12 Rounds 3: Lockdown (2015)

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twohalfstar

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In the first two 12 Rounds films, disgruntled domestic terrorists set up convoluted twelve round scavenger hunts (very similar to the one in Die Hard: With a Vengeance) as a means to teach lessons about perceived wrongs from the past. In the first film pro wrestler John Cena plays a police officer whose journey through the twelve round gauntlet works as a makeshift guided tour through New Orleans’ vast sea of tourist traps. In 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded pro wrestler Randy Orton plays an EMT whose scavenger hunt experience functions as an elaborate anti-drunk driving PSA, one with a bodycount. Curiously, 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown discards the twelve round scavenger hunt concept completely. Pro wrestler Dean Ambrose stars as the film’s good cop protagonist, John Shaw, who finds himself locked inside his own precinct with a gang of crooked narcs looking to end his life before he can expose evidence of their illegal deeds to the proper authorities. In this scenario, the “12 rounds” of the title refers to the dozen bullets in the sole gun Ambrose’s cop has to protect himself with as he faces an armed to the teeth gang of officers who are somewhat similar in character to the gang of DEA scumbags Arnold Schwarzenegger helms in Sabotage.

Removing the high concept silliness of the twelve round scavenger hunt was a huge mistake for 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown. Limiting the action to a single space & replacing the first two films’ mind games with a periodic reminder of how many of Shaw’s twelve bullets are left in the clip (“9 rounds left,” he vocally reminds himself, completely for our benefit) makes the film to be somewhat of a bore. All that’s left to distinguish the film, then is Dean Ambrose’s disappointingly underwhelming screen presence & an unusuallly large stockpile of dead cops. After the guided tour of New Orleans in the first film & the anti-drunk driving diatribe of the second, it’s interesting that 12 Rounds 3 tries to make up for its own narrative shortcomings with an onslaught of bloodshed & gunfights that result in a slew of deceased police officers. Shaw is surprisingly crafty in his cop-killing ways, careful not to waste a single one of his precious twelve rounds. In one scene he beats an officer to death with weights in the presinct’s gym. In another he ends a fight with a vicious head-stabbing. Other kills make thrifty use of electically charged doorknobs & his enemy’s own grenades. My personal favorite moment is when Shaw uses a taser to activate the body of an already dead cop to squeeze the trigger of an assault rifle resting his lifeless hand, creating enough cover fire for Shaw to escape through a comically small air vent. As much as these MacGyver shenanigans can be amusing, it never becomes clear why Shaw doesn’t collect guns or ammo from the crooked cops he kills & instead relies so heavily on those precious twelve bullets of the title.

Dean Ambrose has recently established himself as somewhat of a fan favorite in his run at the WWE. Posed as a sort of pretty boy Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ambrose is a chaotic nuetral element in “sports entertainment”. His character is a whirlwind of bad boy chaos that (heterosexual) female fans seem to find irresistibly attractive, despite the slight hint of a comb-over meant to mask not only the beginnings of male pattern baldness, but also the damage to his forehead left over from his history of extreme, hardcore “death matches” in minor wrestling promotions. Lockdown only makes minimal use of Ambrose’s wrestling background, which (like the disregard for the original 12 Rounds concept) is a damn shame. It is funny, as a fan, that women are the only characters who are nice to his down-on-his-luck cop Shaw in the film and during a boyfight in the precinct’s locker-room there’s a shot of him bodyslamming an opponent through a wooden bench that almost had me chanting “We want tables!,” but otherwise there aren’t nearly enough references to his wrestling career here. Who do they think is watching this movie?

Ambrose’s performance is a calm, brooding sort of good guy bravado that makes little use of the explosive, rebellious personality that makes him so compelling in the ring. Also, although these pro wrestlers are always understandably adept at selling pain during their martial arts sequences, it always surprises me that no use is made of their signature wrestling moves in their motion picture vehicles. The only time I can remember ever seeing that done was The Rock delivering a Rock Bottom to Jason Statham in Furious 7 earlier this year. Why couldn’t Lockdown find a way to work in an Dirty Deeds for Ambrose? It certainly bent over backwards to make its ludicrous locked-inside-a-precinct concept work. Even an elbow drop would’ve been nice, preferably with Ambrose taking out ten opponents at once, as he is known to do. Watching him conserve bullets, hack into the mainframe, and search for a cellphone signal aren’t nearly as entertaining as a little old elbow drop could’ve been. In fact, the film’s villain (Roger R. Cross) is far more exciting than Shaw, providing a full-form example of Roger Ebert’s Talking Killer trope to an often hilarious degree (favorite line: [after punching Shaw] “That was my good cop. Wait til you see my bad cop.”). That’s not to say that Ambrose is entirely underwhelming in Lockdown. At the very least he’s far more compelling than Randy Orton was in12 Rounds 2. It’s just that the film’s muted, stardard action movie concept & his protagonist’s restrictions as a consummate “good guy” make for an overall dull combo that all the dead cops in the world can’t seem to overcome, whether or not their corpses are being tased or exploded.

-Brandon Ledet

Burying the Ex (2015)

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onehalfstar

Joe Dante is, without question, one of my favorite directors. Just a genuinely fun filmmaker. Where would my childhood have been without the subversively satirical live-action cartoons of Small Soldiers & Gremlins II: The New Batch? I shudder to think. As I got older, self-aware genre titles like Piranha & The Howling revealed themselves to be well within my wheelhouse and the genre-defiant fare of Explorers, The Hole, and Matinee have won my heart even as recently as last year. That’s why it hurts me so much to admit that Dante’s latest work, Burying the Ex, is such a crushing disappointment. At a mercifully short 90min, the film is a grueling test of patience, never even coming close to satisfying either the horror or the comedy side of its horror comedy genre. Worse yet, it dabbles in some light, MRA-type misogyny that suggests that Dante has transitioned from the youthful prankster role he’s filled for decades into some unbecoming grumpy curmudgeon territory. It’s truly sad to witness.

As suggested by the “burying the axe” pun from the title, Burying the Ex centers around a troubled romantic relationship that just will not end until the protagonist schlub puts his love & their differences to rest (literally). Max, played by a hoarsely bland Anton Yelchin, finds it difficult to end a longterm relationship with the beautiful Evelyn (Ashley Greene), despite their glaring, irreconcilable differences. This dilemma is complicated even more by Evelyn’s sudden death by speeding bus, which preempts Max’s final attempt to break it off. Somewhere in there is the cool nerd Olivia (Alexandra Daddario) who offers Max a glimpse into what a relationship with someone who shares his geeky interest in oldschool horror films could possibly be like. In comparison, Olivia makes Evelyn look like a megabitch. Evelyn’s violent mood swings, rampaging jealousy, disregard for Max’s monster movie memorabilia, and self-satisfied conviction that she’s saving the world through “green” blogging all make her out to be some kind of a monster, a position that’s only slightly amplified when she rises from the grave to reveal herself as Max’s crazy, undead zombie (ex)girlfriend. Olivia, on the other hand, is more or less just one of the guys.

Zombies as a metaphor for romantic relationships that just won’t die is not only a somewhat unoriginal idea, it was one that one done much better as recently as last year’s Life After Beth. However, the lack of an original concept could’ve been easily overcome if Dante’s typical zaniness had run the show instead of the faintly sexist “Aren’t women just crazy?” vibes that spoil the fun. That’s not even taking into account the nerd fantasy fulfillment that two beautiful women (undead or not) would be fighting over the protagonist Max, who is hopelessly mediocre in both looks & personality (I’ve enjoyed Yelchin elsewhere, just not here). The only part of Burying the Ex that does work is its loving references to older, better monster movies, including shout-outs to The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, Plan 9 from Outer Space, I Walked With a Zombie, Cat People, and the list goes on. When Max explains that horror films are important because they “challenge us to stop accepting the world & face our inner monster & find strength to conquer it,” you really want to find common ground with the film if not only to fulfill that admirable sentiment. However, Burying the Ex never faces its inner misogyny monster, thoroughly misidentifying the enemy as Crazy Women & Their Crazy Ways. All that’s left, then, is cheap, unfunny gags & some last second gore. Whoopee. It’s a highly undignified position for Dante to be in & I hope that this isn’t the part of a larger downward trend in quality for the director, who really should’ve known better than to make this film in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

The Visit (2015)

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three star

The only way I can think to summarize my thoroughly conflicted feelings about The Visit is to recreate The Simpsons‘ take on the shopkeeper scene in Gremlins. The Visit had a surprisingly amusing trailer, but a lot of the best gags were included in the ad. Ooh, that’s bad. But the last half hour is a riot! That’s good. The hour leading up to it is a snooze. That’s bad. But the film ends in a plot-summarizing rap song, one of my all-time favorite movie tropes. That’s good! It’s also a found footage horror movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan . . . That’s bad. Can I go now?

Besides the automatic groans induced its by-the-numbers found footage format, part of what makes The Visit so frustrating is its annoyingly precocious leads. A fifteen year old documentarian & her younger white rapper brother eat up almost the entirety of the film’s runtime, testing my patience in every scene. The pint-sized white rapper is obviously the easier target to pick on here, especially when he’s displaying his cringe-worthy craft for the camera. He boasts to his clueless grandmother, “Do you know who Tyler the Creator is? People say I’ve got that kind of sound,” (Fuck this kid.) but the truth is that he’s a decade-late Aaron Carter at best. Thankfully, his sister calls him out on his bullshit fairly often, calling him “ethnically confused” & describing his art as “songs of misogyny” (he’s particularly fond of punctuating songs with the words “bitch” & “ho”), but the truth is she’s not much better. More arrogant poser than accomplished auteur, she’s prone to saying things like “I hate sappy movies. I find them torturous,” that remind me way too much of the asshole, know-it-all personality I’m glad (or I hope) that I left behind in my teens. It’s a fairly insufferable combo.

The good news is that they’re punished for their shortcomings . . . eventually. Hurting from an early separation from their father, the kids suffer from some crippling neuroses: the documentarian has a disgust with her own self-image and the lil’ rapper struggles both with germophobia & a tendency to freeze under pressure. In an attempt to heal old wounds in their mother’s life & to fill the familial void left by their absent father, the kids decide to document a week-long visit with their estranged grandparents. Subverting the old hat horror trope that kids are usually the creepy ones (something exploited as recently as the Sinister franchise), the grandparents’ “sundowning” & dementia make them out to be a horrific threat that gets increasingly dangerous as the week drags on. The grandparents honestly don’t say too much for the first two-thirds of the film, which is a damn shame, because they’re infinitely more interesting than their would-be victims. What starts out as warning signs like catching them naked, scratching door jams like a cat sharpening its claws & hoarding used diapers in a locked toolshed eventually escalates to A Big Showdown worthy of an 80’s slasher flick. In the movie’s last minute chaos, the kids’ debilitating nueroses are literally thrown in their faces as they’re confronted with mirrors & germ-infested feces in way that finally, finally delivers on some of the potential of a immensely promising premise.

In a lot of ways it’s the typical Shyamalan plot structure that makes the full experience of The Visit so conflicting. The tyranny of The Last Minute Twist drags the film down so hard, evoking far more boredom than tension as you wait for the hammer to finally fall. There’s a little fun to be had before the twist, like when the grandmother chases the kids through a crawl space like a wild animal only to cheerily announce “I’m making chicken pot pie!” when she catches them. Speaking of food, her constant offerings of cookies, bread pudding, cheddar biscuits, and whatever else give the film a distinct Hansel & Gretel vibe, one intentionally landed by her insistence that one of the kids climb into the oven “to clean it”. There’s also some laughable horror movie tropes, like the fact that they’re trapped in an isolated, one cop town with no Wi-Fi or cellphone reception. By the time the film finally devolves into geriatric mayhem, which includes divine moments like the lines “I have the deep darkies. You have to laugh to keep the deep darkies in a cave,” & “I see the veiny, deformed face of the world,” as well as the world’s most tense game of Yahtzee (“We picked teams! Young vs. old.”), I find myself wondering why it couldn’t have been that fun the entire time. Shyamalan’s dedication to springing a surprise on his audience in the final act is needlessly frustrating. Why not have The Twist arrive earlier in the sparsely populated runtime to make room for more senior citizen terror? Why not give the people what they want early & often?

I left my visit with The Visit firmly on the fence with how I felt about it. Although I wished more of the film was like the bonkers final half hour, that type of non-stop old folgey mayhem was already delivered decades ago in the straight-to-VHS gore fest Rabid Grannies. Although the film suffers under the Tyranny of the Twist, Shyamalan knowingly alludes to how frustrating that plot structure can be & teases possible out-there twists like underwater aliens & “the white thing with the yellow eyes” in a admirably prankish attempt to screw with audience expectations. Although I found the main characters to be unbearably dull & precocious (far beyond what I believe was intended), I also found their character arcs to be sufficiently satisfying by the film’s conclusion. It wasn’t until I was standing outside the theater, overhearing a stranger complain, “We’ll that’s two hours I’ll never get back” that my opinion instantly became slightly more positive than my initial indecision. Out of pure spite & pettiness for that offhand comment, I thought to myself “You know what? I’ve seen way worse. It was alright.” You could probably attribute half a star of my rating to that little bit of vindictive eavesdropping. Otherwise, I’d still be exactly divided on how I felt.

-Brandon Ledet

Tenebrae (1982)

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Ironically, the more Dario Argento I consume, the more novel I find his seemingly obsessive repetition of concepts and ideas to be. When I discussed Profondo Rosso, I talked about how it represented the apotheosis of his metaphorical color pallette, a brand new story done up in the same “shades” as his other gialli but narratively perfected; Tenebrae (aka Tenebre, although this is less of a translation of the title as it is a miscommunication about promotional material from day one), released in 1982, is Argento’s first picture to be filmed in the eighties and is the definitive giallo of that decade, despite being less well known than his preceding films in that genre. Most importantly, however, this is the first time I’ve really felt that Argento had a thesis with his movie. His previous gialli ranged from good to bad, but one thing they all had in common was that they were first concerned with cinematography and mystery, with meaning and metaphor playing inconsequential roles in the overall structure. “Here’s a mystery, and it twists a lot! And everything is beautiful!” with occasional “Here’s a mystery, and there’s witches, because why not,” essentially. Here, however, Argento addresses criticism of his work and its themes as well as what he perceived to be a rise in random acts of violence in his contemporary world.

Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa, doing his best, worst, Shatnerest Shatner) is an American thriller novelist who travels to Rome to promote his latest work, Tenebrae, a book told from the point of view of a deranged serial killer who murders those he considers sexually or socially “aberrant.” He meets with his agent, Bullmer (John Saxon, here credited as “Saxson”), and attends a meet and greet with the press, including beautiful lesbian reporter Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), an old friend who accuses his work of being misogynistic, surprising him. Also present is Channel 1 afternoon talk show host Christiano Berti (John Steiner), who stalks about quietly. Neal then reunites with his secretary Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and meets Gianni (Christian Borromeo), an intern with his publisher who will be his driver and gopher during his time in Rome. Arriving at his temporary apartment, the three meet Detectives Giermani (Giuliano Gemma) and Altieri (Carola Stanaro). It seems that, just before Neal’s arrival, a shoplifter (Ania Pieroni, who last appeared as the beautiful Mater Lachrymarum in Inferno) who bribes her way out of an arrest with the promise of sexual favors is murdered in her apartment: Elsa was slashed, with crumpled pages torn from Tenebrae stuffed in her mouth.

Tilde and her polyamorous lover Marion (Mirella Banti) are murdered by the slasher, and Berti’s intense interest in Neal’s work makes him suspicious. His landlord’s young daughter, Maria (Lara Wendel), is also murdered, after she coincidentally makes her way to the killer’s home while fleeing from a vicious dog. His time in Rome is further complicated by the apparent sudden appearance of Neal’s disturbed ex, Jane (Veronica Lario), although his glimpses of her are so transient he can’t be certain. Giermani and Neal work together to try and figure out who the killer is. Every time you think you know who the killer is, that person ends up dead. Also, the villain has recurring nightmares about being sexually humiliated and abused by a woman in red heels, then later stabbing her to death. There are quite a few twists that all work quite well in this movie, so I won’t spoil the reveal here, but suffice it to say, this is probably the best mystery plot so far, rivalling or perhaps even surpassing Profondo rosso.

As a basic plot sketch and in some of the details, there doesn’t initially seem to be anything new on display here. The protagonist is again an artist (as seen in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Profondo rosso, and even Suspiria and Inferno), specifically a writer (as in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and Cat o’ Nine Tails), assisted by a lady sidekick (BCP) played by Daria Nicolodi (PR). The police initially suspect him of guilt but later enlist his assistance in the investigation (BCP, PR). A death is staged using a prop knife that squirts fake blood (FFGV), and a character learns about the killer’s fascination with taking snapshots of victims (FFGV again) by discovering a photographer’s development studio (C9T, although that was actually a crime reporter’s collection of pics of dead folks). Mirrors hold clues and significance (PR, Suspiria), and, like clockwork, a character witnesses something important but struggles to resolve its relevance (BCP, C9T, and PR, with the “struggling to effectively pair partially heard dialogue with the memory of moving lips” lifted directly from Suspiria, although this is the first time that this clue is witnessed by a secondary character and not the protagonist). The killer’s descent into madness is caused by the revisitation of an earlier trauma, recalled and brought on by dark imagery (BCP). And, of course, the film ends completely abruptly once the villain is dispatched (literally all of them, even The Five Days). Hell, Neal’s apartment even has some creepy statues from the gallery in Plumage sitting in the entryway.

The mystery plot here is very polished and precise. Detective Giermani jokes with Neal that, despite solving crime during the day, he can never figure out “whodunit” in the novels he reads, name-dropping Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle as well as, to my amusement, Ed McBain (only a movie that came out in 1982 would reference good ol’ Ed so reverently, during the height of his popularity and before he all but vanished from the public consciousness). Every time I knew who the killer was, that person was slashed or axed in the very next scene, and I never saw the twist coming. There were certain points in the film that initially irritated me, but which I realized were subtly ingenious clues after I had time to let the impact of the movie marinate in my mind for a minute. The cast is great, and it’s a lot of fun to get to see Nicolodi play against type as long-suffering, vaguely smitten survivor for once.

Although this may be one of the more overlooked Argento films, it’s also one of the most influential. Although I didn’t mention it in my review, Argento is credited with being the first director to use a high-speed camera to follow the trajectory of a bullet in Four Flies; here, Argento uses several long one-shots, including one which goes around and over Marion and Tilde’s house, said to have inspired the similar scene in The Untouchables. There’s also a scene in which Detective Giermani bends over and out of the frame, revealing the killer directly behind him and perfectly silhouetted by the lawman, and Tenebrae is generally considered to be the originator of that particular image, which has been imitated and given homage innumerable times by directors like Brian De Palma and Wes Craven. This, incidentally, ties into Argento’s recurring reflection imagery, more present here than ever before. When Giermani is introduced, he stands as a mirror image of Neal, both of them flanked by their respective partners, who are of similar build and hairstyle. Two typewriters are placed side by side as if they are twins, and Neal has two reflections: Giermani, as the real-life equivalent of Neal’s fictional avatars, and the killer, as the twisted reflection of the darker parts of Neal’s own psyche that give birth to his novels.

This reflection has been the subject of no small amount of film scholarship, as has the way that Neal’s work elicits similar criticism to that of Argento’s own (in fact, the plot was partially inspired by a series of harassing phone calls that Argento received from a fan in California who threatened to exact revenge on the director for the having caused the fan emotional distress brought on by watching Suspiria). More interesting to me is the fact that so much of the film depends upon circumstance, unplanned encounters, and apparently unmotivated violence. Doomed shoplifter Elsa is accosted and assaulted by a vagrant before she arrives home, where the killer is waiting for her. Tilde’s jealousy of her (verbally abusive) lover leads to a thrown vase and the opening salvo of a domestic dispute. Maria ends up in the home of the murderer, not because she was an intended victim, but because she was fleeing heedlessly from a tireless and aggressive pitbull (after she herself antagonized the animal out of anger that it scared her). While waiting at a bench in a plaza, a character sees a fistfight break to his right and an unrelated couple arguing violently to his left just before he himself is stabbed; his slashing goes completely unnoticed by anyone until he physically grabs a person walking past. While in reality most crime is committed by an assailant the victim knows, when this is not the case, it’s simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Argento seems to be arguing that, in the eighties and the decades to follow, the wrong place was potentially anywhere and everywhere, and the clock was going to be stuck on the wrong time perpetually.

There’s a lot to recommend this movie. There are some things that are recycled from other movies that probably should not have been, and the sterile aesthetic of the film, which Argento has said was meant to be evocative of television procedurals, is a disappointment after the sumptuous visuals of Profondo rosso and especially Suspiria. Still, Argento reunites with (three quarters of) Goblin here, and the score is absolutely fantastic as a result; I can’t put my finger on it for certain, but I have the feeling that I’ve heard it sampled many times. Although not a perfect film, it’s a near-flawless giallo, and I highly recommend it.

When I went to rent this movie, I attempted to also rent Phenomena, planning to watch both and do two Argento reviews in the same week. Unfortunately, the fine folks at Vulcan Video informed me that it was already rented out, and was in fact already overdue. When I returned Tenebrae last night, whoever rented my favorite Argento still had it, meaning that I stood in the aisles of the video store for what felt like hours, trying to decide what to do. Should I skip Phenomena and go straight to Opera, and then double back later? Should I put the Argento retrospective on hold until I got my hands on Phenomena? Should I review a film by one of Argento’s contemporaries or apprentices? After much deliberation and hesitation, I decided to skip ahead to 2007 and watch The Mother of Tears, the long-delayed concluding chapter of the Three Mothers trilogy. So for those of you out there who were disappointed by how distant that conclusion was, congratulations. If you’re the witch who magically caused this chain of events to occur so I’d have to complete the trilogy faster, kudos to you, and please e-mail me; I will trade cash for hexes.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

D.E.B.S. (2004)

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three star

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I wish that I could have really, really loved this movie. D.E.B.S. is a perennial IFC favorite, and even though there was a period of time where this movie seemed to be on several times a week, I never managed to catch it. It’s a quirky movie with a great cast and a smart concept, and although it has a great stride once it hits it, it takes so long to get there that I can’t give it 4 stars based on the last act alone.

The premise of the film is that there is a secret test within the SATs that measures a person’s aptitude for espionage. Women who pass the hidden aptitude test are recruited into the D.E.B.S. (Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength), a clandestine spy academy where everyone dresses like Catholic schoolgirls and learn to be superheroes. Amy Bradshaw (Sara Foster) is the posterchild of the D.E.B.S., as she made the “perfect score” on the D.E.B.S. test, but she dreams of going to art school in Barcelona. Max Brewer (Meagan Good) is the trigger-happy leader of their quartet, joined by chain-smoking French sexpot Dominique (Devon Aoki) and perpetually ditzy Janet, who has yet to earn her stripes. Amy has recently broken up with her boyfriend, Homeland Security agent Bobby (Geoff Stults), a bro who refuses to accept that it’s over, when the D.E.B.S.’s handler Mr. Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan) assigns the squad to surveil notorious supervillain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), in whom Amy has an academic interest.

Lucy is a criminal mastermind, the last scion of a syndicate family who loves to steal, with diamonds, naturally, being her speciality. She’s back in the states and meeting with “former KGB” assassin Ninotchka Kaprova (Jessica Cauffiel); unbeknownst to the federal agencies tracking her, Lucy’s rendezvous is actually a blind date engineered by her bodyguard and adorably-devoted BFF Scud (Jimmi Simpson). When Bobby’s pettiness accidentally reveals the D.E.B.S. and other agencies to Lucy, a shootout ensues and she escapes, running into a warehouse where she and Amy have a pistol standoff/meet cute. Amy lets Lucy get away, and the latter realizes she’s falling for the enemy. After a few more encounters, Lucy stages a bank heist to meet Amy again, and the two abscond to be together. The rest of the D.E.B.S. organization (minus Janet, who knows Amy went willingly and begins a cyber-friendship with Scud) goes into scorched earth mode scouring the world for Amy, who’s happily shacked up; when they eventually discover the two and retrieve Amy, the D.E.B.S. Boss (Holland Taylor) agrees to cover up the incident to maintain the agency’s reputation, forcing Amy to denounce Lucy publicly at the senior prom, er, “Endgame.” Meanwhile, Lucy realizes she would rather live without crime than Amy, and sets to righting her wrongs and winning her back.

D.E.B.S. is often described as a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, but that comparison doesn’t track very well for me. The Angels were more like private detectives than spies, for one thing (at least in the original show). D.E.B.S. has more in common with Austin Powers than either the 70s Angels TV series or the godawful 2000 film adaptation (or its somehow-worse 2003 sequel) and, despite having a cast full of beautiful women, never feels like it was made with the male gaze in mind. The relationship between Amy and Lucy feels organic, if a little corny, and is never played for titillation or exploitation. There’s also a little bit of Josie and the Pussycats thrown in for good measure, with lots of colorful visuals and the third-act-squad-breakup plot development that was so popular from roughly the mid-nineties through the early-aughts, although it lacks that film’s subtlety and social commentary. As much as I enjoyed the movie once the romantic plot got rolling, overall, the film is ultimately too inconsistent to really leave a mark. As it turns out, combining clunky gags (there’s a callback joke about what Max and Amy said to each other on the first day of training as well that really thuds, as well as a one-liner about Amy going off book in her final speech) with sublime ones (Lucy and Scud lip-synching to Erasure’s “A Little Respect” over a montage of them returning stolen goods is a treasure, and the D.E.B.S.’s house’s security field having the same tartan pattern as their uniforms is a good visual joke) doesn’t work. And that’s not even getting into the inexplicably odd things that happen in this movie. Why do the D.E.B.S. top brass teleport in and out of every scene? Are they teleporting, or are they holograms?

The movie performed abysmally, making less at the box office than the average twentysomething owes in student loans. It didn’t even break six figures! But what can you really expect when you release a film that’s this uneven? Still, it’s definitely worth a watch. The soundtrack is great (there’s even a Postal Service track playing when Lucy decides to give up her life of diamond theft and doomsday lasering), which is always a plus. Brewster and Simpson make a really great on-screen pair with believable chemistry and comic timing, even if the D.E.B.S. (Amy included) are one-dimensional and kind of bleh. If you can get past some of the worst CGI gun sparks ever committed to film, this is a refreshing twist on the indie-tinged lesbian love story that was such a big draw ten years ago, just make sure you see it through to the cliché but cute conclusion.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Unexpected Horror in the Romance Novelist Rom-Coms She-Devil (1989) & The Boyfriend School (1990)

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While we were discussing September’s Movie of the Month, the Steve Guttenberg/Jami Gertz will-they-won’t-they comedy from Hell The Boyfriend School, we had a hard time pinning down the film’s exact genre. Ostensibly a traditional rom-com, the film had some painfully awkward stretches of cringe comedy that clouded the issue. Even stranger yet, the romance novelist character played by Shelley Long was a terrifying, overbearing presence that overstepped her bounds as a quirky sister/side-character & ventured into some truly horrific torture-tactics territory. Her meddling was at least somewhat well-intentioned; she wanted to help her brother, played by Guttenberg, recover from a near-fatal battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma (told you it gets rough) by reshaping him into an alpha male biker trope straight out of one of her romance novels. The problem is that the transformation is emotionally painful for The Gutte & it leads to a really nasty line of deception that he finds difficult to escape once the ball gets rolling. Shelley Long’s romance novelist is the source of all the film’s non-Hodgkin’s related conflict & creates an amped up level of dread that’s not typically present in a traditional, lighthearted rom-com, making for one very strange little movie.

While The Boyfriend School isn’t exceptionally unique in its genre play that takes dimestore romance novel tropes into unexpected territory, it is at the very least part of a small crowd. Perhaps the most well-known romance novel-themed comedies are the Robert Zemeckis films Romancing the Stone & its little-loved sequel Jewel of the Nile, but those are more oriented towards action comedy (as is typical with Zemeckis) than the unusual discomfort & horror of The Boyfriend School. I could only find one picture that explores unexpected horror in a romance novel-themed romcom similar to the dread Shelley Long’s meddling creates in The Boyfriend School. 1989’s She-Devil, an underloved gem starring Meryl Streep, Roseanne Barr, and Ed Begley Jr., injects a surreal sense of horror into the romcom format, at the same time making sure to lampoon the very idea of romance novels, as well as the illusion & cruelty of unfair beauty standards and the competitive wedges that are driven between women who would benefit much more from a sense of camaraderie. She-Devil may, in fact, be a far supreior film than The Boyfriend School, because its writing is so pointed & satirical that its horror can only be read as intentional, whereas the terror of The Boyfriend School sometimes seems to exist outside what the film’s creators intended. I assume that we were supposed to leave The Boyfriend School feeling great that The Gutte got the girl, but I was honestly more in a state of shock & disbelief than anything, whereas in She-Devil the horror element is promised right there in the title.

She-Devil stars Roseanne Barr in the titular role as a frumpy housewife who goes on a violent quest for revenge when her husband leaves her for a wealthy romance novelist played by Meryl Streep. Streep reveals herself to be hilariously adept at playing the butt of the joke here & the movie has a field day poking fun at her in a much more obvious way than The Boyfriend School attacks Shelley Long’s very similar antagonist. First introduced as “The Reigning Royal Highness of Romance” by none other than Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous‘ Robin Leach (who also provides voice over work for the film’s trailer), Streep’s bodice-ripping novelist Mary Fisher is a genteel bore with more than thirty novels to her name, a boy toy butler who does more boytoying than butling, and a vast fortune she vainly tries to enjoy despite her crippling loneliness. In a very early plot development, she seduces the husband of Roseanne’s housewife frump (played by Ed Begley, Jr.) under the guise of hiring him as her accountant. Begley’s accountant is hilariously dedicated to seeing the world in terms of his profession, constantly making offhand remarks about electric bills, tax writeoffs, and balanced checkbooks whenever a vague opportunity arises. When he finally breaks things off with his wife (who was knowingly, but patiently suffering through his adultery) he describes himself as having four assets in life (his home, his family, his career, and his freedom) & exactly one liability: her. That alone would be cruel enough, but he punctuates the conversation with this ugly diatribe: “You’re a bad mother, a lousy wife, and a terrible cook. In fact, have you looked in a mirror recently? I don’t even think you’re a woman. Do you know what you are? You’re a she-devil!”

Watching Roseanne’s much-humiliated wife suffer through this indignity is a horrifying moment, something the film is smart to immediately acknowledge. After her husband’s abusive tirade a visible change takes place in her. She turns to her make-up mirrors, which provide an amusing sort of fun house effect, and Mario Bava-esque horror movie lighting takes over the screen. She’s shown with glowing red eyes & accompanied by fire. Her transformation into the titular She-Devil is very much the kind of classic horror movie theatrics you’d expect to accompany the birth of the Frankenstein monster. This is also when the mood of the film shifts. No longer feeling loyal to a man that has taken her for granted, the She-Devil systematically destroys every one of her husband’s assets (his home, his family, his carreer, his freedom) until he’s broken down to a literal prisoner & not even Mary Fisher wants to pick at the crumbs. To her credit, the She-Devil does not attack Mary Fisher directly, although she does have wicked thoughts about her, like “I hope your pink palace crumbles into the sea. I hope your delicate white skin breaks out in hives and your shiny blond hair falls out at the root.” Instead, she attacks the verbally abusive, adulterous man that takes advantage of both Fisher & herself and even goes as far as to start an employment agency that gives all of the other disenfranchised, unglamorous, non-Mary Fishers of the world a chance to stand up for themselves in a society that’s systemically stacked against them.

Despite the horror movie lighting & the “She-Devil” moniker she’s awarded, Roseanne’s protagonist is actually pretty inspiring. Even though she’s presented in the context of becoming a monster, her transformation makes for a subtly feminist revenge-fantasy spin on the romcom genre that feels almost like a spiritual opposite of the deception & violation that’s played for uncomfortable laughs in The Boyfriend School. Unlike The Boyfriend School, She-Devil adopts a woman’s POV and has pointed things to say about sexual politics & the nature of romance novels as an art & a product (at one point calling them “nothing more than softcore porn for bored housewives”) that extend beyond the basic jab that they’re silly. When a woman complains in the film that, “Men get away with murder, you know. It seems like if you’re a woman, there’s just no justice in the world” the evil She-Devil of the title refuses to accept those terms & (gasp!) makes her own justice. The horror! Besides these thematic charms there’s also some great visual playfulness, like direct references to Psycho & What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a scene transition that cuts from a blowjob to a violent cucumber chopping, and a brief appearance from GLOW: The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Both The Boyfriend School & She-Devil subvert the romance novel genre by portraying it as a horror show (it’s surprisingly rare that it’s portrayed in rom-coms at all), but The Boyfriend School‘s subversion feels cruel & unintentional while She-Devil‘s is much more winkingly transgressive. They make for an interesting double feature either way, one with much more terror & discomfort than you’d expect from a pair of late 80s rom-coms.

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, 1990’s The Boyfriend School, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Wes Craven’s Crown Jewel: New Nightmare (1994)

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Just two weeks ago, we lost a cinematic great who was often overlooked for his accomplishments as an auteur, perhaps due to his extensive work in genre films. Wes Craven may have made an occasional goofy trifle like a Shocker or a Swamp Thing, but his more accomplished films have unmistakably reshaped the horror landscape in a significant way. I don’t have much of a stomach for them myself, but his early works The Hills Have Eyes & The Last House on the Left rang out like the enraged, too-believable battle cries of a deeply disturbed mind eager to unleash its violent cravings upon the world at large. Honing in that anger for something more purposeful & universally palatable, Craven later scared the every living shit out of mainstream audiences with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which did for the simple act of falling asleep what Jaws did for nightswimming. Craven’s instantly infamous Freddy Krueger creation, brought to disturbingly vivid life by actor Robert Englund, would’ve been enough to coast on for the rest of the director’s life, but instead Craven broke out into more surreal territory with The Serpent & The Rainbow, political satire in The People Under the Stairs, and the very nature of horror as a genre in the meta franchise Scream, among other projects. Craven was an inventive fella, to put it mildly. He was enthusiastic about exploring new, strange ideas that would allow his demented id to escape from his mild-mannered exterior, scaring his audience while simultaneously challenging them in unexpectedly intellectual ways, the latter being something a lot of horror peddlers don’t bother with often enough.

My personal favorite Wes Craven film is 1994’s New Nightmare. It’s not his scariest, nor his most tightly-controlled work, but it is an incredibly smart picture that manages to bridge the gap between the dream-logic horror of A Nightmare on Elm Street with the meta genre reflection of the soon-to-come Scream franchise. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is a perfect way to remember the filmmaker for all he accomplished, not only because it marries those two defining moments of his career in a single picture, but also because he plays a role in the film as a fictionalized version of himself. The Scream franchise introduces its meta context by having the typical bonehead slasher victims be atypically self-aware of classic horror film tropes that usually lead to violent deaths, allowing for them to make commentary on the very film that they populate (eventually with their lifeless bodies). However, thanks to the dream logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street, New Nightmare allows itself even more free rein with its meta context. The movie itself is about the making of another Freddy Kruger picture, a cursed production that blurs the lines between reality & nightmare and free will & scripted fiction to the point where it’s near impossible to tell the difference between a character being awake, getting trapped in Freddy’s playground of the subconscious, or, worse yet, living out one of Wes Craven’s screenplays.

Set on the 10th anniversary of the original Freddy Krueger picture, New Nightmare stars Heather Langenkamp, who played the protagonist Nancy in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, as Heather Langenkamp, who played the protagonist Nancy in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. As the anniversary of the film draws near, threatening phonecalls (often accompanied by Earthquakes) that impossibly seem to be from Freddy Krueger himself torment the poor actress, establishing a mood of dread very early in the picture. The strange thing is that Langenkamp is good friends with Robert Englund, her colleague who portrays Krueger in the movies. Englund, playing himself (and Freddy, of course), is portrayed as a genteel dude here, spending his days idly painting in the sun room of a mansion undoubtedly funded by the success of the Elm Street films, a far cry from the undead homicidal maniac he embodies with Freddy. As mentioned above, Wes Craven also plays himself in New Nightmare. He explains to Heather that he’s been working on a script (or a “nightmare in progress” as he calls it) for a new Elm Street picture as a means to stop Krueger from becoming “real”. According to Craven, because Freddy was killed off in the 6th installment of the franchise (Freddy’s Dead: The “Final” Nightmare), he has been set free like a genie from a bottle, now able to manifest in real life, causing real havoc. The only way to stop Freddy, Craven explains, is to make another picture, an ordeal Heather is very reluctant to suffer.

There is so much to enjoy in New Nightmare & the film really does at times feel like all of the best elements of Wes Craven’s aesthetic conveniently gathered in one package. Striking an unnerving artificiality from the get go, the whole film feels like a constant dream state, a feeling that’s only amplified as the walls between the conscious & the subconscious, as well as the walls between the movie & the movie within the movie, begin to break down into a mess of Freddy Krueger themed chaos. As for Krueger himself, he actually doesn’t appear in his full form for much of the film. He’s more of a disembodied idea than a physical threat, often appearing solely as a clawed glove & at one point literally becoming larger than life by appearing in the clouds above a freeway. Heather’s horrified reaction to Krueger’s new, true-life form & his adoring fans’ gushing at his publicity appearances call into question Craven’s own thoughts on his creations & their fandom, particularly with the rougher work of films like The Last House on the Left. Otherworldly landscapes of bedsheets & subconscious dungeons recall the POV of a child’s imagination Craven so well captured in The People Under the Stairs. Although the dream state reflections of The Serpent & The Rainbow and the original Elm Street as well as the meta reflections of the Scream movies may have been more thoroughly solidfied in his other pictures, it’s nice to see those two worlds bounce off each other in such a satisfying way here.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare might not be his most technically accomplished film & it’s doubtful that it’ll be the one he’s most remembered for, but it holds a special place in my heart as a sum of the accomplishments of a director I grew up loving & fearing. When I heard the recent news that the incredibly gifted director had died, it was the first film I thought to revisit as a means of remembrance. It only helps that the director himself makes an appearance in the film to weigh in on the magical nature of filmmaking, directly referencing his personal compulsions to create, the often hellish compulsions that drive anyone to create, and the ways art can take on a life of its own outside its creator’s will or control. Besides being a great film as well as a reflection on the nature of horror as a genre & art as an enterprise, New Nightmare is a solid means to commemorating the accomplishments of a great director who is unfortunately no longer with us. He will undoubtedly be missed, but we’ll always have great films like New Nightmare to remember him by. Much like his creation Freddy Krueger, Craven lives on.

-Brandon Ledet

Europe in the Raw (1963)

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By the time Russ Meyer made his fourth consecutive nudie cutie picture, the dull-yet-oddly-chaotic Wild Gals of the Naked West, his boredom with a genre he had inadvertently created was starting to show. What did not become boring to the tireless pervert, however, was large, naked breasts. As a result, Meyer’s fifth picture, Europe in the Raw, attempted to shift away from the “cutie” part of the nudie cutie format & moved the director’s work ever so closer to the much darker, stranger territory he would later revel in for decades. Unlike his later works, however, Europe in the Raw was far from unique in terms of genre. Part of what made Meyer’s debut, The Immoral Mr. Teas, such a wild, controversial success was that it for the first time combined moving pictures of naked girls with the mainstream comedy. Pre-Teas nudie films usually snuck past censors by treating their own sexual content derisively (when not vainly disguising  themselves as “documentaries” about nudist camps). An old sexploitation tactic was to get away with showing copious amounts of “depraved” behavior by demonizing the participants & punishing them for their transgressions (often pre-marital sex & the resulting back alley abortions) with a well-deserved death in the final act, in effect denouncing the very thing that made the picture fun & interesting in the first place. Europe in the Raw is hilariously guilty of this strategy.

In its opening narration Europe in the Raw boldly promises to be “undoubtedly the most unusual & intriguing documentary film every brought to the screen” that will expose “the stark realism of contemporary life in Europe.” Uh huh. What the film actually exposes is Russ Meyer’s Jingoistic/xenophobic thoughts on the sex trade in Europe (where he had learned his craft as a combat photographer during WWII) & deeply bizarre, self-contradictory relationship with women, whom he simultaneously worshipped & completely misunderstood. It’s fascinating stuff. Packing only short reels of film so they could pass as tourists, Russ & then-wife Eve traveled to a slew of major European cities to film this fiercely American diatribe: Paris, Stockholm, Hamburg, Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc. The original plan was to film candid footage on a (loudly humming) camera conspicuously “concealed” in a briefcase with a comically visible window cut out to expose the lens. This was ill-advised. Meyer soon discovered that attempting to film sex workers without their knowledge was a dangerous, life-jeopardizing tactic & decided to instead fake a significant portion of the footage once he was back on American soil. What’s left is a lot of touristy photojournaling, obviously staged footage in which the “hidden” camera itself is filmed in multiple scenes, occasional glimpses of the actually-real, actually-dangerous candid footage Meyer managed to sneak in a couple scattered red light districts (including one terrifying sequence in which he is essentially chasing a leather-clad dominatrix down the street), and some beautiful documentation of European strippers doing their thing. To borrow a phrase from Dana Carvey’s Johnny Carson impersonation, it’s weird, wild stuff.

As with Meyer’s previous four pictures, nearly all of the audible dialogue in Europe in the Raw is provided by an offscreen narrator, in this case Vic Perrin (who would return for Meyer’s next picture & final nudie cutie Heavenly Bodies!). Perrin’s industrial film intonations are strange glimpses into Meyer’s self-contradictory thoughts on both women & Europe, two subjects on which he is far from qualified to comment upon. Meyer’s simultaneously straight-laced & perverted views on these two subjects feel uncomfortable as soon as the opening monologue, where he states that Europe is, like a woman, a “land of many moods […] On the surface it is usually cheerful & happy, but somewhere underneath this pleasant exterior lies cruelty & lust,” going on to describe the continent as “sometimes a virgin, sometimes a libertine.” This is the first true glimpse into the bitter, bizarre war of the sexes that would populate nearly all of Meyer’s future works, to an almost obsessive degree. Europe in the Raw is full of these strangely acidic, but openly salacious musings. In one passage, he describes Amsterdam as “the most prostitute-infested Dutch city” where women are “displayed like sides of beef in the windows of a chop house”, potrays one red light district as “a cesspool of cheap hotels, tawdry bars, and wanton women”, and says of another that “The street clamors with the sound & fury of unbridled passion & manufactured lust, peddled wholesale at outrageous prices.” Worst of all he claims that in these supposed moral cesspools every sexual aberration can be bought except for rape, because every woman walking the street was for undoubtedly for sale. What an vile, insane thought. As enjoyable & transgressive as Russ’ films could be, he was always eager to remind you that at heart he’s a hopelessly cruel misanthrope & a bully, a real piece of shit.

What’s so peculiar about Meyer’s vilification of “women of easy virtue” & his skewed view of a Europe where “exhibition is the rule rather than the exception”, of course, is that he himself is, in essence, a peddler of smut. It’d be much easier to believe Europe in the Raw‘s prudish dialogue if its writer/director hadn’t previously made a fortune selling pin-up photographs & inventing the nudie cutie, essentially establishing himself as a remarkably talented softcore pornographer. For instance, when the narrator half-heartedly scorns European beaches for being “infested with bevies of bikini busters,” the first things that comes to mind is “Bikini Busters!”, the openly-drooling, dubious history of the bikini segment in Meyer’s previous film Erotica. Part of what makes Meyer’s best work so fascinating is this absurd sense of self-contradiction, especially in his treatment of women. Despite the often misogynistic war of the sexes vibes that infect much of his work, Meyer has a God-given knack for making women look powerful on film, (Tura Satana’s turn as Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! being the most infamous example). Although Meyer speaks ill of sex workers & burlesque dancers in Europe in the Raw, he also films them beautifully from drastically low angles that make them look gigantic & powerful. He had a way of verbally tearing women down in his films & in the press, but his obvious reverence for the gender permeates his visual work in an undeniable way and that bizarre dichotomy is noticeable for the first time in his career in Europe in the Raw.

With Europe in the Raw, you can feel the real Russ Meyer starting to show his true colors, hideous warts & all. Even so, he manages to incorporate some of the hokey humor from his previous nudie cutie work, like in an extended ping pong match staged at a (ridiculously fake) Dutch nudist camp, a gag where a chamber pot is emptied on a passing pedestrian, a scene where the Leaning Tower of Pisa rotates full circle like the hands of a clock, and (my personal favorite) an ungodly long sequence of German street signs that feature the words “Fart” & “Fahrt”. Speaking of the “Fart” sequence, finally coming into its own here is Meyer’s talent for blinding, rapid-fire editing. Flashes of European street signs, advertisements, food, bikes, toilets, neon lights, fine art and, of course, bare breasts overwhelm the viewer in a bewildering assault that would eventually reach a fever pitch in his 1970 picture Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Commercial vessels, automobiles, and steel architecture are also filmed in the same low, reverent angles the director films his burlesque dancers, establishing an aesthetic that what would eventually solidify itself as Russ Meyer’s America. All of the basic building blocks of Meyer’s ouevre are present for the first time in Europe in the Raw, right down to the lingering brutality of WWII. Meyer even once described the film (which he was evidently not too proud of, despite its obvious superiority to dreck like Eve & The Handyman and Wild Gals of the Naked West) simply as “Tits and War”. Honestly, if you had to boil the man’s entire career down to just two words, that wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Similarly, if you wanted to watch the majority of Meyer’s career without tuning in for the stinkers between the milestones, Europe in the Raw wouldn’t be a bad place to start either.

-Brandon Ledet

Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

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After the vignette structure that loosely held together his third “nudie cutie” picture, Erotica, Russ Meyer returned to feature length narratives for his fourth film, Wild Gals of the Naked West. Unfortunately, the same narrative slightness that worked well enough for The Immoral Mr. Teas to become a breakout success & singlehandedly launch the nudie cutie genre had become tiresome as soon as Meyer’s second picture, the impossibly dull Eve & The Handyman, and near sadistic by the time Meyer made Wild Gals of the Naked West. Wild Gals expands upon the strange quick cuts & surreal pastel-colored voids that distinguish Meyer’s work from other Mr. Teas imitators, but outside of a couple sparse visual quirks there’s nothing too remarkable about the film. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Wild Gals was more or less an an excuse for Meyer & friends to play Western-themed dress up in the desert. And, of course, to display bare breasts.

Our host for this burlesque take on playing cowboys & Indians is an old, drunken Western coot played by Jack Moran. Moran had previously provided the besides-the-point narration that made Erotica a mildly enjoyable, disorienting experience, but this was his first full collaboration with Meyer, both as an onscreen presence & as the sole credited screenwriter. Moran would later go on to pen some of Meyer’s best work of the 1960s (including the cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), but it’s hard to see too much promise in the razor thin screenplay he provides for Wild Gals of the Naked West. Even less dignified than his razor-thin screeplay is his onscreen portrayal of the old coot narrator, decked out in a hideously cheap costume complete with horrendously fake-looking eyebrows & mustache.

Much more exciting in her introduction to the Russ Meyer landscape is the actual old coot Princess Livingston, a toothless howl of a loon that would later appear in notable Meyer pictures like Mudhoney & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (not to mention an appearance in the Pufnstuff movie, of all things). Princess Livingston has a wild authenticity to her, making crazy eyes for the camera, cackling like a drunken witch, and calling to mind future featured players in Meyer-devotee John Waters’ films like the late, great Edith Massey. Wild Gals of the Naked West tries its best to cultivate a sense of unbridled chaos in shoddy, vaudevillian gags involving gorilla costumes, crossdressing, and pranks involving outhouses, but none of the film’s thematic shenanigans can even approach the cinematic lunacy Princess Livingston commands simply by being her wonderful self.

Besides the introductions of Jack Moran & Princess Livingston, Wild Gals is mostly significant in its over-indulgence in the pastel voids that made The Immoral Mr. Teas‘ hallucinogenic glimpses of nudity quaintly fascinating. Here, all visions of Old West saloons & brothels are confined to these otherworldly, pastel-colored spaces, populated by quick cuts of hand-drawn pianos, pasties-covered breasts, hideous drunks downing untold gallons of liquor, strange rubber masks, and six-shooters going off indiscriminately. If the entirety of the film’s action was contained in these nudity-filled bursts of drunken chaos, Wild Gals of the Naked West might be among the best of Russ Meyer’s nudie cutie work. Instead it’s severely bogged down by hokey gags involving the aforementioned gorilla suit, sex workers lassoing johns onto second floor balconies, and truly awful Native American caricatures (although I did admittedly enjoy the ones where the Native men were operating WWII gear like grenade launchers & Tommy guns). All in all, Wild Gals may be mildly fascinating for a Russ Meyer completist looking for early glimpses of Jack Moran, Princess Livingston, and the director’s trademark rapid-fire editing, but after previously watching three similarly vapid nudie cuties from Meyer in a row, I found the ordeal somewhat tiresome.

-Brandon Ledet

Grandma’s Boy (2006)

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(Unrated edition, viewed 9/8/2015)

Starts slow, but delivers consistent lowbrow humor. Predictable, but a solid entry for its genre.

Allen Covert puts in a dopey but lovable performance as Alex, a middle aged video game tester who moves in with his titular Grandma after losing his apartment. He finds himself learning to navigate life with his new elderly roommates (wonderfully fun performances by Doris Roberts, Shirley Jones, and Shirley Knight), the challenges of working with a company of gamers, and his affection for the new project manager, played by Linda Cardellini. Throw in a few gross-out gags, a hefty dose of stoner humor and a cameo by Rob Schneider, and you’ve got the regular Adam Sandler formula.

Grandma’s Boy works pretty well. Interestingly enough, it manages to pull off a convincing bait-and-switch with the main character, Alex. Alex begins the film as a schlubby loser, difficult to like and not easy to root for. By the end of the movie, he’s a goofy, kind protagonist who works hard to keep his Grandma happy, develop his own video game, and win the girl. There isn’t a single other twist in the entire movie, and that’s ok.

I recommend this movie to viewers looking for a stoner flick that’s engaging, if lowbrow, without being thought-provoking. Not a bad pizza night or sick day movie.

-Erin Kinchen