brandon ledet

Halloween Report 2020: Best of the Swampflix Horror Tag

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as they can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: The X from Outer Space (1967)

“Between its adorable miniature space rockets, its goofball bird monster, and its willingness to pause any conflict for a jazzy soiree, this one’s overall tone is decidedly Cute. It only makes vague gestures towards the Horrors of the Atomic Age that usually concern the kaiju genre, while it mostly busies itself by having a swinging good time.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.

Oct 2: Lily C.A.T. (1987)

“Weirdly, I’m not sure if Alien superfans would be the first audience I would recommend this to, unless their favorite detail from the original film happens to be Ripley’s relationship with her cat. This cheap DTV animation never had a chance to stack up to the original in a direct comparison, nor does it really attempt to. This film’s built-in audience is more likely nerds who salivate at the idea of any horror-themed anime or, more to my own alignment, weirdo genre enthusiasts who salivate over ludicrous killer-cat creature features like Cat People ’82, Sleepwalkers, and Night of a Thousand Cats. Surely, there’s some significant overlap between those two camps who will find its shapeshifting-feline-tentacle-monster genre thrills exactly to their tastes. If nothing else, it’s a very specific niche that strikes a tone no other Alien knockoff ever could—animated or no.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on TubiTV.

Oct 3: The Platform (2020)

“This is an incredibly nasty slice of schlock with a deviously wicked sense of humor; it’s also a politically engaged provocation that’s obsessed with understanding & undermining the systemic power imbalances that keep us all stuck in place and at each other’s throats. It’s a perfect film to watch in these increasingly bizarre, dysfunctional helltimes where it seems like those very systems are crumbling before our eyes. It feels like there might be a chance that we’ll all soon break out of our own arbitrarily cruel rut and tear this prison down any day now – as long as we don’t eat each other alive before we achieve that solidarity.” Currently streaming on Netflix.

Oct 4: Vivarium (2020)

“A cartoon exaggeration of the long-simmering frustrations & resentments that accompany even the most successful of romantic partnerships. Gawks at the traditional, decades-long monogamous marriage as if it were a sideshow attraction at the county fair, amused but disgusted by the freakish unnatural behavior we’re all supposed to aspire to.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Oct 5: Viy (1967)

“The five-minute stretch that makes good on its long-teased witchcraft & devilry—boosted by an importation of Silent Era special effects into a 1960s filmmaking aesthetics—should leave an intense impression on your psyche that overpowers any minor qualms with its build-up. This is a quick, oddly lighthearted folk-horror curio with a fascinating historical context and an eagerness to wow the audience in its tension-relieving climax. That’s more than enough to melt my own horror-hungry heart, but your own mileage may vary.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on TubiTV.

Oct 6: The Head Hunter (2019)

“Of course, audiences would generally prefer to see the offscreen battles than the daily preparatory chores & bloody cleanup aftermath we get instead, and the monster slayings themselves do essentially amount to an [IMAGINE A BIGGER BUDGET HERE] insert. Personally, I found this setup to be an impressive device in low-budget filmmaking shrewdness. It knows it can’t convincingly stage battle scenes on its limited production scale, so it makes up for it by leaning into what it can do well: grotesque creature designs & a nihilistic mood.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library membership) on Hoopla.

Oct 7: Blood Quantum (2020)

“The real selling point is the way it finds yet another new application for the zombie apocalypse as a literary metaphor, which is quite a feat considering how many times that well has been returned to over the decades. Whether or not a new metaphor alone is enough to draw you back into the genre is up to you, as the film entirely plays it straight as a genre entry elsewhere. You have to be onboard for some of the same-old same-old to appreciate those new textures.” Currently streaming on Shudder.

Oct 8: Sea Fever (2020)

“I was genuinely chilled, especially once it hit a heated debate about the personal sacrifice of quarantining yourself for the greater, communal good. It was nice to see a scientist positioned as the hero in that debate for once, something I took time to note even while squirming in discomforting resonance at the thought of the film’s invisible, lethal enemy within.” Currently streaming on Hulu and for free (with a library membership on Hoopla.

Oct 9: Extra Ordinary (2020)

“Traffics in grotesque, horrific scenarios involving demonic possessions, domestic abuse, and paranormal sex fluids, but the characters who navigate them are so quietly sweet that you hardly notice how harsh or over-the-top the whole thing feels from afar.” Currently streaming for free (with a library membership) on Kanopy & Hoopla.

Oct 10: The Housemaid (1960)

“I absolutely loved this movie. It kept me on the edge of my seat for its entirety, and I was surprised to see how far it pushed the envelope. I was in complete shock by how dark certain parts of the film were, and that’s a film quality that I will always have mad respect for.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 11: Zombi Child (2020)

“A from-the-ground-up renovation of the zombie film. Directly reckons with the racist, colonialist history of onscreen zombie lore, and pushes through that decades-old barrier to draw from the untapped potential of its roots in legitimate Vodou religious practices.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Oct 12: The Lodge (2020)

“It’s unfortunately predictable, but it wears its horror influence on its sleeve, and there are no bad performances, with McHugh and Keough providing a strong backbone when the strength of the narrative atrophies a little.” Currently streaming on Hulu.

Oct 13: The Invisible Man (2020)

“It’s like a reinterpretation of Batman where billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne using his extraordinarily expensive gadgetry to beat up jobless street criminals is framed as a horrifying act – which is to say it’s a realistic, politically engaged interpretation.” Currently streaming on HBO Max.

Oct 14: Housebound (2015)

“Funny how this film’s humor now feels so familiar to a Taika Waititi brand of low-key absurdism but felt like a total anomaly five years ago.” Currently streaming for free (with a library membership) on Hoopla (or with ads on TubiTV).

Oct 15: I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993)

“As the title suggests by calling back to 1950s B-pictures like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, there’s a playful sense of humor to this misandrist bloodbath. For instance, there’s a sickly-sweet dating montage our protagonist shares with a fellow serial killer while they cutely bond over cannibalism & genital mutilation. There’s also a seething, long-simmering sense of anger behind that playful façade, however, which mostly spills out in a final monologue where the teenage serial killer explains her motives to her last would-be victim. It’s the same anger that fueled most of the zines & records of the riot grrrl movement, a communal feminist frustration that rarely made it to the screen in any genuine form.” Currently streaming (with ads) on TubiTV.

Oct 16: Prom Night (1980)

“Between the gruesome kills and the dance floor glam of the disco prom, this eventually emerges from its formulaic slasher chrysalis to become its own beautiful specimen of cheap-o grime. Its earliest stretch is guaranteed to test the patience of audiences generally bored with by-the-numbers slasher ritual, but I find that sturdy plot template can be exceptionally useful in providing structure for over-the-top aesthetic & tonal choices like, say, a Disco Madness theme.” Currently streaming on Shudder or for free (with a library membership) on Hoopla & Kanopy.

Oct 17: Bloody Birthday (1981)

“If you cut the killer children angle out of the film entirely, this picture would be unmistakable as a cheap-o Halloween knockoff. Swapping out the looming presence of Michael Myers with a small cult of toe-headed rascals is a pretty substantial deviation from the Halloween slasher template, however, offering the Village of the Damned formula an interesting new subgenre avenue to explore. It’s an unholy marriage of two horror sensibilities that likely shouldn’t mix, and that explosive combination makes for a wickedly fun time.” Currently streaming on Shudder or free (with ads) on TubiTV.

Oct 18: The Pool (2020)

“Fun, upsetting trash that’s eager to push its limited scenario to its furthest extremes, alternating between slapstick gags & vicious cruelty without much notice. Weirdly, there’s also a thematic undertone that suggests it might be Pro-Life propaganda.” Currently streaming on Shudder.

Oct 19: The Tingler (1959)

“William Castle’s playfulness extends beyond his imagination for attention-grabbing gimmickry to push schlocky premises into the realm of vividly graphic, surreal art. I have not been giving him the respect he’s owed for that willingness to experiment with the boundaries of cinema myself, and The Tingler’s a perfect example of these experiments’ dual extremes as silly novelty & high art.” Currently streaming for free (with a library membership) on Hoopla (or free with ads on TubiTV).

Oct 20: Host (2020)

“It’s unlikely that we’ll see another feature film this year that so directly, accurately captures what life is like right now, and I’m honestly not shocked that my beloved Online Horror subgenre was the engine that got us there. It’s perfectly suited for that kind of of-the-moment documentation, with plenty of other entertaining payoffs besides.” Currently streaming on Shudder.

Oct 21: Wounds (2019)

“An unpredictable creep-out overflowing with genuinely disturbing nightmare imagery and a lived-experience familiarity with what it means to be a charming drunk who works the graveyard shift at the neighborhood bar. Its tale of emotional & spiritual rot for a hunky, barely-functioning alcoholic on the New Orleans bar scene is so true to life that I have an exact bartender in mind who the story could be based on (although he’s a dead ringer for Lee Pace, not Armie Hammer). ” Currently streaming on Hulu.

Oct 22: Angst (1983)

“An impressively upsetting mood, offering no reprieve from the suffocating psyche of its narrator – a nastily hollow man who kills because he wants to kill. There’s something about that total lack of motivation that efficiently chills my blood, maybe because it’s more reflective of real-life cruelty & violence than the class war callousness that usually commands the home invasion genre (usually with a much duller aesthetic palate as well).” Currently streaming on Shudder, Amazon Prime, and free (with a library membership) on Kanopy.

Oct 23: Luz (2019)

“As the story’s various competing fractions combine into one sharp-edged mosaic, the film achieves a deranged, sweaty, deliriously horny nightmare that all demonic possession media strives for, but few titles ever achieve.” Currently streaming on Shudder and free (with ads) on Crackle.

Oct 24: Color Out of Space (2020)

“The prologue before the meteor crash is a little creaky & awkward, recalling the tone of a VHS-era fantasy movie that never quite earned the forgiving lens of cult classic status. Once the horror of the Evil Color fully heats up, however, this movie is genuinely just as disturbing as anything Stanley accomplished in Hardware – if not more so.” Currently streaming on Shudder and free (with a library membership) on Hoopla.

Oct 25: Violence Voyager (2019)

“Feels as if it were made entirely by one loner-creep in some far-off basement, as if he were racing to publish his work before being raided by the authorities for crimes against society & good taste. It’s the rare work of modern outsider filmmaking that feels genuinely dangerous, with all the excitement & unease that descriptor implies.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Oct 26: The Faculty (1998)

“Like Terry Quinn’s iconic performance as the archetypal Stepfather or Corbin Bersen’s skin-crawling performance as the archetypal Dentist, Robert Patrick transforms the broad concept of the high school sports Coach into a classic movie monster abomination on the level of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, or The Wolfman. It would have robbed the film of some of its other post-Scream late-90s charms and transformed the endeavor into something much more thoroughly horrifying, but I think they could have easily reworked the entire premise to be about that one monstrous villain alone – under the title The Coach. His performance is that scary, and the real-life terror of sports coaches runs psychologically deep for many horror nerds.” Currently streaming free (with ads) on Vudu.

Oct 27: Wrinkles the Clown (2019)

“If you don’t mind being openly lied to/manipulated by a ‘documentary’ (think Exit Through the Gift Shop), it’s really fun. Lots of eerie commentary about what urban legends look & feel like among modern children online (and incidentally about psychological child abuse). It’s everything I wanted out of that so-so Slenderman doc on HBO a few years back.” Currently streaming on Hulu.

Oct 28: Doctor Sleep (2019)

“This film never feels its length, and the muted public reaction and mediocre box office returns are a personal disappointment; this film was never going to surpass The Shining, but it’s not far behind, and Flanagan was right to mix the original film’s solemn meditative qualities with occasional frenetic setpieces. In a lifetime of watching movies, I’ve never been so invested or felt so much tension in my spine when watching a scene of a man eight years sober struggle to not take a drink, even in Kubrick’s opus; it’s powerful movie-making at its best, and I can’t recommend it more highly.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 29: Queen of the Damned (2002)

“Still not convinced that the world ‘needed’ a nu-metal sequel to Interview with the Vampire, nor am I convinced that this is in any way a Good movie. By the time Aaliyah massacres an entire goth bar of vamp baddies with surreally cheap CGI hellfire I kinda warmed up to it as a novelty, though. Nothing wrong with enjoying a korny movie from time to time, and this might be the korniest.” Currently streaming free (with a library membership) on Hoopla.

Oct 30: Messiah of Evil (1973)

“You can approximate a nearly exact equation of what genre pieces were assembled to create its effect; it plays like a post-Romero attempt at adapting ‘Shadows over Innsmouth’ as an American giallo. However, you can’t quite put your finger on how these familiar pieces add up to such an eerie, disorienting experience. T hat’s just pure black movie magic, the goal all formulaic horrors should strive for but few ever achieve.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Oct 31: Phantasm (1979)

“This ‘Let’s put on a show!’ communal enthusiasm & D.I.Y. approximation of nightmare-logic surrealism is the exact kind of thing I’m always looking for in low-budget genre films. Its trajectory of starting with familiar regional slather locations like suburban cul-de-sacs, dive bars, and graveyards before launching into a fully immersive nightmare realm of its own design is a perfect encapsulation of how it somehow turned low-budget scraps into cult classic gold in the real world as well.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

-The Swampflix Crew

Bogart on the Verge

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I pre-ordered the new Seth Bogart album from the Wacky Wacko store several months ago and had completely forgot about it by the time it arrived on my doorstep this week. I was surprised, then, to (re)disover that the album’s title overlapped thematically with our current Movie of the Month selection, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It was also officially released on director Pedro Almodóvar’s birthday, something neither Bogart nor the Swampflix crew consciously intended to celebrate. That’s some beautiful happenstance.

Men on the Verge of Nothing is Bogart’s second album as a solo artist, following his self-titled debut in 2016. Ironically, his debut was much more closely aligned with the candy-coated pop art aesthetics of Almodóvar’s classic screwball comedy. This new record is more downbeat & despondent, practically reaching for the sleeping pills-laced gazpacho just to put an end to it all. It turns out the existential turn of phrase in the title is totally appropriate to how his music’s mood has soured (an understandable reaction to the ways the world has degenerated in the four years since the previous record). Still, you can feel a continued kinship with Almodóvar’s love for women, queerness, and artifice in all of Bogart’s work, whether or not it’s specific to the tone of Women on the Verge in particular.

Check out the video for the album’s single “Boys Who Don’t Wanna Be Boys” below (featuring appearances from other loveable L.A. weirdos like Tammie Brown, Peggy Noland, and Kate Berlant). If nothing else, it shares a strong cut-and-paste magazine collage aesthetic that appears throughout Almodóvar’s work, Women on the Verge included.

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and our podcast discussion of Pedro Almodóvar’s greatest hits.

-Brandon Ledet

Robin Williams’s Undervalued Restraint in The Birdcage (1996)

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Usually, when we praise comedians for their acting, it’s when they Get Serious in a dramatic role. When Melissa McCarthy goes dark for a Can You Ever Forgive Me? or Bill Murray dulls down his irreverence for a Lost in Translation, it almost feels like a cynical Oscars play – because those are the roles that get prestige-circle accolades. Robin Williams’s career is an excellent sample of this pattern, since the hyperactive goofballery of his comedy and the reserved vulnerability of his dramatic performances are at such drastically opposed extremes. Williams’s dramatic turns in grounded, sober films like Dead Poets Society & Good Will Hunting are paradoxically showy in their restraint, considering how starkly different they are from the frantic, coke-rattled mania of his comedic sidekick roles and his on-stage stand-up routines. His awards attention for those more somber, restrained performances practically register as a child getting a lollipop for good behavior.

If we’re going out of our way to highlight Williams’s finest roles as the ones where he’s most restrained, there is at least one frantic screwball comedy that belongs in the conversation: 1996’s The Birdcage. A collaboration between comedy legends Nichols & May (as director & screenwriter, respectively), an early credit for overachieving cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and a remake of a popular French farce, The Birdcage has enough built-in prestige to appear Respectable in a way that other Robin Williams comedies like Mrs. Doubtfire & Death to Smoochy do not. More to the point, it’s a performance that explicitly asks Williams to tone it down and keep his flamboyance under wraps for the sake of the plot – a self-inflicted restraint that you can practically see is eating him alive as the rest of the world around him gets exponentially zanier. The Birdcage might just be the one movie where Robin Williams is the best-behaved adult in the room, and much of its humor derives from the fact that he so badly wants not to be.

The Birdcage is a traditional screwball comedy about a tense, disastrous dinner party in which a gay couple (Robin Williams & Nathan Lane) hide their true personalities from the straight Conservative parents (Gene Hackman & Dianne Wiest) of their child’s fiancée (Calista Flockhart). Ironically, Williams is cast as The Straight Man in this comedic set-up, a proud but accommodating nightclub owner who’s willing to tone down his eccentricities to appease his monstrous asshole of a son. His main job is to sweat & fret as the deception unravels from every direction. Meanwhile, other comedic performers are set loose to go as over-the-top as they please: Lane as a drag queen doing Barbara Bush schtick; Hackman as a cartoon exaggeration of Republican Party cruelty (one that’s only become closer to the truth in the past couple decades); Hank Azaria as a hot-to-trot houseboy; etc. It’s a rare instance where Williams sets aside his usual “Look at me! Look at me!” manic comedy to merely react to the buffoonery that surrounds him, and that silent frustration elevates every other performance handily.

There is one isolated moment in The Birdcage where Robin Williams is set loose to do his usual hyperactive child routine. In a scene where he’s choreographing a stage number for his drag club, he excitedly shouts the directions “You do Fosse, Fosse, Fosse! You do Martha Graham, Martha Graham, Martha Graham! […] Madonna, Madonna, Madonna!” while acting out each impersonation in pantomime. It’s a brief moment where his manic stand-up persona (later repurposed for the eccentric sidekicks he voiced in kids’ movies like Aladdin & Happy Feet) is allowed to invade the screen. For the rest of the runtime, he’s asked to keep that flamboyance in check, and the act of bottling it up is visibly crushing him in a consistently hilarious way. If Robin Williams’s acting chops are mostly going to be remembered & lauded in roles where he exercises a toned-down restraint that contrasts his over-the-top comedies, I think it’s worth singling out The Birdcage as a performance where we can see that self-discipline being practiced in real time. If nothing else, it’s a lot more fun to watch than snoozers like Good Will Hunting or What Dreams May Come.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the haunted house creeper A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and where it fits in with the modern wave of internationally exported Korean genre films.

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Mark “Boomer” Redmond & Brandon Ledet

The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

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It’s very difficult for a horror movie to shock a modern, jaded audience, but The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen eventually did drop my jaw in astonishment. It wasn’t any of the film’s over-the-top gore gags or rug-pull cameos from the original cast that shocked me, but rather the name under the Directed By credit in the concluding scroll: McG. After suffering the stylistically flat, aggressively unfunny 140-minute eternity preceding that credit I was genuinely shocked to be informed it shared a director with its predecessor. If The Babysitter was helmed by the deliriously fun, bubblegum McG who directed the Charlie’s Angels movies, then Killer Queen was clearly the work of the flavorless-gruel McG who directed Terminator: Salvation. It was an appalling step backwards for a filmmaker whose sugary music video aesthetic had finally found its niche, only for it to be immediately abandoned.

Is there any point in recapping the plot, bloodshed, or aesthetic choices of this disposable novelty? Doubtful. The same overlit Burger King commercial visuals, empty nostalgia signifiers, and hack writers’ room humor that plagues all straight-to-Netflix trash is carried over here in the exact ways you’d expect, which is a shame since the first Babysitter film felt freshly exciting & playful in its own distinguishing details. The only standout aspect of Killer Queen is that it oddly feels nostalgic about its own predecessor, a fun-but-forgettable sugar rush with the cultural longevity of cotton candy in a rainstorm. Instead of pushing The Babysitter’s Satanic teen cult absurdities into new, undiscovered territory, Killer Queen merely retraces its steps to provide additional background info & throwaway gags for every returning character, no matter how inconsequential. It’s only been three years since the first Babysitter film—a frivolous diversion meant to be enjoyed & immediately forgotten—yet Killer Queen treats it with the glowing “Remember this?!” reverence of an I Love the 80s VH1 special.

I initially thought Killer Queen’s diminished returns were a result of the charisma vacuum left by Samara Weaving—you know, the titular babysitter—but even when she returns to the screen in a contractual act of charity here the result just feels like a waste of her valuable time. It’s also tempting to blame the film’s shortcomings on its four(!) credited screenwriters. The lack of imagination on how to expand or push the teen-cult premise forward in any way is damaging enough, but the joke writing is somehow even less inspired. The most consistent line of humor involves a middle-aged stoner who loves his hotrod more than his teenage daughter; but we all Get It because it’s a really cool car! That’s not a joke that becomes any funnier the second dozenth it’s repeated, but that writers’ room vapidity should never have been a factor in the first place. McG’s breakfast cereal commercial aesthetic should be beating you over the head with so much giddy, hyperactive inanity that there’s no time to notice minor concerns like plot, dialogue, or character development. Instead, you can practically hear him snoring in his La-Z-Boy director’s chair just outside of the frame.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast: Zombi Child (2020) vs. The Zombie Diaspora

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Welcome to Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss Bertrand Bonello’s new film Zombi Child (2020) and the ever-broadening zombie genre’s diasporic exodus away from its Haitian Vodou roots. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Britnee Lombas, James Cohn, and Brandon Ledet

24 Hour Party People (2003)

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Usually, historical biopics about artists & musicians are a waste of time for anyone not already in love with their work, as they’re often kids-gloves hagiographies only meant to promote their subjects’ cultural significance without any genuine interrogation or nuance. 24 Hour Party People is a major exception to that rule. A meta-historical comedy tracking the unlikely transformation of the Manchester music scene from punk to new wave to raves, 24 Hour Party People is just as impressive for its multimedia playfulness as it is for its willingness to portray its cultural icons as total buffoons who had no idea what they were doing. Its protagonist, an obnoxiously pretentious record producer played by Steve Coogan, is booed and called a “cunt” in practically every room he enters, despite being majorly responsible for fostering the U.K. punk scene’s post-punk longevity. Seemingly untouchable, tragic icons like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis are equally razzed for being music-scene dorks who’re absurdly full of themselves, despite the saintly aura cultivated over the decades since their professional flameouts or deaths. It’s easy for biopics to lose track of the recognizable humanity of long-canonized artists when attempting to capture what made them special. 24 Hour Party People pulls off an amazing trick of portraying its music-scene legends as highly fallible buffoons while also maintaining the enigmatic Cool of their art. You don’t have to already be in love with New Order, The Durutti Column, or Happy Mondays to love this movie. It’s about something much more universally relatable than those bands’ cultish fandoms suggest: how all human beings are self-centered fuckups, especially artists.

I did wonder for the first third of this film whether it was appealing to me solely because I was such a sucker for the soundtrack. I can only hear so many Siouxsie, Buzzcocks, and Joy Division needle drops before my punk-youth nostalgia outweighs my critical skepticism. That question was answered decisively by the time the punk scene melted away into new wave and then was usurped entirely by rave culture, something I personally know nothing about. While the first half of 24 Hour Party People tracks its asshole protagonist’s involvement in the recording & promotion of Joy Division—a band I very much love—its back half does the same for an ecstasy-flavored jam band called Happy Mondays — a band I frankly had never heard of despite their apparent popularity. That shift in subject did not throw off my interest at all, though, since the film was less about recounting the Wikipedia highlights of its music-scene legends than it was about the unfocused, self-destructive hubris of Coogan’s would-be record label tycoon (Tony Wilson, figurehead of Factory Records). 24 Hour Party People mixes in enough real-life archival footage, winking cameos from People Who Were There, and glowing memoirs of poorly-attended Sex Pistols shows that inspired dozens & dozens of legendary disciples to appear to be the exact kind of for-fans-only historical biopic that bores the shit out of anyone not already on the hook. With time, it proves itself to be a much sharper, more incisive peek into the kinds of high-ambition, low-empathy buffoons who drive those legendary flashes of music-scene youth culture. And it turns out that getting to know the bullies, lushes, and narcissists behind the scenes doesn’t make the music sound any less cool; it just makes the story behind it a lot more believable and relatable.

No amount of praise for this film’s radical honesty or messy multimedia formalism could fully capture what actually makes the whole thing work: it’s damn funny. Even though nearly every single character is a self-centered asshole, they also come across as charming goofs. The biggest moral conundrum at the center of the story—as defined by Coogan’s suffocatingly narcissistic narrator—is how to make a name for yourself without “selling out”. Every character wants to make it big without losing their hipster cred, which only becomes more absurdly amusing as they age out of the adolescent years where that kind of pretentiousness is acceptable (the ones who survive into adulthood, anyway). Every gag is at the expense of one of these beloved artists’ self-serving quest to become beloved. Not for nothing, every gag is also successfully hilarious. Maybe the key to making a decent historical biopic about an arts scene is having a critical sense of humor about the legends you’re trying to depict. That’s at least a good first step in the direction of acknowledging their humanity, and one I can only recall being repeated in the recent black metal satire Lords of Chaos. Even that example isn’t nearly as impressive, though, as it’s poking fun at fascist metalheads who commit literal murder, whereas 24 Hour Party People profiles seemingly affable chaps who just happened to not be as Cool as you’d expect based on their classic records.

-Brandon Ledet

Sugar & Spice (2001)

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By now, Heathers has surely gotten its full due as a cult classic in terms of its delicious visual aesthetics & eternal quotability. It’s even earned its own Broadway musical adaptation, so there should be nowhere left for its “cult” legacy to go. I still don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with how well balanced the tone of Heathers is, though, especially as a feat of screenwriting. Daniel Waters’s playful, sardonic cruelty is a deceptively tricky balancing act to properly execute, which is glaringly apparent when you look at the film’s dark teen comedy imitators in the late 1990s & early 2000s. Drop Dead Gorgeous is the most accomplished imitator to the throne, with the biggest laughs & most keenly pointed satirical eye of any post-Heathers high school cruelty comedy. It’s also a film that chooses some hideously misjudged moments to punch down, particularly at the expense of anorexic teens & the mentally disabled. For its part, Jawbreaker evolves the highly stylized visual whimsy of Heathers into a candy-coated fantasy all of its own, but its callous humor about sexual assault & physical abuse leaves an unignorably sour taste. However, neither of those examples conveys the high wire balancing act of the post-Heathers teen cruelty comedy quite as succinctly as Sugar & Spice.

Sugar & Spice is an absurdly bubbly, flippantly cruel teen comedy about bank-robbing cheerleaders. Its 1960s Archie Comics stylization is infectiously fun & energizing, complete with collage-style pop art screen wipes that nearly push the film into surreal, dreamlike territory. Its story of teen sweethearts whose rosy vision of the world harshly clashes with reality when they unexpectedly become pregnant offers a great satirical core for its humor, and the transgression of high school cheerleaders robbing a bank to solve that problem is sublime. Best yet, the movie is only 81min long, cramming as many goofs, gags, and one-liners as it can into every beat without wasting the audience’s time on superfluous details like thoughts or feelings. The only problem, really, is that the film is viciously homophobic. This is a mainstream, PG-13 comedy where f-bombs are carefully avoided so as not to upset the schoolmarms at the MPAA, but homophobic slurs are tossed in every direction like confetti. The only gay character in the film is a one-note visual gag: a male cheerleader who occasionally catapults into the frame to be called a “fag” and promptly dismissed. And then come the flood of prison rape jokes as the girls research their bank heist schemes among inmates at a women’s prison. Hilarious!

At first, the film’s tonal missteps seem to result from a poor choice in narrator: a small-minded rival of the bankrobbing teens who rats them out to the FBI out of petty jealousy. Watching a room full of middle-aged men listen to a bratty child endlessly monologue about the intricacies of cheerleader squad drama is hilarious, but choosing the least likeable character in the film to narrate often tilts the tone into sour territory, especially considering that character’s raging homophobia. You can’t blame all of the film’s misfired cruelty on the villain, however. The girls we’re supposed to be cheering for eventually prove to be just as guilty, calling the film’s politics into question not the characters’. The weirdest thing about that POV is that Sugar & Spice is otherwise perfectly calibrated for a dedicated queer fandom. It’s already practically a mash-up of Point Break & Bring It On, which sounds like a mad scientist experiment to create the perfect Gay Movie Night go-to. This is a film where James Marsden is ogled as a star-quarterback himbo, Madonna lyrics are treated as literal gospel, and teenage girls commit crimes while wearing knock-off Barbie masks. It’s also a film that frequently dehumanizes the exact target audience who would find those details fabulous for the sake of a cheap gag (or ten).

So yes, Sugar & Spice gleefully shares in the Jawbreaker & Drop Dead Gorgeous problem in that it can be a little too mean in spots; it may even be the meanest picture of the three. It’s also like those movies in that I love it anyway, which only makes me cringe harder when it spectacularly fucks up the balance of its tone. It’s certainly no Heathers, although over-written one-liners like “It was like he was a piece of chocolate and the entire school was on the rag” suggest that it very much wanted to be. If I’ve learned anything from loving these flawed teen cruelty comedies over the years, it’s that Heathers, although enduringly popular, was much more singularly skillful than could ever be fully acknowledged, especially in its mastery of tone.

-Brandon Ledet