Three films into the Super Giant series I’m finally starting to feel a little fatigued. Atomic Rulers of the Worldwas a great introduction to the franchise, establishing the bizarre Superman knockoff Starman and placing him in the context of Cold War atomic paranoia. Invaders from Space kept Starman’s world fresh by pitting him against a ludicrous villain, the alien race of The Salamander Men of Planet Kuliman. Attack from Space is where the limitations of Super Giant, a made-for-Japanese-television miniseries that was chopped up & reassembled into four American features, really starts to show at the seams. There’s a sense of monotony & going through the motions in Attack from Space that even Starman, a spandex-clad space alien superhero & intergalactic cop, can’t overcome.
The main problem in Attack from Space is the lack of a compelling villain . The movie begins with the exact footage that begins every entry in the series: an Emerald Place space counsel deciding to prevent nuclear war on Earth by deploying Starman. From there, it’s the villains’ job to keep the to keep the formula interesting. Starman himself, however entertaining in concept, remains as rigidly unchanged as his introduction in each film. The villains of Attack from Space fail to carve out their own niche as a novel Starman foe, as they’re very much reminiscent of the nuclear arms dealers of the first entry in the franchise. The Sapphireans are the baddies du jour in this case, but for convenience’s sake, let’s just call them Space Nazis. They dress like Space Nazis; they salute like Space Nazis; I think even the movie itself has a hard time not referring to them as Space Nazis. There might have been a way to make this villain exciting if they stood out enough from the atomic gangsters of Atomic Rulers, but after the boundless absurdity of the Salamander Men of Planet Kuliman, they play as totally limp onscreen. The Space Nazis kidnap a scientist so he can point his dangerous satellites towards Earth or some scheme that’s just as vague & uninteresting, and the procedure of thwarting their evil Space Nazi deeds leaves little room for surprise & excitement.
There’s very little, if anything, on display in Attack from Space that you can’t see done better before or since in the Starman series, and the exercise ultimately feels pointless because of that lack of novelty. Although it aired in Japan after the broadcast of the titles that made up Invaders from Space (under its own original titles of The Artificial Satellite & the Destruction of Humanity and The Spaceship and the Clash of the Artificial Satellite), American producers placed it directly after the first film in the series, the one it most closely resembles. I think that was a massive mistake, as it would have signaled to me as an audience that Super Giant was a one trick pony. The film transports the atomic strife of Atomic Rulers into space, which makes room for some decent miniatures, explosions, rocket ship designs, and astronaut fashions. If those effects were smashed together with the novelty of Starman’s introduction in Atomic Rulers or with the space alien weirdos of Invaders from Space, it might have been enough for a worthwhile venture. As is, it feels like watching Space Nazis tread water for 70+ minutes in a punishing void of purpose.
Look, I’m solidly, repeatedly on record as being a fan of WWE’s recent team-ups with long-dead Hanna-Barbera properties. Two Scooby-Doo crossovers (WrestleMania Mystery& Curse of the Speed Demon) and one Flintstones detour (Stone Age SmackDown) into this newborn era of Hanna-Barbera pro wrestling cartoons, I haven’t had a single sour experience yet. The larger than life personalities of “WWE Superstars” entering the far-out worlds of Bedrock dinos, fake ghosts, monster trucks, and Scooby Snacks is a perfect fit, especially since WWE likes to maintain the illusion of producing PG content despite building its entire empire on “fantasy violence.” WWE’s fourth collaboration with Hanna-Barbera, while not my favorite crossover so far, is no different in the way it delivers the absurd, over the top fantasy violence goods in a cartoon setting. The Jetsons & WWE: Robo-WrestleMania is the first new Jetsons content produced in nearly three decades, a feature that might mark a lowpoint in terms of that property’s overall quality, but still had me giggly over the way it handles a very specific kind of larger than life absurdity that only a pro wrestling cartoon can deliver.
This is one of those situations where an IMDb plot synopsis is all the information you really need to know if you’d be interested: “A snowstorm freezes Big Show solid for decades. When he finally thaws out, Elroy and George help him build wrestle bots. When Big Show uses them to take over their city, the Jetsons go back in time to enlist help from WWE Superstars.” Well, technically, that synopsis isn’t exactly accurate. You see, The Big Show doesn’t build wrestle bots himself; he overtakes pre-existing robots with his wrestling prowess after discovering in horror that World Wrestling Entertainment has evolved into World Wrobot Entertainment (the second “w” is silent) while he was frozen, making his livelihood an obsolete practice. There’s a dual level of fantasy going on here: one where The Big Show is currently in contention to be the World Heavyweight Champion (those days are long gone) and one where WWE is still thriving 100 years in the future. Whatever automated dystopia pro wrestling slips into is likely imminent too, as the wrestling bots featured in the film are mechanical versions of current superstars: Robo-Roman Reigns, Robo-Seth Rollins, Robo-Dolph Ziggler, etc. I guess there’s a third level of fantasy at work too, you know, the one where lil’ Elroy Jetson invents time travel for a middle school science fair. That aspect of the film can’t really compare to the spectacle of human vs robot pro wrestling, though. Really, what could?
The Jetsons’ presence in Robo-WrestleMania is secondary at best. Besides the initial thrill of having the long dead television show’s iconic theme music (a cheap pop that’s later repeated for a gag where WWE Superstars are similarly introduced) as well as the dead-on impersonations of the new voice cast, the Jetsons mostly just provide an appropriate backdrop for the robotic & time-traveling hijinks of the much more interesting pro wrestling personalities they mix with. A lot of the property’s “women be shoppin'”/men are workaholics humor feels uncomfortably outdated in a modern context. Rosie the sarcastic robot maid remains the only fresh & amusing aspect of the original Jetsons dynamic. She gets in some great lines here about how “If [The Big Show] makes a mess on the carpet, I am not cleaning it up” or about how Robo-Roman Reigns really turns her on/pushes her buttons. I also appreciated a gag where George accidentally wins a wrestling match and when asked to provide his in-ring name, he bills himself as the amusingly generic Future Guy. Again, though, it’s mostly just the Jetson’s futuristic setting that provides anything of value for the WWE Superstars to bounce off of, but it’s a context that pays off nicely
The biggest surprise of Robo-WrestleMania is how much effort The Big Show put it his vocal performance. I didn’t have much confidence in watching a kids’ film starting the lug after suffering through the abysmal (even by WWE Studios standards) Knucklehead. He plays a great heel here, though, anchoring the film with the larger than life, enraged growl of a classic decades-old wrestling promo, redundantly declaring himself to be “the world heavyweight championship of the world.” I’d even dare say there’s an ounce of genuine pathos to the way the living giant feels physically awkward in an automated future where his body & his profession are essentially now obsolete. I even wonder if that robo-wrestling angle was a mode of sly writer’s room commentary on the way pro wrestling has been morally sanitized & made less physically risky in the PG, publicly traded modern era. There’s some similarly satirical jabs at Roman Reigns’s persona here: he charges his fist as if he’s gearing up for his patented “Superman punch” only to fire off an autograph for a fan; Rosie only likes his robo-version for his good looks; his robo-version’s stilted, mechanical delivery of his “Believe that” catchphrase sounds oddly reminiscent of some of his on-mic botches in real life; etc. For the most part, though, Roman and the rest of the WWE Superstars take just as much of a backseat as the Jetsons do. This is The Big Show’s, uh, big show and he delivers surprisingly strongly in that animated spotlight.
I was mildly, pleasantly amused by Robo-WrestleMania just as I have been with all of these Hanna-Barbera pro wrestling crossovers. Still, I feel like the opportunities presented by these cartoon backdrops aren’t being fully exploited to match the inherent absurdity of the wrestlers who populate them. Besides the wrestling robots & off hand references to Seth Rollins’s frequent claim that he’s “The Future of WWE,” the 100 years in the future setting of Robo-WrestleMania isn’t pushed to its full potential. Imagine all of the places a cartoon about a time traveling pro wrestlers could go; I’d argue this movie settled on the least interesting one. Thinking about the self-aware psychedelia of what could pop up in a New Day cartoon or how much weirder a Jetsons crossover could’ve been if it were produced while Stardust was still with the company (something I’ve called for in every review of these damned things so far) makes me mourn for the things that could be if these crossovers strayed a little further from the wrestling ring and a little deeper into the personas of the weirdos who work in it. The Jetsons & WWE: Robo-WrestleMania is admirably silly as is, though, and it works remarkably well as a redemptive palette cleanser for The Big Show, who really needed it after the dregs of Knucklehead.
April’s Movie of the Month, the Mark Waters comedy Head Over Heels, is many disparate films tied up in a single package. At times a formulaic romcom, a Farrelly brothers-style gross-out comedy, a diamond heist action thriller, and a winking Hitchcock homage, this Freddie Prinze Jr./Monica Potter madcap romance is largely a fun watch due to its violent, unexpected shifts in genre & tone. At its core, however, Head Over Heels can be readily understood as a light-headed satire of the fashion industry. Constantly poking fun at Monica Potter’s befuddled lead’s supermodel roomates, borrowing some of their second-hand glamor for its central romance fantasy, and staging its climactic showdown on a Fashion Week runway, Head Over Heels is a silly, parodic stab at couture culture. It was not alone in its year of release, either. The similarly silly, but much more popular Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander also arrived in 2001, with its own jokes about fashion models’ supposed stupidity and its own climactic runway-set showdown. Head Over Heels & Zoolander share more than just their deliriously silly fashion world parody too. They also undercut the frivolity that drives their central fashion world gags with some truly depressive, cruel lines of pitch black humor, diving much deeper into the darkness of the human soul than you might expect from a Freddie Prinze Jr. romcom and a ZAZ-style comedy that proudly features a Fabio cameo.
Fashion models seem to lead surreal, absurd, almost inhuman lives. Zoolander & Head Over Heels build their humor around that perception. They introduce a “normal” person (movie-normal anyway; one’s an art-restorer and one’s a photo-journalist for TIME Magazine) into the otherworldly realm of superhuman fashion models, or in Zoolander‘s parlance “people who are really, really, ridiculously good-looking,” to play off that eccentricity. Part of the humor they find there is in jealousy: lavish parties, beautiful clothes, a total lack of sexual inhibition, etc. are overwhelming to the two films’ non-model normies and both movies have a lot of fun indoctrinating them into this culture, which appears to be a live action cartoon from the outside looking in. To take the models down a peg, then, they also poke fun at the two things typically associated with people who are really, really, ridiculously good-looking: low intelligence & eating disorders. Zoolander is a lot harsher on both of those topics than Head Over Heels. The Mark Waters film is a lot more humanizing in its portrayal of its star’s supermodel roomates, who are eventually proven to be a lot more cunning & self-aware than any of their foils give them credit for. I don’t really see the point in diving into the particulars of either films’ jabs at bulimia or stupidity, though, since it’s the easiest, most common sources of humor you’d expect from any fashion world comedy. What interests me, and I think what makes these films memorable, are the more unconventional places they find their dark humor, the real weirdo shit.
At its core, Head Over Heels is a much sweeter movie than Zoolander, with more of a sincere focus on its milquetoast woman/fashion world weirdo romance. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t indulge in its own forms of pitch black humor. The reason our generic romcom lead puts herself on the market for a new man at the beginning of the film is that her old biddy coworkers keep announcing, plainly, “You are going to die alone.” She then has her “meet cute” moment with Freddie Prinze Jr.’s hotshot fashion exec when the dog he’s walking tackles & mounts her in the lobby of their apartment building, which is a special kind of brutally embarrassing public humiliation for a cutesy romcom. The movie later indulges in other similar raunchy comedy moments, like a stray cunnilingus gag or an epic scene where the leads’ fashion model roomates are covered head to toe in human feces. What’s even darker is that the movie’s entire romcom plot is built on a Rear Window moment where the lead witnesses the fashion exec hunk “murder” someone through his apartment window, but romantically pursues him anyway, because of their overwhelming sexual chemistry. This includes a scene where she bangs the possible murderer before he’s convincingly absolved of the crime, an act her roommates gleefully watch through the window as if it were a plot point on a daytime soap. Sometimes these models’ lack of sexual inhibition is played for light laughs, like in an early scene when they aggressively catwalk nude through their apartment’s shared living space. Sometimes it gets much darker, though, like when the Russian-born model casually accuses a Girl Scouts troupe of being a childhood prostitution ring or when the Australian-born model (who has a crippling addiction to plastic surgery) constantly makes casual references to being molested by her uncle as a child, which is played for laughs. For all of its indulgences in cutesy romcom tropes, Head Over Heels can be a deeply strange, deeply fucked up comedy.
Much like how Head Over Heels builds its madcap romantic mixup around a possible cold-blooded murder, Zoolander finds its humorous A-plot in a conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia so that child labor laws will relax enough in that country for fashion clothing production to pinch a few pennies. That’s pretty fucked. Its dark soul wasn’t lost on critics at the time of its release either. Ebert famously wrote in his post-9/11 review of the film, “There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week’s Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander, a comedy about a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because of his opposition to child labor.” Besides that boldly crass plot line (which does have a pointedly satirical jab at fashion as an industry built into its DNA) and its much harsher stance on models being oversexed, anorexic idiots than the one taken in Head Over Heels, Zoolander ups the stakes of its dark humor by actually claiming a few human casualties. While the witnessed “murder” of Head Over Heels turns out to have been faked, one of Zoolander‘s first big gags (and easily the one that got the biggest laugh out of me as a teen at the theater) involves four of its idiotic lead’s closest male model friends perishing in a gas station explosion. It’s the kind of gag that you’d expect to see in the icily funny mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous, where the punchline is a smash cut to a funeral service. Later in the film, the fashion industry is again skewered when Ben Stiller’s male model lead participates in a runway show that exploits/appropriates the tattered rags of the world’s “crack whores” & homeless for a marketable fashion aesthetic. And the darkest joke of all is that the film’s very first celebrity cameo (one of thousands) is none other than Donald J. Trump. Yikes.
As harsh as the humor can be in both of these movies, they’re still largely absurd, silly, light-hearted films. In both Head Over Heels & Zoolander, initial competitive jealousies in an industry where vanity is everything eventually give way to heartfelt camaraderie. Initial unease with the fashion world’s liberated, uninhibited sexuality eventually leads to sexual & romantic satisfaction. Models considered to be useless idiots at the outset save the day & prove their worth as human beings. Still, there’s a dark soul lurking at the center of both Head Over Heels & Zoolander, a black comedy undercurrent that occasionally cuts through the deliriously silly fashion world parody to laugh in the face of betrayal, death, bulimia, child abuse, etc. 2001 not only saw the release of two energetically silly fashion world comedies; it also brought out a surprisingly corrosive spirit in each of them that can disrupt & subvert the cheeriness of their shared mainstream comedy surface. Both movies were better & more memorable for it.
The highest grossing anime film of all time is slowly trickling through American theaters in what’s been a fairly quiet release so far. Subtitled foreign films & traditional hand-drawn animation aren’t the usual hallmarks of a domestic box office smash hit in the 2010s, so it mostly makes sense that Your Name. isn’t lighting up megaplex cash registers here the way it did in Japan last year. What’s a little more difficult to speculate is why, exactly, Your Name. did run away with all of Japan’s box office dollars in 2016 (becoming the country’s highest-grossing film of all-time, animated or otherwise), outpacing even the Studio Ghibli films that obviously inspired it. My best guess is that Your Name. resonated with Japanese teenagers in particular. I can say with confidence that the most I ever indulged in repeat viewings of films in the theater was when I was a teen with summer job money to burn and nothing constructive to do with myself besides watching the latest Wes Anderson release three times in a week to escape the New Orleans heat. Your Name. seems perfectly calibrated for this kind of obsessive teen repeat-viewing. From its tale of star-crossed, long distance romantics to its mildly crude sexual humor, bottom of the heart earnestness, supernatural mindfuckery, and pop punk/post-rock soundtrack (provided by the appropriately named Radwimps), Your Name. is the distilled ideal of a teen fantasy film in the 2010s. It’s also the most beautifully animated and strikingly empathetic picture I can remember seeing on the big screen in a long while.
The first thing that struck me about Your Name. was the immensity of its scope. Cities and mountains are framed from above the cloudline as a passing comet is meticulously tracked through the star-filled sky from the upward gaze of teens on the ground. Those teens’ lives take on a similar kind of intricate majesty as the comet in the sky triggers a cosmic event that intimately & inextricably links two total strangers, a boy who enjoys a very modern existence in Tokyo and a girl who practices old world religion with her sister & grandmother in a rural mountainside village. Oddly enough, Your Name. begins its strange, unwieldy journey as a body swap comedy. The Tokyo boy and mountain village girl swap places at erratic intervals, initially mistaking their day-long vacations in each others’ skin as hyper-realistic dreams. As the body swap picture is traditionally a fixture of crude 80s comedies and these are horny teens, those alternating positions do involve a lot of “self”-exploration of each others’ bodies and same-sex attraction/flirtation, but never with a tinge of gay panic humor disrupting its intergender empathy. Gender and identity became decisively fluid the more this pair continue to swap places, as does the nature of time, tradition, and reality itself. Small town angst & romantic desperation, cornerstones of teenage inner life, dominate the early proceedings of Your Name., but several monumental narrative shifts completely disrupt those concerns as the co-protagonists’ stories strive to intertwine in a shared, physical space. Leaving notes on each other’s smart phones & foreheads is one thing, but as our distant teen “radwimps” attempt to share a single space in a more significant way, their story explodes in a much wider array of supernatural phenomena than a mere 80s body swap comedy ever could contain. The film’s scope is near-boundless in its thematic & visual explorations of an intangible cosmic event I’ve never seen depicted onscreen before.
Your Name. more than justifies its choice of medium, accomplishing large, supernatural feats that could only be pulled off in animated cinema. The film almost operates like Persona in reverse, where two jumbled identities slowly detangle and then have to desperately search for common ground. This philosophical crisis of identity, punctuated onscreen with blatant questions like “Who are you?,” are matched by an ambition in animation that reaches far beyond the linear & the literal. One sequence in particular makes use of color pencil sketches in a way that wholly distorts the border between reality & fantasy, surpassing even the heights of The Tale of Princess Kaguya in its adeptly loose grip on the certainty of basic human existence. The film’s visual palette obviously pulls heavily from the work of all-time-great Hayao Miyazaki, an influence that becomes very much apparent in its opening frames of gorgeous mountainside landscapes seen from a birds’ eye view. As much as it focuses on Nature, however, Miyazaki’s work isn’t typically as obsessed with the immensity of the cosmos as Your Name., so the film immediately has an in on finding new perspectives to apply that animation style to. It also seems intent on updating Miyazaki’s obsession with natural landscapes to accommodate a newfound wonder in modernity. Tokyo skyscrapers are flanked by birds & sunshine, reflecting the same simple majesty a Miyazaki picture would typically reserve for a forrest or the miracle of flight. This visual clash of tradition & modern innovation perfectly echoes the sentiment of Your Name.‘s narrative as well, where boomboxes & smartphones are incorporated into ancient religious ritual and time is just as fluid as identity & the state of the human body.
I don’t mean to be at all dismissive or reductive when I refer to Your Name. as a teen picture. The supernatural narrative & delicate thematic nuance of the film are handled in a much more richly complex, rewarding way than they’d be in most modern R-rated, live-action “adult” dramas. Still, I got a sense watching the film that it was specifically, expertly designed to resonate with the earnestness of teenage sentiment. The immensity of the story’s ambition and the intricacy of its visual craft leave me with no doubt, even as a thirty year old dinosaur, that the film will remain one of the best domestic releases we see all of 2017. I just also have to admit that I’m admiring it from the outside looking in. Your Name. wasn’t made for me; it was made for teens. And if I were still that age, running around with my heart on my sleeve & my identity still wildly fluctuating on an almost day to day basis, I’d certainly be one of those kids out there who have paid to see it repeatedly play out on the big screen while it’s still an option. It’s more than just a teen movie; it’s the perfect teen movie for this exact moment in time.
Traditional horror anthologies are difficult to critique as an artform since they often leave a lot of room for error in experimentation. Recent films like Trick ‘r Treat & Southboundhave modernized the horror anthology format into a familiar everything-is-connected structure that used to be a go-to for indie dramas in the mid 00s. This allows characters & storylines to cross paths & blend borders so that each short story segment coagulates into one all-encompassing gestalt. A more traditional horror anthology format would keep each of these segments rigidly separated, connected only through a wraparound buffer. Isolating each segment usually means that the film’s overall value as a collection is often ignored in favor of critiquing each individual story on their own terms. I don’t, for instance, knock Creepshow as a whole just because I despise the segment where Stephen King plays a hick farmer or dismiss Twilight Zone: The Movie because of John Landis or Stephen Spielberg’s duds of contributions. Instead, I tend to forget to even recall those segments and focus entirely on the short form experiments that did work for me: the Howard Hughes archetype who’s terrorized by roaches, that ludicrous Joe Dante segment with the cartoon demons, etc. Horror anthologies, like sketch or improv comedy, allow directors to take big chances in small doses. When these short form experiments pay off, they can be seared in your brain forever. When they fall flat, it’s easy to forget they even exist, which leaves little impact on the overall quality of the anthologies that contain them.
XX is the rare kind of horror anthology where each individual experiment pays off. Four concise, slickly directed, but stylistically varied horror shorts each take a chance on a premise rich enough to justify an 80 minute feature’s leg room, but is instead boiled down to a digestible, bite-sized morsel. The stories are connected only by a delicately beautiful stop-motion wraparound (seemingly inspired by the stop motion animation classic Alice) and the gender of their directors, but together form a solid unit of efficient, effective horror filmmaking where every moving part manages to pull its own weight. The four female filmmakers involved in the project (five if you include the wraparound’s animator Sofia Carrillo) worked independently of each other, unaware of the ways their own contributions might visually or thematically overlap. This goes against recent pushes to homogenize anthology segments into a single everything-is-connected unit (a style at least partly pioneered by one of XX‘s contributors, Southbound producer/co-director Roxanne Benjamin), but feels very much in line with horror anthology classics, not to mention the horror comics like Tales from the Crypt & Tales from the Darkside that inspired them. 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.
Although their connections are entirely incidental, three of the four stories told in XX touch on motherhood and the anxiety of raising children in their respective segments. Karyn Kusama’s “Her Only Living Son” makes a parent’s fear of their own child a literal threat. Kusama shows her chops as the most accomplished director of the batch (last year’s The Invitation is a must-see) by expertly building tension between a single mother in hiding and her increasingly beastly teenage son. The opening segment, “The Box” is a lot less literal with this anxiety, ruminating on the ways raising children can suck the life out you in a spiritual, philosophical sense reminiscent of a classic Twilight Zone episode or the music video for Radiohead’s “Just.“ Annie Clark (of St. Vincent, guitar-shredding fame) directs the always-welcome Melanie Lynskey in the segment “The Birthday Party,” which lightens the mood of the motherhood anxiety by ending on its own music video style comedic punchline involving a death at a child’s birthday/costume party. The only outlier of the bunch is “Don’t Fall,” a motherless creature feature set on a camping trip that goes horrifically wrong when a young group of cityfolk desecrate sacred ground in the wild. It’d be understandable to argue that having one outlier in an otherwise thematically cohesive collection somewhat dampens XX‘s overall value as an anthology. I just see it as a natural part of horror anthology tradition, where uneven, off-kilter variance in themes & mode of expression is a highlight & an asset, not a drawback. One (competently made) outlier like “Don’t Fall” is just as much of a necessary feature for XX to feel like an old-school horror anthology as its rigid, animated wraparound buffers or its individualized title cards. It’s perfect in the way it invites imperfection into what shouldn’t be a tightly controlled environment in the first place.
I can’t objectively say exactly why XX struck such a chord with me while it’s left a lot of critics lukewarm or even bitterly cold. Some of my personal resonation might be linked to the way certain titles or themes echo the accomplishments of movies I already dearly love without retreading any of the same ground. “The Box” & “The Birthday Party” in particular share names with two of my all-time favorite features (directed by Richard Kelly & William Friedkin, respectively) and Karyn Kusama’s contribution functions as a semi-sequel to another one of my personal favorites (in print and onscreen) so well that even speaking its name might be a kind of spoiler. This sense of tradition obviously also extends into the way XX follows the rigidly segmented format of horror anthology past, recalling some all-time greats like Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath and (a recent discovery for me) Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. My appreciation of this feature-length collection might be even more simple than that, though. From the way food is dreamily framed in “The Box” to the way sound design is playfully jarring in “The Birthday Party” to the way the whole world crumbles around us in “Her Only Living Son” to the basic creature feature surface pleasures of “Don’t Fall,” there’s something worth latching onto in each segment of XX, some feature that can never outwear its welcome or play itself too thin thanks to the temporal limitations of its format. I find great, long-lasting pleasure in that, especially in the way each experiment becomes more sketched out as I mull them over in my mind long after the credits roll. It’s a damn good horror anthology in that way.
I find myself very much conflicted about where to land on the mid 80s by-the-books slasher The Mutilator. That kind of indecision seems to be appropriate for the film’s tone, though, which is hilariously at war with itself, maybe even intentionally so. After a brutally cold introduction in which a young boy accidentally shoots his mother dead, The Mutilator switches to the schmaltziest sitcom music imaginable as the same kid, now college age, vacations to the beach with a group of friends. There’s an interesting, even amusing clash in those two tones, the horrifically violent & the lightheartedly goofy, that makes The Mutilator at the very least memorable despite its adherence to every known slasher trope. The problem is that only one side of that divide is at all interesting to watch and it ain’t the snappy dialogue between the college age victims.
Like with most slashers, there’s no real mystery to who’s killing off these beer-swilling knuckleheads one by one. The little boy who accidentally commits matricide on his father’s birthday (while cleaning the dad’s guns as a present) is responsible for driving his old man homicidally insane. Before the teen slaying begins, the old man fantasizes about shooting, slashing, and axing the young child down in his dreams, which is usually a place even the most brutal of horror films won’t dare to go. The brutality only deepens form there, as The Mutilator tries to justify its existence in the variety & viciousness of its kills. Characters are destroyed by chainsaws, pitchforks, battle axes, and fence boards, then hung out to dry on meat hooks like gigantic fish waiting to be gutted. The film even boasts one of the nastiest kills I’ve ever seen on celluloid, one involving a woman’s genitals and a gigantic fish hook, which is where I imagine it got saddled with an X rating. Unfortunately, the stretches between those kills are brutal in their own way, as they’re desperately devoid of any entertainment value, a hopelessly dull exercise in treading water (sometimes literally so).
The Mutilator’s comedic failure is in mistaking a funny joke for someone making a funny face while saying anything. The most amusing the film ever gets is in its musical cues, like an early motif during the matricide intro that includes the saddest version of the “Happy Birthday” song imaginable. There’s also a titular “Fall Break” theme song meant to match the film’s original title, Fall Break. It’s too bad that the acting in this film is unbearably awful, with line readings like “Jeez, would you look at all this shit,” that make John Waters dialogue seem subtle by comparison. The brutality of The Mutilator’s gore and the frivolity of its pop music soundtrack make it fascinating as a novelty, but it’s too boring for too many lengthy stretches to justify a recommendation. I’m not at all shocked to learn that this is filmmaker Buddy Cooper’s sole feature, but I do think he managed to make something that could at the very least be called a memorable oddity. This is the exact kind of slasher fodder that would’ve inspired the dumb horror movies I was watching as a teen, particularly I Know What You Did Last Summer, but that context isn’t going to hold the same personal significance for everyone tuning in. For most folks, I’d suggest seeking out The Mutilator’s vicious kills through a YouTube highlight reel or a curated .gif set. That’s all most people will remember from the film anyway, as they are strikingly brutal.
Heavy metal & horror seem like an obvious, foolproof combination, but mixing the two comparably macabre mediums for easy cinematic terror without backsliding into clichéd cheese is actually a very difficult balance to strike. For every successful metal-themed horror film, like the recent triumph Deathgasm, there’s a thousand corny hair metal & nu-metal failures that make the entire enterprise feel like a cheap, half-cooked financial ploy. As with most hyper-specific fandoms, such as superhero comics or pro wrestling or video game cultures, there’s always a sense with metal that inauthentic outsiders will be eaten alive by those in the know if they aren’t coming from the knowledgeable starting point of a true fan. The metal in Deathgasm and even Tenacious D’s Pick of Destiny feels true to the culture in ways that less successful (but enjoyably campy) features like Shock ‘Em Dead & Trick or Treat (1986) don’t and through that authenticity they build a more long-lasting, dedicated fan base. I believe The Devil’s Candy will also strike a chord (heh, heh) with true metal fandom in the same way. It makes a strong case for itself as a title worth being championed by the legions of black leather-clad headbangers out there who’re hungry for authentic metal-themed horror. It even does so without acknowledging the basic silliness of that combo the way the more comedic titles Deathgasm & Pick of Destiny do.
A young family moves into what’s quickly revealed to be a haunted house. The gloomy teen daughter struggles to find footing in her new school, but bonds with her work-at-home artist father (Can’t Hardly Wait/Empire Records‘s all-growed-up Ethan Embry) over a shared love of melt-your-face metal riffs. The mother (UnReal‘s Shiri Appelby) doesn’t share their passion for ear-shattering monster riffs, but the family functions well as an insular unit. This cohesion unravels, of course, as the demons that haunt their new home show themselves as an artistic muse both for the paterfamilias painter and for the mentally disabled man who formerly occupied their home and is revealed very early in the proceedings to be a self-conflicted murderer. The painter loses time while feverishly working on increasingly disturbing art in his new studio space, dropping the ball on his familial obligations while sinking into a hypnotic state. This leaves his wife & daughter vulnerable to the cursed home’s former resident, who’s similarly compelled to hypnotically riff on his candy red, flying-V guitar at unreasonable volumes . . . as well as to chop up children with a hacksaw. As the painter reflects on the young figures that suddenly populate his increasingly violent works, he explains, “It’s like these children are inside of me, begging, screaming to get out. And I don’t know why.” Presumably, the child killer feels the same way about his own unsavory passion, but he much less eloquently states that children “are the sweetest candy of all.” It’s an effectively creepy line.
Story-wise, The Devil’s Candy is a fairly standard haunted house creepshow, not much different from other recent low budget horrors like We Are Still Here or I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. The film is slickly edited, however, especially in scenes where Ethan Embry’s painter loses time in a trance while images of his intensifying artistic process mix with the equally haunted killer’s own mode of expression: dead children. It’s an eerie device for depicting possession, one where ghosts & demons are only felt onscreen through the artistic muse of the people they torment. The metal soundtrack that flavors these scenes is only ever disrupted by the always-creepy sounds of Catholic mass (I feel comfortable saying that as someone who was reluctantly raised in the Church), which pushes the central hauntings beyond basic artistic obsession into a religious (if blasphemous) zealotry. Character actor Leland Oser (who recently killed it as the lead in Faults) appears occasionally as a priest on the killer’s personal collection of VHS tapes to explain that Satan is very much real and that humans are His demons who walk the Earth, allowing Him to express His evil through their bodies. Sometimes this takes the form of oil on canvas; sometimes it looks like hacked-up dead children. The basic premise of the film might be an overly familiar concept, but the way it’s expressed onscreen as artistic muse is still chillingly effective.
Initially premiering at the Toronto International Film Fest in 2015 and being quietly dumped to VOD two years later, The Devil’s Candy isn’t likely to make waves outside eagle-eyed horror circles. Within these clusters of people who obsessively pick over every new horror release, however, the film’s likely to find a significant, dedicated audience, especially with folks who regularly listen to metal. The Devil’s Candy‘s haunted house premise is far from a game changer, but its slick editing style and authentic heavy metal aesthetic is likely to win over a very specific, very dedicated audience in the long run. They might award the film two devil horns way up \m/ \m/ instead of the traditional Siskel & Ebert thumbs, but the sentiment will be all the same.
Welcome to Episode #27 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twenty-seventh episode, Brandon makes James watch the blood-soaked horror comedy Blood Diner (1987) for the first time. Also, James & Brandon discuss all ten collaborations between director Brian Yuzna & “surrealistic” special effects master Screaming Mad George, the monstrous creative team behind the horror classic Society (1992). Enjoy!
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Alli, Britnee , and Brandon watch Head Over Heels (2001).
Boomer: Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: Head Over Heels is not a good movie. Objectively, it’s actually kind of awful. It’s a nineties holdover of a specific kind of romantic comedy that paid for Meg Ryan’s house and every meal she will eat for the rest of her life. There’s a silly voice-over at the beginning about growing up in [small Midwest location] but now the protagonist lives in [major metropolitan city] with [impossibly perfect job], but gosh darn it she’s just so unlucky in love! It’s so dumb, and I love it so, so much.
I already wrote a more complete recap of the film’s plot in my review of it so I won’t go overlong with the details here, but I’d stand by my assessment of it as “Two parts standard turn of the century romcom, one part Rear Window, with just a dash of genderbent Zoolander.” Future Mean Girls helmer Mark Waters directs Monica Potter as Amanda Pierce, an art restoration expert who moves in with four supermodels after catching her fiancé in bed with another woman. With the encouragement of her newfound group of unlikely friends, Amanda reluctantly begins to open her heart to handsome neighbor Jim Winston (Freddie Prinze Jr.), upon whom the women spy through his windows. He seems perfect, until Amanda alone sees him murder a woman. Or does he?
Britnee, what did you think of the relationships between the women in this movie? The film just barely passes the Bechdel Test (when the models talk about fashion and trading clothing), but that’s not a make-or-break barometer, really. I feel like the representation of non-traditional female friendships and the presentation of the supermodels as being vain and vaguely self-centered but also powerful and accepting of their new friend was fresh, especially for 2001. What do you think?
Britnee: First off, I just have to say that I absolutely loved Head Over Heels. It has that late 1990’s vibe that I am totally addicted to (Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Jawbreaker, She’s All That, etc.), even though the film was released in 2001. What can I say, brightly colored mismatched clothes, frosty lipstick, hair chopsticks, chunky heels, and halter tops get me jazzed. To top it all off, the movie stars Freddie Prinze Jr.! He’s such a great actor for those terrible-yet-addictive types of movies, so what a perfect choice for the lead guy in Head Over Heels. It’s a shame that he doesn’t really act anymore. If I’m not mistaken, I remember him becoming involved with WWE after he stepped away from acting, but the latest I’ve heard of Prinze is that he wrote a cookbook (with a forward by Sarah Michelle Gellar). I haven’t tried any of the recipes, but I hope that he makes references to his films in them (Spaghetti à la House of Yes).
To answer your question, Mark, I loved the relationships between the film’s female characters. Amanda’s friendship with the models and Lisa (her hilarious lesbian coworker) really shows that sisterhood comes in many forms, some more unique than others. In the beginning of the film, Amanda is harassed about not being married by her elderly coworkers, and I get it, being single wasn’t seen as an option during their youth, but it was still annoying to listen to their comments. Once she moves in with the models, they didn’t seem to be interested in her other than the $500 per month she was going to pay to live in a closet to fund their spending habits. I couldn’t help but assume that they were going to be a portrayed as the stereotypical self-absorbed group of air-headed models that were total mean girls, but thankfully, things didn’t go in that direction. The models, although very self-absorbed, did care about Amanda. They saw that she was interested (more like obsessed) with Jim, and they helped her score a date with him. Unfortunately, they covered her in makeup and dressed her up to their liking, making her look nothing like herself, but they were truly doing what they thought was best. And during Amanda’s quest to find out whether or not Jim was a murderer, they helped her break into his apartment to look for clues. They even endured Jim’s very intense poop and an absolutely disgusting septic tank shower in a public men’s room to get information for Amanda. If that’s not friendship, I don’t know what is.
What surprised me the most out of all the insanity in Head Over Heels was the incorporation of a murder mystery. I definitely didn’t see it coming, and I just about flew off my chair when Jim “murdered” Megan in his apartment. I sort of wish that Jim would’ve actually committed the murder and was part of a Russian mob or something like that because it would’ve made for a more interesting ending. Alli, what are your thoughts on the idea of Jim being an actual murderer? Or were you satisfied with him being an undercover agent?
Alli: I, too, actually kind of wish he was an actual murderer. The contrast between the bubble gum 90’s romcom aesthetic and a grim serial killer story really could have saved this movie for me. If Amanda had actually had a bad case of Hybristophilia (a crime fetish; I just looked up this word in case anyone was getting worried about me), I think the dark turn could have made for an extremely interesting and unique twist. Imagine her going to all this trouble and Rear Window-esque voyeurism to find out he actually did, only for her to realize that she doesn’t care and still loves him anyway. I thought the whole undercover agent thing was tacked on and sloppy. I understand that we’re supposed to be rooting for Amanda and want her to finally fall in love with Mr. Right, but it just seemed like a forced way to have a happy ending. It did make it possible to have that bizarre fashion show chase scene, though.
Fashion is an interesting part of this movie. The four models are dressed in perfect representation of current fashion for 2001, fashion that is now extremely dated. It seemed like, though, Head Over Heels was already acknowledging how ridiculous this all is. In the scene where the four models give Amanda a makeover, she knows it’s ridiculous. Her crush, Jim, knows it’s ridiculous.
Rather than a love letter to the fashion of the times, this movie strikes me more as a subtle satire. There’s vapid models constantly getting pointless plastic surgery done, who only care about rich men so they can continue a comfortable lifestyle (though, they do have a certain amount of Girl Power and protective instinct when it comes to Amanda), and there’s the fashion show gone wrong, but the press thinks it’s intentional. Brandon, what do you think about fashion in this film? Do you see this movie as a satire of the industry?
Brandon: It’s clearly satire, but I think there’s a pretty distinct difference between the way this film handles its fashion industry parody and how that same attitude is executed in meaner, more pointed works of the era like Zoolander & Josie and the Pussycats. When we first encounter Amanda’s fashion model roomates, Head Over Heels clearly sets up a dichotomy between our protagonist’s supposedly more worthwhile career in fine art academia and the mindless frivolity of fashionista trend chasing. Unlike with Zoolander, however, the fashion industry and the perceived stupidity of fashion models eventually fades as a punchline and we start to see the value of their lifestyle. One of the roomates is a cunning academic who put her education on hold to take advantage of what a young, beautiful body can (temporarily) afford her. Casual nudity, aggressive catwalking, uninhibited attitudes toward sex, and blatant financial negotiations with men who want to be seen in public with them all afford these women a certain confidence & power that Amanda’s missing out on as a meek, academic shut-in. Waters (who is no stranger to dark humor in projects like Mean Girls and House of Yes) will sometimes undercut their power with somewhat tragic jokes about incest, child prostitution, and routine plastic surgery, but his script makes it clear that these are worthwhile, intelligent people who improve Amanda’s life with their specific skill set & collective life experience. There’s plenty of stray jabs aimed at the basic absurdity of fashion modeling as a profession, but the models themselves aren’t portrayed as nearly as cruel or idiotic as the people who look down on them merely for being models (especially the reoccurring police officer who won’t take their legitimate cries for help seriously until after they’re vindicated by his higher-ups).
One thing I love about the film that the modeling industry opens up to it is the incessant runway music. Gay 90s club music is just as omnipresent here as it is in the SNL comedyA Night at the Roxbury, which feels like a deliberate choice, given that this film would’ve been released a few years after the heyday of acts like La Bouche and Real McCoy. From the A*Teens’ aggressively bubbly cover of ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” in the make-over montage to the film’s wordless, repetitive Gay 90s theme music to the choice to include The Go-Go’s titular hit song “Head Over Heels” instead of the more obvious (and more romantic) Tears for Fears option, there’s a very specific soundtrack direction to Head Over Heels that keeps it away from the detached cynicism of Zoolander and moves it toward the absurdist fantasy of films like Spice World & Teen Witch. As Head Over Heels shifts its genre gears from romcom to Farrelly brothers-style gross-out to murder mystery to action comedy, the 90s style club music remains its only real constant, a consistent runway beat that feels just as important to the fashion world setting as the actual on-the-runway debacle of its Fashion Week conclusion.
Boomer, did you at all notice the soundtrack while watching Head Over Heels or did it just feel like typical romcom tunage to you? Is the film’s 90s-hangover club music significant to its fashion world aesthetic or am I allowing my love of acts like Deee-Lite & Snap! to make it appear to be more than it is?
Boomer: I love this question, because I’ve held a longtime fascination with films that are named for song titles. Until the 1980s, most movies that followed this naming convention were about music and starred musicians: White Christmas (1954) starring Bing Crosby, Rock Around the Clock (1956) starring Bill Haley and the Comets and The Platters among others, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) starring future Mrs. Brian De Palma Nancy Allen and focusing on four girls going to see The Beatles. Starting with John Hughes’s 1984 film Sixteen Candles, there was a boom of more romantic films taking their titles from classic love songs and contemporary pop music. Candles was followed by Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful, Roxanne, and Can’t Buy Me Love (all 1987), My Girl (1991), Love Potion No. 9 (1992), When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), One Fine Day (1996), Can’t Hardly Wait (1998), Simply Irresistible (1999). Of course, the veritable apotheosis of this concept was 1990’s Pretty Woman.
This conceit started to die out around the time that Head Over Heels was released (give or take a Sweet Home Alabama here and there), but I have to admit that, minus the cover of “Take a Chance on Me,” and the inclusion of the title song, none of the music in the film stood out to me all that much. That’s odd, considering how often I find myself consciously dissecting a film’s score while watching, sometimes to my own annoyance (while at a recent screening of A Tale of Two Sisters, every time the piercing, intense strings started playing, I found myself daydreaming about Psycho). Maybe the overall generic nature of the (accurately described) “gay 90s club music” is what makes the film flow with such grace. It fits well enough that it’s beneath notice, which is a compliment, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
When I hear the phrase “head over heels,” I too first think of Tears for Fears, but looking at the lyrics of the Go-Go’s “Head Over Heels,” it’s apparent why this is the title song and not the more famous new wave track. The song includes lines like “I couldn’t see the warning signs/I must be losin’ it/Cause my mind plays tricks on me,” which is much more in line with Amanda’s state of mind than poetical waxing about talking about the weather, wasting time, or being lost in admiration. It’s more consistent with the film’s thesis of a woman who has been fooled too many times but still finds herself smitten with a handsome stranger against her better judgment, although I can almost hear her say “don’t take my heart, don’t break my heart/Don’t, don’t, don’t throw it away” (presumably while sitting on the stairs outside a dreamboat’s apartment while he explains that his work persona is a facade).
To be honest, a part of me wishes that this was less of a romcom and more about an art restorer who gets into international shenanigans with the help of her fashion model roommates. Britnee, what do you think of the espionage plot? I agree with Alli that it feels tacked on and sloppy, and I wish the intrigue of smuggled diamonds had played a larger role in the overall narrative. Do you feel the same way? What changes would you make to the screenplay if you had the chance?
Britnee: I agree that the whole secret agent twist was sloppily thrown in. To be honest, I was waiting for another plot twist to happen about 5 minutes to the end of the movie where Jim reveals himself as a murderer disguised as a federal agent who was pretending to be a murderer. Anything would have been better than the overused agent-in-disguise cop out. I get it, Amanda and Jim needed to end up together, and this was written in the script so the two love birds could have their “happily ever after.” It just felt so lazy. Thankfully, there were many other interesting events that made up for it.
Like Mark, I too would like to see the film focus more on Amanda’s career as an art restorer because that has to be one of the coolest jobs on the planet. If I could make changes to the screenplay, I would definitely make the film more of a fantasy romcom that would focus on Amanda’s art restoration skills. Amanda receives a renaissance painting in desperate need of restoration, and as she starts to restore the faces on each person in the painting, they come to life. Sort of like the street art in the movie Xanadu. The characters from her paintings are confused about the time period change, and she has to bring them home with her until she can figure out a way to get them back to their world. When Amanda leaves the medieval folk at her apartment while she attempts to research the mysterious painting, her model roommates give them makeovers and take them out clubbing. Amanda would end up falling in love with one of the painting characters and in the end, she would chose to go back with them to their time period as she doesn’t feel like she fits in with early 2000s city life. Also, I would make sure that my version of Head Over Heels would be a bit slower than the original so the audience could have time to catch their breath and comprehend what’s going on.
Alli, did you feel as though the pace of Head Over Heels was extremely fast? The moment the film begins, Amanda’s voice immediately started to describe her upbringing, and everything was moving at 100 mph from that moment on.
Alli: I did think the pace of the movie was pretty strange actually. I felt like it breezed over interesting and important things and then spent too much time on others. Like you said, there’s barely any time spent on her career, even though it’s made out to be a minor plot point eventually, but we get to see a bunch of Freddy Prince Jr. doing chin-ups. I think part of it was that there was so much stuff going on in this movie, too much even. There wasn’t enough time to make a well paced film, because there was just a lot. It’s the sort of movie that makes you think, “less is definitely more.”
I think I would have cut out the jewel heist, and made it an art related plot. The diamonds just felt thrown in there. I know it was a good vehicle for the runway sequence, though. I think it would have also helped to have the big undercover agent reveal earlier on if we’re forced to go that route, instead of Amanda investigating this murder forever. Another thing that could go is the voiceover. We can see she’s in New York. We can see that she’s unlucky in love, but has a dream job. Maybe, I’m just being a hardline film snob here, but the voiceover felt completely unnecessary.
Brandon, are there any details you find unnecessary? Am I being too hard on the voiceover?
Brandon: “So dumb,” “sloppy,” “extremely dated,” “lazy,” “not a good movie,” “actually kind of awful;” I’m being a little unfair with the pull-quotes I’m cherry picking here, but it is funny how willing we are to tear this movie down even though we seemed to have a lot of fun watching it (excluding maybe Alli). The problem there might be that the romcom fantasy is so inherently frivolous as a genre that it can’t support this kind of roundtable critical discussion without the conversation devolving into nitpicking. I don’t often excuse the use of voiceover as an easy narrative tool, but removing it from Head Over Heels would be like asking a Batmanmovie to skip its suiting-up montage or a slasher film to cast geriatric actors instead of hot, horny teens. Without its voiceover narration, Head Over Heels would likely be a struggle to follow as an audience, given the film’s whiplash-inducing pace & shifts in tone. More importantly, though, it would remove one of the earliest & most consistent markers that this is an exercise in romcom genre filmmaking, with all the deliriously silly bells & whistles the format implies. The voiceover is just as much a part of the territory to me as the film’s dogwalking meet cute, its Big Misunderstanding romantic mixup, or its pretty-but-not-too-pretty lead (Monica Potter looks like she was built in a lab by combining Sandra Bullock & Julia Roberts DNA into a cute, but “approachable” hybrid).
What’s most fun about Head Over Heels is how it uses this familiarity with romcom tropes to allow the film to continuously shift gears from minute to minute in terms of content & tone. The clash of Zoolander-style fashion world parody with Hitchcock homage thriller beats, diamond heist action comedy, and scatological Farrelly brothers humor amounts to a disorienting, absurdist whirlwind that in any other situation might feel like an untethered mess, but there’s always the familiar romcom structure about a clumsy academic-type with “the worst taste in men” waiting to anchor the story to something that can easily be processed & understood. I believe that method of anchoring the film was an entirely intentional decision on Waters’s part, one that allows for a lot of the film’s more absurd tangents to creep in (like its crossdressing security guard or its unexpectedly raunchy cunnilingus joke), while still making for one of the most memorable romcom plots of all time. In terms of pure absurdity, it’s right up there with Brittany Murphy learning to make a magical bowl of ramen in Ramen Girl or Aubrey Plaza falling for a delusional “time traveler” in Safety Not Guaranteed or whatever the hell’s going on in former Movie of the Month entry My Demon Lover. I’m not saying that Head Over Heels is beyond critical nitpicking because of the genre territory it willfully chooses to occupy, but I just don’t have the heart to tear it down myself. I had too much fun going to the one million and ten places the movie took me in just 90 minutes to sour on the trope-reliant methods it needed to exploit to get me there.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Candi, the Australian model, was my favorite character. Her quirky personality and constant plastic surgery procedures added a lot of humor to Head Over Heels. However, I could have done without all the creepy Uncle Pete comments. Those just made me feel super uncomfortable.
Alli: I was really not expecting the amount of poop jokes. Poop jokes are fine and all, but it just didn’t work for me. The one in the bathroom stall is nauseating even.
Brandon: It’s funny to me that everyone’s drawing a line here as to where specific gags of crude, gross-out humor didn’t work for them. While I was a little more willing to follow Head Over Heels into its nasty child abuse humor and grotesque scatological visuals than Britnee or Alli (if not solely because they were such an absurd intrusion on the typically tamer romcom reverie at the film’s center), I also had a moment where the movie pushed me a little too far: the film’s plot-instigating meet cute. Freddie Prinze Jr. is introduced walking a friend’s dog (a Great Dane named Hamlet, heh heh) that knocks over and sexually mounts our poor down-on-her-luck protagonist. My shock at this most undignified public degradation might be a result of it arriving long before any of the film’s other gross-out gags. It was still shockingly cruel either way, a moment that’s even repeated to bring the chaotic plot around full-circle in a strangely sadistic way. Although I was taken aback by the film’s bestial meet cute cruelty, however, I still ultimately respect that it could have that kind of effect on me at all. It’s not often that a traditional romcom can surprise its audience that sharply and it’s only one of many examples of Head Over Heels continually pulling the rug.
Boomer: I think that some of the aberrant elements of the screenplay were an attempt to appeal to too many people: eye-candy in the form of FPJ doing pull-ups and lady models strutting about in various states of undress to suit whatever your tastes may be; scat humor and an action plot to serve as a more stereotypically masculine counterweight to the trappings of the “chick flick” formula (i.e., makeovers and girlie talk); a little bit of gay panic with Amanda and her overly-touchy friend but also a celebration of queerness in the form of Bob’s landlord. It’s probably not the only reason this film was a commercial failure and is relegated to late-night programming on USA, but it certainly doesn’t help. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick a movie that Alli likes next time.
Upcoming Movies of the Month May: Alli presents Mikey and Nicky (1976) June: Brandon presents Cool As Ice (1991) July: Britnee presents Something Wicked this Way Comes (1983)
Doris Wishman is primarily known for her work in sexploitation cinema, building her career as a low-energy, oddly punk version of Russ Meyer with films like Nude on the Moon, and Another Day, Another Man. Once you get into the back half of her career, however, there are plenty of weird genre outliers that complicate that reputation, like the killer breasts espionage thriller Deadly Weapons. Nothing I’ve seen from Wishman so far, though, Deadly Weapons included, has been comparable to the way out of bounds, dissonant horror cheapie A Night to Dismember. Although the film stars porn actress Samantha Fox and makes occasional use if her nude body, it’s a work that finds Wishman operating far outside her sexploitation comfort zone. 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.
I can’t say with total confidence that I fully understand the plot of this picture. A young woman is released from a mental institution where she’s imprisoned for supposedly killing two teen boys. Her siblings conspire to have her re-committed by gaslighting her with prankish “hallucinations” and by framing her for a series of axe murders. That’s all I’ve got. Rapid, continuous narration from a detective who worked on this case of violent crimes is the only aspect of A Night to Dismember that affords the film any level of cohesion. There are a few scenes of badly dubbed dialogue that if you squint at them just right feel as if they belong to a proper feature film, but for the most part the movie a jumbled mess of candy red blood, kaleidoscope graphics, and brief flashes of nudity. It’s a full-length exercise in oddly disjointed editing, but I found an enjoyable sense of kinetic energy in that constant, off-kilter disorder. From the opening scene where a woman axe murders her sister in a bathtub to light-hearted elevator music, to the narrator’s instructions to contact authorities with any intel in the whereabouts of the killer over the end credits, A Night to Dismember is a total nuclear meltdown of a mess, but it’s an undeniably entertaining mess. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before, which makes it a valuable work as a cinematic experience, even if some of its most interesting results might be attributable to ineptitude.
Headless necks squirt blood in tidy steams, knives are rhythmically stabbed into victims’ throats, hearts are ripped out by hand, fingers are severed, a skull is crushed under a spinning car tire: Wishman’s horror show features gore galore. Some scenes are much stranger in their visual effects: disembodied hands reach to grope our would-be final girl from all directions, dreams of fratricide are accompanied by orgasmic moans, unexplained skulls & 80s computer graphics overlay the action, lightning strike stock footage straight out of 1930s horror appear to signify dread. Wishman forgoes her duties as a storyteller here to deliver a disorienting montage instead of a proper feature film. She readily supplies the basic components of blood & tits 80s horror, but makes no effort to reign them in as an understandable narrative. A Night to Dismember bluntly delivers the goods with no concern for justifying their presence onscreen. It’s just as blatantly to the point as it is a total mess and I greatly admire the punk energy Wishman finds in that sloppiness even if it is a constant struggle to understand exactly what she’s doing onscreen throughout the experience.
According to Wishman herself, most of the film negative for the original version of A Night to Dismember was destroyed in a lab, which made the constant, overbearing narration necessary to tell a cohesive story. The VHS cover art for the film claims an 80 minute runtime and the original poster credits an entirely different actress than Samantha Fox. It’s widely believed that the original version of the film was intentionally “lost” & re-shot to include Fox, completely ditching the story told in the first version to boost ticket sales with a recognizable actress. Not having seen the lengthier version of the film, which is apparently hosted by a different narrator & follows a more supernatural plotline, I can only report that the short, hour-long version of A Night to Dismember is an entertaining oddity, a fine example of avant garde filmmaking at its trashiest.
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