Farewell to The Dissolve

July 10, 2015July 10, 2015 / swampflix / 3 Comments

I’m going to try to keep this brief in fear that if I ramble on I’ll gush & blubber. The only website I care about has ceased to be. Roger Ebert’s website is what prompted me to start reading about film in an obsessive way, but The Dissolve is what inspired me to start writing on a daily basis, something I hadn’t done in years. When I first started reading their reviews & articles, I was more or less a casual observer of immense floods of schlock. The site’s writers & its unusually friendly comment community expanded my viewing habits & encouraged me to take part in the game as an active participant. I don’t pretend to be an especially essential writer or a critic (we’re still figuring out exactly what we’re doing here in a lot of ways), but I do owe the push to get started to The Dissolve’s staff & its readers. I literally do not know what to do with myself now that Ebert has passed & The Dissolve has disbanded. This is what it must’ve felt like to live through the end of The Beatles.

For now, I encourage the unitiated to look back through the incredible work the website managed to accomplish in its all-too-brief two year run. Their Movie of the Week articles provided an invaluable structure for the Movie of the Month conversations we hold here. Their Essential Films tag is an incredibly diverse list of must-see movies released in recent years, both newer films that reached the cinema & older titles on home video. Featured articles such as this look at feminist themes in the vampire genre & the strange ways female pleasure is depicted in Magic Mike XXL are indispensable reminders that non-clickbait film writing is still out there, even if it’s sadly not sustainable. Their Dissolve Canon lists like the 30 Best American Indie Horror Films & The 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters were incredibly well-curated collections that we will all be poorer to not see expand. They also have an incredible wealth of pieces written by Nathan Rabin, who is, hands down, my favorite living critic. I could go on.

It’s highly likely that these articles will be preserved for posterity indefinitely, but it’s still worthwhile to give them a look just in case the site eventually disappears completely. I owe a lot to The Dissolve & I’m deeply sad to see it go, but it’s honestly incredible that something so perfect lasted as long as it did. It’s a great loss, but what remains is a solid collection of work worth celebrating just as much as it’s worth mourning. I look forward to following the site’s writers to wherever they land next (a lot of the community has already migrated to a related site called The Solute), but I doubt they’ll ever find such an incredibly perfect oasis again. The Dissolve was truly something special & it will undoubtedly be missed.

-Brandon Ledet

Magic Mike XXL (2015)

July 9, 2015July 20, 2015 / swampflix / 20 Comments

I’ve long considered pro wrestling to be the hyper-masculine equivalent to the way femininity is vamped up in drag performances. Magic Mike XXL poses that male entertainment (read: male stripping) fills that role instead. As represented on the screen here, it’s a solidly convincing argument. Early in the film male strippers & drag queens meet eye to eye in a small dive bar where the male entertainment crew from the first Magic Mike film participate in a voguing contest hosted by a wonderful small-part drag queen MC named Ms Tori Snatch. This scene not only gives the world the wonderful gift of watching former pro wrestler/NWO member Kevin Nash attempt voguing (he at least gets the spirit down more than some of his buddies, even if he can’t move his lumbering body very well), but it also establishes a connection between drag & male entertainment as artforms. Although the strip routines at the big competition at the end of the movie feature a ludicrous amount of faux ejaculations & weightlifting human beings that you’re unlikely to see in a roadside drag show, that brand of cartoonishly gendered performance is not far from what Tori Snatch does for a living. It’s just at the opposite end of the spectrum.

This exploration of stripping as absurd gender performance is limited almost entirely to Magic Mike XXL‘s on-screen stripteases & the brief foray into voguing (although Channing Tatum’s titular protagonist does reveal that his drag queen name would be Clitoria Labia), though, so what of the rest of the film? Besides a couple refreshingly casual nods to a few characters’ bisexuality & some vague philosophising about male entertainment’s role as female worship & sexual healing, the film doesn’t have all too much on its pretty little mind. The first Magic Mike film was an existential, melancholy look at the personal lives of male entertainers that had a lot of devious fun clashing their gloomy off-the-clock behavior with the over-the-top escapism they delivered on stage. Magic Mike XXL, by contrast, is pure escapism. The sequel ditches its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy. The opening of the film revisits a little of Mike’s downtrodden attempts to escape The Life, but once he rejoins the fold & starts dancing again the film is essentially a long list of road trip gags that all land beautifully (when they aren’t interrupted by the film’s hot & heavy strip teases).

True to the film’s boy band dynamic, its narrative focus mostly distinguishing the individual personalities of Mike’s crew of stripper buddies. There’s the pretty boy mystic, the aging giant with an artist’s heart, the boytoy who’s looking to shed his casual sex life in favor of a longterm relationship, etc., all for you to fawn over while they remove clothing from their shaved & oiled bodies. Magic Mike XXL only loses its spark when it strays from detailing the quirks of its all-growed-up boy band heart throbs & tries to find women for them to love. A lot of the heart of the first film was wrapped up in finding a budding romance for Mike, but the idea of repeating that process for the sequel isn’t exactly an enticing one. The love interest angle of XXL is treated like a necessary evil that the movie attempts to downplay at every turn. Mike’s potential partner is an unlikeable Ke$ha type who fancies herself an important artist too wrapped up in herself to engage with the oustide world in an interesting way. She’s self-absorbed, too young & too naive for Mike, and “not going through a boy phase right now” anyway, so her role as the generic Love Interest #2 is significantly downplayed, but it still feels like a waste of the movie’s time. Brief turns as potential love interests from Jada Pinkett Smith & Andie MacDowell (whose Georgian accent is so bad here that she uses the phrase “you guys” instead of “y’all”) fare a little better than Ke$ha the Self-Important Photographer, but they don’t make much of an impression either. The best XXL has to offer story-wise is as a goofy roadtrip movie about a ludicrous group of male entertainment buddies each finding themselves & bringing their true natures into their acts instead of emptily filling the Village People type of stripper roles like fireman in a thong, policeman in a thong, etc.

Beyond the road-trip story, which survives on the strength of its individual gags, Magic Mike XXL‘s greatest asset is its intense imagery. It’s totally understandable that a franchise about male strippers often gets overlooked for the quality of its cinematography, but it’s still a shame. Certain images (like a BDSM-themed strip tease set to Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” & a surreal tour through Jada Pinkett Smith’s dream-logic sex mansion) are just as striking as anything you’d find in a well-crafted art film, but still feel comfortably at home in this over-sexed road-trip buddy comedy. Magic Mike XXL is an impressive melding of the high & low brow, engaging both in its wealth of comedic & over-sexed surface pleasures & in its intense visual palette & light philosophising on the nature of gender performance & sexual healing in male entertainment. It’s difficult to say whether or not it’s a better film than the first, but it’s undeniably more fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Rewind Moment: Orgazmo (1997)

July 9, 2015July 11, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Rewind Moments are those special scenes in films that deserve to revisited over & over again due to their overwhelming impact.

Prior to achieving fame and success with the hit animated television series, South Park, Trey Parker wrote and directed Orgazmo, a film about a Mormon trying to make his way in the porn industry. Joe (Trey Parker) gets mixed up in the porn business in order to make enough money to marry and start a life with his sweetheart, and he ends up becoming a porn superstar and real-life superhero known as Orgazmo. The film is absolutely stupid, but if you’re a fan of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s style of humor, it’s an unforgettable gem.

In my opinion, the film’s standout character is Dave the Lighting Guy (Matt Stone). He has the best lines in the film and the best butt-hole shaped mouth I’ve ever seen in my life. In this particular scene, he approaches Joe during a porn scene and says his signature phrase: “I don’t want to sound like a queer or nothing.” It still kills me after all these years.

-Britnee Lombas

Terminator Genisys (2015)

July 8, 2015 / swampflix / 9 Comments

In the recent flood of reboots, remakes, reimaginings and good, old-fashioned sequels that have effectively taken over Hollywood, there’s been an occasional uproar about what these films are doing to the credibility of the films they’re resurrecting. A few rehashes of long-dead properties have been lauded as critical darlings (such as the fever dream action monster Mad Max: Fury Road), but a lot of them have been met with aploplectic rage, such as Paul Feig’s not-even-released-yet take on Ghostbusters. Part of what Feig is getting flack for is tampering with the original formula, trying his damnedest to give his reboot its own reason to exist, and being met with a resounding opposition that claims he’s “ruining their childhood.” It’s sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t endeavor, creatively speaking, since studios are pouring so much money into these retreads instead of fresh material, but it’d also be entirely pointless to just remake the original film faithfully, except with temporal markers like smart phones & drone-operated cameras to provide modern context (like in the utterly useless Poltergeist remake).

Terminator Genisys has a fun time not only acknowledging the fact that reboots & sequels have a tendency to tarnish the memory of the films that came before them (according to a hypersensitive few), but it revels in the idea. Using the time travel paradox theme from the first couple films in the series, Genisys tinkers with & dismantles its predecessors in a dismissive, disrespectful way that feels alarmingly bold for a film that eventually amounts to a long string of chase scenes. The first hour of the film features a jumble of timelines that interact not only with the 1984 & 1991 stories told in The Terminator & T-2: Judgement Day, but also fleshes out some of the 2024 revolution, makes a pitstop in 1972 that changes the whole game of the first film, and sets up an entirely new Skynet timeline that needs to be dismantled in 2017. It’s a doozy of an opening sequence that features cheap, literal imitations of exact scenes from the earlier movies & repurposes them for its own ends, the implications of how it unravels the first two films be damned. I respect its moxy in this respect, even if the execution was far from flawless.

There’s a televised news report in Terminator Genisys that features the hilariously self-aware headline “Has Genisys gone too far?” This plays like a direct nod to how the film is not only disrespectful to its audience as Terminator fans, but also calls them out as a bunch of technology-obsessed dolts who would allow a computer program to end human existence as long as it promised to make their lives easier. The idea of a killer app that links all of the world’s smartphone technology into one conveniently vulnerable control is far from unique. At the very least, I’ve already seen that concept play out twice this year in Furious 7 & Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s still interesting to see it tie into an action movie’s larger overriding idea that its own audience is worth disdain. There are so many shots of people emptily gazing into their smart phones as a doomsday scenario swirls around them that even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s give-the-people-what-they-want one-liners like “I’ll be back” feel like a dig at the audience’s expectations. It’s so weird to see a film both fulfil movie-goer’s desire to see an old scenario play out yet again & subvert that desire by tearing apart the timelines of the original films by making them irrelevant, or as Schwarzenegger’s cyborg says of himself in this film, obsolete.

Speaking of Arnold, he’s the only enjoyable member of the film’s cast, performing with a weary, but endearing charm that says both “I’m too old for this shit” & “This is all I know how to do”. As a lifelong fan, I’m delighted by the idea of Arnold stretching himself to try new things, but if that means more snoozers like Maggie instead of the one-liner-fueled killing machine performances like in Genisys & the surprisingly enjoyable The Last Stand, I’m also more than happy to just see him filling this role for the rest of his life. No one else in the cast makes much of an impression at all, which (along with a who-cares 2017 climax sequence) tampers my enthusiasm for the film a bit, but that’s okay too.

Look, this is a franchise that’s already been dragged through the mud. Its first two entries are undeniable classics, but Terminator 3 & worse yet, Salvation weren’t exactly memorable cinema. Although I admire Terminator Genisys‘ mission to go back in time & effectively murder its predecessors, it’s an impossible mission. No matter what, those movies still exist & they’re still great. You can revisit your un-ruined childhood anytime you want through Netflix or blu-Rays or murderous smart phone apps or whatever you like, really. They’re still there. We just now also have a serviceable sequel that jumbles the timelines of those films into a barely-coherent mess just to watch its audience squirm under the pressure. I happen to find that tactic pretty hilarious, even if it did have trouble sticking the landing.

-Brandon Ledet

The Overnight (2015)

July 7, 2015 / swampflix / 8 Comments

Usually, filmmakers have a tendency to keep their dark comedy & their sex romps separate. Full-blown sex comedies are usually mindless entertainment more concerned with raunchy gags than existential contemplation & while a black comedy might lighten the mood with an occassional sexual diversion (last year’s sadistic Cheap Thrills comes to mind), it’s rare that sex is its main focus. Even the recent raunch fest Wetlands, which I absolutely loved, kept its dark streak separate from its hedonism, a difficult task for a movie mostly remembered for its ungodly volume of on-screen semen. There might be a reluctance in blending the sexual with the menacing both because it’s awkward to take sex seriously & because sexual menace is difficult to play for a laugh for reasons that should be more than obvious without explanation.

In The Overnight, we have a surprisingly successful homogeneous blend of the black comedy & the sex romp, one where both elements are fused together completely instead of played off each other for a contrasting effect. The movie strikes a consistently terrifying tone through its depiction of underhanded sexual coercion, but somehow never loses grasp of the sillier raunch tangents you’d expect in a typical sex comedy. The effect of this powerful combination is that the sex gags are twice as funny as they’d normally play, thanks to the way they relieve overbearing tension of the the film’s sexual menace. In a lot of ways The Overnight follows the typical party out of bounds story structure of classic black comedies like The Exterminating Angel & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where in-over-their-heads guests feel compelled to remain at a social function even though the mood has soured, but the four characters at the center of this particular party out of bounds & their surprising tenderness for each other are unique to the genre. It’s a very well-written example of a very familiar story that I have a huge soft-spot for.

Besides the deft balance & gradual escalation of the razor sharp script, The Overnight‘s strongest asset is its cast. Adam Scott & Taylor Schilling are fantastic as the befuddled North Westerners struggling to decide if their Los Angeles party hosts are just having a California-style good time or if they’re swingers trying to take their newfound friends to bed. Jason Schwartzman & Judith Godrèche steal the show as the film’s sexual menace, making both sly & overt sexual advances through maneuevers as simple as a hand on a knee and as ludicrous as an art studio packed with abstract paintings of buttholes. It’s difficult to decide through most of The Overnight whether the L.A. couple is taking advantage of their more uptight out-of-towners guests or if they’re apparent sweetness is genuine. The tension between those two competing readings is a great dynamic and both tones could be read in some of the film’s best scenes, like in a stoned, strobe-lit dance party or in a literal dick-measuring contest by the poolside. It’s a testament to the film’s effectiveness that what lingers in your mind after the credits is not the film’s individual sex gags, but rather the implications of the relationships that form between the film’s two central couples. It’s both an equally fun & terrifying experience, as well as a must-see for fans of Jason Schwartzman at his most mischievous.

-Brandon Ledet

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

July 6, 2015 / swampflix / 7 Comments

It’s been interesting to see lately how teen movies are shifting away from the raunchy, American Pie type of sex comedies that have been prevalent since the late 90s towards a more serious, “grown-up” sensibility that hasn’t been very popular since the 80s era of films like Say Anything . . . & The Breakfast Club (or anything by John Hughes, really). Newer films like Dope, White Bird in a Blizzard, and an endless list of John Green adaptations have all reached for a more emotionally resonant, less detached brand of teen media, all with varying degrees of success. The recent Sundance-favorite Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is painfully aware of this trend and attempts to both play along with & subvert serious teen movie earnestness. It fails on both counts. By pretending to be above the emotional vulnerability of John Green adaptations while dabbling in the very same overreaching narcissism & sentimentality, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl creates an all new kind of inflammatory teen movie monster, one with both unique & clichéd reasons to be derided.

If Me & Earl & The Dying Girl is trying to interact with its earnest teen cinema pedigree in any deliberate way, it’s at the very least echoing elements of the John Green cancer-romance drama The Fault in Our Stars. As opposed to the John Green aesthetic where Everything Means Everything & teens struggle with the overwhelming significance of everyday existence, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl shrugs off the emotional weight of a teen dying of leukemia and proposes that nothing means anything at all. It’s not endearing. The film’s protagonist, the titular Me, drifts through life without any concern for anything outside himself. An all-star navel gazer, Me (often referred to as “Greg” for some reason) finds zero significance in any of life’s little ups or downs and tries to keep it all very casual, unless of course the subject at hand is himself, in which case it’s of the upmost importance. This could be an interesting character trait if the movie surrounding him didn’t have the exact same fascination with Me, despite the wide range of infinitely more fascinating characters surrounding him.

The level of self-absorption in Me & Earl & The Dying Girl (alternately titled Me, Me, Me & Me) is so out of control that the central conflict is not whether or not The Dying Girl survives leukemia, but whether or not Me gets to go to college. The least interesting character in this film gets the first, middle, and last word, steamrolling any possible character development outside himself with his overbearingly bland omnipresence. There’s a scene late in the film where Me discovers that his Dying Girl friend has an artistic side she neglected to express to him directly. According to Me’s (& the movie’s) logic this is because Dying Girl was intentionally keeping her artistry private. The truth is, of course, that Me never shut up about himself for two consecutive minutes, so Dying Girl never had a chance to get a word in edgewise. Along with Me’s depressed stoner dad, Dying Girl’s white wine enthusiast mother, the titties & Criterion Collection obsessed Earl of the title, and a selfless former bad boy history teacher, Dying Girl is just one of many fascinating characters that are shamefully allowed to fade into the background while Me blathers on about Me, Me, Me & Me. The best scene in the film (& one of Dying Girl’s most prized memories) is a glorious, but all too brief stretch where Me finally shuts up because he is high & eating a popsicle.

This Is The Part Where I Explain That The Movie Is Not Only Narratively Bankrupt, But Also Stylistically Horrendous. Me, Me, Me & Me is broken up by annoying chapter titles similar to the first sentence of this paragraph and that’s far from the only instance of its stylistic overreaching. The film mostly borrows from familiar visual sources like Wes Anderson & Michel Gondry, often deviating into stop motion animation & Be Kind Rewind-style “Sweded” versions of Criterion Collection films. One of the worst mistakes Me, Me, Me, & Me makes is constantly reminding you of better media you could be filling your time with: The 400 Blows, The Red Shoes, Modest Mouse, etc. The movie does find its own visual language & metaphorical exploration in objects like scissors, pillows, and hand-drawn, Criterion-themed DVD covers, but their significance amounts to little more than inside jokes. Most of what the film accomplishes visually has been done before, better & many times over.

Like when I saw b I of course got the nagging feeling that no matter how much enjoyment I could pull from this movie, there was going to be a very specific target audience who connected to it even more. The difference is that Dope was at the very least entertaining to an outsider, while this film will only be entertaining to Me and all the Me’s in the audience, whoever they are. All I can say at this point is that I didn’t particularly care whether or not Me got into college, which seemed to be the main point of the film, so I guess it was a failure overall & I very much look forward to never spending any more time or energy on Me in the future. Hats off to the other characters & members of the audience who have more patience for Me’s incessant pondering on the nature of Me. I just didn’t have it in me.

-Brandon Ledet

Ballet 422 (2015)

July 5, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Although I don’t remember seeing the first 421 Ballet movies, I found the 422^nd entry in the franchise to be remarkably accessible. Now that I’ve gotten that horrendously unfunny joke out of the way I can at least echo a similar sentiment in the way the documentary Ballet 422 indoctrinates outsiders into its tightly controlled world of professional dance. As if the film were a triple digits sequel for a franchise that’s been running strong since 1948 (when the New York City Ballet company where it’s set was established), the world it depicts is already well-established & lived-in. Instead of explaining the art of ballet as a whole, however, the film is smart to remain pinpoint-specific. This is not a film about ballet, but about the production of a specific ballet and that specificity allows it to reveal more about the artistry as a whole than broader strokes ever could.

Ballet 422 documents a world in which all of the participants are already on the same wavelength, communicating abstract ideas to each other almost wordlessly as they work together to create a new ballet. It’s strikingly intimate. The central subject is Justin Peck, a 25 year old dancer from the New York City Ballet’s Corps de Ballet (layman’s term: background dancers). Although Peck has been a dancer with the Corps for seven years, he’s still a relative youngster as far as choreographer goes (maybe? I’m guessing there; sounds young to me) and the film follows him as he pieces together the company’s 422^nd production in just a few months’ time. There’s a mostly dialogue-free fly on the wall approach to documenting these few months, which is entirely appropriate for an art form that is so physical, so visually based. It’s a rare treat to actually watch the ballet culminate slowly on film without its machinations being described by needless voiceover. After Peck’s production hits the stage, he immediately returns to his secondary role in the Corps de Ballet. It’s an oddly sad, abstractly affecting moment that the film allows to remain open to your own interpretation.

Ballet 422 sidesteps interacting with ballet’s historical or critical significance as an art form & instead reduces the dance into its most basic elements: music & movement. There’s a little insight into the physical tax, the backstage primping, and the politics in the interactions between the dancers & musicians involved in the production being documented, but those moments are mostly fleeting. The real meat & potatoes of the film is when the dancers are talking shop without talking at all. There’s a physical communication at the heart of Ballet 422 that reveals a great deal about the physical communication of ballet itself. It’s fascinating stuff without being flashy or pedantic. Like the ballet documented in the film, Ballet 422 is simple, straight-forward, and effortlessly elegant.

-Brandon Ledet

Leprechaun: Origins (2014)

July 4, 2015July 4, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

It was difficult not to go into Leprechaun: Origins without very specific expectations. Given its pedigree as a WWE Studios horror film starring little person pro wrestler Hornswoggle as the titular leprechaun, a role once played by a wisecracking Warwick Davis, it’d be fair to assume you know everything about the film before you even watch it. If you follow the WWE on a somewhat regular basis you might know Hornswoggle as a sort of a walking punchline. The performer is less recognizable for the quality of his wrestling performances (like, say, El Torito) and more for being involved in some of the promotion’s all-time worst storylines, such as ones where he was revealed to be Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son & the Anonymous Raw General Manager. Thanks to this kind of groan-inducing little person humor that Hornswoggle’s usually used for, it’s even already easy to picture him in the leprechaun costume (or to just Google image search it) and just sit back waiting for the Warwick Davis-style quips to be plugged into the script.

I’ll give credit to WWE Studios for this: they most definitely subverted my expectations here, a rare feat for the movie studio. Instead of dressing Hornswoggle up like Warwick Davis & providing him a bunch of Freddy Krueger/Chucky style one-liners about he gold, Leprechaun: Origins gave him a full-bodied prosthetic makeover. The pro wrestler/human punchline was reconstructed to look & sound like a shaved burn victim gorilla that did little more than bite, hiss, scratch, and growl. It seems that I may have spoken too soon when I said that remakes like Poltergeist weren’t doing enough to update their ancestor’s formulas in a means to justify their own existence.

Leprechaun: Origins is a far cry from its actually-fun predecessors like Leprechaun 2: Back 2 tha Hood & Leprechaun 4: In Space, so it does at least sidestep criticisms of being a shameless retread. The problem is that instead of retreading ground already covered by the Leprechaun franchise in particular, Origins instead removed everything that was unique about it & simplified the formula to the point where it felt like a retread of every monster movie ever. In a lot of ways this crime is far worse than the sins of Poltergeist’s by-the-numbers mediocrity.

Outside its Irish setting & a throwaway one-liner about Lucky Charms, there’s absolutely nothing of note in this film to distinguish it from any other cabin in the woods horror film I can name. Even the hideous get-up they use to conceal Honswoggle is oddly downplayed, so that most of the monster’s screen time is through a first-person POV cam à la Pitch Black. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I would almost rather they had just dressed Hornswoggle up in the cliché leprechaun costume and have him tell a bunch of lame ass jokes for 90 min. At least there would be the small chance of the film being fun (or at the very least memorable).

-Brandon Ledet

If You Enjoyed Dope (2015) You Should Double Back & Watch The Wood (1999)

July 3, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Although the recent coming-of-age teen comedy Dope felt like the emphatic debut of a just-out-of-film school youngster (in terms of energy, not competence) it was actually the work of a director who’s been lurking in Hollywood for more than 15 years. In that time, Rick Famuyiwa has only been able to get four feature films off the ground, which, judging by the two I’ve seen, is a total shame. Famuyima has a smart, authentic, straightforward lens through which he examines youth & nostalgia, both in his most recent effort Dope & in his actual debut, a small-scale charmer made for MTV Films 15 years ago called The Wood.

The Wood & Dope have a lot in common besides the name in the director’s credit. While Dope is set in the present it looks back to 90s music & fashion for inspiration. The Wood splits its time between (the then present) 1999 & flashbacks to the 1980s, equally conscious of reconstructing the styles & sounds of a bygone era as Dope. The flashback chapters of The Wood are introduced through spinning vinyl records, Jheri curls are hilariously abundant, and the high school age protagonists wear clothes so dated that they’ve already had their vintage cool heyday and have gone back to tacky again. Both Dope & The Wood feature protagonists speaking directly to the audience, follow young teens getting into heaps of trouble trying to shed their virginity, happen to include a disgusting puke gag, and discuss the small changes of course that can turn a young nerd into a perceived-violent criminal in the particularly hazardous social minefield of Inglewood, California, where both movies are set. As if that weren’t enough of a solid connection, both films also feature a character named Stacey played by actor De’aundre Bondsl, who are ostensibly the same person (although Dope doesn’t make that connection explicit).

Of course, Dope & The Wood aren’t exact copies of each other and if I had to choose a favorite of the two, I’m inclined to lean towards the more energetic cartoonishness of Dope. The Wood does stand up quite well on its own, though, and helps to reveal a director with a keen eye for nostalgia & growing pains instead of the out-of-nowhere youngin’ with something to prove that I assumed directed Dope when I first saw the trailers. With these two films Famuyiwa establishes a genuine, confident voice that allows him to both tackle the intricacies of gang violence & the inconvenience of public boners. If you enjoyed Dope, I highly recommend giving The Wood a look for context. If you’ve already seen & enjoyed both, maybe just keep an eye out for Famuyiwa’s other films, both past & future. That’s what I plan on doing, anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Highway to Hell (1991)

July 2, 2015July 2, 2015 / swampflix / 8 Comments

Every month one of us makes the other two watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon watch Highway to Hell (1991).

Britnee: “Where the toll is your soul,” and “If there’s one thing worse than dying and going to Hell, it’s not dying—and going to Hell,” are two taglines that grace the cover of my ratty old VHS copy of Ate de Jong’s Highway to Hell, and they both make it blatantly obvious that this is going to be a very “special” movie. I saw Highway to Hell for the first time over 10 years ago as a late night feature film on some cable network I can’t remember, and I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. This was more than just another typically mindless “bad” movie; it was a smart “bad” movie. The way elements of comedy, horror, adventure, and romance mixed into one magnificent, unforgettable film was brilliant, and it’s a crying shame that Highway to Hell never got the spotlight it so rightly deserves. At least it has some time to shine as my selection for July’s Movie of the Month.

Charlie (Chad Lowe) and Rachel (Kristy Swanson) are young, dumb, and totally in love. As the two lovebirds are on their way to elope in Las Vegas, Rachel gets kidnapped by Hellcop (a cop from Hell). Charlie journeys to Hell to save his soon-to-be bride from the devil himself. When one thinks of Hell, usually the image of a dark, underground lair full of goblins and flames is what comes to mind, but the Hell in Highway to Hell is a hot, endless desert with a sparse population (Ben Stiller, Jerry Stiller, Lita Ford, and Gilbert Gottfried all make appearances as citizens of Hell). The concept of Hell in this film is very interesting because the individuals that are in Hell each have a different experience. Some are stuck performing annoying everyday tasks for eternity, some are in a biker gang, some are chopped up in a huge wood chipper, etc.

Brandon, what are your thoughts on Hell in this film? Was de Jong attempting to send out some sort of message with the symbolism in Hell or was it all just campy fun?

Brandon: I think it’s best not to reach too deep for symbolism in this one. As I’m sure you could tell from our screening, I don’t think I was quite as jazzed about the film as you are, but there most certainly is something special about it, even as a late-night basic cable oddity. Hell, especially as a late-night basic cable oddity. I think in a lot of ways we had the perfect Highway to Hell experience. Watching a tattered VHS copy of the movie on a tiny TV, past my bedtime & with a couple of beers, feels like the ideal atmosphere for this film, tracking issues & all. I feel like if it had actually received a proper theater release, it would be a widely reviled flop that would have an unfair amount of people listing it as one of the worst films ever. As a basic cable gem that never made the leap to DVD, it sidestepped a lot of the ridicule and is mostly known only by those who herald it as a minor cult classic.

The reason I don’t think that too much stock should go into the movie’s symbolism is that the script is its most shallow element. There are occasional brilliant moments, (the sex demon scene & Jerry Stiller’s eternally suffering cop who desperately wants a cup of coffee that ain’t coming both come to mind), but for the most part the film doesn’t have a lot to say. There are so many missed opportunities in the plot & the absence of memorable one-liners that it’s difficult to put too much faith into what the movie’s visual symbolism is supposed to represent. The practical, not-fun answer to why a movie set in Hell was shot in the desert is probably that it’s super cheap to film in the desert, as opposed to building a set from scratch. However, I do believe the set design is what distinguishes the film from lesser late-night fare. Considering that Highway to Hell was obviously produced on a shoestring budget, it’s honestly incredible what the film pulled off visually. The art department really gave it their all here, building such an impressively hand-made & lived-in hellscape that it’s both totally understandable & a total shame that the script couldn’t keep up. That disparity makes it really tempting to look into the film’s imagery for some kind of symbolism or grand metaphor, but I just don’t think that anything’s actually there.

Britnee, do you also feel that the film’s impressive visual intensity & lackluster screenwriting were at war with one another? Could you picture the film’s reception & legacy having a greater impact if its script were a little tighter, or is there another missing element at play here?

Britnee: I agree that there’s a definite imbalance between the film’s script and visuals. Personally, I think it’s a good thing because it’s part of what makes the film so amazingly terrible. However, stepping away from my biased opinion, a better script would have bumped up this movie a bit and made it likeable to a broader audience. Maybe it would be good enough to be on DVD! What’s sad is that there was enough money in the film’s budget for awesome visual effects and a decent script. According to IMDB, the film had an estimated budget of $9,000,000, which is totally shocking. I think that the film’s producers were just a little too excited about the film’s handful of special effects and spent all their time and money on them. I’m not going to hate on them because if I had a $9,000,000 budget for a film about Hell, I would do all sorts of stupid stuff with that money.

Come to think about it, I bet it was pretty expensive to get Gilbert Gottfried, Jerry Stiller, and Lita Ford to make such smallappearances. I didn’t mention Ben Stiller because he wasn’t really famous at this point; he was just tagging along with his dad. A good chunk of that budget probably went to these useless cameos.

Brandon, did you find the celebrity appearances to be rather annoying and unnecessary? Like Gilbert Gottfried as Hitler?

Brandon: It varies depending on the cameo. Gilbert Gottfried & Lita Ford got by basically on their mere presence, but honestly just the basic idea of Gottfriend playing Hitler is still funny enough to me now that an empty appearance in that costume feels worth it. And as I said earlier, Jerry Stiller desperately pleading for a cup of coffee for eternity was one of the highlights of the film. His son Ben wasn’t so bad as the befuddled grill cook either. The problem with the script wasn’t necessarily that it wasn’t playing with a full deck. There was a lot of potential in the plot scenarios & celebrity cameos. They just never were employed for a greater, cohesive whole, but instead were left to survive on their own merit as individual moments, seemingly disconnected.

For instance, consider the little kid our doofus of a hero saves from the Satanic Mechanic. What the Hell (to steal a bad joke from a bad movie) was up with that little kid? From the moment he’s introduced as an innocent moppet from Hell, everything in the script screams for him to eventually reveal himself as an evil demon, but it never comes to be. He’s exactly what he presents himself as: a hilariously trite little tyke with nothing but positive things to say about the hero. Much like with Kristy Swanson’s non-entity of a love-interest, the little kid is basically just waiting around to be saved by the bland everyman hero. This adds a lot of camp value to his performance, which had become one of my favorite elements in play by the end of the film, but it does point to a script that has no idea what to do with everything it brought to the table . . . except for to blow it up in the desert.

Britnee, speaking of saving women & children and blowing things up in the desert, you first suggested we watch this film because it reminded you of the Mad Max franchise and I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on that connection before we wrap it up. Also, do you have any thoughts on the Totally Not Evil Moppet the protagonist befriends in Hell? I think I’m warming up to that little booger.

Britnee: One of the reasons that I chose Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month was because Mad Max: Fury Road was getting ready to hit theaters, and I thought it would be interesting to discuss a film that was obviously influenced by Mad Max movies. Hellcop, the motorcycle gang, the super-secret tricked out car, and the numerous car chases on dusty desert roads are just a few things in Highway to Hell that mirror Mad Max. This brings me back to my first question about the reasoning behind Hell being an empty desert. Yes, there was probably no symbolism with Hell being a desert and it was easy on the budget, but I’m just now realizing that this could just be the result of an influence from the Mad Max films.

The Totally Not Evil Moppet (aka Adam) was an over-exaggerated version of an average innocent child, and I agree that he seems like an evil demon in disguise. Plus, he was pretty much the devil’s adopted son, so it makes sense for him to be demonic. Every time his squeaky little voice screams “Charlie!” I cringe, waiting for his teeth to get sharp. His big dopey eyes and stringy hair doesn’t make it much better. What really cracks me up about this kid is that he doesn’t seem to have that big of a problem living in Hell and having the Satanic Mechanic as a father. He was probably a demon child all along, befriending Charlie in order to get his assistance to escape Hell and wreak havoc on the living. Ate de Jong, where is Highway to Hell 2: Adam’s on the Loose?

Brandon, speaking of Ate de Jong, I recently checked out his filmography, and it’s interesting to say the least. He’s anaward-winning Dutch filmmaker, and the majority of his films are on the more serious side and completely opposite of Highway to Hell. What are your thoughts on this? Can you think of any other directors that have failed when going outside their comfort zone?

Brandon: Honestly, when I first saw Ate de Jong’s name appear in the opening credits I assumed it was a fake alias, as if Lynch or Cronenberg had taken a quick made-for-TV paycheck project to fund something more worthwhile. It definitely surprises me that de Jong has such an extensive list of credits on his IMDb page, with a lot of titles in the wartime melodrama genre. What’s even more surprising is that the same year Highway to Hell was released de Jong also helmed the cult comedy Drop Dead Fred. I’ve personally never seen Drop Dead Fred but it does have a pretty positive reputation among folks in our age range and it is somewhat of a surprise that de Jong’s only other American title (as far as I can tell) was a big budget action comedy that never made it past basic cable.

As far as directors failing outside of their usual genres go, it’s hard for me not to think of the recent record-breaking blockbuster Jurassic World as an example, if not only because the wound is so fresh. The director, Colin Trevorrow’s first feature was a small-scale, entertaining sci-fi romance called Safety Not Guaranteed. Jumping from that humble, but admirable beginning directly into an outrageously expensive action film was a mistake for Trevorrow’s growth as an artist (but not for the growth of his bank account) that left him looking a little foolish in my eye. Ate de Jong was seemingly in similar too-big-studio-for-his-britches water with Highway to Hell, as was the inspiration you cited, George Miller, when he made Beyond Thunderdome. When making large scale action movies like this it doesn’t really matter how incredible your visuals or action choreography are if a large number of people involved in the script-writing process are just going to spoil the goodwill.

Lagniappe:

Brandon: I do feel like I was a little unfair to Highway to Hell, which does have its occasional charms as a hidden gem. Now that I know what the film’s limitations are & the fact that the Adam character is most definitely not a demon child, but something much more terrifying (an actual child) I feel like I would enjoy it much more on a second viewing. If nothing else I’d love to spend more time with the mutant sex demon. There was a whole lotta weirdness packed into that all-too-brief scene. Too bad the movie’s difficult to get your hands on, since I’m fairly certain the only home video copy that exists in the world is Britnee’s ratty VHS.

Britnee: I forgot to mention that AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” does not play at any point in the movie. I think this is super funny because when I tell people about this flick, the first they usually say is “Did someone seriously make a movie based on that song?” Sadly, Highway to Hell wasn’t cool enough for the song to be in the movie, but there’s some of the strangest songs I’ve ever heard on the soundtrack. Some unknown band called Hidden Faces did the music for the film, and the singer sounds like he’s singing through his butt. Just one of the many fun things that can be found in Highway to Hell. God I love this movie.

Upcoming Movie of the Months:
August: Brandon presents Babe 2: Pig in the City (1998)
September: Britnee presents The Boyfriend School (1990)

-The Swampflix Crew