When I saw Don Hertzfeldt’s latest animated short at this year’s Overlook, there was an hour-long line of giddy nerds queued up to squeeze in for a specialty screening and Q&A. A few months later, ME was paired with a victory-lap roadshow exhibition of Hertzfeldt’s 2012 feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I attended with a smattering of fellow introverts avoiding eye contact and the afternoon sun in the complimentary AC. Both experiences were immaculate. The hustle & bustle of the film festival environment made ME feel like a burning-hot ticket, especially since fans could corner the animator in the flesh to force such intimate experiences as asking questions during a moderated panel, showing him the tattoos he inspired, asking for autographs and, in my case, catching a glimpse of him wolfing down Shake Shack between screenings like a regular Joe. The theatrical rollout was obviously less intimate, but Hertzfeldt did his best to make it feel personal. As an intermission between the short & feature, he FaceTimes the audience with a pre-recorded message to explain the ways in which It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a breakthrough formal experiment for his art and to also apologize for exhaustion of watching it so soon after ME. It still felt like a one-of-a-kind presentation for a work that was once streaming without context or personalization on Netflix, even though this exact Cinematic Event is currently touring dozens of international cities.
I’ve never thought of Hertzfeldt as a public figure before this recent tour. Since he largely works alone on self-taught animation techniques that take years to calibrate, I’ve always imagined him as a reclusive outsider artist, the exact kind of quiet introvert that his movies attract to the theater. Early works like Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, and Beautiful Day all had a word-of-mouth quality to their cultural awareness, and if his widest critical breakout World of Tomorrow screened anywhere near where I live with this level of fanfare, I totally missed it. Unsurprisingly, it turns out Hertzfeldt does carry himself with a quiet, shy, apologetic demeanor, seemingly surprised by the continued cult enthusiasm for his animated stick figure abstractions. It also turns out that his public personality was a lot more integral to the tone & narrative of It’s Such a Beautiful Day than I remembered, since his gentle voice is a constant hum on its soundtrack as the film’s scene-by-scene narrator. There’s an observational comic-strip humor to It’s Such a Beautiful Day that makes it feel a hand-drawn diary, especially considering the direct, intimate rapport the director establishes with his audience through narration. That’s what makes it so horrifying when it develops into a diary of personal anxieties rather than a diary of personal experiences as its story escalates, given that if any of this happened to Hertzfeldt himself, he would be either institutionalized or, more likely, dead.
Hertzfeldt narrates the daily, mundane thoughts & experiences of a middle-aged stick figure named Bill. Our milquetoast protagonist starts his journey suffering the same nagging indignities that plague us all: awkwardly waiting for buses, awkwardly chatting with strangers, awkwardly navigating urban hellscapes, etc. Bill’s suffering takes on increasing specificity as his mental health declines, though, due largely to a brain tumor that distorts his ability to think clearly (and inevitably kills him). Although told in third-person, the narration is filtered entirely through Bill’s increasingly warped perception of reality, and the imagery warps to match it. The white copy-paper backdrop of Hertzfeldt’s early works give way to photographic mixed-media textures that Bill stumbles through in non-linear time loops, untethered from logic. His observations occasionally become crass & offensive as his POV is compromised by his tumor, making this one of the great illustrations of intrusive thoughts, mental illness, and unreliable narration. Like all of Hertzfeldt’s work, it’s also a great illustration of Millennial humor, from its grim death-wish nihilism to its LOL-so-random internet cringe. There’s even a literal bacon joke that anchors the picture to the Epic Bacon humor of the 2010s, which only makes it more impressive that the film manages to sketch out an earnest, authentic big-picture demonstration of what it feels like to think & function with a brain distorted by anxiety, depression, and physical malady. For a small, devoted audience, no film has ever felt truer.
When Hertzfeldt refers to It’s Such a Beautiful Day as experimental, he means it more in terms of process than in terms of genre. He filmed the animation cells for the project using a bulky 1940s camera, experimenting with how to segment the frame through multiple exposures by blocking the lens, sometimes mixing traditional animation with stock footage. Even so, there are some aesthetic touches to the film that do recall Experimental Cinema in the Stan Brakhage/Maya Deren sense, with flashes of pure color overtaking the screen to tell the story through emotion & mood rather than through figure & voice. It was a drastic evolution for an animator who used to work exclusively in black & white line drawings, with only a few pops of color adding visual excitement to the frame – an evolution that’s since only gotten more extreme through multi-media layering in The World of Tomorrow & ME. The one thing that hasn’t changed, really, is Hertzfeldt’s unique sense of comic timing, which mines dark humor out of the mundane absurdism of being alive. His ability to perfectly time a punchline made him a cult figure long before he fully distinguished his craft as a visual artist, so it’s been wonderful to spend so much time hearing those jokes in his own voice this year, whether in his heavily-narrated cult classic or in his Q&A tour promoting his new, dialogue-free short. It’s fitting, then, that the only way to access these films (if they aren’t physically traveling to your neighborhood theater) is to purchase them directly from the artist’s website. I imagine he personally packages each shipment by hand and includes a scribbled note of apology for making your brain a little darker with his harsh approach to life & art.
I recently saw Guitar Wolf perform at a crowded, raucous dive bar and was impressed by the band’s continued ferocity. The Japanese garage-rock trio has been around for as long as I have been alive, but they’re rocking and rolling as hard as ever, shredding & crowdsurfing through neighborhood venues the size of living rooms. Meanwhile, it took me two full days to recover from just one of their shows, suffering both headbanger’s whiplash and tinnitus from standing too few feet away from their overcranked amps. I am convinced that a single week of touring with Guitar Wolf would literally kill me, especially since they insist on continuing to wear their black leather pants & jackets (the official Jet Rock n’ Roll uniform) in the Gulf South heat. I left the show with a reignited excitement for the band, though, so I spent more time with them by revisiting their most prominent cinematic showcase to date: the late-90s splatstick horror comedy Wild Zero, in which they fight off a local breakout of astrozombies between playing gigs. Despite only currently being accessible via YouTube, Wild Zero has a sizable cult following—partially due to Guitar Wolf’s Ramones-style rock n’ roll superheroes presence in the film, partially due to its surprisingly progressive queer themes—and it was without question my first introduction to the band. That cult doesn’t account for all of Guitar Wolf’s audience, though, as evidenced by a recent failed Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel titled Wild Zero 2: The Strongest Blood of Humanity. There’s apparently a disparity between the ecstatic enthusiasm of rock n’ roll maniacs who show up to see Guitar Wolf in concert (basically anyone who’s familiar with the phrase “Goner Records”) and the dimmed enthusiasm of schlock gobblers who’d show up to see Guitar Wolf onscreen again (aged internet nerds who used to trade zombie schlock recommendations on long-defunct message boards). There’s obviously plenty of overlap between those two groups; there’s just not enough.
Fear not, Jet Rockers! There’s already another Guitar Wolf movie out there waiting for anyone who’s seen Wild Zero a few too many times but wants to spend more time with the band while the buzzsaw feedback from their most recent tour fades from your eardrums. The 1997 indie cheapie The Sore Losers featured a small onscreen role for Guitar Wolf years before Wild Zero entered the chatroom. The band appears as The Men in Black (Leather): a mysterious trio of villainous space aliens who frame a rival alien gang for intergalactic murders. They’re introduced chugging beers in a Mississippi graveyard about halfway into the film, then randomly materialize at arbitrary points in the plot to wield swords, ogle strippers, and shoot CGI laser beams out of their eyes. They’re very much like the Guitar Wolf of Wild Zero, except they have yet to learn how to use their powers for good. The Sore Losers traffics in that kind of continued-adventures comic book storytelling throughout, directly referencing EC horror comics in its guiding iconography just as often as it references 1950s drive-in B-movies. Guitar Wolf is only one faction of local garage-rock royalty who parade across the screen. Members of The Gories, Oblivians, and New Orleans’s own The Royal Pendletons appear alongside them to make it clear this is the document of a specific, contemporary scene just as much as it is a nostalgia piece about vintage schlock media. Specifically, The Sore Losers is scuzzy, D.I.Y. exploitation trash starring hyper-local celebrities of the Memphis garage punk scene – a lost broadcast from the non-existent film division of Goner Records. Given that Goner was initially established as a means to book & distribute Guitar Wolf in America just a few years before this film’s production, it fully has the credentials to back that up (even if competing garage label Sympathy for the Record Industry initially released the tie-in soundtrack, as advertised in the credits).
Like Wild Zero, The Sore Losers opens with CGI UFOs invading planet Earth, except in this case the UFO transforms into a hotrod the second it lands. We’re told in voiceover that our antihero alien lead (Jack Oblivion) has been in exile from Earth for the past 42 years, punished for failing his 1950s mission to kill a dozen Northern Mississippi beatniks. He immediately picks his mission back up again in a scheme to get back into the good graces of his alien overlords on The Invisible Wavelength, finding it much easier to locate & kill hippies in 1990s Mississippi than it was to locate & kill beatniks there four decades prior. There are a lot of convoluted negotiations around hitting the exact dead-hippie metric that would earn his freedom, but narrative coherence isn’t among the movie’s priorities anyway. Really, the hippie hunt is just an excuse for the intergalactic assassin to go on a short road trip to Memphis, so he can pose in vintage rock n’ roll gear along the way with redneck farmers, astrozombies, heavy-leather dominatrixes, and Betty Page pin-up girls. The cinematic influences on this episodic adventure are clear: John Waters, David Freidman, Gregg Araki, Russ Meyer, etc. The vintage sexploitation bent to that reference material leads to a lot of onscreen nudity, but not a lot of genuine horniness, giving the whole thing the feel of a rockabilly-themed Suicide Girls strip show. It’s all mugging & posing, which is perfectly fine for a movie that’s clearly designed for an insular group of musician friends to celebrate how cool the scene they created together is by mimicking the cool the vintage media they grew up with. It feels appropriate, then, that the end credits scroll includes the organizers of The Sore Losers Bash, since the local premiere & party for the film was almost more important than anything that actually happens in it. As of yet, you cannot time travel back to that party to experience it for yourself, but you can order a reissue of the accompanying garage-rock soundtrack from Goner and blow out your eardrums in an attempt to recreate it.
It says something that the reissued Sore Losers soundtrack currently has a better at-home presentation than the film it promotes. I rented The Sore Losers for $2 on VOD and was shocked by how gorgeous the digital restoration of its 16mm footage looked streaming at home. The cranked-up color saturation vividly highlighted the vintage comic book influence of its guiding aesthetic, whereas just a few years later it likely would’ve been filmed in a grim, grey DV format. However, the version I rented via Amazon had sound mixing issues that made the garage-rock soundtrack barely audible as a background whisper, as if those tracks were accidentally muted in export. There are much fuzzier copies of the movie uploaded to YouTube where you can hear that the songs are supposed to be much louder in the mix, but a lot of the visual & aural details are lost in the lower quality of those transfers, so it’s really a matter of picking your poison. The reason it’s worth mentioning is that the entire draw of the movie is watching cool people model outrageous leather outfits to loud rock n’ roll music (especially if you know those people personally), so a major component of that is experiencing missing if you can barely hear the rockin’ tunes. The best way to view the movie, then, is likely to buy a physical copy on disc. Better yet, don’t watch it at all. Just go to the next garage rock show at your local dive bar and do some covert people-watching while the amplifiers cause irreparable brain damage. From what I can tell, not much has changed on the scene fashion or personality-wise since the 90s. You’re just likely to see more people wearing earplugs now, and I wish I was smart enough to be one of them.
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, Boomeris 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.
We’ve talked a little bit about the CW’s “Arrowverse” series of shows in this feature, but there’s one name that hasn’t really come up here yet, and that’s Batwoman (no, not that one). The interconnectedness of the so-called “Bat Family” is already a tangled web, and it gets more tangled every year, so I’m not going to get into that, but suffice it to say that the current Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, was introduced in 2006 as an updated version of an earlier character, one who was introduced for the sole purpose of showing how super not-gay Batman was in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s infamous censorship call-to-arms, The Seduction of the Innocent. As a way of thumbing the industry’s collective nose at Wertham and his regressive quackery, Kate was explicitly made a lesbian. This was a big deal at the time (as someone who was reading Young Avengers, which featured a gay couple in the form of Wiccan and Hulkling, I can tell you that the contemporary comic letter pages were a fiery, brimstone-y place), and in some ways still was at the time that Batwoman, the 2019 TV series, premiered – at least, if the neanderthal braying of online agitators in the wake of the show’s airing is anything to go by. In the series, which follows the characterization of Kate/Batwoman that was introduced by our old friend The New 52, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate returns to Gotham some time after the abdication of the city by its Dark Knight, and she discovers the Batcave and all the gadgets, retrofits them to suit her needs, and then sets out to clean up the city. Tale as old as time, right?
Among the DC CW shows, Batwoman was the most … cursed, one could say. The first season never completed filming because of COVID, the lead performer (Ruby Rose) left between seasons one and two, and the show’s mixed messaging about the role of the “Crows,” a private security firm headed by Kate’s father, was questionable even before BLM and has only grown more tone deaf over time. Reports have been mixed for years as to whether Rose was fired (for alleged behavior on set) or quit (due to being pretty badly injured during some stunt filming and not taking adequate recuperation time), and although we’ll probably never know for certain, I can say that I think Rose leaving was to the show’s benefit. That tone deafness regarding “non-police” police was rampant all over the first season, to the point where, although I would never agree with the bigots who hated the show on principle about why, they weren’t wrong that it … kinda sucked.
Rose’s exit allowed for the show to go in a different direction. Javicia Leslie was cast as Ryan Wilder, an ex-con out on parole following a short term she served following some poor police work (redundant, I know) on the part of the Crows; when Kate’s plane crashes near where Ryan has parked for the night in the van that she’s living in, Ryan finds the batsuit and puts it to work right away. She was a completely fresh take on the character, and that allowed for new and interesting developments. In the first season, the romantic conflict comes from the fact that Kate and her love interest, Meagan Good’s Sophie Moore, were in military training together before Kate was given the boot for failing to follow “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Sophie didn’t speak up for Kate or herself and is still deeply closeted by the time of the pilot. Batwoman’s archnemesis, Alice (as in “of Wonderland”), is also tied to Kate because—spoiler alert—she’s actually the long presumed dead twin sister that Kate hasn’t seen since her supposed death when they were in elementary school. It didn’t help that Rachel Skarsten’s not-quite-Joker performance was the most interesting thing about the series, either, making her more engaging and magnetic than our purported hero.
So, as season two begins, you have a whole supporting cast who not only don’t know if Kate’s dead or alive, but who also have no idea who this new person in Kate’s costume is. Skarsten’s Alice has to find something new to obsess over now that she can’t just keep pestering the sister she blames for never finding her, and her attempts to play on the guilt of that become a no-sell for Ryan, who grew up in the foster system. To their credit, the CW DC shows often tried to address social issues, and even when their heart was in the right place, it did so pretty clumsily (Black Lightning did it best, obviously, while Supergirl was a real roller-coaster of comrade/allyship). When it was made a selling point of the show, it was often to the show’s detriment. For me, this comes through most clearly in Batwoman’s first season treatment of Sophie, where filthy rich white woman Kate Kane lives in constant judgment of Sophie’s past choices. Kate’s constant exhortations that Sophie should come out of the closet are pure Western neoliberalism, dictating the lives of others without real knowledge of their lived experiences and dangers. But, because it had to pull a soft reboot before it ever really got going, Batwoman was able to do more and be a more interesting text for discourse because it wasn’t a “message” show, or it was at least no longer trying to send the same message that it was from its initial conception. Over time, Ryan and Sophie grow closer without all the emotional baggage of what Kate and Sophie had in the past, and this is the only show that I can think of offhand which had a queer relationship between two Black women as its primary romance storyline. It ended up being a lot better than it had a right to be.
This is all yet another long lead up to me talking about an animated DC film, because this one introduces the Kate Kane Batwoman to this continuity. Batman: Bad Blood opens some six months after Batman vs. Robin, in a pretty cool sequence in which several C-tier Bat-nemeses are gathered in a warehouse and a familiar cloaked figure starts to take them out from the shadows—except, as the firing of a handgun from the darkness reveals—this isn’t Batman (Jason O’Mara), but Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Batman soon intervenes himself, but in so doing, he ends up being blown to bits when the warehouse explodes. The absence of Batman, highlighted by the fact that the Bat-signal is going unanswered and the public has started to notice, leads to Bruce’s son Damian (Stuart Allen) being drawn home, and prompts the return of Nightwing/Dick Grayson (Sean Maher) as well, while Kate enlists her father’s help in trying to find any evidence that Bruce is still alive. Dick finds himself forced to take on the mantle of Batman—something that was his greatest dream as a child before it morphed into the thing that he wanted to escape from most as he matured—but when he recognizes Kate, he unmasks himself to her and takes her on as a probationary member of the team. They’re further joined by yet another new Bat-hero, Batwing (Gaius Charles), who is the son of Wayne Enterprises’ Lucius Fox.
The villain this time around is someone called “The Heretic,” whom Batman seemed to recognize despite his mask in the moments before his death. We in the audience even get a glimpse of the man beneath when he does, but this franchise’s aforementioned difficulty in differentiating the faces of its square-jawed manly men ensures that it means nothing to us. It turns out that he’s operating under the direction of Damian’s mother and Bruce’s ex-lover, Talia al-Ghul (Morena Baccarin), who also has the Mad Hatter and his mind control tech as integral parts of her plan. The Bat Brigade invades her hideout and manages a rescue of Bruce before the fifty-minute mark, and then the real evil plot kicks in: Talia’s turned him into a Batmanchurian Candidate, with the intention of using Hatter’s tech to take over Gotham City (and then, of course, the world). From there, the film dissolves into a series of (admittedly well-executed) cliches, with the finale taking place aboard a floating tech summit. We get our designated girl fight between Talia and Batwoman, Batman’s brainwashing is broken by one of those “I know you’re in there somewhere” speeches, and a floating base is prevented from colliding with Wayne Tower at juuuuuuuust the last second. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s fun, and sufficiently exciting. I got a real kick out of watching all of these folks flying around in their costumes; it gave me flashbacks to watching G-Force/Gatchaman in my youth.
It’s telling that I had more to say about the Batwoman TV series than I did about this movie. Funnily enough, this one goes back to basics with its Kate Kane, as she is decidedly not Bruce’s cousin here. The most interesting thing about this one is that it gives us a chance to see how these characters play off of each other when the title character is missing, where we have a void in the center of this narrative that creates an opportunity for us to spend more time with the others. Dick and Damian are the most fun together that they have ever been here, and the backstory that Dick and Kate knew each other because of cotillions and such is a nice detail. That still highlights some of the film’s weaknesses. These have become self-perpetuating now, so there’s no need to think too hard about certain details; for example, it would have been much more fun if Dick-as-Batman had gotten a little too acrobatic with his fighting, and if this had been the thing to tip off Damian and Kate that he wasn’t the “real” Batman. Instead, they just know when they see him. The dialogue here is a bit more fun than normal too, since Batman isn’t around glooming up the place, and that’s a nice change, but it doesn’t reach the level of being truly special.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon & Britnee watch Notorious (1946).
Boomer: For many years, I’ve been calling Notorious my favorite film of the Hitchcock oeuvre. I’ve recently been filling in some blind spots—most notably The Birds and Dial “M” for Murder, which are pretty big ones in that canon—so I wasn’t sure if I would still hold this one in such high esteem, or if I had simply been trying to be cool as a teenager and cite a lesser known one as my favorite and had been, perhaps, wrong all these years (even if I were, I was still of a feather with Roger Ebert, who named it as his favorite work of the director’s). I still remember the first time I caught this one on TCM when I was in high school, with the requisite intro and outro presented by Robert Osborne. He drew attention to the way that the camera at one point provides a point-of-view shot of Ingmar Bergman’s inebriated driving, her view occluded by her errant hair, and how this was meant to give the viewer a sense of her drunkenness; he talked about how Hitch had received a visit from some men from the state who were curious about why the British director seemed to know so much more about uranium than one would expect for someone not involved in espionage. He praised the arch performance of Madame Konstantin and pointed out the way that the story is bookended with a Nazi’s back to the audience as he faces judgment. And, of course, there was discussion about all that Hayes Code-skirting kissing and nuzzling.
Notorious is a love story. Girl’s father is imprisoned for treason, girl meets boy, boy recruits her to infiltrate a cabal of expatriated Nazis who are living in Brazil, boy gets inexplicably jealous when she is able to ingratiate herself with the mark, girl and boy are able to solve the mystery of her new husband’s dealings. Tale as old as time. In more specific terms, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is, at the story’s outset, present for the sentencing of her father to a Miami prison for his sedition and espionage, and although we are never made privy to the details, his final statement to the court reveals that he is unrepentant. She has a party at her house to drown her sorrows, and is drawn to a mysterious handsome man named Devlin (Cary Grant). She finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by his calm stoicism, and her attempts to get him to crack escalate to her insisting that the two of them go for a drive, where her reckless speeding catches the attention of a motorcycle cop, who lets them go when he sees Devlin’s identification. The next morning, he reveals to Alicia that he has been sent to recruit her for a job in Brazil. Once there, the two of them fall in love, although their little state-sponsored honeymoon comes to an abrupt end when her mission is revealed; she is to ingratiate herself with one Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former contact of her father’s who, in the past, was infatuated with her. Devlin has a little pout about this and freezes Alicia out when she begs for some other way she could help, one that wouldn’t tear the two of them apart. It doesn’t work, and Sebastian proves to be an easy mark, and within a short time, he asks her to marry him. Alicia gives Devlin one more chance to speak up and pull her out, but he doesn’t, and she ends up the new Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband adores her completely, but his hard-nosed mother (Madame Konstantin) is more suspicious of her new daughter-in-law.
What struck me on this most recent viewing is that this film is unhurried, and while an argument could be made that this is to its detriment, I think that true only insofar as one reads this as a thriller, and that it is to Notorious‘s benefit as a love story. So much of the romance is already raced past in order to establish Devlin and Alicia’s passion for one another, and I think that it might be a disservice to the believability of that love to try and abbreviate it any further. It’s fascinating that, as with the previous collaboration between Bergman and Rains, Casablanca, the things which sever our two lovers are duty and patriotism; except that in that film, released at the height of the war in 1942, our reunited Ilsa and Rick are rent asunder for what can be assumed to be the rest of their lives, while this post-war 1946 picture sees Alicia and Devlin get a happy ending (or at least are implied to have one). Spending this much time with the two of them means that the plot doesn’t really kick in until the midpoint of the movie, after an appropriate amount of time to lull you into forgetting that there’s something inevitably coming to rip the two lovers apart. It lends an air of tragedy and gravitas to their parting that they must continue to see one another but deny their passions, which Devlin does behind a screen of sex shaming while Alicia has a harder time concealing her happiness with his company, even when doing so arouses suspicion.
I’m not here to question the late master of suspense and the choices that he made, but I do think that there was room for at least one more close call for Alicia in the Sebastian manor. Madame Sebastian regards Alicia with a constant air of appraisal and unspoken but nonetheless present disapproval. The party sequence in which Alicia and Devlin, through some exciting near-misses, manage to enter the wine cellar in which the secret uranium is hidden and abscond with evidence, is a thrilling one, and there’s some truly magnificent camerawork that swoops over the great Sebastian house entryway, with its checkered tile pattern calling to mind a chessboard that Alicia must cross, before it zooms in on the tiny key in her hand. But I do wish that Alicia had almost been caught another time before or after this, to really build up the tension, although that would risk making the Sebastians seem more naive and less threatening, if she were able to get away with too much before they catch on to her. And when they do catch on to her, we get one of the great lines that I think about all the time, stated by Madame Sebastian to her heartbroken son: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.”
It’s interesting that this one comes right on the heels of the war, when the potential for a Nazi resurgence on another continent after a short breather was something that would have been on the minds of every member sitting in that audience. I’m hard pressed to think of a contemporary or even recent analogy for how that plot point must have felt for the people watching the film, for whom the revelations of just how depraved and barbaric the regime had been within its borders were still an unfolding series of horrors. I wonder, Brandon, if you feel that the way contemporary events were folded into the narrative is as effective now as it was then, if the film would function as well without that element (and instead focused on a fictional cabal of more generic evil plotters), and if you have any other thoughts on the matter?
Brandon: As you’ve already implied, this is a love story first and an espionoir second, with most of the thrills in the first hour generated through the bitter flirtation between Bergman & Grant. The dialogue walks right up to the line of spilling the details of Bergman’s loose morals every time they bicker, and it’s not hard to imagine Hays Code censors tugging their collars in the screening room. As for contemporary audiences’ reaction to the secret Nazi cabal in the second hour, it’s also not hard to imagine that feeling like a more immediate, chilling threat in the 1940s that it is all these decades later. I just don’t think Hitchcock is interested enough in their fascist violence or ideology to make the specifics of their villainy central to the text. Would the movie be all that different if it were made a few years later and our reluctant couple were spying on Cold War Russians instead of Nazis in exile? I have my doubts. Casablanca was specifically about the futility of attempting to remain politically neutral in the face of Nazi fascism, and it was filmed before America joined the war. Comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be parodied the specifics of Hitler’s racism & mannerisms while he was still alive and ascending to power. Besides the Brazilian setting and the Uranium smuggling plot, there isn’t much specificity to the Nazi presence in Notorious, except as shadowy villains whose suspicion raises the tension of the espionage romance that’s front & center. The specifics of exactly why that romance is so tense (mostly Grant’s closed-minded frustration with Bergman’s disregard for womanly virtue) also go unstated, but most of the fun of the movie is in watching Hitchcock chip away at the restraints that block him from fully vocalizing them. Most of his interest is in the fictional, bitter romance he’s created, not in the real-world politics.
The only way I really felt Hitchcock’s disgust with Nazi scum was through the ghoulish specter of Madame Sebastian, who radiates pure hate in every scene while her younger cohorts act like proper gentlemen. Most of the Nazi cabal’s villainy is hidden behind locked doors, but the matron of the house proudly parades her cruelty out in the open as a voluntary enforcer and a true believer in the cause. She can’t even crochet in her rocking chair without coming across as a Nazi piece of shit, which is a major credit to Madame Konstantin’s performance. Britnee, as our resident hagsploitation expert, I have to ask where you think Madame Sebastian’s legacy falls in the cinematic canon of evil old women. It wouldn’t be for another decade or so that Hitchcock literally put the “Psycho” in “psychobiddy” (speaking of menacing rocking chairs), but it seems he was already interested in the horrors of a hateful, overbearing mother here, assigning most of the onscreen evil to the elderly Madame. The question is, was she evil enough for the task? Did she give you the proper psychobiddy tingles?
Britnee: I’m honored to be considered a hagsploitation expert and will immediately add that to my résumé. With such powerful performances from Bergman and Grant, it’s hard to focus on anyone else, but Madame Konstantin earns your attention. I’m always excited to spend time with a mean old lady who wears fancy dresses, so I was riveted during her scenes. Her cold, emotionless tone & face alone gave me the chills, along with her being Nazi trash. The scene where Alexander wakes her up to tell her the news about being married to an American agent was gold. Madame Sebastian is covered in satin sheets and lights up a cigarette with a devious smile before she starts calling the shots in a “Mommy knows best” sort of way. Alexander’s mommy issues were the icing on the cake for this thriller. It created a very eerie atmosphere, especially in the latter half of the film when we’re stuck in the oedipus mansion with a poisoned Alicia. I got goosebumps when Madame Sebastian appeared in that creepy black dress while Devlin was rescuing Alicia from their evil clutches. Once again, this is more evidence that elderly women with horrible hair make wonderful villains, and Hitchcock knew it. He may just be the godfather of hagsploitation.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Notorious was made into a 5-act opera that premiered in Sweden in 2015. From the clips I’ve stumbled upon, it looks absolutely amazing!
Boomer: I’m embarrassed to admit how late in my life I learned that Isabella Rossellini is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (this year!). I’ve seen Bergman in a couple of other flicks since learning this, but Notorious is the one in which I see the most direct ties to her daughter. Even though this one comes after Gaslight and Casablanca, both of which I have seen in abundance just as I have Notorious, her accent here is perhaps at its most undisguised. There are moments throughout where I can almost hear Rossellini speaking through her mother, as the more senior actress’s pronunciation here is the most like her daughter’s.
Brandon: Bergman’s intro in the opening sequence is magnificently badass. Who could help falling for a cop-hating lush with a death wish and a sparkly top that exposes her midriff? The fabulously talented pervert that he is, Hathcock puts just as much effort into establishing her character in this opening sequence as he does shooting the espionage payoffs in the final act. The hair-in-eyes effects shot while she’s drunk-driving is one of his great flourishes of camera trickery, and it’s immediately followed up by extreme, twisty Dutch angles from her POV while she sees the room spinning in bed, failing to sober up. As far as noir’s great femmes fatales go, I can only think of one ferocious character intro that outpaces Bergman’s here: Ann Savage’s relentless viciousness in Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). And even she was meant to be seen as less loveable than she was, uh, savage.
Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon compare Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to Pam Grier, Jackie Brown (1997), against her early run of 1970s blaxploitation classics.
As a result of last year’s Hollywood labor strikes, there was a short-term drought of big-ticket blockbusters at the top of this summer’s release calendar, which has sent media journalists into a doomsaying tailspin. A lot of attention & pressure has been focused on the box office performance of the mid-tier actioners The Fall Guy & Furiosa in particular, whereas most years they would’ve enjoyed their solid critical reviews without all the grim financial scrutiny weighing them down. I don’t want to join in the collective handwringing over the short-term profits those films scraped together for their investors, so instead I’ll just point to the bizarre middle ground I recently discovered between them while they’re still a hot topic. Like The Fall Guy, the 1978 action novelty Stunt Rock is a love letter to professional stuntmen, offering audiences a peek behind the scenes of film production stuntwork that’s usually left invisible. In particular, the film was created as a star vehicle for Australian stuntman Grant Page who, among a hundred other credits, worked on the Mad Max series all the way up to Furiosa. Unfortunately, Page did not live to see Furiosa‘s release, though, as he died in a car crash earlier this year as an octogenarian daredevil who did not know when to quit. There’s been no better time to celebrate his life’s work, then, and there’s no better way to celebrate it than by watching Stunt Rock.
Grant Page stars as himself: a charismatic stuntman with an uncanny fearlessness. The film is essentially an advertisement for his professional skills, with newsreel announcers cheering him on as “Australia’s favorite stuntman goes to Hollywood.” While working his first regular gig on an American TV show, he woos two awestruck blondes: the show’s Dutch star (former Verhoeven collaborator Monique van de Ven, also playing herself) and a fictional reporter who’s fascinated by his craft (Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director’s wife). There’s not too much drama behind Page’s flirtations with those women, though. Mostly, the film is an excuse to watch him perform what the opening title-card warning calls “many extremely dangerous stunts.” Page drowns himself, sets himself on fire, hang-glides, and jumps into the windshields of speeding cars with the going-through-the-motions calm of a bureaucrat filing paperwork. His stuntwork is framed as an extension of Australian independent filmmaking in general, advertising the many thrills & spectacles of that industry with repackaged clips from Page’s resume. Aussie schlockteur Brian Trenchard-Smith creates his own exciting filmic language during that clip show by doubling the 16mm frames of the cheaper films to fill the wider 35mm scope for a psychedelic splitscreen effect. More importantly, though, he just wholly commits to worshipping at the altar of Grant Page, whom he was convinced he could make an international star.
Of course, “Stunt” only accounts for half of this film’s title & premise, and I’m somewhat burying the lede here by not also mentioning where the “Rock” fits in. While brainstorming in the shower, Trenchard-Smith came up with Stunt Rock as a simple combination of two popular mediums, envisioning a showcase for Page’s talents that would score his stuntwork with bitchin’ rock n’ roll. The Dutch production company who funded the project was confident that they could land a legitimate, popular rock act for the soundtrack, reaching out to bands like Kiss, The Police, and Foreigner before finally settling on a much-less famous Los Angeles act named Sorcery. Instead of a perfect marriage of stunt & rock, the combination of Sorcery’s stage act with Page’s screenwork ended up being more of a hat on a hat. The band plays generic, sub-Zeppelin stadium rock that wouldn’t be much to speak of on its own, but they pair it with a live performance of two pyrotechnic magicians who dress like Merlin & Satan to pantomime a Good vs. Evil battle while their songs narrate a play-by-play. There is a vague gesture in the plot that ties Page’s stuntwork to the band, contracting him to help innovate stunts for their magic act as a favor to his cousin. For the most part, though, the stunt and the rock of the title exist side by side as two separate, competing forces.
I suppose there’s some historic value to Stunt Rock‘s peek behind the scenes of 1970s movie-production stuntwork. At the very least, it includes early acknowledgements of filmmaking techniques that have since spread to general public knowledge: wigging, squibs, fire gels, etc. However, by the time Page is narrating the history of cinematic stuntwork over old-timey Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd footage and comedic slide whistles, it’s clear you’re not supposed to be taking any of its film production insight too seriously. Most of its cinematic history is rooted in watching Page conquer America like King Kong, climbing our highest peaks and immediately falling off them. Meanwhile, he’s sharing the stage with one of the goofiest rock ‘n roll acts of all time, whose own stuntwork makes for a fun novelty while also elevating the grittier, gutsier film set stunts through side-by-side comparison. The volatile combination of those two acts is exciting in a way that directly appeals to the audience’s lizard-brain instincts, to the point where there’s simply no way to describe Stunt Rock without sounding like a 13-year-old dweeb; “It’s like if Quentin Tarantino directed an episode of Jackass . . . on acid!!!” It’s a great showcase for Grant Page, though, who really did have a peculiar, one-of-a-kind talent for getting into car accidents and setting himself on fire.
Most children grow up with innate knowledge of the main-cast monsters in the Godzilla series, regardless of whether they’ve ever seen a Godzilla film. Names like Mothra, Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, and Jet Jaguar really mean something to children, who extend their fascination with real-world dinosaurs to the fantastic monsters of classic Toho tokusatsu as if they were interchangeable. It isn’t until you’re older and learn the names of second-tier kaiju that the absurdity of that knowledge becomes apparent. The names Dogora, Atragon, Matango, Varan, and Gorath sound like AI-generated nonsense to anyone not obsessed enough with the genre to collect those lesser monsters’ action figures, but it’s only their general unfamiliarity that makes them ridiculous. Or that was at least my thought when I sat down to watch 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster for the first time and had to back away because I didn’t recognize one of the monsters billed on the poster. Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah . . . these names all mean something to me, but Rodan the Pteranodon (speaking of the fuzzy border between fictional kaiju and real-world dinosaurs) was entirely foreign. So, I took the time to get to know the winged beast before watching his official entry into the Godzilla canon.
Appropriately enough, the introduction of Rodan is as an Unidentified Flying Object that attacks jet fighter pilots who have no idea who he is either. The flying dinosaur travels at supersonic speeds and leaves sky trails in his path, playing into 1950s sci-fi audiences’ fascination with contemporary reports of UFOs. The answer to the mystery of his body is fairly straightforward; he’s an unearthed pterosaur who’s mutated to kaiju scale through radiation exposure – Godzilla-style. His mutant abilities can be surprisingly devastating, though, as he can flap his wings with enough force to create shockwaves & wind gusts that level entire cities in a manner of minutes. Since the monster design is a little unimaginative, it’s clear he needs help to carry the film along, so he’s joined in his debut by a race of giant bug larva with sword-sharp claws that slice people to death on the ground while Rodan attacks from the sky. The bugs are identified as mutated dragonfly larvae and assigned their own official kaiju name Meganulon, which is well-earned, given than they carry the first half of the movie on their exoskeletal backs before the mystery of Rodan is fully revealed to the audience. It turns out that even in his titular debut, Rodan was already presented as a second-tier monster and no threat to Godzilla’s reign as King to them all.
You obviously don’t need to know Rodan or Meganulon’s names to fully enjoy the Godzilla series. Only hopelessly nerdy completists would feel compelled to Do The Homework for a genre that’s mostly just pro wrestling matches in novelty rubber costumes. The only name you really need to know is Ishirō Honda, Toho’s go-to director for most of its tokusatsu classics. From the sincere post-war devastation of the original Godzillato the groovy psychedelia of Space Amoeba, Honda was central to the invention & evolution of kaiju filmmaking in his three decades as a director. With Rodan, he hit the milestone of directing Toho’s first in-color kaiju picture, which makes for beautiful vintage pop art in its modern HD presentations, especially as the tactile monster costumes clash against the matte-painting vistas of the background. More importantly, Rodan is interesting as a tonal middle ground in Honda’s kaiju oeuvre. If you put aside the giant-bug attacks in the first hour, it’s a surprisingly grounded mining labor drama that’s just as grim as the original Godzilla. Mining-town workers are drowned, crushed, and sliced while their widows wail in agony, making the movie just as much of a political piece about working conditions as it is a pollution allegory. That dramatic sincerity can slow down the monster-action payoffs in the first hour, but it does make for a fascinating contrast with the screen presence of Rodan and his insect frenemies, who are too goofy to take 100% seriously.
I am choosing to accept Rodan‘s self-conflicting tone as a feature and not a, uh, bug. If it were made a decade later, it would’ve been pushed to a more cartoonish extreme to fully appeal to children, which might have robbed it of its interest as a volatile battleground for the sincere vs. silly sensibilities of early kaiju movies. Arriving just a couple years after the 1954 Godzilla, it’s an early sign of the goofier direction Honda and the rest of the genre would go while still maintaining the brutality and harsh political messaging of that original text. The least interesting aspect of Rodan, then, is likely Rodan himself, who only earns top bill by default. I doubt the film would’ve lost all that much if it were just about miners being attacked on the job by Meganulon, so it’s somewhat a shame that their name was pushed to the back pages kaiju history books alongside the likes of Ebirah, Baragon, Destroyah, etc. I’m never going to complain about getting a chance to see a flying dinosaur attack a miniature city, though, so count me among the dozens of nerds who are glad that Rodan was given his momentary spotlight.
I recently suffered an online indignity worse than being Rickrolled, Goatsied, Lemon Partied, 1-Cupped, and Dickbutted all at once: I was pressured into watching a YouTube clip from The Joe Rogan Experience. After fifteen years of deliberately avoiding that Libertarian MRA anti-vaxxer shitshow, I finally caved, and it’s all because of my weakness for cheaply produced monster movies. I was just minding my own business watching the forgotten 1970s creature feature Octaman on Tubi, and a couple Google searches later I discovered it was the very first professional monster makeup job for a college-student-age Rick Baker. My interest was piqued, but my usual lazy research methods bore no fruit; Octaman is not currently listed among Baker’s IMDb credits, nor is it mentioned on his Wikipedia page. To my horror, when you search for “Rick Baker Octaman” the only substantive result is a 13-minute clip of his career-spanning interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I’m always down to hear anecdotes from Baker’s legendary career regardless of the venue, but I gotta say this one really tested that resolve.
I won’t be linking to Joe Rogan’s podcast on this blog, but I will report what I learned during my short visit there. While Baker was a full-time student, he picked up side work in a small studio that created Harryhausen-style stop-motion effects, so he could learn the craft. When B-movie producers approached that studio to animate their original octopus-monster creation Octaman, they ultimately decided that the stop-motion medium was too expensive for their budget and instead poached Baker (along with coworker Doug Beswick) to craft him as a traditional rubber-suiter instead. Baker is careful to note that the titular Octaman was not his design; he worked from sketches that were already created before he was hired for the gig. He had six weeks and $1000 to bring the aquatic beast to life, and he looks back on the final result with slight professional embarrassment. That’s largely because the producers lied to the young artist, assuring him that the Octaman would only be shown briefly onscreen in forgiving low-light scenarios that obscured the cheapness of the costume. They must’ve been surprised by the quality of Baker’s work, then, because the Octaman himself is all over the Octaman film, so much so that “Octaman” is listed among the acting credits in the opening title card sequence.
The most endearing detail of Baker’s involvement in Octaman is that the film was directed by the screenwriter for Creature from the Black Lagoon, a Universal monster classic for which this later work could only compare as a distant echo. There’s something adorable about there being a rubber-suit monster movie directed by Harry Essex with creature effects from the much younger Rick Baker, who grew up idolizing his screenwriting credits like Black Lagoon & It Came from Outer Space. At face value, there’s nothing especially important or unique about Octaman as an out-of-time Atomic Age sci-fi that arrived two decades too late to mean anything. However, Baker & Essex’s collaboration position it as the exact dividing line between old-school creature features and their nostalgic throwbacks – a generational passing of the torch. Baker was a toddler when Creature from the Black Lagoon first hit drive-in theaters, but he still got to work on a bargain bin knockoff from one of its central creators years later, and I think that’s beautiful.
If I’m avoiding talking about the events or themes of Octaman here, it’s because there’s not much to it. American scientists researching environmental contamination from “underwater atomic detonations” in Mexico discover small, rubber, octopus-like puppets that live at the mouth of a polluted river, taking them back to the lab for dissection & study. Ever the protective father, the titular Octaman swiftly arrives to slap those scientists to death with his giant rubber tentacles. The 76-minute double feature filler is heavily padded out with Ed Woodian stock footage and faux-philosophic narration about the value of scientific research & adventure in the modern world. It does not skimp on the Octaman action, though. The aquatic beast frequently pops into the frame to strike scientists down for daring to experiment on his octababies, with the camera often shifting into 1st-person octavision so we can watch the kills though his monstrous eyes. Baker gets to play with some light gore effects here, as Octaman rips throats and pops eyeballs out of their sockets, but for the most part the joy is in basic design of the suit. Octaman is more than a little phallic in silhouette (and weirdly veiny to boot), and his eight tentacles sprout from comical angles around his body. He’s more Riverbeast than he is Gill-man, but that is exactly why he’s loved by all who’ve gotten to know him.
Rick Baker is not so embarrassed of Octaman that he refuses to acknowledge his involvement. If nothing else, one of his greatest film credits, Gremlins II: The New Batch, plays a clip from Octaman in a throwaway TV horror host gag (billing it as The Octopus People instead of its actual title), which alone shows that he’s a good sport about it. Why Baker would choose to save all of his juiciest Octaman insight for The Joe Rogan Experience of all platforms remains a mystery to me, though. Maybe Rogan was the only interviewer who’d listen. Or maybe it’s just a result of the movie being so cheap that it couldn’t afford official advertising, so Baker couldn’t take those anecdotes to his usual home on Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell YouTube series – a place I’m a lot more comfortable visiting.
No one understands dream logic quite like an Italian horror filmmaker. The 1994 horror comedy Cemetery Man might visually recall fellow zombie splatstick titles like Evil Dead & Dead Alive, but it updates that sensibility with a distinctly 90s sense of apathetic cool and then heavily distorts it through the Italo-horror dream machine. Director Michele Soavi’s calling-card films Stage Fright & La Chiesa unmistakably belong to a tradition of post-giallo schlock in which the surreal scene-to-scene whims of his narratives are an expected part of the territory, but Cemetery Man is just generic-looking enough that those impulses feel remarkably out of place. A contemporary of fellow horror-dreamers Dario Argento & Lucio Fulci, Soavi makes films that are just as logically sound as Suspriria or The Beyond, which can be confounding when you’re expecting the standard beats of a non-Zombizombie film. It’s the perfect midnight movie in that way, its lingering memory indistinguishable from the movie your dreaming mind would have assembled if you fell asleep halfway through. It would be redundant to say that trying to remember it is like trying to remember a dream, since it very clearly is a dream that just happens to be on celluloid.
Rupert Everett stars as the slacker caretaker of a small cemetery where the dead have an annoying habit of rising from the grave within 7 days of burial. He’s been working the job long enough that he’s bored with the routine, barely bothering to turn around from his writing desk to shoot the undead ghouls in the head and put them out of their supernatural misery. That indifference to his work is somewhat surprising, given that there’s no real consistency to the zombie phenomenon. Some of the “Returners” can continue talking & operating as a severed head, while most just groan incoherently and die the instance their heads are damaged. The 7-day rule also has no real effect on who rises when, since Soavi is much more invested in the momentary pleasures of a visual gag than he is in the overarching logic of his narrative (an attitude a lot of movies would benefit from adopting). The part of Everett’s job that really bothers him is that he has to pretend to be impotent so that local townies don’t assume he’s being sexually inappropriate with the corpses. This gets in the way of his romantic life, of course, placing the handsome young bachelor on the same level of desirability as his unwashed, mentally disabled assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro). Cemetery Man starts with standard zombie attacks, then swerves into sweaty nightmares about male sexual performance anxiety, then swerves again into existential crisis for a last-minute stab at profundity. I haven’t been this jostled by a movie’s narrative trajectory since I watched Argento’s Opera in the exact same movie theater last October, a huge smile beaming on my face in both instances.
If there is any unifying theme to Cemetery Man that ties it all together, I do think it’s lurking somewhere in its detached, apathetic 90s slackerdom. Everett spends the entire movie grumbling about working a boring job where nothing he does natters, to the point where there’s “no difference to being alive or dead.” Later, he tests this theory by actively sending fresh corpses to his workplace as a mass murderer (after some quippy negotiations with Death itself) and is frustrated to find that there are no consequences to his actions. Every time he confesses his crimes to the local detective, he’s met with bemused chuckling. Overall, there’s no rhyme or reason to the rhythms of the plot, but that pointlessness plays directly into the disaffected nihilism of the slacker era. Everett’s line reading of “I’d give my life to be dead” first sounds like a clever play on words until you realize it doesn’t actually mean anything, and then that lack of meaning starts to mean Everything. When he spends his evenings reading the phone book as if it were literature, it’s mostly a joke about how he only sees other living people as potential Returners that he’ll later have to execute, but it’s also a joke about the banality of his daily routine. All jobs and lifestyles are ultimately boring, I guess, regardless of their supernatural circumstances.
The poster for Cemetery Man promises “Zombies, guns, and sex, oh my!”, and I suppose the movie technically delivers on all of those promises. Anyone looking for a non-stop splatstick free-for-all based on that tagline would likely be much better served by Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, though. Cemetery Man is a much calmer, more slippery kind of vintage zombie novelty: the kind best experienced half-awake on late-night cable, so that you’re tormented for years with vague questions if the movie actually exists or if you made it up in a dream. Its limited distribution over the past couple decades has only amplified that effect, but there’s now a Severin restoration making the theatrical and home video distro rounds, so there’s evidence that this movie does, in fact, exist and is just as weirdly dreamy as you remember.
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, Boomeris 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.
In the world of Justice League: Gods and Monsters, the titular team is composed of only three people: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Except that this Wonder Woman isn’t Diana, Princess of Themyscira or Paradise Island, but a humanoid extraterrestrial warrior woman named Bekka who hails from the planet of New Genesis. Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, but is instead Dr. Kirk Langstrom, who appears in the comics and its adaptations as B-tier (if you’re feeling generous) Batman villain Man-Bat, a giant bat creature who was once a man. Here, Langstrom is reimagined as a kind of vampiric anti-hero in the vein of Morbius. Superman is still the last son of Krypton, but we eschew the traditional baby-in-the-space-bulrushes story, and instead Jor-El and Lara are just going to dump some DNA into a rocket and send off a theoretical child they neither know nor love, like in Man of Steel. At the last moment, however, General Zod storms into the laboratory and sticks his finger into the machine (not a euphemism), so that the child that arrives after space gestation is genetically his and Lara’s son. Upon reaching the earth, instead of being discovered by the Kents, who are able to adopt the space child and hide his spaceship on their farm, he is instead first discovered by migrant workers who must flee from government agents, causing this Superman to grow up with no knowledge of his heritage while the government has possession of his pod and access to its technology.
It’s an interesting set-up that allows us to actually examine who these characters are, how they maintain relationships with each other and people on the outside, and how we perceive them as icons through a new lens, darkly. Superman (Benjamin Bratt) here has a more complicated relationship with humanity at large, and at one point idly comments that it might be easier to enforce peace through conquest. Is this a matter of nature or nurture? If it’s the latter, is it possible that there is some genetic predisposition toward egomania that he inherited from his militaristic father? If it’s nurture, is this the result of his identity being deliberately kept from him, or perhaps the result of more direct interaction with the ineptitude (and danger) of the status quo, having seen the way that the American government and people treated his undocumented adopted parents? His relationship with Lois Lane (Paget Brewster) is more adversarial here, and that’s a lot of fun to watch. Like mainstream Wonder Woman, Bekka (Tamara Taylor) is royalty, but instead of coming to “man’s world” as an ambassador of peace, she’s a refugee with nowhere to go after entering into an arranged marriage that was secretly an assassination/coup plot by her father. She’s carrying around a greater burden than Wonder Woman normally does, but she’s nonetheless still paired with Steve Trevor (Tahmoh Penikett) who is now the liaison between President Amanda Waller (Penny Johnson Jerald!) and the League.
As with most things in DC animation, however, Batman is still the star of the show. Michael C. Hall brings a lot of gravitas and pathos to Kirk Langstrom, which is good news, since he’s in a “these super scientists all knew each other in college and there was a terrible accident” plot. The film has to have a pretty strong emotional center if you’re aiming for a demographic that, if they’re at all interested in your product, has probably already seen this exact thing lampooned on The Venture Brothers; I’ve never seen Dexter, so my primary Hall touchpoint is Six Feet Under, and there’s a lot of the vulnerability and introversion that Hall brought to David Fisher there that’s coming through in this performance, perhaps making it slightly better than it has a right to be. See, he was one of the hand-picked graduates of a select group of students overseen by this world’s benevolent(ish) Lex Luthor (Jason Isaacs), although he’s only really remained close to his former best bud and nanomachine specialist Will Magnus (C. Thomas Howell) and Will’s wife Tina (Grey Griffin). Flashbacks to their college days reveal that Tina was always more in love with Kirk than Will, but that the former’s aloofness meant that she found herself in the arms of the latter, although Kirk’s social awkwardness partially stems from his desperate need to find a cure for a wasting disease with which he is afflicted. He’s researching the use of bat plasma, naturally, and when he hits upon the idea of incorporating Will’s research into his own as a hybrid treatment, they put their heads together on it, resulting in the unfortunate Hero Dracula state in which Kirk now finds himself.
The backstory of all three characters takes up a good portion of this film’s runtime, but it never feels expositional. This also means that the main plot of the film is cut down to the bare essentials, which does wonders for the pacing. It’s essentially a mystery story, as we see several other members of the Luthor special program for geniuses killed off by dark, unrecognizable creatures. When the third of these murders occur, it becomes clear that someone is attempting to frame the Justice League for these killings by mimicking their powers and/or fighting techniques. What is “Project Fairplay,” and what does it have to do with the murders? And why take the extra step of making it seem like the Justice League has crossed the moral event horizon? It’s an effective little mystery, probably the first time that one of these movies has attempted a superwhodunit and managed to succeed, with multiple twists that lead up to the big reveal.
It’s also worth noting that Gods and Monsters is done in the artistic style of Bruce Timm, which is to say that it echoes the design aesthetics of Batman: The Animated Series and its associated properties, including Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited. What’s interesting about that is that one of the occasional complaints about those series was that the character designs were too static, specifically that it could be hard to tell the difference between characters when they were unmasked, and that all the female characters in particular were almost identical. I didn’t bring it up in Batman vs. Robin, but that inability to differentiate between characters is becoming an issue over in that ongoing franchise. The big reveal scene of Talon’s identity in that movie (and that he was sleeping with Bruce’s love interest) was completely undercut by the fact that, with the shadowing choices used in the scene to evoke the light of a city skyline at night meant that I initially thought we were finding out that Talon was Nightwing, since they had the exact same jawline, cheekbones, and haircut. Later scenes in normal lighting reveal that he’s a brunet, which helps us tell them apart from that point on in the film when they are out of costume, but that’s not the kind of character modeling you want in an animated film. Here, even though they have the same hair color and are in a lot of scenes together during their college flashbacks, even in the relatively simplified Bruce Timm style, Magnus and Langstrom have sufficiently different features that it’s never an issue, and that’s worth praising here. It’s a small thing, but it’s important.
I enjoyed this one as a nice, refreshing break, and as an interesting spin on the whole “through a lens, darkly” thing that shows us our characters in a different context. The animation style feels like coming home after a long time away, and the plot zips along at a great pace between legitimately interesting backstory reveals. This one gets an unequivocal recommendation.
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