The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

February 25, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

I’ve been curious about The Adventures of Pluto Nash for over a decade now. It’s widely accepted that Eddie Murphy has been putting in subpar work since at least the late 90s & Pluto Nash seemed to be one of those early signs that his best days were well behind him. With a $100 million budget and a mere $7 million dollar return, the movie was one of the top ten biggest box office flops of all time. While I didn’t expect it to be a particularly great movie, I though it did have potential as a trashy gem (à la Leonard Part 6 or Howard the Duck) because of its sci-fi premise. I suspected that Pluto Nash had potential as a fun bad movie because it was a Bad Movie in Space, which gave it a distinct advantage over the appeal of the Klumps & Norbits of Muprhy’s career. Unfortunately, it instead committed the number one sin in the Bad Movie Bible: it was boring.

When I pictured a Shitty Eddie-Murphy-in-Space Movie with a $100 Million Budget, I naively expected all kinds of goofy adventures featuring Murphy exploring improbable planets & cracking wise at the expense of goofy-looking aliens. Instead, Pluto Nash bottled all of its action on the Earth’s moon and supplanted madcap adventure with run-of-the-mill gunfights & a staggering surplus of jokes about horny robots. Murphy’s Nash is a retired smuggler struggling to run a clean nightclub business where oddly costumed weirdos can line dance to Outkast songs in a futuristic version of doing the robot. His wholesome nightclub is threatened by mafia types who want to turn the moon into a tacky outer space Atlantic City and he risks his life to stop them. The movie could’ve been set on Earth in the present and not lost much in the translation.

In the rare moments when the movie is in full gear the screen is littered with cheap-looking gunfights & car chases crippled with mediocrity. When it slows down Nash literally goes into hiding and essentially watches the Moon’s version of Netflix, which has to be one of the most boring approaches to a space adventure ever conceived. Imagine if The Fifth Element were adapted as a hackneyed UPN sitcom that frivolously wasted its entire budget on huge explosions & cameos that no one asked for and you’d have a pretty good idea of Pluto Nash’s style. Even the movie’s sole set outside on the Moon’s surface is embarrassingly cheap looking, faker than even 1969’s “real” Moon landing.

It’s hard to imagine where the film’s budget went outside the cast (and the gratuitous explosions). The list of supporting players is beyond impressive: B-Movie legend Pam Grier plays Nash’s gun-toting mother; the beautiful Rosario Dawson is his unlikely love interest; Peter Boyle is his partner in crime; Jay Mohr is a pop star that narrowly avoids drinking battery acid; John Cleese is some kind of AI butler. That’s not even including the appearances of Alec Baldwin, James Rebhorn, Joe Pantoliano, Illeana Douglas and Randy Quaid (as the aforementioned horny robot). Unfortunately, this ungodly stockpile of talent is put to waste and everyone seems to be in full paycheck mode. Even Murphy himself is dead weight here, keeping the antics to a minimum & surrounding himself with a script seemingly designed to massage his ego by constantly reminding everyone how awesome he is. The only actor that has any fun with the film is the always-dependable Luis Guzmán, but Guzmán is about as consistent as they come, so it’s a fairly hollow victory.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash is an action comedy that fails both in its action and its comedy. Jokes about Hilary Clinton’s face on future money (har har) and robots desperately trying to get laid (hee hee) aren’t funny the first time around and are downright painful in their repetition. The film even unironically uses a record scratch sound effect to punctuate its action gags, lest the audience forget to laugh. It’s that dire. As I’ve pointed out before in reviews of Exit to Eden & 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it’s possible for failed comedies or action movies to still be interesting as cultural time capsules or complete train wrecks. There’s a miniscule amount of early 2000’s charm in Pluto Nash’s shoddy rap versions of corny songs like “Blue Moon” & “Dancing in the Moonlight”, its semi-futuristic nightclub attire, and its use of Space Jam-inspired font, but it’s not enough to save the film from its own self-crushing blandness. In this case the schlock is both unfunny and boring, which is a brutal combination for any audience. I should’ve left Pluto Nash where it belongs: forgotten in the past, in hiding on the Moon, watching Moonflix (or whatever) in its pajamas, and trading tired quips with oversexed robots.

-Brandon Ledet

An Angry Rant about the Angry Rant that is Birdman (2014)

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015 / swampflix / 8 Comments

Look, I don’t take pleasure in hating on any film. As I noted on our About page, “We genuinely try our best to love every movie we watch, so know that it hurts us to give one a negative review. We’re looking for the gems in the garbage, not for films to shame.” I watch movies with the full intent of loving them, sometimes a little too eagerly, which often leads to positive reviews of questionable titles like Zombeavers and Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Internet is already full to the brim with vitriol and it’s a fairly tedious exercise to contribute to its negativity, but watch me do it anyway.

Birdman or (the Unamusing Pretension of Arrogance) is a terrible film with a truly nasty disposition. Like a wounded animal, it lashes out at every target within reach. Aging theatre types are too snooty to function; young people are narcissistic voids who bow before the false god of Social Media; average audiences are slack-jawed dullards who vapidly drool over celebrities & superheroes; more discerning critics are vindictive hacks; women are oversexed messes obsessed with their fathers & dying to make out with each other as soon as they can be alone. It’s a bitter worldview at best and a hopelessly misanthropic one at worst. However, that nasty disposition is not its Achilles heel. Birdman‘s major flaw is that as a lampoon of the entertainment industry, it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. Pitch black misanthropy has worked for comedies like Happiness & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the past, but those movies are also, you know, funny. When a film hates all of humanity and only roughly 20% of its jokes land, it’s a remarkably dire experience. Just ask That’s My Boy or Nothing but Trouble. A failed comedy is already painful enough without the hateful arrogance Birdman has in spades. If you’re going to believe yourself to be above everyone & everything, you probably should at least succeed in the most basic requirements of your genre.

Of course, I wouldn’t even be addressing a film I miserably suffered through several months ago if it weren’t for its recent Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. If it’s redundant for me to complain about a film online it’s almost reprehensible to add to the surprlus of complaints about a film that won the Oscars. Awards of that nature always have a way of splitting votes between idiosyncratic choices and allowing mediocrity to rise to the top and suffer excessive scrutiny. When was the last Best Picture win that truly felt deserved? The Silence of the Lambs in 1991? The Deer Hunter in 1978? There are plenty of enjoyable films that have won over the years, but it’s rare (if not impossible) for The Academy (and other awards-giving institutions) to “get it right”.

The 2014 awards season was particularly tiresome, however, because after a year packed with exciting cinema you’d think that Boyhood & Birdman were the only two films of any merit. They not only ate up all of the Oscar buzz; they topped almost every critical list imaginable. Boyhood this. Birdman that. They’re both films interesting in concept, but deeply flawed in execution. It’s great that two ambitious works have earned so much recognition, but there were plenty of other ambitious films released last year that were far more successful as finished products. Birdman’s Academy Award for Best Picture wasn’t an affront to the sanctity of cinema or anything as drastic as that. The film, although sour & unfunny, did have its occasionally impressive ideas and its cinematographer, longtime Alfonso Cuarón collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, provided an intense visual appeal (when the single-take gimmick wasn’t being too distracting). My problem was more that after a long, tiring award season where the same two films ate up every prize available (Boyhood, Birdman, Birdman, Boyhood) the more viciously bitter of the two claimed the final trophy, arguably the most coveted prize of them all.

Plenty of people love Birdman and that’s perfectly fine. Duh. My own Best of 2014 picks never stood a chance of sweeping the awards season anyway. The trashy charms of titles like Snowpiercer, Interstellar, The Guest, and Wetlands aren’t the exactly the kind of artistic merits that earn accolades. Part of my failure to connect with Birdman might be a basic difference in personal sentiments. Perhaps I didn’t find it funny because we’re coming from opposing POV’s and the self-righteous humor of the film worked a lot better with folks on an entirely different wavelength. Although I personally failed to appreciate its final product, the film obviously clicked with a large audience so who am I to question its validity? It only took one mind a couple hours to write this diatribe against Birdman, but it took hundreds of people several months to complete the film itself, so it seems foolish at best to continue to rage against it.

Instead of ending on an angry, Birdman-esque note, I’d like to offer a few other 2014 titles for consideration as alternate viewing. For a similar attention to striking cinematography, I’d like to recommend Under the Skin, The Double, and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears. For dark, embittered comedies with genuine laughs, I’d recommend The Guest, Cheap Thrills and Wetlands. Most importantly, if you connected with Birdman’s attack on the artificiality & sex politics of life & theatre, I highly recommend Polanksi’s Venus in Fur. It accomplishes so much more with so many less moving parts, supplanting Birdman’s strained efforts with a simplistic grace and still somehow not losing a drop of the vitriol. Despite the reductive nature of awards seasons, I’d just like you to know that there were more than two films released last year and that Birdman was far from the best among them.

-Brandon Ledet

The Other Vincent Price Masque: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

February 23, 2015September 15, 2015 / swampflix / 5 Comments

Vincent Price’s fey, effete, menacingly campy persona made him a natural for old-school horror. It was a persona he intentionally cultivated. In his transition from 50’s monster movie classics like House of Wax and The Fly to the 60s Corman-Poe Cycle that made him infamous, he gradually ramped up the eccentricities in his voice & mannerisms that established him as a horror staple. By the 70s Price had devolved into delicious self-parody. His playful demeanor was perfect for the horror genre: his characters were not only evil; they took great delight in their wicked deeds, proudly snickering at the depths of their own cruelty.

It was this persona that made Price perfect for the Prince Prospero role in February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death. The film’s masquerade setting not only afforded Price the chance to be sadistic to a large group of costumed guests, it also gave the sadism a party setting. That mischievous combination of pleasure & pain was positively ideal for the Vincent Price aesthetic. The masquerade setting was so perfect for Price, in fact, that it was recycled years later in another one of his iconic roles: 1971’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

By the time Price starred in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, he was in full self-parody mode. Where Corman’s Masque is a trippy horror show with occasional, unsettling touches of humor, Dr. Phibes is a full-on horror comedy. Price’s Phibes is a horrifically scarred car crash survivor hell-bent on avenging his wife’s death against the surgeons that failed to save her life. The pattern of his revenge mimics the seven Biblical plagues. Despite that disturbing premise, it’s a deviously fun film and one of Price’s most memorable performances. Phibes himself wears a prosthetic mask to hide his facial scars, but that’s not the common thread it shares with Masque. In the film’s best scene (or at least my personal favorite) Phibes offs one of his deceased wife’s doctors at a masquerade ball. His murder method? He supplies the doctor with a mechanical frog mask that crushes his head. The frog mask is not only a beautiful work of art; it also cleverly fulfills the frog plague requirement of the film’s premise.

The masquerade scene in Dr. Phibes is brief, but beautiful. It not only echoes Corman’s Masque in the setting, but also in the gorgeous saturation of color and in the other guest’s nonchalance at the frog-mask victim’s pleas for help. Just as Prospero laughs cruelly at his party guests’ demise, Phibes casually looks on from behind a crystal chandelier as his frog mask contraption exterminates his prey. The two films are tonally different works from two opposing phases of Vincent Price’s career, but in the brief moment at the masque in Phibes, The Masque of the Red Death and The Abominable Dr. Phibes are spiritually linked.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death, visit our Swampchat on the film, the round-up of its dueling 1989 knockoffs, and last week’s photos of The Red Death at Mardi Gras. Coverage of our next Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, begins early next week.

-Brandon Ledet

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

February 23, 2015 / swampflix / 6 Comments

The best-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey recently made its long-awaited debut on the silver screen and, as a fan of the book series, I was very curious to see how this film could possibly be tame enough for movie theaters. What could have been one of the most iconic movies of the year turned out to be a total snoozefest. Literally. People in my theater were sleeping so hard they were snoring.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a film about a man incapable of love that falls for a hopeless romantic. What makes this average love story different from others is that he also likes to dominate his female partners in his “Red Room of Pain.” Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) is a successful, attractive businessman that really enjoys the color grey. He has a grey office, grey ties, grey cars, etc. Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a shy college student that earns the opportunity to interview the hottest billionaire in Seattle, Mr. Grey. After administering a truly crappy interview, she finds herself to be attracted to Christian, just as he finds himself to be infatuated with Ana. He instantly becomes disgustingly obsessed with her and takes time out of his busy schedule to make sure he knows her every move. There’s a mysterious aura about Christian, but Ana just can’t seem to figure out his big secret, even after he shows up at her hardware store job to buy cable ties, rope, and masking tape. Shortly after that uncomfortable encounter, he tells her “I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard.” Everything sort of went downhill after that.

I don’t understand how a film about a BDSM relationship could be so quiet and lackluster. There wasn’t very much dialogue between Ana and Christian, and that really didn’t do much to make their love for each other believable. There was so much awkward energy between the two that it just became too much to handle. In the book, which is told in first person by Ana, many of her internal emotions are discussed, but this isn’t really shown in the film. The film made it look like she really didn’t enjoy being dominated, and at some points, it seemed like she was being sexually abused. It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but from what I remember, she was actually enjoying the submissive lifestyle; she was just scared that she liked it too much. Something went terribly wrong when the information from the book was translated into a film script.

In all honesty, I didn’t expect much from this film. The book was pure smut, so I was prepared for a silly mess of a movie that it wasn’t. With lots of good one-liners, a wicked soundtrack, and an amazing slow-motion flogging scene, it was far from the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Actually, I’m kind of looking forward to the sequels.

-Britnee Lombas

Upside Down (2013)

February 22, 2015February 28, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

It’s probably safe to say that by the end of its whopping seven minutes of opening narration you’ll be prepared to tell if you’re game for where Upside Down wants to take you. In heavy, overreaching breaths the protagonist coos about pink bees, forbidden love, flying pancakes, and “the three basic laws of double gravity” in a stunningly over-explanation of the film’s ludicrous premise. It’s as if Romeo & Juliet were retold through the half-mad kaleidoscope of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. The line “Once love was stronger than gravity” best sums up the tone, distinctly warning the audience that this is a fairy tale and a love story, not a crowd-pleaser for discerning sci-fi types.

As is common with fairy tales (and sci-fi for that matter), the film sets up a very simple haves-vs-have-nots dichotomy. Two worlds are connected by opposing gravitational pulls, so that inhabitants of one are always looking upside down at the inhabitants of the other. The world on top is rich. The world on bottom is poor. It’s about as simple of an allegory as you’ll get outside the front & back of the train in Snowpiercer. The fun is in the film’s more fantastic elements, like the aforementioned pink bees that pollinate flowers from both worlds and improbably make an interplanetary romance possible. Besides a few grim details in the wealth disparity and interplanetary oil trade, Upside Down is mostly light fare. If you have the ability (or desire) to turn off your brain and enjoy a sappy against-all-odds love story that involves distant planets and magical pink nectar, it’s a truly fun film.

Even though the movie requires a complete absence of cynicism, it does boast visually thoughtful rewards as well. The spaces where the two worlds meet (particularly in offices & ballrooms that stretch on like two mirrors facing each other) are just straight up nifty. There’s an effortless cool to watching Kirsten Dunst sip a martini out of an upside down glass or watching her love interest hop around on floating platforms like a video game character. After the film’s opening Richard Kelly-style rant, it slows way down to tell a simple love story that will sound awfully familiar to most, but it’s a cliché that’s substantially boosted by its outlandish setting. The romantic fairy tale Upside Down tells is trite, but it’s also timelessly cute and backed up by a puzzling visual landscape that’s deliciously stubborn to even the most basic logic.

Upside Down is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Possession (1981)

February 21, 2015 / swampflix / 23 Comments

Let’s just get this out of the way: Possession is a masterpiece. It’s a cold, incomprehensible film that confidently unleashes cinematic techniques like deadly weapons. Filmed in Berlin in 1980, Possession occupies harsh, uncaring architectural spaces, but populates them with passionate characters that remain in constant, violently fluid motion. The camera moves with them, rarely allowing the audience to settle as it chases its tormented subjects down sparse rooms and hallways like a slasher movie serial killer. In one shot the central couple undulates back & forth in front of a blank white wall, constantly swirling around each other during a bitter argument, but seemingly going nowhere as if trapped in a void. The film feels like a visual manifestation of madness, inertia, and heartbreak all rolled into one dizzying package. It captures the cold horror of divorce & separation and transforms it into an unknowable evil. It’s one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in quite some time, but finds its horror in ambiguity instead of a tangible, comprehensible threat.

That’s not to say there aren’t the typical on-screen genre-signifiers of horror in the film. There is gore. Characters bleed at the impact of sharp instruments and are confronted by humanoid demons, but these aspects serve more as exclamation points than the main attraction. With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, “Maybe all couples go through this” it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.

For a taste of the film’s fascinatingly bizarre sense of movement, the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague” samples key scenes and repurposes them as demonic, Kate Bush-style interpretive dance. It could possibly spoil some striking images, but the film’s plot is mostly spoiler-proof in its intentional obfuscation. The Berlin setting, the sound design in the final scene and the protagonist’s confession that he’s “at war against women” all allude to the possibility of a war allegory subtext, but it’s not explicit or concrete. If anything, characters are at war with themselves and the uncaring nature of the world they occupy. When Sam Neill’s protagonist confesses “For me, God is a disease” it’s easy to empathize. Whoever created the cruel, heartless world of Possession and brought life into it must have at least been as callous as a disease. With its brutal momentum & inevitable bloodshed it’s a terrifying hellscape, especially if it’s something that “all couples go through.”

-Brandon Ledet

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

February 20, 2015April 3, 2015 / swampflix / 18 Comments

Although it was made a few years before the term “documentary” was coined, Häxan was far from the first non-fiction film ever made. It may, however, be the first documentary to ever be billed as a horror film. Based on the painstaking research of Danish writer/director Benjamin Christensen, Häxan is a hot-button doc that pretends to be about the “real” history of witchcraft, but is in truth a condemnation of how modern society deals with mental health. Although it begins & ends with lectures on antiquated notions of geography and health care, most of the film consists of live reenactments of medieval depictions of witchcraft that often blend the film’s documentary genre with classic silent horror. The reenactments are not only the sugar that helps the medicine go down. They’re also technical marvels that made Häxan the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made and a cinematic outlaw in countries that found its depictions of witches & devils to be blasphemous.

In its reenactments, Häxan looks like what you’d get if Fritz Lang’s Metropolis were set in Hell. Devils wag their tongues and suggestively churn butter while witches make potions out of thieves’ fingers, cat feces, and doves’ hearts. Women are lured out of their marriage beds by demons for late night naked dance parties and rub salves on each other’s backs that give them the ability to fly around on brooms. In these scenes, Häxan is the most metal 20s movie I’ve ever encountered. There’s so much wild imagery in the costuming and practical effects that I swear I’ve seen directly echoed before in VHS-era creature features like Nightbreed, Demons and C.H.U.D. The movie’s late night witches’ councils could also pretty much be considered source material for Kate Bush’s incredible “Sat in Your Lap” music video. Although Häxan boasts a serious message it deeply cares about, there’s no denying that it has a lot of fun in scaring the shit out of people with the medieval “The Devil takes many shapes” concept. Recreating live-action versions of witchcraft from art history is the film’s bread & butter, even if Ben Christensen had a loftier purpose in mind.

As devilishly fun & influential as the reenactment scenes are, Häxan (like a lot of hot button documentaries) is ultimately a huge downer. When the film returns to the real world to draw the thread between how women with mental illness have been treated in the past (as witches) and how they’re treated in the present (as lepers & pariahs) the naked dance parties are a far off memory and a flood of more sobering thoughts comes crashing through. The narration explicitly states “The Devil does not belong to the past” and asks “Isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” as depictions of the horrors of modern mental institutions and shady health care practices play out on the screen. Christensen then smartly returns to the opening depictions of the crystal spheres & bowl-shaped landscapes people once believed to be the science of the Universe’s structure, calling into question the validity of modern scientific consensus. Even nearly a hundred years since Häxan’s release, the sentiment is still potent. There are still huge flaws in our treatment of mental health & we still need flashy, sinful entertainment to draw our attention to them. Along with its hellish practical effects & creature design, the film’s central message has a surprisingly long shelf life.

Häxan is currently streaming on Hulu Plus.

-Brandon Ledet

The Running Man (1987)

February 19, 2015February 19, 2015 / swampflix / 11 Comments

In honor of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s induction into the WWE Celebrity Hall of Fame, it seemed appropriate to revisit 1987’s The Running Man, a pro-wrestling meets dystopian sci-fi film that helped cement the actor as a cultural icon.

Some action movies feature exploding heads, but few include them by the end of the opening credits. In this violent video game of a movie, human heads are not only exploded in the opening sequence, they’re also burned, shot, impaled and electrified later on. All of this head-squashing takes place around Ben Richards, a former soldier being framed for the deaths of innocent women & children, as he becomes an unwilling contestant on a sadistic gameshow. Richards must fight his way through a gauntlet of assassins (each with their own wrestling-friendly gimmick personas like Fireball, Buzzsaw, Dynamo and Subzero) as bloodthirsty spectators, including grandmothers and children, watch on eagerly. The dystopian hell of Running Man is set in 2017, but thankfully the game shows of today have not sunk to the depraved levels predicted in the film (if you don’t include Fear Factor).

The original host of Family Feud, Richard Dawson, plays the show’s sleazy, always inebriated host in a performance that doesn’t feel far removed from how Dawson himself acted on his real-life gameshow (where he shamelessly kissed & fondled contestants). Dawson chews the scenery every time he’s on-screen, but is just one of the many memorable cameos in the film. Mick Fleetwood, the infamous drummer for Fleetwood Mac, also makes an appearance as a coked out revolutionary. Then there’s the former governor of Minnesota & pro wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as Captain Freedom, who pummels Richards inside a steel death cage in the film’s best scene. As well as being the best, the death cage scene is also the film’s most violent, because in Running Man the two are one in the same.

Truth is, although Arnold’s protagonist in the main attraction, The Running Man never feels like his film. Easily upstaged by the bigger personalities around him, Ben Richards is one of the weaker roles of Arnold’s career. For most of the film he is simply there, acting like a dick until he has to step into action and kill something. He does have a few good one-liners, though, like the Arnold staple “I’ll be back” and my personal favorite, “I’ll tell you what I think of it: I live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” Despite the one-liners, even María Conchita Alonso (as Arnold’s standard girl-he-kidnaps-who-then-falls-for-him) gives a fiery performance with what little room she is allowed, sometimes outshining Arnold’s.

According to Wikipedia, Arnold stated that the director “shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes.” He is right in that The Running Man never really delves into the social satire that was present in the 1982 Stephen King novel the film was based on. Instead, the film is highly entertaining because of its over-the-top violence, breakneck pacing, and great cameos. I doubt King is a fan of professional wrestling, but the film adaption of The Running Man is like an ultra-violent WrestleMania. Vince McMahon would approve even if King & Schwarzenegger didn’t.

-James Cohn

Zombeavers (2015)

February 19, 2015February 19, 2015 / swampflix / 14 Comments

Zombeavers is a deeply stupid movie. Just a remarkably dumb piece of work. Its irreverent “potty humor”, skin-deep characters, theatrical sex, and leering lipstick lesbianism all feel like the musings of a particularly gross twelve year old boy. Its endless fascination with the double entendre of the word “beaver” is about as corny as its central conceit. A lot of the dialogue is merely a long string of insults (so much so that you could probably apply our See No Evil Drinking Game here and leave fairly sloshed). The zombie-beaver hand-puppets look like garbage. It’s just an undeniably bad movie. I enjoyed it anyway.

Zombeavers is not just a dumb movie; it’s a faithful sendup of dumb 80s horror. Sorority sisters on retreat in a remote cabin find flimsy excuses to strip nude and have loud sex with their airhead boyfriends. They’re punished for their transgressions by an army of murderous, undead beavers that have been transformed by toxic waste polluting the river. As if toxic waste & horny campers being murdered isn’t enough of an 80s throwback, it also boasts a John Carpenter nod in its opening credits & title card to drive the point home. Thankfully, its most faithful 80s sendup is in the practical effects of the beavers & the gore. The beaver puppets don’t look particularly professional, but they have a handmade charm to them that’s missing from a lot of modern horror cheapies, especially in The Asylum mockbusters like Sharknado & Mega Piranha. If the movie had opted for CGI over practical effects, it would’ve been a total slog, but it instead manages to succeed in the choice to chase a homemade, DIY, VHS aesthetic. I might not have laughed at most of its verbal stabs at humor, but the beaver attacks had me howling.

Yes, the humor is hokey and the “beaver” quips are especially relentless. One character even pleads “Can we please stop with the beaver jokes?” in the film’s most genuine moment. However, I’m going to choose to believe it’s cheesy on purpose. It’s not like corny jokes & shoddy puppets didn’t work for folks like Peter Jackson just a few decades ago. It’s a winning formula. Besides, there are a couple moments of absurd brilliance in the script as well, like in the line “We can’t turn on each other right now. That’s exactly what the beavers would want.” I also chose not to turn on the film, the same way the horny, beaver-persecuted sorority sisters chose not to turn on each other. Zombeavers’ hokey banter was bullshit, but the practical effects & 80s horror throwbacks really worked for me. It worked for me so much that when a post-credits stinger promised (or threatened, depending on your perspective) a second instillation in the form of Zombees, I was totally on board. I’ll even throw out a few suggestions for a Part Three: Zombeetles, Zombengals, Zombeagles. Keep ‘em coming, ya violent goofballs. And don’t lose the puppetry.

-Brandon Ledet

Get Excited! Indywood is Looking to Expand their Programming through a Kickstarter Campaign

February 18, 2015February 26, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

I’ve heard tale of an ancient time when New Orleans was blessed with independent movie theaters, from legitimate single-screen cinemas to the overheated living rooms of shotgun houses where enterprising weirdos would sell you cheap beer & strange art films. By the time I was old enough to care, this cinematic paradise was gone. Up until a few years ago, the only independent theater holding on for dear life was The Prytania, a cultural institution that’s blessed our city with a hundred years of service. Most of our city’s independent cinemas had fallen to the crushing presence of AMC theaters in the suburbs and the convenience of home video.

Thankfully, things have changed. Just in the last few years, New Orleans’ independent movie scene has been veritably raised from the dead. In addition to the Prytania, we now have Chalmette Movies, Zeitgeist, Shotgun Cinema, The Theatres at Canal Place, outdoor Moonlight Movies screenings, the upcoming cinema on Broad Street and Indywood at the edge of the French Quarter. The city is buzzing with filmmaking & film watching activity. It’s a great time to be a cinephile in New Orleans.

One of the more exciting and more recent movie theaters in the city, Indywood, is looking to expand its scope & ambition through a crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign. A much cozier & laidback downtown option than the too-rich-for-my-blood Theatres at Canal Place, Indywood is an intimate single-screen cinema on Elysian Fields, a few blocks from the river. It occupies a strange, comfortable middle ground between watching a film in a traditional theater and popping in a DVD in a friend’s living room. Much like the experience of seeing a film at Zeitgeist or the outdoor Moonlight Movies screenings, there’s a communal aesthetic to Indywood that can’t be achieved at a larger, corporate-owned venue.

Asking the very community it serves for a very reasonable donation to fund an expanse in programming, Indywood is looking to be more than just an intimate place to watch movies. According to the Kickstarter page, they’re looking to serve food & wine, play Saturday morning cartoons, and host stand-up comedy & discussions of classic works. They’re also looking to expand the ranges of films they screen to include spotlights on local films, African American films, silent films with live musical accompaniment and (most exciting to me) “80’s VHS gems”. The campaign’s “rewards” are also pretty cool, including a nifty t-shirt, private screenings, and the right to buy a seat in the theater that you’ll have the right to claim “no matter who’s sitting there for a whole year. Even if it’s Beyoncé.”

If you have the time or a few bucks to spare, help support the revival of New Orleans’ independent cinema scene by donating to the Indywood Kickstarter page or at least spreading it on social media. It has about two weeks left to reach its reasonable goal, but just over half of its funding secured. We at Swampflix would love to see their project completed.

2/26/15 UPDATE: The campain was a success!

-Brandon Ledet