body horror

Double Lover (2018)

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The French erotic thriller Double Lover first hit L.A. & NYC theatres around Valentine’s Day this year, coinciding with the nationwide release of Fifty Shades Freed. As a result, many early American reviews had cheeky things to say about how this kink-splattered fuck fest made the final installment in the Fifty Shades franchise look embarrassingly tame by comparison. It’s a correlation that doesn’t make too much sense outside their parallel American release dates. Double Lover is erotically charged, sure, but its pronounced horniness is a ferocious, irrational indulgence in dream logic that leads to something much stranger & further outside the bounds of linear storytelling to be compared to a series of films so . . . vanilla in their estimation of kink cinema. That’s not to say the film supports no comparison to pre-existing art. In fact, it’s practically a work of pastiche. Double Lover starts as a cover version of David Cronenberg’s cult classic Dead Ringers, then works in notes of De Palma’s Sisters, Rosemary’s Baby, the 1982 Cat People remake, [safe], and the most shamelessly smutty gialli you can name until all its various influences meld into one barely cohesive, unholy erotic nightmare. It’s a narratively & thematically messy film that gleefully taps into sexual taboos to set its audience on edge, then springs a surreal horror film on them once they’re in that vulnerable state. Double Lover is not your average, by-the-books erotic thriller. It’s a deranged masterpiece, a horned-up nightmare.

A 25-year-old, gaunt ex-model becomes fed up with medical professionals dismissing a mysterious stomach pain she’s suffered her entire life. With few options left to search for a cure, she turns to psychiatry, interrogating her doctors’ claims that her symptoms are psychosomatic. Early therapy session are tame, with her doctor listening intently to her life’s story & list of ailments, offering an open ear more than any verbalized advice. The act of listening is eroticized in this early stretch and the pair become an unlikely couple, complete with a handsome shared apartment & a mischievous house cat. Reality melts around them from there. It turns out the psychiatrist is hiding the existence of a twin brother, who operates his own mental health practice nearby. Our troubled protagonist is both obsessed with the mystery of why her lover would lie about the existence of his twin and turned on by the erotic implications of there being a physical copy of the man she loves. She, of course, investigates the twin’s competing psychiatry practice and finds his . . . unconventional methods as alluring as they are taboo. In a traditional erotic thriller, her sexual affair with her lover’s twin brother and the mystery of the dual psychiatrists’ past would drive the plot home from there. Indeed, the violent confrontations you’d typically expect from that setup do arrive in due time, but the circumstances surrounding them are both too supernatural & too perverse to wholly predict. Double Lover’s basic premise is a familiar template, but as it spirals out into total madness, there’s no bounds to its erotic mania, which is communicated through an increasingly intense list of indulgences: incest, body horror, gynecological close-ups, bisexual orgies, negging, pegging, “redwings” erotic choking, and nightmarish lapses in logic that, frankly, make no goddamn sense outside their subliminal expressions of psychosexual anxiety.

Aesthetically, Double Lover filters the pseudointellectual smut of the most illogical giallo pictures in existence through the color-muted, urban visual lens of Brian De Palma (who was already heavily influenced by giallo himself). De Palma’s clinically-applied split screens are abound throughout the picture, visually echoing the theme of twins & doubles just as much as its obsession with mirrors (seriously, it feels like over half of the runtime is framed through mirrored reflections). The visual provocations are blunt & unsubtle, humorously so. The film opens with an intense, medical closeup of a gynecological exam, then dissolves into a similarly-framed eye, directly referencing Georges Bataille. The protagonist picks up part-time work at an art museum, which allows for artistically framed photography of medical gore in a clinical but abstract setting, in an exhibit seemingly titled “BLOOD, FLESH, BLOOD, FLESH.” Like many gialli, the film often resembles a fashion shoot more than a horror movie, with almost any given frame practically being able to pass for a Vogue magazine cover (minus maybe the gore and the sex). Many audiences will dismiss this handsome, cold aesthetic as pretentious drivel, but there’s a dry humor to the film’s fashionable psychosexual madness. As our protagonist enters a staring contest with her cat mid-fucking, as the frame fills with a funhouse hall of mirrors at the climax, as each sinister sex dream reveals another layer of gleefully taboo desire, it’s clear the film is having fun with its over-the-top indulgences. It’s just doing so with a straight face.

I wouldn’t exactly call Double Lover an empty provocation. Its (well-founded) paranoia over men’s control & dismissal of women within the medical field is a legitimate strand of psychological terror with a rich history in the horror genre (and in real life). Its fretting over the power dynamics of a dominant (evil?) twin and their submissive (good?) twin is outdated psychobabble, but an interesting lens for viewing the power dynamics of romantic coupling in general. These themes are conspicuously present and exhaustively explored throughout, but it would be a lie to say they’re the film’s main draw. Double Lover is a blast because it shamelessly indulges in excess. Its shots of mirrored reflections persist long after the audience catches onto their significance. Its nightmare logic makes little attempt to justify its narrative trajectory outside the fun & the discomfort of its surprise. Its horror genre indulgences are entirely unconcerned with remaining highbrow, even risking its art film pedigree on a series of jump scares in the increasingly bonkers third act. Its external influences are blatantly displayed on the surface, with a reference to “steel gynecological instruments meant for torture” directly calling attention to its similarities with Dead Ringers within the opening ten minutes. Most importantly, though, its indulgences in onscreen, kinky sex are frequent, disturbing, and often genuinely erotic. Your comfort level with deliberate shock value provocation will likely steer your experience with the film overall, even though it’s far from the only factor at play.

Given Double Lover’s willingness to indulge in kink-minded titillation and its completely disinterest in subtlety, I should probably be more forgiving of its flippant comparisons to the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. I have two major roadblocks preventing me form that accepting that, though. First, I’m deeply invested in the film being understood as a continued tradition within the dream logic surrealism of the horror genre, not just a throwback as an erotic thriller. More importantly, though, I want to single out Double Lover as being an exceptional example of my favorite type of filmmaking: Elevated Art Cinema™ techniques applied to trashy, genre-minded premises that typically aren’t afforded them. This movie is dumb, crass, exploitative, trope-laden, and more than a little silly. It’s also a gorgeous work of fine art that disarms its audience with its nonstop onslaught of inelegant indulgences as a means of crawling under their skin and rotting them from the inside. It’s so much more than a less tame Fifty Shades. Its kinks are just the surface of its bizarre sense of psychological menace, a deep well of oversexed paranoia & manicured evil. Double Lover is an over-indulgent, preposterous film and, paradoxically, a perfect one.

-Brandon Ledet

Street Trash (1987)

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The eternal trade-off in horror fandom is having to put up with a lot of cruelty & trash while searching for the gems, which means getting burned repeatedly for daring to seek relief in fictional & comedic violence. Shock horrors from the 70s & 80s are an especially tricky enterprise. They were birthed in a time where the genre was at its wildest, most over the top creative summit, but they also often gleefully depict rape & intentionally offend in their politics in a way that sours the party vibe. The infamous “melt movie” Street Trash perfectly encapsulates that trade-off in the span of a single picture. Street Trash‘s opening & closing stretches of goopy, psychedelic body horror deliver everything anyone could reasonably hope for in a VHS era genre picture, but its second act doldrums are an hour-long indulgence in horror’s worst, cruelest impulses. The film is just barely recommendable for the strength of its practical effects gore & impressive camera work alone, but more than half of its runtime is a dead-in-the-water descent into heartless rape humor and plotless vilification of the poor. It’s a microcosm of the horror genre in that way: mind-boggling art buried under a mountain of cruelty & trash.

Like the Mortville setting of John Waters’s Desperate Living, Street Trash is mostly confined to a grime-slathered homeless community, just outside of Proper Society’s periphery. Unlike in Waters’s film, this horror comedy has an open distaste for its characters, who mostly populate a junkyard shanty town constructed out of old cars & stacks of tires. Everyone in the film is a drunken, psychotic asshole coated in an opaque later of grime. The film directly acknowledges their plights under addiction, police harassment, war veteran PTSD, and general mental illness, but still mostly makes them out to be cretinous trash (hence the title). All dialogue is shouted or slurred as the homeless swarm NYC streets, clawing for spare change & desperately offering to wash car windshields for tips. It’s much like the dystopic Out of Control Teens panic of Class of 1999 in that way. There’s a satirical opportunity in visualizing wealth classes’ fears of the poor (like an inverse of Brian Yuzna’s Society), but Street Trash is too light on plot to pursue it. The mechanism of its horror spectacle is a poisonous case of a fortified wine called Viper that a convenience store clerk sells to the homeless for dirt cheap. When consumed, Viper melts its victims from the inside out, reducing them to puddles of multi-color acrylic goop & exploding flesh. It’s a killer conceit and it’s undeniably fun to watch this insular community get torn apart by this villainous poison. There’s ultimately no point behind its existence, however, as it’s merely a crate of expired liquor some bozo found in a storeroom wall. With a plot about corporate boardrooms plotting to poison homeless people en masse with Viper as a way to clear city streets (in the vein of Three the Hard Way or Black Dynamite), Street Trash might have had something to actually do in its second act. As is, the lack of a plot only leaves a vacuum the film intends to fill with rape humor & open gawking at homeless cretins.

The latex special effects work in Street Trash is undeniably impressive. The film is bookended with opening & closing 20min stretches of gorgeously grotesque, for-its-own-sake gore spectacle that makes the film feel like it has potential to be one of the greatest body horrors of all time. The hour between those bookends is brutally unfunny & nihilistically pointless, however. A psychotic Vietnam vet torturing his wino underlings and a murder investigation involving the mafia & a fatal gang rape stretch the movie way past a reasonable runtime for what it accomplishes as well as past a tone that anyone who’s not a teenage boy could possibly find comedic. As little as I enjoy 60% of its runtime, however, my horror nerd appreciation of the remaining forty minutes leave the film at least passably enjoyable. At the very least, it’s impressive that a film this obviously cheap is also so visually impressive. Not only are the special effects of the rainbow-colored, Viper-melted bodies a visual art triumph; the film is just generally well-shot for VHS era schlock, making great use of low to the ground tracking shots to build majesty & menace. Synapse’s recent restorative DVD release looks especially fantastic. With a lot of the cast appearing to be crew & their friends and the only recognizable faces being people like That One Guy From GoodFellas, The Frankenhooker Dude, and The Mom From Polyester, that visual achievement can’t be overpraised, as the film is an obvious labor of love. It’s just a shame that it declined to fully explore the implications of its poisoned homeless community in-between its most impressive stretches of flesh-melting violence. Even when a stray gag in its second act doldrums does pay off (like a Benny Hill-inspired routine involving a severed dick), it feels like that time might have been better spent investigating the originating source of Viper or further exploring the homeless community’s interactions with the equally assholish upper class. Better yet, it could have cut out the second act entirely & just stuck to Viper’s physical effects, as it obviously cannot be trusted to use its idle time well when afforded it.

-Brandon Ledet

eXistenZ (1999)

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As I proudly count Videodrome as one of my all-time favorite films, I have no excuse for how long I’ve put off watching its kissing cousin, eXistenZ. Like how all Cronenberg horrors are driven by unspoken, cerebral fear, maybe I was subconsciously worried about seeing one of my most loved works lessened in its cultural update from cable television moral outrage to video game paranoia. eXistenZ even opens with a murder executed through an organic firearm made of bone & teeth, which picks up right where the flesh gun assassination conclusion of Videodrome leaves off. I wasn’t at all disappointed by my experience with eXistenZ, however. The film didn’t tarnish my appreciation of earlier Cronenberg works like Videodrome, but rather enhanced them by providing better context for the director’s career at large. Not only does a Cronenberg spin on the video game paranoia explored in less-horrific titles like The Matrix & TRON have an instant appeal to it, but eXistenZ also serves as a great bridge between the cerebral body horror of the director’s early career and the cold philosophical comedies he’s been making since the mid-2000s.

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as a hotshot virtual reality game developer who’s workshopping her greatest work to date, eXistenZ. The focus group testing of the game is disrupted when an assassination attempt is made with the aforementioned bone gun, leaving the developer/artist vulnerably injured. A marketing nerd played by Jude Law then finds himself operating as a makeshift bodyguard, whisking the developer away to safety while a vaguely-defined They (a paranoid conspiracy theory combination of both anti-gamers & gaming corporations) chase the pair down. Reality blurs as the two new “friends” delve into multiple levels of games within games to ensure the safety of both eXistenZ and its creator. There are no TRON-like digital landscapes around to give away what is “reality” vs what is eXistenZ, so the movie mostly amounts to a colossal mind fuck of Cronenberg needling his audience into a paranoid questioning of the validity of every character & every story beat. His version of a virtual reality future is much grimier & more organic than most similarly-minded sci-fi, works that tend to vizualize their own futurescapes with crisp lines & sanitized spaces. Cronenberg’s horrific vision is not the reality presented by the gaming systems, “meta flesh game pods” that plug into players’ spines through an umbilical chord & a puckered asshole of an outlet, or “bio-port” in the movie’s parlance. The writhing game pods, which look like gigantic human ears with clitoral nobs, make technology itself to be a literal horror, which really essentializes the paranoia films like The Matrix & The 13th Floor labor to communicate.

It’s interesting that no character in eXistenZ ever once says the term “video game,” yet we know exactly what medium Cronenberg is targeting. The glowing flesh cell phones & casual acceptance of virtual reality as a commonplace technology suggest a distant future where video games are a long-obsolete artform, but not so distant that the anus-like bio-ports & umbilical chord connectors that make gaming possible are acceptable to everyone. eXistenZ gleefully taps into the sexual taboo of female on male penetration, lingering on moments when Jennifer Jason Leigh has to lube up & enter Jude Law’s bio-port for stabs of psychosexual unease. Cronenberg sets up a fictional work where ours is “the most pathetic level of reality,” but the biological technology necessary to transcend it is a source of bottomless horror. Much like with Videodrome, he uses that bodily unease to open the film to metacommentary on the value of his own art. While Videodrome explores the violent & sexual urges titillated by a shifting media landscape, eXistenZ focuses on the nature of artificial realities created in individual movies, calling into question what qualifies as “real.” Characters detach from their in-game personas to critique the quality of the dialogue they’re compelled to say & what value a scripted sex scene has on their characterization. eXistenZ feels like the beginning of Cronenberg coldly playing with philosophical humor in conspicuously artificial environments, an aesthetic that became full fledged by the time he made more recent titles like Cosmopolis & Maps to the Stars. The joy is in watching him achieve that aesthetic through the technology-paranoid body horror tools of his earliest classics before abandoning them entirely.

From the continuation of Videodrome ideology to its dream logic sci-fi mindfuckery to the surprise of seeing a large chunk of the Last Night cast reassembled for a gross-out horror, I was always going to be predisposed to enjoy eXistenZ. It felt almost as if I were destined or scripted to watch & enjoy the film, a fate I delayed for as long as I could, but did not avoid indefinitely. As I’m wrapping up this review, I’m feeling a phantom itch where my bio-port should be, which is the exact kind of reality-questioning paranoia I hope to catch from all of my Cronenberg fare. If Jennifer Jason Leigh enters any room I’m in for the remainder of my life I’m going to let out an uncontrollable scream.

-Brandon Ledet

Are We Not Cats (2016)

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fourstar

One curious throughline that ties together a lot of body horror classics (besides the sadly dying art of grotesque practical effects) is the idea of doomed romance. Titles like The Fly, Possession, Altered States, Splice, and Slither all make their inhuman, nail-splitting, mucus-gushing freakshows count for something by using a doomed romance plot as an emotional anchor. The surprise indie gem Are We Not Cats, delivered by first time director Xander Robin, flips this dynamic on its head. As grotesque as the film’s body horror imagery can be, not least of all in its moments of hair-eating & amateur surgery, its practical effects shock value always feels secondary to its central romance plot. Are We Not Cats toes the line between many genres: body horror, mental health drama, black comedy, surrealist fantasy. It’s first & foremost a doomed romance, though, one that’s infectiously celebratory despite the grotesque violence & grime of its direly tragic atmosphere.

An out of work garbage man finds an unexpected love interest in a lumber yard worker who shares a surprising amount of his peculiarities/afflictions: addiction, crippling loneliness, boredom, poverty, and (most importantly) trichophagia. Our two stray cat lovebirds suffer a rare psychological condition that urges them to compulsively eat human hair. One has a manageable condition that largely sticks to the tiny hairs of beards & arms, but the other is far more voracious. She chows down on the stuff wholesale, leaving entire scalps bare in her wake. There’s a tangible sense of impending doom in this sudden romance, as both addicts feel “weirdly sick” in a way they find difficult to express. Surely, this is somewhat attributable to their likelihood of consuming toxic amounts of jug wine & antifreeze for a cheap high instead of anything that could remotely be considered food, but eating large quantities of human hair also has its own inherent health risks. Have you ever seen a cat cough up an oversized, mucus-coated furball? This is far worse.

Are We Not Cats is a minor work in a lot of ways & features some narrative clichés you’d expect from a first-time filmmaker (an emotionally damaged male lead searching for a female love interest to “fix” him, for starters), but Robin finds a way to luxuriate in the narrative’s insignificance in a way that charms instead of deflates. His characters are society’s throwaway trash, at one point literally tossed in the garbage, so that everything they do is minor by nature anyway. More importantly, though, the film makes lyrical art out its discarded pieces. Instead of chasing the burn-out shrug of the similarly-minded psychedelic body horror Anitibirth, the film is confident that it has style to spare and instead builds its world around an intangible air of romance & desperation. For all its dirty Detroit soul & doom metal sound cues, colorful Quintron-esque musical contraptions, and horrific flashes of skincrawl gore, Are We Not Cats is a film ultimately about intimacy & mutual addiction. As memorable as its grotesque, psychedelic freak-outs can be, their impact is equaled if not bested by the tender melancholy of lines like “When was the last memory you have of not being truly alone?” The details of the romance that ends that loneliness construct a body horror nightmare of open sores & swallowed hair, but still play as oddly sweet in a minor, intimate way that underlines the film’s viscerally memorable strengths & forgives a lot of its more overly-familiar narrative impulses.

-Brandon Ledet

Antibirth (2016)

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twohalfstar

I don’t want to say that I’m the only fan of last year’s online-bullying slasher #horror (not only would it be a little presumptuous, I also know James enjoyed it when I made him watch it for the podcast), but I do assume I’m among a very precious few hopeless weirdos who got excited when the stars of that film, Natasha Lyonne & Chloë Sevigny, were reuniting a year later in another horror cheapie. Antibirth looked to be a repeat of the neo-psychedelia explored in their previous collaboration, a total freak-out of genre filmmaking done weird & done right. Sadly, I can’t say I was nearly as hot on Antibirth as I was in #horror. Where the Tara Subkoff film felt effortlessly strange & unnerving from beginning to end, Antibirth had to strain its resources to get itself there. The entire film feels like a pained effort to reach the unhinged intensity of its final moment, when that last minute development should have ideally been a launching point. If Antibirth were a plot for a television show it would’ve been a home run. As a standalone feature film, however, it feels like all wind-up & no pitch.

Lyonne stars as a metalhead stoner with a grimy crew of dirtbag friends, including a fellow shithead played by Sevigny. Between getting blackout drunk & chain-smoking bong rips to late night television, Lyonne’s unsuspecting, unremembering protagonist is drugged at a party & abducted for nefarious purposes. Thankfully, no onscreen sexual assault is included to spoil the mood, but Lyonne’s heavy metal wastoid does emerge from the haze of her bender to find herself pregnant. Although Antibirth does rely on pregnancy-specific modes of body horror – like the terrors of sore feet, puking, ultrasounds, and sore nipples – her struggle is conveyed as entirely supernatural. There’s a Cronenbergian element to her transformation from mind-numbed party girl to expectant mother that gets gradually, grotesquely bizarre before culminating in what’s possibly the most disgusting birth scene gore I’ve ever witnessed. The problem is that her horrific birthing trauma feels like the beginning to a story rather than an ending, which is especially disheartening considering that a lot of its lead up centered on the far less compelling antics of scumbags & dazed-out alien conspiracy theorists. If the ending of Antibirth were merely the ending of a more condensed first act, we might have something interesting here, something as bizarre as the movie seems to think it already is.

One thing Antibirth isn’t lacking is a sense of style. The film plays like a low octane reimagining of Rob Zombie taking on Death to Smoochie. Its overbearing grime, Cramps-style music cues, and knockoff Tonetta music videos (something I honestly never expected to see in a film) mixes with its Chuck E Cheese-inspired Teletubby/Sasquatch hybrids to make for a really interesting underground horror tone. There are also easily recognizable seeds of good stories in the film’s talk of extraterrestrial intuition (or “interdimensional street smarts”) and its basic idea of turning the myth that “every pregnancy is different” into its own disturbing tale of body horror. In an ideal world Natasha Lyonne & Chloë Sevigny would annually team up for a horror film just as weird & off-putting as Antibirth, maybe even a couple more with the same director (this is the debut effort of Danny Perez, who’s previously done visual collaborations with Animal Collective), but their previous outing together was far more successful. Here, I only see a few germs of good ideas without the proper follow through, emphasis heavily put on “germs”.

-Brandon Ledet

Strange Invaders (1983)

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twohalfstar

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There’s nothing misleading about the title of Strange Invaders. Much like the recently-mentioned Invaders from Mars, the 80s sci-fi cheapie attempts to profess its love for 50s alien schlock sensibilities while updating them for a modern audience, but unfortunately the results are much less successful here than they are in the Tobe Hooper film. There are plenty of interesting ideas at work in Strange Invaders & enough grotesque practical effects to fill a decent YouTube highlight reel, but getting through the painfully paced 90 min runtime is a lot less fun than it should be. This is highly dispiriting, considering that the filmed was partially penned by a young Bill Condon, who I have a certain affection for, but it still remains true.

Strange Invaders‘ plot involves a bland everyman searching for his missing ex-wife in a ghost town populated by some gross-ass aliens who can transform human beings into floating balls of energy merely by zapping them with their fingertip lightning. Oh yeah, and this town, which was, officially-speaking, “destroyed by a tornado”, is temporally trapped in the 1950s. And the government totally knows about it. And the aliens can (and do) mate with the human populace to create human-alien hybrids. And so on & so forth. You’d think that with as much of a narratively stacked deck that Strange Invaders has to play with it’d be a breezily entertaining picture, but the truth is that its sublime moments of occasional alien invasion weirdness are mere respites from a slog of a movie that more of often than not bores its audience to tears.

The most significantly enjoyable aspect of Strange Invaders is its fleeting moments of body horror. Aliens ripping off their human disguises, spewing green blood from bulletholes, and sucking the life out of human victims to add to their precious orb collection are the sole bright moments in an desperately dull film, probably all better experienced as .gifs than as complete scenes. You get a real sense here that Bill Condon has a love for dated genre films, a love best put to use in his breakout film Gods & Monsters, but that influence just makes Strange Invaders al the more frustrating. You can feel a better movie dying to be cut loose from the bland, pooly-paced orb that contains it, trapped in time decades later, still waiting to be rescued in the editing room.

-Brandon Ledet