Erotica (1961)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

bear

twohalfstar

campstamp

After the somewhat labored narratives of his first two nudie cutie films, The Immoral Mr. Teas and Eve & The Handyman, Russ Meyer stripped away a few layers of narrative pretense for his third feature, Erotica. A series of ostensibly erotic vignettes, Erotica is little more than a loosely connected series of in-motion pin-up shoots strung together to reach a feature length (barely more than an hour, all things told). After the mundane & oddly nudity-light slightness of Eve & The Handyman, however, Erotica‘s loose anthology of naked girls & disorienting narration set-ups feel like a godsend. Just as the narrator of Mr. Teas hilariously droned on about such non sequiturs as the absurdities of modern life & the history of bathing while the screen was filled with the film’s true main attraction (bare breasts), Erotica‘s vignettes are each nudity-filled exercises in dissonance, establishing a strange contrast between the images on display & the completely besides the point narration (provided by Jack Moran, who would later write one of Meyer’s undeniable classics, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) that compliment them.

The wraparound

The segment that binds this loose anthology is a self-reflective piece about the production of nudie cuties in general. In Erotica‘s opening minutes Moran rambles on about how a film evolves from an idea to an outline to a treatment to a shooting script until, eventually, “projectors explode their images across the movie screens of America.” Posing the nudie cutie to follow as a series of “intimate, moving portraits of women […] made by adults, for adults”, Erotica bends over backwards to remind you that it is but a simple, entertaining diversion that amounts to “one hour, a very small segment of the day”. In other words, don’t get your hopes up for anything too significant.

“Naked Innocence”

Perhaps the least disorienting of the film’s five segments, “Naked Innocence” makes the brave decision to actually match the off-screen narration to the action on display. A woman explains that she was, more or less, just too damned horny & tired of being stared at by strange men on city streets so she retreated to the woods to calm down. Stripping nude & enjoying an impromptu tanning session & nude dip in a stream, our narrator starts to muse about how even Nature is trying to seduce her. She describes the Sun as a “hot, burning eye probing my bareness” & the feeling of water on skin like “many hands moving against you.” Originally escaping city life to avoid the oppressive male gaze, she discovers that even in Nature she is not safe from salacious oggling. If nothing else, this is a much stranger idea than anything you’d encounter in Mr. Teas or The Handyman, but at the same time all three properties really don’t amount to much more than a reason to gawk at naked women, the very thing this character is trying to escape.

“Beauties, Bubbles”

The second vignette keeps the first’s weirdness improbably rolling with an even stranger idea. Upping the on-screen nudity from not one, but three beauties, “Beauties, Bubbles” depicts a trio of nude models bathing each other in a swimming pool in what, without the narration, could’ve just have easily been titled “Boobs, Boobies”. As with the first segment, it’s the narration that makes the accompanying images so odd. As the girls bathe each other using swimming pools, trash cans, and army helmets full of soapy water (sometimes in the pastel voids that populate Meyer’s other nudie cuties), an offscreen East Coast plumber poses the segment as a PSA to help promote the act of daily bathing in hopes of boosting work for plumbers in general. There’s a goofy dissonance between the plummer’s nonsensical words & the pin-ups in motion imagery at here that’s enjoyably disorienting . . . when it’s not testing your patience.

“The Bare & The Bear”

Speaking of testing your patience, the exact same format from the plummer’s segment is repeated in “The Bare & The Bear”. There’s only one mild variation: instead of promoting bathing, this segment is promoting the sales of bearskins by, how else, showing a nude model wearing nothing but a bearskin intercut with images of real life bears. It’s a very strange sensation to flip back & forth from monstrous bears to a woman rolling around in the nude, especially once the narrator goes off on tangents about “beatniks & coffee drinkin’,” but back to back with the plumber segment the weight of the film’s mercifully short runtime becomes a little laborious.

“Nudists on the High Seas!”

Continuing the diminishing returns of the film’s segments, a narrator drones on about “damsel deckhands” & the history of women being excluded from sailing as the titular “Nudists on the High Seas” sun their nude selves of the deck of a sailboat. It’s nothing much to speak of.

“The Nymphs”

Seemingly becoming bored with itself, Erotica completely devolves here. The narration erratically switches from rambling about subjects as varied as botanical gardens, the sex life of the amoeba, and proper card-playing etiquette, the movie just completely falls apart & loses faith in itself in an irreverent & self-referential way as the models combine previous segments’ affinity for bathing & sunbathing into a single incomprehensible vignette.

“Bikini Busters!”

Falling apart even further, Erotica concludes with a chaotic segment about the history of the bikini. In the only segment to approach the purple prose absurdity of the “Naked Innocence” opener, “Bikini Busters!” features this insane thought: “This is a bathing suit. And this is a girl. Separately these are both in a sense aesthetic, appealing, but together a certain chemistry takes place & the living compliments the inanimate.” “Bikini Busters!” is deliciously empty work that features not only Meyer’s affinity for visually comparing a well-built woman to a well-built steel structure, but it also calls back to both the half-hearted disgust with the male gaze of the first segment (this time featuring the only on-screen men of the film, all ogglers) & the self-referential musings about the nature of the nudie cutie in the wraparound segment, making direct nods to the two Meyer pictures that precede Erotica by displaying their advertisements poolside. “Bikini Busters!” follows the history of the bathing suit from the time the biblical Eve first covered herself with a leaf through a possible future of space-age pasties, a very silly & improbable endeavour that I doubt was well-researched.

By the time an over-excited Russ Meyer (presumably playing himself) falls into a swimming pool trying to film the nude models on display & breaks his (amusingly fake-looking) camera at the end of “Bikini Busters!” Erotica reveals itself as what it truly is: a light romp without too much of anything on its mind outside of bare breasts & cheap jokes. It’s neither the height nor the depth of Meyer’s nudie cutie work, but it is occasionally amusing in its narrative dissonance & surprising attacks on the male gaze in its opening & closing segments (considering that the film itself is an act of leering). However, you could easily cut out at least three of the film’s six segments & retain its full range of amusement, which isn’t exactly high praise for an anthology film that barely lasts an hour from front to end.

-Brandon Ledet

Pet Sematary (1989)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

(Viewed 9/2/2015, available on Netflix)

I hate to come down so harshly on a movie screen-written by Stephen King as an adaptation of his own book. It’s possible that I’m coming at it from a bad perspective, like attempting to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey after seeing all of the derivative works. Maybe after years of fast-cut digital movies, I don’t have the attention span to appreciate the pacing. Maybe having read the book first, I’ve ruined my shot at enjoying the movie.

Honestly, I just don’t think it’s a very good movie, following the general trend of Stephen King films. Pet Sematary comes with enough elements to make it truly terrifying, but it never quite gets off the ground. There’s a beautiful young family whose perfect life goes terribly wrong in a perfectly real-world way. Ancient, evil Powers Beyond Human Comprehension bring back the beloved, but brings them back . . . wrong. A rational man of science is driven to acts of madness. A possessed child kills everything in sight. Gory special effects are, well, effectively gory. All of these things should come together to take the viewer on a creepy descent into madness and metaphysical uncertainty. It just never gets there. The characters just sort of wander through the movie.

I truly enjoyed Fred Gwynne’s performance as the old Mainer Jud, which is no surprise because I loved him as Herman Munster. He’s easily the best and most believable actor in the movie, and I would have loved to have seen more of his relationships with the other characters.

I can recommend Pet Sematary to anyone merely looking for a Stephen King film or anyone interested in the Fred Gwynne’s post Munsters work. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for most viewers, simply because it’s not very good, and not bad enough to enjoy.

-Erin Kinchen

Eve & The Handyman (1961)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

onestar

campstamp

Russ Meyer’s goof of a debut film, The Immoral Mr. Teas, made the future cult cinema giant a filthy pile of money for something that was basically a pin-up picture in motion. Even Meyer himself, usually prone to larger than life arrogance, admitted that Teas was  dumb idea that happened to get lucky due to excellent cultural timing. He once explained to biographer David K. Frasier, “It musn’t come across as some kind of great planning. I did it as I went along. […] Teas was a fluke, an absolute fluke. I had no real idea when I started. All I had was [Bill] Teas, three girls, and my dentist and my attorney for assistants.” Filmed over just a few days with limited resources, Mr. Teas, fluke or not, earned a name for Meyer & established an entire new genre of exploitation film-making: the “nudie cutie” (essentially a mainstream, winking, soft-core version of the stag film). It’s no wonder, then, that Meyer immediately returned to the Mr. Teas format & basically imitated his own creation for his next five features. There are varying levels of quality to Meyer’s Teas-imitating, by-the-numbers nudie cutie pictures, but it’s fairly safe to say that his second feature, Eve & The Handyman, is the worst, most unimaginative one of the bunch.

The titular Eve of this nudie cutie stinker is no other than Eve Meyer, the second (but by no means the last) wife of the film’s pervert director. In his pre-movie career, Russ had a ball photographing his buxom wife in the nude for “glamor magazines” & pin-ups. When it came to committing her body to moving pictures, however, Russ refused to deliver the goods & hides her top model body behind a loose-fitting trench coat for much of the film. The only charm that overlaps with Mr. Teas is in Eve’s off-screen narration (which she reportedly wrote herself, despite Meyer’s “written by” credit at the film’s beginning) which coos vague phrasings like “I’m a big girl in a big town with a big job” as she silently spies on a handyman for reasons that are withheld until the film’s final gag. There’s much less nudity than there was in Mr. Teas (with none contributed by the titular Eve), which means that the strange pastel voids that added a visual flair to most of Russ’ nudie cutie work is mostly absent, save a few isolated scenes. When it comes to the climactic moment that the extended burlesque act has been building to, Eve drops the spy act & removes her trenchcoat, revealing herself to be a “Strump Brushes” salesman hunting down the titular handyman for a business deal. It’s possible that revealing that gag in this review may have spoiled the movie for you uninitiated, but I promise watching it in real time spoils the experience even more.

Eve & The Handyman is, above all, a waste of time. The film starts with an ungodly gag in which a shrill alarm clock rings incessantly despite attempts to turn it off. At first I was turned off by this incessant annoyance, but by the end of the picture I was desperate for the alarm clock to return & make me feel anything at all. The best laugh I got of out of the entire film was the opening credits, in which Russ thoroughly makes sure that you know he produced, directed, wrote, photographed, and edited the picture himself. As for Eve Meyer, she was far from a captivating screen presence here, but her contributions to Russ’ sexploitation work thankfully didn’t stop with this nudie cutie stinker. Eve went on to produce nearly all of Russ’ 1960s films under the moniker Eve Pictures well after the dissolution of their marriage, proving to be extremely useful both in taking financial risks on his batshit insane visions and in nailing down distribution deals & getting deadbeat cinemas to pay up their share. I hope that Eve & The Handyman served as some kind of cherished compensation for all she did for Russ down the line (especially considering how awful he could be to women), because it’s doubtful the film will bring much pleasure to anyone other than Eve herself.

-Brandon Ledet

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)

/ swampflix / 15 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

In more ways than one, The Immoral Mr. Teas is a right place, right time kind of motion picture success. Long before legendary cult movie director & eccentric asshole Russ Meyer set the world on fire with films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls & Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he was a combat photographer that found a post-WWII career shooting pin-up models for “glamor magazines”. With nudist camp “exposés” & the high class pornography of Playboy magazine paving the way for mainstream acceptance of nude modeling on film, it was only a matter of time until someone brought nude photography out of underground screenings of stag films to much more visible (not to mention more profitable), conventional cinemas. With The Immoral Mr. Teas, Russ Meyer simply filled a need. While many exploitative sex films of the time heavily moralized & scolded the very salaciousness they depicted in order to sneak pass the censors, The Immoral Mr. Teas combined moving pictures of naked girls with the comedy genre for the first time since the Hays Code first took its chokehold on Hollywood. Although it’s hard to see exactly what the fuss about the relatively tame & decidedly hokey film was in the context of modern sensibilities, Mr. Teas essentially opened the floodgates for playful nudity on film, giving birth to a genre adorably named “the nudie cutie” & fighting many a censorship battle across the country, from which Hollywood would later benefit greatly.

Presented as a sort of comedic documentary on modern living, Mr. Teas only thinly pretends to be anything more than an excuse to display naked breasts. As the only dialogue heard throughout the film is a hilariously overwritten narration, the film’s endless visual gags & gradual stripteasing call to mind both the artforms of vaudeville & burlesque. The titular Mr. Teas, played by Meyers’ war buddy Bill Teas, is a horny, bargain basement version of Charlie Chaplan’s Tramp. Early in the film Teas openly oggles the barely-covered breasts of dental assistants & barkeeps in a leering way that well earns his “immoral” moniker in the film’s title. True to burlesque fashion, Meyer’s camera gradually reveals more & more female skin as the nudity escalates. What starts with cleavage escalates to a leg being bared to a pin-up photo shoot on the beach (as a nod to Meyer’s profession/passion) where breasts are cleverly obscured from the audience behind objects like a well-placed elbow or a camera. After a loosely defined incident at the dentist that leaves Teas magically altered by Novocaine, our peeping tom protagonist is suddenly struck by intense reveries that overrides his mind with hallucinations of every woman he meets in the nude, giving birth to the “nudie cutie” picture. At this point, the narration fades a great deal, leaving us alone with a shrill, accordion-heavy soundtrack & what will eventually become Meyer’s onscreen calling cards: insane editing choices & strikingly large breasts.

Although lighthearted nudity in motion obviously doesn’t hold the same shock value today that it would’ve fifty-six years ago, there’s plenty of jarring weirdness to The Immoral Mr, Teas that makes it worthwhile as a cultural relic. Much of the charm is dependent on the overreaching narration, which adds a level of snarky commentary on the absurdities of modern living that feels very much in tune to the early works of (my favorite band of all time) DEVO. Much like the gradual escalation of nudity, the narration ratchets up its absurdity over time. It starts by contrasting the calming nature of rocks & trees to the much more constricting traffic, pills, and tight underwear of modern man, but eventually gives way to over-the-top, Criswell-esque statements like “Modern man must, in the course of his endeavors, always keep his eyes on the future. For who knows how the windy zephyrs of fate may twist & cross two lives?” & “And so ends another day, another seeming eternity in the complex scheme of things.” I think the best laugh I got from the entire film was when the off-screen narrator, voiced by Edward J. Lasko, droned about photosynthesis, the density of water, famous discoveries made by sea, and the history of bathing all to justify Teas peeping on women as they skinny dip. It’s a ridiculous, disorienting moment & a tactic that Meyer will repeat several times in his five redundant nudie cuties that immediately followed Mr. Teas.

In addition to the film’s historical significance & ludicrous narration, Mr. Teas is also an early glimpse into the visual weirdness Meyer would eventually push to absurd extremes in Faster, Pussycat & Beyond the Valley. His odd Dutch angles, rapid cuts of mechanical equipment & ample bussoms, and general sense of feverish horndoggery are all present in the film, just on a smaller scale. In order to avoid having the film’s shoots shut down for indecency, he also filmed all of Teas’ hallucinations indoors, placing the film’s naked women in these strange pastel-colored voids that feel like they exist outside of space & time. It’s a genuinely strange touch that, like the besides-the-point narration, would be repeated incessantly in his five nudie cutie follow-ups to Teas. You can tell that Meyer had a ball filming & editing his first foray into motion pictures & it’s no coincidence that the director’s cameo in the film is as a rowdy strip club patron shouting emphatically at a burlesque dancer. The Immoral Mr. Teas is nowhere near the heights (or the depths, honestly) of where Meyer’s career would eventually go, but it is an appropriately silly start for a man whose passion was making movies about large breasts.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood Massacre (1991)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

campstamp

On the last Sunday of each month, the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz in downtown Austin screens straight-to-VHS movies for their “Video Vortex” series. For August, this film was an almost forgotten flick helmed by venerable Baltimore-based director Don Dohler. Dohler was a cinephile from an early age who took a brief career detour into working on the underground comix circuit before founding Cinemagic magazine, which was purchased by long-running genre mag Starlog in 1979. In 1976, Dohler made his first film, The Alien Factor (released in 1978), with a reported budget of less than $4,000; the film was a Ted Turner cable staple throughout much of the 1980s. The Alien Factor, like most of Dohler’s work, was a B-grade creature feature about an alien crash-landing in/near Baltimore and proceeding to be a murderous nuisance. After going in a slightly different direction with 1980’s Fiend (in which an evil spirit possesses the corpse of a piano teacher in order to wreak havoc), Dohler returned to the “alien crashes, deadly hijinx ensue” mold with 1982’s Nightbeast and 1985’s Galaxy Invader (the former of which featured an original score composed by sixteen-year-old J.J. Abrams, who corresponded with Dohler after becoming a fan of Cinemagic and essentially begged to be involved in a future production of Dohler’s).

According to Alamo art director and programmer Joseph A. Ziemba, Dohler’s early work on the film that would become Blood Massacre was shot on video but piqued the interest of several film investors, who asked that he shoot the rest of the picture on film, including reshooting the 45 minutes that had already been produced. He later presented them with an incomplete working print of the film in 1988, and was told that they would get back to him. They never did. After quite some time, Dohler walked in to a video rental outlet in 1991 and discovered that the incomplete film had been released on VHS without his knowledge when he saw it sitting on a shelf. Dohler wouldn’t make another film for eleven years.

This is, presumably, the reason that the plot structure of Blood Massacre seems so out-of-joint. The transitions between scenes are often abrupt, and it sometimes feels that there is more filler dialogue than final dialogue being spoken onscreen. Consequently, the anti-hero protagonist of the film (Charlie Rizzo, played by frequent Dohler collaborator George Stover) suffers from inconsistent characterization, which isn’t helped by the fact that portraying jovial everymen is well within Stover’s acting range—Rizzo’s post-‘Nam grizzled nihilism, not so much. Stover’s not a bad actor, but he fails to have the kind of screen presence required to make Rizzo believably disturbed, and the inconsistency in the movie’s tone doesn’t help. Rizzo kills two people in the film’s opening scene with little provocation and for virtually no consequences in order to steal a small wad of bills; later, his bank-robbing partner has an emotional crisis after the collateral death of one person during a robbery that nets barely $700 dollars. In another scene, Rizzo supposedly murders a woman in an extremely violent way, but it’s hilariously apparent that he is repeatedly stabbing the table next to her, complete with repeated wooden thunks. There’s a pretty decent story in the film, which might have been saved with proper editing, but the reach far exceeds the grasp of the film’s budget and troubled production, and it’s a shame that viewers never got a chance to see Dohler’s complete vision of this narrative.

The film opens with Rizzo, a Vietnam veteran, being thrown out of a bar after aggressively berating a waitress for collecting his not-quite-empty beer can. He waits in the bar owner’s car; after they close for the night, he murders the man and his wife. After the title, we meet a young woman (Lucille Joile) approaching the home of the Parkers, a farming family with a room for rent. She introduces herself to the family’s daughter, Chrissy (Grace Stahl), and explains that she is an art student who has come to the countryside for the landscape painting opportunities it provides. She also likes the family matriarch’s stew, which seems like a throwaway line but becomes important later. (This character does not appear again before the final act, and it would seem that most of her scenes were planned but not shot, although I can only infer that this is the case.) Elsewhere, Rizzo returns to his fellow criminals:Jimmy (James DiAngelo), whose life Rizzo saved in the war; Pauly (Thomas Humes), Jimmy’s brother; and Monica (Lisa DeFuso), Jimmy’s girlfriend, who openly despises Rizzo. Following an aborted bank robbery, the foursome robs a video store (Rizzo picks up a copy of Nightbeast, which is a nice touch), killing a female clerk in the process. Their car breaks down, and Pauly and Monica take off on foot to find gas before flagging down a car being driven by Elizabeth (Robin London), who happens to be the elder daughter of the Parker family. The gang takes her hostage and forces her to take them back to her home, and the interesting part of the film, obviously inspired by the late Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, begins.

Rizzo and company meet Mr. (Richard Ruxton) and Mrs. (Anne Frith) Parker, and there’s some general strangeness about them. Pauly searches the rest of the house and says that there’s no one else there aside from the family, and there’s no mention of the young painter from the earlier scenes. Elizabeth in particular is an odd duck, displaying no apparent fear and seeming, if anything, bored (and slightly aroused) by her captors. She showers and seduces Rizzo, and the two exchange in a truly kinky sex scene (Google “bloodplay fetishism” if you’re curious–on second thought, don’t). A detective (Herb Otter, Jr.) comes to the Parker farmhouse, but Mr. Parker convinces him to leave while a gun is held to his back. Realizing that the heat will be on soon, the thieves prepare to skedaddle, but not before checking to see if the Parkers have anything of value worth stealing. What they actually discover, however, is the young art student from the beginning of the film, who is locked in a closet. They free her; she warns them that the Parkers are cannibals, then runs for her life. She doesn’t make it far, however, as she is captured and killed by Mr. Parker, as is the detective. Only Rizzo survives long enough to hide overnight in the woods, where he sets to work crafting homemade mines and building an impromptu long-range weapon that is basically a sling shot that shoots blades for a handheld circular saw. He returns the next night to exact his revenge.

Like I said, there’s a some decent plotting on display here, and it’s impossible to look back after two and a half decades and say how much better the film might have worked if Dohler had been allowed to smooth the film’s rough edges. As it stands, there are some neat visual elements (Rizzo’s nightmare sequence in the woods is a standout montage of experimental editing) and some that are… not so great (Dohler couldn’t resist revealing that the Parkers are monsters of some kind, although the pulsating air bladders in the Mr. Parker monster head are sickeningly effective). The film’s score is also quite good, featuring great snare drum work and an early synth leitmotif that really deserves to be in a better film. As a whole, however, Blood Massacre shows its seams as an aborted feature. The only reason you or I have access to this movie is because of a broken promise, and above all else, it really shows. If you manage to catch it on late night cable or it materializes on Netflix, check it out, but don’t go out of your way to track it down.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Introducing: The Swampflix Canon

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

Although we’ve fairly easy critics (especially when it comes to trash cinema) & have reviewed hundred of films since we first launched in January, it’s been interesting to see how few & how disparate our selections have been that exceed a four star rating. Over the last eight months we’ve given only two dozen films a rating of 4.5 of 5 stars, and they’re as wildly varied as a mindless 80s slasher flick, a Paul Rudd superhero movie, a pro wrestling action comedy starring famous monsters, and a Björk concert film. We’re turning out to be a wildly goofy & oddly dissonant bunch and it’s starting to show in the movies we profess our love for.

In light of this growing list of targets for our critical gushing, we’ve begun to collect our reviews that exceed a four star rating on a page we’re calling The Swampflix Canon. All 24 reviews that have met this one criteria so far are listed in alphabetical order on the new page for easy access & I’m certain more will be added shortly. If you’re interested in a starting point for where to dive in, here’s the list of the nine titles that we have awarded a five star rating so far: Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Duke of Burgundy, Monster Brawl, Paris Is Burning, Peeping Tom, Pieces, Possession, Profondo rosso (aka Deep Red), and What We Do in the Shadows.  The rest of the list can be found here.

As always, Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet

White God (2015)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

White God opens with an immediate delivery of its basic hook: a canine revolution. Our young teen protagonist Lili is shown biking down empty city streets, passing the same vacant cars & eerie urban voids that begin 28 Days Later. Before you can piece together an answer to “What happened here?” Lili meets a canine flood. Hundreds of real-life pups chase her down the road, suggesting some kind of Dogpocalypse. Even in these opening minutes you’re overwhelmed with the feeling that White God is an instant classic or, at the very least, something you’re not likely to see too many times in your life. The trick is once it has you on the hook with a taste of what’s to come, it has to earn the grand scale lunacy of that moment, which the film backtracks to accomplish with an intense tale of (somewhat supernatural) revenge.

Although Lili is first shown bracing the Dogpocalypse by herself, she’s far from alone in this world. Her pet mutt Hagen is Lili’s right hand dog, forming a strong sense of solidarity with her as the pair is passed off to her meat inspector father for a three month visit. Lili’s father is not fond of the dog, to say the least, and at first it’s tough to see his tenderness for his own daughter as well. The parallels between Lili & Hagen are established as early as when they’re being passed off to the nonplussed meat inspector at his slaughterhouse workplace. As they’re walked to his car, two cows are literally marched to the slaughter, hammering home the metaphor as much as possible in visual shorthand. As Hagen is shouted at, dragged by the collar, isolated, and abused throughout the film, Lili is similarly pushed around by the cops, teachers, and parental figures of her life. Her coming of age story poses a teenage girl’s lack of autonomy to be just as miserable & vulnerable as that of an abused street dog. As Hagen hurts his paw, Lili injures her leg. As Hagen’s filmed galloping down city streets, Lili prowls the very same locations on her bicycle, etc.

As similar as their troubled paths may be, however, it’s difficult to argue that Lili’s struggles with authority figures & indifferent older crushes are nearly as devastating as the indignities Hagen suffers. A mixed-breed street dog, Hagen is cruelly treated by every human being in his life in a gradually escalating gauntlet of abuse. After the cold beratement he suffers from Lili’s father, Hagen is abandoned roadside & left to fend for himself. A large part of the movie’s narrative takes a dog’s POV in a style that’s much more akin to the harsh realities of Baxter than it is to Homeward Bound. The confusing chaos of ducking through traffic, scavenging for puddles to drink & garbage to eat, and curiously pawing at roadkill are only the start to Hagen’s perilous journey. He initially makes enemies with animal control, a villain the film holds common with Shaun the Sheep & Babe 2: Pig in the City, but then his growing list of wrongdoers escalates to include butcher shop employees, desperate & homeless fiends, and heartless animal shelter brutes. Worst of all is an organized dogfighting ring (portrayed here in disturbing detail) that systematically abuses Hagen into becoming a trained killer instead of the sappy sweetheart he was in Lili’s protection. Speaking of Lili, even she becomes culpable in Hagen’s abuse as she gets so distracted with her own life that she gives up looking for her best friend, who’d been left to survive alone.

The good news is that as much as White God tests the strength & patience of animal lovers’ hearts (that dogfighting ring sequence is particularly brutal), it also delivers the immense sweetness of abused dogs’ revenge in a way so satisfying & so calculated that it approaches the supernatural. The final half hour of the film, which features extended sequences of Dogpocalypse mayhem & very precise acts of revenge on Hagen’s list of enemies, reaches a grand scale crescendo of chaos that rivals anything you’d see in a more well-funded natural horror film, like a Godzilla or a King Kong. White God pulls a surprising amount of pathos out of a dog’s dialogue-free journey through various forms of cruel captivity, whether he’s displaying the unbridled freedom of a leashless run, assembling a gang of dogpound miscreants (in curiously butsniffing-free exchanges), or, sadly, transforming from a kind soul to a hardened killer. Dogs really do just want to please us. They want to make us proud, asking only for love & attention in return. Even if you can see where the movie is going in its final minutes as Lili answers for her own participation in Hagen’s abandonment & resulting abuse, the climax still hits hard. Both in the sheer joy of beholding seemingly all of the world’s abused dogs exact their revenge on us human scum & in the tender intimacy of watching two wounded animals, Hagen & Lili, facing off & reconciling their pasts, White God makes every ounce of suffering that came before the climax well worth it. It’s a rare, satisfying conclusion of a genuinely strange film that gratifies both in its willingness to go over the top & in its ability to touch you emotionally.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: The Boyfriend School (1990)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon and (newcomers) Erin & Boomer watch The Boyfriend School (1990).

Britnee: As a fan of uncomfortably terrible films, I was more than excited to select The Boyfriend School (aka Don’t Tell Her It’s Me) for September’s Movie of the Month. This is a film that was washed away with the other thousands of unsuccessful romantic comedies of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, but it’s truly a diamond in the rough. What makes The Boyfriend School stand out from the rest is, well, just about everything. The film’s cast includes the crème de la crème of chintzy actors: Steve Guttenberg, Shelley Long, Jami Gertz, and Kyle MacLachlan. Who can resist a line-up like that? Throw in a crap ton of cringe worthy, knee-slapping moments, and you have one hell of a movie.

The film follows the sad, sad life of Gus Kubicek (Guttenberg), a depressed cartoon artist that just won a battle against Hodgkin’s disease. His overbearing sister, Lizzie (Long), is a romance novelist, and she is disturbingly obsessed with getting him a girlfriend. She decides to prey on a young journalist, Emily (Gertz), and attempts to force Emily and Gus to become a couple. It’s extremely difficult to sit through the first half of this film without doing a couple of facepalms. Every ounce of Gus’s embarrassment and humiliation seeps from the screen and into your soul, and just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Lizzie creates a persona for Gus, and he morphs from a chubby, hairless Average Joe into a hunky biker from New Zealand named Lobo Marunga. Guttenberg ends up looking like Mad Max and George Michael’s love child, and it’s absolutely amazing.

Brandon, what are your feelings on the love story between Gus and Emily? Should she have ran after him or away from him?

Brandon: Discomfort is certainly the story at the heart of this film & Emily The Love Interest had so, so many discomforting reasons to run away from Gus that the movie was honestly pretty gutsy to go for the traditional romcom ending at the airport than the much more appropriate option of a murder-suicide. At the risk of spoiling a decades old Steve Guttenberg vehicle for anyone who could possibly care, let’s get this out of the way: Gus violated Emily. He doesn’t come clean about not being Lobo until the morning after they slept together. That’s pretty fucked. The only time Emily met Gus as himself he was in full Uncle Fester cosplay (because of the cancer, God help our souls) and the two of them were force-fed jellyfish salad (a dish Emily humorously describes as “chewy tears”) in a scene that makes Shelley Long’s character out to be less of a romance novelist & more of a torturer whose techniques rival those of Vlad the Impaler or the Holy Inquisition. Even if Emily saw something in Gus through the façade of Lobo Marunga, she should at least have ran far away to escape his sister’s evil clutches.

The strange thing is that even though Gus is a certifiable monster for not coming clean before doing the deed, it’s still difficult not to feel bad for him because he starts the film as a visible monster. In the opening scenes Gus is a Hunchback of Notre Dame type who’s locked himself away in his seaside cabin to draw cartoons & die alone so his Jack Russell terrier can pick at his bones. It very well may have been his sister that motivated him to win his battle with cancer, but she uses his extra time on Earth to remind him of how sad & ugly the disease has made him as a means to try to whip him back into shape & “get himself out there”. No one comes across looking good in this exchange. Gus is is a horrifying shell of a man. His sister is a Type A sociopath who takes great glee in playing God. Emily is an astute journalist who can’t figure out that this dude (that she has met before) who is most definitely not from New Zealand is not from New Zealand. There are very few traces of dignity or humanity to be found in this film & the resulting cringe fest is oddly fascinating.

Erin, am I exaggerating here? Is this kind of absence of dignity or recognizable humanity normal for a romcom or does The Boyfriend School push the pained awkwardness into unusually morbid territory?

Erin: I have got to agree that this movie definitely pushed the boundaries of taste, even for a self-consciously cheesy romcom.  I’d almost categorize it as a cringe comedy, instead.  I can only hope that the actors protested their roles in this wreck of a movie.  It’s set in a strange and unrealistic world, a caricature of a reality populated by caricatures.  Yes.  Undignified and inhuman and inhumane.  The most real character is Annabelle, Gus’s toddler niece, who has a speech delay and has somehow survived Lizzie’s negligent and neurotic parenting.

Maybe we’re missing something with this movie, or there was a disagreement between the editing team and the director.  If the movie as watched is the intended product, then The Boyfriend School might be a comprehensible work if the watcher forgets the romantic comedy genre and watches it as an exploration of the universe of romance novels.  It has all of the hallmarks of a trashy novel: unrealistic universe mechanics, tragic back stories, completely unbelievable plot turns, romantically picturesque settings, unethical sexual encounters . . .

Boomer, what do you think? Were we mislead by marketing?  Is there any redeeming quality to be found at all in this movie?

Boomer: It took me nearly a week to track down a copy of this movie, and the copy that I did find was the kind of bare-bones affair rushed onto the market in the early days of  DVD to fluff up home video collections; in fact, it has one solitary “special” feature: the theatrical trailer, which I watched before the movie, out of habit. I’m not sure if it was the American market trailer, since it features the alternate title, Don’t Tell Her It’s Me, but the narrative outlined in the promo recapitulates the film’s plot fairly well: unlucky man is made over into a precognitive Dog the Bounty Hunter cosplayer by his sister in order to win the heart of the girl of his dreams. The trailer does make Kyle McLachlan’s Trout character out to be more of an innocent in the end of his relationship, rather than the two dimensional cuckolder that he is in the film, and it fails to show that Gus will end up, as Brandon notes, violating Emily; the marketing is pretty straightforward in broad strokes and (mostly) in the details. At the end of the movie, I thought to myself, “Yes, that was certainly a movie.” The 1990s were the decade of the romcom, a short period in which so many films of the genre were made that the concept itself was subject to so much dilution and derivativeness that Meg Ryan went from starring in such straightforward love stories as falling for a rival storeowner in a remake of The Shop Around the Corner to being swept off her feet by angels and handsome timelost scientific pioneers (that was actually 2001, but you get the picture). As a cultural artifact, The Boyfriend School is charming in its simplicity and straightforwardness, if not necessarily in its subject matter.

As Emily says to Lizzie near the end of the film, the former hates the latter in the abstract, but can’t hate her in the flesh. I would wager that this is true of virtually any character played by Shelley Long; she’s just an intensely likable actress with a great sense of comic timing, and it’s hard to be certain that the enjoyment I got out of this movie would have been present without her. Long brings an effervescent effusiveness to a role that would likely play as more malicious had Lizzie been portrayed by another actress. Jami Gertz is also quite charming here, despite the fact that her character is paper-thin. During the time it takes Gus to grow a full head of hair, learn to poorly impersonate a Kiwi, lose those horrible face prosthetics that are supposed to simulate illness, and sweat off all the cotton stuffed around his waistline, what do we see Emily doing? Shaving her legs. We don’t see anything of her relationship with Trout, or her working on a different story (at one point Gus does read an article of hers about snakehandling, the first paragraph of which is actually about that religious practice, while the rest is advertising copy about desktop publishing software–great job there, propmaster), and yet I felt her character was likable in her sweetness, if a bit obtuse, even before the film felt the need to go full Liz Lemon with her mud-sprayed, torn dress airport run. Even Gus, a handsome creep played with discomfiting ease by Guttenberg, comes off as hatable in the abstract but not the flesh, and, to his credit, Gus is only at Emily’s the night of the violation to come clean about his double identity, although he stops putting forth an effort on this front almost immediately, for the sake of plot contrivance.

If anything, it was the tight plotting of this movie that struck me as a pleasant surprise, especially in a film with such low stakes, so to speak. In contrast to a lot of the romcoms that followed in the next ten or so years, there’s not a single wasted line or moment, and there are a lot of subtle touches and ironies that I found to be inspired, or at least novel. The film introduces the “Unkow” clue and the fact that Lizzie’s dog only likes Gus early in the movie, with a kind of deft subtlety that belies the over-the-top facade of a somewhat high concept story. Lizzie is constantly trying to impress upon Anabelle the potential consequences of her adorable but dangerous random childlike actions, but she fails to foresee the consequences of her own meddling in things that she shouldn’t. She even mentions that she has to get Gus to the metaphorical last page of the bodice-ripping romance she’s constructing in her mind; for her, what matters is getting to that final paragraph of sexual conquest, and what happens afterwards is irrelevant because, in her novels, nothing happens next. It’s a formulaic, cookie-cutter movie, but with the kind of foreshadowing and payoff that you wouldn’t expect from a movie sharing shelf space with other forgettable fare like Something to Talk About, Addicted to Love, or Simply Irresistible (why were so many of these movies named after songs, anyway?).

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough about a movie that’s, by and large, pretty inconsequential, despite featuring a brief scene between Beth Grant and a life-size demonstration doll with questionably accurate anatomy. What about you, Britnee? How do you see this film fitting into the milieu that was the romcom ocean of last millennium’s last years? Is it a precursor, a relic, or a non-starter?


Britnee: Even though I really enjoy this film (for all the wrong reasons), I would have to say that when compared to the romcom scene of the 90s, it’s nothing more than a dud. The film does try hard to be great by playing on the popular “don’t judge a book by its cover” love story, where the nerd gets the hot girl in the end, but as we all know, it leans more towards being a psycho in disguise horror-type film. What really hurt this film (among other things) and caused it to be a romcom failure was the hard-to-believe romance between Gus and Emily. You can’t have a solid romantic comedy without the romance. When she initially meets Gus as himself, she has no romantic or friendly feelings for him, and Gus merely makes a few compliments on her “playboy model” looks. What causes him to go after Emily is his twisted sister, who pushes him to win Emily’s heart for her own sick pleasure. A couple of heartfelt exchanges after Lizzie’s disastrous dinner would’ve made all the difference. Even when Gus becomes Lobo, there still doesn’t seem to be much going on between the two. None of Gus’s personality shines through in his Lobo character. He does have a couple of vocal slipups, but he doesn’t give Emily a reason to fall for him, which really ruins the creditability of the “romantic” ending scene. He violated her and she didn’t really care for him to begin with, so why is she going after him? Big mistake. Huge.

I first came across this film on late-night cable, and the main reason I tuned in was because I noticed that Shelley Long’s name was in the TV Guide description. I’m a huge Shelley Long fan, so I wasn’t going to miss this one. Strangely enough, it wasn’t Shelley that won me over; it was Guttenberg’s horrible New Zealander caricature. In real life, Guttenberg looks, sounds, and acts like someone who would own a candy shop or run a summer camp, so seeing him head to toe in leather, whispering to himself, “I am Lobo. I hunt alone. I need no one,” is beyond hilarious. Even when he’s plain old Gus, there’s just something about his signature Guttenberg mannerisms that make the character unforgettable.

Brandon, do you think Guttenberg did well in his role as Lobo/Gus? Does he contribute this film’s failure or is he without blame?

Brandon: Here’s where I have to cop to genuinely enjoying Steve Guttenberg. It helps that I am just a few years too young to remember a time when he was this unlikely, but oddly ubiquitous leading man that was legally required to star in every movie offered to him no matter the quality. I have the fortunate position of remembering The Gutte as an odd cultural footnote. It’s fascinating to me to see him play parts like the mayor with a secret on Veronica Mars or the pot-smoking DJ in the Village People movie or even his own charming self on Party Down. He’s not a particularly versatile actor, but he is a pleasantly goofy one. Somewhere along the line, I’ve somehow learned to love The Gutte, God help me.

I think that’s why it hurts so damn much to see him in the cancer survivor Uncle Fester make-up, the embarrassing leather daddy New Zealander chaps, and the lowly position of Shelley Long’s whipping boy in The Boyfriend School. I felt as if the film were a punishment someone was putting Guttenberg through to atone for the sins of his mid 80s omnipresence. Throughout the endless parade of embarrassments (especially in the first half of the film), my brain was screaming “This is Hell! This is Hell! Set him free!” The Gutte may not have been exactly deserving of his ludicrously overblown success, but surely this punishment was a little rough for even him. Y’all were right to call The Boyfriend School out for being more of a cringe comedy or a psycho in disguise horror than a romcom, but I find it also plays like an act of penance. Even in the film’s trailer, which Boomer mentioned earlier, where the Gutte is talking directly to the camera (looking like his normal, healthy, non-Kiwi self for longer than he does in the entire film), I can feel the menacing presence of someone slightly off-screen holding a gun to his head & pointing at the cue cards.

Erin, do you think it’s time that we as a society let Steve Guttenberg back into our hearts? Now that he’s served his time in the squalid prison of The Boyfriend School, what kinds of roles (if any) would you like to see him play?

Erin: I can understand how The Gutte earned his spot in the limelight – his completely non-threatening, boy-next-door good looks, his passable skill with goofy comedy, and his string of not-too-terrible 80s movies.  Not to discredit what I’m sure was lots of work, but it seems like The Gutte benefited a bit from right-place-right-time syndrome.

His current career has been hit and miss . . . well, actually, after appearing in Veronica Mars ten years ago, mostly miss.  His latest credit seems to be for Lavalantula.  If you are thinking that this is a move about giant and horrifying lava spewing tarantulas, then you are absolutely correct.  Could it be a hidden gem in the land of self-aware, poorly produced B movies?  Could it be the movie we’ve all been waiting for to watch at 3:00 am while eating a whole bag of pizza rolls?  Maybe.  But probably not.

I’d love to see Steve Guttenberg reclaim his career with a well produced family comedy (The Gutte as a slightly befuddled dad? Sure!), then maybe take on slightly more adult dark comedy roles that explore the world of the aging baby-boomers as they navigate a world vastly different from their heyday.  The Gutte takes on Tinder and deals with the death of his close friends?  Is that past The Gutte’s range?  I’d like to think not.

Boomer, do you see any room in our current movie environment for a Gutte-back?  Are his current roles due to some fault in talent, natural Hollywood career trajectory, or are we simply seeing a man taking the projects that make him happy?

Boomer: There is something to be said for Guttenberg’s natural charm. I, too, remember his sinister turn on Veronica Mars as yet another in a long line of adults who couldn’t be trusted, a wealthy man whose privilege made him feel above morality; somehow, this role felt well suited for him, despite his charm in movies like Police Academy, the Three Men and a Little X flicks and even, God help me, Cocoon. As an actor, he has a charisma that helps him sell characters that are despicable, either intentionally (as on Mars) or unintentionally (as in The Boyfriend School). Earlier, I praised Long, saying that another actress in the role would have made Lizzie seem more sinister, but that dubious accolade could be ascribed to Guttenberg just as easily, and his contribution to making Gus likable in spite of the character’s flaws can’t really be ignored.

Which is not to say that I’m suffering from a lack of Guttenberg in my life, at least not in the way that I miss seeing Shelley Long in vehicles that show off her charm (her occasional appearances on Modern Family notwithstanding). But I could stand to see him in something new. He could put in an appearance as relatively obscure character given new prominence in an upcoming Marvel film, for instance; there’s no dearth of those coming out, and it could give him the visibility he needs to resurrect his career. Personally, I think I’d like to see him in a role more like Michael Keaton’s in Birdman, where he tackles a thinly veiled version of one of his former characters in a serious, postmodern way. The Boyfriend Academy, perhaps? Or maybe Three Men and a Divorcee? If the Vacation movies aren’t sacred, perhaps nothing is.

Lagniappe

Brandon: When I said earlier that there’s very little humanity for the audience to identify with in this film, I may have been selling Gus’ aforementioned, nonverbal niece Annabelle a little short.  Known to her mother by the hideously cruel nickname “Piglet”, Annabelle is a bizarre collection of quirks just like every other character in the film, but she does have the very relatable impulse to escape the confines of The Boyfriend School‘s sadistic universe (and the evil clutches of Shelley Long) by ending her own life. Whether she’s shoving metal into electrical sockets or ingesting toxic household products, I totally understand Piglet’s desire to leave a world that can be this unkind to a man as simple and as goofy as The Gutte. Thank you for speaking up for the audience, Piglet, (even if you couldn’t use your words) when you repeatedly asked that they shuffle off this cruelest of mortal coils.

Britnee: Something I forgot to mention in the Swampchat was the short, strange appearance of zydeco music in the film. Shortly after Gus enrolls in Lizzie’s “boyfriend school” and starts getting into shape, all the fun 80s film pop is set aside to allow a few minutes of zydeco. Watching Guttenberg run to zydeco made my little Cajun heart very happy, but it really threw me for a loop. It was such a weird choice of music for a running scene, but I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised because, afterall, this is a weird movie. A weird movie with a little heart and loads of discomfort.

Boomer: I was surprised to learn that the screenwriter of The Boyfriend School, Sara Bird, was also the author of the book on which the film was based, and she was named by The Austin Statesman as Austin’s best author in 2011. It’s hard to conceptualize that this accolade could be applied when School is, overall, a fairly mediocre movie, but I can see that the tight plotting of the film probably mirrors a more complex structure in the original novel. That having been said, this film gave us Beth Grant tonguing a lifesize mannequin, so it’s not without some value. I probably never would have seen this movie were it not for this Swampchat, and I can’t say that it changed my life, but it did give me a new perspective on the genre, so I’d have to say I appreciated the opportunity to view this little oddity.

Erin:  The Boyfriend School is definitely a strange movie.  I think that it definitely seems like a novel in the characterization and pacing.  Purely speculation, but I think that some of the creepiness would be mitigated if presented in written form since we would be able to understand some of the thought processes of the characters.  It’s actually pretty interesting for a self-referential trashy movie.

Upcoming Movie of the Months
October: Erin presents Innocent Blood (1992)
November: Boomer presents The Class of 1999 (1989)
December: Brandon presents The Independent (2000)

-The Swampflix Crew

Peeping Tom (1960)

/ swampflix / 16 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fivestar

More than a decade after his back to back classics The Red Shoes & Black Narcissus, British director Michael Powell nearly sank his prestigious career with a seedy horror film about a psychotic cameraman with a very peculiar sort of bloodlust (emphasis on “lust”). Due to its lurid subject matter, Peeping Tom was initially met by British critics with an absurd flood of vitriol that placed Powell’s career in immediate peril, but time has been kind to the film & it’s now regarded at the very least as a cult classic, if not one of the greatest horror films of all time. It’s near impossible to gauge just how shocking or morally incongruous Peeping Tom must’ve been in 1960, especially in the opening scenes where old men are shown purchasing ponography in the same corner stores where young girls buy themselves candy for comedic effect & the protagonist/killer is introduced secretly filming a sex worker under his trench coat before moving in for his first kill. Premiering the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho and predating the birth of giallo & the slasher in 1962’s Blood & Black Lace, Peeping Tom was undeniably ahead of its time. A prescient ancestor to the countless slashers to follow, Powell’s classic is a sleek, beautifully crafted work that should’ve been met with accolades & rapturous applause instead of the prudish dismissal it sadly received.

Striking an odd resemblance to a more dapper version of Peter Lorre’s child killer in M (occasionally complete with whistling), the titular peeping Tom, Mark Lewis, is portrayed by Austrian actor Carl Boehm with an authentically creepy, lustful nervousness. Trained from a young age by his late father to not only act as a voyeur, but also to pursue the capture of fear on film, Mark is, reductively speaking, a strange bird. As his ambitions in his serial murders escalate, so do his ambitions in his photography. Discontent to merely film pin-up models as they remove their complicated lingerie, Mark dreams of one day being a director of feature films. His first step in this direction towards legitimacy is a gig as a camera operator on a production cheekily titled The Walls Are Closing In. Unfortunately for Mark, his professional ambitions & his bloodlust are intrinsically linked and, despite owning a director’s chair with his own name printed on it, he is destined to be captured by the authorities as he becomes more bold & obsessive in his choice of victims. Mark plans to begin his career in filmmaking on a fascinating little indie documentary about his own slashings & their resulting crime scene investigations. He admires his own work in the darkroom void of his personal studio, a lushly photographed inner sanctum packed with a mouthwatering stockpile of analog film equipment that Powell’s film leers over & lights with a giallo-esque palette of intensely colored lights. Just as Marks’ camera oggles drunken partygoers & couples canoodling in the dark, Peeping Tom oggles the very equipment he uses, drawing really uncomfortable parallels between Powell’s obsession with lush filmmaking & the more unsavory obsessions of his killer voyeur subject.

Mike’s one chance for salvation is a budding love interest in a downstairs neighbor, Helen Stephens, played by Anna Massey (who inexplicably reminds me of a mousier version of Game of Thrones actress Natalie Dormer here), an aspiring children’s book writer who lives with her bitter alcoholic mother. Their relationship is mostly a nonstarter, of course, as during their outings Mark’s mind is consistently distracted by the film developing back in his studio or passing glimpses of young couples molesting each other in the shadows. While he enjoys Helen’s company, Mark treats his missing camera on their excursions like a phantom limb & by the time he kisses the equipment goodnight, it’s painfully obvious who his true love is. Helen’s presence is more or less simply a glimpse into the more sympathetic aspects of our killer’s psyche, but her social circle also offers a view of Marks’ queerness in comparison to the more traditional square-jawed masculinity of her other beaus. Helen also provides an excuse for Mark to put his work on display. As he shows her his father’s documents/experiments of his own childhood (including what was likely his very first peeping), as well as the much more devious/criminal documents he’s been making himself, Helen acts as an audience surrogate, voicing reasonable responses like “Naughty boy. I hope you were spanked,” & “It’s horrible! It’s horrible! But it’s just a film, isn’t it?” Mark’s chillingly responds, “No.”

For all of its ghastly subject matter & general creepiness, Peeping Tom is actually great fun. Not only is there a swanky dance break provided by (legendary The Red Shoes actress) Moira Shearer, but the movie is packed with a dark sense of humor that might’ve gone by the priggish critics who initially dismissed the film on moral grounds. There’s a ton of winking, under-the-breath jokes that can be bitterly morbid, but are also genuinely hilarious. Powell’s proto-slasher is remarkable not only in its muted black comedy & phrophetic glimpses into the future of the horror genre, but also in its studied craft. Very rarely do horror films look this arty, with this much reverence for photography as a craft. Powell’s camera may leer in a way that cheaper exploitation films tend to, but it leers more at movie-making equipment than it does at half-dressed women. It’s Mark’s camera that lunges at its targets like a weapon, establishing the first person POV of countless cinematic serial killers to follow, except with a solid narrative reason for its inclusion that’s often missing from those films. Peeping Tom is the rare film of narrative, stylistic, and historical significance that plays just as chillingly fresh decades after its release as it did when it was first criminally overlooked. It may, in fact, be one of the greatest films of all time, horror or otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

campstamp

In my review for the first 12 Rounds entry I found myself asking if I would’ve enjoyed the film at all if it weren’t for its New Orleans setting. There were a couple cheap, but entertaining action movie thrills here or there, but for the most part the ludicrous ways the John Cena vehicle interacted with its local setting were the highlights of the film. That movie’s sequel, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded strips almost everything enjoyable from its predecessor in favor of an endless slow drip of hopelessly generic action movie tropes. WWE Studios’ decisions to downgrade its star pro wrestler attraction from John Cena to Randy Orton (I like him okay in the ring, but he cannot carry a film on his own the way Cena can), to swap out its theatrical-release budget for a straight-to-DVD distribution, and to disregard any specificity in setting (this could’ve been filmed in any major city, unlike the first 12 Rounds, which is intrinsically tied to New Orleans) all sink the ship here, leaving very little of interest in the way of entrainment, mindless or otherwise.

Very little has changed in the set-up of this “reloaded” version of the 12 Rounds concept. Orton plays an buff EMT instead of a buff supercop, but he still gets wrapped up in a terrorist-conceived scavenger hunt that drags him all over the city (whatever city that may be) in an effort to rescue his potential-victim wife. Where did this concept of the 12 round scavenger hunt originate? Do terrorists collab on this kind of stuff? No matter. It’s a yawn of a journey with very few bright spots, none of which touch the heights of the first film’s silliness. Even the film’s villain is a downgrade from legit-actor Aiden Gillen’s turn in the first 12 Rounds; this time we’re being threatened by a much more generic bald dude with a leather fetish who has very specific ideas about drunk driving & political corruption.

The villain, no matter how typical, is at the very least a interesting oddity in an otherwise dull proceeding. His determination to turn the film into an anti-drunk driving PSA is at the very least not something I’m used to in my action movie dreck. There’s also some interesting cheapening of the general vibe, including some sleazy, nude hotel sex that felt wildly out of place in such a tame picture & a makeshift stoner sidekick that turns out to be more than he initially seems. The only true kickass moment in the film’s entire runtime, however, is a brief gag in which Orton employs some of his pro wrestling acumen & body slams a cop onto the hood of a car. That’s a two second clip I would’ve much rather experienced as a .gif, though, whereas I got many more small moments of light amusement from the first entry in the franchise. 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded should be reserved solely for Randy Orton’s most rabid fans & generic action movie buffs who really, really hate drunk driving. Otherwise, you’re better off avoiding it entirely.

-Brandon Ledet