bonus features

Bonus Features: The Swimmer (1968)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1968’s The Swimmer, stars Burt Lancaster as an aging suburban playboy who, on a whim, decides to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy East Coast neighborhood.  It’s a boldly vapid premise that New Hollywood button-pusher Frank Perry (along with his then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote the majority of his early screenplays) somehow molded into a low-key mindmelter of 1960s moral rot through an eerie, matter-of-fact sense of surrealism.  The Swimmer is more of a quirky character piece than it is concerned with the internal logic of its supernatural plot.  Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends much of the runtime galloping alongside horses, leisurely walking through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot.  He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we dig deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle.  He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado.  By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women of his past whom we meet along the way.  The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.

I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now.  Not only was its general film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools.  Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Carribean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film.  Unfortunately, even Lancaster’s decrepit playboy protagonist couldn’t pull that off without cutting some corners on-foot, so his swimming-home dream remains unachievable.  However, I have been able to swim my way across several other movies in the same milieu as The Swimmer: intense psychological dramas centered around summertime sex, booze and, of course, swimming pools.  So, here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969)

There’s no telling how the over-the-hill playboy Ned sees himself in The Swimmer, but it might look a little like 1960s Alain Delon.  Delon was in his prime when he filmed his own poolside psych drama La Piscine, but his outer beauty does little to conceal the inner ugliness he shares with Lancaster in The Swimmer.  The film opens with Delon lounging half-naked poolside, barely lifting his head to sip his cocktail, then initiating sex with his girlfriend the second she’s within butt-swatting reach.  The couple are enjoying a horny, lazy vacation in South France before the reverie is interrupted the arrival of her ex-boyfriend and his teenage daughter, played by a young Jane Birkin.  Tensions quickly rise as it’s immediately apparent that everyone in the makeshift foursome is attracted to exactly the wrong person, threatening to escalate the volatile group dynamic with physical violence if anyone acts on their obvious, mutual desire.

La Piscine is not especially exciting as a psychological crime thriller, but it still excels as deliriously overheated summertime hedonism.  It feels like the entire cast is always seconds away from either a poolside orgy or an afternoon nap, and they’re all too miserable to enjoy either option.  It’s a real shame for all involved that the tension is released through violence instead of orgasm.  Before that act of violence (which takes place in the titular pool, of course), they lounge around a true summertime Eden, soaking up the oversaturated Eastman Color sunshine of a gorgeous, chic European locale.  There have been plenty of erotic dramas & thrillers over the years that have taken direct influence from La Piscine, but the director I found myself thinking of most was Luca Guadagnino, who borrowed its summertime color palette for Call Me By Your Name and its plot for A Bigger Splash (another classic in Swimming Pool Cinema).

Swimming Pool (2003)

Luca Guadagnino is not the only European hedonist to have floated a soft remake of La Piscine.  François Ozon’s 2003 erotic thriller Swimming Pool is so directly influenced by La Piscine that it barely bothered to change the title.  Charlotte Rampling stars as an uptight pulp mystery writer in need of inspiration, vacationing at another Southern French villa with its own backyard swimming pool.  Once there, she becomes obsessed with the sex life of a local twentysomething who has frequent, loud fuck sessions just one bedroom wall away.  The two mismatched women quickly develop a catty, petty roommate rivalry that, again, escalates to a shocking act of violence involving the swimming pool just outside their bedroom windows.  Swimming Pool works really well as a poolside erotic thriller (telegraphing some of the best aspects of Ozon’s Double Lover), but it works even better as a repressed-Brits-vs-the-liberated-French cultural differences comedy, as Rampling struggles to adjust to the local hedonism.

The differences between the two women’s personalities are plainly delineated by how they interact with the titular swimming pool.  While the younger roomie is content to swim in the pool without any leaf-skimming or PH maintenance, Rampling coldly declares “I absolutely loathe swimming pools” as a way to imply only a filthy beast would swim in that Petri dish.  It’s the difference between someone who truly lives and someone who only writes about people who live, a difference that Ozon sketches out with a sly smirk by the final reveal.  He also has a lot of fun playing with the wavy mirror surface of the pool water, reflecting and abstracting Rampling’s obsessive gaze as she ogles the half-naked youth swimming & fucking just outside her own bedroom. 

Deep End (1970)

If all of these suburban & provincial swim sites make the other swimming pool dramas on this list a little difficult to relate to as an urbanite in need of cooling off, dive into Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End instead.  Set in downtown Swinging 60s London, Deep End follows the mouthbreather exploits of a horny teenager who falls for his older coworker in an urban bathhouse, to both of their perils.  The story gradually establishes a hierarchy of low-level sex work from bathhouse-attendant tips to porno theater cruising sites to strip clubs and actual, true-blue brothels, but the bathhouse’s swimming pool is ultimately its main source of leisure and its main site of violence, as is customary to the genre.  As the teen’s older, street-wiser coworker, Jane Asher might be the most inspired “Risk it all for her” casting in the history of the practice; she could easily make a chump out of anyone.  Still, it’s incredibly bleak watching the ways the poorly socialized lout conspires to sexually corner her so that he can lose his virginity with his boyhood crush.  It probably says something that when he does finally corner her in the deep end of the central pool, it’s been entirely drained of water.  It’s eerily empty.

All four of these movies involve sex between adults and nearby youth.  All involve heavy drinking and physical violence, usually poolside.  No wonder this year’s January horror novelty Night Swim found so much to be scared of just beneath the surface of its backyard suburban swimming hole.  Pools are not just an excuse to get half-naked & cool off in a semi-social setting.  They’re also deadly, with just as much threat of drowning as threat of spontaneous sex & merriment.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1951’s A Place in the Sun, is a high-emotions noir about a desperate social climber who drowns his pregnant girlfriend so she doesn’t get in the way of his wealthier, prettier romantic prospect.  In essence, it’s an epic-fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor.  She was the most marriageable woman of all time, after all, apparently lethally so.  At the time, Taylor was just starting to make the transition from child star to adult romantic lead, and A Place in the Sun doesn’t ask her to do much other than to look elegant while modeling classic gowns designed by Edith Head.  Most of the film’s more serious brooding is left to Taylor’s costars Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters as the factory-worker couple who’re undone by her natural glamor. 

Elizabeth Taylor’s onscreen transformation into a convincingly mature actress did not begin & end with A Place in the Sun.  It was a gradual rebranding over several projects under her studio-system contract with MGM.  If you’re curious to track her progress through this transitional era, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Conspirator (1949)

Elizabeth Taylor’s first role as an adult character was co-lead of the Cold War espionage thriller Conspirator, starring opposite Robert Taylor.  Elizabeth plays Robert’s 18-year-old bride but was only 16 at the time of shooting, while her co-star was more than double her age, in his late 30s.  That might sound like a gross, old-fashioned approach to Old Hollywood romance—and maybe it is—but it’s at least acknowledged & addressed in the text.  Elizabeth plays a young, bratty teenager who has no business getting married, while Robert plays a Soviet spy posing as a British officer who’s attracted to her because she’s naive and easy to manipulate.  There’s some sly humor to the way the pair star in entirely separate movies for the first half of Conspirator.  Elizabeth is playing girlish, flirty games while Robert is plotting to subvert the Western Bloc, often undermined by his young wife’s immature antics.  That tension slowly deflates once the bride is fully clued into her husband’s true allegiances, but the path to that reveal is more fun than you might expect.

Of course, the teenage Taylor radiates pure movie star glamor in this otherwise mediocre Red Scare noir — the same natural glamor that she echoes in the soon-to-come A Place in the Sun.  There’s something incredibly charming about her character’s insistence on being treated like an adult, while also being too scared to sleep alone during thunderstorms and waiting around like a puppy for her crush to call on the telephone.  Conspirator is far from her best onscreen work, but it is a clear marker of her transition into being seen as an adult by her audience, almost to the point of it being her character’s arc.  In a third-act argument with her Filthy Commie husband, he remarks, “You’ve grown up, haven’t you?”, and she spits back “You can’t lie to me anymore, if that’s what you mean.”  The couple’s age gap may make for an uncomfortable pairing, but the movie clearly knows what it’s doing with it; the paranoid anti-Communist politics on the other hand . . .

Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincent Minnelli’s original adaptation of the 1949 novel Father of the Bride is just as bubbly & fluffy as its later adaptations in Norah Ephron’s 1991 version and the most recent straight-to-HBO-Max remake.  Like in A Place in the Sun, Taylor isn’t asked to do much in the picture besides look elegant in her couture gowns, this time including an iconic wedding dress (that ironically telegraphs of her many tabloid-covered weddings decades down the line).  Most of the film’s psychological grit defaults to the titular father (Spencer Tracy), who narrates his neurotic breakdown as he watches Daddy’s Little Girl prepare to walk down the wedding aisle, struggling to reconcile how he sees her vs her actual, adult autonomy.  In that way, it’s a perfect role for the teenaged Taylor, who was asking audiences to stop looking at her like a little girl and start seeing her as an adult.  It’s also a strange, upsetting reflection of macho insecurities lurking just under the surface of every American dad’s Neanderthalic skull.

The 1950 Father of the Bride might be light-hearted fluff, but it’s still high-quality fluff when compared to the mawkish sentimentality of its two remakes.  At the very least, its surrealistic nightmare sequence in which Tracy sinks into the floor while walking Taylor down the aisle is the high-water mark for the series as visual art.  More importantly, there’s something about the promo shots of Tracy spanking Taylor in her wedding dress that gets to the core of this series’ Suburban Dad Psychosis more than anything that happens in the actual films.  This is fundamentally a comedy about how fathers infantilize their daughters for as long as they can get away with it, so there’s something apt about casting a young actor who was pleading to no longer be infantilized by her audience as a child star.

Giant (1956)

Taylor didn’t fully come into her own as a lead actor playing adult characters until she reunited with A Place in the Sun director George Stevens for the sprawling Texas family drama Giant.  Specifically, it happens about halfway into the epic melodrama, just when my borrowed library DVD prompted me to flip the disc over to Side B.  In the first 100 minutes on Side A, Taylor plays a defiant but romantic teenager who’s swept off her feet by a Texas cattle rancher (Rock Hudson), only to discover that her handsome, charming husband is also a raging racist & misogynist in most social settings, as is the way of his home state.  At the start of Side B, she’s shown knitting in the family parlor, her hair pasted grey for an unconvincing geriatric stage-drama effect.  Decades into her marriage to an old-fashioned, uptight cowboy, she’s still a progressive do-gooder who challenges his Conservative views on women and the Mexican servant class every chance she gets, which means she has a lot more to chew on here than she has in Conspirator, Father of the Bride, or even A Place in the Sun.  Giant is the kind of well-meaning, anti-racist drama that’s just old & creaky enough to undercut its point by casting white actors in brownface for the minor roles, but it’s still surprisingly left of center for a studio production of this epic scale, and Taylor is the main mouthpiece for its political messaging.

I’m tempted to pitch Giant as what might happen if Douglas Sirk guest-directed a season of Yellowstone, but the existence of Sirk’s Written on the Wind (released the same year, also starring Hudson) makes that comparison somewhat redundant.  Stevens was a formidable contemporary of Sirk’s, but there’s nothing especially stylish or personal about his filmmaking craft that makes Giant more essential viewing than Written on the Wind or Imitation of Life, which combine to cover a lot of the same thematic territory.  He was a talented workman director within the studio system, most reliable for his ability to manage large-scale productions without them spiraling out of control.  It’s not a flashy, auteurist approach to directing, but it does allow for the Old Hollywood dream factory to do its work at peak efficiency.  If nothing else, Giant is worth seeing for the spectacle of its cast.  It almost seems impossible that a single movie could gather Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo all in one picture, but when you stretch your runtime out 3.5 hours and your setting over multiple decades, you have the space for that kind of feat.  Taylor & Hudson are the white-hot center of the drama, though, and they’re the main reason to clear an evening to watch it in full.  When Hudson first spots a teenage Taylor on her family farm, she’s riding a wild, misbehaved horse and he absentmindedly calls her a “beautiful animal” in a way that equates the two.  Years into their marriage, that wild streak never fades, and the adult version of Taylor’s character is given plenty open land to run free and buck Texas social conventions, to her husband’s fury & frustration.  It was a career-making role for her, one that cleared a path to the even juicier roles in Tennessee Williams & Edward Albee adaptations that were just over the horizon. 

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper.  Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.

A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking.  It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales.  Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.

Flashdance (1983)

A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance.  Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review.  It’s not hard to see why.  While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal.  Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video.  When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke.  When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids.  When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really.  She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre.  A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.

I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too.  Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism.  It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder.  It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.

Stripper (1986)

There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper.  The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living.  The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness.  At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival.  That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series.  Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time.  Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.

Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven.  It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs.  It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime.  On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.

Vamp (1986)

It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special.  A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks.  So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists.  Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power.  In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.

There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring).  It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty.  As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 2013’s All Cheerleaders Die, is a delightfully vapid, shockingly cruel horror comedy about undead cheerleaders seeking supernatural revenge on their high school’s misogynist football team.  It opens with faux-documentary footage that anthropologizes the cheerleaders’ social rituals as queen-bitch rulers of the school.  Our outsider-goth protagonist intends to infiltrate, expose, and tear down the institution of popular-girl supremacy by joining the squad and sabotaging them from the inside.  Only, once she makes the squad she finds it to be an unexpected, heartfelt bonding experience . . . especially after they’re murdered by the school’s meathead jocks, then rise from the grave to avenge their own deaths.

All Cheerleaders Die is a tonally chaotic mix of campy bitch-sesh dialogue, disturbing jabs of misogynist violence, high-femme lesbianism, vintage zombie gore, and supernatural goofballery involving magic crystals & spells.  Its shocking ultraviolence strikes a sharp contrast against the bubbly cheer squad social setting, touching on a long tradition of playfully violent cheerleader thrillers like Jennifer’s Body, Sugar & Spice, Satan’s Cheerleaders, and the list goes on.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more bubbly, morbid films about the deadly art of high school cheerleading.

Cheerleader Camp (1988)

All Cheerleaders Die’s greatest strength is its more-is-more ethos. It’s a shamelessly silly film that’s fearless about piling on more supernatural mayhem than it can possibly manage atop what easily could have been a simple undead-cheerleaders premise.  You can find more of that over-extended hot-mess novelty in the 80s sex-comedy slasher Cheerleader Camp.  Cheerleader Camp relocates the Porky’s sex comedy to Camp Crystal Lake, breaking up the usual rhythms of the summer camp slasher with frat boy gags involving locker room snooping & old-biddy crossdressing in an endless desperation to see cheerleaders topless.  Then, it goes the extra mile with some cheap-o surrealism in sub-Elm Street nightmare sequences starring various school mascots and razor-sharp pom-poms.  Like All Cheerleaders Die, it’s light-hearted, boneheaded novelty trash that reaches a kind of vapid transcendence in its overly complicated genre mashups.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

If the meathead Reaganite antics of Cheerleader Camp are an instant turn-off, you’re much likelier to feel at home with the bubbly, Valley Girl cuteness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The original Buffy film is basically Clueless before Clueless, if Clueless were a Hammer Horror.  Kristy Swanson stars as a mallrat cheerleader who’s recruited for her true calling as the modern Van Helsing.  Suddenly her priorities shift from determining which shopping mall multiplex has the best popcorn to learning how to drive stakes into vampires’ hearts without breaking a nail.  I never fully understood the appeal of the Buffy TV show, but the movie was a childhood favorite and remains a total delight.  It’s the exact kind of giggly, high-femme horror comedy that would be a hit at the same baby-goth sleepovers as All Cheerleaders Die, if either film got the respect they both deserve.

The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993)

All Cheerleaders Die may belong to a tradition of theatrically released cheerleader horrors, but most deadly cheerleader movies are made-for-TV.  Lifetime, in particular, is overflowing with titles like Cheer for Your Life, Deadly Cheers, Dying to Be a Cheerleader, Death of a Cheerleader, and Pom Poms and Payback, releasing cheerleader thrillers with the same rate most channels release made-for-TV Christmas movies.  The very best straight-to-TV cheerleader thriller I’ve ever seen was made for HBO in the 90s, though.

The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom is the scrappy little sister of headlines-riffing black comedies like Serial Mom, To Die For, and Drop Dead Gorgeous.  It can’t quite compete with those 5-star classics, but Holly Hunter is deliciously vicious as the titular cheerleader-murdering mom.  She tears through small-town rubes like an overgrown child pageant queen gone feral.  It’s the exact kind of novelty I was looking for when I watched the much more mundane Denise Richards Lifetime thrillers Killer Cheer Mom and The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders earlier this year, so I’m recommending it as the only title you need to understand the artistry of the made-for-TV cheerleader thriller sungenre.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: The Music Lovers (1971)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1971’s The Music Lovers, is a biopic of 19th Century composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  Most of my biographical knowledge of Tchaikovsky comes from this over-the-top distortion of his life, which mostly fixates on his volatile marriage to a fantasy-prone nymphomaniac.  A closeted homosexual, Tchaikovsky pursues a traditional marriage with the manic, insatiable woman to the detriment of his own sanity, inviting director Ken Russell’s usual erotic funhouse nightmares to spill onto the screen in spectacular ways that match the explosive piano jolts of Tchaikovsky’s music.  His violent compositions & barely closeted homosexuality land him firmly under the Misunderstood Mad Genius umbrella where Russell loved to play, meaning the film is so indulgent in its fantasy sequences and stylistic expressiveness that it’s foolish to form any concrete historical or political conclusions without further research.

Ken Russell was the master of turning real-life, historical artist’s lives into fodder for his own auteurist idiosyncrasies, from Lord Byron in Gothic to Franz Liszt in Lisztomania to Oscar Wilde in Salome’s Last Dance (which is what originally inspired me to track down The Music Lovers in a previous Movie of the Month cycle).  He did not own a total monopoly on the practice, though.  There are plenty of other directors who used loose-with-the-facts biopics of famous composers as inspiration for over-the-top, high-style pictures with little historical connection to those musicians’ lives.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more composer biopics gone wild.

Amadeus (1984)

Miloš Forman’s libertine biopic of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart doesn’t quite match the unhinged, sweaty mania of Ken Russell’s composer “biographies”, but it’s likely the closest you can get and still win a Best Picture Oscar.  Amadeus is wonderfully, extravagantly lewd, especially for a mainstream production. It characterizes the composer as a shrill, ridiculous fop whose fame at an early age stunted his emotional maturity — like so many fallen Disney Channel stars.  According to its stats on Mozart’s child-celebrity accomplishments, he had composed his first concerto by the age of 4, his first symphony by 7, and his first opera by 12.  It is not a birth-to-death biopic, though, so we do not see these adolescent accomplishments.  Instead, Forman delivers a character study of Mozart as a fully grown, immature lush whose undisputed musical genius does nothing to impede his love of sex, booze, and fart jokes.  He drinks himself into total delirium just like Tchaikovsky does in The Music Lovers, but for most of the picture he’s more of a hedonistic party boy than he is a self-hating sad sack.

While Amadeus indulges in the same “ecstatic truth” approach to historical storytelling as Ken Russell’s comparable biopics, it never totally detaches from reality in any decisive way.  Mozart’s bifurcated nature as a musical genius and a ludicrous fop is solidly grounded in a decades-long rivalry with his fellow composer Antonio Salieri, who cannot stand that his professional competition is a drunken jester whose music is “The Voice of God.”  That rivalry is fictional, but it’s not exactly a Ken Russell-style break from reality.  It does offer the film a bitter source of comedy, though, especially as Salieri’s frustration with Mozart’s ease in exquisite compositions starts to resemble Frank Grimes’s one-sided rivalry with the clueless Homer Simpson.  Forman has self-indulgent fun with Mozart’s life & music—historical truth be damned—which is the core tenant of all of Russell’s own biopics.  Lisztomania never had a chance at winning a Best Picture Oscar, so we might as well celebrate the closest the industry would ever get to that kind of anomaly.

Immortal Beloved (1994)

Candyman & Paperhouse director Bernard Rose attempted his own Ken Russell style biopic in Immortal Beloved, which portrays Ludwig van Beethoven as a temperamental rock star who took his anger over his own hearing loss out on the world at large.  Immortal Beloved delivers even less feverish Ken Russell theatrics than Amadeus, despite the surrealism of Rose’s iconic horror films.  It’s a little too restrained to match the fantastical heights of The Music Lovers or Amadeus, but it’s still a relatively fun, volatile period drama on its own terms.  That’s because it fully commits to the mystery genre structure that Amadeus only toys with as a convenient launching pad.  At the start of Amadeus, Salieri claims he murdered Mozart, but the 161min flashback that follows proves that confession to be figurative (and, again, fictional).  For his part, Bernard Rose fixates on a line in Beethoven’s actual last will & testament that refers to a mysterious “Immortal Beloved” that historians have never successfully identified.  Rose claims his own research and resulting Citizen Kane-inspired screenplay conclusively identified this Immortal Beloved that has been so elusive to Beethoven biographers for centuries. That claim, of course, is insane, but it’s the exact kind of unhinged energy directors need to bring to their projects if they plan to outshine Ken Russell in any way.

Unfortunately, Immortal Beloved also participates in the lowliest form of art: the Gary Oldman acting showcase.  Oldman plays Beethoven as a tortured creative genius and an excuse to don some dinner theatre old-age stage makeup.  Acting!  At least the movie’s adherence to Citizen Kane story structure allows for many points of view on Beethoven’s violent abuses.  Enough of his acquaintances report that the composer was “a terrible man” & “a scoundrel” that there’s nothing cool or romantic about watching him trash hotel rooms like a geriatric rockstar or cruelly insult the people who work to keep his life afloat.  Hanging out with a drinking, farting Mozart in Amadeus is a lot more fun, but there’s enough mysterious intrigue & proto-Sound of Metal dramatics in Rose’s take on Beethoven to make Immortal Beloved worth a look.  Besides, Rose’s conviction that he solved the case by processing it through mainstream screenwriting conventions is just objectively hilarious.

Paganini Horror (1989)

Both Amadeus & Immortal Beloved play around with the biographical details of their respective composers to up their own entertainment value, but neither can claim to go as off-script as the cheap-o Italo slasher Paganini Horror.  There were real-life rumors Antonio Salieri maintained a bitter rivalry with Mozart, even if those rumors have been proven false by historians.  Beethoven’s final will did refer to a mysterious “Immortal Beloved”, even if Rose’s claims to having uncovered that enigma’s identity are ludicrous.  Luigi “Star Crash” Cozzi’s Paganini Horror is working with even an even flimsier scrap of historical inspiration than either of those pictures, though.  Apparently, Niccolò Paganini was such a virtuoso violinist that it was rumored he sold his soul to Satan for the talent, earning him the nickname “The Devil’s Violinist”.  That’s all the real-world inspiration Cozzi needs to resurrect Paganini’s ghost on the set of a “Thriller” rip-off music video shoot, modernizing his musical devilry in the most direct, literal way possible.  Now, there’s a Ken Russell-style disregard for the respectability of real-world logic & historical fact.

Paganini Horror is basically off-brand metalsploitation, trading in the genre’s hair metal soundtrack for classical compositions and cornball 80s pop.  While filming a promotional “video clip” for their new single (a modernized recording of a lost, cursed, Paganini composition, of course), an all-girl rock band accidentally summons Paganini’s ghost, who hunts them one-by-one with a novelty violin knife.  They trade myths about Paganini’s signature on a literal contract with Satan, or how the musician used his wife’s intestines as strings, and you can still hear “the screams of his poor bride” today.  We don’t get to see much of that, though.  We get loopy music video clips & dream sequences where the devil’s violinist chases buxom new wavers around an abandoned castle.  Apparently, the production couldn’t land the full financing needed to stage all of the gore gags in the original script (co-written by Daria Nicolodi as a mockbuster version of a Klaus Kinski Paganini movie that never materialized), so they replaced the gnarlier details of those kills with more loopy dream sequences.  It’s a fun, detached-from-reality schlock novelty as a result, never quite reaching the euphoric highs of a Ken Russell art film but often reaching for the weirdest indulgences possible in a movie about a real-life historical figure, fictionalized beyond recognition.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Tatie Danielle (1990)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1990’s Tatie Danielle, is a dark comedy about a cruel old biddy whose sole purpose in life is making everyone else as miserable as she is.  It plays like the geriatric counterpoint to Problem Child, wherein the titular scamp is such an absurdly awful little shit that you can’t help but cheer on their misanthropic pranks.  The main difference (besides their anti-heroes’ disparate ages) is that Problem Child is an 80min Hollywood comedy that’s scored by endless repeats of “Bad to the Bone”, while Tatie Danielle is a two-hour French film with an ironic air of buttoned-up sophistication.  Both are great.

It’s rare that elderly characters are allowed to be complicated, difficult people onscreen.  They’re usually dazed wallflowers who are only good for an occasional comedic one-liner or a pang of audience sympathy.  The titular Auntie Danielle might be an ornery bully, but she’s at least interesting & complicated enough to carry an entire character study all by her lonesome – something you can’t say about many elderly characters on the big screen.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more films about wonderfully terrible old people whose geriatric misanthropy makes them oddly adorable.

Grumpy Old Men (1993)

If you want to see a version of Tatie Danielle with all the dramatic sophistication surgically removed to make room for broad Problem Child-style comedy, Grumpy Old Men is basically its dumbed-down American remake.  The core emotional drama of Tatie Danielle is in watching its miserable old biddy find an unlikely kindred spirit in her younger, even meaner nurse – a complicated relationship that evolves from borderline elder abuse to Thelma & Louise feminist heroics.  Grumpy Old Men takes a much simpler, lazier route by pairing Jack Lemon & Walter Matthau up as two miserable old men who find good company in each other’s equal-footing sourness.  They’re essentially playing two photocopies of the same ornery-old-man archetype—next-door neighbors & lifelong rivals—so there’s nothing nuanced or surprising about their I-love-to-hate-you dynamic.  Still, I got choked up by a scene where Matthau drags Lemon to the ER post-heart-attack and struggles to answer a nurse who asks whether he’s “friend or family.”  The thing about simplified Hollywood schmaltz is that it works, often to an embarrassing degree.

What’s brilliant about Grumpy Old Men‘s archetypal frenemy dynamic is that it allows the film to immediately launch into Matthau & Lemon’s hate-love dynamic.  It plays like a “The Movie” version of a decades-running sitcom in that way, or maybe a legacy sequel to the comedians’ previous team-up in The Odd Couple.  That frees up a lot of space for geriatric Problem Child pranks, which are of course much broader & cuter here than in Tatie Danielle.  These geezers might spitefully refer to each other by pet names like “moron” and “dickhead,” but they’re not really as misanthropic or cruel as Auntie Danielle, and a lot of the film’s fun is in watching them unwittingly bond as friends as they ruin each other’s daily lives with slapstick pranks.  Go to the French film for nuance; go to the American one for a Benny Hill set piece involving a runaway fishing hut.

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)

I suppose referring to Grumpy Old Men as the “dumbed-down American version” of Tatie Danielle doesn’t leave much room for discussion of Bad Grandpa – a geriatric prank movie from the professional dummies at Jackass, the most dumbed-down game in town.  In this spinoff from the official Jackass canon, Johnny Knoxville appears in old-age makeup as a horny old grump who briefly celebrates the freedom of his wife’s death, only to be saddled with custody of his grandson for the length of a disastrous road trip.  It perversely mixes candid-camera pranks with a Little Miss Sunshine-style feel-good comedy plot, even concluding with a real-life recreation of Little Miss Sunshine‘s climactic dance number (this time a drag/strip routine set to Warrant’s hair metal classic “Cherry Pie”).  Knoxville is obnoxious, cruel, selfish, uncomfortably horny, and often casually racist throughout the road trip, and the film scores a lot of easy laughs in observing people’s horrified reactions to a frail old man’s misanthropic misbehavior – the same transgressive thrill as Tatie Danielle. 

There’s been a lot of serious academic reconsideration of Jackass‘s artistic value as a documentary series lately, and I honestly believe there’s an argument to be made that Bad Grandpa is one of the more innovative, nuanced examples of mean-geezer cinema.  The love for last year’s Eric Andre vehicle Bad Trip seemed to suggest that the narrative-hybrid approach is the future of the candid prank film, so it’s a little odd this one is poorly remembered.  It’s not quite as funny as a legitimate Jackass film, but it is funny, and it’s an interesting evolution of the form.  If nothing else, every prank feels narratively purposeful in a way neither Bad Trip nor the Borat movies bother to attempt.  It was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup, which might very well be one of the first legitimizing accolades a Jackass film got as an achievement in cinematic craft.  You have to wonder whether if the series were filmed in France instead of the US, it might’ve been legitimized as “documentary art” & “a joyous vision of resilience in the face of trauma” a lot sooner.

Rabid Grannies (1988)

Given that the comedic legacy of Grumpy Old Men & Bad Grandpa has an immediate successor in the Robert DeNiro comedy Dirty Grandpa, it’s tempting to offer that much maligned (but surprisingly funny) gross-out comedy as the third compliment to Tatie Danielle.  I don’t want to lean too hard into the dirty-old-man side of the geriatric gender divide, though, since part of the novelty of Auntie Danielle’s misbehavior is the novelty of seeing an old woman shine as a sour misanthrope.  I can think of plenty examples of elderly men causing an age-inappropriate ruckus in slapstick comedies, but misbehaving biddies are a lot more difficult to come by.  In fact, I had to deviate to splatstick horror comedies to find the perfect pairing with Tatie Danielle‘s evil-old-woman humor, landing on the 1988 Belgian gore fest Rabid Grannies.  It might seem like the furthest outlier recommendation listed here, but it’s both the only one of these pairings that, like Tatie Danielle, centers on misanthropic old women and features a French-speaking cast.

Well, they normally speak French anyway.  One-time director Emmanuel Kervyn instructed his cast to speak phonetic English so the film would be internationally marketable.  For his effort, he sold the film to Troma, who has since bungled its release for over thirty years in both the quality of its prints and the censorship of its gore gags – a shitty trade-off for having to listen to characters talk-shout in a language they barely understand.  As a farce, Rabid Grannies is painfully unfunny, if not outright shrill.  As a special effects showcase, however, it’s a hoot, approximating what it would be like if the creepy biddies from Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of The Witches actually tore into some flesh instead of just threatening to.  What it lacks in belly laughs it more than makes up for in its flashes of Dead Alive-level splatstick gore.

At the start of the film, the titular killer “grannies” (referred to as “The Aunts” by their ungrateful relatives) are stereotypically sweet old ladies.  They freely give money to homeless people but are tight-pursed when it comes to their relatives, who are nastily competing for the women’s soon-to-be-distributed inheritance.  No matter how sweet they appear, The Aunts are sinisterly Conservative in their old age, pressuring their children to hide lesbian relationships & second marriages out of distaste for the impropriety.  It’s a moral fascism that’s amplified when The Aunts are cursed by the black sheep of the family, who infects them with a witchcraft spell that transforms them into flesh-eating demons.  In their first act of violence, the evil old women bite off a family member’s head.  In their climactic showstopper, they eat another family member’s ass – literally.  It’s all very gloopy & over-the-top, but it’s rooted in the same generational warfare that runs throughout all these misanthropic comedies. 

If you squint at it the right way, Tatie Danielle is a kind of horror film about an evil grandmother the same way that The Stepfather is a horror film about an evil stepfather, or The Dentist is a horror film about an evil dentist.  Rabid Grannies follows through on the novelty of that premise in the most extreme, tasteless way, transforming its bitter-old-lady villains into grotesque monsters.  The funny thing is that even in that creature-feature context, they take delight in their family-destroying mayhem as if they were just playing juvenile pranks on their victims (or, more accurately, just playing with their food).  It’s an approach that makes the broad caricatures of Tatie Danielle look restrained & sophisticated by comparison, which I suppose you could also say about Grumpy Old Men, Bad Grandpa, and the like.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Lifeforce (1985)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1985’s Lifeforce, finds screenwriter Dan O’Bannon returning to the retro sci-fi horror he revived to great success in Ridley Scott’s Alien (and, less famously, in John Carpenter’s Dark Star).  Just like in Alien, Lifeforce follows an unprepared crew of astronauts who are lured by a mysterious distress signal to a hostile alien landscape (in this case, on the surface of Halley’s Comet), where they’re hunted by the horrific creatures who inhabit it (in this case, soul-sucking nudist vampires).  By the time those creatures become stowaways on the space crew’s return to Earth, it’s clear that O’Bannon was recalling a very specific subgenre of Atomic Age sci-fi from his youth in both films; what’s unclear is what exact retro sci-fi titles he was referencing.

After revisiting Alien and watching Lifeforce for the first time this year, I did find myself curious about what Atomic Age sci-fi cheapies had influenced their shared tropes.  What I found was a group of cheap, quaint space travel pictures with a remarkable narrative overlap in O’Bannon’s screenplays.  Alien & Lifeforce are both updated to the modern horror tastes of their times, but there were plenty of retro space travel cheapies that mapped out the future details of their shared plot structure.  Here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see the vintage prototypes for its distinctly 1980s mayhem.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

You can’t ask for a much more straightforward, no-frills prototype for O’Bannon’s stowaway space alien invasions than It! The Terror from Beyond Space.  Even though the film’s rubber-masked pig-man is more adorable than scary, the way it hides in the rafters & crawl spaces of its Earthling victims’ spaceship is pure Alien.  It’s the kind of 1950s space travel thriller where the poster declares “$50,000 guaranteed by a renowned insurance company to the first person who can prove It is not on Mars now!” (despite the fact that It spends most of the runtime on a spaceship, not its Martian home planet).  It also laid out a roadmap to the kinds of stowaway alien invasion movies that O’Bannon would later emulate in his two biggest productions.

It!  The Terror Beyond Space even introduces its Earthling spaceship crew chatting around the dinner table, which is how audiences got familiar with the crew of Nostromo in Alien.  The stark difference here is that the women onboard the ship are mostly around to serve the men coffee at that table, and to tend to their wounds after the Martian creature attacks.  O’Bannon originally wrote Eleanor Ripley as a man, and his domineering nudist vampire villain in Lifeforce isn’t exactly the personification of Feminism, but you still have to credit him for giving his women characters something more to do than hang around as waitresses & cheerleaders.

Queen of Blood (1966)

In a lot of ways Queen of Blood is the least substantial of these Alien prototypes, if not only because it’s one of those AIP/Corman cheapies that were built out of Americanized scraps of better-funded, more imaginative Soviet sci-fi films — lurking among throwaway titles like Battle Beyond the Sun & Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.  It’s the one that most closely resembles the plot of Lifeforce, though, in that its stowaway alien invader is a wordless, beautiful woman who feeds on the blood of men like a vampire.  You’d think that of all the retro sci-fi films of this ilk this would be the one titled Planet of the Vampires—since Mario Bava’s own eerie Alien prototype doesn’t feature any actual vampires—but the title Queen of Blood is just as badass, so we’ll have to let that slide.

It’s hard to know exactly what to praise in Queen of Blood, since so much of its sci-fi spectacle is borrowed wholesale from the Soviet film Mechte Navstrechu, but its titular, green-skinned vampire queen is fabulous; she’s got a whole Juno Birch thing going on and it’s wonderful.  Not for nothing, but the film’s space crew also include prominent female scientists who actively save the day as the horndog men around them fall victim to the vampire, which is more than you can say for either Lifeforce or It!  The Terror Beyond Space.

The Green Slime (1968)

If you want to see the retro Alien prototype at its goofiest, you likely won’t do any better than 1968’s The Green Slime, a sci-fi creature feature collaboration between MGM and the Japanese studio Toei.  From its funky psych-rock theme song to its adorable X from Outer Space-style miniatures, to its slimy rubber monster, The Green Slime is pure kitsch.  Many of its plot details overlap with the specifics of Alien, though, despite that goofiness: its stowaway creatures’ lethally corrosive blood, its menacing stockpile of alien eggs, its doomed crew members’ refusal to adhere to proper quarantine protocol, etc.  You can practically picture little baby O’Bannon propped in front of his cathode-ray TV scribbling notes on how to tell an alien invasion story.

The Green Slime was mocked on the pilot episode for Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and it’s easy to see why they thought it left enough dead air for the show’s riffing to fill.  Its adorable old-school special effects work compensates for its lethargic pacing issues, though, and it’s the only film on this list that even vaguely resembles the batshit goofballery that O’Bannon would later indulge in Lifeforce.  It’s a shame that Lifeforce didn’t have its own titular theme song, though, since the one for The Green Slime is such a delight:

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Sneakers (1992)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1992’s Sneakers, is a mainstream thriller about elite hackers played by middle-aged movie stars instead of teenage Mall Goths.  As a “cyberpunk” thriller about elite early-internet hackers, it is absurdly un-hip.  I’ve come to expect my movie hackers to be young, androgynous perverts dressed in glossy patent leather, not near-geriatric celebrities who tuck in their shirt-tails.  However, as a big-budget Dad Movie that plays with 90s-specific cyberterror anxieties, I found it solidly entertaining.  It feels like a dispatch from a bygone studio filmmaking era when movie stars actually drove ticket sales, so that their importance on the screen is stressed way more than directorial style or production design – which are slick enough here but deliberately avoid calling attention to themselves.  Even among the movie’s biggest fans, I get the sense that it satisfies most as a comfort watch steeped in nostalgia for that era, right down to the clunkiness of its landline phones and desktop computers.

I appreciate Sneakers‘s appeal as a star-studded studio thriller, but I personally prefer my Evil Technology movies to be just a smidge goofier, sexier, or more stylistically over the top.  Thankfully there are plenty of trashier, less reputable 90s thrillers about computer hackers to choose from.  Here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month but want to see something a little less sensible.

The Net (1995)

For something just a smidge goofier than Sneakers that still sticks to the mainstream star-vehicle format, I’d recommend the much-mocked but highly entertaining The Net.  The Net stars Sandra Bullock as a loner computer hacker, vulnerable to attack because she’s friendless in the world. Watching Bullock’s slovenly hacker eat junk food & code in her “cyberchat” computer dungeon really pushes her Sweetheart Next Door onscreen persona into absurdly unbelievable territory. Bullock’s inability to lose herself in a role comes hand in hand with movie star celebrity, a suspension of disbelief audiences are willing to accommodate because we love seeing these megastars perform, Everyday Sweethearts or no.  It’s the same suspension of disbelief that asks us to buy a middle-age Robert Redford as the hippest computer genius on the planet or Dan Ackroyd as a Mall Goth conspiracy theorist, when more reasonable casting would’ve skewed younger or nerdier.

Besides Bullock’s natural star power & effortless charm, The Net’s main draw for modern audiences is its glimpse at 1990s era fears & misunderstandings of online culture, which is pushed to a much goofier extreme than the standard political thriller beats of Sneakers. The film’s main conflict involves an encrypted floppy disc that hackers are willing to murder Bullock’s online slob to obtain, exploiting then-contemporary audiences’ fears of the vulnerability of digitally stored information. Characters anxiously explain the vulnerability of our “electronic shadow” in a world where “our entire lives are in the computer,” waiting to be hacked. The film’s tagline bellows, “Her driver’s license. Her bank account. Her credit card. Her identity. DELETED.” Most of The Net‘s basic thriller elements derive from Bullock’s helplessness in the face of this online identity persecution limiting her mobility & capital as she protects the McGuffinous floppy disc.  On the sillier end, there are also primitive AOL-era emojis, in-dialogue explanations of terms like “IRL” (all-caps), and exchanges like “You’re hacker too?,” “Isn’t everybody?,” to help color The Net as a so-bad-it’s-good early Internet relic.

Where The Net truly gets good for me is in its lack of confidence that its chosen subject is sufficiently cinematic. Unsure audiences will bother reading online chatroom text to themselves, Bullock’s computer “helpfully” reads out the chatter in exaggerated robotic voice synthesizers. Discontented with merely displaying online data in matter-of-fact presentation, harsh music video edits & slashing sound cues are deployed to make computer readouts more “dynamic” (read: obnoxious). To add some explosive energy to the onscreen thrills, the film’s evil hacker syndicate graduate from hijacking online personal data to hijacking personal airplanes – essentially hacking victims to death in fiery crashes. It’s all deeply, incurably silly, a tone that only improves with time as its moment in tech becomes more obsolete.  Whereas Sneakers molds a traditional, reasonable political thriller formula onto a 90s cyberterror setting, The Net goes out of its way to stress the contemporary gimmickry of his computer hacker plot to the point of delirium.

Disclosure (1994)

For something “sexier” than Sneakers, I’d point to the Michael Douglas erotic thriller Disclosure, which features the middle-age movie star in yet another deadly battle with a femme fatale who desperately wants to fuck him to death . . . this time with computer hacking!  Douglas stars as a misogynist computer programmer whose daily sexist microaggressions are turned back on him a thousandfold by his new bombshell boss (and sexual harasser), played by Demi Moore. It literalizes the 90s-era War of the Sexes in the same queasy way all these mainstream erotic thrillers do, which you’re either going to be on board for or not.  However, this particular example is flavored with an Early Internet tech obsession that includes wide-eyed wonder at cell phones, emails, video calls, and CD-ROMs – placing it in the same techno-espionage realm as Sneakers, just with the absurdity dialed to 11.

There is no actual, consensual sex in Disclosure, despite its erotic thriller patina.  Most of the frank, adult conversations about sexuality are contained to legal mediations about the gendered nature of consent and power in the workplace.  The actual computer hacking portion is also minimal in its screentime, but once it arrives it is a doozy. The climax of the film is staged in a Virtual Reality simulation of a filing cabinet in a digital hallway, with Michael Douglas frantically searching for confidential files while a Matrixed-out killbot version of Demi Moore systematically deletes them with VR lasers.  Of all the examples of movies overreaching in their attempts to make computer hacking look visually dynamic and Cool, this is easily up there in the techno-absurdism Hall of Fame.  It’s also lot more thrilling than it sounds on paper, depending on your taste for this kind of horned-up, technophobic trash.

Hackers (1995)

And of course, no list of 90s computer-hacking thrillers would be complete without the over-styled, undercooked excess of 1995’s Hackers.  When I was picturing my ideal version of Sneakers—young perverts in fetish gear throwing around the word “elite” as if it were the ultimate honor—I’m pretty sure I was just picturing Hackers . . . a film I had never seen before.  Whereas Sneakers is careful to present its corporate espionage computer hacking in a reasonable, rational context that’s careful not to deviate too far from the mainstream thriller norm, Hackers fully commits to its Computer Hacking: The Movie gimmickry.  Jonny Lee Miller stars as a child hacker (alias Zero Cool) who has to lay low after being convicted for hacking into the systems of major American banks, then emerges as a hip teen hacker (new alias Crash Override) who’s pinched for a similar corporate espionage crime he did not commit.  Will he and his elite-hacker friends be able to out-hack their evil-hacker enemies to clear their names before they’re sent to prison?  Who cares? The real draw here is the rapid-edit visualizations of computer hacking in action, wherein Zero/Crash closes his eyes and zones out to psychedelic clips of vintage TV shows & pop culture ephemera while his hands furiously clack away at his light-up keyboard, techno constantly blaring in the background.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for something while you’re watching it for the first time?  Hackers has everything I want in movies: tons of style, no substance, mystical visualizations of The Internet, wet dreams about crossdressing, Matthew Lillard, etc.  In the abstract, I recognize that Sneakers is technically the better film, but its competence keeps it from achieving anything half as fun or as surreal as this 90s-teen derivative.  I very much appreciated Sneakers as is, but I spent its entire runtime re-imagining it as my ideal version of a 90s computer-hacking thriller . . . only to later discover that Hackers already is that exact ideal.  It’s, without question, the most ridiculous and most essential film in this set.  Hack the planet!

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Trouble in Mind (1985)

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Our current Movie of the Month, Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind, is a stylish but lowkey neo-noir set in a fictional version of Seattle called Rain City, featuring an incredibly cool soundtrack from Marianne Faithful. Its oddball clash of 1940s noir nostalgia & intensely 1980s fashion trends is a one-of-a-kind novelty in many ways, not least of all in the unconventional casting of its mafioso villain.

For degenerates like us, the main draw of Trouble in Mind is going to be the novelty of seeing Divine, the greatest drag queen of all time, play a male villain outside the context of one-off gags in John Waters comedies.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you loved Divine’s performance in our Movie of the Month and want to see more footage of him performing a male persona.

Out of the Dark (1988)

The closest role Divine played to his mobster villain in Trouble in Mind was an extended “special appearance” cameo as a police detective in 1988’s Out of the Dark.  His final acting credit before his death, Out of the Dark is a kind of unofficial class reunion for the major players from the Divine-starring comedy-Western Lust in the Dust: Tab Hunter, Paul Bartel, and Lainie Kazan (among other cult movie superstars like Bud Cort & Karen Black).  While the film itself is shameless 80s sleaze about a serial killer in a clown mask who targets phone sex operators in downtown Los Angeles, Divine plays his role as an old-fashioned police detective with the broad, vaudevillian humor of an SNL sketch, complete with a laughably fake mustache.

Out of the Dark is basically a disposable Skinemax slasher, but it’s got charm to spare if you’re already under the spell of its eclectic cast of B-movie all-stars.  If you’re looking for a thoughtful examination of the everyday labor exploitations of sex work as an industry, you’re better off looking to Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls.  The “fantasy phone line” girls at Suite Nothings offer much schlockier delights, and Divine’s minor presence is only there to sweeten the deal.

I Am Divine (2013)

Besides Trouble in Mind & Out of the Dark, there aren’t many places to see Divine performing a male persona for the camera.  He was poised to become a much bigger star out of drag in a recurring role on the hit sitcom Married with Children but died the night before his first scheduled day on-set, tragically cutting short his ascent as a household name.  That’s the exact kind of factoid you can pick up from the recent documentary I Am Divine, though, an intimate look at the drag superstar’s life & career.  It’s nothing flashy in terms of its filmmaking aesthetics, but I Am Divine is still very much a worthwhile primer for Divine & John Waters devotees who don’t know much about the dastardly duo’s off-screen antics (re: anyone who hasn’t already read Waters’s memoirs like Shock Value & Crackpot).  It’s also a great opportunity to see Divine out of drag, just being a normal-ass person, which is fascinating in its own way.

I Am Divine also offers insight into his post-Dreamlanders career, including the era when he filmed Trouble in Mind.  I even picked up this factoid about our Movie of the Month long before we watched it: the gigantic diamond earring Divine rocks in the film was not provided by wardrobe but by the actor himself.  He was super proud of saving up for that hunk of jewelry (after a fabulously delinquent life funded mostly by shoplifting) and paraded it around in public as much as possible in later years as a status symbol. It totally fits the mafioso character he’s playing, to the point where you might not even notice it, but I still love that Divine got to immortalize that obnoxious gem he was so proud of onscreen (and I never would have caught that detail without the documentary).

Hairspray (1988)

Of course, the very best source for Divine Content is always going to be his collaborations with John Waters.  The only reason seeing Divine out of drag outside of a John Waters film is a novelty at all is because their collaborations inarguably defined his career (unless you were around to watch Divine perform live with The Cockettes or as a disco act, you lucky fuck).  Divine did appear out of drag in a couple Waters films, even if only briefly.  The foremost example of this might be the stunt in 1974’s Female Trouble in which Divine effectively rapes himself on a dirty mattress while playing two separate characters (teenage runaway Dawn Davenport and local pervert Earl Peterson).  It’s a horrific gag, but it’s one played so broadly & grotesquely that you cannot take serious offense to the provocation – the John Waters specialty.

I firmly believe his best work out of drag is in the film Hairspray, though, another Waters picture where Divine plays dual roles.  His housewife caricature Edna Turnblad rightly gets the most attention in the film (if not only for the uncanny horror of John Travolta’s reprisal of the role), but he also makes for a great male villain in the proudly racist TV station manager Arvin Hodgepile.  The seething, grotesque bigotry that oozes out of Divine in that role is incredibly upsetting, and the character feels way more specific & nuanced than the broad caricatures he played in Trouble in Mind & Out of the Dark. It feels as if he were channeling some monstrous authority figure from his own youth that he despised, and you can feel that dark energy flowing through the disgusting pig.  Of all of Divine’s performances in man-drag, the one in Hairspray is the one that lands as the most memorable & authentic to me.  It’s the one that best hints that he might have pulled off a successful career beyond his John Waters collaborations had he not died so suddenly in his early 40s.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Home of the Brave (1986)

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Our current Movie of the Month, the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave, is only a small glimpse into the profoundly peculiar mind of performance artist & avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson. Home of the Brave is a streamlined, 90min distillation of Anderson’s United States I-IV stage show: a four-part, two-night concert series in the early 1980s that combined lectures, digital projections, absurdist dance, and bizarre new wave compositions to abstract & deconstruct the nature of modern living in the Western world (and America in particular, as the title suggests). It’s a sprawling “Who are we?” existential crisis for The Reagan Era, abstracting basic modern concepts as varied as America’s national identity, the nature of rock music, the absurdism of gender performance & 80s workout routines, basic human interactions, technology, language, etc. Even as only a small portion of that magnum opus, Home of the Brave clearly registers to my eyes & ears as one of the greatest concert films of all time, a wonderful introduction to Anderson’s consistently exciting & confounding genius.

While there is only one wonderful mind like Laurie Anderson’s, she’s not the only philosophically minded musician who’s used filmmaking to document & bolster her art. Here are a few recommended titles if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to see more pop music cinema on its profoundly peculiar wavelength.

American Utopia (2020)

Full disclosure: the only reason I recently sought out Home of the Brave in the first place is because last year’s David Byrne concert film American Utopia reminded me so much of Anderson’s work in United States I-IV. In American Utopia, Byrne’s parade of solo & Talking Heads hits are bookended by short lectures that examine the function & the soul of American culture from an abstracted outsider perspective – a kind of spiritual sequel to his Small-Town America portrait True Stories. American Utopia is an honest but optimistic temperature check of where America is today, both acknowledging the horrors of racially motivated police brutality that have long been a stain on this country’s honor and pointing to our current moment of change as a possibly transformative turning point towards a better future. Meanwhile, everything onstage is rigidly uniformed & regimented like a dystopian sci-fi film, with the traditional rock performers’ instruments & colorful costuming stripped away to mimic the minimalism of modern performance art. Like Home of the Brave, it’s the kind of existential national identity crisis that you can dance to.

To be honest, I do have a small chip on my shoulder about how much praise is heaped on Byrne’s American Utopia & Stop Making Sense films while Home of the Brave never even made the jump from VHS & Laserdisc to DVD, much less Blu-ray. Although she’s less of a household name elsewhere, Laurie Anderson was very much an equal & contemporary alongside David Byrne in NYC art snob circles in the early 1980s. Stop Making Sense might have preceded the concert film version of her United States act by a few years, but she was already pushing its more out-there ideas to their furthest extreme in her own stage work at that same time. If anything, American Utopia finds Byrne leaning further into the Laurie Andrersonisms of his own work, to the point where it feels like it’s turning Home of the Brave‘s idiosyncrasies into a concert film subgenre all of its own. Both films are great, but only one is being left to rot in the wasteland of fuzzy YouTube uploads.

Björk: Biophilia Live (2014)

While David Byrne collaborated with the distinctly American auteur Spike Lee on his own pop-lecture concert film, Björk outsourced the filmmaking duties on her 2014 concert piece Biophilia Live to two eccentric Brits. Unrepentant fetishist (and one of my favorite living filmmakers) Peter Strickland handled the direction of the film, while famed naturalist David Attenborough contributed the lecture portions of the performance (and expanded on its ideas in a bonus feature titled When Björk Met Attenborough). Biophilia Live beings with Attenborough making wild, unrealistic declarations over breathtaking nature footage, urging the audience to “Forget the size of the human body. Remember that you are a gateway between the universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and Nature, who embraces you and all there is.” He goes on to claim that “We are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovation.” That abstract, philosophical subject is a Laurie Anderson-scale ambition for a mere concert film. Björk nearly delivers on that majestic promise too, finding a unique visual language that combines “nature, music, and technology” into one cohesive whole.

This union of “nature, music and technology” is accomplished through a layered visual collage that matches the on-stage aspects of the concert being filmed to the beautiful nature footage & pixelated CGI that swirls around and above it. During the opening song “Thunderbolt” Björk appears in the Earth’s stormy atmosphere, her backing band’s synths (and a specially rigged Tesla coil) seemingly controlling the lightning that illuminates the air around her. The imagery then shifts from the earthly to the celestial, the rhythm of the music correlating to the phases of the moon and the glacially shifting lights of stars and galaxies. The focus then shrinks from the heavenly to the microscopic; Fantastic Voyage-style close-ups of blood moving through veins fade to pixelated bacteria attaching to strands of DNA before the images finally devolve into distorted television color bars & computer monitor static. These phases of the imagery are cleverly allowed to bleed into one another instead of remaining isolated, which leads to some transcendent juxtaposition: a lightning storm in outer space, the moon perched on a spinal column, crystal formations melting into prism light. Even Björk herself looks like a combination of two ostensibly separate natural phenomena: her gigantic wig like a colorful galaxy & her asymmetrical dress like an underwater growth.

Attenborough’s opening monologue defines “biophilia” as “the love for Nature in all her manifestations” and Biophilia Live tries desperately to capture all those manifestations in one definitive catalog. Conceived as a single facet of a multi-media project alongside a studio album, music-composition computer apps, and the aforementioned conversation between Björk & Attenborough, the film itself is more than just a document of a single concert. It’s also an attempt to tie years of far-reaching ideas spread across various art forms into a single product, the same way it tries to tie all of Nature into a single entity. It’s the only concert project I can think of that matches the hyperbolic ambition of United States I-IV, and it’s not at all surprising that effort came from an artist as daring & eccentric as Björk.

Heart of a Dog (2015)

While I greatly respect both the American Utopia & Biophilia concert films on their own terms, neither can truly scratch the itch of wanting more art on Home of the Brave‘s peculiar wavelength. Laurie Anderson is just too distinctive of a philosophical mind to find that need satisfied in another artist’s hands. That’s why I’d also recommend pairing Home of the Brave with her essay film Heart of a Dog (her only subsequent feature-length work as a director) even though it’s not a concert film. While Home of the Brave is a snapshot of Anderson going as broadly, abstractly philosophical as possible, Heart of a Dog finds her at her most intimate. Presented as a meditation on the nature of Death following the loss of Anderson’s beloved rat terrier Lola, the film mostly functions as an act of self-therapy after the also-recent death of her husband, Lou Reed. In the film, Anderson mixes stock footage, digital photography, home movies, and animation to bring her trademark spoken-word work to vivid, visual life. Anderson’s intense soundscapes & language play hadn’t changed much in the decades since Home of the Brave, but they’re presented here with the immediacy & intimacy of listening to her narrate a private family photo album instead of a sprawling stage show.

Of course, Anderson can’t help but process her familial grief through prodding at larger, more abstract concepts; that’s just who she is. The losses of Lola & Lou inform every frame of Heart of a Dog, but they’re part of a larger tapestry of ideas that cover everything from the modern surveillance state to living in New York during 9/11 to the tenants of Buddhism to the existence of ghosts. Lou Reed’s absence weighs heavily on the proceedings, cropping up in an occasional image or song or dedication, but speaks volumes as Laurie Anderson instead discusses the process of accepting loss in terms of her dog, her dog’s sight, the twin towers, a world before the omnipresence of modern technology, and a mother she feels she never genuinely loved. As with all of Laurie Anderson’s work, Heart of a Dog is a writer’s delight, an intense meditation on the bizarre nature of language, but it stands as her most fiercely personal work to date. It not only covers the whirlwind of painful change & transition she’s survived in recent years; it also lays out in simple, clear terms how she sees the known world & the unknown one that follows. Nearly every word, sound, and image in the film was created by Anderson herself and by the end credits the film feels like a snapshot of her very soul, as opposed to the snapshot of America’s soul presented in Home of the Brave.

-Brandon Ledet