Casting By (2013)

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threehalfstar

One of the most disingenuous things about the way we talk about cinema is the idea of the auteur. Directors have so much input on so many aspects of each production that it’s tempting (or at least convenient) to discuss a film’s merits based on the work of a single person, when it really takes hundreds of contributors to complete a picture. Films are one of the most collaborative forms of art our there, requiring the blood, sweat, and tears of a wide range of people to achieve success. There are many roles in film production that don’t get their proper due, but according to the documentary Casting By the most egregiously overlooked position of all is that of the casting director.

Casting By follows the history of the casting director credit in the film industry by focusing on the career of Marion Dougherty, a legend within the field. Among countless other household names, Dougherty can be credited for at least partially helping to launch the careers of Warren Beatty, James Dean, Robert Duvall, John Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Peter Falk, James Caan, John Travolta, Gene Wilder, Glenn Close, and the list rolls on infinitely. Due to the endless list of celebrities who owe at the very least a kind word or two about Dougherty for helping get their foot in the door, Casting By is packed to the gills with great little Hollywood anecdotes about an industry that’s known for refusing to change its ways (including an especially raw one from Richard Donner that had me on the verge of tears) & a woman who doesn’t take no for an answer. Dougherty not only has an immense talent for spotting potential stars in the raw, but she also stubbornly refuses to accept the roles women & people of color are relegated to in Hollywood’s margins. Casting By is not a particularly flashy documentary in any formal way, but it is one that serves the noble purpose of preserving an often overlooked legacy on film.

One of Casting By‘s strongest stances is a call for an Academy Award category to honor the work of the casting director & it makes a pretty strong case. There’s even a quote from Marty Scorsese, who has worked closely with Marion Dougherty many times in the past, early in the film that claims that casting is more than 90% of making a movie. It’s hard to argue with that point, especially when the film delves into the early days of studio contracts when on-retainer actors would play parts whether they were right for them or not, just because they were there. Dougherty came up through the time of New Hollywood, helping to define what it was exactly that a casting director does. She would help steer directors & studios into finding the right actor for the job, instead of the more traditional typecasting of actors based on physical appearance alone.

It’s a shame that there still isn’t a casting director Oscar to this day & Dougherty hasn’t at the very least been awarded an honorary Acadamy Award herself. Although Marion Dougherty has struggled for decades to earn the respect that casting directors deserve & to break up the boys club of film production in general, she has received few accolades for her work. It’s only right that Casting By serves as a document of her legacy, laying out in plain, simple words just how important she has been to the shape & climate of American film & just how vital the role of casting director that she pioneered is to the motion picture landscape.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)

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threehalfstar

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In my initial review I faulted the Norwegian horror comedy Dead Snow for keeping its Nazi zombie antics under wraps until far too late in its runtime. There was plenty of over the top cartoonish gore to be had in the film’s third act, but for some reason the it pretended that the audience didn’t know exactly what was coming (despite the prominence of Nazi zombies all over its advertising) & kept its monsters concealed in the dark for as long as possible. Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead ditches the first films’ reluctance to immediately devolve into blood-soaked chaos & instead opts for a constant barrage of Army of Darkness-type gore gags from front to end. Even the opening sequence’s recap of the first film’s plot is little more than a flimsy excuse to rehash all of the gore that’s already come as a primer for the entrails, severed limbs, and copious gallons of blood soon to follow.

Despite its eagerness to please on the gore front, Dead Snow 2 surely has its own problems. In addition to occasionally uncomfortable caricatures of hot nerd girls & sexually ambiguous Eurotrash, the film also has a tendency to self-referentially pat itself on the back. Martin Starr’s turn as a self-proclaimed zombie hunter (read: nerd fantasy fulfilment in the flesh) is often a mere conduit for the movie to proclaim its own uniqueness, going so far as to explicitly say in the dialogue that they’re inventing a new zombie genre. This may be awkward, but in a lot of ways it’s difficult to disagree. Red vs. Dead is far from the by-the-numbers retread of films like Wyrmwood. I can at least personally attest to having never seen Nazi zombie surgeons, Nazi zombie priests, magical Nazi zombie arms grafted onto still-human hosts, or gasoline syphoned through a corpses’ intestinal track in a movie before, much less all in the same picture.

As awkward as Dead Snow 2 may be at times, it’s difficult to deny that it’s thoroughly more entertaining than its predecessor. Even the bro-culture politics & self-referential zombie genre discussions have their roots in the first entry, so it’s difficult to get too down on its crudeness on that front. A non-stop gore fest about Nazi zombies attempting to reclaim their stolen gold & completing long-forgotten marching orders from Hitler himself is not the place I would typically look for a moral beacon  or an absence of hubris anyway. This is a live-action cartoon in which undead Nazis mercilessly disembowel the living from the opening minutes until they’re finally stopped in their tracks just before the end credits. Even when they dismember children or the handicapped (very rare targets for horror films, for obvious reasons) it’s easy to dismiss the cruelty of that behavior in the context of the film. I mean, they are undead Nazis after all. If you can stomach (or even frequently seek out) this kind of blindly brutal, played-for-laughs mayhem in your genre films, there’s no doubt that you’ll have fun with the buckets of blood Dead Snow 2 sloshes at the screen. In my case, I enjoyed it even more than the first one, which pretended a little too hard to be more tastefully restrained that it truly was at heart. With the second entry, taste has thankfully gone out the window entirely.

-Brandon Ledet

John Dies at the End (2012)

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fourstar

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I wrote a couple months back that the recent coming of age comedy Dope was a sort of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for 90s hip hop geeks & bucket hat enthusiasts. A snarkily overwritten, but genuinely sincere & visually expressive comedy for video game & manga-addled teens, Scott Pilgrim has become an unofficial benchmark for young adult media with highly specific target audiences. Viewed from that perspective, John Dies at the End can be understood as a Scott Pilgrim descendant for teen schlock junkies, a comedy specifically aimed at young B-movie nerds. That is, if John Dies can be understood at all.

The trick to appreciating John Dies at the End is allowing yourself to get on its wavelength & roll with the out of nowhere punches. The film does adopt a helpful interview & flashback story structure to vaguely rein itself in, but it’s mostly a loose collection of horror movie tangents that take on subjects as wide & as varied as zombies, alien invasions, exorcisms, demons, the Apocalypse, abandoned malls, heroic dogs, white rappers and alternate universes. The doorway to these swirls of madness is a mysterious needle drug known as “soy sauce”, the only real connective tissue to the film’s off-the-wall proceedings.

The episodic structure of John Dies would lend itself quite nicely to a Joss Whedon-esque television series, but in its cinematic form it feels much like a long string of practical jokes, cheekily playing with audience expectations at nearly every turn. Whether it’s a mustache suddenly taking winged flight or household objects transforming into floppy cocks, much of John Dies‘ humor is derived from the mischievous element of surprise. There are a few genuinely funny (and surprisingly vulgar) turns of phrase in the dialogue, like in the line “A toast to all the kisses I’ve snatched . . . and vice versa”, but it’s generally the film’s “Everything you know is wrong” edict that drives most of its amusement.

Just like how Scott Pilgrim felt authentic to its video game & manga roots, John Dies at the End is smart to stick to what makes B-movies great. Besides its genuinely eccentric weirdness, the film also boasts a tendency towards practical effects & grotesque creatures befitting even films like Possession or the best works of Cronenberg. John Dies even backs up its Scott Pilgrim connection by depicting the titular character playing guitar in a rock band, a trope also cringingly echoed in Dope. If any of the three films I’ve cited in this (admittedly loosely connected) genre appeal to me directly based on my personal tastes, John Dies at the End is an easy favorite. It’s overenthusiastic chase for a B-movie aesthetic is firmly in my wheelhouse & I ended up enjoying the film quite a bit once I gave into its purposefully messy charms.

-Brandon Ledet

Razorback (1984)

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threehalfstar

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An Australian horror film about a supernaturally enormous wild boar, Razorback should not be worth much more than its value as an 80s creature feature, but there’s something oddly special about it, especially in its visual palette. Although it is by all means a run of the mill horror film, at least narratively speaking, it also excels in monster movie mayhem & dreamlike visual trickery. Its skeezy tale of big city folks from New York being tormented by dangerous, near-feral Outback locals is far from extraordinary in the context of its genre & can often be downright repugnant in its cruelty. Still, Razorback endures as a unique oddity. The true draw of the film, of course, is the titular razorback, a gigantic beast whose remarkably horrific screen presence makes for one of the best cinematic monsters I’ve seen in a good while, but there’s also a much stranger undercurrent of psychedelia backing the boar up with a beyond-ominous atmosphere that helps the film outshine its mundane dedication to the horror tropes of its era.

The wild boar star of Razorback is far from the kind of cinematic swine you’ll find in titles like Babe or Gordy. It’s a disgusting, vile monster of a beast, tearing apart homes & vehicles and snatching up babies & women with wild abandon, his menacing tusks threatening to gore everything in site. There’s a certain amount of typical low budget monster movie concealment that keeps the razorback in the dark, hiding him in shadows or depicting action from a boar cam that captures his POV, but whenever he’s afforded screen time he shines as a grotesque menace. Given the unlikability of most of the film’s local brutes, it’s almost tempting to sympathize with the boar in all of his horrific magnificence. There’s even a scene where the hideous bastard prevents a near-rape, almost shining as an unlikely hero, but that sentiment is severely undercut when he immediately devours the would-be victim.

Even the schlockiest of horror flicks rarely can survive on the strengths of their monsters alone & although Razorback boasts some surprisingly effective creature horror, it’s the movie’s general atmosphere that makes its special. The film has an otherworldly eye for Australian wilderness, illuminating the setting’s wide open landscapes with strangely colored lights, animated skeletons, and humanoid pig faces. Just as a dehydrated traveler would hallucinate in the Australian wild, Razorback‘s visual eye is a horrifically detached-from-reality trip through a dangerous landscape ruled by dangerous reprobates & and ripped apart by a supernaturally dangerous boar that ties the whole thing together in a neat little creature feature package. It’s an alarmingly wild film (especially considering its strict adherence to genre tropes) that’s definitely worth a look next time you want to take a trip into the more sordid, but oddly psychedelic depths of the natural horror genre.

-Brandon Ledet

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

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threehalfstar

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When I was a kid, I looked forward every week to the articles on TV Guide’s website from the Televisionary and FlickChick (better known as critic Maitland McDonagh). These proto-blogs were where perplexed readers who had reached the outer limits of their personal research could ask what this film or that TV show was that featured that thing–you know that thing–and finally get an answer after years of trying to recall. “What was that movie with the kid living in the walls?” Bad Ronald. “What was that series with the girl whose dad was an alien and she talked to him through a crystal?” Out of this World. “What was that movie that was like Blair Witch Project but, like, from the 70s?” The Legend of Boggy Creek.

I was lucky enough to take in a viewing of this 1972 oddity at the Alamo Drafthouse last night, projected from the last known extant 35mm copy, loaned to the theatre by its owner, a certain director you may have heard of named Quentin Tarantino. Boggy Creek is a curious entry into the canon of 1970s horror flicks. Like Blair Witch, which was made nearly 30 years later, the film is shot largely as a documentary, featuring interviews with individuals who encountered what became known as the Fouke Monster, a three-toed, vaguely sasquatchian cryptozoological beast that supposedly roamed (or perhaps still roams) Fouke, Arkansas and the surrounding waterways. The film was made by a relatively amateur director, Charles B. Pierce, who had made a series of commercials for Texarkana-based trucking firm Ledwell & Son Enterprises before borrowing $160,000 from the company to produce Boggy Creek. Surprisingly, the film became the 11th highest grossing film of 1972, netting $20 million(!) dollars. More people saw Boggy Creek in theatres than Hitchcock’s penultimate outing Frenzy, or Peter O’Toole’s Man of La Mancha, or the film adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five. In fact, were it not for the surprise mainstream popularity of Behind the Green Door–a movie that is literally pornography–Boggy Creek would have cracked the top ten, not a bad legacy for an independently produced flick about one town’s personal Bigfoot.

Boggy Creek is not an excellent movie, but it is obviously a labor of love and was made by someone with an untrained but doubtlessly cinematic eye. There are lovingly framed shots of a child fleeing across a field from the howling in the night, accompanied by voice-over from the film’s narrator: “I was seven years old the first time I heard him scream; it scared me then, and it scares me now.” The omnipresent narration of the film, some of it framed as the recollections of an adult who lived in Fouke as a child and some of it having a more documentarian distance, is one of the odder elements, but it contributes to the feeling that this is not a work of fiction–and many of the people interviewed in the film would argue that it is not, recalling individual interactions and inexplicable events. Some of these interactions are recreated on screen, and although the Fouke Monster, a furry creature with hair hanging down in its face, looks silly to the modern eye, it nonetheless is effectively discomfiting, and by the end of the film feels like a real creature that you might see dart across a dark highway while driving at night, or be caught washing its feet in a stream by a wandering hunter.

The last third of the film is taken up with an extended reenactment of the monster’s two-night assault on a multi-family household. This is the most captivating section, and it feels like it was spliced in from a very different film, although it would likely not work as well as it does without the backstory provided by the more Direct Cinema elements of the first two-thirds. There are certain parts of this segment that are somewhat repetitive, but there are some legitimate scares and shocks in it, so it works. There are other sections of the film that can charitably be described as “padding,” but these also yield something memorable. Pierce wrote and performed two songs for the film; one, which is either titled (or should be titled) “The Ballad of Travis Crabtree,” plays over a montage of said teenager (who was also the film’s key grip) checking traps and engaging in standard rural lifestyle activities. The second is a lovingly crafted ballad about what it must be like to be the only monster in the world, and whether that life would be terrible lonely or not. It’s an undeniably silly excursion that’s treated with complete sincerity, which is the best way to describe the film overall. It’s a slow burn, but it finds its fun in both camp and otherwise, and is a great testament to how one person can create a career out of finding one narrative and following it through to its end.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Gift (2015)

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three star

In a lot of ways The Gift is a tricky film to review. Due to its suspense thriller genre, it’s at the very least difficult to discuss too much of the film’s plot without ruining the surprise of some of its bigger twists, so I’ll try to tread lightly there. What’s even more complicated about this thriller in particular, though, is that I enjoyed the majority of its run time, but the last couple of narrative twists in the concluding few minutes left me feeling deeply uneasy. So much of The Gift works, but the little that doesn’t makes a huge, uncomfortable impact. If the overall quality of a thriller relies on the strength of its twists, it’s tempting to allow the last few minutes of The Gift poison the generally likable film that precedes them, but that feels more than a little unfair to me.

Here’s a short list of things that work in The Gift: the imagery, the tone, the tension, the acting, and the brutal reflection on how cycles of teenage bullying don’t stop on graduation day. Much of the credit to the film’s success goes to the performances from the three leads. Joel Edgerton (who also writes & directs here) brings the quiet menace of an abused, but sadly loyal puppy dog on the verge of biting back to his role as the film’s would-be menace, Gordo. Rebecca Hall affords an unusual amount of intellectual competence & believable fragility to her role as the Typical Horror Movie Victim, Robyn. Jason Bateman carries most of the weight here, though, nimbly navigating a role that requires him both to be a befuddled everyman & (as the film’s advertising already spoiled, freeing my hands here) a vile, immature highschool bully that never outgrew his abusive ways. Bateman’s turn as Simon truly is the film’s bread & butter, calling into question the means by which a teenage bully can translate their brutality into adult situations, namely in professional & domestic arenas.

Most of The Gift unravels the power dynamics of Simon’s & Gordo’s shared past through Robyn’s perspective, which is where the film shines brightest. There’s a stark simplicity to the movie’s visual palette that makes for a sleek-looking thriller. Sliced apples, pills in a kitchen sink, traditional horror film reds emanating from brake lights, and a sly reference to The Shining (there’s a hospital room numbered 237) all overpower the film’s cheaper elements, like last minute plot twists & dog-exploiting jump scares. It’s when the perspective shifts from Robyn’s POV to Simon’s in the third act that The Gift wavers a bit. It’s difficult to determine if the audience is supposed to empathize with the lifelong bully in the final half hour or indulge in his comeuppance, but honestly neither effect is all that satisfying, so it ultimately doesn’t matter.

I’m firmly on the fence with how all of The Gift‘s individual elements play out in its conclusion, but there’s plenty to enjoy in each moving part as isolated components (especially in the visual starkness & the effective performances from its three leads) before they’re uncomfortably misused. I liked most of the film, but I definitely left the theater with a lingering, bitter taste in my mouth, which I guess isn’t the worst way a movie can affect you, all things considered. It’s unlikely that The Gift will have much box office staying power or be making any Best of 2015 lists as the year winds down, but it does have enough going for it that it could potentially make for some decent Netflix viewing whenever someone’s in the mood for a mostly well-executed thriller starring a bitterly unlikable Michael Bluth. There are certainly worse fates than that.

-Brandon Ledet

L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970)

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fourhalfstar

The trailer for L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, better known in the U.S. as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, explicitly references Alfred Hitchcock, who supposedly said that Dario Argento, “That Italian fellow,” was beginning to make him nervous. Plumage was the first film directed by Argento, who was already relatively well known as a screenwriter, and the reference to the Master of Suspense in the film’s advertising is well placed, as the traces of Hitchcock’s influence are all over this film like fingerprints at a murder scene; this is not a criticism, per se, but it is nonetheless true. Specifically, I found myself thinking of Psycho from the film’s first onscreen murder, which featured no flesh to blade contact and instead focused on slashing motions and splashes of blood. The connection to that most well known of Hitchcock’s works moved from subtext to text at the film’s conclusion, which featured a voice-over from a mental health professional explaining the psychological motivations of the killer, just as the 1960 film had used an expert to explicate Norman Bates’s madness.

If one must steal, it’s smartest to steal from the best, and Argento’s homages did not end with Hitchcock, as he also lifted the appearance of the killer in Plumage from fellow Italian horror master Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. I mention all this not to imply that Plumage is a retread of other, better films; in fact, Plumage would be an excellent movie at any point in a filmmaker’s career, and the fact that it was Argento’s first feature is, frankly, astounding. There is a lavish attention to detail in composition, color, and framing that is already on display in this freshman effort, and although he would refine this palette over the course of his career (at least until his latter day works, which leave much to be desired), there is a rawness, a viscerality, to those elements here that works in the film’s favor. Plumage is just as much a precursor for and inspiration of the slasher genre as Psycho, precognitions of a style and type that were freshly emerging from the depths of the subconscious and which would be codified a few years later in John Carpenter’s Halloween. And, to a modern audience, Plumage has something that neither of those films has: a surprise ending that hasn’t bled into the mainstream via pop-cultural osmosis, meaning that you, dear reader, are much more likely to find a surprise here.

The film follows handsome American Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante, most recognizable to a modern audience as Nino Schibetta from the first season of Oz) as he prepares to return home from Rome, where a series of young women have been murdered, to New York with his model girlfriend, Giulia (Suzy Kendall). Walking home from collecting his paycheck for a completed project, he passes an art gallery wherein he witnesses a struggle between Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi) and a figure clad in a dark latex jacket and hat. She is stabbed, and Sam is trapped in a glass enclosure when he attempts to help. The police arrive, and suspicion is cast on both Sam and Monica’s husband, gallery owner Alberto (Umberto Raho); Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) initially confiscates Sam’s passport, but eventually realizes that he is innocent when Sam becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Sam’s investigation leads to being stalked, objectified by an aging antiques dealer, attacked by a former boxer with a heroin habit, and fed cat meat by a mad hermit painter, but he eventually finds the truth… in a surprising place.

There are some moments in the film that are distinctly odd or unsettling when compared to modern sentiment, although I must admit I cannot be certain whether this dissonance is the result of cultural differences between nations or eras. Morosini has Sam view a line-up of perverts, whose crimes include such heinous items as contributing to the delinquency of a minor alongside presumably consensual “sins” as sadomasochism and sodomy; it’s a scene which is ultimately pointless, and its inclusion is puzzling. There is undoubtedly a sexual undercurrent to all slasher films that feature, completely or simply in large part, victims of a feminine persuasion; that has been discussed in many essays by more academic minds than mine, but suffice it to say that this is present in this film as well, although the revelations of the film’s final third call into question some of the assumptions that could otherwise be made about the sexual politics of this specific film. In order to preserve the viewing experience, I won’t get into that here, but I will say that the sexual violence of the film is no more intentionally titillating than that of Psycho, and is relatively tame by current standards. More disappointing, in my opinion, is the utter victimization of Giulia when she is trapped in her apartment by the killer; she is utterly helpless, and she does make several stabs (pardon the pun) at defending herself, but her hysteria while doing so reflects the contemporary sexism of the era a lot more clearly than when the killer rips a victim’s undergarments off.

All in all, Plumage is an excellent movie, and well worth tracking down if you get the chance. There are several different versions floating around, but the differences between them are minor and inconsequential; I recommend the two disc release from Blue Underground for its faithfulness to the 35mm print and the wealth of special features. The film has a rapid pace that horror movies of the era are not generally known for, and the kind of attention to cinematic technique that most films in general fail to capture. It’s a classic for a reason.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Patch Town (2015)

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threehalfstar

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There’s been a lot of grumbling lately about the inherent lameness of intentionally campy B-pictures aiming for a cult audience in an overtly phony way. Movies like Sharknado & Zombeavers have been derided by many schlock junkies for recreating a calculated sense of what was once felt like genuine cinematic weirdness in order to gain an instant, unearned cult status. It wouldn’t be too hard to see that same allegation being lashed at the horror comedy Patch Town, but (besides being generally more lenient on the calculated cult movie as a genre than some) I believe there’s something a little more special about the film than titles like Wolf Cop & Piranhaconda. Patch Town‘s high-concept, low budget weirdness is calculated, sure, but it’s also surprisingly thorough in pushing that concept as far as it could possibly go & even better, it’s surprisingly funny.

A horror comedy about an evil Cabbage Patch dolls factory, Patch Town sounds like the kind of Sci-Fi Channel dreck that would settle for a couple odd moments & a celebrity cameo, then call it a day. Instead, it milks its concept for all it’s worth, telling the story of a magically talented toy inventor who discovers a cabbage patch in the woods that gives birth to real-life babies. Unable to provide for every single babe he finds, he uses his advanced toy-making technology to preserve them in plastic doll bodies & sells them in stores so that little girls can mother them (real-life Cabbage Patch dolls used to come with adoption papers). Once the girls became women & left their adopted baby dolls by the wayside the (since-deceased) inventor’s evil son would snatch them up, free them from their plastic doll prisons, and force them to work in his evil doll factory where they perform grotesque cesarean section operations on the magical forest cabbages. That’s not even to mention a subplot in which one of the workers breaks free to track down the mother who abandoned him. Or the fact that it’s a Christmas movie. And a musical.

If Patch Town were made in the 1980s there’s no doubt in my mind that it would have a strong cult following. It may even just be strange enough to pull one off in the 2010s. There certainly aren’t that many horror comedy Christmas musicals about evil doll factories around these days to compete for its potential audience. I don’t think it’s an entirely successful endeavour from front to end, but it does have a whole lot going for it in terms of go-for-broke narrative absurdity & genuinely hilarious moments that feel like bizarre sketch comedy tangents (complete with a Scott Thompson cameo). I’d understand if some folks dismiss it outright based on its calculated cult following ambitions alone (especially considering how flooded that particular market is at the moment) but I believe it’s genuinely strange enough to deserve a fairer shake than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Sole Survivor (1983)

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threehalfstar

“Before there was Final Destination, there was Sole Survivor,” proudly proclaims Code Red’s 2008 DVD release of 1983 indie horror film Sole Survivor. There are some superficial similarities between the two, notably a plane crash, psychic visions, “accidents” aimed at the survivor of said crash, and a scene with a coroner that helps explain the film’s plot, but the two films are different in execution and concept, and I daresay the older, cheaper, and admittedly somewhat sloppier film is superior. The Final Destination series’ bread-and-butter was constructing tension through shots of elaborate Rube Goldbergian death traps falling into place in order to lead those characters who managed to cheat death into a gruesome end. Directed by Thom Eberhardt, whose inarguably classic film Night of the Comet premiered just one year later, 1983’s Sole Survivor lacks the kind of frenetic energy that characterizes the more modern film and its sequels. Instead, there is a quiet intensity to it, and I was surprised by how haunting some of the imagery was. For instance, in the first sequence of the film, Karla (Caren Larkey) awakes after having a psychic vision of Denise (Anita Skinner) strapped to her airplane seat, placid with shock, surrounded by a rustic field strewn with debris and broken bodies. Later in the film, Denise is trapped in an underground parking garage, and she is first seen only in beautifully composed long shots, before she begins running and quick film splices are made as support beams pass between her and the camera, in a scene reminiscent of the oft-referenced behind-the-columns transformation from The Twilight Zone‘s “The Howling Man.” Eberhadt also edited the film, and cinematographer Russell Carpenter went on to a fairly distinguished career, working as the director of photography for James Cameron in the nineties (notable highlights include being D.P. on both True Lies and Titanic, the latter of which earned him an Oscar). This was the first film for both of them, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from a purely aesthetic standpoint, despite the film’s issues with pacing.

After an effectively unsettling cold open of a bloodied and armed woman riding a bus past closed shops full of mannequins on a Christmas-season evening, we see the same woman sitting in a field surrounded by body parts and airplane debris, in the scene mentioned above. It’s the last chance for actress Karla Davis, an over-the-hill former starlet who was blacklisted because her psychic visions (perceived by producers to simply be delusions brought on by alcohol use) made her too difficult to work with. She awakes after dreaming of Denise’s plane crash and tries to convince her agent to warn her, but he ignores her. Later, Denise is rushed to the hospital for treatment by the dreamy doctor Brian Richardson (Kurt Johnson, who unfortunately died of AIDS-related illness in 1986 at only 33), who is attracted to her but is concerned that she is masking her survivor’s guilt, as she seems to simply feel lucky to survive. After seeing an apparition of a soaked girl and nearly being crushed by a truck with no driver, Denise is taken home by her neighbor, a 19 year old party girl named Kristy (Robin Davidson), whose parents are absent for the course of the film.

Karla has great difficulty completing her work on the coffee commercial that Denise is producing. She is distracted and zoned out, and she tells Denise about her visions. Denise continues to experience inexplicable events, like a man appearing on the road and driving her onto the shoulder, an elevator with a mind of its own that deposits her in an underground garage where she is menaced by a ghoulish troublemaker, and a creepy figure standing in the rain watching from across the street as she and Richard have dinner. It’s very atmospheric and intriguing, and the composition of the images makes the sections of the film in which little happens more intriguing and intense. There’s a sharp turn around the hour mark, however, when it is revealed that the spectres haunting Denise are not the spirits of those who died in the crash, as one expects, but reanimated corpses. It’s never made clear why the supernatural force that Denise theorizes is trying to end her because she survived the crash would go about reanimating corpses to fulfill its goal, or why it targets people other than Denise, but this is not a movie that gets bogged down in those particular details.

Larkey, who financed the film along with her husband, appears in the special features in a ten minute interview alongside Eberhardt, and they discuss the fact that they wanted to produce a low-budget movie and hopefully make a return on their investment; they mention that with their budget, they could have made either a horror or a sexploitation flick, so they took the high road. Unfortunately, the film was financially unsuccessful. The film passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors with a cast mostly made up of women, and there’s some great dialogue to punch up some of the more static moments. (My favorite line comes when Roxie, the ditzy but spiritually curious friend of Kristy says she has seen God; when asked what he looked like, she says he was “Not great, like he wasn’t eating right or something.” That’s one for the ages, honestly.) The film was released on Vestron VHS in 1985, but Code Red’s out-of-print DVD is release from seven years ago is the only release on contemporary media; despite the not-great mono sound mix, I recommend checking it out if you can find a copy, for the imagery if nothing else. Unlike a lot of cheaply made horror movies from that era, this one stands up.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Babe 2: Pig in the City (1998) as a Key to Understanding George Miller’s Oeuvre as a Cohesive Whole

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At first it might seem strange that the same dude who brought this summer’s intense fever dream Mad Max: Fury Road to the screen also directed August’s Movie of the Month, Babe 2: Pig in the City. In fact, any quick glance at George Miller’s list of feature films could leave you scratching your head, but his range of work is not nearly as disparate as it may initially seem & there’s something special about Babe 2: Pig in the City in particular that helps make the connections between his films all the clearer. Much like how Babe was an unlikely choice for a prize sheep herder in the first film that bares his name, Pig in the City is an unlikely, but oddly effective gateway to understanding Miller’s oeuvre as a cohesive whole.

It’s probably safe to say that the Mad Max franchise is the property most closely associated with Miller’s name. It’s at the very least where Miller started the strange path of his career. The first Mad Max film created a charmingly handmade & genuinely dangerous-feeling post-Apocalyptic universe that’s been retooled, reinvented, and redefined in each of its three subsequent sequels. Pig in the City may not immediately resemble the Australian wasteland depicted in the original Mad Max film, but its decidedly urban landscape is populated with the same kind of wild, frothing-at-the-mouth cretins that terrorize what remains of Mad Max‘s small town victims. The world of Pig in the City is similarly lawless & cruel, with its own uncaring authority figures & gang leaders holding their boots to the necks of the poor & defenceless.

The similarities in their world-building aside, it’s not until the second Mad Max film that the franchises connections to the Babe sequel become explicit. Just as Miller tossed out the “That’ll do” philosophy of the first Babe film out the window when he made its off-the-wall sequel, he abandoned much of the first Mad Max film’s aesthetic with Road Warrior & each subsequent entry to the point where their only connective tissue was a titular performance by Mel Gibson. And even that connection was severed with Tom Hardy’s headlining performance in Fury Road. The sequels also link up closer to Babe 2‘s central idea that solidarity & communal sharing are the only way to survive life’s seemingly pointless onslaught of cruelty. The hippie dippie gasoline hoarders of Road Warrior, the feral tribe of children in Beyond Thunderdome, and the runaway sex slaves of Fury Road are all echoed in the gang of talking animals Babe assembles in Pig in the City simply by being pure of heart & wanting to share the wealth.

Of the Mad Max sequels, it’s fairly safe to say that the one that most readily resembles Pig in the City would be Beyond Thunderdome. Beyond Thunderdome is a strange bird of a film, initially creating a strange corporal-punishment based society (headed by Tina Turner, because why not?) whose titular thunderdome arena is used to settle any & all major disputes. That world is largely left behind when the film goes beyond those Tina Turner-ruled boundaries (for some ungodly reason) and devolves into a version of a Peter Pan & the Lost Boys dynamic much more closely related to Spieldberg’s Hook than it is to any of the preceding Mad Max content. Pig in the City somehow touches on both halves of Beyond Thunderdome, both recreating the bungee chord-aided thunderdome battles in its climactic ballroom scene & further easing Miller’s catalog into the realm of children’s media. On a less superficial, but also less easily-recognizable level, Babe 2 is echoed in the unhinged, live-action cartoon of Fury Road. Both films have a fevering, relentless intensity to them that not only compliment each other, but combine to exemplify the detached-from-reality heights that tinge nearly all of Miller’s film, even when that absurdity is relegated to the margins.

It’s a little more difficult to pinpoint Pig in the City‘s similarities to the films Lorenzo’s Oil & The Witches of Eastwick, but far from impossible. Both Lorenzo’s Oil & The Witches of Eastwick are at the very least filtered through the visually wild eye Miller overindulged in with Fury Road & Babe 2. They look especially strange for their genres (the medical drama & the rom-com, respectively) and they both have a relentless never-look-back-or-question-the-rules pacing to them that takes the audience hostage for their intensely eccentric runtimes. This lack of restraint is wicked fun in The Witches of Eastwick, a surprisingly cruel mix of black magic & sexual energy that always catches me off guard as one of my favorite movie-watching experiences. However, that same manic energy is absolutely brutal in Lorenzo’s Oil.

A drama about a child dying of ALD, a disorder that devastates his mind & body, Lorenzo’s Oil is a deeply angry film that bucks the bureaucracy of scientific research that slows down the chances of survival for individual patients in favor of longterm studies that could potentially help future generations. This is not at all unlike the cold, heartless bureaucracies that keep Babe’s gang & owner down, but it’s all the more depressing in that the movie is based on a true story & the on-screen pain has more readily recognizable real-life pain attached. Babe 2 may be occasionally depressing in an arresting way, but it has nothing on the relentless emotional wrecking ball of Lorenzo’s Oil’s dissent into the madness that strangles the parents of a child dying of ALD. Pig in the City‘s connections to The Witches of Eastwick are much more fun; both films feature magical worlds that play like distorted versions of our own and, more artificially, fill their screens with brightly colored balloons in their more surreal moments- pink in Witches & blue in Pig the City. Lorenzo’s Oil offers very little in means of escape, instead using its surreal undercurrent to create a hard to stomach look at the real-life devastation.

On the opposite end of the silly-serious spectrum, George Miller’s Happy Feet films could not be further from the emotional destruction of Lorenzo’s Oil. Pure, unadulterated candy, the Happy Feet franchise can, however, feel just as difficult to stomach. From the first film’s opening scene, when a CGI penguin seductively performs a karaoke version of a Prince song with a come-hither look in her eyes, I wanted to puke, or at the very least give up on watching the two films to come. I instead bravely soldiered on through both Happy Feet pictures, finding very little respite from the sexy penguin karaoke Hell that persistently broke my spirit in both. For every pleasant element in play (Matt Damon & Brad Pitt’s domestic partnership as a pair of krill, for instance) there was twice as much content to hate (Robin William’s politically uncomfortable caricature of a Hispanic penguin immediately comes to mind).

You would expect that the only other children’s media Miller was involved in would most closely resemble his Babe sequel but there really isn’t much else connecting the films outside genre & vague political overtones.  In both the Happy Feet films & Pig in the City, Miller takes a spoonful of sugar approach to political philosophizing. Just as Babe 2 sneaks a positive representation of communism in action in its talking animal adventure plot, Happy Feet (much less covertly) hides its environmental activism behind a shroud of cute animated penguins & some of the worst karaoke ever committed to film. Besides the political Trojan-horsing I don’t see much else connecting Happy Feet to Pig in the City. Even more so, I find Happy Feet to be an outlier in Miller’s ouevre at large, both in terms of quality & content. It’s a pretty terrible stain on an otherwise perfect record.

George Miller is a strange success story in terms of typical auteur career paths. His films wildly vary in terms of genre to the point that he initially seems to exist outside the auteur theory entirely, but once you squint a little closer, his personal touch shines through in each disparate property. As unlikely as it sounds, Babe 2: Pig in the City not only serves as a Rosetta’s Stone of understanding Miller’s career in its glorious entirety, but it also exemplifies the dreamlike intensity he’s still bringing to his films in his 70s. Fury Road felt like the energetic work of a director attempting to prove his worth, but that same energy has somehow been consistent since his 1979 Mad Max debut & already reached its fever pitch in Pig in the City. Let’s hope the runaway train of his imagination leads to a ton more of completed projects in his remaining years, even if that means suffering through the pain of another Lorenzo’s Oil or (more painful yet) Happy Feet one more time around. He’s given us more than enough joy to earn a few of our tears.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, George Miller’s Babe 2: Pig in the City, check out last week’s Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet