For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the sequel & prequel to the high-concept Canuxploitation sci-fi thriller Cube (1997): Cube² – Hypercube (2002) & Cube Zero (2004).
I’ve lost track of how we’re supposed to react to Bob Odenkirk as a screen presence. After all the obsessive rewatches of Mr. Show DVD sets in my college years I’m trained to receive Odenkirk as a sight gag, where his very presence is meant to read as a joke. Given the barely stifled laughter that echoed his titular line reading of “My little women!” in my theater screening of Gerwig’s Little Women, I assume I’m not the only one who reacts to him that way. Bob Odenkirk is synonymous with sketch comedy in my mind, making any scene he’s in inherently feel like a bit. What’s confusing about that association is that Odenkirk has been much busier and more widely popular in recent years in a medium I know very little about: Prestige Television. His roles on shows like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Fargo appear to be occasionally comedic in the way most TV dramas dabble in dark humor from time to time, but for the most part they’re played straight. Bob Odenkirk is just as much of a legitimate actor now as he was a visual punchline in the past, and it’s up to the audience’s personal familiarity with specific pockets of his work to determine how he’s going to register onscreen (the same way I can’t watch Toby Huss in a serious dramatic role without first thinking of Artie, The Strongest Man in the World for at least a half-second).
That muddled screen persona makes for an initially confusing experience in Odenkirk’s post-John Wick action vehicle Nobody. At first glance, it’s absolutely absurd that Odenkirk would be starring in any kind of action movie at all, much less one styled after the bone-crunching ultraviolence of John Wick. You’re not immediately invited to laugh at that casting choice, though, since Nobody plays its John Wick in the Suburbs premise entirely straight. Odenkirk plays a self-identified “nobody”: a suburban dad with severe home invasion anxieties and an exponentially distanced relationship with his nuclear family, who’re bored by his stability. The only early wink towards the absurdism of Odenkirk’s casting is in the brutality of its close-quarters violence. Once a bloodlust is awakened in the milquetoast suburban dad, he over-commits to his role as a macho protector, and it’s absolutely bizarre to see Odenkirk smashing windows and crushing throats as if he were a retired, middle-age Rambo. As that violence escalates and the suburban-America nobody’s list of enemies grows to include the entire Russian mafia, it’s clear that this is very much an intentional action-comedy; it’s just one that’s incredibly patient in paying off the set-up to the punchline. Odenkirk starts the film in his Prestige TV Drama mode but by the end he’s a full-on sketch comedy player.
I had a lot of fun with Nobody once it fully sketched out what it’s doing. Based on its marketing (and the involvement of producer David Leitch), I expected it to be a fish-out-of-water action comedy about suburban dad stumbling into a John Wick plot. By the end, I was more convinced it was a direct parody of every post-Taken Liam Neeson thriller about a dad on the verge. All the signs were there if I had known to look for them. My borrowed library DVD started with a Liam Neeson trailer; Odenkirk grimly refers to his secretive military past, hinting at a “very particular set of skills” that could be deployed to save his family; he breaks into thieves’ apartment to retrieve his daughter’s beloved kittycat bracelet instead of, you know, his entire daughter; etc. The opening montage is even a direct spoof of the morning-routine sequence from The Commuter (aka Taken on a Train, not to be confused with Non-Stop, aka Taken on a Plane). The only way the Neeson spoofing could’ve been more obvious is if Odenkirk were speaking in a gravelly Irish accent, and I still didn’t catch onto what it was doing until about halfway into the runtime. Nobodyis a Mr. Show level parody of the post-Taken dad thriller; it just doesn’t make that satirical target immediately apparent.
The tonal confusion of what eventually turns out to be an over-the-top action comedy here feels both purposeful and effective. Odenkirk’s mid-life macho fantasy of being an untapped protector of his household just waiting for a threat to quash is already funny enough when it’s played straight in the opening act. Watching that fantasy meet the harsh reality of a suburban dad bod being pummeled by Russian mobsters mid-film is even funnier. Then, the whole thing farcically escalates into live-action cartoon mayhem by the finale, boldly underlining the absurdism of its premise to the point where it’s unignorable. If I were more confident on where Odenkirk is in his acting career (basically, if I watched more cable TV dramas) I might’ve caught onto that parodic sense of humor a lot sooner, but it took me a minute to get my footing on the film’s tone. In retrospect, that makes it the perfect Bob Odenkirk vehicle despite the unlikeliness of its genre: a comedy where you’re not initially sure whether you’re supposed to treat the actor as a joke but it’s funny either way.
This is going to sound ironic coming from someone who publishes multiple paragraphs of movie opinions no one asked for on a daily basis, but I’ve been trying my best to avoid Online Film Discourse lately. I still frequently listen to podcasts, lurk in heavily curated Facebook & Twitter circles, and refresh my Activity feed on Letterboxd—mostly looking for new movies to watch—but I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to participate in conversations with strangers online about movies, or about anything at all. Sometime between the reactionary blowback to the Cutiestrailer and the immediate Hot Take apocalypse aftermath of Bo Burnham: Inside, I’ve just lost my taste for engaging with strangers’ opinions online. I’ll read and listen to film criticism, but I have no energy for contributing to the discussion . . . unless that discussion is contained among the half-dozen people who contribute to the Swampflix blog & podcast. That loss of appetite for a more generalized, public form of film discourse is likely Pandemic related. I’m just generally burnt out on the daily chore of basic existence, and having all my social interactions limited to digitally obscured strangers is not helping at all. If anything, spending too much time scrolling my Twitter feed makes me outright misanthropic; I always end up walking away with a few sparse movie recommendations and a thousand reasons to feel worse about the nature of humanity as a species. The tradeoff is not really worth it.
The recent Dutch black comedy The Columnist deeply understands that kind of internet-inspired misanthropy, just as much as it understands how weak I am for succumbing to it. It’s a satirical horror film for our cursed Online Discourse times. It treats the universal truth “Never read the comment section” with the same grave seriousness previous generations’ horror films gravely warned “Never sleep in the woods,” “Never have premarital sex”, and “Never swim on a shark-infested beach.” Katja Herbers stars as a clickbait columnist who reads one too many anonymous sexist tweets about her work and snaps, going on a violent rampage. It starts as a kind of writer’s block thriller, where she cannot focus on her work until her detractors are violently silenced (after she slays them in their homes, confronting them with sexist language from their tweets). By the end, though, she’s totally Jokerfied, losing track of her familial connections and professional duty to create #content in her pursuit to destroy every last misogynist troll who antagonizes her online — of which there is an infinite supply. The biggest red flag that she’s lost to the madness of Online Discourse is when she announces that she’s officially quitting Twitter, then spends more time obsessively checking the notifications on that message than she does writing or enjoying her life. It’s a very familiar kind of horror, one that evokes a humor of recognition and despair rather than anything politically satirical.
The Columnist is smart enough to satirize its antiheroine for her own ideological weaknesses, so as not to entirely rely on The Internet Is Evil fearmongering. She’s at least lightly ribbed for her amorphous neolib politics, as her strongest ideological stances are that blackface is bad (a still-sensitive subject in Holland, at least, thanks to Christmas celebrations involving the figure Black Peter) and that people with differing opinions should be nicer to each other online. Still, it mostly backs her ultraviolent revenge on her much more grotesque right-wing trolls, gleefully indulging in a Fuck Around and Find Out ethos. The Columnist is most fun as a pitch-black counterpoint to all those NPR & Chris Gethard human interest stories where targets of online bullying forgive and make amends with their vilest trolls. Here, internet vitriol is literalized into physical, cartoonish violence and everyone involved is mocked for getting sucked into the pointless ritual of Online Discourse in the first place. It’s just as cathartic as it is sharply observed, especially considering that women in particular take the most shit for daring to have opinions online (apparently even women with benign clickbait-friendly “opinions” of no real consequence).
As an illustration of why I’m losing my appetite for engaging in Online Film Discourse with unmoderated strangers, I’d like to point to the real-world clickbait article “Bizarre Dutch dark comedy film ‘The Columnist’ mocked for showing journalist on a killing spree against online critics“. Much like the reactionary blowback to films like Cuties, Joker, and The Hunt months before they were actually released, The Columnist apparently stirred up minor right-wing vitriol for “endorsing” the murder of lefty journalists’ political opponents. You can’t fault the anonymous right-wing commentariat (and their army of bots) for willfully misconstruing the point of a movie that satirizes the journalist herself as well as her trolls; after all, they were commenting on a movie they hadn’t seen. It’s still a useful affirmation that the kind of aggressively inane Online Discourse that accompanies every last news item (including the release of low-budget Dutch horror comedies, apparently) is enough to make a normal, calm person violently misanthropic — proving the satirical point of The Columnist months before the movie was released. Anyway, I should have known better than to read that comment section round-up in the first place, a mistake I hope I can avoid making again in the future.
Welcome to Episode #138 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss the most noteworthy movies from last year they‘ve seen in the six months since they made their respective Top Films of 2020 lists, with a particular focus on the mainstream horror oddity The Empty Man. Enjoy!
00:00 Welcome
01:50 Good on Paper (2021) 04:30 Mother’s Day (2016) 08:30 The Devil Wears Prada (2006) 09:20 Nobody (2021) 15:40 The Summer of Soul (2021) 22:20 Coyote Ugly (2000) 28:55 The Columnist (2021)
36:15 The Empty Man (2020) 1:04:20 Pinocchio(2020) 1:21:24 Ham on Rye (2020) 1:39:10 Babyteeth (2020)
Most documentaries about the lives & works of artists are majorly self-conflicted in their form & content. The artist being profiled can be the most provocative, combative bombthrower in the history of their medium, and their retrospective documentary will still be the safest Wikipedia-in-motion overview of their life imaginable. I don’t know that the recent doc Wojnarowicz ever matches the righteous fury of its own subject, but you can’t say it doesn’t try. Fully titled (please excuse the incoming slur) Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, the film clearly attempts to recreate the in-your-face political activism of its subject’s ACT UP-era queer resistance & art. It’s nowhere near as inventive, shocking, or confrontational as multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz was in his own time, but it’s at least bold & propulsive enough to convey what made his art so vitally incendiary.
It helps that almost all of the documentary’s imagery was created by Wojnarowicz himself, supplemented by audio interviews with the people who personally knew him. Paintings, prints, stencils, photographs, 3D instillations, audio journals, and a soundtrack from his post-punk band 3 Teens Kill 4 overwhelm the screen, often as David himself rants about the grotesque injustices of the world at large and of 1980s NYC in particular. There’s a vibrant, purposeful anger to his visual art and his recorded monologues that especially comes into sharp relief in discussions of the AIDS crisis and the Reagan administration’s genocidal indifference to that epidemic. There’s no shortage of worthwhile targets for Wojnarowicz’s fury, though, and he throws well-observed punches at the irresponsible vapidity of news media, the grotesque elitism of fine art collectors, and the economic disparity that led him to hustling as a runaway teen, among other social ills. When he was alive, most of Wojnarowicz’s contemporaries likely would’ve reductively described his unbridled anger as a mentally ill artist sabotaging his own success. Here, his work is properly contextualized as confrontational, queer activism in direct opposition to economic exploitation & respectability politics.
The purposeful, incendiary provocation of Wojnarowicz’s art reminded me a lot of Marlon Riggs, along with the more obvious No Wave contemporaries in his social circle (most notably Richard Kern). If Wojnarowicz had survived the AIDS epidemic to make this film himself as a self-portrait retrospective, I imagine it might’ve come out as invigorating as Tongues Untied, Riggs’s magnum opus. Director Chris McKim instead does his best to recreate that exact era of queer-activist video art with the clips, scraps, and completed works that Wojnarowicz left behind after dying at the hands of governmental indifference. The result is one of the few hagiographic documentaries on an artist’s life that approximate the shock & awe of their subjects’ actual work: Sick, Crumb, Marwencol, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, etc. At the very least, it leaves you infuriated that Wojnarowicz and his immediate community were purposefully abandoned & encouraged to die by their own government at the height of the AIDS epidemic; he likely would’ve been proud of that effect.
I’ve been a voracious audience for Doris Wishman sexploitation cheapies over the past few years. There’s a wholesome amateurism to the schlockteur’s decades of D.I.Y. smut that appeals to me as a fan of B-movies and kitsch erotica, especially in the context of her being one of the few women directors to “make it” in that industry. I will admit that I’ve hit a wall with my appreciation of Doris Wishman’s back catalog, though. It’s the exact same genre barrier that made parts of my Russ Meyer retrospective such a prolonged slog. I hate “roughies.” Somewhere between the cutesy nudist-colony novelties at the start of her career (titles like Nude on the Moon) and her late-career, absurdist whatsits (titles like Double Agent 73), Doris Wishman cranked out a lot of roughies. They’re violent rape-fantasy films in which a female protagonist is stripped, exploited, and assaulted by every man she encounters on her journeys, her torment played purely for the audience’s sexual titillation. A lot of Wishman’s auteurist quirks repeat throughout her roughies period—most notably her adorable obliviousness to what is and what is not erotic—but I’d much rather seek those pleasures out in a genre that’s less inherently grotesque. It’s slowed me way down on seeking out her work, since the bulk of the remaining ones I haven’t seen appear to fall in that category.
I’m at least glad that my general distaste for roughies delayed me from seeking out Bad Girls Go to Hell sooner, despite it being one of Wishman’s most widely recognized titles. My appreciation of the film is just as muted now as it would’ve been a few years ago when I was at the pinnacle of my Wishman binge, but the film’s presentation has changed in the meantime. Whereas I’ve previously had to seek out Wishman novelties like Dildo Heaven or A Night to Dismember as fuzzy VHS rips on YouTube or sub-legal porn streamers, Bad Girls Go To Hell is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel – all cleaned-up and presented as Important Art. It is a roughie in the strictest sense, following a sheltered housewife’s moral decline after she kills her rapist neighbor and flees from the law by bed-hopping across the country, mostly against her will. The film is included in Criterion’s “Close to Home” programming, which highlights films shot in their directors’ homes & apartments (alongside another pre-hardcore erotica classic, Pink Narcissus). I initially suspected it was added as a bizarro Pride Month selection, given that our housewife-in-crisis’s only consensual sexual encounter while on the run is shared with another woman. Regardless, seeing a Doris Wishman film all cleaned up and prestigious on Criterion feels like a major cultural Event. I just personally wish they had programmed something outside of her roughies period; almost all of her films were at least partially staged in her NYC and Miami apartments, so pretty much anything she’s directed could’ve fit the bill.
Despite my reluctance to dig any further, I’m sure that there’s a Doris Wishman roughie out there that will wholly win me over someday. If nothing else, the women-on-top, femdom variation of the roughie format in titles like She Moband Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!appeal directly to my sensibilities, and it’s likely Wishman has waded into that exact territory sometime in her career – if not only through having made so many films in that genre. There’s also plenty pure-Wishman goodness oozing out of Bad Girls Go to Hell as is. Her instantly recognizable apartment is starting to feel like a nostalgic setting after seeing it repeat in so many of her classic-era pictures. There’s a statement-piece glass ashtray always on display in her living room that’s used as a murder weapon in this particular appearance, and it feels like a surprise celebrity cameo. Wishman’s camerawork is also as wild as ever here, sometimes tilting around the room as if her sex scenes were set on a carnival ride and sometimes statically fixating on the most mundane details imaginable: strangers’ feet on the sidewalk, pigeons, beaded curtains, etc. I’ll even admit that Wishman is highly effective at times in highlighting the sleaze & grime of the roughie genre. Her flashlit crime scene lighting and insert shots of lace panties resting on the corner of a mattress are incredibly lurid for a smut director who largely doesn’t seem all that interested in sex.
Bad Girls Go to Hell is not the best Doris Wishman has to offer, but it’s maybe her most iconic – at least among Something Weird VHS collectors and other video store weirdos of that ilk. It’s cool to see any of her work presented in such crisp, respectful packaging from a taste-making institution like Criterion. Anything that gets me closer to owning Deadly Weapons restored in HD on Blu-Ray has to be counted as a victory, so I’ll gladly suffer a few more roughies to get there.
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 Brandon made Hanna, Boomer, and Britneewatch Starstruck (1982).
Brandon: I’ve been thinking a lot about movie musicals lately. Not only are the releases of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake threatening to dominate online film discourse all the way through next Oscars season, but we also recently discussed the grim, reality-grounded stage musical London Road as a Movie of the Month selection. In his intro to London Road, Boomer mentioned a few reasons why the movie musical is a medium he struggles to connect with as an audience—its awkward rhyme schemes, its Declared Feelings, its emotional artificiality, etc.—a few of which I bristle at myself. The real reason I struggle with most musical theatre, though, is that I often just don’t care for its music. The singing-for-the-back-row emotional projection of most traditional, stagey musicals strikes me as a kind of false, strained earnestness that takes me out of the promised fantasy of the artform. When I think of movie musicals I do love—Rocky Horror, Velvet Goldmine, Hedwig,The Lure,etc.—they’re often the ones that indulge in the punk, glam, synthpop, and new wave musical tones I already listen to in my idle time.
In that respect, the 1980s new wave extravaganza Starstruck is perfectly suited for my movie musical tastes. Not only does it operate like a rough prototype for 90s Australian gems like Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—all huge tastemaking discoveries for me as a young film nerd—but it also plays like a jukebox musical adaptation of Cyndi Lauper’s landmark debut She’s So Unusual, one of the greatest pop albums of all time. If you’ve ever found yourself watching a marathon of Cyndi Lauper music videos on YouTube (if you haven’t, who are you?) you’ll notice that there’s a vaguely defined storyline from that She’s So Unusual album cycle wherein Lauper is a bubbly, working class teen desperate to escape her restrictive household to find other artsy weirdos like her in the big city outside her reach. Starstruck was released at least a full year before that album but follows a remarkably similar storyline: a bubbly teen who’s tired of working the counter at her family’s local pub maneuvers her way into fronting a new wave punk band, then a Top 40s pop career (thanks largely to collaborating with her younger, manically ambitious cousin) where she excels as her So Unusual self. There’s some indulgences in record industry satire, let’s-save-the-pub community rallying, and television broadcast heists along the way, but largely the film is a fantasy-fulfillment for the same sheltered, artsy kids who saw their ideal selves blooming in Lauper’s avatar a year later. And it’s just as satisfying here as it is in those videos.
Speaking of music videos, I think the main reason Starstruck works so well for me as a movie musical is that its break-from-reality performances are presented in the visual language of early MTV broadcasts. Given how much of my idle time is still spent YouTubing videos from 80s icons like Lauper, Kate Bush, and Madonna, that MTV-specific version of fantasy-fulfillment cinema speaks to me in a way most musical theatre can’t. The new wave music & fashion of Starstruck is pitched exactly to my tastes, and the movie only strays from those modernized music video pleasures to (lovingly) mock the traditional movie musical as outdated kitsch (most notably in a Busby Berkeley synchronized swimming sequence featuring a pool packed with oiled-up muscle boys). It’s my ideal version of its genre, and I can’t believe it’s not more routinely cited as an all-time classic.
Boomer, was Starstruck able to sneak past your own genre biases, or did its new wave-ification of the artfrom still fall flat in the face of your general movie musical skepticism?
Boomer: I was initially resistant to giving in to Starstruck‘s allure in much the same way that the first time I saw God Help the Girl; despite my absolute and utter adoration for all things Belle & Sebastian (a close friend gave me a copy of The Life Pursuit for my recent birthday and it hasn’t left the turntable yet), I had a hard time surrendering to Stuart Murdoch’s twee vision until the first non-title musical number well and truly won me over. With regards to Starstruck, I had the same hesitancy, and was also immediately set a bit off-kilter by its odd opening that dispensed with the normal film structure–there’s no studio or distributor logo, we’re simply thrust straight into the opening credits. From there, we meet our two leads in a brief intro scene that’s mostly taken up by a phone call that obscures both of their faces. Before the film even hits the three minute mark, Phil Judd from The Swingers is staring straight into the camera and singing “Gimme Love,” and by the seven minute mark, Jackie Mullens (Jo Kennedy) is doing her own musical number, singing “Temper Temper.” And I … wasn’t really having a great time, if we’re being honest. As I’ve noted before, the two things that I dislike most about typical Western musicals are the artificially earnest “musical voice” that’s a hallmark of “classically” trained singers and the belabored nature of musical lyrics, as plot points and exposition are beaten into submission in order to match a rhyme scheme and rhythm. As to the former, I much prefer the raw earnestness of your average local garage band to the operatic diaphragming of the university, and although Kennedy’s untrained and—frankly—confrontational vocals certainly aligns with my preferences, the strong-armed rhyming lyrics are very much in the style of those of traditional musicals: So trigger happy you get vicious / Also getting malicious / And you throw the dishes. I know that those are real lyrics because The Swingers were a real band, but they’re painful.
But then … as soon as “Temper Temper” ends at about 8.5 minutes in, the “musical” part of this musical dries up for nearly 30 minutes, and we just get to enjoy the antics of Angus (Ross O’Donovan) and Jackie as they try to make Jackie famous. When Jackie first starts to tightrope walk in the family pub, the film was giving such strong The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking vibes that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself, because I realized that what I had initially interpreted as just another “teenager wants to be a star” narrative, with all of its well-worn waypoints that we know from previous films in the genre, was actually a fantasy for children (the nudity, swearing, and smoking notwithstanding). The elaborate set piece that follows, in which Jackie dangles precariously from a wire between two buildings, was a genuine thrill in which there’s no real danger, unless you put yourself into the accepting mindset of a child who thinks Jackie may actually plummet to her death. That this is prelude to “Body and Soul,” which was the best and most energizing musical number to that point, only makes it that much more fun. The song itself wasn’t necessarily better than the dead-in-the-water tracks that frontloaded the picture, but that it’s not framed as an on-stage performance lends itself to a feeling of genuine spontaneity, and the frenetic energy of the family and the ever-present barflies as they dance around and sing is infectious, and the backing band gives it an effervescent quality that was lacking in the first two numbers. It’s genuinely catchy!
And then we have our first (and only) song that’s a showpiece for Angus, and even though Angus is by far the most fascinating and magnetic character in this movie, it’s also … not very good. However, as musical producer/host Terry (John O’May) says to Jackie at one point after she botches a show, “There’s only boring and interesting, and you certainly weren’t boring;” and Angus is never boring. This is about the point where the movie really started to lose my interest: Angus’s number, “I Want To Live In a House,” fun as it was, ends at 55:05, and it’s less than two minutes before Jackie does her disastrous rendition of “My Belief in You,” which lasts over three minutes of screen time (56:45-59:48), and then it’s less than ninety seconds before Terry and Jackie perform “Tough,” which itself clocks in at five long minutes (60:07-65:07). Five minutes later, we’re in another musical number (“It’s Not Enough”), this time a sappy ballad, but it’s mercifully short. When looping back to take notes about those time codes, I think that “I Want to Live in a House” works fairly well in isolation and suffers primarily from its proximity to several consecutive stinkers, and although it’s not a good track, I was thoroughly charmed by the performances and dancing of Donovan and the backing band (mostly comprised of members of The Swingers minus Phil Judd, but also our love interest Robbie, as played by Ned Lander). It’s interesting, not boring, like the tracks that follow it. After this overstuffed middle section, we head into our final act, in which we spend a goodly amount of time with the Mullens family, as they have what may be their last Christmas together in their apartments above the pub and commiserate about the possibility of losing their business and home. After that, the last performances at the opera house are pretty fun, counterposed with the Mullens et al watching the performance and doing their little old people dances, and I was pleased in spite of myself.
So I would have to say that, yeah, the New Wave nature of the music did do some of the legwork of making the musical part of this musical more palatable. The lyrics of the songs were still very much in line with what annoys me about the traditional musical—It’s the monkey in me that makes me want to do it / It’s the monkey in me that makes me want to chew it is a lyric written by an alien trying to imitate human music after only having heard “Rock Lobster”—but the energy and unadulterated, unpolished performances really made up for it. The musical sequences would perhaps be better served from being more spaced out, rather than happening in multiple clumps, but there’s an argument to be made that putting all of the worst ones in the middle and lumping them together helps you get through them more efficiently.
Britnee, a few weeks back my best friend and I were sitting around and watching Cyndi Lauper videos (as one does), and she asked me if I thought a woman with Lauper’s lack of “traditional” talent would be able to make it in the current musical market. I’m of the mind that it’s possible, since it’s more difficult for most people to sing along with a classically trained vocalist as opposed to someone whose range is “whatever range the listener is in” (Lindsay Ellis once made this comparison between Christina Aguilera, who is inarguably a better vocalist, and Britney Spears, who is the better performer; Aguilera has something in the range of four octaves that she can dance between, while Spears has a broader appeal because it’s a lot easier to keep step with “Toxic” than, say, “Beautiful”). I have no interest in shaming Jo Kennedy, but she’s in the latter camp, with a sound that’s very similar to Lauper’s high, nasally own. Do you think that if Jackie were a real person, she would have had a real chance to make it big in 1982? Do you think she would have a chance now?
Britnee: I honestly never made the Cyndi Lauper connection with Jackie, but that definitely makes sense. I don’t think that Jackie would have made it big in the world of mainstream pop in 80s though. She’s too cool for any of that nonsense. She reminded me a lot of Kate Fagan (especially with Kate’s hit “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool”), but with a little more quirkiness. At most, she would have been more on the popular side of underground 80s pop/punk. I actually think she would find more mainstream success today. With social media being a huge component to the success of musicians, especially in the world of Pop, she would be a hit! If nothing else, her tightrope stunt would be all over TikTok and the Gram, reaching millions around the globe.
I do agree that Jackie’s strength lies more in her performance than her voice, but my god, this soundtrack is so damn good. I love pretty much every song, especially “I Want to Live In A House” and “Body and Soul”. And all of the outrageous performances that go along with the songs are chef’s-kiss spectacular. That’s something that musicals don’t always do as well as Starstruck. The wacky hijinks and action constantly happening around the musical numbers add to the entire feel of the movie. It’s so high energy and fun without falling into any boring slumps.
Other than the fabulous tunes, I think the other component of this movie that blows it out of the water is the eccentric pub crowd. The lady covered in leopard print, her Lifetime movie mom, Nana, the bird, and the rest of the gang could have had their own TV show that I would have watched without a doubt. Not to mention the gorgeous pub décor and tiling. While that part of the film was a huge win for me, I did have some difficulty following along with some part of the plot. Especially the drama in her family. I knew that Angus was Jackie’s cousin, but I was so confused by the dynamics between her mother, father, and uncle. I honestly thought that her uncle was her widowed/divorced mother’s boyfriend for a bit. It was just hard for me to keep track of that story while focusing on Jackie’s journey to stardom.
Hanna, what do you think about Jackie’s family drama happening in the background? Was it necessary or added anything extra to the movie?
Hanna: I also had a hard time understanding the family dynamics; I consistently mixed up brothers, cousins, uncles, and romantic partners up until the very end of the film. I definitely thought Pearl was having a fling with her brother for a minute. I have pretty terrible hearing, so I would blame 80% of my confusion on the thick, wondrous Aussie accents. I wasn’t that invested in the particular relationships as a result, but I think the haze of confusion actually complemented everything I liked about the film; it added another little another little layer of chaos over the dance numbers and bare-breasted publicity stunts. On top of that, I enjoyed each family member so much (Nanna is a sweetie, Pearl’s outfits are A+, and I’m a sucker for Uncle Reg’s cockatoo) that I was happy to watch them saunter around Sydney and Pearl’s beautiful pub without quite knowing what was going on.
Besides, the film with or without the drama is absolutely delightful. I was totally charmed by Jackie, Robbie, and the weird little pub community. There are so many delicious visuals that have stuck in my mind: the seafoam barmaid dress! The pool boys with their big inflatable sharks! The big red kangaroo outfit! Jo Kennedy’s performance alone makes Starstruck worth the watch; she carries her plucky new-wave energy with an effortless joy, and her rabid determination to stardom give the film a fantastic backbone. Basically, Starstruck is a whole lot of fun, and you should watch it; I love watching musicals when I’m in the mood for a visual feast with a bare minimum of conflict, but I never dreamed that the pop-punk version of musical escapism was out there waiting for me.
Lagniappe
Hanna: I am completely in love with the sweeping curved bar and the splashes of tile Pearl’s pub, which was filmed in the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney. It’s one of the most unique locations I’ve seen in a long time (Hilly Blue’s mansion in Trouble in Mindgets second place; I would love to go on a Swampflix MOTM location tour). It looks like the bar was renovated with wood paneling, and all of the beautiful colorful tile is gone. It’s still gorgeous, but I’m crushed that I’ll never be able to see the pub in its kitschy prime.
Britnee: Jackie’s cousin Angus had a look that reminded me a lot of AC/DC’s guitarist Angus Young. They both wore blazers with shorts, both were named Angus, and they both were Australian. I don’t think this means anything, but I thought it was interesting and worth mentioning!
Boomer: It’s worth noting that the lead singer of The Swingers, Phil Judd, was much more handsome than Ned Lander, who plays the love interest, Robbie (for what it’s worth, I think Lander looks much cuter now in his older age). I can only imagine two reasons why they didn’t use him in the film outside of his appearances at the beginning and end during the “Gimme Love” and “Starstruck” musical numbers, respectively: (a) at nearly 30, it was too creepy to have him act as love interest to the supposedly teenaged Jackie, or (b), he refused to stoop to doing the “litter box” choreography for the “I Want to Live in a House” segment.
Also, if you’re a sci-fi fan and saw the name “Melissa Jaffer” in the credits and recognized Mrs. Booth and weren’t sure from where, it’s because she’s Noranti! From Farscape!
Brandon: While Jackie’s fashion sense and persona both strongly resemble Cyndi Lauper’s, I think her vocal style lands much closer to Lene Lovich’s, especially in the song “Temper, Temper”. If Jackie were a real-life performer in the 1980s, I think she could have easily “made it” on the level of Lovich’s minor-league version of success: a few decent new wave albums on a mid-card record label like Stiff, followed by decades of obscurity in the shadow of more memorable performers of the same ilk like Kate Bush, Nina Hagen, and Siouxsie Sioux. As an eternal sucker for new wave kitsch who owns most of Lene Lovich’s output on vinyl, I can almost guarantee I’d have Jackie Mullins records on my shelf right now if they existed. I’m actually frustrated that I don’t own the Starstruck soundtrack, as it’s wonderful from start to end (contrary to some outrageous claims made elsewhere in this conversation).
Upcoming Movies of the Month August: Boomer presents Sneakers (1992) September: Britnee presents Hello Again (1987) October: Hanna presents Lisa and the Devil (1973)
I remember discussing Aniaraand High Life as sister films when they first went into wide release in 2019: two ice-cold space travel narratives about the doomed prospects of humanity surviving the next few decades of Climate Change decimation. And now we have met those sisters’ goofy little brother in Voyagers: a trashy YA space thriller on a similar subject but without their sense of purpose or coherence. It’s difficult to say whether Voyagers is “about” the same existential concerns as Aniara or High Life. If Voyagers is about anything at all, it might just be a grim warning that teenage hormones are dangerous for space travel. Mostly, it’s just a mockbuster echo of themes that have been tackled in much more thoughtful, substantial works before it (including Equalsand The Lord of the Flies, among the two already mentioned), ensuring that it will only be exciting to a teen audience young enough to not have seen this exact ground tread before. Thankfully, genre filmmaking doesn’t have to be entirely novel to be worthwhile; it just has to be entertaining.
Like in Aniara and High Life, Voyagers follows a doomed, decades-spanning mission to preserve the human race in the farthest reaches of outer space, leaving a decaying Earth behind. It skips over the more complexly philosophical and moralistic conflicts of its smarter sister films so it can quickly get to the good stuff: shirtless teen boys wrestling on a spaceship. Where Aniara and High Life will ask big-concept sci-fi questions about the ethics of forcibly bringing children into a world that is already ending before our eyes, Voyagers instead rapidly ages those children until they’re hormonal powder-kegs, then smashes them together like Barbie dolls in PG-13 friendly make-out sessions. It occasionally pretends to be about the chaotic selfishness of human nature or the dangerous appeal of populist right-wing politics, but it’s heart not really in it. This is not a cinema of ideals or ideas. This is a thirst-trap movie for teens where everyone involved is their age, horny, inexplicably heterosexual, and the boys among them love to wrestle. The only reason it’s even set in outer space is that sometimes a hatch will open so the boys’ shirts will fly right off into the vacuum, revealing their abs for the swooning audience at home.
Voyagers is a bad movie. It’s also a strangely compelling one. There are some truly chaotic editing choices in its early stretch when the starbound teens first discover the joys of living horny & unmedicated, their minds’ eye opened to universe in rapid-fire montage of Ed Woodian stock footage. Not since Lucy has a film so confidently dived headfirst into stock-footage psychedelia on this level of sublime inanity. It’s too bad that editing-room giddiness cools down once the horny teen violence heats up; if they had worked in tandem this could’ve been worthy of Midnight Movie programming for decades into the future. Instead, it’s the kind of so-bad-it’s-decently-entertaining novelty that you shamefully watch on the couch alone, shuttering the windows to hide your shame from the neighbors. I wouldn’t recommend the film so much as I would bashfully admit that I had a fun time watching it – my appreciation crumbling under any scrutiny or pushback against its many, many faults. If you want a Good Movie, watch High Life or Aniara. That’s not what Voyagers is for.
There’s a thin line between dread & tedium and, unfortunately, the cheaper your film is the likelier it is you’re on the wrong side of it. It used to be that horror movies set on spaceships post-Alien would struggle most with that conundrum, as they often failed to match the exquisite tension of their inspo. Now we’re officially in an era where The Witch inspires that same mediocrity in bulk, just in a woodland setting. It took a lot of decent-to-great movies to get here (Hagazussa, Relic, The Other Lamb, The Ritual, Apostle, The Head Hunter, It Comes at Night, etc.) but we’re finally at the point where we simply just don’t need any more low-budget ~atmospheric~ horrors set in the woods, at least not for a while. I can pinpoint the exact moment that line was crossed too. It’s in the opening credits of Sator, which repurposes the final shot of The Witch as an early moodsetter instead of a last-second cathartic release. It’s literally picking up where The Witch left off, highlighting its diminished returns before it ever has a chance to stand out on its own. We’re done with the woods for a while, folks. Time to pack up the tents.
To be honest, even without the shadow of The Witch lingering across woodland-horror cinema at large, you’d have to dial the clock back to even before The Blair Witch Project for Sator feel fresh or exciting in any significant way. Its most attention-grabbing details are in the circumstances of its production: a no-budget family affair written, shot, directed, produced, edited and scored by Jordan Graham. You can tell this is a deeply personal project for Graham, not only because of his obsessively auteurist control over the entire production but also because of his casting his own grandmother, June Peterson, in a central role. Like the grandmother figure in Trey Edward Shults’s similarly underfunded Krisha, Peterson appears to be suffering enough from dementia that she’s not fully aware she’s participating in a movie production at all. The film is structured around several trips to grandma’s house in the woods, wherein Peterson pontificates about a local demon figure named Sator who possesses the bodies of the spiritually weak. She discovered the existence of this demon through automatic-writing exercises, which provide most of the loopy, vaguely menacing atmosphere the film can muster through her mumbled monologues. The film that Graham builds around that automatic-writing core is some pretty basic Indie Horror 101 material. Grainy black & white tours of a candlelit cottage are crammed into a boxed-in aspect ratio, scored with cassette tapes of Peterson’s audio journals and occasionally interrupted by the mythical Sator – a cloaked humanoid figure in a deer skull mask. As much as I admire the scrappy, D.I.Y. feel of its production values, I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve taken that exact haunted-cottage tour a dozen too many times in the past couple decades, if not just in the past five years.
My overriding thought throughout Sator was “Do I want a snack or am I bored?” I ate some Ritz crackers, and the feeling did not go away. In the abstract, I’m in love with the idea of automatic-writing exercises leading directly to demonic possession; I spent too many years chasing down a bachelor’s degree in Poetry for that premise not to appeal to me. The actual text of those automatic-writing journals never feels specific enough in its mythology or iconography to land with any real impact, though. They mostly just recall Bray Wyatt’s pro wrestling sermons when his in-ring character was Insufferable True Detective Fan. They drone on with no clear sense of purpose, and the visual iconography that accompanies them never amounts to anything novel or substantial. It’s likely not fair to single out this particular example of post-Witch woodlands horror as the subgenre’s tipping point, but hey, this is the one that dares to repeat the final image of Robert Eggers’s A24 Horror linchpin in its opening minutes. Once that comparison is invited, it’s impossible not to look back to the steadily diminishing returns of the genre in the years since Black Phillip’s enticing offer of the taste of butter & a pretty dress and to long for the days when that kind of whispered oration felt goosebumps-fresh.
Swampflix 