Zombi Holocaust (1980)

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There is no horror subgenre more hideously racist than the Italian cannibal film, and yet I keep tricking myself into watching them every time they appear in the wild on thrift-store DVDs.  The 1980 Fulci knockoff Zombi Holocaust was at least more memorably entertaining than the last time I picked up one of these cursed objects about five years ago, when I reviewed Slave of the Cannibal God.  I was hoping Zombi Holocaust would be Zombi-style gonzo Italo mayhem while fearing it might be Cannibal Holocaust-style racist Italo bullshit instead.  The results were just as evenly mixed as the title suggests.  Opening in a New York City med school where cadavers are being ransacked for lunchmeat behind professors’ backs, it at least promises a novel, urban angle on the Italo cannibal movie.  Soon enough, though, those unsanctioned organ harvests are revealed to be the work of “primitive savages” from a small Indonesian island, and the white academics set sail to see what’s causing those “Asiatic” brutes to go so violently mad.  Once on the island, the movie becomes more traditionally racist in the Mondo Italo style, except that the usual cannibal-tribesmen threat is made worse by the locals worshiping a small gang of rotting zombies who stalk the jungle and occasionally pop by for a human snack.  It’s a wild genre mashup between the kind of shameless schlock I love and the kind of shameless shlock I loathe, erratically alternating between them from minute to minute.

What’s fascinating about Zombi Holocaust‘s xenophobia is that the film actively attempts to convey an anti-racist sentiment; it’s just too tone-deaf to pull it off. In a laughable line of faux-profundity, a college professor asks if New York City is really all that different from a society of “primitive savages,” undercutting whatever point they think they’re making with their own racist terminology.  There is something to the juxtaposition of the university’s nighttime cannibal raids and its daytime surgery lectures, though, calling into question how medical study is functionally different from mad-scientist butchery.  That parallel is confirmed later when it turns out that the reason the islanders have been regressing to crazed cannibal savagery is that they’re being experimented on by the professors’ white academic colleague who has gone mad and gone rogue.  It’s a plot wrinkle spoiled by the film’s alternate American title Dr. Butcher M.D., which is a little less descriptive than Zombi Holocaust but a lot less embarrassing to say out loud when someone asks what movie you’re watching.  The messaging behind that white villainy reveal is somewhat commendable, even if it is driven by an impulse to shock & entertain rather than an impulse to discourse.  It’s also completely undone by the way every single Indonesian character is presented onscreen, since it still gets its thrills by depicting them as cannibalistic humanoids regardless of the reasoning.

It’s foolish to look for any coherent messaging in this vintage zombie cheapie, of course, so it’s ultimately a movie that lives & dies (and comes back to life) by the frequency & brutality of its violence.  There are a few mundane stretches wherein characters drive around NYC, change clothes in real time, and struggle to read a map, but for the most part it’s a volatilely entertaining picture.  When the island cannibals eat, they disembowel and chow down in swarms while their victims squirm & scream in protest.  When the mad doctor performs surgery, he cracks open his nonconsenting patients’ skulls to dig around the goop inside in full view of the camera.  There’s even an early giallo-style sequence in the hospital morgue where a gloved maniac meticulously removes a corpse’s hand with a bone saw and then runs off with it, presumably for a midnight snack.  For all of my wincing at Zombi Holocaust‘s racial stereotypes and willingness to dawdle, it did make me yell “WHAT?!” at the screen several times, which is invaluable for second-hand horror schlock.  I’m still not convinced that the Italo cannibal genre at large has anything of value to offer to cinema or to humanity, but this one example is just crazed enough in its practical-effects hyperviolence that for once I didn’t regret watching it.  I’m just a lot more likely to rewatch Burial Ground instead next time I get the itch, since it delivers the same Italo zombie goods without miring them in cannibal muck.

-Brandon Ledet

Play Dirty (1969)

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I’m not especially interested in War Films as a genre, but André de Toth’s WWII thriller Play Dirty sneaks past those well-guarded genre biases and hits me where I’m vulnerable.  Instead of being guided by the usual narrative maps of WWII stories about the valor of defeating Nazis or the horrors of what those Nazis achieved before defeat, Play Dirty is structured more like a heist picture that happens to be set on the battlefield.  It’s a crime picture first and a war movie second, as explained by a British colonel who declares in an early strategy meeting, “War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals.”  Those criminals are the men under his command: a gang of disaffected mercenaries who wear the British uniform but are more motivated by money & personal survival than they are by the prospect of defeating Hitler’s Germany.  If it were an American film, it might’ve been received as a reaction to our country’s ongoing, pointless involvement in The Vietnam War, but its pervasive Britishness divorces it from such a strict 1:1 reading, extending its commentary to all war everywhere at every time.  In Play Dirty, war is a sprawling, scrappy prison fight wherein you’re just as likely to be shot in the back by your own men as you are to be taken down by the enemy.  It deliberately strips all valor from history’s most noble victory over a warring enemy, with the Head Criminal in Charge advising, “Forget the noble sentiments if you want to live.”

A young Michael Caine provides the most familiar face (and voice) here as a clean-cut military officer who naively takes command of this criminal unit.  He immediately struggles to exert control over the undisciplined brutes, desperately pulling a gun on them whenever they refuse to obey his orders.  Unbeknownst to him, the only reason he survives these altercations is because the most undisciplined brute of all (Nigel Davenport) has been promised a bigger payout for the mission if Caine returns alive, unlike the other officers who’ve preceded him.  Their half-Inglorious Basterds, half- Sorcerer mission is to sneak behind enemy lines disguised as Italian soldiers and explode a critical Nazi fuel depot, expediting Hitler’s defeat.  The rocky path to victory is high in tension and sparse in dialogue, often with a shaky handheld camera jostling the audience with the uneasy feeling that gunfire or explosions could erupt at any moment; they often do.  On a character level, there’s no chance of meeting in the middle for Caine & Davenport, who represent opposing noble & savage philosophies of war.  In order to survive the mission, Caine has to cheat & kill just like the heartless criminals under his command, while Davenport just knowingly smiles and scoffs at the supposed differences between “playing dirty” and “playing safe.”  It’s by no means the only war picture that posits that “War makes monsters of us all,” but it is one of the only ones I’ve seen that frames that monstrous behavior as a lowly, scrappy crime spree.

Even if this gang of British soldiers weren’t sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as Italians, this would still clearly be the kind of cinematic relic Quentin Tarantino raves about through coke sweats at LA house parties to anyone who’ll listen. It’s got the exact haggard, macho hangout vibe he’s always praising in vintage genre cinema, and I’m sure he could rattle off the professional stats of all the various character actors who pad out the rest of the cast like a little kid who obsesses over baseball cards.  The only woman among those macho brutes is a German nurse whose capture raises the tension of the group dynamic for obvious, hideous reasons, which reminded me why I don’t spend much of my personal time perusing this particular video store aisle.  Even so, the rougher, confrontational approach to the genre did pique my interest in André de Toth’s directorial career, of which this was shockingly his final film. It’s got the showy, punchy impact of a much younger man with more to prove professionally, which speaks well to de Toth’s late-career enthusiasm behind the camera.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the horror & thriller titles in his catalog that speak more directly to my personal tastes (House of Wax, Crime Wave, Pitfall, etc.) almost as much as I’m looking forward to never picking up a gun on a battlefield, nor having a one-sided conversation with Quentin Tarantino.

-Brandon Ledet

Audition (1999)

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Between all the tradwife influencers, anti-feminist slanderers, anti-Choice Evangelicals, and pro-Trump merchandise bots that flood your doomscrolling app of choice, you don’t need me to tell you that old-fashioned Conservatism is back in a big way.  President-elect Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory this week was a sharp reminder that, in majority, we are a nation that yearns to turn the clock back to a made-up Leave It to Beaver 1950s at the expense of minor, inconvenient details like personal freedom & autonomy – especially for women.  There is no victory to be had over the ghouls who’ve funded & bulldozed our path to this new Conservative hellscape, since the election results indicate that they’re supplying exactly what the people demand: political & moral regression.  That’s why it can be such a relief to fantasize about victory & retribution through art, the only place left where the bad guys lose and our stories can be understood through lenses like progress, meaning, and justice.  At least, that’s what’s on my mind as I think back to watching Takashi Miike’s 1999 cult thriller Audition the week before the election.

If I can dial my own mental clock back a couple decades to when I first saw Audition in the mid-2000s (during a previous popular-vote-sanctioned Conservative hellscape), I believe my thoughts were less political.  They were more like, “Wow, this is boring,” followed by “Whoa, this is fucking sick.”  Audition is the kind of slow-burn horror that tests the patience of twentysomethings who are overeager to get to the gore, with much of its first hour playing more as a domestic drama than a serial killer thriller.  We follow a single-father widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who hopes to bring home a fresh new wife to help maintain a traditional domestic life for his teenage son, since, “A man needs a woman to support him, or he will exhaust himself.”  After sneering at a group of women who dare to have fun in public at an audible volume, he starts to doubt whether there are any demure, mindful women left worth wifing in all of Japan.  That’s when his gross filmmaker business partner steps in to introduce the titular conceit of The Audition, wherein they will host a casting call for young women to play the role of a traditional, submissive wife.  The women think it’s a fictional role for a movie, but the men know it’s for real life.

A Japanese production made to cash in on the popularity of Ring, Audition was obviously not speaking to the American political landscape.  The men who hope to entrap an unsuspecting actress in domestic servitude pine for an older, more conservative Japan.  When they overhear boisterous women daring to enjoy themselves in a public bar, they complain, “Japan in finished.”  The way the movie calls them out for indulging in the Japanese filmmaking industry’s casting couch culture obviously has its own echoes in Hollywood sexual abuse scandals, though, to the point where it’s amazing that the film wasn’t remade as a Good-For-Her Horror revenger in the #metoo era.  The widower is, of course, cosmically punished for his moral crimes by targeting the exact wrong actress from the casting call (Eihi Shiina): a torture-happy serial killer who poses as a wispy loner who’s too shy to make eye contact, when she’s really just waiting for the right time to pounce on her prey.  Men are her prey.  Yes, all men, as she explains, “All men are the same,” even if they’re using the casting couch to find a loving wife instead of a one-time hookup.

It’s easy to forget all of this patient set-up to Audition‘s hyperviolent conclusion.  The bone-sawing, needle-plunging imagery of the final act is so unnervingly grotesque that it obliterates most of what comes before it, at least as the movie lingers in memory.  That effect unfortunately influenced a lot of mainstream American horror filmmaking throughout the torture porn phase of the Bush era, but movies like Saw & Hostel did not echo the more nuanced touches of what Miike accomplished.  I was particularly struck during this rewatch by how the basic perspective and reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation.  When the killer reveals herself as a violent avenger of all abused women against the men who sexually exploit them, she doesn’t do so in a direct, declarative monologue like a Bond villain.  She speaks softly, mostly to herself, while the dipshit widower drifts in & out of consciousness (from both paralyzing drugs and unbearable pain), witnessing detailed reveals of her past experiences that he could not possibly know about, mixed with his own warped dreams & memories.  Meanwhile, she’s not treated as the moral hero of the story so much as a tragic figure who’s dangerous to those who happen to waltz into her trap, and there’s little relief or catharsis to be found for either combatant in her little self-waged war of the sexes.

Audition does not aim to make you feel better about modern culture’s longing for an over-idealized, unjust Conservative past.  It mostly aims to upset & disturb, leaving behind stabs of horrific imagery that you’ll clearly recall even as the plot details fade: pornographic camcorder footage, a ringing telephone, a smirk, a writhing burlap sack, etc.  Still, it can be comforting to know that there are other people out there who find our great cultural Conservative yearning to be grotesque, alienating, and worthy of violent retribution.  The only problem is they apparently do not represent the majority, who’d rather oppress than evolve.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Catwoman – Hunted (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

There’s a moment in this movie where Selina “Catwoman” Kyle is in the middle of a heist, very early in the runtime, when—suddenly—a Batarang appears in front of her, and a cowled shape moves in the shadows. I sighed a heavy sigh; after Soul of the Dragon, nearly three hours of a Long Halloween, and the Batman-heavy Injustice, I was really, really tired of the Batman. You can’t imagine the relief I felt a few minutes later when Batwoman emerged from the shadows. At this point, I’ll take any reprieve that I can get. 

The film opens at a lavish party being hosted by Barbara “Cheetah” Minerva (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), which doubles as the onboarding of Gotham mob boss Black Mask (Jonathan Banks) into the criminal organization “Leviathan.” It’s a costume ball as well, which serves to help a woman who arrives in an old-school Catwoman outfit, catching Black Mask’s eye and prompting him to invite her to accompany his party inside. Unbeknownst to him, the woman on his arm is the real Selina Kyle (Elizabeth Gillies), and she makes her way through the party flirting and pickpocketing until she can get into Minerva’s vault. Along with her faithful feline companion Isis, abscond with the Cat’s Eye Emerald, which Black Mask brought as his buy-in on this criminal enterprise. Mask and his henchman pursue Catwoman along with Minerva’s brute Tobias Whale (Keith David), but she manages to escape, only to be apprehended by Kate Kane, aka Batwoman (Stephane Beatriz), who spirits her aboard an aircraft that Interpol has “acquired” from Penguin. There she meets secret agents Julia Pennyworth (Lauren Cohan) and King Faraday (Jonathan Frakes!), who enlist her help in bringing down Leviathan by acting as bait for Minerva et al’s cronies, promising to wipe her criminal record clean if she succeeds. 

Like Gotham Knight before it, Catwoman: Hunted is drawn in an anime style, although it was handled by a single studio rather than several, as the earlier, vignette-based film was. That studio is OLM, best known in the west for their work on various Pokemon projects, and I love the art style. Catwoman herself is adorable, as is Isis (uh, please don’t take that out of context), and the designs of all of the characters make this one a very pleasant watch, especially following so closely on the heels of more Tomorrowverse thick-line drawing and the ugly art style that was omnipresent in Injustice. Of particular note is just how cool Cheetah looks once she hulks out into her big, feline form; it makes for a much more dynamic visual experience than the rotating house styles that I had come to expect from these, and it was a pleasant surprise once the film got started. I was already pretty won over, however, as the opening credits featured a great jazz soundtrack (courtesy of Yutaka Yamada) and a fun sequence which has this grainy feeling, like the images are drawn with chalk on newsprint. It’s very 70s, and I loved it. Looking back, this film is also one in which those opening credits serve a narrative function; it tells an impressionistic story of Catwoman going to Sochi and rescuing a large group of women from some kind of imprisonment. At first, this seems to simply be a little bit of character development, to signal to potential new viewers that this Catwoman isn’t just the criminal with whom they are likely already familiar, but also establishes her moral code. Further than that, however, this event is actually the impetus for the plot, as it’s later revealed that Catwoman liberated a group of women who were being human trafficked by Minerva, and that what seemed like little more than typical Catwoman steal-a-big-jewel shenanigans was actually the first step in a more complicated plot to take down Minerva. 

I suppose it’s not that unusual for a script by Greg Weisman to be clever. I’ve sung the praises of his television series Young Justice many times in these pages. I love it so much that I put on a random episode while doing some chores the other day and ended up not only just sitting down and watching it, but also having to force myself not to spend the rest of the day like that. For fans of animation in general, Weisman’s name may be familiar because of his development of the criminally underrated Gargoyles, a 90s Saturday morning Disney product that wove mythology, magic, and Shakespeare into its text while tackling ambitious topics like prejudice, redemption, legacy, and identity. If you read the above paragraph and read the names David Keith and Jonathan Frakes(!) and you’re familiar with Gargoyles, you might have already assumed Weisman was involved, as Keith voiced lead gargoyle Goliath and Frakes provided the voice of the show’s first and primary antagonist, Xanatos. Weisman’s work has always been noteworthy, and he’s one of those writers who knows exactly what part of my brain to metaphorically reach inside of and scratch an itch with a perfectly, elegantly constructed narrative. While we’re on the topic of Weisman, this one will probably be of particular interest to fans of the aforementioned Young Justice, as the film’s interest in not just Catwoman but cat women, as evident in the choice of Cheetah as the primary villain, means that the character Cheshire shows up here, with Kelly Hu reprising her voice role. I honestly can’t think of a single thing in this movie that would contradict YJ, so if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by the series (second) cancellation, this can slot right into that continuity, if you like. 

One of the best scenes in the film involves Selina and Kate, left alone on the fancy jet that Interpol commandeered, getting surprisingly intimate for these largely sexless movies. Selina draws a bath and plays at inviting Kate to join her, clearly aware of both Kate’s secret identity and her sapphic inclination. It’s a ploy to get a piece of equipment from Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Selina isn’t into it, and in this house, we fully support bisexual Catwoman. Although Batman isn’t present in the narrative, it’s clear that he and Selina are or have been “a thing,” as Selina is hesitant to use lethal force against Solomon Grundy because of a promise she made to an unnamed friend (before she gets the go-ahead from her teammates since Grundy is technically undead), and bristles at Kate calling her “Cat,” saying that “only he gets to call her that.” Still, this is a new, fun take on the typical Bat/Cat dynamic that we’ve grown used to, and the quippy, flirtatious banter between the two is a highlight of the script. I get the feeling that this one was not well received—it’s the lowest rated of all of these movies by IMDb users (an admittedly feral and untrustworthy lot), has only a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.9 star rating on Letterboxd—but if you’re not a stick in the mud, don’t let that deter you. I’m going to give this some of the highest praise I possibly can, which is that this is one of a very short list of these NSN52 titles that, after this project is over, I might actually watch again. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Uzumaki (2000)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the live-action adaptation of Junji Ito’s cosmic horror manga Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:03 Ju-On – The Grudge (2002)
06:56 The Substance (2024)
10:30 Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
16:25 DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection (2010)
19:51 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
21:17 Ghostwatch (1992)
25:25 The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011)
29:49 Gothic (1986)
36:26 Rumours (2024)
43:23 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
48:21 Audition (1999)
54:00 Smile 2 (2024)
1:00:46 Memoir of a Snail (2024)

1:06:16 Uzumaki (2000)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Local Legends: Bloodbath! (2024)

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Despite his deliberately milquetoast appearance, Matt Farley is a man of extremes. I see both the best and the worst version of myself in the Massachusetts-based backyard filmmaker, whose tireless self-promotion as a self-published artist is simultaneously admirable and diabolical.  As the world’s foremost Matt Farley scholar, Matt Farley is fully aware of this extreme duality in his own creative & professional drive, nakedly confessing to it in his self-portrait series Local Legends.  The original Local Legends was a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a D.I.Y. artist, breaking down the exact economics of how he makes a living improvising the novelty pop songs that fund the projects he really cares about: sincere rock anthems & regional horror comedies.  That film’s sequel, Local Legends: Bloodbath!, is a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a manic narcissist, breaking down the tireless self-promotion routines Farley has to maintain every waking minute to keep his Motern Media brand afloat through sheer momentum – all to satisfy his insatiable ego.  As a pair, the Local Legends films portray Matt Farley as both an aspirational figure and a cautionary tale for self-published songwriters & filmmakers.  Yes, it is possible for the average person to dedicate their entire life to their creative pursuits, but the level of self-obsession required to make that work will transform them into a grotesque monster unworthy of an audience’s admiration.

Not much has changed since the “Matt Farley” of Local Legends broke down his business model & production schedule a decade ago.  Farley’s still cranking out thousands of improvised novelty songs and carefully composed, heartfelt ballads for anyone who’s curious to listen.  The only thing that’s changed, really, is his increased demands for attention & compliments, which has escalated to him renting out music venues on his own dime just so he can feed off his half-empty audience (or half-full audience, depending on your perspective) in real time.  That personal stagnation and professional doubling-down has apparently strained every relationship in Matt Farley’s life.  His wife, his bandmates, his filmmaking partner, and even his audience regulars just can’t seem to match Matt Farley’s enthusiasm for the “Matt Farley” project, abandoning him one by one as he falls further down the novelty-song rabbit hole.  This triggers the return of Matt’s crude businessman alter-ego from the first Local Legends, who arrives on the scene to “eliminate distractions” from his production schedule.  I don’t remember the Business Matt persona looking so much like Paulie Walnuts last time, but the new look makes it all the more disturbing to watch him strangle friends & family to death for slowing down the poop-themed novelty song recording sessions that pay the bills.  Then you remember that he, too, is Matt Farley, who hilariously brands himself as “The nicest guy in showbiz!” despite all the murders.

With Bloodbath!, Matt Farley finds a way to push Local Legends under the horror-comedy umbrella that covers the rest of his output, while maintaining the original’s confessional honesty.  This genre-shifting sequel is very funny as a barrage of self-contained inside jokes, but it’s also genuinely unnerving in its honesty about every artist’s bottomless self-obsession, regardless of success or prestige.  Some of the jokes are benefited by having been fully submerged in the Motern Media filmography, like Farley’s madness being represented in his increased consumption of “coffee milk” or his businessman persona shooting lighting out of his fingertips, à la Druid Gladiator Clone.  Most are Bloodbath!-specific, though, and only become funny through repetition.  By the fifth time Farley repeats inane phrases like “statement analysis” or “No good deed goes unpunished” or leads his half-empty/half-full audience through a sing-along encore of a song about house keys, the laughs are frequent and genuinely earned.  Anyone initially uneasy with the rudimentary imagery’s hideous day-for-night greys or blown-out white balance clipping is gradually rewarded by sticking it out for what Farley is always determined to deliver: funny jokes and good times shared with friends.  Like the best of Motern’s output, Bloodbath! does a great job of making you feel like you’re part of that inner-circle friend group, building its own inside jokes without requiring knowledge of extratextual material.  Still, it’s a work best paired with its less fanciful, more documentary original, since they combine to give you the full Matt Farley experience: the praiseworthy underdog artist and the exhausting, off-putting narcissist.

-Brandon Ledet

Steel and Lace (1991)

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Do you remember that scene in RoboCop where RoboCop shoots a rapist in the dick?  RoboCop nails the guy perfectly through the thighs and skirt of a would-be victim, doubly traumatizing her before ineffectively referring her to a rape-crisis center so he can swiftly move on to enacting more police-state violence elsewhere on the streets of Detroit.  The straight-to-video sci-fi slasher Steel and Lace is essentially a feature-length remake of that scene, except with both the rape victim and the avenging cyborg embodied by one character.  Curiously, it plays that violent rape-revenge scenario with the softer, melodramatic tones of a Lifetime movie instead of the tongue-in-cheek humor of Verhoeven’s classic satire.  It’s no less violent than RoboCop, though.  Directed by special-effects artist Ernest D. Farino—who cut his teeth staging kill gags for the likes of Charles Band, Roger Corman, and Fred Olen Ray—its revenge robot’s body-destroying gadgets vary from scene to scene, depending on the momentary whims of the gore department.  As the title suggests, it’s a wild mix of hard & soft tones, a volatile sentiment that’s echoed by its original tagline: “She’s tough. She’s tender. She’s all woman. And all machine.”

Originally scripted under the title Lady Lazarus, Steel and Lace stars New Orleans local Clare Wren as a victim of sexual assault who loses her court case against her gang of business-bro attackers.  While the ponytailed yuppie scum celebrate their legal victory, she leaps from the courthouse roof to her death, becoming a victim of suicide as well as rape.  Devastated, her techie brother (Bruce Davison) brings her back to life as a rape-revenge Terminator that hunts down each of her Reaganite attackers one-by-one.  She bores holes in chests, she sets men aflame, she decapitates; she even sucks one deserving “victim” dry during penetrative sex, using his dick like a plastic straw.  She’s also a master of disguise, often appearing as single-scene characters before removing her face Mission Impossible-style to reveal the robo-woman beneath.  That shapeshifting ability lends a fun air of mystery to the film, as the audience is never fully sure which minor character is going to be revealed to be the Lady Lazarus robot next: the hot secretary, the hot lady at the bar, the male FBI agent who’s supposedly investigating the murders, etc.  The cops on her trail actually solving that mystery don’t add much to the movie (least of all David Naughton as Detective “Clippy”), but the inventiveness of the robo-murders more than make up for their bland asides.

Much like the dick-shooting scene in RoboCop, there’s an unshakeable sadness that settles on Steel and Lace once the novelty of its over-the-top violence wears off.  Wren recites the mantra “Pretty, very pretty” to each of the investor-bro villains before disposing of them, righteously spitting their own words from her attack back at them.  It’s a cathartic reversal of violence during the first couple of kills, but it gets increasingly sad the longer she’s forced to dwell on it, especially when her brother makes her replay each act of revenge on video so he can obsessively salivate over them like homemade pornography.  Worse yet, she doesn’t really seem to know who she was when she was alive and attacked, asking haunting questions like, “Who was I? Did I have friends? Was I happy?”  The only other woman of the note is the courtroom reporter who sketched her throughout her trial (Stacy Haiduk), whom she frequently locks robo-eyes with in an attempt to make a genuine social connection that has nothing to do with her former self’s rape or her brother’s revenge.  It’s likely silly to seek genuine pathos in this straight-to-video rape revenge RoboCop knockoff, but the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome did such a wonderful job restoring it to a Fine Art quality that I can’t help myself.  It’s just as visually crisp & thematically meaningful to me as the time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

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It was recently announced that self-appointed Stephen King adapter Mike Flanagan (usurping Mick Garris’s throne) will soon be adapting the horror author’s debut novel Carrie into a five-part miniseries.  If you’re not already onboard for Flanagan’s melodramatic, literary take on horror storytelling, it’s not an especially promising proposition.  On the page, Carrie is King at his most direct & succinct, barely breaking through the page count of a novella to tell a simple story of a bullied teenager who violently strikes back at her religious-zealot mother & high school tormentors with newfound telekinetic powers.  It’s a tragic tale without much room to expand, especially not over five hours of serialized television.  Brian De Palma already staged a book-faithful adaptation of Carrie in under 100 minutes nearly half a century ago, while also finding plenty room to bulk up the work with his showy directorial style – the opposite of Flanagan’s grounded interpersonal drama.  If anyone is going to expand the Carrie story without dragging out what’s already on the page with endless expositional filler, they’d have to deviate from the source text entirely and just make up their own thing . . . which is exactly what happened when Carrie was given a late-90s nu-metal makeover in The Rage: Carrie 2.

Written as an original screenplay titled The Curse, The Rage was only reworked as a Carrie sequel several drafts into its rocky production.  Its only tangible narrative connection to the original film is the return of Carrie White’s well-meaning classmate Sue Snell (Amy Irving, reprising her role from the De Palma film), who now works as a guidance counselor at the high school where she once watched all her friends get telekinetically slaughtered.  This disconnection from the original Carrie was a major red flag to director Katt Shea, who only reluctantly signed onto the project (filling in for another director who bailed at the last minute) once she secured permission to include clips of Sue & Carrie in flashback to make it a more credible sequel.  I’m not sure those clips would’ve meant much to the teens of 1999, since De Palma’s Carrie was released before they were born and only lived on through cable broadcasts & Blockbuster Video rentals.  If anything, The Rage‘s horror cinema callback that spoke loudest to that generation was a spoof of the “Do you like scary movies?” phone call from Scream, delivered in a mocking Donald Duck voice by the leader of a new crop of high school bullies.  The moody teenagers of the era were likely showing up to The Rage looking for something contemporary, not to check in on how Sue Snell was doing 20 years later.  To Shea’s credit, she mostly delivered it to them.

Emily Bergl stars as Rachel Lang, the de facto Carrie White in this somewhat-sorta sequel.  She’s a goth-girl loner who’s already grieving the loss of her single mother (Succession‘s J. Smith-Cameron) to institutionalization for schizophrenia when she’s hit with another loss: the sudden suicide of her only good friend (Mena Suvari).  That friend’s death is quickly linked to a small gang of football players who’ve made a point-system game of sleeping with and then immediately dumping as many virginal classmates as they can in a ripped-from-the-headlines plot befitting a Law & Order episode.  Unfortunately for those meathead degenerates, the school goth at the bottom of the social ladder happens to have immense telekinetic powers that could crush them at any time.  This all comes to a head at a homecoming game afterparty at a local rich boy’s house, when Rachel goes full Carrie and burns the entire senior class to the ground.  I hadn’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a horror movie that badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago.  The difference is that the bullies’ deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad, like in the De Palma film.  Rachel unleashes Hell at that party, killing her tormentors with everything from harpoons to flare guns to eyeglasses to Compact Discs.  It’s the kind of payback that makes you stand up & cheer instead of feeling sorry for everyone involved.

The Rage repeats many beats from the original Carrie but transforms the story into such a blatant goth-girl power fantasy that it’s much more closely aligned with films of its own time like Ginger Snaps & The Craft.  There are some very sweaty script-rewrite maneuvers that directly link the source of Rachel Lang’s telekinetic powers to the source of Carrie White’s, but for the most part Katt Shea does her best to distinguish The Rage as its own thing.  The harsh flashbacks to the original Carrie are highlighted in a blood-red color filter, echoed in the black & white, choppy frame-rate textures of Rachel’s telekinetic episodes.  Shea’s background directing erotic thrillers also leaks through, especially in a tender Cinemax-style sequence where Rachel sheds her virginity with one of the popular boys.  I just don’t expect to see that kind of source-text deviation or personal auteurism in a made-for-streaming take on Carrie.  If studios are only going to greenlight (or, in The Rage‘s case, complete) projects with built-in name recognition, the only path forward is for filmmakers to deliver in-name-only sequels that transform their source material into something entirely new.  It’s unlikely that a modern, five-hour version of Carrie will add much to the novel’s cinematic legacy besides digging into its individual character’s motivations & backstories, which means more dutiful homage to forgotten-to-time characters like Sue Snell and fewer novelty modernizations like the flying, throat-slicing CDs of The Rage – reminding you to buy a copy of the official tie-in soundtrack on your way out.  In other words, Mike Flanagan could never; Katt Shea forever ❤

-Brandon Ledet

Smile 2 (2024)

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I wanted to see a new-release horror on the big screen in the lead-up to Halloween, and the offerings are desperately thin.  There are no original horror films in wide release this week (give or take the last few remaining screenings of The Substance, which premiered over a month ago).  Everything on offer is reboots & sequels, continuing this summer’s trend of name-brand horror properties filling in the gaps left by the usual action/superhero fare that’s nowhere to be seen this year.  Among the few horror franchise extenders that did make it to theaters in time for Halloween, it was difficult to find one worth leaving the house to see. Besides being a novelty-Christmas slasher, Terrifier 3 simply looks too mean.  By contrast, Beetlejuice 2 & Venom 3 both look too goofy, to the point where they barely converge with horror at all.  Smile 2 was the obvious choice, then, since it falls somewhere between those tonal extremes.  I remember the first Smile movie being cruel in its messaging that the suicidally depressed should self-isolate to avoid scarring or infecting loved ones with their mental illness, but at least it wasn’t as violently, grotesquely misogynistic as the first Terrifier film.  I also remember Smile being silly in concept, never overcoming the initial cheese of building its horror around an evil Snapchat filter, but at least its sequel isn’t going to indulge in the self-aware schtick of a Beetlejuice or Venom sequel: echoes of you-had-to-be-there comedic properties that would’ve been better off abandoned as one-off novelties.  So, Smile 2 reigns supreme this Halloween, entirely by default.

I suppose Smile 2 is also superior to the first Smile film entirely by default, given that it finally comes up with a reason for The Smile gimmick besides it looking off-putting.  In the first film, the titular Smile is a body-hopping demonic curse that possesses the minds of the mentally unwell, driving them to suicide within a week, then transferring to a new host through the miracle of Trauma. It’s represented onscreen as the hallucinated smiling face of everyone the possessed victim meets, creeping the doomed soul out with a harsh face-altering digital filter that exaggerates their features (a gimmick borrowed from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, from which Smile 2 also borrows its ending).  You could meet Smile halfway by mentally reaching for some thematic connection in how it’s isolating to suffer a mental episode while everyone around you is seemingly, sinisterly cheery, but there really isn’t much to it beyond it looking creepy.  However, Smile 2 does justify The Smile visual gimmick in its narrative, this time following demonically possessed popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) as she prepares for a career-comeback tour after rock-bottoming as a drug addict.  Skye is outfitted to look like Lady Gaga in her onstage costuming, but her offstage struggle to please fans, staff, press, record label execs, and her micro-momager while maintaining a cutesy smile read as Chappell Roan.  Being grinned at by strangers & sycophants all day really does seem like a tough part of the popstar gig.  Usually, the millions of dollars in monetary compensation help make that discomfort worthwhile, but I can see how being stalked by a suicide-encouraging demon might tip that scale in the wrong direction.

Not that it’s easy to know exactly what poor Skye Riley is going through.  The demon’s main method of attack is to cause its hosts to hallucinate, confirming their fears that nobody cares about them, and they deserve to die alone (soon!).  As a result, roughly 90% of Skye’s onscreen journey happens entirely in her head, and the movie constantly pulls the rug from under her to reveal that she’s imagining things, often while humiliating herself in public.  It’s the kind of social cringe that makes you cover your eyes in embarrassment while watching a hack sitcom more often that it is the kind of unnerving horror that makes you cover your eyes in dread.  There are plenty of genuine scares, though.  This being a mainstream studio horror means that things get real quiet every time Skye is alone, only for a loud soundtrack stinger to startle the audience with an out-of-nowhere jump scare (punctuated by a creepy smile, of course).  Her luxury apartment is also invaded by a hallucination of her backup dancers doing a body contortionist routine straight out of Climax, revealing anxieties around how she’s passed around like a doll during her stage act.  Thankfully, no one stops the plot dead to recite search engine results for the word “trauma” like in the first Smile film, but there’s still plenty of brooding over topics like addiction, survivor’s guilt, and suicidal ideation, establishing a visual device where Skye chugs bottled water every time she’s triggered.  Just when you think all of this could be solved by the popstar-in-crisis admitting herself to a “health clinic” for “exhaustion,” though, the film reminds the audience that, yes, there is an actual, physical demon at work here – not just a metaphorical one.

In popstar-crisis terms, Smile 2 is about on par with Trap but oceans behind Vox Lux.  It makes good use of the inherently exaggerated music-video aesthetics of its setting but just as often strays from that world to dwell in the same drab, grey spaces most mainstream horrors occupy.  It’s clear that writer-director Parker Finn was funded for more creative freedom to play around as a visual stylist here than in the first film, and he uses the opportunity to make a name for himself as a formidable auteur before tackling his next ill-advised project: a modern remake of Żuławski’s Possession.  The results are mixed.  The high-gloss pop music aesthetic and sprawling 127min runtime suggest an ambitious filmmaker who’s eager to leave his mark on the modern-horror landscape, but by the third or fifth time he frames that landscape through an upside-down drone shot you have to wonder if he has enough original ideas in his playbook to pull off a name-brand career.  I’m not yet fully invested in Parker Finn as an artist, but I am grateful that he delivered a moderately stylish mainstream horror with a few effective jump scares during such an otherwise abysmal Halloween Season drought.  Smile 2 might not have meant much to me as cinema, but as a commercial product it supplied exactly what I demanded.

-Brandon Ledet