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Kill-O-Rama 2025

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Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.

For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.

Corpse Bride (2005)

I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.

In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.

Frankenstein (2025)

The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein and the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.

As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.

-Brandon Ledet

Babygirl (2024)

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After hearing early reports that it was not included in the pre-show package, there was a perverse thrill in seeing Nicole Kidman’s infamous AMC ad precede my local screening of her new erotic melodrama Babygirl.  It felt like getting away with something, much like how her CEO character in the film gets a thrill out of sleeping with a much younger intern.  However, no matter how much “heartbreak feels good” in a place like the corporate multiplex, it’s never felt nearly as good as the mind-shattering orgasms Kidman simulates in the film’s corporate skyscraper offices. I say “simulate” with some uncertainty, given the actor’s pull-quote confessions that she occasionally had to pause production because she didn’t “want to orgasm anymore,” an intimate experience that left her feeling “ragged” by the time the shoot had reached completion. All of this extratextual Nicole Kidman press is clouding my mind as I try to write about this movie because it’s a movie that’s partially about the actor’s icy real-world persona. Her frustrated CEO character is constantly coached by a PR team about how to present herself to the public, like an actor prepping for a press junket. During one crucial sequence, she’s plucked, injected, and flash-frozen to sculpt her already-gorgeous body into fighting shape, so she can be the public face of an upcoming, all-important product launch. The movie would mean significantly less if Kidman had not been cast as its titular babygirl, since it constantly invites you to import details from her real-life public persona into her character’s fragile ferocity as a public figure. That’s what makes its steamy, taboo sex scenes feel like genuinely vulnerable exposure for the actor – not necessarily their vulgarity.

The source & authenticity of orgasms are very important in Babygirl. The movie opens with Kidman having traditional Movie Sex with her hot, age-appropriate husband (a salt-and-pepper Antonio Banderas), simulating orgasm in their luxury-apartment marital bed. When the husband rolls over, Kidman sneaks off to her private home office to achieve the real orgasm he warmed her up for but was otherwise unable to assist. Notably, she finishes herself off to BDSM pornography, making it clear at the start of the film that she already knows exactly what she wants in her sex life; she just doesn’t have the courage to voice it. This status quo is interrupted by the hiring of a young, tall, strapping intern played by Harris Dickinson, in whom Kidman immediately detects a Dominant Vibe. It’s immediately clear that the high-powered CEO and the bratty, fresh-out-of-college bro beneath her will be having a torrid office affair, but Kidman’s inability to voice exactly what she wants from him delays the consummation of their mutual lust. Babygirl is not the usual self-discovery kink story wherein a dormant submissive discovers a newfound sexual appetite, à la Secretary or Fifty Shades of Grey. It also goes out of its way to not pathologize Kidman’s interest in the kink-play power dynamic of simulating submissiveness when she’s truthfully a high-powered Business Bitch. It’s more of a kink coming-out story, wherein Kidman knows exactly wants but has to work up the courage to ask for it. Too bad she has to have dirty motel room sex with a confused, vulnerable employee to break out of her vanilla rut, since she’s already married to a hot Daddy type who directs stage plays for a living; the irony is that he’s extremely well suited for the job but remains an untapped resource.

All of this dramatic tension is released (and released and released) through a series of successfully thrilling sex scenes between Kidman & Dickinson, who establish a convincing sexual rapport as well-matched but poorly trained kinksters. Unfortunately, the impact of those scenes does not reverberate through Babygirl‘s attempts at corporate & familial drama elsewhere. When Kidman & Dickinson negotiate power dynamics in seedy nightclubs & motel rooms the vibes are electric; when attempting the same negotiations in empty offices & apartment hallways half of their lines feel coldly ADR’d, registering more as a ventriloquist act than a dramatic performance. I kept leaning towards the screen, straining to see if their mouths are actually moving. However, any time I found myself questioning the thematic choices to link Kidman’s kink journey to her religious-cult upbringing, her rebellious daughter’s queerness, her sympatico relation to a wild dog in need of training, to Girlboss cultural politics, or to the soundtrack’s absurdly on-the-nose needle drops, the movie would pause for another fantastic sex scene that felt alive, authentic, and rich with nonverbal power negotiations. It’s a wobbly balancing act that director Halina “Bodies Bodies Bodies” Reijn only gets away with because the actors she cast are extremely hot. Kidman & Dickinson’s undeniable hotness are just as important to the text of Babygirl as the alien impersonablility of Kidman’s AMC ad, the audience-teasing hints at her on-set orgasms, and the obscure, high-end cosmetic work that presumably goes into keeping her physically preserved and camera-ready. The movie works best when it vaguely gestures at these things—not when it makes declarative statements about sexual & corporate power—letting Kidman & Dickinson’s physical chemistry do the talking.

-Brandon Ledet

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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Is nostalgia a disease? If you ask the internet (which one should rarely or, perhaps, never do), there are vigorous discussions about whether the fact that the term “nostalgia” was created to describe a disease of the mind is relevant or not. To wit: “a psychopathological condition affecting individuals who are uprooted, whose social contacts are fragmented, who are isolated and who feel totally frustrated and alienated” (source). I think that, depending upon its gravity, it can be either a harmless diversion or a sign of actual disordered thinking. There should never be any confusion about certain things, and one of them is this: within the narrative of Western history, our current host of problems are generally better than they have ever been in the past. We’ve tainted every bit of progress with nonsense, of course — what benefit is it to a society that can save lives a hundredfold more successfully than three centuries ago if the law allows for the use of such lifesaving measures to act as a middle-class bankruptcy manufacturing system? What good has it done to raise generations to see the consumption of meat at every meal as a sign of financial security and an unquestioned right, when it means that we’ve sausaged ourselves into a climate collapse? Still, in general, things are better than they were one, two, and three hundred years ago (at least until the last few years, jeez). Cutting your foot on a rock in a river isn’t a death sentence, and even though your dumb relatives who think climate change is a hoax think that crime is out of control because of shoplifting, crime is actually going down, with violent crime on a decline for a while now — with stories as far back as 2000 citing constant decline year after year that we’ve only seen more of since. 

Nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler” is a normal part of the human experience, because people (who didn’t experience daily and consistent traumas as a child) look back on that period of their life as having a simplicity that they do not recognize as false. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracies of their recollection is the danger; in so doing, one fails to recall the banal wickednesses of the past and learn from them. Each generation remembers the simplicity of their childhood when the time period about which they reminisce saw the AIDS crisis in full bloom, or the quotidian threat of nuclear death sending an entire generation of kids cowering for cover underneath their desks, or every class had several kids who had lost relatives in Vietnam or Korea or Normandy, or undisguised bigotry was 9/10ths of the law, or people were trapped in abusive relationships because of the draconic nature of divorce laws, or … you get the picture. The difference between that kind of nostalgia, which leaves one open to being manipulated into thinking that reversion to the values of a bygone era simply because of coercive aesthetic or ideation (while ignoring its attendant prejudices), and the kind that pumps out something like, I don’t know, Turbo Kid, can be imperceptible when you’re caught up in the moment. Recent years have shown us that appealing to the nostalgia of the masses in order to draw them to the banner of political hatred in the name of their lionization of a false past can be effective. The algorithm can take your dad from watching reruns of Barney Miller straight into Kyle Rittenhouse apologism pretty damn fast, so there’s not not a reason to be concerned about, say, a 15-years-later sequel to a 19-years-later sequel to a trilogy of classics (your mileage may vary). Of course, when that nostalgia trip has the cathartic element of watching Nazis get absolutely fucking wrecked for two and a half hours, who am I to say that it’s wrong? 

It’s summer 1969, and the now elderly Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in New York. His days of dashing adventures against the footsoldiers of the Third Reich and defying death in search of ancient treasures to unearth are long over, and in a world whose focus is on the future (embodied in the presence of a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts and counterposed by the apathy of his students for his historical lectures), he’s a man stuck in the past. His personal life is also rocky, as he’s estranged from wife Marion (Karen Allen) for reasons that become clear later, and his seemingly forced retirement from Hunter College means he will no longer have academia to fill his empty days. Enter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s godchild and daughter of heretofore unmentioned friend Basil Shaw (Tobey Jones). At the tail end of WWII, the elder Shaw and a digitally de-aged Indy had an encounter with Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) during which they came into possession of half of Archimedes’s Antikythera, a kind of orrery that was theorized to be capable of charting rifts in time. Helena’s reappearance in Jones’s life is to acquire the artifact, and hot on her trail is the still-living Voller, having presumably made his way to the U.S. as a part of Operation Paperclip. Thus ensues several multi-party chases and races against time to reach the other half of the dial before Voller and his henchmen (Olivier Richters and Boyd Holbrook) can use it to change the outcome of WWII. Indy is aided in this by help from old friends that we know like Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and those we don’t like Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), while Helena has her own Short Round-style sidekick in Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore), and all are pursued by CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson). 

I was looking forward to a real treat when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. I grew up watching the original movies, but some of my earliest memories are also of watching not only the now largely forgotten Young Indiana Jones Chronicles but also the enduring image of Kermit as Indiana Jones in The Muppet Babies. When that Crystal Skull trailer came out, I was naively exhilarated for what I thought was to come, and when I went to see it, on my birthday, it was perhaps one of the great media-related disappointments of my life. (I know that film has had some late-stage revisionist reappraisal in recent years, but not from me.) Having been burned on that stove before, I was more reticent about this one, especially with septuagenarian Ford being called back into service to perform a duty in which, from all appearances in Crystal Skull, he had no interest. There were no weeks of anticipation, just a realization that it had been released and a midday holiday weekend expectation of a moderate amount of thrills. Perhaps this says more about how low my expectations were than about the quality of the film overall, but I was pleasantly surprised overall. The opening sequence in 1944 is a bit prolonged, but I was less put-off by the uncanny nature of the de-aged Ford to play a younger Jones than by other recent abominations, and I appreciated the grafting of Waller-Bridge’s character into the story quite a lot. I’m sure that many of the reviews popping up online are already spouting all the usual aphorisms and cliches that every manchild says about a self-possessed woman in a movie (here’s a tip: if you hear someone say that she’s annoying and that person is also the most annoying person you know, those things are not as disconnected as they may seem). I find her rather likable, and she adds a bit of flair to the proceedings as someone who is solely concerned with opportunities to cash in on her father’s research and no regard for history as anything other than a means to an economic end. This could go too far, but the inclusion of Teddy humanizes her and makes her seem more impishly roguish than her initial monetary focus makes her seem. Even the child actor is pretty good, and that’s rare praise from me. 

If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like “too much” being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun. I don’t know that you need to rush out and see it since the current timeline of theater-to-home-release is so short now, but if you need to get out of the heat and into a cold, air-conditioned vehicle for a while, at 154 minutes that never get boring, this one’s a pretty solid choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Official Competition (2022)

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As the Fall Film Festival season spills over into the Year-End Listmaking frenzy and the new year’s hangover Awards Ceremonies, it’s easy to be tricked into believing that movies are Important.  Forget all the jump-scare horrors of October and the action blockbuster bloat of what’s now a six-month summer.  This is the time of year when cinema cures all the world’s ills, from “solving” racial & economic injustice in 180 minutes or less to fortifying millionaire actors’ praise-starved egos with gold-plated statuettes.  And so, it’s the perfect time of year to catch up with the Spanish film industry satire Official Competition, which is exactly as cynical about the absurd ritual of Important Cinema Season as the ritual deserves.  Dissatisfied with merely being grotesquely wealthy, a pharmaceutical CEO decides to purchase cultural clout by funding a high-brow art film.  He employs a temperamental arthouse auteur to complete the task in his name (Penelope Cruz, sporting one of cinema’s all-time greatest wigs).  To make the most of the opportunity, she has to manage the competing egos of her two male stars (Oscar Martinez as a pretentious stage actor & Antonio Banderas as a himbo film star), and the three mismatched artists violently bicker their way into purchasing a Palme d’Or.  Hilarity ensues, with none of the pomp nor dignity of Prestige Filmmaking left intact.

As you can likely tell from the dual presence of Cruz & Banderas, Official Competition borrows a lot of aesthetic surface details from the Almodóvar playbook: ultra-modernist art gallery spaces, video-instillation digi projections, cut-and-paste magazine collages, etc.  It just repurposes those Great Value™ Almodóvar aesthetics for broad goofball schtick instead of subtly complex melodrama.  And it works!  The jokes are constant & consistently funny, always punching up at the absurd self-importance of artsy filmmaker types’ delusion that they can change the world through a millionaire producer’s vanity project.  From the himbo’s Instagram charity sponcon to the theatre snob’s practiced awards rejection speech to the auteur’s failure to master TikTok dance crazes, the movie constantly pokes fun at its three central players for being far less Genius, Important, and Uniquely Talented than they believe themselves to be.  At its core, this is a comedy about a boyish rivalry between the two actors under Cruz’s direction, and her mistaken belief that she’s the sole voice of reason on-set.  They’re all equally ridiculous and all a constant source of verbal & visual punchlines. 

Even though Official Competition is essentially a farce, it can’t help but absorb some of its own arthouse prestige through proximity.  The three main actors all put in great, nuanced performances as broad film-world archetypes, especially Cruz as the exasperated auteur who can’t fully domesticate her collaborators.  The Almodóvar set details afford it a crisp art instillation feel, especially in a lengthy gag involving a loudly mic’d lesbian makeout session.  Its icy humor at the expense of its own industry also goes subzero in the third act, when the vicious on-set rivalries become outright lethal.  It’s a very smart comedy about a very silly industry that thinks very highly of itself, an easy but worthwhile target for ridicule.  It’s around this stretch on the annual film distribution calendar—when the novelty horror titles dry up between Halloween & January dumping season—that I’m desperate for a little novelty & levity in my moviewatching diet.  Official Competition meets me halfway in that respect, finding plenty novelty & levity in Prestige Filmmaking itself.

-Brandon Ledet

Femme Fatale (2002)

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Brian De Palma’s late-career erotic thriller Femme Fatale opens with an exquisitely staged diamond heist, set during a red-carpet movie premiere at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. It ends with an all-in commitment to a sitcom-level cliched Twist that zaps any remnants of prestige or intelligence from that refined opening locale. Those two bookends—a pretentious Art Cinema patina and an intellectually bankrupt gotcha! plot twist—perfectly frame what makes the movie such sublimely idiotic fun. Femme Fatale is preposterous, lurid trash from the goblin king of preposterous, lurid trash. De Palma imports his refined visual acrobatics into the cheap Paris Hilton-era fashions of the early 2000s, and the result is just as impressively crafted as it is aggressively inane.

The opening image of Femme Fatale finds then X-Men villain Rebecca Romijn lounging naked in a French hotel room, watching a classic noir (1944’s Double Indemnity) on a cathode television. Even without the way the title underlines the femme fatale tropes of the noir genre, the audience instantly knows she’s bad news because she shares the same slicked-back bisexual hairdo Sharon Stone sports in Basic Instinct. Romijn pulls off the Cannes diamond heist by distracting her mark with bathroom-stall lesbian sex. She then double-crosses her fellow thieves, and struggles to protect herself (and her loot) in a world where she slinks around with a target on her back. Luckily (very luckily), she’s able to escape by stealing the identity of a French civilian who looks exactly like her (because she’s also played by Romijn); she just has to hope that a snooping slimebag paparazzo (Antonio Banderas) doesn’t blow her cover, or else she’ll have to seek her own revenge for the betrayal. The rest of the film is a convoluted tangle of blackmail, double-crosses, strip teases, and unearned plot twists. It’s all so cheap in its Euro trash mood & straight-boy sexuality that it’s a wonder De Palma managed to not drool directly on the lens.

Story-wise, Femme Fatale is only remarkable for its perversely laidback pace. It’s shockingly unrushed for such a tawdry erotic thriller, allowing plenty of time for relaxing bubble baths, leisurely window-peeping, and little cups of espresso between its proper thriller beats. Otherwise, the film would be indistinguishable from straight-to-DVD action schlock if it weren’t for De Palma’s pet fixations as a visual stylist and a Hitchcock obsessive. All of his greatest hits are carried over here: split-screen & split diopter tomfoolery; suspended-from-the-ceiling Mission: Impossible hijinks; shameless homages to iconic Hitchcock images like the Rear Window binocular-peeping. The mood is decidedly light & playful, though, especially in the flirtatious deceptions shared between Banderas & Romijn. In that way, it’s a lot like De Palma’s version of To Catch a Thief: beautiful movie stars pushing the boundaries of sex & good taste in a surprisingly comedic thriller set in gorgeous European locales. The difference is that Hitch’s film is a carefully crafted Technicolor marvel, while De Palma’s is only elevated a few crane shots above a Skinemax production. Both approaches have their merits.

I wish I could say that there’s some pressingly relevant reason to recommend this film to new audiences. The only contemporary connection I can bullshit on the fly is that its stolen identity sequence recalls the recent Hilaria Baldwin nontroversy in the press, as Romijn’s titular conwoman is publicly exposed for faking a French accent for seven consecutive years (even to her husband). The truth is that I only watched this because it’s one of my few remaining blind-buys from the pre-COVID days when I would collect random physical media from nearby thrift stores. The copy on the back of that DVD is so dated in its relevancy that, just under its “Fatale-y Attractive Bonus Features” section (woof), it includes an America Online Keyword for the poor dolts who might want to research the film on The Web but need the extra guidance. That early-2000s-specific insignificance speaks to the film’s broader appeal. This is disposable, amoral trash that would be totally lost to time if it weren’t for the over-the-top eccentricities of its accomplished horndog director. What would normally be an anonymous entry into a genre comprised mostly of cultural runoff instead feels like a significant cornerstone of De Palma’s personal canon.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

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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 Hanna made Boomer,  Britnee, and Brandon watch Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).

Hanna: Sometimes the universe has to shove you into art before you’ll pay any attention to it; this was the case with me and Pedro Almodóvar. I vaguely remember my mother talking about Broken Embraces and admiring Penélope Cruz on the poppy-covered poster for Volver when I was a teenager, and The Skin I Live In floated across my radar when I was in the habit of seeking out macabre media as a protest against the Midwestern values of Minnesota, but for some reason I wasn’t compelled to watch any of those movies. I didn’t see an Almodóvar film until my first year of college, by force, in my Spanish Media class; that film was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), and it shoved me (very happily) into the Almodóvar canon.

The primary Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown is Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura), a TV actress and film dubber. Her ex-lover and co-dubber, Ivan—an older, spineless lech with a mahogany voice—left her a week ago; he is going on a trip (with another woman), and is asking her to pack him a suitcase. Pepa is inconsolable. She wolfs down sleeping pills, spiking her gazpacho with barbiturates. She sleeps through the alarms of the 30-odd clocks littered around her apartment. She accidentally lights her bed on fire. She leaves Ivan desperate voicemails, insisting that she has something important that they need to discuss and becoming increasingly irate. No matter what Pepa does, she is always just catching up to Ivan’s ghost: finding that he left the studio a minute before she arrives, or that he called her apartment just before she walked in the door. When the phone does ring for Pepa, Ivan is never on the other line. Eventually, through a series of fraught coincidences, chaos seeps into Pepa’s apartment through her friend Candela, Ivan’s ex-wife Lucía, Ivan’s son Carlos, and Carlos’s fiancée Marisa, shattering the spell of her obsessive despair over Ivan.

Of the Almodóvar films I’ve seen, Women on the Verge is probably the lightest fare – the least political, the least subversive, and the least confessional. It never seems to bubble over in the way that madcap comedies usually do, even in its final stretch (which is still, in my opinion, a jaunty little thrill ride). Regardless, there is something about this film that totally entrances me. First of all, for being a breezy, highly stylized black-comedy melodrama, Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was confoundingly successful; it was the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time when it was released and is still Almodóvar’s 4th highest grossing film (not adjusting for inflation, which would boost it up even higher). The cinematography is characteristically gorgeous, tactile and vibrant, and some of the images are still splintered into my brain from the first watch (specifically, the scenes of Pepa and Ivan dubbing Johnny Guitar and Pepa looking out of her apartment through that huge slatted peephole). I’m consistently delighted by the film’s comic serendipity: the near-misses, close calls, and coincidental injuries (shoes and records are the universe’s guided missiles, launched unintentionally by people in fits of rage or despair). If nothing else, this movie has given me the Mambo Taxi driver, one of the purest and most absurd characters in cinema; his attention to the provisions of amenities in his taxi was genuinely touching.

One of my favorite things about Almodóvar is his embrace of multiple genres; he has touched comedy, drama, autobiography, and horror, and his films are usually a chaotic blend of two or three. In the case of Women on the Verge, I do think the comic elements could have been pushed even further. Britnee, what did you think about the balance of comedy and drama in Women on the Verge? Did the tone work for you, or do you wish the film had pushed more in one direction or the other?

Britnee: Right now, we are all living in a pretty dark world, and my primary escape from all the insanity has been reality TV and, of course, movies. For some reason, I’ve been finding myself binging old made-for-TV Lifetime films with pretty intense plots. While I thought these films were helping me unwind and relax, I was actually subconsciously adding to my already high stress levels. Women on the Verge basically got me out of this horrible funk because of it’s wonderful blend of the drama that I crave while giving me the light comedy that I so desperately needed. From the Mambo Taxi driver (“Thank You For Smoking”) to Candela’s moka pot earrings, there are many eccentricities sprinkled throughout the film that brought me so much joy and laughter. And don’t even get my started on how much I loved that kitschy apartment setup! I definitely think Women on the Verge leans more towards being a comedy than a drama, but I actually admire how it holds back from going too far in a comic direction. It somehow makes all the funny moments more special and memorable.

Pepa is constantly surrounded by the mysterious Ivan, be it through the many characters who pop up in her life who have various connections to him or through her own obsession with finding him to tell him “something.” The drama that Ivan brings into her life without him actually physically being a part of her life is the kind of drama that I find fascinating. Boomer, do you think the film would have benefited from having Ivan physically appear in more scenes? Like, if there were even more scenes that focused on what Ivan was up to while Pepa was going through all of her apartment-contained insanity?

Boomer: I prefer Ivan as—as Hanna puts it—a ghost in the film. There’s something so smarmy and gross about him, from the way he distances himself emotionally from his son and his lover by giving them autographed photos as if they were fans, to his callous movement from one lover to the next with careless disregard for the damage he leaves in his wake, to his uneven application of secrecy (Pepa clearly never knew about Lucía or Carlos, indicating that Ivan intentionally hid the fact that he was a divorced father, while Paulina Morales clearly knows who Pepa is from the moment the latter walks into the former’s office, treating her with open hostility). He’s such a cad that he has no shame about asking his former lover to pack a suitcase for him but can’t face her in order to collect it. The fact that, as you mentioned, he brings so much drama into the piece without being present for much of it is part of the fun for me. He’s mysterious: a clear heel in every way, and yet able to be such a focal point of the attention of women are all too good for him, but who find themselves caught in his wake against their better judgment. If there was one thing that I wanted more of, however, it was Pepa’s role as the mother of the Crossroads Killer in her TV show. What is that program even about?

Brandon, you and I have spoken in the past about the relationship between comedy and mystery and how they both occupy the same kind of space in the mind: the set-up of joke and punchline is not entirely dissimilar from mystery and revelation, and there’s actually a fair amount of that at play here. Although this is first and foremost a comedy, the mystery element (who is Ivan going away with?) is still omnipresent. The relationship between planting and payoff may have its most triumphant example on film here, as we first see Ivan dubbing over Sterling Hayden’s voice in Johnny Guitar while we can’t hear Joan Crawford’s dialogue at all, only to later see Pepa in the studio performing her half of the scene, not against silence as Ivan had, but against his voice. Even in this, he is a ghost. What were your two favorite planting-and-payoff revelations here, comedic and mysterious?

Brandon: I love the idea of breaking this film down into individual moments & punchlines, because it’s practically a feature-length pilot for a sitcom.  I could happily watch these characters burst into & out of Pepa’s candy-coated apartment forever, even if they were dealing with more mundane day-to-day conflicts than the high-stakes farce staged here.  It’s comforting to know that Almodóvar heavily reuses the same actors & crew for most of his pictures, because it was heartbreaking to leave these outrageous women behind just because the credits rolled.  Ivan, I could live without.  If he were made to be even more of a ghost and was only talked about but never shown, the movie would have worked just was well.

My favorite payoffs—both comedic and mysterious—resulted from the Hitchcockian tension of the poisoned gazpacho.  When Pepa first loads Chekhov’s Blender with gazpacho & sleeping pills, her intentions are opaque.  She’s distraught enough over Ivan’s infidelity that it appears she’s planning to kill herself in a deliciously complex manner, but it’s later revealed to be a long-game murder attempt (Ivan loves gazpacho).  Instead of either tragedy unfolding as planned, the gazpacho litters Pepa’s apartment with the unconscious bodies of an exponential number of hungry fools who sneak a taste: first Carlos’s bratty girlfriend (the fascinating-looking Rossy de Palma), then the meathead cops who seek to bust Pepa’s naïve bestie, then practically every other character on the cast list in a giant impromptu slumber party.  It’s a hilariously wholesome escalation of a plot point that first promised to be nastily lethal (although delicious).

My other favorite payoff is more aesthetic & superficial: the matter-of-fact presentation of this world’s surreal artificiality.  The exterior shots of Pepa’s apartment building are represented in fake, plastic miniatures, and the skyline outside her apartment is an old-school painted backdrop.  Given her work at a movie studio, you’d expect those images to be a winking joke that the movie pulls away from to reveal the “real” world behind that artifice.  Instead, they’re just allowed to exist on screen as-is, entirely matter-of-fact.  I found that choice just as rewardingly delightful as any of the madcap complexities of the plot.  There are many comedies that are just as funny as Women on the Verge, but there are very few, if any, that look this fabulous.

Lagniappe

Britnee: I had no idea who Rossy de Palma was until I watched this movie, and I am totally obsessed with her now. She is mesmerizing!  I am especially loving the photos from her modeling career. The looks she served when wearing Thierry Mugler are absolutely stunning. Also, she apparently makes an appearance in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter, which I’m pretty excited to watch now.

Boomer: My absolute favorite bit was Pepa’s laundry commercial. It’s just so perfect: the self-identification as the Crossroads Killer’s mother, her presentation of the detergent, the reaction of the cops to the lack of viscera on her son’s freshly washed clothing. Just ::chef’s kiss::.

Brandon: This might be my favorite Almodóvar movie I’ve seen to date, mostly because it’s fully immersed in the things he excels at best (Gorgeous Artifice & Complex Women) while also sidestepping a lot of the darker, more violent tones of his work (which is an odd thing to say about a movie that occasionally dabbles in murder & suicide).  It’s a perfectly constructed little screwball comedy throwback populated by wonderfully over-the-top women and set in a world so beautifully artificial it’s practically Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It’s perfect.

Hanna: Almodóvar has said that women make the best characters, and he absolutely delivers that here. We have deranged women, compassionate women, cruel women, calculating women, funny women, tired women, angry women, all revolving around one barely-present man who doesn’t deserve their attention. If this movie were made in the US, I think Pepa would have ended up with some doting hunk in the end; instead she burns her bed, reclaims her beautiful loft apartment, and moves on with her life. Glorious.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
October: Brandon presents Monster Brawl (2011)
November: Boomer presents Passion Fish (1992)
December: Britnee presents Salome’s Last Dance (1988)

-The Swampflix Crew

Bonus Features: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, is a deceptive work of broad commercial appeal that also carries out a wicked subversive streak just below the polite charms of its genteel surface. Fried Green Tomatoes looks & acts like a Normal movie aimed to stoke mainstream America’s nostalgia for “The Good Old Days” of the vintage American South. That bait-and-switch allows the film to constantly veer into abrupt bursts of absurdist humor, grisly violence, and heartfelt lesbian romance without much of an uproar from its Normie audience. It’s that exact clash between the conventional vs. an underplayed indulgence in the bizarre that makes the movie such a treat for me. It’s both proudly traditional & wildly unpredictable, paradoxically so.

It would be difficult to recommend further viewing for audiences who want to see more films that pull off that exact balancing act between tradition & subversion. Luckily, though, Fried Green Tomatoes is not the only film around that heavily relies on the traditional charms of fierce Southern Women to sneak its own hidden agendas & indulgences past mainstream audiences’ defenses. Here are a few suggested pairings of movies you could watch if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience more cinema that falls on the quietly dark side of Southern twang.

Crazy in Alabama (1999)

In my mind, the clearest parallel to Fried Green Tomatoes‘s clash between the conventional & the morbidly bizarre is the 1999 black comedy Crazy in Alabama. The only major difference is that Fried Green Tomatoes is subtly subversive, while Crazy in Alabama is gleefully over-the-top. Melanie Griffith is flamboyant as the anchor to the film’s violent side, playing a kooky Southern Woman who poisons & decapitates her abusive husband so she can run off to become a Hollywood star (a straight-up trial-run for her future role as Honey Whitlock in John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented). Lucas Black costars as her favorite nephew, whom she left back home to deal with the exponential civil unrest of the Civil Rights 1960s. These two disparate storylines—one where an over-the-top Hollywood starlet regularly converses with her husband’s severed head (which she carries around in a hatbox) and one where a young white boy becomes a local hero by bravely declaring “Racism is bad” and attending fictional Martin Luther King, Jr rallies—are only flimsily connected by occasional phone calls shared between these two unlikely leads. It’s the same bifurcated, traditional vs. absurdist story structure as Fried Green Tomatoes, except that there’s nothing subtle at all about what it’s doing. Everything is on the surface and cranked incredibly loud (which suits my sensibilities just fine).

If you need any convincing that these movies make a good pairing, consider that Fannie Flagg, the novelist who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, has an extended cameo as a roadside diner waitress in Crazy in Alabama. Flagg’s entire purpose in her one featured scene is to cheer on Griffith’s crazed, wanted-murderer protagonist out of admiration for her breaking out of an abusive marriage in the way she personally saw best (sawing off her husband’s head). The audience has to share that baseline appreciation for wild Southern Women at their most hyper-violent to be fully on-board with either of these titles, which is partly what makes them a perfect match. Just don’t go into Crazy in Alabama expecting the same quiet, controlled hand that doles out the absurdist tangents in Fried Green Tomatoes. It’s the first feature film directed by Antonio Banderas and he eagerly allows the space for his then-spouse, Griffith, to run as wild as she pleases.

Now and Then (1995)

This suggestion is something of a cheat, since Now and Then is technically set in Indiana. However, it was filmed in Georgia and looks & feels entirely Southern to my Louisianan eyes. Like Fried Green Tomatoes, its story is bifurcated between two timelines: the increasingly cynical days of the 1990s and a rose-tinted view of a simpler past that was both more dangerous and more romantically Authentic. It even begins its feature-length flashback to “The Good Old Days” by explaining that children used to have to go on adventures & get into mischief to entertain themselves “in the days before MTV & Nintendo . . .” While the adult versions of our central group of childhood friends indulge in a distinctly 90s brand of Gen-X sarcasm (especially among Rosie O’Donnell & Demi Moore’s moody banter), their childhood versions purely ascribe to a gee-willickers coming-of-age adventurism that’s purely heartfelt & sentimental (as portrayed by child actor superstars like Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, and Gaby Hoffman). From the crisply uniform tableaus of freshly built cookie-cutter suburbs to the sequences of young girls singing Motown hits in unison while riding bicycles down dirt roads, the nostalgia on display here is lethally potent, to the point where I genuinely could not tell if this is the first time I’ve seen it. Now and Then is the exact kind of VHS-era lazy afternoon comfort viewing that feels as if it’s always been part of your DNA.

Unlike Fried Green Tomatoes & Crazy in Alabama, Now and Then doesn’t use this nostalgic charm as a cover for extreme dips into subversively morbid subject matter. If anything, it ultimately plays more like a softer, safer variation on Steven King’s nostalgia-classic Stand By Me, complete with the wistful narration track from a jaded adult who’s “seen it all.” The childhood friends at the center of the picture do launch their own D.I.Y. investigation of an unsolved murder from decades into their town’s past, one that invites ghostly seances, potentially dangerous strangers, and brief moments of lethal peril into their otherwise safe suburban lives. Mostly, though, the threats that arise during this murder mystery aren’t meant to elicit a genuine in-the-moment danger so much as they’re meant to highlight the conflicts & insecurities that haunt the girls’ variously troubled home lives and internal struggles with self-esteem. I’d most recommend Now and Then to Fried Green Tomatoes fans who’re more into that film’s nursing home visits & nightswimming intimacies than its freak train accidents and wild swerves into cannibalism. It’s a much better-behaved film overall, but an equally nostalgic one in its scene-to-scene details (including the ultra-specific 90s Girl™ fantasy of getting to smoke cigarettes with a young Brendan Fraser at his beefcakiest).

Steel Magnolias (1989)

Our one major stipulation for Movie of the Month selections is that they must be films that no one else in the crew has seen. Because bits & pieces of Fried Green Tomatoes were constantly looping on television when I was a kid, I honestly wasn’t sure if I had ever seen it all the way through before or not. Once I got into the lesbian & cannibal tangents that distinguish the film from its fellow works in the Southern Women Nostalgia canon, though, it was clear that I hadn’t actually seen it – at least not as a complete picture. In fact, I had been mistaking my memories of the title with another, unrelated work that similarly got the round-the-clock television broadcast treatment in the 1990s: Steel Magnolias.

Having now watched Fried Green Tomatoes & Steel Magnolias back-to-back in their entirety, I can confirm that they’re really nothing alike, except that they’re about the lives of fierce Southern Women. I much preferred Fried Green Tomatoes out of the pair, but Steel Magnolias was still charming in its own way. Adapted from a stage play, the film is mostly centered on the life & times of a small clique of heavily-accented women who frequent the same beauty shop (run by matriarch beautician Dolly Parton). Like a hetero precursor to Sordid Lives, much of the film’s humor derives from the Southern idiosyncrasies in the women’s mannerisms & idle banter as they gossip in the beauty salon between dye jobs & perms. The darkness that creeps into the frame springs from the women’s lives outside the salon, particularly the medical drama of a fiercely protective mother (Sally Fields) and her severely diabetic daughter (Julia Roberts) who pushes her body too far in order to live up to the Southern ideal of a traditional housewife.

The details of the medical melodrama that drives Steel Magnolias fall more into tear-jerking weepie territory than the wildly violent mood swings of Fried Green Tomatoes, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. The most outrageous the film gets in any one scene is a moment of crisis when Sally Fields has to force-feed orange juice to a deliriously over-acting Julia Roberts in the middle of a diabetic seizure. Her repeated shouts of “Drink the juice, Shelby!” had me howling, and I’m sure that scene is just as iconic in some irony circles as “No wire hangers, ever!” is in others. All told, though, that storyline is too sobering & sad to mock at length, and you have to genuinely buy into the dramatic tragedy of the narrative to appreciate the film on its own terms. I won’t say it’s as convincing of a dramatic core as the unspoken lesbian romance of Fried Green Tomatoes, but it’s effective in its own, smaller way. Anyone with endless room in their hearts for Southern Women as a cultural archetype should be able to appreciate both films enough for Steel Magnolias to survive the comparison.

-Brandon Ledet

The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, 2011)

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fourstar

When I went over to a friend’s house to watch a movie, he presented me with several recent rentals and let me pick one. “What’s this one?” “An early anti-western.” “And this one?” “Oh, that one’s really good, but I need to wait to watch that one with my girlfriend.” “What’s The Skin I Live In?” “It’s a horror film by Pedro Almodóvar.” So in.

Of  course, my only real experiences with Almodóvar came over ten years ago, when I saw Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) and La mala educación (Bad Education) in my freshman year of college, and a few years later when I saw ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) and was displeased with the film’s overall themes. Still, although the former two films have faded in my memory like paper flowers left in the sun, I was excited to see his approach to a straight-up horror flick. That’s not really what The Skin I Live In was, but it was all the better for it.

The film follows Roberto Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a plastic surgeon who has tragically lost both his wife and daughter to suicide, the former after she catches sight of the reflection of her badly burned face following extensive reconstructive surgery, and the latter after a lifetime of mental illness resulting from witnessing her mother’s fateful leap to her death. As a result, he keeps a mysterious woman named Vera (Elena Anaya) locked away in a (metaphorical) gilded cage in his palatial home and experiments on her to create a skin that is resistant to fire. Vera’s only connection to the outside world besides Roberto and a few television channels is Marilia (Marisa Paredes), a domestic servant of Roberto’s who has been with his family since before his birth. When Roberto is away, Marilia’s son Zeca (Roberto Álamo) reappears during Carnival and discovers the imprisoned Vera and believes that she is actually Roberto’s dead wife, with whom he had an affair.

While Zeca forces himself on the woman he believes to be his lost love, Roberto returns and kills him to protect the fact that he has secreted Vera away. Vera’s offer to stay with Roberto, ostensibly out of love for him, elevates her from captivity to his bed, where dreams relate the tale of the fateful night that drove Roberto’s daughter Norma (Blanca Suárez) to her final throes of madness. Six years prior, Roberto took Norma from the sanitarium that has been her home for many years to attend a wedding, where she meets Vicente (Jan Cornet). Vicente is a sensitive young man who works in his mother’s vintage boutique, but who is nevertheless too fond of recreational drugs– so much so that when he hits it off with Norma at the wedding, he is too pilled-out to recognize that she is mentally unwell. As various young couples in the same garden engage in sexual acts, Norma objects to Vicente’s physical advances; as he disengages, she bites him and he strikes her before fleeing the scene. Roberto comes upon Norma lying near the tree as Vicente speeds away on his motorcycle, leaving the surgeon to assume the worst.

That’s already spoiler-heavy enough that I’m hesitant to say more, as I encourage you to seek the film out and form your own opinion, especially given some of the more controversial elements. As a trigger warning, it is imperative to understand before viewing that there is at least one rape scene in this film. Perhaps there are more, but given the film’s various and occasionally conflicting points of view on agency, consent, deception, gender, mental health, and overall sexual politics, you as a viewer will find yourself questioning the motivations and preconceptions not only of the characters but also yourself. (Also, unlike Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, the sexual violence is treated respectfully, rather than as erotic or titillating, which it s a valid criticism of Almodóvar’s earlier work.)

At turns provocative and disquieting, The Skin I Live In is relentless in the way that its unfolding narrative forces the viewer to re-evaluate every previous scene with each new revelation. Do our sympathies for Roberto outweigh the fact that the well of his monstrosity is deeper and darker? His ultimate fate is a consequence of his inability to accept the reality of his life (which is related to his being a plastic surgeon, which is conventionally considered a position that exists solely due to society’s vanity) and let go of that which has been lost (which is more reflective of his well-intentioned scientific drive to build a better human skin through unethical experimentation, as well as his activities as a reconstructive, restorative plastic surgeon). It’s a film that rewards close attention and empathy; as each fleshy layer is peeled away, the viewer finds him- or herself challenged, but the experience is ultimately fruitful.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spy Kids (2001)

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I’m not always on board with what Robert Rodriguez is selling, but when he’s firing on all cylinders, his particular brand of of B-movie absurdity can be quite endearing. I think it might be a question of earnestness. he same intentional throwback-camp aesthetic that can be somewhat tiresome in titles like Planet Terror & Machete Kills work perfectly fine in more original-leaning material like The Faculty. In some ways, then, children’s media might be the perfect arena for Rodriguez’s schtick, since it requires a certain lack of ironic detachment. His first foray into the genre, 2003’s Spy Kids, is a case-in-point example of Rodriguez’s live-action cartoon hijinks & intentional genre send-ups working best without this usual hard-wink irony gumming up the magic. In a lot of ways Spy Kids plays like a feature-length cereal commercial (complete with ad placement for fictional cereal) that takes more than a few dark turns every time it can get away with it. For a quick glimpse into what I’m getting at here, check out htis clip of Alan Cumming singing the barnburner “Floop’s Dream” in one of the film’s more sublime moments. What the what?

In the film, the aforementioned Floop (played by Cumming) attracts the attention of international superspies/sexy parents through the children’s show/criminal operation Floop’s Fooglies. Floop’s evil deeds mostly revolve around genetic manipulation that turns former spies into horrific clown monsters he dubs “fooglies” & similarly ineffective world domination plots & extreme wealth eccentricity. When he abducts the parent-spies & threatens to turn them into fooglies, it’s up to their oblivious children to take up the family business & spring into action. The movie has a great deal of fun pulling humor from the spy industry’s goofier gadgetry (like an underwater SUV or an unwieldy jetpack), but for my money almost all of its best features revolve around Floops’s horror show of a lair. A virtual reality room that’s equal part’s Dodo’s Wackyland, Star Trek‘s holodeck, and the nightmare sequences of Ken Russell’s Altered States gives the movie a nice, surreal touch. Then there’s strange details like the “thumb thumbs” (humanoid flunkies made entirely of thumbs) and the fact that the Floop’s Fooglies theme song, when played backwards, is “Floop is a madman! Help us! Save us!”. And if you have any question of just how weird this movie gets, I’d like to direct you again to the “Floop’s Dream” clip. Go ahead. Watch it a second time. I’ve been practically running it on loop.

What I like most about Spy Kids is how the Floop’s Fooglies horror show is thoroughly mixed with its regular kids’ movie fare, as if it weren’t a nightmare vision of a saccharine hellscape. Regular old kids’ movie standards like poop jokes, McDonald’s ad placement, and goofy one-liners like “My parents can’t be spies! They’re not cool enough!” fit in very inconspicuously with the Floop-flavored terror as if the latter weren’t going to wake the pint-sized target audience screaming in the middle of the night. It’s an absurd, endearing combo that makes for  much more challenging children’s feature that what you’d typical expect from a movie with such heavy reliance on CGI & fake-looking, sanitized sets. I really should not have waited to watch Spy Kids as long as I did. Not only does it stand as an example of Rodriguez at his finest,  but it also gave the world the gift of “Floop’s Dream”, a clip I’m just going to leave right here just in case you haven’t watched it yet. It’s a beautiful thing.

Bonus Points: Besides the Floop insanity, I think Spy Kids is noteworthy for being a high profile film that not only gathering Latino greats Antonio Banderas, Danny Trejo, and Cheech Marin all in one feature, but also for writing in two Latino children as its leads (even if one of the actors they cast’s heritage wasn’t quite in line with that detail in reality). That’s a rare treat indeed. There’s also a great deal of implication that the “Machete” character Danny Trejo plays in the film is the very same Machete he plays in Rodriguez’s Machete franchise. That feature is no “Floop’s Dream”, but it’s a fun little tidbit to chew on, if nothing else.

-Brandon Ledet