brandon ledet

Impetigore (2020)

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The Indonesian ghost story Impetigore shocked me, chilled me, and left me guessing where its story was headed until its very last minute. That’s an extremely rare quality to find in a modern horror film, especially one that sticks this close to the tones & conventions of its genre. In an ideal, perfectly-functioning movie industry, Impetigore would be the kind of well-funded horror flick that hits wide theatrical release regularly: handsomely staged, efficiently creepy beyond the traumatizing shock of its imagery, and complicated enough in its mythology that it’s not just a simple morality play. Instead, it’s an international export that premiered to mildly positive reviews at this year’s Sundance before quietly finding its way to streaming on Shudder with little fanfare. Impetigore should be an industry norm. Instead, it’s a minor miracle.

It starts with a concise, conceptually brilliant cold open in which a highway tollbooth employee is stalked and eventually hunted in her glass cuboid prison by a machete-wielding maniac. Before he raises his weapon for the deathblow, the crazed killer complains in a reasonable, weary tone, “We don’t want what your family left behind. Please take it away.” That short-story slasher intro then opens up to a much wider, richer tale of an intergenerational curse. A young, desperate woman treks back to her seemingly well-to-do family’s isolated village, hoping to reclaim any generational wealth she may have left behind when she was whisked away to the big city as a child. It turns out her family’s domineering presence in the village is represented by more than just a large house & a fear-inciting name. It also lingers in the form of a vicious curse that torments & disfigures each new generation of the community, so that whatever exploitative evils they committed in the past continue to haunt the present in an active, malicious cycle.

Reductively speaking, Impetigore offers an on-the-surface metaphor about the persistent evils of communal betrayal & inherited wealth. However, the rules & origins of its ghostly curse mutate & self-complicate often enough that it doesn’t feel lazily considered or over-simplified. That’s rare in a modern horror film, where each plot development is typically expected to hold some metaphorical Meaning in a 1:1 allegory. Impetigore’s relationship with Extreme Gore freak-outs is similarly distinctive in the modern horror landscape – walking a difficult balance of being gradually, severely fucked up without rubbing your face in the grotesque details of its cruelty. This is a film that weaponizes your imagination against you for maximum dread, then somehow exceeds the worst-case-scenario imagery you conjure instead of shying away from the discomfort (often by depicting horrific violence against children in particular, it should be said). It’s also a movie that features several traditional Indonesian puppet shows, just in case you’re not already thoroughly entertained.

I very much wish Impetigore weren’t exceptional, that its handsomely executed but appropriately bleak grotesqueries were just another shock-of-the-day horror. As is, it feels like a role model for how well-funded modern horror should look & operate – offering a glimpse of a better, more fucked-up cinematic landscape. It is exceptional, and it should be celebrated as such.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Monster Brawl (2011)

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Our current Movie of the Month, the low-budget horror comedy Monster Brawl, might be the absolute worst movie that I wholeheartedly love. That’s partly because it mimics the structure & rhythms of a pro wrestling Pay-Per-View instead of a traditional Movie, which requires the audience to adjust expectations to the payoffs of that format. A one-time-only deathmatch tournament between famous monster archetypes in a haunted graveyard to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”, it’s staged as if it were a real-time Pay-Per-View broadcast of an actual pro wrestling event. Monster Brawl‘s feature-length commitment to that structure can be alienating if you’re not immediately tickled by its absurdity, which proved true for most of The Swampflix Crew. This turned out to be an extremely self-indulgent Movie of the Month selection on my part, as no one else in this polluted swamp seemed to have a good time with it. Whoops.

As a result, recommending further viewing to anyone who enjoyed Monster Brawl and wants to see more movies on its shamelessly trashy wavelength is somewhat of an empty exercise. It appears that no one enjoys Monster Brawl, outside maybe appreciating the creature design for the bayou-dwelling eco terrorist wrestler Swamp Gut. Regardless, here are a few recommended titles if you—improbably—loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience similar goofball horror comedies that traffic in the same grey area between creature feature & pro wrestling PPV.

Santo vs. The Vampire Women (1962)

No discussion of the intersection between pro wrestling & cheap-o horror would be complete without the masked luchador Santo. A wrestler so beloved in Mexico that he was practically a folk hero, Santo’s in-ring celebrity was exported to the big screen in over 50 feature films, many of them within the horror genre. I can’t speak to the quality of the majority of Santo’s cinematic output (much of which was never translated to English), but I can heartily recommend his most financially & culturally successful picture: Santo vs. The Vampire Women. It’s a film that’s most well recognized in the US for being featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it’s a fun pro wrestling-themed Halloween Season watch even without that ironic mockery (especially without, honestly).

Amusingly, Santo vs. The Vampire Women mostly keeps its horror & its wrestling separated in the plot. Santo is hired by a worried father as a kind of bodyguard to protect his vulnerable daughter who is being actively recruited by a vampire coven, as the luchador comes from a long line of ancestors who are sworn “to eliminate evil of all kinds.” Unfortunately, the professional demands of being a popular sports entertainer means that Santo is often too “busy” to help keep the daughter-stealing vampire women at bay, as he’s often tied up with a wrestling match he can’t get out of. The novelty of the film’s wrestling angle exists almost entirely independently from the main action, which means that the story has to stop dead still to make room for the on-screen luchador matches the same way a porno’s story stalls for lengthy depictions of sex.

Even so, the Satanic ritual imagery & buxom vampire coven are so Cool on their own that this would be a solid horror cheapie even without the novelty of the wrestling angle. Anyone with an appreciation for pro wrestling pageantry and Poverty Row knockoffs of Universal Horror classics should have blast with the spooky-campy atmosphere established here. And maybe it’s for the best that it kept its wrestling & its plot separate, since Monster Brawl synthesized those two elements into a single structure-defining gimmick and practically no one enjoys it.

Mortal Kombat (1995)

Monster Brawl is not the only gimmicky fight tournament movie that I love more than I likely should. I also have a huge (likely nostalgic) soft spot for Paul WS Anderson’s big-screen adaptation of the gory button-masher Mortal Kombat. Much like how Monster Brawl structures its story around a Pro Wrestling Pay-Per-View, the Mortal Kombat movie goes out of its way to maintain the tiered tournament structure of its video game source material. It’s a little better funded than Monster Brawl and a little less committed to their shared gimmick (the official fights don’t start until 40min into the film in this case), so in comparison it stands out as a slicker, more accessible variation on the same deathmatch tournament theme.

Instead of fighting to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”, the combatants of Mortal Kombat compete “to defend the realm of Earth” from an “emperor sorcerer demon” who seeks to subjugate & steal the souls of every living being. The humans who enter this interdimensional deathmatch tournament (Mortal Kombat all-stars Sonya Blade, Johnny Cage, and Liu Kang) face off against evil creatures much less culturally overfamiliar than the Universal Monster knockoffs featured in Monster Brawl — mostly demonic ninjas with black magic control over elements like fire, ice, and … shapeshifting reptiles? Much like how Monster Brawl has its clear stand-out monster with Swamp Gut, however, the real star of Mortal Kombat is the four-armed mutant freakshow Goro — a beautiful blend of clunky animatronics and shitty mid-90s CGI.

The best argument for Mortal Kombat being a superior precursor to Monster Brawl is the way it keeps the audience’s energy up throughout, mostly by periodically re-playing its insanely high-BPM techno theme song as a constant pep-up. A hissing Christopher Lambert also hams it up for the camera as the wise “lightning god” Raiden in a way that stands out more than any single performance in Monster Brawl, which is more about playing on familiar archetypes than establishing anything novel or nuanced. If you found yourself amused by the premise of Monster Brawl but frustrated by the execution, Mortal Kombat might be the slicked-up, smoothed-out version of the film you were looking for.

Septic Man (2013)

Monster Brawl is not the first time director Jesse T. Cook has let down a member of The Swampflix Crew. In the earliest months of the blog, James published a two-star review of Cook’s feces-themed creature feature Septic Man, in which a sewer worker is trapped in a contaminated septic tank and subsequently transforms into a hideous turd monster. James wrote, “Watching a filth-covered man roll around in a septic tank for an hour and a half didn’t turn out to be as fun as I expected. […] Septic Man had the potential to be like a darker Toxic Avenger but instead has none of Troma’s charms and ends up being every bit as bad as its premise would imply.” He goes on to call the film “drab”, “ugly”, “depressing”, “boring” and, most bluntly, “crap.” Naturally, after subjecting everyone to what turned out to be a miserable experience watching Cook’s previous film, I felt that it was my turn to suffer Septic Man myself as penance.

James was right and wrong. Septic Man is only 80 minutes long; it’s also crap. It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Troma got into the gritty Eli Roth-era torture porn game. I dare say I was charmed by it, though. The way the grunt sewer worker is financially pressured to keep working during a water contamination pandemic only to be transformed into a hideous Poo Beast just happened to hit me at the right time, considering the parallel labor exploitations of the COVID age. The gradual Turd Monster transformation was also surprisingly solid as a practical effects throwback (although he’s obviously nowhere near as loveable as our beloved Swamp Gut; no one is).

If I’ve learned anything from this exercise it’s that I have terrible taste and cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to the oeuvre of Jesse T. Cook. This blog is a septic tank of bad takes, and I am but the filth-mutated man trapped inside it.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #119 of The Swampflix Podcast: Tales from the Hood (1995) & The 1990s Black Horror Renaissance

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Welcome to Episode #119 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss the Spike Lee-produced horror anthology Tales from the Hood (1995) and its place in what Horror Noire describes as The 1990s Black Horror Renaissance. Enjoy!

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

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: All the Colors of the Dark (1972)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the psychedelic giallo classic All the Colors of the Dark (1972) and the unforgiveable ways it was butchered in its alternate-title edit They’re Coming to Get You! (1972).

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

– Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Limbo (1999)

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The trash angels at the American Genre Film Archive recently restored & distributed a shot-on-video horror relic from the late 90s that both transcends & typifies its era in no-budget filmmaking. Limbo is a warped-VHS headtrip that’s all disoriented disgust with the world and nothing remotely resembling coherence. It’s more of a cursed object than a Movie, so that AGFA’s restoration feels less like a standard home video release than it does a black magic spell. The Blu-ray disc includes a feature-length commentary track with director Tina Krause, which I’m hesitant to listen to even though it might help make sense of the film’s eerie, disjointed imagery. I’m worried that any context or explanation would deflate its delirious 3a.m. mystique.

The IMDb logline for Limbo is “A woman makes a descent into Hell after she kills a man she brought home as a one-night stand.” That’s a relatively accurate way of describing the final third of the one-hour runtime, but as a whole the film is far too meandering & self-distracted to support any kind of one-sentence plot description, especially one so concrete. Most of Limbo finds Krause dicking around with camcorder effects & morbid ephemera in a spooky warehouse locale. Lynchian horror imagery—complete with a Laura Palmer surrogate wheeled around in a clear-plastic body bag—is filtered through a D.I.Y. video art aesthetic in a haunted, scatterbrained haze. The only unifying sensibility on a thematic level is a disgust with the nü-metal dirtbag men who ogle & harass our traumatized lead. Parsing out anything else feels like trying to make sense of a half-remembered nightmare.

It’s tempting to dismiss Limbo as something that would be best served as a background projection at a Halloween party or raw footage for a music video re-edit. Yet, there’s something potently angry & distraught about its mood that cuts through its lost, dizzied narrative to save it from being tedious (a quality that’s majorly helped by its succinct runtime). Judging by the bonus shorts included on the disc, Krause was mostly working in sleazy SOV softcore around the time she made Limbo, and her sole feature as a director feels like a defiant protest of that genre. This is a deliberately anti-sexy, impossible-to-pin-down video art nightmare with no patience or interest in the typical genre signifiers of its era. It may not satisfy the usual metrics for A Great Horror Film, but its off-kilter details linger with you longer than with more focused, technically proficient works of well-funded mediocrity. In fact, it’s practically spitting directly in those films’ faces.

-Brandon Ledet

Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead (1991)

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Given the title, you’d expect Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead to be a schlocky zombie movie. It turns out it’s more of a horror-tinged nudie cutie. This “erotic” martial arts fantasy horror stars Donnie Yen and a gaggle of Topless Babes (give or take one warrior princess) in a fight against a supernatural horndog Moon Monster. The monster is more of a moon-dwelling cannibal wizard with glowing eyes than a walking corpse, and he’s far more interested in ripping blouses off unsuspecting women than he is in eating brains. If it weren’t for the gore & the fight choreography, this film could pass as an old-fashioned nudist comedy along the lines of The Immoral Mr. Teas or Nude on the Moon. It’s incredibly sleazy late-night trash that’s so endlessly fascinated with bare breasts it’s also somehow adorably quaint.

If there’s any element in Holy Virgin that justifies the “Evil Dead” half of its title, it’s in the drastic comic book camera angles and low-to-the-ground tracking shots it lifts directly from Sam Raimi’s playbook. Those images only come in flashes during the Moon Monster attacks, though. The rest of the film is an oddly straight-forward police procedural in which a college professor (Yen) is suspected of stripping & murdering his female students. Meanwhile, the audience knows the truth: a cult that worships a mustachioed goddess has summoned a boobs-obsessed lunar ghoul to do the job. Duh! Thankfully, a badass virgin princess with a laser sword takes over the investigation halfway through to save the professor’s hide (and to put an end to the violent strippings, of course). Rapid-paced fight choreography & wuxia-style wire work ensues, until the whole thing concludes with a police shootout in a cave decorated with giallo-style crosslighting.

It’s impossible to describe Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead without overselling it. Even its own impatient opening credits sequence that previews the gore & nudity to come feels like hyperbolic hype the movie never lives up to. Still, it’s a delightful late-night curio that touches on an incredibly vast range of genre payoffs: dark fantasy, 80s splatter horror, police procedurals, martial arts epics, softcore porno, etc. The fact that its Skinemax-era sexuality and post-Raimi horror signifiers have become increasingly outdated in the decades since its release only make it more charming to the modern schlock-gobbling viewer. It’s a weirdly adorable film for something so gore-soaked & sexually violent, almost as if it were produced for an audience of perverse children. I wish I had first seen it when I was 10 years old, anyway.

-Brandon Ledet