For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Fritz Lang’s German expressionist sci-fi landmark Metropolis (1927).
The evening after seeing Furiosa, I was visiting with a friend who had attended a different screening, and although they admitted that they had “been fighting for their life” after taking an edible, they spouted off a piece of criticism that I was stunned to hear: “I just wish there had been more action and less dialogue.” I couldn’t believe it; I’ve been teasing them about it for weeks now. I can’t conceive of how this movie could have tweaked the mayhem/monologue ratio of what was happening on screen in that direction even the tiniest bit. People have slept on this one, and the long time between the last installment and this one means that I can hardly blame them, but Furiosa is every bit as good as Fury Road, in that they’re both instant classics.
The film opens on child Furiosa, living in a green oasis somewhere in Australia (and trust me, we start in orbit here and dive down to the continent because George Miller wants you to know for sure that we are in Australia). She and another little girl are picking peaches when they come upon a group of scavengers feasting on a horse, with the intention of bringing the head back to their leader as proof of their discovery; Furiosa attempts to sabotage their motorcycles but is captured. Her mother pursues her captors and the two of them manage to pick off most of the bikers, with the last survivor making it back to the scavenger encampment with Furiosa, managing only to tell that he found a green place but not where before Furiosa fatally wounds him. When Furiosa’s mother is tortured to death by the leader of the camp, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), she stops speaking and becomes Dementus’s prisoner/replacement child, and she learns a great deal about the world that was through the teachings of Dementus’s “History Man” (George Shevtsov), who also serves as this film’s narrator. Through various changes of circumstance and squabbles among the disparate groups of scavengers, young Furiosa ends up taken by Immortan Joe, the main villain of Fury Road, to be one of his broodmares; she escapes from this by weaponizing the attention that she receives from Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), cleverly giving him the slip when he tries to “have” her for himself. She slips out into the Citadel and disappears … for now. The rest of the film picks up years later, with Anya Taylor-Joy now in the lead role, but I don’t want to give away any more than I already have.
I came to Fury Road a bit late, having only seen it for the first time within the past couple of years. There’s a whole Sliding Doors other world where I saw it on early release. Nine years ago, a friend and I were going to meet up to go see Jurassic World, but because we got confused about which theater was which, we ended up getting there too late. This was back when the theater chain in question, Alamo Drafthouse, wasn’t owned by Sony and hadn’t already started to go downhill because it was starting to spread itself too thin too quickly, so although it was their (good) policy to not allow us into the movie after it had started, they gave us a raincheck for another movie in the future and offered us an open in spot in either of the next two films that were starting, both in ten minutes: Mad Max: Fury Road or … Terminator Genisys. We chose Genisys, of course, because obviously the new Terminator was going to be so much better than a different decades-too-late addition to a genre defining sci-fi franchise. Right? Obviously, no one remembers Genisys fondly (except for me, and I’ll come right out and say right now that my appreciation was 90% hormonal and not really related to the text as an artistic endeavor), but Fury Road has been touted as one of the greatest movies ever made since it first hit the big screen. Even as a latecomer to the phenom, I was completely captivated by it — its audacity, its scope, its vision. It’s a work of genius, and the only problem with that is that this film, which rivals it in many ways and even occasionally surpasses it in others, is being measured against it and found wanting. And I just don’t get it!
There does seem to have been a cult of personality that has been built up around Fury Road that has pushed past the limits of what the film is into making up legends about it. That is, there are people online who seem to think that every effect is practical and that there’s no CGI in the film. For one thing, Huh? and for another, Whuh? See, my friend that I went to see this with had never seen Fury Road, and when her mom came to town and wanted to see this one (because of her general affection for Anya Taylor-Joy as a performer rather than out of any interest in Furiosa in character or concept), she was hesitant. She decided to give it a shot based on the fact that this was a prequel and thus she wouldn’t be missing anything; she enjoyed it a lot, and we started watching Fury Road the following day, and the difference in these two movies and what is demonstrably computer generated … there’s no light between them. Fury Road starts with Max eating a two-headed lizard that’s just as cartoony as the mammal that we see in the desert in Furiosa. You have to be a fool to believe that there’s no CGI in Fury Road, and the same things that look fake in one look fake in the other.
That’s fine, actually! There are all sorts of fun new desert weirdos, methods of “road war,” and plans within plans in this one. Since it’s the past, we get to see one of Joe’s other sons that’s dead by the time of Road in the form of the hilariously named Scrotus (Josh Helman), who’s even more unstable than Erectus. The real standout here, though, is Hemsworth’s Dementus, who almost steals the show. Furiosa, by her nature, is a quiet, nearly silent character who deflects attention, while Dementus is a gloryhound with the temperament of a child, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. The guy gets around in a chariot drawn by three motorcycles; that’s just cool, man, I don’t know what to tell you. Even his entourage is fun, with one of his allies in the first of the film’s chapters is “The Octoboss,” a gothy gang leader whose presence is established throughout the film by the sudden appearance of a giant, tentacled, Lovecraftian kite, which wasn’t even my favorite new thing in the sky in this one (that would be the paratroopers and kite-sailors, which are super awesome but get taken down so swiftly and easily that you understand why they don’t appear after this). I know it seems like I’m going from topic to topic really quickly here, but that’s the pace at which this film is moving, so take it all in.
Furiosa doesn’t seem to have done very well financially, which means it may already be too late to see it in your market as you read this. That’s a shame. It’s not lost on me that, nine years ago, what was most readily available for me to access via the theater was all IP franchise material: Terminator, Jurassic World, and Fury Road. I made the wrong choice that day back in 2015, but you could just as easily make that mistake at the movies this year, as right now my closest multiplex is screening Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, and … Fury Road. If you still can see this one on the big screen, you should take advantage of that opportunity. This is going to be a long, hot, franchise driven summer, and if there’s something that’s worth spending money for a ticket and popcorn for, it’s Furiosa.
I have not felt motivated to watch Richard Linklater’s undercover cop comedy Hit Man since it hit Netflix, but I did happen to catch its opening half-hour in the holiest of cinematic venues: muted on the TV at my neighborhood bar. The one sequence that caught my eye while I was enjoying my banh mi and cocktail that evening was an early montage of classic film clips in which Glen Powell’s pretend-hit-man explains that the entire hired assassin concept is a movie trope, not a real-life occupation. I don’t know whether the 1967 neo-noir Le Samouraï was referenced in that quick montage because I wouldn’t see it screened at the theater down the street from that bar until a few days later, but it would have fit right in. Like Branded to Kill, In Bruges, John Wick, Barry, and all the other hired-assassin media that Hit Man gently mocks for its outlandishness, Le Samouraï imagines a complex crime-world hierarchy in which money is routinely exchanged for murder, no questions asked – a world with its own bureaucratic rules & procedures. Like those films, it’s also fully aware of its indulgence in outlandish fiction, striving to be as cool & entertaining as possible without worrying about being factual. If anything, the most outlandish aspect of Le Samouraï is its casting of the extraordinarily handsome Alain Delon as an anonymous assassin who goes unnoticed in public as he executes his orders, which is a logical misstep Hit Man repeats by casting the Hollywood handsome Glen Powell as a master of disguise who can credibly disappear undercover.
In its own way, Le Samouraï is also a commentary on classic crime movie tropes, or it’s at least in direct communication with them. A few years after Jean-Luc Godard’sBreathlessshook up the French filmmaking establishment by returning to the high-style chaos of classic American noir, Jean-Pierre Melville offered a much calmer, stranger refraction of the American gangster picture. Delon’s mostly silent hitman glides through the streets of Paris with an overly professional, emotionless affect, but he still vainly checks his image in every mirror he passes, making sure his trench coat & fedora match the classic noir archetype projected in his mind. He’s a film trope out of time, which leads to great pop-art juxtaposition when he passes advertisements for modern products like Orangina on city streets. A disorienting organ motif loops on the soundtrack as he wordlessly carries out his work, dodges cops, and kills professional rivals, giving his crime world setting the same dreamlike quality that the Goblin soundtrack gives the ballet school of Dario Argento’s Suspriria. If Godard brought the crime film back to the poverty-row roots of its infancy, Melville pushed it forward past the point of death to the world beyond, sending his audience to a hypnotically hip hitman heaven. Most of the storytelling is visual, with all of the loudmouth blathering left for the cops on Delon’s tail. In other words, it’s all style, to the point where the style is the substance.
Any further praise I could heap on Le Samouraï that would just be variations on labeling it Cool. The opening scroll that explains Delon’s antihero protagonist lives by an honorable samurai code? Cool. His anxious-bird home alarm system; his small collection of adoring Parisian babes who will likely be his undoing; his deep knowledge of the public transit system that allows him to avoid arrest? All very cool. What’s even cooler is that I got the chance to see the movie with a full, enthusiastic crowd, thanks to the popularity of The Broad’s regular $6 Tuesdays deal. Like the muted television hanging over the local watering hole, $6 Tuesdays has become a great cinematic equalizer that has made watching movies into a communal event again, rather than something I do alone in the dark while everyone else watches Hit Man on Netflix at home. If there were only a new digital restoration of a classic Euro genre film I’ve never seen before making the theatrical rounds every week, I’d be set.
Full disclosure: I have extremely unhip opinions about David Lynch. The accepted wisdom among movie nerds is that late-style Lynch is the director at his best, with the titles Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return earning frequent accolades as the absolute artistic pinnacle of cinema. I find them borderline unwatchable. My favorite Lynch titles are much better behaved: Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Original Flavor Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart … essentially, Lynch for normies. It brings me no pleasure to take the conservative stance on this, wherein David Lynch was at his creative best when his vision was tempered by studio notes instead of being allowed to run wild. In my tragically square view of his catalog, the last great movie he made was while working for Walt Disney Pictures, which is never the side someone wants to take in an argument. So, I’ve done a lot of recent soul-searching on why, for example, Lost Highway works for me but Mulholland Drive does not, when they’re essentially the same inexplicable persona-crisis story told in two different ways. Or why I enjoy the chaotic absurdism of Twin Peaks‘s second season that most fans hate, while I could not force myself to finish the third-season arc of the same television show that fans frequently cite as “The Greatest Film of All Time” on my Twitter feed. It was during a recent screening of Blue Velvet at Canal Place (as part of their new Prytania Cinema Club series) when I finally came up with a theory. Forgive me as I work it out on this blog as a form of public therapy.
It’s likely that Blue Velvet remains Lynch’s finest hour in my mind simply because it’s the very first film of his that I watched. A feverish erotic thriller set down the street from where the Cleavers live, the film has a very accessible premise — perfect for teenagers desperate to see something strange & risqué. Looking back as an adult who’s since seen all of Lynch’s features before & after, Blue Velvet paradoxically becomes both eerier and more familiar. As literal as the film is about its peek into the grimy underworld just beneath the pristine surface of American suburbia (starting with the bugs & larvae wriggling below subdivision flowerbeds), it also indulges in capital-L Lynchian dream-logic imagery that cannot be fully explained without robbing its magic. What do the closeups of a roaring wind blowing out a candle symbolize to the audience beyond association with the villainous Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has incorporated candlelight into his nightly sexual abuse routine? To me, they become an abstract symbol of that violence, often equating the white-knight heroics of our doofus protagonist Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) to Booth’s violence by appearing during his own interactions with the victim that unites them (Isabella Rossellini). Putting that association into words makes the image sound triter than it is in practice, though, especially since the link between hero & villain is vocalized multiple times in the dialogue (when Laura Dern’s virginal love interest says, “I can’t figure out whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” and, more directly, when Hopper says, “You’re like me”). Maybe a more recent Lynch film would “explain” their connection entirely through the candle imagery without that accompanying dialogue, but the effect would more or less be the same.
The candle is only one isolated image among many that Lynch overloads with thematic significance; the longer you spend immersed in his world the more significance those totems take on. It becomes significant that Rossellini hides her kitchen knife behind a radiator, since it recalls her fellow torch-singer who lives in a radiator in Eraserhead. The hypnotic yellow lines passing under Frank Booth’s car recall Lost Highway. Booth’s widespread smearing of red lipstick across his face before planting a Judas kiss on Jefferey’s mouth recalls the lipstick facemask of Wild at Heart. When the camera pushes into the canals of a severed ear that Jeffery discovers in an open field, finding an entire inner world there, a modern audience recalls the same push-in to the interior of the Mulholland Drive puzzle box. In retrospect, even just the casting of McLachlan, Dern, and Jack Nance feel like just as much of directorial calling cards as the heavy curtains Lynch always uses to mark his liminal spaces (in this case, Rossellini’s bedroom). David Lynch has essentially been making the same movie his entire career. He just repositions its building blocks into new, puzzling configurations as if he’s trying to work out a question he’s not fully sure how to ask. In Blue Velvet, that internal interrogation seems to be fixated on self-disgust over the peculiarities of heterosexual male lust, especially in the Madonna/whore dynamic represented by Dern & Rossellini. In the bigger picture scope of his career, he seems largely concerned with the manifestation of violence & Evil in an indifferent world. Jeffrey’s melodramatic delivery of the question “Why are there people like Frank?” earned some ironic laughter in my theater, but I believe Lynch is posing it sincerely. It’s a question he’s been asking over & over again for decades, often in fear that there’s even a fraction of Frank inside himself.
My theory on the divide between Lynch’s pre- and post-Mulholland Drive career, then, has less to do with how the director has changed than it does with how the world changed around him. Not all of the heightened melodrama of Blue Velvet can be taken seriously. If nothing else, Laura Dern’s recounting of a dream in which a flock of robins represent pure, universal love fully crosses the line from Sirkian melodrama to TV movie theatrics, inviting ironic chuckles from the audience. I don’t know that Lynch himself is laughing, though. He appears to find the mundanity of mainstream media to be oddly sinister, drawing out uncanny interactions from lesser artforms with just enough awkward pausing & ominous whooshing to make them genuinely nightmarish. There’s a winking reference to the soap opera quality of Twin Peaks in the parodic inclusion of a fictional program called Invitation to Love, often playing on characters’ TV sets throughout the show. Likewise, Blue Velvet draws comparison between the erotic thriller and the Old Hollywood noir by showing Jefferey’s mother watching old noirs on her living room TV whenever the audience passes through. Mulholland Drive was also designed as an eerie abstraction of televised-drama aesthetics, as the majority of the film is a pilot for an ABC series that was famously rejected for being too uncommercial. It’s the same approach to post-modern warping of mainstream media in all cases, but over time the cultural circumstances of that media changed. When Lynch was finding the eerie world just below the surface of a Sirk film or a Days of Our Lives style soap, there’s a substantial, defined aesthetic to the source material that he’s working with. Decades later, when he’s making the nightmare version of late-90s television in Mulholland Drive, the affect is flatter, uglier, less appealing. The switch from celluloid to digital video in Inland Empire is emblematic of a steep decline in pop culture aesthetics across the board. In other words, David Lynch did not get worse as time went on; the culture did.
Of course, this is all subjective, to the point where it might not even be coherent. Given that there is currently a push to bring back the pop culture aesthetics of the late-90s and early-00s in the resurgence of low-rise Paris Hilton fashion, nu-metal rap rock, and “indie sleaze” college radio jams, it’s clear that there is some fondness for that era of cultural refuse that I cannot share in, possibly out of leftover embarrassment from being around when it was fresh. The awkward acting & staging of Mulholland Drive reminds me of wasted hours of watching garbage-water melodrama on broadcast TV as a kid, desperately trying to squeeze entertainment value out of titles as insipid as Touched by an Angel and Walker, Texas Ranger. The vintage television quality of that aesthetic might be a lot more romantic for a younger audience who wasn’t there to cringe through it in real time, the same way that I find the sinister reflection of 80s TV media in films like Blue Velvet to be mesmerizing. If anything, I should be applauding David Lynch for keeping up with the times as his work evolved alongside the mainstream culture it subverts. I might not personally be enthusiastic for his latest projects, but I’m also not cheering on his recent struggles to land funding, if not only because I know the pain of watching your favorite filmmaker get soft-censored by cowardly investors (having been left hanging by unrealized John Waters projects like Liarmouth & Fruitcake). I’ve just come to realize that my personal split with Lynch is not a reaction to his thoughtfulness & seriousness as an artist; that has not changed. It’s a reaction to The Great Enshittification of everything, positioning him as a found-materials artist who’s been given less & less substantial materials to work with as the quality in craft across all media has gotten generally worse (at least to my aging, Millennial eyes).
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.
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