror where the titular poop-eating science experiment fails immediately & miserably due to infection, as any reasonable person would expect. 2012’s Full Sequence upped the ante significantly & almost retroactively made its comparatively dull predecessor a joy to watch. Its tagline reading “100% medically inaccurate,” it tells the story of a mentally disabled, sexually perverse superfan of First Sequence recreating the film’s experiment in a warehouse and, major surprise, it actually kind of works. His centipede is longer and more durable despite the disgusting conditions of its environment begging for a life-ending infection to take hold. Full Sequence is not only meaner & more disgusting than the first film; it’s also much more satirically pointed, revealing an indictment of its own audience for being the sick fucks who would want to watch not one, but two of these atrocities in the first place. I saw the film at a packed New Orleans Film Fest screening at Chalmette Movies and was both tickled by the darkly comic depravity I had just witnessed & strongly tempted to ask each attendee what’s wrong with them for showing up in the first place on their way out the exit. The Human Centipede 3: Full Sequence thoroughly ruined all of that questionable goodwill.
The all-important tagline of Final Sequence is “100% politically incorrect.” I hope you can already see the problem there. Long gone are the morbid fascination factor of the first film and the unexpected satirical edge & audience hatred 0f the second. In their place is a desperately unfunny, try-hard “political” comedy of legendarily hideous & vapid proportions. The same intense focus on gore & human cruelty that’s consistently present throughout the franchise is in tact here, but Full Sequence finds entirely new, unwelcome ways to disappoint & disgust. In some ways it’s director Tom Six’s greatest achievement yet, as it is a truly depraved work surely no decent human being could enjoy without failing a litmus test that calls into question their capacity for empathy, compassion, maturity or potential for spiritual growth. If someone ever tells you that The Human Centipede 3 is their favorite film, do the world a favor and push them into the nearest incinerator. Anytime a property claims that its goal is to be “100% politically incorrect” prepare yourself to witness some vile, misanthropic shit that’s toxic at best in its societal & spiritual value. Final Sequence surpasses even that low bar of depravity, sucking all joy out of its entire franchise & anything else unfortunate enough to lie in its vicinity. By the time I made it to the end credits (no small feat, that), I had to fight back an urge to alternate between screaming & chugging hard liquor in a scalding hot shower.
Inexplicably, though, it’s not necessarily the “100% politically incorrect” humor that makes the movie such a chore to survive. It’s the lead performance by actor Dieter Laser that sinks the film decisively before it even gives itself a chance to offend the audience with an onslaught of rape jokes & racial slurs. Laser delivers what is, hands down, the single most annoying lead performance in the history of the motion picture as an artform, if not the history of scripted theater. He is loud, brash, incomprehensible, devoid of value. His work here should be legally deemed criminal with some kind of mandatory penalty leveled on him as a penance (though, hopefully not one that takes inspiration from the film itself). Did I mention that Dieter Laser is profoundly awful in The Human Centipede 3? Good, because he’s shit, or perhaps something even more difficult to stomach.
For those of you paying close attention to this franchise (God help you), you may recall that Dieter Laser played the Nazi-esque doctor in First Sequence who invented the human centipede torture meme in the first place. Both he & the actor who portrayed his copycat in Full Sequence are recast here as the heads of a prison in the fiercely Republican state of Texas despite this being a universe where the first two films exist & are available on DVD. As the warden & assistant warden of George H.W. Bush Prison (topical humor! funny!), these two evil fucks attempt to please their right wing governor (played by Eric Roberts of A Talking Cat?! & Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs fame) by implementing methods of discipline that wouldn’t fly on Adult Swim’s Superjail!. Laser explains openly, “I believe in bringing back medieval torture methods” when he’s not busy screaming racial epithets at the top of his lungs. His assistant does him one better by suggesting a recreation of Tom Six’s visionary work in First Sequence & Full Sequence. Their centipedal masterwork isn’t realized until the final fifteen minutes of Final Sequence, a choice that withholds whatever perverse pleasure could possibly derived from the spectacle of seeing the longest human centipede yet in favor of boring/annoying the audience with Laser’s beyond-grating lack of subtle nuance or basic dignity. You know exactly where the film is going and yet it drags is little insectoid feet getting there so that you can spend more time “enjoying” political commentary that relates conservative Texans to Nazis in the first two minutes & doesn’t bother expanding its scope from there. What a godawful piece of trash.
I’ll admit that I didn’t watch this film in the best environment. Instead of heckling it with friends on a late night or quietly squirming in a crowded film fest screening like the fist two, I swallowed this shit while enjoying my breakfast alone on a Sunday morning. I doubt a better venue would’ve helped much, though. Outside a couple stray one-liners like “We don’t get to deal with their shit no more. They just got to deal with each others'” and a doctor’s fretting that the experiment is “in serious conflict with [his] Hippocratic Oath,” there’s truly nothing of value here. Even the intense gore, which includes an up-close, believably real castration, pales in comparison to the depravity of Full Sequence. On its list of achievements, Final Sequence boasts the two most disgusting rape scenes I’ve ever seen in my life (two low points I hope to never experience again), only to pull back & reveal that one of them was all just a dream, an empty exercise.
Tom Six, who appears as himself in the film & is aptly described by Laser’s cruelly unbearable warden as “a poop-infested toddler” knows a thing or tow about empty exercises. His one true accomplishment in Final Sequence is making the longest centipede yet to appear in the series, but no one could possibly care, considering the rotting pile of garbage he births it in. Six appears smug here, proud of his work & its cultural impact, directly referencing a South Park episode his magnum opus inspired. He forms a makeshift human centipede Ouroboros here, fashioning a cinematic monster that greedily feeds on its own filth. Everything feels off, a complete failure overflowing out the sides of Six’s pull-up diaper. Only porn star Bree Olson seems comfortable with the production value & “political incorrectness” on display and for some reason Six feels the need to mercilessly punish her for it. A final scene of Dieter Laser screaming unintelligibly into a bullhorn aimed at no one in particular, perhaps a long-dead God, suggests that Six knows exactly what a shitty monument to nothing he’s constructed here, but that doesn’t make the nihilistic exercise worthwhile in the least.
Trust me, folks. I’ve been known to enjoy many a shitty movie in my time, but my claim that Final Sequence is the worst film I’ve ever endured is not a challenge or a low-key recommendation or a thinly-veiled dare. This is a hateful, empty work meant to be enjoyed by no one. No one. If you can avoid giving Tom Six even the microscopic revenue of a hate watch on Netflix I highly recommend toughing out a life without having seen a spiritless, self-obsessed work of misanthropic masturbation that might forever define of sewers of needless, failed horror cinema . . . if you can manage to bear the thought. At the very least, I’ll envy you.
-Brandon Ledet
As the less fortunate among you surely know by now, The SyFy Channel usually churns out its CGI mockbusters to siphon off money from the especially content-hungry in anticipation of major summer releases. While there’s no accounting for certain titles like Sharknado or Lavalantula, which have no “real” cinema counterparts to speak of, SyFy will usually pull a stunt like preempting del Toro’s kaiju love-letter Pacific Rim with its own mech suit cheapie called Atlantic Rim or riding the MCU’s Thor‘s coattails with some generic atrocity called The Almighty Thor, etc. My curiosity, then, was recently piqued while scrolling through Netflix after midnight when I noticed that SyFy had produced a film last year titled Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs. The most obvious comparison point to that title would be Jon Favreau’s better-than-its-reputation Cowboys & Aliens, but that film’s from all the way back in 2011 & Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs aired in 2015, so the timeline didn’t make much sense to me.
It wasn’t until I was a good 20 minutes or so into Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (thanks to a complete lack of willpower) that I remembered, oh yeah, there was a CGI dinosaur movie that came out last year. It was called Jurassic World and starred one of Hollywood’s up & coming leading men and made a ridiculous amount of money all over the world, despite apparently being less memorable than a box office flop that came out five years ago. By the time I had this epiphany I was too far into Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs to bail, though, and I just sort of gave into finishing it the same way your body gives into the numbness of freezing to death when you plunge into icy waters.
Truth be told, Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs isn’t all that bad when judged by the perilously low standards of SyFy mockbusters. The characters are laughably wooden & the entire premise is just as try-hard as they come, but damn if I didn’t laugh every time some dope was eaten by a CG dino. In a world of cowboy cliches that range from fallen rodeo hero to power-hungry sheriff to country music video skanks of all genders, a CG dino is more savior than monster. The wicked creatures are released early on from their dino treasure trove inside an active mine shaft thanks to a shitty little CGI dynamite charge and are thankfully violent at every given opportunity: chomping heads, removing guts, biting people purely out of malice instead of hunger. The mine shaft works like some kind of bizarre 3D dino printer, emanating countless copies of the same generic, raptor-like dinosaur that move in quick jerks like a video game glitch and bleed explosive methane, because why not? The movie drowns in its own mediocrity when there’s no dino mayhem on display, focusing mostly on a romantically-charged rivalry between the sheriff & his rodeo cowboy nemesis that no one could possibly care about, but the plot is mostly an inconvenience at best. The dinosaurs are easily the more interesting half of the dino-cowboy equation, but the movie knows it & does its best to disperse their murderous chaos evenly throughout the production.
I was just shy of abandoning all hope on Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs when a second round of explosions happened to set loose a new, more varied batch of dinosaurs. This is when the cowboy gimmick really pays off. Our rodeo hero lassos himself a wild one & ends up riding a stegosaurus like an ornery bull. There’s even an exploding T-Rex. Where else are you going to see that? Don’t answer that. Look, the production value is essentially on par with a softcore porno, the gore is goofy but never quite gruesome, and the plot feels like one beat in a screenplay instead of a finished product. Even SyFy’s signature celebrity stunt casting is lackluster here, featuring Eric Roberts of such prestigious works as A Talking Cat?! & The Human Centipede 3. If Roberts’s IMDb page is to be believed, he appears in roughly 4,000 projects a year, so that wasn’t much of a get by any measure.
Still, I chuckled at far too many dino attacks in this film to brush it off completely. This must be how the poor people who enjoy watching Birdemic must feel. I wasn’t excited when Cowboys vs.Dinosaurs left the door open for a sequel, but I honestly would be more likely to watch that then giving Jurassic World a second look. If you want to consider that an insult to one movie instead of a compliment to the other, that’s up to you.
-Brandon Ledet
