Men will literally gun down an entire biker gang by themselves instead of going to therapy. The Danish dark comedy Riders of Justice is essentially a two-hour shitpost with that exact punchline, which you might not guess in its opening, somber first act. Like Nobody, it’s a low-key parody of the suburban-dad revenge thrillers Liam Neeson’s been treading water in since Taken – especially his collaborations with Jaume Collet-Serra: The Commuter (Taken on a Train) and Non-Stop (Taken on a Plane). In both instances, the humor of that parody is delayed; both Nobody & Riders of Justice open with a straight-faced first act that doesn’t prepare you for the over-the-top absurdist mayhem to follow. Riders of Justice doesn’t play like a thriller in its opening half-hour. It starts as a solemn, introspective drama about a train accident that tears a family apart by killing its matriarch. Instead of healing from the pain of that tragedy through therapy, however, the surviving widower stubbornly creates an anti-hero action plot out of thin air, exacting violence on a terrorist biker gang he believes is responsible for the train wreck, as if that’s the easier path to healing from the loss. The more that revenge mission spirals out of his control and the further he goes out of his way to avoid talking about his emotions, the funnier the joke becomes (and the higher the bodies pile).
Like Nobody‘s front-and-center, against-type casting of Bob Odenkirk, the main draw for most audiences to Riders of Justice will be seeing Mads Mikkelsen in the starring role as a grieving Military Dad on the warpath. I’m largely indifferent to Mikkelsen myself (beside being impressed by those magnificent cheekbones), so I’m shocked to report I was way more satisfied with his star-vehicle Taken parody than Odenkirk’s. All of Nobody‘s action genre signifiers are pulled directly from modern post-Taken and post-John Wick thrillers, leaving it with very little visual style to call its own outside the incongruity of seeing Odenkirk presented in that context. Riders of Justice casts a much wider net in its own action genre parody, especially by the time Mikkelsen assembles a crack team of computer experts in an industrial barn to help track down the targets of his wrath. Once the plot is in full swing, he stands as a lone machine-like killer among a house full of bickering nerds who constantly undercut the macho revenge fantasy of his one-man gang war with their own petty, unmanly quibbles. It’s the same mode of comic relief that side characters like Tyrese & Ludacris provide to the Fast & Furious franchise, for instance, but it’s deliberately uncool & uncomfortable in a way that constantly underlines how much these men need professional help instead of guns & ammo. Meanwhile, Mikkelsen’s job as the traditionally macho hero (and comedic straight man) is to maintain a seething, barely contained anger at the world at large for contrast against those nerds, and he’s great at it.
It helps that Riders of Justice is also about something beyond its satirical observations about the emphasis on violent revenge in macho action flicks like Taken & John Wick. It makes room for lots of unexpected, heartfelt reflection on grief, abuse, “found family”, and the cruelty of coincidence, all delivered with a real sicko sense of humor. The movie is outright philosophical in the way it interrogates our need to apply logical order to the chaos of random tragedies by filtering them through religious faith, statistical analysis, or violent retribution. It also pays careful attention to its own visual style, however muted. At the very least, I appreciated the way its motif of blue & orange crosslighting helped break up the earth tones of its militaristic anti-hero’s joyless, colorless life. All of the promotional materials for Riders of Justice feature Mads Mikkelsen staring directly into the camera while modeling action-hero army gear, which makes the film look like a humorless bore. It turns out the character himself is the bore, and the film finds lots of humor at the expense of his performative brutish exterior (after taking the time to seriously consider the emotional pain of the loss he’s suffered). It takes an unusually long time for the anti-macho humor of its action genre parody to emerge, but thankfully that’s not the only thing on its mind. If you’re looking for zanier or more immediate humor in your action movie parodies, there’s always MacGruber or Hot Shots or even the final hour of Nobody.
Ten films into the “The Fast Saga“, I have no idea how to evaluate individual movies in the franchise beyond noting how much fun I had while watching them. During the last entry, Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, I didn’t have any fun at all despite seeing it in a theater full of braying strangers; the mood was sour & off-brand. During its pandemic era follow-up, F9, I had a moderate amount of fun watching a borrowed public-library DVD alone on my couch. F9 mostly offers more of the same from the decades-running action franchise, which has ballooned from street racing heist films to superhero fantasy epics that just happen have car engines revving in the background. In this outing, Dom’s gang/family drive over landmines, through weaponized magnetic fields and, inevitably, into outer space. I can’t tell how much my enthusiasm for these stunts was dampened by watching the film at home vs. how much it was dampened by feeling like I’ve seen it all before. All I know is that after the bitter taste left by Hobbs & Shaw‘s aggro-bro sense of humor, I’m now way more conscious of how these films generate their moodsetting comedy. As it turns out, it’s a lot more difficult to have fun when you’re thinking about whether or not you’re having it.
A lot of the straightforward, dialogue-based humor in F9 is pretty dire, but at least it’s delivered in a better spirit than Jason Statham & The Rock’s play-hateful banter. Its verbal comedy is typified by Ludacris’s computer nerd side-character making lazy pop culture references to fellow IP giants like Harry Potter, or by Michelle Rodriguez’s A-team hero quipping “Well, that was new” after Vin Diesel swings a sports car off a cliffside rope like an automotive Tarzan. Most of the fun to be had in these films relies on the visual absurdism of those impossible car stunts, which has gotten exponentially self-aware since the skyscraper jump in Furious 7 (my personal favorite in the series). They want to clearly signal that they realize it’s all in good fun by adding MCU-style one-liners to the script, but the series’ internal humor’s just not there yet. In that respect, F9‘s biggest blunder was in casting John Cena in a dead-serious villain role despite him being the funniest member of the cast (judging by his recent string of R-rated raunch comedies) while feeding its proper Jokes to dead-behind-the-eyes action stars like Vin Diesel. All longtime fans really want out of these movies is for Diesel to mumble the word “family” with outsized gravitas in-between Looney Tunes-level car stunts; he doesn’t need to land any bon mots.
To F9‘s credit, it does find a way to push its hack “Well, that just happened” MCU humor to new, absurd places. Roman (Tyrese Gibson) escalates that self-awareness of the improbability of his family/gang’s superheroism by pausing to remark “We should all be dead.” After dodging machine-gun fire, landmine explosions, and physics-defying car wrecks, he desperately tries to spread his self-aware epiphany to the rest of the crew. He points out how out of control the street racing gang’s “insane missions” have gotten, declaring their continued existence on Earth “damn near impossible”. I wish he had pushed that line of thinking a little further beyond “We are not normal” to realizing that he must be a fictional character in a Hollywood action franchise. At least that post-Last Action Hero meta narrative would’ve landed as a novelty in a series where the only other frontiers they haven’t yet explored are time travel & dinosaurs. Give them enough time, and I’m sure they’ll get there. After all, launching Ludacris & Tyrese into space is already lightyears away from the gang’s first-movie mission of stealing DVD players out of 18-wheelers.
If I had to narrow down Roman’s “We’re invincible” epiphany to a more specific observation, it’s that the Fast &Furious family appear to be invincible as long as they fall on a car instead of the ground. There are multiple stunts in this film in which an actor (or a CG blur standing in for an actor) flies through the air while their partner rushes towards them in a car, making sure they land on the hood instead of the concrete below. Apparently, that three-foot difference is enough to save the day in this loopy-logic action series (and even if it weren’t, fan-favorite characters frequently return from the dead anyway). That’s the kind of inane bullshit that makes this series fun, and the more you can focus on those cheap thrills instead of the halfhearted one-liners the happier you can drive away. I do think it helps to watch these films in the theater, where the rumble of car engines helps drown out the whimpers of dialogue, but Hobbs & Shaw is proof that watching these action blockbusters big & loud isn’t enough to cover up their worst attempts at straightforward humor. Thankfully, F9 is still a lot of goofball fun when it lets the cars do the talking.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss The Great Satan (2018), Everything is Terrible!’s retelling of the story of the fallen angel Lucifer, conveyed in a hyperactive mixtape of obscure VHS clips.
As a terminally online movie nerd who has been relying on borrowed public-library DVDs instead of theatrical distribution to keep up with new releases all pandemic, it’s a minor miracle when I can enter a movie unbiased & unspoiled. By the time I get to most buzzy releases, I’ve already heard every possible take on its faults & merits, with plenty of plot & stylistic details filled in as supporting evidence. I was fortunate, then, to watch Janicza Bravo’s Zola without any clear roadmap to where it was headed. As it was adapted from one of the most notorious Twitter threads of all time (with the co-writing help of its real-life subject & Tweeter, @zolamoon), I should likely be embarrassed that I had no idea where the film’s road-trip-to-Hell story would lead me, but instead I’m grateful. While the hype around @zolamoon’s tweets was sensational, the conversation surrounding their movie adaptation has been much more subdued, which means the film-obsessed corners of the internet where I lurk left me mostly blind to where it was going. All I really knew is that Zola lived to tweet about the journey, which did little to lighten the tension of the distinctly Floridian nightmare she survived.
This is not the first movie I’ve seen that was directly adapted from a series of tweets. 2013’s Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy. is a Thai coming-of-age drama adapted from 410 consecutive tweets on an anonymous teen girl’s Twitter account, credited to @marylonely. It’s a playfully experimental work that allows the jarring tonal shifts of reading a Twitter feed from bottom-to-top to dictate its moment-to-moment whims. Zola is the darksided mirrorworld version of that much lighter, kinder film – finding a chaotic terror & humor in life’s sequential randomness. By definition, Zola is a purely episodic journey, following each “And then this happened, and then this happened” anecdote of its online source material like the twisty tracks on a rollercoaster – with no hopes of the deranged carnies in charge letting you off. A part-time waitress & dancer in Detroit, Zola is seduced into a road trip to working a few Florida strip clubs with the promise of easy money & friendship. The second she becomes a backseat passenger in her obnoxious, shady “friend’s” SUV, she realizes she’s in the hands of unhinged strangers with no choice but to see the journey through, hoping they return her to Detroit in one piece. Each new strip club & hotel room she’s dragged through along the way springs horrific funhouses surprises at her, and she does her best to remain visibly calm, unphased by their sinister absurdism. It was the scariest movie experience I had in the entirety of October, when I was mostly watching movies about supernatural ghouls & goblins.
Speaking of funhouses, Janicza Bravo has fun adding a layer of fairy tale artifice to this darkly funny nightmare, setting its pre-strip show dress-up sequences in a fantastic mirror realm scored by angelic harp strings. We’re swept off our feet by Zola’s new, chaotic stripper friend right alongside her, intoxicated by the promise of wealth & adventure. There’s a music video sheen to the pop art setting & fast-fashion costuming that can put you under the Wicked Stephanie’s spell if you’re not careful. Once that spell is broken, you’re forever tied to her, cursed to stare at blank hotel room walls while listening to her turn tricks you didn’t consent to witnessing in an endless parade of gnarled Floridian dicks. Mica Levi’s usual tension-generator scoring is made even more upsettingly arrhythmic with the intrusion of gum-chewing & Twitter notifications, making sure the vibes remain just as poisonous as they are sickly sweet. The movie is only 85 minutes long, including its end credits, but by the time it’s over you feel as if you’ve been trapped in its hellish mirrorworld for a thousand eternities – in desperate need of a scalding-hot shower.
I’m not sure why Zola was so breezily discussed & forgotten among online movie nerds when it was released this summer. Maybe its social media source material or its episodic nature made it appear unsubstantial by default. Maybe its online discourse cycle had already exhausted itself before the movie was even announced, back when the original Twitter thread was a must-read. Whatever the reason, I’m grateful that I got to engage with the movie as a fresh, volatile cultural object months after its initial run – a rare treat these days.
Rose Plays Julie is a subtle, well-made movie built on subtle, well-played performances. A psychological thriller about a young veterinary student’s increasingly dark mission to uncover her place in the world as an unwanted adopted child (and, more to the point, about the generational trauma of sexual assault), it has all the potential in the world to swerve into a sensationalist rape revenge tale with a violently heightened sense of style. Instead, it keeps its mood low-key & pained, allowing the Greek tragedy of its doomed characters’ downward trajectory to quietly unfold at its own pace. It’s one of those thoughtful, tasteful indie chillers that I appreciate in terms of intent & craft but only help clarify my personal disinterest in subtlety & restraint. I wish I could appreciate this quiet, finely calibrated psych-thriller on its own terms, but instead its coming-of-age fury & vet school setting just made me wish I was watching the explosive coming-of-age cannibal horror Raw instead. That’s just the kind of audience I am, to my shame.
It’s okay that Rose Plays Julie works better as an exercise in craft than as a cathartic, stylistically expressive genre film. It’s explicitly about performance in a lot of respects, which shines a direct spotlight on the actors in three central roles of Daughter (Ann Skelly), Mother (Orla Brady), and Rapist (Aiden Gillen). Gillen puts in the same raspy creep performance he’s been delivering as a manner of routine since he was cast in Game of Thrones, but the drama is more centralized on the women he’s hurt anyway. The mother is an actress by trade, shown avoiding her traumatic past by getting lost in her roles on period dramas & vampire movies. The daughter—the surviving result of a rape—is an actress by choice, taking on her imagined persona of the name on her birth certificate (paired with an unconvincing wig) as an undetectable alias while pursuing revenge against the mother’s assailant, her “father”. The tension between them is a feel-bad triangle of gloom that each actor ably performs through several layers of self-protective artifice. The avenging violence that breaks that tension is just as dejectedly sad, providing little emotional catharsis for the generations of hurt at the film’s core – presumably on purpose.
To wish Rose Plays Julie was more expressive or cathartic would be wishing for a more divisive, if not outright irresponsible kind of filmmaking that it’s just not interested in indulging. This is a very serious film about a very serious subject, and I’m sure there’s a larger audience out there who’d prefer that sober approach to genre storytelling over what’s usually offered. Personally, I could only appreciate the craft of its individual performances rather than the larger purpose they served. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but if it were even 10% trashier or flashier in its delivery, I’d probably be much more enthusiastic about where it fits in the modern revenge thriller canon.
I am greatly excited by the return of the New Orleans Film Festival this month, since I’m finally feeling confident enough about the city’s vaccination rates to attend a few screenings in person (as opposed to last year, when I watched Undine at an outdoor screening and the rest of the fest on my couch). There’s a total immersion in low-budget, scrappy art films that I only experience at festivals, where I emerge forgetting what a well-funded, market-tested studio film even looks like. My standards of quality shift from questions of technical craft to genuine engagement with films’ intents & ideas. I imagine most of the ecstatic praise for the nostalgia-poisoned horror indie Censor was a circumstance of that immersion in the Film Festival Brainspace. Censor premiered to strong reviews at this year’s Sundance (the festival that’s most notorious for hyping up films that play much cooler once they reach the wider public), but it’s proven to be divisive & middling as its distribution has spread in the months since – culminating in a quiet streaming release on Hulu this Halloween season. Imagining myself in Film Fest Brainspace, it’s easy to see how that hype deflated so quietly. It’s a movie with strong ideas, weak execution, and a stunner of an ending that leaves you on a memorable high note despite the hour of tedium that precedes it. I assume that if I had seen Censor in a festival environment, I’d be much more gleeful about its merits myself. Watching it at home amidst a flood of other horror indie streamers this October, however, I’m struggling to drum up that enthusiasm.
If nothing else, it’s easy to see how Censor landed such a high-profile distribution deal while so many other high-concept horrors on its budget level never make it past festival programs. It’s got a killer hook. Niamh Algar stars as a 1980s film censor during the UK’s “video nasties” panic, spending most of her days watching (and rejecting for public consumption) over-the-top gore gags & simulated acts of misogynist violence. Never mind the anachronism of British film censors actually watching the horror movies they banned in order to Save the Children, as opposed to glancing at VHS covers and making a snap judgement based on the title & artwork. The movie is more of an intimate character study about this one specific film censor rather than a history lesson on her profession. She is haunted by scenes & performances in the films she screens not because of their brutality, necessarily, but because they evoke long-buried childhood memories of her sister’s mysterious disappearance (and likely murder). Questions of how “real” these connections between the violent art she watches and the violence of her life are remain unanswered. Instead, we lose sight of the boundaries between art & reality altogether alongside our doomed protagonist, until those two versions of the “truth” directly battle for supremacy at the film’s thrilling, psychedelic climax. The murder mystery portion of the plot directly recalls the art-imitating-life murders of the similarly styled Knife+Heart—a daunting comparison to overcome—but the video nasty setting & aesthetic help distinguish it enough for it to feel like its own thing.
My main roadblock to fully loving Censor is one that a lot of low-budget festival entries suffer; it just doesn’t have enough going on to justify being a full-length feature. Even with a delicious 80min runtime, this takes way too long to get where it’s going. There’s a version of this movie where its anti-heroine’s quiet brooding and hazy childhood flashbacks create a throathold tension on the audience, but in the version we got they just feel like treading water. The reality-meltdown finale is a stunner (as long as you can stay awake long enough to get there), but I enjoyed the destination more than the journey, which is never a good sign. The movie is okay over all but great in flashes, inviting you to assess it on its ideas alone instead of its execution of those ideas, which is the quintessential film festival experience. I did not attend this year’s Sundance Film Festival—either online or in person—so I did not get the perfect Censor experience. Personally, I cannot wait to “discover” and overpraise some misshapen, almost-great indie at NOFF once my own critical facilities are overpowered by Film Fest Brain. I wish I could live in that loopy brainspace all year-round.
The movie is just alright, but Rebecca Hall is great: a tale as old as time. I always hear that Hall is a powerhouse performer, but I’m used to seeing her play low-key, anonymous roles in genre movies like The Gift, Transcendence, and Godzilla vs Kong, where she tends to support instead of outshine the ooky-spooky monsters & ghouls at centerstage. That likely says more about me than it says about Hall, though, since her fan-favorite performance as the titular role in the 2016 biopic Christine is widely available and I’ve yet to make time for it. Luckily, The Night House is willing to meet me halfway by casting Rebecca Hall as the dramatic lead in a straight-forward horror film about a haunted house, wherein she’s the central focus of every single scene. The movie itself is just okay, but her performance is fantastic, so I at least appreciated that it dragged me kicking and screaming into the Rebecca Hall fan club.
Viewed purely as a haunted-house movie, The Night House is only so-so. It’s overloaded with exciting ideas, teasing tangents of Lovecraftian blueprints for a dark-magic home, silhouettes of ghosts formed by the negative space in architectural details, erotic foreplay with said negative-space ghosts, and a cursed netherworld that can only be accessed through lucid dreams. Unfortunately, it’s frustratingly restrained in its execution of its most out-there concepts, only indulging in each for mere seconds before dragging the audience back to the dramatic reality they disrupt. That dramatic core is yet another It’s Actually About Grief metaphor that has become so standard in modern horror, with Rebecca Hall being both physically & emotionally haunted by her recent suicide-victim husband. In a decade, academics will have something smart & concise to say about why so many of our contemporary horror films are so fixated on the subject of grief, just as we’ve since explained away the early-aughts’ obsession with onscreen torture as a way to process American war crimes during the War on Terror. In the meantime, there’s very little room for individual entries in the Grief Horror canon to have anything novel to say on the subject, so all The Night House can really do is create a spooky mood while repeating images & concepts you’ve already been exposed to many times before. It is spooky, but I question if that’s enough of a draw considering how familiar its themes are.
The Night House is much more impressive as a showcase for Rebecca Hall’s screen presence, encouraging to flex her acting muscles in the same way the Grief Horror genre has already spotlighted Toni Collette in Hereditary, Elizabeth Moss in The Invisible Man, and Essie Davis in The Babadook. Hall plays a wonderfully prickly, sardonic widow who refuses to wallow in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide, instead choosing to prod at who he was and why he decided to stop being. She’s haunted both by the gun violence that ended his life—often finding herself hearing, touching, and Googling guns whenever her mind drifts—and by a spiritual presence in her now empty home, seemingly rekindling their doomed romance from beyond the grave. Weirdly, the movie often excels most when it’s not indulging in supernatural phenomena at all, chronicling Hall’s investigation into her husband’s secretive life outside their marriage and her wonderfully icy responses to the polite but condescending rituals of communal consolation that accompany all funerals. She’s hurt, she’s hurtful, and she’s fiercely opposed to the idea of fading away quietly after her marriage’s violent end, despite that feeling like the only path offered in her empty, cursed home. The movie asks a lot of Rebecca Hall as its emotional anchor, and she holds it all down with ease. It’s just a shame the movie around her couldn’t quite match her virtuoso performance with something memorable enough to make it a must-see entry in its genre.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Hanna made Brandon, Boomer, and Britneewatch Lisa and the Devil (1973).
Hanna: I didn’t know anything about Mario Bava the first time I saw Lisa and the Devil (1974). It was two or three Halloweens ago, when streaming services pepper their suggestions with every horror movie in their arsenals, especially Argento & Bava films from the 70s with irresistible, colorful covers. The film has persistently clung to my mind since then because of its totally bizarre ending and its resplendent, House of Usher-esque mansion. I don’t know if it held up for me on a second viewing, and it has a gross depiction of sexual assault at ~1:14:00 that I had completely forgotten about, but I still overall enjoyed Bava’s spooky dreamscape.
At the outset of Lisa and the Devil, Lisa—a German tourist played by Elke Sommer—is climbing off a tour bus in Toledo, Spain. The very first stop of the tour brings her group to a mural of the Devil carrying the dead away, with a face that “expresses a quality which reflects the very soul of pleasure and evil.” Lisa seems struck by this mural, and inexplicably leaves her friend behind with the tour group to go wandering through the small Spanish village alone. She’s drawn into an antique shop and finds herself mesmerized by a sort of box-less music box/turntable with six rotating figures (if somebody could tell me what this thing is called, I would be much obliged – it’s extremely cool). She interrupts the shopkeeper’s conversation with the lone customer in the shop, who’s fussing over the particularities of a large wooden doll, to purchase the object. The customer turns to look at Lisa, who realizes that he bears a striking resemblance to the “very soul of pleasure and evil” plastered on the mural. From that point on, Lisa is lost; she dashes from the shop and wanders hopelessly through the deserted streets of Toledo, finding it impossible to return to the town square and repeatedly running into the menacing man from the mural (played by Telly Savalas) and the human manifestation of his life-size wooden doll. Eventually night falls, and she’s picked up by a tense couple and their driver in a lovely green car. Lisa is hopeful that this is the end of her nightmare, until the car breaks down in front of a sprawling Spanish villa of an elderly blind countess (Alida Valli) and her odd son Maximillian (Alessio Orano). The villa is staffed, of course, by Leandro, who continues to drag around his giant wooden doll for a mysterious purpose.
The rest of the film slowly unfolds into a visually striking festival of murder. The long shots of Lisa wandering throughout the remote village and the rich, green grounds of the villa are fantastic, and the interior of the villa oozes with a thick, decrepit opulence (I love the rotting cake room). I mostly found the performances a little lackluster, especially Sommer (who, despite being the leading lady, has about 10 lines of dialogue), but Telly Savalas is a pleasure to watch as a puckish devil butler who’s perpetually sucking on lollipops.
Britnee, I think I’m a Bava newbie compared to the rest of the Swampflix crew. I’ve heard some people say that this one is especially strange and dream-like, but it was the first Bava film I ever saw, so I didn’t have much of a reference for his body of work. How do you think Lisa and the Devil stacks up against his other films?
Britnee: I’ve actually only seen a couple of Bava films, but there was something different about this one. The other films I’m thinking of—Blood and Black Lace (my first Movie of the Month choice!) and Kill, Baby…Kill! in particular—weren’t as dreamlike for sure, but even more so, none had a character as comical as Leandro. Bava’s characters tend to be dark, mysterious, and serious – just not the type of characters that you really connect with. In no way is that a bad thing, because I’ve never watched a Bava movie for the cast. Bava movies are beautiful, bloody treasures about creepy sickos, and I expect nothing more. Leandro caught me off guard because I expected him to be terrifying since he’s basically the Devil. I thought he was going to terrorize Lisa from the moment she ran into him in the antique shop, but he felt like more of a guide instead – guiding Lisa and the audience to and around the castle while making clever comments and sucking on lollipops. He felt more like a witty uncle than Satan.
My absolute favorite thing about Lisa and the Devil are all of the creepy mannequins. The first one we see that continuously reappears is a mannequin of Carlos, the dead lover of the dead woman who Lisa resembles. But we eventually get introduced into a room filled with them! It seems that everyone who’s murdered by this bizarre castle family is transformed into a mannequin. This becomes apparent when Leandro takes Lisa’s measurements after she faints. I was hoping for some satanic ritual where Leandro turns the dead bodies into mannequins before our eyes, but it never goes down that road.
The ending of this film is so unexpected. Just when we think that Lisa is free and leaving Spain, she’s trapped on a plane with corpses and Leandro. This is where she turns into a mannequin and essentially dies. Brandon, what are your thoughts on the ending? Should Lisa have lived or died on the castle grounds instead?
Brandon: I don’t have any strong opinions about whether Lisa should have survived this film un-mannequined, but I do appreciate that she got to escape from the castle grounds after sunrise. At first, the shifting geography of the city and Lisa’s role as a silent observer had me thinking of this movie as a dream-logic story, but her return to the modern world outside the castle helped me re-contextualize everything as fairy tale logic, which is its own distinct thing. The way the castle feels untethered to the modernity, the way its decadent food is used as bait to lure in outsiders, and the way Bava constantly frames its inhabitants through mirror reflections all feel traditional to fairy-tale storytelling – something that didn’t dawn on me until the castle receded back into its own temporal limbo at, well, dawn. I loved seeing Lisa emerge from that fairy tale realm to return to her modern-tourist reality, and by then I was pretty much down for however Bava wanted to wrap it up. Maybe she couldn’t fully escape the castle because she ate the food and drank the wine: a classic fairy tale blunder.
As always with Bava, Lisa and the Devil is consistently beautiful, and parsing out the whats & whys of ~what’s really going on~ in its plot is miles beside the point. What I love most about this film is how much it resembles a standard haunted castle horror movie (maybe with more shapeshifting mannequins than usual) but the longer you grapple with its internal sense of logic the less familiar it feels. The car troubles that lead a foursome of naïve passersby to the film’s haunted castle are clichéd almost to the point of conscious parody, and yet the Technicolor surrealism they encounter inside is something you’ll be hard-pressed to find in any of the Hammer Horror or Corman-Poe movies it recalls. Boomer, what do you think Bava brings to the creepy-castle horror movie as a genre? Is his filmmaking or storytelling style particularly suited for this generically spooky setting in any way?
Boomer: One thing that I thought was notable here is that, when we think about Mario Bava, we mostly think about his earlier directorial work, starting with 1957’s I, Vampiri, then peaking in the early-to-mid 1960s. That’s the era with perennial classics like Black Sunday (1960) and Black Sabbath (1963) as well as movies that we’ve mentioned above: Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Kill, Baby, Kill (1966). After that, we get things like Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1970), which I did not care for, and 1972’s Baron Blood, which I got on VHS many years ago and managed to sit through precisely once. When we talk about Bava, we always talk about him as a horror or giallo director, and although that makes up the bulk of his filmography, we rarely talk about his sword-and-sandals swashbucklers (Hercules in the Haunted World, Erik the Conqueror), his non-giallo crime thrillers (like Danger: Diabolik), or his westerns (The Road to Fort Alamo, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack), and even his non-horror sci-fi The Day the Sky Exploded usually gets lumped in with his horror sci-fi like Planet of the Vampires and Caltiki – The Immortal Monster. But what’s really missing from this list are references to his comedy pictures, like spy spoof Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and sex romp Four Times That Night.
Strangely, I think it’s the last of these that has the most influence on Lisa and the Devil, as it allows for a little levity in the proceedings. I don’t think any actor I’ve seen in a Bava film has been as magnetic and fun as Telly Savalas is here, hamming it up and clearly having a good time. The scene in which he bums a smoke from one of the visitors and then loudly chastises the man for smoking indoors when the blind countess enters the room is an inspired gag, as are his seemingly improvised moments, like when he dances with one of the mannequins. Italian horror movies are littered with scenes in which a person gives exposition to a bound or unconscious figure (Profundo rosso comes to mind), but Savalas manages to turn even this into a lively and comparably electric scene. I’ve often said that comedy and mystery “live” in the same mental space; what is a punchline if not a resolution that makes you laugh? What is the answer to a riddle if not the solution to a mystery? That Savalas is an American amidst these Europeans (most of whom probably learned their lines phonetically or were dubbed, both of which were in fashion at the time) also contributes to a separation between himself and makes him appear much more lifelike and composed. All too frequently, casting is treated as something that’s purely matter-of-fact in films; Dune is about the dangers of trusting a white savior and deconstructing that narrative of white messiahs, but that also means it’s about a white twink savior, so of course the current film adaptation has the whitest and twinkiest of currently working actors. Here, the casting of Savalas contributes to the tone, which I found fascinating.
To circle back on Bava’s storytelling style, the gothic is definitely where his powers reign supreme, and I don’t think that anyone else could have helmed this movie and captured that energy and atmosphere as well as he does here. Comparing this film to the body of work of his two major contemporaries, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, both of them made their own dreamlike haunted house stories within a few years, with Suspiriafor the former and The Psychic for the latter, although the reasons for the house/school being/seeming haunted in each of those films is decidedly different, both from one another and from Lisa and the Devil. Lisa is also a much more successful counterposing of the modern and the gothic than the aforementioned Baron Blood. In that film, a modern (for 1972) American co-ed visits his ancestral home in Austria and resurrects a murderous aristocratic forefather, while Lisa is a modern (for 1974) tourist thrust into a decaying relic of a home inhabited by murderous aristocrats. That they both exist, were released a mere 2.5 years apart, and that Bava wrote both in addition to directing them, says something about his interest in contrasting those two things later in his life, and I do wish we could have seen more of that before he passed away in 1980. Interestingly, although Suspiria is largely considered Argento’s masterpiece and The Psychic was a film I heard discussed in certain circles with frequency, Lisa and the Devil is one I had never heard of before this viewing.
Shudder’s interface describes this as “Bava’s strangest film” (emphasis added), presumably because it boasts a more dreamlike atmosphere than his other horror fare, but I can’t say that I necessarily agree. Although the ending leaves much to the imagination and interpretation, this is a film that makes explicit early on that the narrative takes place in a timeless non-time on a carousel that loops. We first see the animated music box thing in the shop as soon as Lisa wanders away from her tour group, and it immediately captivates her, with the six figures depicted representing the characters that we will meet as well as the fact that, although they may be in motion and constantly moving away from one another, they are nonetheless in a closed loop that ends where it begins. We are also let in on the fact that the ghosts or spirits that reside in the villa are not necessarily bound there, as Lisa meets Carlos for the first time far from the Countess’s home; it’s here that he drops his watch, breaking it in such a way that the clock’s hands do not lie over its face, cluing us in that not only is this a loop, but one in which time has no meaning. Full size mannequins weren’t really a thing until the mid-1750s, when they were made of wicker. Wicker mannequins gave way to those made of wirework, which were supplanted with papier-mâché mannequins, which were themselves replaced with wax figures, which eventually gave way to the plastic mannequins—with which we are mostly familiar—in the 1920s. The figures here appear waxen to me, which immediately pegs them as being outmoded and out of time by half a century in the film’s contemporary 1970s setting.
Lagniappe
Hanna: Besides the gorgeous, lustrous cinematography, I will forever treasure Lisa and the Devil as the only film I know of with a haunted European villa and a haunted plane. I would 1000% watch Lisa descend further into madness in a surreal plane-centric sequel.
Britnee: I thought Leandro was strangely similar to the bald, lollipop sucking detective from the popular 70s detective show Kojak. Well, it turns out that they’re the same person. Telly Savalas is both Leandro and Kojak! Kojak premiered shortly after Lisa and the Devil, so this lollipop habit crossed over between the two as they were most likely being filmed at the same time.
Boomer: Telly Savalas is best remembered as TV’s Kojak or as one of many Blofelds (he’s the one in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, for the record), but for me, he will forever be remembered as the stepfather from the Twilight Zone classic “Living Doll.” He’s also in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour‘s “A Matter of Murder” with Darren McGavin, meaning it’s the only time outside of their respective series that Kojak and Kolchak worked together, so stick that in your back pocket to whip out as trivia for your relatives at Thanksgiving this year.
If this film’s ending was a chiller to you, I also recommend the short story “Showdown,” by Shirley Jackson. Although spooky season as defined by the Gregorian calendar may be officially over, if you believe, you can carry it with you in your heart all year, and this short story, which was previously mentioned in our Lagniappe episode about 2020’s Shirley, remains one of the most chilling ghost stories to ever stir my soul.
Brandon: We cannot let this conversation go by without acknowledging the bizarre existence of 1975’s The House of Exorcism. Since contemporary distributors weren’t sure how to market Bava’s loopy nightmare in America as-is, they re-edited Lisa and the Devil into a cash-in knockoff of Friedkin’s wildly popular The Exorcist, titled The House of Exorcism. In that cut, the haunted castle sequences of Lisa and the Devil are recontextualized as hallucinations Lisa suffers while writhing in a hospital bed, possessed by Satan (there are also some additional nude scenes shoehorned in to up the titillation factor for the drive-in crowd). It’s a bizarre viewing experience if you’ve already seen Lisa and the Devil, simulating the horror of watching a shitty movie you remember being great – like revisiting the original King Kong only to find half the scenes replaced by clips from Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
Bava was rightfully appalled by the production of House of Exorcism, and successfully had his name removed from the project. It’s embarrassing as a standalone film, but I will say there’s a welcome novelty in seeing the horror master’s usual laidback pace properly sped-up in the edited-to-shreds clips it uses from Lisa and the Devil. It’s maybe the closest I’ve ever gotten to understanding disrespectful youngins who “speedwatch” everything at 1.5x.
Upcoming Movies of the Month December: Brandon presents Lifeforce (1985) January: The Top Films of 2021
I’ve been seeing a lot of praise online for the supposed return to form for erotic thrillers that’s been happening on major streaming services. While the biggest movie franchises in the world—The Fast and the Furious, the MCU, Star Wars, etc.—have completely removed sex & eroticism from the movie theater, at-home streamers like Netflix have scored minor word-of-mouth hits for hornt-up trash like 365 Days and Deadly Illusions. I think praising this ripple-sized “wave” of straight-to-streaming erotic thrillers as some kind of return to the genre’s 1980s-90s heyday overlooks a plenty of much better, riskier examples of the recent past like Double Lover, Knife+Heart, and Stranger By the Lake. What’s being championed instead of those modern genre gems is the straight-to-VHS softcore version of that revival, which is fine. At the very least, Netflix’s recent, self-reported success in producing mainstream home-video erotica is inspiring their competitors to make more of the stuff to attract that bored & thirsty market while it’s viable. And now Amazon Prime has taken a swing at the erotic thriller throwback with its in-house release The Voyeurs. I’d argue that their movie studio wing has already done a great job of bringing erotic menace back to the multiplex in much more creative, daring titles like The Neon Demon, Suspiria and, most recently, Annette. Still, I had a lot of fun with their goofy, salacious entry into the home-video end of the genre, with all of its lustful coveting of what Netflix was doing in private.
The Voyeurs is basically Hitchcock’s Rear Window reimagined (maybe un-imagined?) for the straight-to-video erotic thriller genre, making it the second delightfully inane Rear Window homage of the year, following The Woman in the Window. It’s much more ludicrous & consistently fun than Joe Wright’s film, however, pushing its idiotic internal logic towards a spectacularly trashy third-act climax that would be a water-cooler discussion topic for months if it were a proper theatrical release instead of a disposable streamer. We start with a young couple (Euphoria‘s Sydney Sweeney & Detective Pikachu‘s Justice Smith) moving into their first apartment together in Montreal. The French-Canadian substitute for Parisian lust & romance is pronounced early & often, with Montreal being introduced through its lingerie boutiques and described as “Fuck City”. Mostly, though, it’s as cold and isolating as any major city in the North, which leads its doe-eyed Millennial protagonists to huddle up in their gorgeous apartment. Instead of retreating into the modern incuriosity with the physical world around them that plagues most Kids These Days, they find themselves fascinated with the constantly nude gym-body couple across the street whose living room & bedroom windows are clearly visible from their own loft. This initial curiosity quickly snowballs into full-blown erotic obsession, with many crossed lines, a surprising number of dead bodies, and an even more surprising number of onscreen orgasms.
It’s the third act twists that really elevate The Voyeurs above the routine tedium of straight-to-streaming thrillers that get released on a weekly basis. Its flat cinematography and the robotic mannerisms of its cast reinforce the terrifying reality that the house style of The CW has become one of the major cinematic influences of our time, but there is one major benefit to it suffering the many ills of modern streaming #content: its sprawling 2-hour runtime. The rising-action portion of this steamy thriller hits all the exact beats that you’d expect, from the young couple’s decision to buy baby-pervs’ first set of binoculars to their inevitable escalation of making physical contact with the neighbors they’ve been spying on as foreplay. Once all those lustful indulgences are out of the way, it’s time to teach them (and the lustful audience indulging through their POV) a hard-earned lesson through the most ludicrous mechanism possible. And then the film goes an extra beat to allow our horny-for-the-first-time anti-heroes a chance to take revenge. It’s a rare instance where the unrushed, over-plotted runtime that’s become standard for most modern mainstream films is actually used to its full advantage: giving the audience exactly what we want out of the genre, then pushing it into shameless, delirious excess no one really wanted or needed out of this simple tale of erotic voyeurism. It delivers on the sexual menace promised by its premise, then stumbles around making incredibly goofy decisions in the post-coital afterglow, something we’ve all been through before.
There are a few distinguishing details that make The Voyeurs memorably stylish in its own dopey way: its soundtrack’s dream pop cover of Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face,” its attempts to kink-up the intimacy of routine eye exams, its protagonist’s unlikely transformation into a rooftop superhero, etc. For the most part, though, it’s most enjoyable as a standout example of a larger industry trend: the shameful slinking-off of the mainstream erotic thriller from public movie theaters to private maturbatoriums. I doubt any of these word-of-mouth streamers will ever hit me the same way as seeing my beloved, filthy Double Lover with a packed, in-the-flesh film festival crowd, but I guess I have to appreciate these deliriously horny novelties wherever I can find them. I’m always pushing for movies to be simultaneously sexier & sillier, and The Voyeurs admirably tears itself in both directions.
Swampflix 