Halloween Report 2017: Best of the Swampflix Horror Tag

October 1, 2017 / swampflix / 2 Comments

Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means a lot of cinephiles & horror nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as they can before the best day of the year (except for Mardi Gras, of course) passes us by. We here at Swampflix watch a lot of horror films year round, so instead of overloading you with the full list of all the spooky movies we’ve covered since last year’s Halloween report (and the one before that), here’s a selection of the best of the best. We’ve tried to break it down into a few separate categories to help you find what cinematic scares you’re looking for. Hope this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge! Happy hauntings!

Art House Horror

If you’re looking for an escape from the endless parade of trashy slasher movies & want a more formally refined style of horror film, this list might be a good place to start.

The Psychic (1977): “Unlike a great deal of Lucio Fulci’s ouevre, The Psychic is not a particularly gory or bloody film. Compare this, for instance, to The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, and the greater part of his body of work, which feature lots of gore in the Romero vein. The film’s bloodiest moment comes at the very beginning, and in fact seems like part of another Fulci film that has been grafted on to the beginning of this one, and serves only to establish that our main character has experienced a psychic vision before. The rest of the deaths that are depicted, while perhaps not bloodless, are fairly restrained in comparison to the rest of the director’s body of work. Instead, Fulci focuses on the anxiety and the terror of the drama that unfolds onscreen.”

Raw (2017): “I was beaten to the punch by Catherine Bray of Variety in the comparisons that were most evident to me, as she called Raw ‘Suspiria meets Ginger Snaps,’ which was my thought exactly while sitting in the theater. The school setting lends itself to the former allusion, as does the stunningly saturated color pallette and the viscerality of the gore (which is less present than one would expect from either the marketing or the oft-cited fainting of several audience members at the Toronto premier), while the coming-of-age narrative as explored by two sisters with a complex relationship makes the latter reference apparent. Make no mistake, however: even for the strongest stomachs amongst us, there will be something in this film that turns that organ inside out.”

We Are the Flesh (2017): “I’m in love with the way We Are the Flesh disorients the eye by making its grotesque displays of bloodshed & taboo sexuality both aesthetically pleasing and difficult to pin down. The subtle psychedelia of its colored lights, art instillation sets, and unexplained provocative imagery (a pregnant child, close-up shots of genitals, an excess of eggs, etc.) detach the film from a knowable, relatable world to carve out its own setting without the context of place or time. Its shock value sexuality & gore seem to be broadcasting directly from director Emiliano Rocha Minter‘s subconscious, attacking both the viewer & the creator with a tangible, physical representation of fears & desires the conscious mind typically compartmentalizes or ignores (like a poetically surreal distortion of Cronenberg’s Videodrome).”

It Comes at Night (2017): “What It Comes at Night captures more distinctly than any other horror or thriller I’ve seen before is the eerie feeling of being up late at night, alone, plagued by anxieties you can usually suppress in the daylight by keeping busy, and afraid to go back to sleep because of the cruelly false sense of relief that startles you when you slip back into your stress dreams. It’s in these late night, early morning hours when fear & grief are inescapable and nearly anything seems possible, just nothing positive or worth looking forward to.”

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2017): “Oz Perkins’s sensibilities as a horror auteur are wrapped up in the eeriness of droning sound design and the tension of waiting for the hammer to drop. That aesthetic an be frustrating when left to rot in a directionless reflection on stillness, but when woven into the fabric of a supernatural mystery the way it is in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, it can be entirely rewarding, not to mention deeply disturbing.”

The Skin I Live In (2011): “At turns provocative and disquieting, The Skin I Live In is relentless in the way that its unfolding narrative forces the viewer to re-evaluate every previous scene with each new revelation. Do our sympathies for Roberto outweigh the fact that the well of his monstrosity is deeper and darker? His ultimate fate is a consequence of his inability to accept the reality of his life (which is related to his being a plastic surgeon, which is conventionally considered a position that exists solely due to society’s vanity) and let go of that which has been lost (which is more reflective of his well-intentioned scientific drive to build a better human skin through unethical experimentation, as well as his activities as a reconstructive, restorative plastic surgeon). It’s a film that rewards close attention and empathy; as each fleshy layer is peeled away, the viewer finds him- or herself challenged, but the experience is ultimately fruitful.”

Mainstream & Traditional Horror

It often feels as if we’re living in a substantial horror renaissance where metaphor & atmosphere-conscious indie filmmakers are revitalizing a genre that desperately needs new blood. These films are a welcome reminder that mainstream horror outlets & genre-faithful traditionalists can still deliver just as much of a punch as their art house, “elevated” horror competition.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983): “Everything about Something Wicked and its more modern contemporaries is commanded by a creepy feeling, an atmosphere established by roaring winds and empty settings like a suburb or a carnival that makes its characters seem like they’re the only kids on Earth, having to stage a world-saving battle between Good & Evil all on their own. Although this kind of kid-friendly creepshow is rarely as terrifying as you remember it being growing up, it’s the exact kind of film that sticks with you for life.”

The Silence of the Lambs (1991): “One of the most consistent pleasures of The Silence of the Lambs for me is in watching Jodie Foster & Anthony Hopkins try to out over-act each other. Foster’s thick Southern accent & Hopkins’s *tsk tsk* brand of mannered scenery chewing have always been a neck & neck race for most heightened/ridiculous for me, but this most recent rewatch has presented a third competitor in this struggle: Howard Shore. The composer’s string arrangements actively attempt to match the soaring stage play line deliveries from Foster & Hopkins, who similarly seem to be playing for the back row. The rabid horror fan in me wishes that the score would ease up and leave a more sparse atmosphere for the movie’s genre film sleaze to fully seep into, but the more I think about it, the more Shore’s music feels symbiotic with the lofty Greek tragedy tones of Jonathan Demme’s performers. I’m still a little conflicted about it even as I write this.”

The Cabin in the Woods (2012): “The film is at once a celebration of the horror genre as a cruel, ritualistic blood sport that serves a significant purpose in the lives of its audience and a condemnation of that very same audience for participating in the ritual in the first place. An ambitious, self-reflective work of criticism in action, Cabin in the Woods in one of the best horror films I’ve seen in recent years, not least of all for the way it makes me rethink the basic structure & intent of horror as an art from in the first place.”

Get Out (2017): “Instead of a virginal, scantily clad blonde running from a masked killer with an explicitly phallic weapon, Get Out aligns its audience with a young black man put on constant defense by tone deaf, subtly applied racism. Part horror comedy, part racial satire, and part mind-bending sci-fi, Jordan Peele’s debut feature not only openly displays an encyclopedic knowledge of horror as an art form (directly recalling works as varied as Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Under the Skin, and any number of Wes Craven titles), it also applies that knowledge to a purposeful, newly exciting variation on those past accomplishments. Get Out knows what makes horror effective as a genre and finds new avenues of cultural criticism to apply that effect to instead of just mirroring what came before, no small feat for a debut feature.”

Split (2017): “Split‘s D.I.D. premise provides a near-borderless playground for James McAvoy to chew scenery and he does so admirably, fully committing himself to the film’s brilliant stupidity. I think Split works best when it is genuinely creepy, though. M. Night Shyamalan is confidently playful with the film’s tone at every turn (even appearing onscreen to practically wink at the camera), but still mines his pulpy premise for plenty sincere tension & dread in a highly stylized, artfully considered way. Split truly does feel like the director’s return to glory. This is the moment when he loudly broadcasts to the whole world that he can still be highly effective within the pulpy genre box he often traps himself in without having to blow the container open with a last minute twist. Here, the twist is allowed to comfortably exist as its own separate, artfully idiotic treat, another sign that the filmmaker has finally become the master of his own brilliantly stupid game.”

IT (2017): “IT is an Event Film dependent on the jump scares, CGI monsters, and blatant nostalgia pandering (even casting one of the Stranger Things kids to drive that last point home) that its indie cinema competition has been consciously undermining to surprising financial success in recent years. What’s impressive is how the film prominently, even aggressively relies on these features without at all feeling insulting, lifeless, or dull. Even more so than well-received franchises like The Conjuring, Sinister, and Insidious, IT fulfills the major studio promise that big budget horror filmmaking can still be intense, memorable, and above all else fun. While indie filmmakers search for metaphorical & atmospheric modes of ‘elevated’ horror, IT stands as a declarative, back to the basics return to mainstream horror past, a utilitarian approach with payoffs that somehow far outweigh its muted artistic ambitions.”

XX (2017): “As a contribution to the horror anthology as a medium & a tradition, XX is a winning success in two significant ways: each individual segment stands on its own as a worthwhile sketch of a larger idea & the collection as a whole functions only to provide breathing room for those short-form experiments. On top of all that, XX also boasts the added bonus of employing five women in directorial roles, something that’s sadly rare in any cinematic tradition, not just horror anthologies.”

Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016): “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children isn’t likely to win over anyone who’s chosen to write off Tim Burton’s post-90s work completely (his recent, aggressively tone deaf comments on racial representation in Hollywood casting aren’t likely to help either), but it is a damn good spooky children’s movie, joining the likes of Goosebumps & ParaNorman as great starter packs for kids who need an intro to a lifelong horror fandom. It’s a genuinely macabre affair that might be better accomplished in terms of visual craft than it is with emotional deft, but still stands as Burton’s best work since at least Sweeney Todd. Of course, I’m a little more forgiving than some on the current Burton aesthetic, so mileage may vary there, but if any other director’s name were attached to this film I suspect it would’ve been praised with far less scrutiny.”

Weirdo Outliers

Halfway between high art & the depths of trash, these titles occupy a strange middle ground that defies categorization. They also are some of the scariest movies on the list in completely unexpected ways.

The Lure (2017): “The Lure is a mermaid-themed horror musical that’s equal parts MTV & Hans Christian Andersen in its modernized fairy tale folklore. Far from the Disnified retelling of The Little Mermaid that arrived in the late 1980s, this blood-soaked disco fantasy is much more convincing in its attempts to draw a dividing line between mermaid animality & the (mostly) more civilized nature of humanity while still recounting an abstract version of the same story. As a genre film with a striking hook in its basic premise, it’s the kind of work that invites glib descriptors & points of comparison like An Aquatic Ginger Snaps Musical or La La Land of the Damned, but there’s much more going on in its basic appeal than that sense of genre mash-up novelty.”

Society (1992): “Society was largely panned in its time for this disinterest in thematic subtlety, struggling for three years after its initial release in 1989 to earn a proper US distribution deal. Treating its class politics as a flimsy excuse for the disturbing practical effects orgy in its final act seems like a mistake to me, though, and I’m delighted that the film has been reassessed as a cult classic in the decades since its humble beginnings. The way it explores class divisions in the most literal & grotesque terms possible is highly amusing to me in an almost cathartic way. This is especially true of these earliest days in a Donald Trump presidency, where poking fun at the inhuman cruelty of the wealthy oligarchy feels almost necessary for survival, even if their status as the ruling class hasn’t at all changed since this film’s initial release.”

Spider Baby (1964): “Spider Baby focuses on the Merrye family, which is so inbred that they suffer from a terrible condition which causes individual members to mentally regress as they age until they become savages. The Merrye clan lives in seclusion, and once a member of the family has fully regressed they get isolated further until they become such a threat to everyone that they get moved to their own section of the basement. Virginia and Elizabeth are two of the three remaining family members of their dying line, not yet old enough to be shoved into the basement. Being isolated from society gives them a dark, sprite-like quality. Due to their regression they have no knowledge of circumstances for their actions. Together they wantonly romp about the house, taking in pet spiders, eating bugs and suspicious fungi from their yard, and bickering almost constantly. Elizabeth is as volatile as a three year old on a bad day. Virginia regularly ‘plays spider,’ which is a handy euphemism for murder. In their isolation, they act outside of society, with unkempt hair and make-believe games gone too far.”

Paperhouse (1988): “After two smaller films that are largely forgotten, Rose directed Paperhouse, which was a perennial favorite on IFC in the early 2000s, before moving on to direct cult classic (and his only other truly great film) Candyman released in 1992. Candyman is undeniably a horror film, and Paperhouse was largely lumped in with the horror genre upon home video release as well, despite not strictly deserving that distinction. It’s much more of a mood piece, with a relatively simple story elevated by striking visuals and a moodily beautiful score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer.”

eXistenZ (1999): “eXistenZ feels like the beginning of David Cronenberg coldly playing with philosophical humor in conspicuously artificial environments, an aesthetic that became full fledged by the time he made more recent titles like Cosmopolis & Maps to the Stars. The joy is in watching him achieve that aesthetic through the technology-paranoid body horror tools of his earliest classics before abandoning them entirely.”

Pet (2016): “The cheapness of the film is apparent in several sequences that are genuinely cinematic in their framing but appear to be shot on low-end digital video; on the other hand, that same sparsity of funding also means that the film has room to breathe as a character piece, regardless of whether any of the character growth that we see is genuine. If Don’t Breathe is is a schlocky thriller with slick artistic design that disguises its crassness, Pet is a low-rent version of the same, with sufficient style but none to spare.”

Are We Not Cats (2016): “For all its dirty Detroit soul & doom metal sound cues, colorful Quintron-esque musical contraptions, and horrific flashes of skincrawl gore, Are We Not Cats is a film ultimately about intimacy & mutual addiction. As memorable as its grotesque, psychedelic freak-outs can be, their impact is equaled if not bested by the tender melancholy of lines like ‘When was the last memory you have of not being truly alone?’ The details of the romance that ends that loneliness construct a body horror nightmare of open sores & swallowed hair, but still play as oddly sweet in a minor, intimate way that underlines the film’s viscerally memorable strengths & forgives a lot of its more overly-familiar narrative impulses.”

80’s Slashers

Sometimes all you need to scratch your horror itch is watching a bunch of hot, young idiots get stabbed to death for their moral transgressions by an inhumanly persistent killer.

A Night to Dismember (1983): “A Night to Dismember is a Doris Wishman slasher, purely so. It finds the director shooting gloom & gore the way she usually shoots scantily clad women, following a very strict Halloween/Friday the 13th-style narrative structure to deliver its jarringly violent genre thrills. What makes it notably bizarre beyond Wishman stepping outside her usual genre box is that the film makes no attempt to tell a clearly intelligible story besides mimicking the general feel of a slasher. So sloppy it’s avant garde, A Night to Dismember adheres to a strict ‘Axe murders for all, coherent plot for none’ political platform. Almost unwatchable, yet undeniably entertaining, Wishman’s sole slasher is chaotic outsider art, a watch that’s just as challenging as it is inane.”

The Funhouse (1981): “The Funhouse comes across as a run-of-the-mill B-movie because it follows the generic B-horror movie storyline; a group of teens get high and decide to get crazy & spend the night in their local carnival’s funhouse. It really doesn’t get cheesier than that, but somehow The Funhouse manages to be seriously scary. […] The gruesome murders that take place in the funhouse filled with horrifying animatronic clowns and evil dolls will haunt your dreams forever, or at least for a day or two.”

The Last Horror Film (1983): “Besides the inclusion of kills from other horror pictures screening in-film at the Cannes Festival, The Last Horror Film also boosts its production value significantly by playing tourist. Intercutting shots of movie advertisements that line the streets of the festival (with particular attention given to an ad for the masterful Possession) and nude women sunbathing on nearby beaches, the film often plays like a much, much sleazier version of Roger Ebert’s video essays of Cannes from the 90s (clips of which are featured in the documentary Life Itself). The film’s plot & murders are almost treated as unneeded interruptions of its cheap pop music montages, where the main attraction is not murder, but people-watching.”

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1982): “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is part soap opera and part slasher horror. The combination of the two makes for an amazing horror movie experience. It’s one of those amazing, unique horror films that got lost in the flood of 80s slasher movies, but it does a great job of holding its own.”

Creature Features

Do you want to see some weird/gross/creepy/goofy monsters? Check out these bad boys.

Shin Godzilla (2016): “It plays like how I would imagine a creature feature version of The Big Short (a film I’ve yet to see, I should note): pointed & playful political humor that calls into question the very fabric of its nation’s strength & character. Instead of being attacked by predatory investors, however, the victims in Shin Godzilla face the towering presence of a giant, rapidly evolving reptile that shoots purple lasers & leaves a trail of radiation in its wake. Otherwise, I assume they’re more or less on the same vibe, but I’ll likely never know for sure since only one has the laser-shooting lizard beast & that’s the one I watched.”

Train to Busan (2016): “Train to Busan doesn’t reinvent the wheel; in fact, there’s an awful lot of 28 Days Later in its DNA, what with the Rage-like zombies, the urban environments, the involvement of military forces , and the ending. Still, placing the action on a train puts a new spin on things, as when one group of survivors is trying to reach another group in a distant compartment, with the horde between them. The interplay of light and darkness, the addition of color, and a child character who’s actually quite likable are all touches that this genre was missing. It’s such an obviously great idea that I’m honestly surprised it was never done before (despite searching my memory and the internet, I can find no evidence of previous zombies-on-a-train films).”

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016): “After a brief, forgivable trek through Search for a Cure zombie film tedium, The Girl with All the Gifts sinks into a fascinating exploration of the ways Nature reclaims human structures when given enough time and how human bodies are a part of that reclamation. Fighting against Nature’s course is proposed to be potentially futile, which is a pretty hefty lesson to stomach within a genre that’s often reduced to cheap jump scares and Michael Jackson dance routines.”

Slugs (1988): “While the basic premise of Slugs is both silly & clichéd due to the size & nature of its titular threat, the violence & technical skills of its various kills elevate the material to the exact kind of goofy brutality people are looking for in cult classic drive-in fare. These giant, juicy black slugs not only carpet the ground and invade homes from the drains of sinks & toilets; they also bite with sharpened fangs and burrow into unsuspecting victims’ skin. In lesser natural horrors, the slugs’ dirty work would be depicted through a discovered, picked clean skeleton. Here, the little bastards turn their victims into exploding, bloodied meat, covering the sets and nearly the camera in untold excess of blood & gore.”

Drive-In Era Relics

Here’s a few vintage horror relics that only could have been birthed from the drive-in & grindhouse eras of the genre’s now-distant past.

The Colossus of New York (1958): “Unexpectedly serving as a bridge between Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein & Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, I found the film far more inventive & thematically well-considered than I would have initially assumed. It looks from the outside to be just one of many cheap 1950s Frankenstein bastardizations, but the film pushes way past a simple brain transplant horror story into something that feels anachronistically forward-thinking. A lot of The Colossus of New York‘s initial appeal rests in its drive-in era charm & unique creature design, but it somehow amounts to far more than the sum of its parts.”

The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960): “Cynically made as a cash grab in the wake of Christopher Lee’s Dracula finding popularity in Italy, this is a deliberately over-sexed work that anyone under the age of 16 was banned from watching at the theater. You can feel those trashy origins in every frame of The Vampire and the Ballerina, but the film still manages to be a surprisingly artful experience for me. Anyone who regularly enjoys a slice of cheap black & white schlock should get a kick out of the film’s creature designs & shameless, theremin-scored burlesque. What’ll really stick with you if you’re on that wavelength, though, is the strange relationship dynamics between its vampiric killers & the artfully odd images the film manages to pull out of a seemingly nonexistent budget.”

The Earth Dies Screaming (1964): “The alien threat of The Earth Dies Screaming is one thing after another, a continually shifting obstacle course that pummels its audience and its victims with just the right rhythm to remain surprising & just the right runtime to never outwear its welcome.”

Abby (1974): “For all that Warner Brothers did to bury Abby, they certainly had no issue taking some elements from it when drafting a script for The Exorcist 2, including the connection to ancient African myths and legends. That aside, Abby is marvelous, aside from a little bit of drag in Act III. Speed’s performance as Abby is heart-wrenching, as she struggles to make sense of the actions taken while possessed during her moments of clarity.”

Horror Comedies

Basket Case (1982): “In the annals of delightfully bad horror films, few can hold a candle to Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 freshman film Basket Case. Following the bloodthirsty trail of revenge left by a monstrous flesh sack and the (formerly conjoined) twin brother from whom he was untimely ripped, the film is weirdly disjointed but utterly charming, minus a tonally bizarre sexual assault that happens in the final moments.”

Brain Damage (1988): “Six years after the release of Basket Case, Frank Henenlotter unleashed a new ‘boy and his monster’ movie onto the world with Brain Damage, a film with a similar conceit to his first work but with even more disgusting special effects, a slicker production style, a new villainous creature, strong metaphorical subtext, and homoeroticism to spare. Though less well remembered than the cult classic that preceded it, Brain Damage is nonetheless a lot of fun, and may be objectively better than its predecessor.”

Multiple Maniacs (1970): “It’s impossible to divorce the context from the content in this case, because Waters is such a highly specific stylist & works so closely with a steady cast of nontraditional ‘actors,’ but even if the director had never made another feature in his life I believe the world would still be talking about Multiple Maniacs all these decades later. Horror films this weird & this grotesquely fun are rarely left behind or forgotten and, given the devotion of Waters’s more dedicated fans, I’m honestly surprised it took this long for this one to get its proper due.”

Office Killer (1997): “Cindy Sherman delivers exactly what I want from my genre films here, the exact formula that won me over in Tara Subkoff’s #horror. She mixes lowbrow camp with highbrow art production in an earnest, gleeful work that values both ends of that divide. As faintly silly as Carol Kane’s performance can be as a deranged killer, Sherman colors her background with a genuinely horrific history of sexual assault, where she constantly has to hear praise for her abuser in a work environment. She employs infamous provocateur Todd Haynes to provide ‘additional dialogue’ to make sure that discomfort seeps in. The sickly, flickering florescent lights of her film’s office setting afford it a horror aesthetic long before the kills begin, especially when she focuses on the harsh, moving light of a copier running in the dark. Even the opening credits, which glides as projections across still, office environment objects, have an artfulness to them missing from a lot of tongue-in-cheek horror.”

I Married a Witch (1942): “It’s very cliché to say that a film is “ahead of its time,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe Rene Clair’s comedy, I Married a Witch. For a film that debuted in the early 1940s, it’s got a very different style of humor when compared to other comedies that came about during that era. When I think of films of the 1940s, I think of Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Meet Me in St. Louis, so watching a film that is about a resurrected witch that preys on a soon-to-be-married man just feels so scandalous!”

The Love Witch (2016): “The Love Witch filters modern feminist ideology, particularly in relation to heterosexual power dynamics, through old modes of occultist erotica & vaguely goth burlesque to craft the ultimate post-modern camp cinema experience. Biller establishes herself as not only a stylist & a makeshift schlock historian, but also a sly political thinker and a no-fucks-given badass with a bone to pick, which is more than you’d typically expect with an intentionally ‘bad’ movie about witchcraft & strippers.”

Blood Diner (1987): “A supposed sequel to the grindhouse ‘classic’ Blood Feast (a film I have zero affection for), Blood Diner is pure 80s splatter comedy mayhem. It boasts all of the shock value violence & misogynistic cruelty of its predecessor (this time at the hands of a female director, Jackie Kong), but has a lot more in common with ZAZ spoofs or Looney Tunes than it does with its grindhouse pedigree. Everything in Blood Diner is treated with Reagan-era irreverence to the point where this pointlessly stupid horror comedy starts to feel like inane poetry. It shocks; it offends. Yet, Blood Diner is so consistently, absurdly mindless that all you can do is laugh at its asinine audacity in its cheap midnight movie thrills.”

The Greasy Strangler (2016): “I found The Greasy Strangler to be an amusingly perverse provocation, one that works fairly well as a deconstruction of the Sundance-minded indie romance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who disliked the film for being cruel, grotesque, or aggressively stupid. Those claims would all certainly be valid. As a nasty slasher by way of Eric Warheim, however, that’s just a natural part of a very unnatural territory.”

Campy Spectacles

The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972): “Ever since I picked up its laughably shoddy DVD print at an ancient FYE for pocket change, the film has held a strange, undeniable fascination for me. It’s something that could have only been made in what I consider to be the sleaziest, most disreputable era of genre cinema and, yet, I return to it often in sheer bewilderment. You might expect a horror film with the title The Night of a Thousand Cats to be laughable camp, but somehow the inherent goofiness of a mass hoard of ravenous, man-eating house cats is severely undercut here. Much like with the mannequin-commanding telepathy of Tourist Trap, The Night of a Thousand Cats is far too grimy, loopy, cruel, and unnerving in its feline-themed murders to be brushed aside as a campy trifle.”

Mark of the Witch (1970): “Mark of the Witch is a fun little movie, and surprisingly impressive for a film made on such a small budget and with only local talent. The fun is mitigated in a few places by special effects failures (the fire that the possessed Jill uses in her rites at the wooded grove is no larger than a dinner plate, for instance) and some repetitiveness (the witch uses the same overlong invocation in a few separate scenes), but it’s obvious that all of the players involved are having fun, and that sense of bonhomie and good humor is infectious enough that it’s no trouble to get swept up in the moment.”

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007): “One of the ways Extinction shakes off its stylistic rut is by hitting the reset button, opening with the exact same scenario as the first Resident Evil film. Milla Jovovich’s zombie-slaying protagonist wakes confused & unremembering in the shower, finding her iconic red dress from the franchise’s debut laid out carefully on her bed. As she tries to fight her way out of a military takeover of her home, she’s killed, the scenario is revealed to be a simulation, and her body is dumped on a pile of similarly-dressed clones in a chilling image that recalls the excellent existential horror Triangle. While The Umbrella Corporation’s main stooge (Game of Thrones’s Iian Glen) is literally trying to clone past successes of the franchise with villainous intent, Extinction then blows its derivative, campy treats wide open by shifting from Matrix knockoff to Mad Max knockoff, taking the zombie-infested shit show on the dusty, dusty road.”

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012): “The fifth Resident Evil film, Retribution, matches (if not surpasses) Extinction‘s entertainment value as a standalone feature, but does so without having to step outside the franchise’s usual formula. Retribution fully embraces its zombie-themed shoot-em-up video game roots as well as its nature as a late-in-the-game sequel by conducting a simulated, virtual reality retrospective of the series where each film is a level that must be cleared on the way to the final boss. Here, Anderson establishes his particular brand of nu metal technophobia as its own distinct artform, turning what should feel like an exercise in generic action film tedium into high-concept, reality-bending sci-fi with a kick-ass female protagonist in the lead. It’s an amazing act of genre alchemy, one that completely turned me around on the merit of the series as a cohesive whole.”

Beyond the Gates (2016): “It takes a little patience to get into Beyond the Gates, but it’s pretty rewarding if given half a chance. There’s a lot of love for the VHS era of horror in the movie’s DNA, but unlike other throwbacks, it’s not beholden to that aesthetic or the trappings thereof. The film is currently streaming on Netflix, and is a delightful way to keep Halloween in your heart on a hot summer night.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Safe (1995)

September 30, 2017 / swampflix / 11 Comments

Although it’s told in three fractured, disjointed segments, there’s a unifying theme of unspoken menace in Todd Haynes’s debut film, Poison, that ties the whole thing together as a cohesive expression of queer anxiety. One segment in particular that involves a 1950s B-movie mad scientist who gradually transforms into a monster after accidentally ingesting his own experimental sex serum felt like a darkly comical, but ambiguously tense reflection on the AIDS crisis that wrecked queer communities in the 80s & 90s. That same thematic thread continued into Haynes’s follow-up feature, Safe, which also dwells on the menace of declining health without directly connecting the illness to a real world crisis in the text, but still feeling like direct commentary on a real life tragedy. I’m not sure if Safe is tackling AIDS (the way Poison does), the way women are discounted & disbelieved about dysfunction within their own bodies, the ills of modern culture at large, or some unholy combination of all three. Its continuation of playing an unknowable, unstoppable health menace as a kind of existential crisis is its strongest asset and the one that’s the most welcome contribution to Haynes’s overall oeuvre. Its only misstep is when it strays from that menace in its lackluster third act.

Julianne Moore stars as Carol (a protagonist name Haynes would later repurpose for much a more amplified effect), a milquetoast housewife to a wealthy California business prick. Carol’s suburban ennuii initially resembles a run of the mill indie drama conflict. Her sex life is unsatisfying, the constant renovation & redecoration of her home is a sign of discontent, and her alienation from her husband & violence-obsessed stepson becomes increasingly pronounced with every awkward meal they’re obligated to share. Things devolve into a “The Yellow Wallpaper”-style horror from there as Carol’s ennuii transforms into a physical illness that cannot be explained by the men in charge of her well being. Her headaches, nosebleeds, and coughing attacks suggest there’s something deathly wrong with her body, but her unsympathetic husband & doctor brush it off as hypochondria, since the ailment cannot be pinpointed by science as a virus or allergy or anything else scientifically measurable. Carol moves to a commune far outside the city to immerse herself in a chemical-phobic culture of New Age medicine, yet her health continues to decline, because there is no clear trigger for her expanding list of symptoms.

In Safe‘s best moments, it plays like an existential horror take on Douglas Sirk melodrama (an influence Haynes would later explore more fully in Far From Heaven). As Carol navigates a wide range of possible cures that include self help books, holistic medicines, fad diets, and an impromptu hair perm, the menace of her declining health is played both as a sly joke and as an existential nightmare with a John Carpenter-style score. The only plausible answer offered to the question of her illness is a flyer that reads “Are you allergic to the 20th Century?” That idea leads Carol down a rabbit hole of New Age conspiracy theories about “deep ecology,” “spiritual awareness of the planet,” and “the oneness of all life” that ultimately does her no good, but also no worse than what modern medicine has to offer. Haynes has a lot of fun clashing modern life with Nature in this way, shooting plants on VHS-quality camcorders and juxtaposing pop songs like “Lucky Star” & “Heaven is a Place on Earth” with one-with-the-Earth folk music feel-goodery. Unfortunately, it also feels as if Safe somewhat gets just as lost in examining this New Age bullshit as its slowly dying protagonist, however coldly. Once Carol adjusts to cult life on the “chemical free” commune early in the third act, there isn’t much left to what Safe has to say and all that the audience can do from there is wait for the credits, whereas earlier scenes felt like a nonstop onslaught of existential dread in a much more memorably satisfying way.

Although I’m underwhelmed by Safe’s ultimate destination at the New Age commune, it does lead to a great moment where Carol is pressured into giving a speech for her new cult family. There’s something horrifying about the way she babbles vaguely about toxins & pollutants in that moment with nothing solid or specific to say, especially after watching her suffer physically for so long in the scenes leading up to that moment. Julianne Moore is undeniably one of our greatest living actors and Safe offered her a fantastic early-career spotlight to generate both heartbreaking empathy & frustrating mystery in an existential plight. As much as I feel Safe‘s energy is zapped by its New Age cult criticism focus in its third act, I very much respect Haynes for offering Moore that platform, as well as the ways he managed to turn modern life & paranoia over health into Sirk-tinged horror in earlier sequences. Safe is far from the perfected Haynes heights of its follow-up, Velvet Goldmine, but it’s still memorably menacing all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Born in Flames (1983)

September 29, 2017 / swampflix / 11 Comments

Part of the thrill of immersing yourself in a lot of low-fi genre films & amateurish schlock is in watching outsider artists break the rules of traditional filmmaking, whether or not they know those rules exist. There’s a D.I.Y. punk ethos to B-movies & micro-budget productions that allow for wilder & more varied creative choices than professional studio filmmaking permits. Even within that paradigm, Lizzie Borden’s 1983 feminist sci-fi cheapie Born in Flames is a total anomaly. Although it visually recalls the cheap, amateur ugliness of a grindhouse horror film or a Doris Wishman sex romp, Born in Flames is directly opposed to exploitation both as an artform and as a philosophy. It’s an angry, ramshackle work of radical politics that transcends its jumbled narrative & the typical limitations of its micro-budget sci-fi genre to deliver a clear, unmistakable message: “All oppressed people have a right to violence” and revolution can only be achieved through solidarity. I’ve seen more low-fi, rough-around-the-edges 80s genre films in my life than I’ll ever be able to remember, but I doubt I’ve ever seen one half as politically pointed and culturally essential as this feminist punk milestone.

Set ten years after an American Socialist revolution, Born in Flames follows several factions of NYC women at unrest with their country’s supposed political utopia. Adopting the academic distance of a documentary, the film depicts the deficiencies in the nation’s self-congratulatory political “progress” by showing that it most benefits straight, white men. “The World’s First True Socialist Democracy” still ignores intersectional issues of racial injustice, unequal pay, sexual harassment, and queer identity bias that marginalize the women at its fringes. Several unassociated resistance groups rise up in this crisis, all dedicated to the same goals of radicalized feminist politics, but in disagreement on the tactics necessary to achieve them. With the revolutionary broadcasts of two rival pirate radio stations serving as a mouthpiece for the cause and relentless montages set to repetitions of a titular post-punk song by the band Red Krayola providing a visual representation of progress, the movie gradually makes a unified front against systemic oppression out of the chaos of unrest. Its disjointed narrative style mirrors the unorganized radical politics of its subjects until their collective mission & the moral lesson of the central story become clear, focused, and weaponized. Born in Flames is above all else a film about political organization, a topic that’s only enhanced & deepened by the outsider art aesthetic of its means.

What’s even more exciting than the film’s visual & narrative punk energy is how prescient its politics are. On one level, Born in Flames actually functions as a genuine documentary of what NYC women’s lives looked like in the early 1980s, especially in detailing images of what was then considered “women’s work”: cleaning house, feeding babies, working on a factory line, applying condoms to romantic partners– all underpaid, undervalued labor. More astonishingly, the film distinctly predicts what political unrest looks & sounds like in the 2010s. Women on bikes band together to break up public harassment & sexual assault in radical acts of vigilante justice, only to be labeled as “gangs” & “terrorists” by the press (a narrative echoed in last year’s real life documentary Ovarian Psycos). Intersectionality-minded jabs at the shortcomings of “white feminism” mirror much of the political conversation that surrounded this year’s historic Women’s March, including footage that could easily have been captured at that event with just the right Instagram filter. White men buck against the rise of oppressed voices, claiming that they’re the true victims in all this, recalling “Not All Men” & “All Lives Matter” retorts that relentlessly derail recent, legitimate protests. Mysterious deaths in police custody, public shaming of unprosecuted rapists, arguments between peacefully working within the system for progress or violently toppling it: so much of Born in Flames‘s political DNA rings true to the exact, unsettled moment in time we’re struggling through right now. The only real difference is that the soundtrack features “New Town” by The Slits instead of a rallying cry from Kendrick Lamar.

Born in Flames excels as a document of its time in D.I.Y. filmmaking & radical politics and as an eternally fresh call to arms for oppressed women in a Western society that tells them they should be content with whatever slight progress has already been made. Its tactics of radicalized recruitment & resistance feel as current to the times as ever, yet its visual documentation of black lesbian punks running the streets of NYC distinctly belong to an long gone, idealized past. The way this refusal to accept the system as it is bleeds over to the conventions of cinematic storytelling is downright infectious. This is a rare film with form just as authentically punk as its content, a combination that miraculously amounts to a radical politics powder keg instead of incoherent, unfocused anger. Much like the women who populate its not-so-futuristic political dystopia, Born in Flames starts off disorganized in its intent & tactics, but eventually coalesces into a formidable political force that threatens to topple the long-standing systems that serve as its oppressors, whether that be by-the-rules filmmaking or centuries of patriarchy.

-Brandon Ledet

A Dirty Shame (2004)

September 28, 2017September 28, 2017 / swampflix / 5 Comments

As loudly & proudly as I’ll proclaim John Waters the greatest filmmaker/artist/human being of all time now, he was even more important to me when I was an ornery high school student in the early 00s. I owe the entirety of my sense of humor, camp, and love of “bad” movies to teenage introductions to works like Pink Flamingos & Serial Mom, which shook me out of my nü metal shithead phase into something much sillier. That’s why it was a huge deal when Waters released a new film in theaters the summer after I graduated. A Dirty Shame was a return to form for Waters, whose previous two efforts, Pecker & Cecil B. Demented, were a little too mired in arts world self reflection & nü metal era creative doldrums to match the singular eccentricity of his earlier works. With A Dirty Shame, The Pope of Trash figured out how to re-energize his voice in a cinematic climate where once taboo, over-the-top gross-out comedies had become the norm, thanks to success stories like The Farrelly Brothers & the Jackass crew. He did so by returning to the sex-obsessed comedies of his youth and the suburban-invasion narratives of his mid-career mainstream successes like Hairspray & Polyester, crafting a kind of career-retrospective overview of his cinematic aesthetic. A Dirty Shame has only become more valuable over time for that redemptive act of career-spanning review & revitalization, if not only because it might very well be the last film Waters even directs.

Tracey Ullman stars as prudish Baltimore housewife Sylvia Stickles, whose calm suburban neighborhood, her daughter included, is seemingly being taken over by horned-up “sex addicts.” As more & more fetishists appear out of thin air and even the squirrels & shrubbery in her neighborhood begin to titter with teenage-level horniness, taunting her and other “neuters” with lewd acts, this phenomenon appears to be a supernatural event. It turns out to be more than supernatural; it’s divine. Johnny Knoxville soon appears as a Christ-like, miracle-performing figurehead with a devoted, DTF cult of apostles behind him, turning A Dirty Shame into a religious allegory so blatant & over-the-top it would make Aronofsky blush. Sylvia Stickles joins their ranks when she’s struck with a freak accident concussion that leads to a kind of religious epiphany . . . in her clitoris. Along with her fellow concussion-survivors/fetishists, she becomes a devotee to the Second Cumming as a self-identified “cunnilingus bottom,” waging war on the Neuters of her neighborhood & going on a religious pilgrimage to discover “a brand new sex act,” which is feared to be a myth. As the apostles barrel closer to the promised Resurrsexion, their horniness devolves from combative exhibitionism to zombie-level mayhem & sexual terror. Waters builds the cartoonishness of this societal meltdown to a point where it has to accommodate David Hasselhoff’s frozen feces, CGI squirrels headbutting each other in ecstasy, corpses rising from the dead, and a star-filled sky slathered in divine semen in its (literal) climax. It’s even sillier than it sounds.

Of course, like all John Waters films, A Dirty Shame survives more on the outrageous moments of individual flourishes than it does on strength of its plot. Outside a couple shots of flaccid dicks, the film does nothing especially vulgar to earn its NC-17 rating. In fact, it’s arguably a fairly tame entry into the modern sex comedy canon. It is irreverently aggressive in its sex positivity, though, stocking its legion of horned-up side characters with bears, sploshers, rimmers, adult babies, masturbation addicts, and a go-go dancing Selma Blair with Russ Meyer-proportioned CGI tits. Character names like Ursula Udders, Roddy the Rimmer, and Fat Fuck Frank mingle with intentionally shoddy CGI and intensely punny one-liners like “I’m Viagravated and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” to establish joke-a-second ZAZ rhythms that call back to the playful energy of Waters’s early, Dreamlanders era. The only real difference is that the film is more dedicated to silliness than shock value and outside of appearances from longtime collaborators Mink Stole & Patty Hearst, most of the traditional Waters crew has been replaced with the likes of Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, and Tracey Ullman (who’s essentially doing her best Amy Sedaris in the role). Waters even advances his visual aesthetic here, integrating a lyrical use of Ed Wood-esque B-movie ephemera to visualize the film’s horned-up concussion sequences and fully embracing the drive-in horror movie trappings those concussed transformations imply.

Waters has long been teasing the production of a queer-themed Christmas comedy titled Fruitcake. As the years roll on and his struggle to secure the full funding he desires for the project stagnates, it seems increasingly likely that A Dirty Shame will be his final feature as a director. Of course, I’d love to see Fruitcake completed & distributed to as wide of an audience as possible; every Waters film I’ve ever seen in the theater (I’m up to eight now!) always plays better with a crowd. I’ve come to peace with the likelihood that A Dirty Shame will be his final filmmaking triumph, however. It’s a fittingly enthusiastic swan song that encapsulates both the wildly idiosyncratic energy a young & angry Waters gifted the world and the mainstream raunch comedy aesthetic he inadvertently pioneered. At the very least, it saved him from concluding his catalog on the downbeat of his creative lowpoint, the two late 90s arts scene comedies that preceded it. A Dirty Shame brought Waters back to sex cinema as an elder statesman of Filth. We we’re lucky to have seen him shine in all his smutty glory one final time, even if his sense of shock value had become an unlikely kind of cultural norm.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 35: Royal Wedding (1951)

September 27, 2017September 28, 2017 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Royal Wedding (1951) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 158 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement.” One of his examples includes “when Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling.”

What Ebert had to say in his review(s): Ebert never officially reviewed Royal Wedding, but in a 1997 “Movie Answer Man” column he did address a series of Dirt Devil television commercials that appropriated imagery from the movie to sell vacuum cleaners. He complains, “Special effects were used to remove Astaire from Royal Wedding (1951), where he danced with a coat rack, and insert him in a TV commercial, where he danced with a Broom Vac. Rights to use Astaire’s image were sold by his estate. I was reminded that when the late Ginger Rogers was honored at the Kennedy Center, Astaire’s widow refused permission to use any clips of Astaire in the tribute. What would Astaire have thought about those two decisions? A man who could dance on the ceiling would have no difficulty spinning in his grave.”

It’s embarrassing to admit, but the earliest memory I have of watching Fred Astaire dance onscreen was in a series of television commercials from the 1990s, where his image was posthumously altered to advertise Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners. As a child, watching Old Hollywood footage of a man dancing on the ceiling was a potently memorable novelty even with the vacuum cleaner added in, but I assume that same novelty was horrifying for older folks. Evoking one of the world’s most beloved movie stars to peddle digitally-inserted, CGI vacuums was a boldly blasphemous choice from Dirt Devil’s advertising team that I’m sure earned the company at least a decade of cultural side eye. The ugly truth about this transgression, however, is that the ground they were trampling on was far from hallowed. I have since learn to respect Mr. Astaire tremendously for the “Fred & Ginger” musicals he churned out with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, but, as it turns out, the time the legend danced on the ceiling was far from his creative pinnacle. The majority of Dirt Devil’s digitally-altered Fred Astaire footage pulled from the 1951 musical comedy Royal Wedding. Featuring a . . . seasoned Astaire, the film is at best an entertaining mediocrity, not at all a sacred cow to be protected from the dirty hands of 15-second Superbowl ads.

Fred Astaire & Jane Powell star as a sibling dance team who’re invited across the pond to perform for British royalty at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth & Prince Philip. Besides the complications of maintaining their various bachelor life romances in the pair’s travels to this historic event, Royal Wedding doesn’t have much of a plot beyond that basic premise. Loosely based on Astaire’s relationship with his real life dance partner (and real life sister) Adele Astaire, the film has a kind of rambling, anecdotal quality to it. The dramatic scenes connecting its dance numbers feel like a total waste of time outside providing Jane Powell an excuse to make 10,000 costume changes & proving to the audience that the siblings are not engaged in an incestuous romance. From scene one, it’s uncomfortable that the pair are so closely related, since their dance routines often require them to intimately woo each other with nonverbal body language. The opening dance number, for instance, features Astaire as an idle king ogling Powell as the maid, who tidies up his chamber while flirtatiously revealing her frilly underwear. They eventually dance together in a traditional romantic waltz, only for their sibling relationship to be revealed to the audience as soon as the number is through. To overcompensate for this awkward reveal, Royal Wedding immediately makes it apparent that the two dancers are fucking everyone in the world but each other and most of the movie concerns them juggling potential love interests between dance routines.

As lifeless & belabored as Royal Wedding feels as a 90min comedy, it functions fairly well as an excuse to feature Fred Astaire’s signature footwork. As sullied in the Dirt Devil ads, Astaire dances on the ceiling in one number, Jamiroquai style, as the room rotates but the camera remains fixed. In another sequence, a real life incident of a Fred & Adelle Astaire performance on a cruise ship is recreated with a tilting floor in turbulent waters– the dancers, audience, furniture, and loose objects sliding around the room during the routine as the ship tilts side to side. Astaire also proves he can entertain without those fancy movie magic shenanigans, wowing the audience by performing with a lifeless coat rack for a dance partner (later to be digitally replaced with a much more lively vacuum cleaner). My favorite routine in the film is a vaudeville throwback that “comically” features domestic abuse among impoverished scum. Titled “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life?,” the song features the longest title in any MGM musical and has nothing to do with the plot, but does have a dangerous-feeling mean streak to its scrappiness that I found oddly endearing.

Any of Royal Wedding’s individual dance numbers could be worth seeking out in isolation, especially the ones that have Astaire perform metaphysical, gravity-defying wonders. However, their cumulative effect is only moderately pleasant. I’m not saying it’s right for giant companies to retroactively employ dead movie stars to shill for their products as if we were living in some real world bastardization of The Congress (spoiler: we are). I’m just glad that if Dirt Devil was going to tarnish the memory of a classic MGM musical, at least they picked one that’s so mediocre as an overall product. For every few seconds of Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding, there’s endless minutes of his character rhythmically rubbing bodies with his sister & wasting time between gigs. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Royal Wedding‘s good name is more tarnished by its incestuous body language and total narrative lack of creative energy than it is by digitally-inserted vacuum cleaners. The only reason the movie is at all entertaining is because Astaire really is that great of a dancer.

Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating (3/5, 60%)

Next Lesson: True Grit (1969)

-Brandon Ledet

Love It or Hate It, mother! (2017) is the Most Important Major Studio Release of the Year

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 / swampflix / 24 Comments

Darren Aronofsky’s latest go-for-broke provocation, mother!, has already been in wide release for two full weekends, an eternity in the context of internet time. Its already slight box office returns are dwindling; the hot takes have cooled; film culture is desperate to move onto discussing the next big budget comic book adaptation or (I’m not kidding) half-a-year-early rounds of Oscar predictions, already framing mother! discussions in the rearview. It’s been a fun couple of weeks of wildly varied reactions to this aggressively divided work, though. From the rapturous praise to the horror stories of angry, vocal walkouts during the film’s violently bonkers third act, mother! demands discussion & analysis in the way crowdpleaser comedies, superhero action epics, and computer-animated cartoons about talking animals typically don’t. Even the Swampflix crew is harshly divided on mother!‘s merits as a feature film. It’s one of my favorite new releases I’ve seen all year, but Boomer was much less impressed when he reviewed it last week, writing “It aims for the moon and misses, but it doesn’t land among the stars; it plummets back to earth as a fiery wreck, breaking up in the atmosphere and never again reaching the grounding of earth.” However, the important part of that divide is not whether we were individually positive on the film’s handling of its Biblical & environmentalist allegories or the way it makes deliberately unpleasant choices in its sound design & cinematography to get them across. The important thing is recognizing the significance of that “aim for the moon” ambition in the 2010s Hollywood filmmaking landscape. mother! may ultimately make more enemies than it does dollars during its theatrical run, but it’s the most important Major Studio release of 2017 for its ambition alone.

As Boomer wrote, “Good or bad, this one’s going to be on my mind for a while to come.” That kind of stick-with-you effect is invaluable in our disposable media landscape, which is essentially dominated by Superhero of the Week action spectacle & streaming platform “content” binging. Personally, I was much more unambiguously positive on my experience with mother! than Boomer, but just as mentally preoccupied with how it lingered with me after I left the theater. I spent most of my day after watching the film reading over every scrap of impassioned analysis I could find, positive & negative, and was happy to discover that most of the ways I had engaged with the film were already represented in the cultural conversation. I’m of the firm opinion that subtlety is highly overvalued in modern criticism, so I’m tickled that the film is fully committed to its crash course on the entirety of the Bible and (intended or not) Aronofsky’s self-flagellation over the Artist-Muse power dynamics of his own romantic partnerships, a pitch black act of self-analysis that paints the Artist type as much more of a monster than the divine role of the Biblical analogy. I’m also a huge sucker for what I call the “Party Out of Bounds” narrative, where house guests & partygoers are supernaturally compelled to remain in an obviously toxic social environment when it’s clear from frame one that they should leave immediately. On top of his indulgence in religious, environmental, and uncomfortably personal allegories, Aronofsky also uses mother! to experiment with traditional stage play surrealism. Recalling the artificial environments & darkly funny social horrors of surrealist masters like Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Luis Buñuel, mother! is on a very basic level a surreally menacing comedy about the horror of having guests over who will not leave, a sentiment I identify with more than I likely should admit. The exciting thing is that all of these tactics & influences have been constantly picked at like scabs over the last two weeks of cultural conversation, along with feminist readings of how its narrative mirrors classic texts like Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and real life horrors like the public’s gendered abuse of Jennifer Lawrence when her nude photos leaked without her consent in 2014. The only person out there limiting the endless possible discussions of mother!’s themes & means is the one person no one should have ever asked: Darren Aronofsky.

For some ungodly reason, several interviewers have asked Aronofsky to explain the (aggressively unsubtle, already blatant) Biblical & environmentalist allegories that drive the film’s lyrical sense of narrative. It was idiotic for him to oblige. I can see how after a week of befuddled theater walkouts & wildly mixed reviews, he’d be tempted to explain himself for those confused or angered by the film, but mother! works so much better as conversation starter without the guiding hand of its creator. Following a summer where many films have (supposedly) financially died by the hands of low scores from critical aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, movie studios have been very itchy over negative criticism. Low percentages on the dreaded Tomatometer have been a hot topic for studios desperate to explain why “sure thing” releases like Baywatch & The Dark Tower died on the vine (despite, you know, the fact that they looked awful before they were ever reviewed), but what hasn’t been fully dealt with yet is how a high Tomatometer score isn’t necessarily a sign of quality or substance either. Safe, crowdpleasing films from the MCU, Star Wars, and their Disney-adjacent ilk are much likelier to secure a high Tomatometer score than an ambitious, divisive film that splits critics. We need to put more of an emphasis on celebrating aggressive artistic visions that divide opinion and spark contentious conversation. mother!‘s 61% on the Tomatometer means so much more to me than a 90+% approval for safer bet releases like The Big Sick or Spider-Man: Homecoming (both of which we also reviewed positively, mind you). Just because 98% of critics had some degree of a positive reaction to Kumail Nanjiani’s heartfelt, post-Apatow romcom doesn’t mean the film has lingered in their minds the way mother!’s “aim for the moon” ambitions will. Aronofsky would benefit greatly from abstaining from damage control interviews on that critical divisiveness, encouraging people to remain split on his thematic intent & aggressive filmmaking craft. mother!‘s middling Tomatometer score should be a badge of honor for the director, even more so than its already infamous F CinemaScore (which it shares with similarly genius works like The Box & Bug).

mother!‘s thematic complexity, critical divisiveness, and conversation-sparking ambition make it an exciting work to engage with, but they aren’t the reason why the film is culturally important. There were plenty of films released domestically this year I would categorize as just as ambitious & thematically rich as Aronofsky’s work: We Are the Flesh, The Lure, Your Name., Good Time, Get Out, Raw, Kuso, etc. What makes Aronofsky’s film important in the context of these admirable go-for-broke works is that it was released & supported by a Major Hollywood Studio. In fact, Paramount Pictures has been infinitely better than Aronofsky himself in handling the negative press over the anger & confusion his film has inspired. In addition to prominently quoting the negative reviews in its advertising, they’ve issued the following statement: “This movie is very audacious and brave. You are talking about a director at the top of his game and an actress at the top of her game. They made a movie that was intended to be bold. […] We don’t want all movies to be safe. And it’s okay if some people don’t like it.” Fuck yeah. In the current cinematic climate, there aren’t nearly enough major player Hollywood studios taking chances like this. Young, promising directors are being snatched up for movie-by-committee superhero pictures before they’re even given a chance to find their own voice (a fate Aronofsky narrowly escaped himself). The most invincibly successful film franchise in the world, Star Wars, is afraid to take risks with directors like Phil Lord & Chris Miller, replacing them with well-behaved, personality-free workmen like Ron Howard at the last possible minute (when that’s who they should have hired in the first place if they just wanted more of the same). Nearly every major release feels like it’s tied to a pre-existing property with a built-in audience, banking on familiarity to coast by as a mild delight. Paramount’s defiant embrace of mother!‘s critical & financial doom is a huge deal. It’s difficult to imagine, for instance, Kubrick films like The Shining & 2001: A Space Odyssey (which were heatedly divisive in their time as well) being released in our current don’t-rock-the-boat climate where every movie has to sell billions worldwide & please 90% of its audience to be considered a success. Paramount daring to release mother! in its current, artistically unmitigated form to such a wide audience and then standing by that decision in the face of critical backlash is a modern movie industry miracle.

Last year, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise similarly applied Buñuelian sentiments to a “Party Out of Bounds” story turned apocalyptically violent in a blatant allegory about the evils of modern consumerism. It’s a great film and just as worthy of a descendant of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel as mother!, but it barely played in theaters before being quietly dumped on Netflix & promptly forgotten. By contrast, mother! is a tonally, visually, and thematically challenging work domestically released almost as wide as a typical by-the-books romcom or superhero action flick (which, again, we generally enjoy as well). That’s an increasingly rare occurrence in the 2010s. Whether you’re as enraptured with its audacity as I am or as conflicted over its allegorical buffoonery as Boomer was, you have to recognize mother!‘s value as a Major Studio risk. I sadly doubt it will change the industry in any significant way, but it’s still a damn important agenda statement from a Major Studio system player, who somehow handled this false crisis of critical division even better than the artist they were supporting.

-Brandon Ledet

Schizopolis (1996) Goes Hollywood: Full Frontal (2002)

September 25, 2017 / swampflix / 3 Comments

When Steven Soderbergh filmed the largely improvised, aggressively irreverent Schizopolis in the mid-90s, he seemed to be deliberately disrupting the flow of his career. After a few consecutive big budget duds failed in wide release, the director returned to the themes & means of his popular debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, with the intent of burning them to the ground & shaking himself out of a creative rut. Soderbergh’s one-for-me-one-for-them creative pattern never felt as drastic as when he filmed Schizopolis, which was seemingly made with an audience of one in mind: Steven Soderbergh. The trick worked. The next stretch of the director’s career brought on a string of mainstream successes that made him a formidable creative force within the Hollywood system, instead of a one hit wonder in the 90s indie cinema boom he helped spark. Even success has a kind of complacency to it that begs disruption, however, and early in the 00s Soderbergh returned to the cerebral irreverence of Schizopolis to shake himself out of the comfort of Hollywood System filmmaking.

Following on the heels of major financial successes Traffic & Erin Brockovich, the Hollywood-insider comedy Full Frontal returned to the low-fi absurdism & disjointed structure Soderbergh gleefully turned into a Looney Tunes farce in Schizopolis. Full Frontal is a little less aggressive in its sense of silliness than that 90s work, but is just as prone to jarring non sequiturs, unexplained shifts in form & reality, and playful experimentation with improv. Shot in less than a month on intentionally low quality digital video, the film was called out by contemporary critics for being confusing & visually amateurish, as if those effects weren’t deliberate. For at least the second time in his career, Soderbergh was consciously working in low-fi, anarchic modes of expression to break away from a creative comfort zone that threatened to dull his output. The only difference, really, was that Schizopolis featured mostly non-professional actors (including Soderbergh himself & his real-life ex-wife Betsy Brantley), running amok in the Baton Rouge suburbs, while Full Frontal heavily relies on a vapid Los Angeles movie industry playground for its own hijinks, including public persona-subverting turns from Major Movie Stars like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, David Fincher, David Duchovny, etc.

Full Frontal vaguely tackes the shape of many 00s indies with large casts. A collection group of characters weave in & out of each other’s lives in a loose, everything-is-connected narrative over the course of a single day. Actors, producers, public relations drones, playwrights, and every other brand of LA industry type you can imagine entangle and drift apart in various combinations in the day leading up to a mutual friend’s birthday celebration. Occasionally, Julia Roberts poking fun at her America’s Sweetheart™ persona or Catherine Keener asking nonsensical, stream of conscious questions to her employees in layoff interviews will steal the show, but the movie is ultimately more concerned with form than it is with performance. Jarring shifts in visual quality & location of setting will intentionally disorient the audience, especially as (borrowing a page from Sex, Lies, and Videotape) the audio drifts out of sync from the image presented, to a dissociative effect. Sex is blurred & obscured from the camera. Movie within a movie layering & voice-over interviews deliberately confuse what’s “real” within the narrative. Character introductions are presented in headshots before the opening credits (which are actually credits for a non-existent movie Rendezvous) as if they were a playbill in motion. Much like Schizopolis, Full Frontal feels like a filmmaker playing with the basic tools of his craft to reach for freshly innovative effects he could not achieve in the more well-behaved works that preceded it.

There are plenty visual & thematic details connecting Full Frontal & Schizopolis if you intentionally keep an eye out for them. Catherine Keener’s slow-motion romantic breakup with David Hyde Pierce certainly echoes the domestic fallings out between Soderbergh & Bentley’s various doppelgängers in the earlier work. The reality-breaking interview tangents, the drab office place settings (including scenes set in workplace men’s rooms), and Soderbergh’s choice to appear in front of the camera (this time with a blurred-out face, as if he were an episode of Cops) are just a few blatant connectors that run as parallels between the two films. What’s more important is the way the films use an improv-style spontenaity to make the audience feel as if anything could happen. In Full Frontal, a nameless neighbor is shown performing simple domestic chores in a full Dracula costume; an unnamed man crawls across a hotel hallway on all fours in his underwear, unacknowledged; an actor with a Hitler mustache sings the theme song to Cops in a makeup mirror (there’s that show again). This spontenaity revitalizes Soderbergh as a filmmaker, a creator. Instead of shaking up the romantic ennuii of Baton Rouge suburbanites, it disrupts the business-as-usual mundanity of Hollywood’s sycophantic starfuckers & namedroppers, but the intent remains the same even in the transported setting. Unfortunately, these films also share the burden of being overlooked & undervalued for the deftly absurd ways they reshaped & untidied Soderbergh’s career as it evolved into Hollywood-insider status. They’re two of his best films, yet somehow two of his least loved.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this comparison of its romantic doppelgänger crisis to the similar themes of Anomalisa (2015 ), and last week’s look at how it violently subverted the director’s hit debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989).

-Brandon Ledet

Nobody Knows (2004)

September 24, 2017 / swampflix / 10 Comments

Authentic child actor performances are as difficult to capture on film as it is to build a feature around the uncooperative selfishness of animals. The 2004 Japanese drama Nobody Knows deserves just as much credit for wrangling its incredibly young & convincingly genuine cast of performers as this year’s Kedi does for somehow constructing a narrative around the daily lives of Turkish street cats. Much of that achievement is attributable to director Hirokazu Koreeda’s dedication to a documentary-style verisimilitude while filming his insular cast of young, nonprofessional performers. With a narrative modeled after real life child abandonment cases of the 1980s, Nobody Knows focuses almost entirely on juvenile characters left to fend for themselves with few resources & few interactions with adults. After fifteen years of planning & revision, the story of four young siblings was shot in sequence over the course of a year, mostly held to the confines of single, three room apartment. Most recent stories about this kind of juvenile confinement — Room, Brigsby Bear, The Wolfpack, etc. — adopt the lyricism of a child’s imagination, but Nobody Knows values honesty over style. With very little score and largely improvised performances captured through obscured cameras, the film mostly concerns itself with watching its four central characters grow one year older in an enclosed, unsupervised space without the structure or discipline of adult influence. While sometimes exhaustingly quiet & unrushed, it’s a fascinating achievement in form & authenticity.

A young, single mother smuggles her four children into a three room apartment, claiming to her new landlord that her oldest son is her only child. As the rest of her kids emerge from their transporting suitcases, which they then use like furniture, you get the sense that there’s a nomadic routine to this ritual. She reminds them of the ground rules: remain quiet & stay indoors. Only the oldest boy, Akira, is allowed to venture outside so that he can collect groceries & other supplies while she’s out at work (and at play). The oldest kids’ responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, clothing, and homeschooling their younger siblings to maintain this off-the-books home is a heavy, adult set of obligations. Selfishly, the mother drinks out on the town and acts like an irresponsible child while they shoulder this weight. While she leaves the apartment to pursue external pleasures, we’re left holding our breath for how long she’ll be gone and the kids will be solely responsible for maintaining order within the home & keeping the family intact, out of the destructive hands of child protective services. Her absences are erratic, sometimes lasting a workday, sometimes lasting months, with little thought given to the money & supplies she’s budgeted the children with in her wake. The majority of the narrative unfolds in what feels like a year-long stretch of the mother’s absence, with no sign of return. The kids’ hair grows longer; dishes & garbage pile up; the utilities are cut; home-cooked meals backside into instant ramen & chewed paper. We see the truth of what children are capable of accomplishing when left on their own without a caring adult, a reality that can be both beautiful & tragic as the circumstances become more drastically isolating.

At 140 minutes of solemn reflection on the resilience of abused & abandoned children, Nobody Knows can be a little trying in its commitment to verisimilitude. Watching the kids’ state gradually devolve into disorder as they visibly age in front of the camera is fascinating as an artistic experiment, but maybe a little too academically thorough & a little too subdued for its own good as a feature film. Some of the film’s best moments come when this natural atmosphere is broken up by the kids finding joy in the transgression of venturing outdoors or innocently debating whether pop culture creations like zombies, UFOs, and Totoro are “really, really real.” That joyful release may not have meant as much without the solemn isolation that engulfs it, but I still found myself wishing certain sequences were trimmed in the editing room for the sake of practicality. I can see how after nearly two decades of work on a film with reflections of real life parenting horrors in its DNA, Hirokazu Koreeda may have been reluctant to lose any more of his footage to edits than he already did. Even when its merits as fictional entertainment are sacrificed to the authenticity of documentation of real life trauma, Nobody Knows still shines as a technical achievement in cinematic honesty. You’re not likely to see onscreen performances from children this genuine and this consistent in quality in any other feature, which alone makes the film a significant work. Knowing that there’s a reality to their year-long trial in isolation only makes those performances more hauntingly effective. Hirokazu Koreeda was likely smart for sticking to that honesty over the traditional entertainment value I personally longed for.

-Brandon Ledet

Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (2000)

September 23, 2017September 25, 2017 / swampflix / 2 Comments

As a film series, Pokémon does little to bring outsiders into the fold, assuming all of the clueless parents & professional critics dragged into seeing its individual movies in isolation are familiar with the full canon of its various television series, trading cards, Nintendo games, manga, and so on. There’s a huge time jump in adventures between the first Pokémon film, Mewtwo Strikes Back, and this follow-up, Pokémon: The Movie 2000, that’s even more confusing than the jumbled inconsistencies in their titles. In the Missing Adventures between these two titles, gaps presumably filled by the televised anime series, our hero Ash has acquired far more pokémon & travel partners we don’t have any time to meet before the new plot kicks in. His worried mother is apparently now in the picture as well and the animation style has evolved to include more aid from CGI. The series’ dedication to a Just Another Adventure ethos is entirely baffling to those on the outside looking in and is doing me no favors as I attempt to get acclimated to its pocket monster-infested universe, but I’m sure 90s Kids™ who regularly watched the television show were stoked to see an extended episode of something they loved dearly projected large & loud with the reverence of a summertime blockbuster.

The plot in this uninclusive sequel concerns a wealthy pokémon collector who disrupts the balance of Nature when he starts hunting rare, big game pokétypes. After overreaching narration explains that fire, ice, and lightning are the elements that control the ocean (huh?!) the villainous collector is shown catching the corresponding pokémon that command those elements from their posts in a very specific set of small islands (Lugia, Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, all of which had significance in a recent rollout within the Pokémon Go game). Ash & his pokébuds happen to arrive on those same islands (the chances!), where they’re greeted by Princess Mononoke-style tribes who speak of a Chosen One (Ash, duh) who can restore order to their realm. With the help of a Team Rocket face turn and hoards of wild, free range pokémon who show up just to pitch in (due to being more in tune with the ebb & flow of Nature than humans, of course), Ash is able to fulfill his Destiny and free the captured pokémon to restore their balance of power over the islands and the oceans that house them. This isn’t as exciting of an obstacle as the mutated Mewtwo plot of the first film, but the evil collector & his sky ship poképrison do help establish an interesting pattern. In the first installment, a climactic fight between a stadium full of pokémon and their corresponding clones was met with a pacifist message about how violence is entirely senseless, despite “battling” being an essential aspect of pokémon culture. In Pokémon: The Movie 2000, the main evil is an act of selfish collecting of pokémon, despite “catching them all” being so essential to the series that it’s the hook of its theme song. My best guess is that the next film in the series will focus on the inherent evils of one of three possible topics: miniature monsters, naming kids Ash, or animated children’s media.

As with the first film, the pleasures & rewards of Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (or, in its more literal translation, Pocket Monsters The Movie: The Phantom Pokémon – Lugia’s Explosive Birth) are constant, but moderate. I was once again won over by the earnestness of the film’s music, especially in the opening banger “We All Live in a Pokémon World” (which includes a pokémon-themed rap breakdown) and the closing Donna Summer ballad “The Power of One,” which has since gained fame from being quoted at multiple Herman Cain political speeches (under the guise “A poet once said . . .”). Although both movies are mired in their mundane obsession over bad weather conditions disrupting travel, the sequel does make strides to develop some of its central relationships in a way that suggests narrative progress. The most prominent female character in particular, Misty, is constantly needled about her unspoken romantic feelings for Ash, much to her embarrassment. More importantly, Team Rocket is given plenty to do despite not being the central baddies. Not only do they have a role in saving the day, but Jesse & James are allowed throwaway lines about their not-so-secretly queer identities (referring to relationships with the opposite sex as “trouble”) and meta commentary about the ridiculousness of their even being a Pokémon movie: “Prepare for more trouble than you’ve ever seen. And make it double, we’re on the big screen!” The only thing this pokésequel can offer audiences is more of the same, but since “the same” is so (moderately) pleasant, that’s not so bad of a proposition.

I did walk away from Pokémon: The Movie 2000 with a new theory as to why these films were so hated by critics, however. I wasn’t previously aware that theatrical versions of these films were each proceeded by inane short films featuring fan favorite pokémon, the adorable electric rodent Pikachu. In these 20min shorts, Pikachu and other pokémon get into brightly colored hijinks with little human interference to break up their gibberish repetitions of their own names on loop (as is the pokéway). I can see how getting through one of these introductions, which play like an anime version of Teletubbies, would sour critics & parents on then following up the experience with an 80 minute adventure film that makes no effort to reach out to the uninformed. The Pikachu shorts that accompany the Pokémon movies are undeniably cute, but they likely didn’t help an already perplexed audience get in the proper, receptive mood.

-Brandon Ledet

Beach Rats (2017)

September 22, 2017 / swampflix / 4 Comments

When I was first saw trailers for the Best Picture Winner™ Moonlight last year, I was a little worried that the film was going to be yet another tragically queer coming of age story where a young, closeted protagonist struggles to be their true selves in an unforgiving world determined to propel them to an inevitably violent end. There’s certainly a real world validity to that narrative, but after decades of nearly every major instance of queer representation onscreen following that exact pattern, it’s becoming depressingly limiting to what queer cinema can accomplish as an artform. Thankfully, Moonlight sidestepped most of the Queer Tragedy pitfalls that dull many of its genre peers to deliver something much more transcendently tender & delicately beautiful. The film Beach Rats, which was developed simultaneously at an artist’s retreat with Moonlight by writer-director Eliza Hittman, was much less nimble. Beach Rats is a hyper-specific, wonderfully realized character study about a young queer man navigating the ultra macho beach bro culture that dominates his Brooklyn-based peer group. Its visual language, particularly in its focus on the movement & positioning of bodies, is impressively, subliminally effective. Unfortunately, the film is also stubbornly stuck in an Indie 90s mindset in its estimation of a queer cinema narrative, dimming its idiosyncratic delights in visually detailed culture-gazing to amount to something unnecessarily familiar.

British newcomer Harris Dickinson stars as the confused Brooklynite Frankie (much like how Australian actor Danielle Macdonald recently disappeared into a Jersey Girl persona in Patti Cake$). Pocketing the oxycotin prescribed to his cancer-ridden father, struggling to relate to his grieving mother & sister, and doing his best not to stand out among the Jersey Shore bros that populate his Brooklyn neighborhood, Frankie is unsure how to integrate his sexual interest in the (much) older men he flirts with online into his traditionally macho public persona. He attempts to maintain a romantic relationship with a girl he meets on the boardwalk and claims to the men he begins to hook up with, “I don’t really know what I like,” but his sexual intetests never seem to be in question. It’s clear to the audience (and likely to Frankie) what genuinely turns him on. Excuses why he can’t emotionally or sexually commit to the young woman who’s obviously into him range from having snorted too many pills, lack of condom access, and anxiety over his father’s health, but he seems to have no problem in getting revved up while cruising strange, older men in online chatrooms & on public beaches. As the pressure of maintaining his gym rat beach bro persona while pursuing these anonymous same sex hookups mounts, the movie barrels toward an inevitably dour conclusion that thankfully doesn’t reach for the horrifically violent tragedies typical to its ilk, but still feels overly familiar all the same.

As old hat as Beach Rats feels as a queer cinema narrative, the lived-in imagery of the world it captures feels both believably real & oddly beautiful. The amusement park & nightclub settings these beach bros invade when they’re not shirtlessly staring at the water are near-indistinguishable as neon-lit, electronica-soaked playgrounds, drawing an interesting thread in their continued adolescence even as they search for cheap, drug-fueled highs. The physical rituals of marijuana, handball, and masculine greetings are carefully detailed, especially in the fleeting moments when bodies are socially allowed to touch. While this is far from the explicit territory covered in Stranger by the Lake, Hittman’s eye for this physical communication is carried over to the mostly wordless hookups between queer men, with special attention paid to the strength in the subjects’ muscular hands & buttocks. In an erotic moment, the camera is drawn to the nearest crotch; when the tone turns violent, it lingers on the idle knuckles of potential abusers. This attention to physical detail is never as potent as when Frankie is posing for selfies while working out in his bedroom mirror, baseball cap carefully placed to obscure his face. The way the smartphone flash coldly reflects off greasy thumbprints on the glass is oddly beautiful as Frankie admires & advertises his own body. You can tell Hittman strived to capture a real world setting & culture in this imagery and her attention to its physical detail is what makes Beach Rats feel at all special or worthwhile.

Sometimes, devotion to real world detail is a detriment for the film’s purpose. The dedication to hiring non-professional actors to flesh out its cast feels authentic, but also a little flat. Beach Rats is entirely empathetic to the ultra macho gym bro culture it captures so well onscreen, without a trace of irony in its depiction, but it is a little difficult to suppress laughter while watching Frankie sad-vape or play sad-handball in the rain, as true to life as those images may be. However, that objective approach works well enough while keeping a knowing distance from acknowledging the correlation between Frankie’s thirst for older men & his father’s absence or the vulnerability of identifying as queer in a culture where, “When two girls make out it’s hot; when two guys make out it’s gay.” It’s monstrously unfair to compare Beach Rats & Moonlight solely due to the professional proximity of their creators & their respective depictions of beachside, same sex hookups, but Barry Jenkins’s successes really do exemplify where Hittman missteps. If Beach Rats shared Moonlight‘s narrative instinct in knowing where to pull away from real world tragedy to explore more rarely seen modes of queer representation, it could have been a modern masterwork. As is, it functions just fine as a culturally specific character study with an intense focus on the physicality of its subjects’ social rituals, from the blatantly erotic to the purely fraternal. It’s totally recommendable for those virtues alone, even if it falls short of the transcendent experience it could have been.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

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Halloween Report 2017: Best of the Swampflix Horror Tag

Safe (1995)

Born in Flames (1983)

A Dirty Shame (2004)

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 35: Royal Wedding (1951)

Love It or Hate It, mother! (2017) is the Most Important Major Studio Release of the Year

Schizopolis (1996) Goes Hollywood: Full Frontal (2002)

Nobody Knows (2004)

Pokémon: The Movie 2000 (2000)

Beach Rats (2017)