brandon ledet

Beginners (2011)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

threehalfstar

Immediately after falling in love with 20th Century Women, a film I’ve retroactively declared the best movie of 2016, I went home to watch writer-director Mike Mills’s previous work, Beginners. The immediacy of dividing into Beginners was not necessarily an extension of its convenient availability on Netflix Streaming (not that it hurt), but more a result of the film’s obvious connection to Mills’s subsequent work (and, in my opinion, his best to date). Much like 20th Century Women, Beginners finds Mike Mills in a self-reflective mode, capturing a semi-autobiographical moment in one of his parent’s lives in a loving, spiritual work of non-linear cinema. Instead of detailing the impossibly endearing persona of his ever-present mother like in 20th Century Women, Beginners tackles his much more complex relationship with his once-distant father. The two movies aren’t perfectly, exactly analogous but they’re undeniable in their parallels and they work well as sister films (an odd thing to say about someone obsessed about his parentage as an only child).

Beginners opens with Mills’s on-screen surrogate (an as-charming-as-ever Ewan McGregor) cleaning out the house his father lived & died in as an old man. In what’s appearing to be a trademark narrative style, Mills tells the entire life story of the recently deceased parent up front, then doubles back to color in the details for context. We learn immediately that he was not a great father to his only child in his youth, being mostly absent for his son’s formative years. This is explained largely to be a result of his quiet suffering as a closeted homosexual, something he concealed from the public until after his wife’s death. We mostly see the man as his son remembers him: openly gay, struggling with poor physical health in his 70s, acting as a makeshift father figure for his much younger weirdo boyfriend, and shining as happier than ever. This narrative thread mixes with a separate timeline where his son, grieving for the loss of both of his parents, struggles to form a healthy romantic relationship based on the ideals of the home he grew up in. He also struggles with a self-absorbed ennui he solemnly knows his parents didn’t have the luxury of, due to the times of War and queer & Jewish persecution that dominated their own heyday.

Reductively speaking, Beginners is not as impressive of a film as 20th Century Women. At times it can feel like a less-confident trial run of that far-superior work. It’s still a great movie in its own right, though, one that excels due to the same multi-media, multi-POV approach to a narrative structure Mills would later apply to its follow-up. Still images & physical photographs are used to evoke a period setting. Historical context seeps in to inform the film’s non-linear biographies through news footage & coldly presented facts. The scope of its story pulls back not just to cover its characters’ lives, but the essence of life on Earth. In my personal favorite touch, the nonverbal thoughts if the deceased father’s Jack Russell terrier are presented in subtitles, a detail that increases in frequency as the dog becomes more of a central character. Although I can’t cite Beginners as my favorite Mike Mills movie, it’s easily one of the best Jack Russell terrier movies I’ve ever seen, rivaling even Russell Madness (a lofty target, I know). In watching the dog communicate thoughts like, “The darkness is about to consume us if something drastic doesn’t happen right now,” or the father drunkenly discovering the simple joy of gay club music or his son learning to become a more loving, empathetic person in his grief-stricken moment of crisis, Beginners unfolds as an interesting, delicately beautiful work of personal revelation. Comparing it to the virtues of the immediately similar works from its director might undercut some of what makes it so special as a singular piece of art, but it is special all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2017

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

There are 47 feature films nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards. We here at Swampflix have reviewed little more than half of the films nominated (so far!), but we’re still happy to see so many movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but as a list this isn’t too shabby in terms of representing what 2016 had to offer to cinema. Listed below are the 25 Oscar-Nominated films from 2016 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best based on our star ratings. With each entry we’ve listed a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

EPSON MFP image

1. 20th Century Women, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“Although 20th Century Women is constructed on the foundation of small, intimate performances, it commands an all-encompassing scope that pulls back to cover topics as wide as punk culture solidarity, what it means to be a ‘good’ man in modern times, the shifts in status of the American woman in the decades since the Great Depression, the 1980s as a tipping point for consumer culture, the history of life on the planet Earth, and our insignificance as a species in the face of the immensity of the Universe. For me, this film was the transcendent, transformative cinematic experience people found in titles like Tree of Life & Boyhood that I never ‘got.’ Although it does succeed as an intimate, character-driven drama & an actors’ showcase, it means so much more than that to me on a downright spiritual level.”

2. Kubo and the Two Strings, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, Best Visual Effects

“A lot of what makes Kubo and the Two Stings such an overwhelming triumph is its attention to detail in its visual & narrative craft. As with their past titles like Coraline & ParaNorman, Laika stands out here in terms of ambition with where the studio can push the limits of stop-motion animation as a medium. The film’s giant underwater eyeballs, Godzilla-sized Harryhausen skeleton, and stone-faced witches are just as terrifying as they are awe-inspiringly beautiful and I felt myself tearing up throughout the film just as often in response to its immense sense of visual craft as its dramatic implications of past trauma & familial loss. The film also allows for a darkness & danger sometimes missing in the modern kids’ picture, but balances out that sadness & terror with genuinely effective humor about memory loss & untapped talent.”

3. Hail, Caesar!, nominated for Best Production Design

“Hail, Caesar! is not performing well financially & the reviews are somewhat mixed so it’s obvious that not everyone’s going to be into it. However, it’s loaded with beautiful tributes to every Old Hollywood genre I can think of and it’s pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that I think ranks up there with the very best of the Coens’ work, an accolade I wouldn’t use lightly. If you need a litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the film yourself, Barton Fink might be a good place to start. If you hold Barton Fink in high regard, I encourage you to give Hail, Caesar! a chance. You might even end up falling in love with it just as much as I did & it’ll be well worth the effort to see its beautiful visual work projected on the silver screen either way.”

EPSON MFP image

4. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, nominated for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design

“The cast of Fantastic Beasts reminds me a lot of the cast of the Harry Potter films. Their camaraderie really comes across in their acting, and there’s just good vibes all around. The film’s director, David Yates, also directed the last four Harry Potter films, and he’s known for being a pleasure to work with. This is cinema that’s made with so much passion and love, and I cannot wait to see the next four!”

EPSON MFP image

5. Silence, nominated for Best Cinematography

“It’s going to take me a few years and more than a few viewings to fully grapple with Silence. My guess is that Scorsese isn’t fully done grappling with it himself. What’s clear to me is the film’s visual majesty and its unease with the virtue of spreading gospel into cultures where it’s violently, persistently rejected. What’s unclear is whether the ultimate destination of that unease is meant to be personal or universal, redemptive or vilifying, a sign of hope or a portrait of madness. Not all audiences are going to respond well to those unanswered questions. Indeed, most audiences won’t even bother taking the journey to get there. Personally, I found Silence to be complexly magnificent, a once-in-a-lifetime achievement of paradoxically loose & masterful filmmaking craft, whether or not I got a response when I prayed to Marty for answers on What It All Means and how that’s reflected in his most sacred text.”

EPSON MFP image

6. Zootopia, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Zootopia is at its smartest when it vilifies a broken institution that has pitted the animals that populate its concrete jungle against one another instead of blaming the individuals influenced by that system for their problematic behavior. A lesser, more simplistic film would’ve introduced an intolerant, speciesist villain for the narrative to shame & punish. Zootopia instead points to various ways prejudice can take form even at the hands of the well-intentioned. It prompts the audience to examine their own thoughts & actions for ways they can uknowingly hurt the feelings or limit the opportunities of their fellow citizens by losing sight of the ideal that “Anyone can be anything.”

7. Hidden Figures, nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer)

“As with all historical films, it’s not wholly clear how precise Hidden Figures is in its details (I must admit that I haven’t read the book on which the film is based), but that’s largely irrelevant to the film’s message. Does it matter whether or not the real-life Al Harrison took a crowbar to the ‘Colored Ladies Room’ sign and declared that ‘Here at NASA, we all pee the same color,’ after learning that his best mathematician had to run a mile to the only such lavatory on the program’s campus every time she needed to relieve herself? Not really. What matters is showing young people (especially young girls) of color that although barriers exist, they can be surmounted. It also reminds the white audience that is, unfortunately, less likely to seek this film out that the barriers that lie in place for minorities to succeed do exist despite their perception of a lack of said barriers.”

8. Moonlight, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Barry Jenkins), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), Best Supporting Actress (Naomi Harris)

“In Moonlight, Jenkins somehow, miraculously finds a way to make a meditation on self-conflict, abuse, loneliness, addiction, and homophobic violence feel like a spiritual revelation, a cathartic release. So much of this hinges on visual abstraction. We sink into Chiron’s dreams. We share in his romantic gaze. Time & sound fall out of sync when life hits him like a ton of bricks, whether positively or negatively.”

EPSON MFP image

9. Arrival, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Denis Villeneuve), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound Editing

“Arrival is a film about two species, human and alien, learning to communicate with one another by the gradual process of establishing common ground between their two disparate languages. Similarly, the film has to teach its audience how to understand what they’re watching and exactly what’s being communicated. It’s often said that movies are about the journey, not the destination, a (cliché) sentiment I’d typically tend to agree with, but so much of Arrival‘s value as a work of art hinges on its concluding half hour that its destination matters just as much, if not more than the effort it takes to get there. This is a story told through cyclical, circular, paradoxical logic, a structure that’s announced from scene one, but doesn’t become clear until minutes before the end credits and can’t be fully understood until at least a second viewing. Whether or not you’ll be interested in that proposition depends largely on your patience for that kind of non-traditional, non-linear payoff in your cinematic entertainment.”

EPSON MFP image

10. La La Land, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Damien Chazelle), Best Cinematography, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Original Score, Best Original Songs (“Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”, “City of Stars”), Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing

“La La Land manipulates its audience from both ends. It opens with a big This Is For Musical Theater Die-Hards Only spectacle to appease people already on board with its genre and then slowly works in modern modes of the medium’s potential to win over stragglers & push strict traditionalists into new, unfamiliar territory. The ultimate destination is an exciting middle ground between nostalgia & innovation and by the film’s final moments I was eating out of its hand, despite starting the journey as a hostile skeptic.”

EPSON MFP image

11. I Am Not Your Negro, nominated for Best Documentary

“It seems inevitable that I Am Not Your Negro will be employed as a classroom tool to convey the political climate of the radicalized, Civil Rights-minded 1960s, but the form-defiant documentary is something much stranger than that future purpose would imply. Through Baldwin’s intimate, loosely structured essay, the film attempts to pinpoint the exact nature of the US’s inherent racism, particularly its roots in xenophobic Fear of the Other and in the ways it unintentionally expresses itself through pop culture media. These are not easily defined topics with clear, linear narratives and your appreciation of I Am Not Your Negro might largely depend upon how much you enjoy watching the film reach, not upon what it can firmly grasp.”

EPSON MFP image

12. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, nominated for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing

“Rogue One frames the rest of the series in a much darker light. It brings a revived urgency and anxiety to the franchise, which I hope was probably there when Star Wars was first released in 1977. It manages to make the Death Star not just an impractical super weapon and the Empire a floundering bureaucracy that can’t teach its Stormtroopers how to aim. No, the Empire is a real frightening threat. Despite Disney’s CEO insisting that this is not a political movie, there’s quite a bit of war imagery and themes that are being presented in a time when the threat of fascism seems to loom. I mean, the movie itself is about a rebellion.”

EPSON MFP image

13. Star Trek Beyond, nominated for Best Makeup And Hairstyling

“Although this film is being billed as a return to Star Trek’s roots or a real ‘classic style’ Star Trek story, that’s not entirely true. Of course, given that the same thing was said about Insurrection back in 1998 (and, for better or worse, that’s a more or less true description of the film’s premise if nothing else), that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is still a film that takes characters from a fifty year old television series where most problems were solved within an hour and attempts to map them onto a contemporary action film structure, which works in some places and not in others. Other reviews of the film have also stated that Beyond is a more affectionate revisitation of the original series than the previous two films, which is also mostly true. The film does suffer from the fact that the opening sequence bears more than a passing resemblance to a scene in Galaxy Quest, which is a stark reminder of the kind of fun movie that can be made when someone loves Star Trek rather than simply sees it as a commercial venture. Overall, though, you’d be hard pressed not to get some enjoyment out of this film, Trekker or no.”

bear

14. The Jungle Book, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“The Jungle Book is a two-fold tale of revenge (one for Mowgli & one for the wicked tiger Shere Khan) as well as a classic coming of age story about a hero finding their place in the world, but those plot machinations are somewhat insignificant in comparison to the emotional core of Baloo’s close friendship with Mowgli (which develops a little quickly here; I’d like to have seen it given a little more room to breathe). So much of that impact rests on the all-too-capable shoulders of one Bill Murray, who delivers his best performance in years here (outside maybe his collaborations with Wes Anderson).”

EPSON MFP image

15. Captain Fantastic, nominated for Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen)

“Six kids wielding knives, late-night gravedigging, and skinning animals all sound like elements to a rather disturbing horror movie, but, surprisingly, all exist in Matt Ross’s latest comedy-drama, Captain Fantastic. Those with a slightly darker sense of humor will get a kick out of this film, but it really has something to offer everyone, such as family values, brief nudity, religious humor, and a heart-wrenching love story. I had no idea who Matt Ross was, and I was surprised to see that he directed less than a handful of movies because he did such a ‘fantastic’ job with this one.”

EPSON MFP image

16. The Lobster, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“There’s a fierce, biting allegory to this premise that combines the most effective aspects of sci-fi short stories & absurdist stage play black humor to skewer the surreal, predatory nature of the modern romance landscape. It takes a certain sensibility to give into The Lobster‘s many outlandish conceits, but it’s easy to see how the film could top many best of the year lists for those able to lock onto its very peculiar, particular mode of operation, despite the sour word of mouth at the post-screening urinal. It’s basically 2016’s Anomalisa, with all the positives & negatives that comparison implies.”

EPSON MFP image

17. Jackie, nominated for Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Costume Design, Best Original Score

“As much as I admire Jackie‘s search for small character beats over broad dramatization, I think it could have benefited from the campy touch of a drag queen in the lead role. Jackie is delicately beautiful & caustically funny as is, but I’m convinced that with a drag queen in the lead (I’m thinking specifically of Jinkx Monsoon) it could have been an all-time classic.”

EPSON MFP image

18. Manchester by the Sea, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Kenneth Lonergan), Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Casey Affleck), Best Supporting Actor (Lucas Hedges), Best Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams)

“What I was most impressed by in Manchester by the Sea wasn’t at all the heartbreaking drama Affleck skillfully conveys under the falsely calm surface of each scene. Rather, I was most struck by the way the film clashes a take-no-shit Boston bro attitude with devastating moments of emotional fragility to pull out something strikingly funny from the wreckage. The film works really well as a dramatic actors’ showcase, but it’s that act of black comedy alchemy that made it feel special to me.”

EPSON MFP image

19. Nocturnal Animals, nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Shannon)

“Nocturnal Animals feels most alive when Ford drops the pretense of trying to make a point and instead lovingly shoots his beautiful sets & impeccable costumes without any semblance of making them narratively significant. His art curator framing device works best as an instruction manual on how best to appreciate what he’s trying to accomplish in the film, rather than a participation in its thematic goals. I have very little interest in the way Ford’s narratives clash fragile artsy types against the unhinged threat of dangerously macho hicks, but any abstracted moment where he carefully posed naked bodies before blinding red fabric voids on top of a classical music score had me drooling in my chair. I’m not convinced Nocturnal Animals has anything useful or novel to say about the frivolity of revenge or the human condition, but it often works marvelously as an art gallery in motion (when it’s not hung up on watching Amy Adams think & read herself through another lonely night).”

EPSON MFP image

20. Loving, nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Ruth Negga)

“Loving finds Nichols returning to the muted, sullen drama of Mud, this time with a historical bent. It isn’t my favorite mode for a director who’s proven that he can deliver much more striking, memorable work when he leaves behind the confines of grounded realism, but something Nichols does exceedingly well with these kinds of stories is provide a perfect stage for well-measured, deeply affecting performances. Actors Joel Edgerton & Ruth Negga are incredibly, heartachingly sincere in their portrayals of real-life trail-blazers Richard & Mildred Loving and Nichols is smart to take a backseat to their work here, a dedication to restraint I respect greatly, even if I prefer when it’s applied to a more ambitious kind of narrative.”

EPSON MFP image

21. Hell or High Water, nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Jeff Bridges), Best Film Editing

“I totally believe people when they say Hell or High Water is their favorite movie of the year so far, but I suspect these folks are just more finely tuned to the intricacies of its genre & tone than I am. For me, the film is formally a little flat, playing like what I’d imagine a modern Showtime drama version of Walker, Texas Ranger would look like, right down to the wince-worthy music cues. However, even as an outsider I did find myself entertained, especially by the film’s showy dialogue & muted performances.”

EPSON MFP image

22. Fences, nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Denzel Washington), Best Support Actress (Viola Davis)

“Pushing aside any concerns with Fences‘s uncinematic tone, strange sense of pacing, and iffy final moments of redemption for a despicably cruel character (that seems to go even further than the source material in their cautious forgiveness), there’s a lot worth praising in what Washington & his small cast of supporting players accomplish here. Besides the obvious merit of bringing a play he greatly respects to a much wider audience who would not have had the opportunity to see he & Davis perform on stage, Washington does the quintessential thing actors-turned-directors are often accused of: crafting a work as an actor’s showcase above all other concerns. I may have some reservations about Fences being suitable for a big screen adaptation on a tonal, almost spiritual level (although I do very much appreciate the play as a text), but there’s no denying the power of the performances Washington brings to the screen with the project. The film is very much worth a look just for that virtue alone.”

EPSON MFP image

23. Suicide Squad, nominated for Best Makeup And Hairstyling

“Instead of portraying one of the few enjoyable characters in its roster suffering repetitive abuse, Suicide Squad instead re-works her love affair with Mr. J as a Bonnie & Clyde/Mickey & Mallory type outlaws-against-the-world dynamic, one with a very strong BDSM undertone. Affording Harley Quinn sexual consent isn’t the only part of the studio-notes genius of the scenario, either. The film also cuts Leto’s competent-but-forgettable meth mouth Joker down to a bit role so that he’s an occasional element of chaos at best, never fully outwearing his welcome. Not only does this editing room decision soften Leto’s potential annoyance & Ayer’s inherent nastiness; it also allows Harley Quinn to be a wisecracking murderer on her own terms, one whose most pronounced relationship in the film (with Deadshot) is friendly instead of romantic. I know you’re supposed to root for an auteur’s vision & not for the big bad studio trying to homogenize their ‘art’, but Suicide Squad was much more enjoyable in its presumably compromised form than it would have been otherwise.”

EPSON MFP image

24. Doctor Strange, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“Dr. Strange is a feast for the eyes, but fails to nourish on any comedic, narrative, spiritual, philosophical, or emotional level. For a work that’s inspired over a year of think piece controversy and a few weeks of hyperbolic Best of the MCU praise, it mostly exists as a flashy, but disappointing hunk of Nothing Special.”

EPSON MFP image

25. Elle, nominated for Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert)

“Elle vaguely echoes ideas about what it’s like to mentally relive a trauma once it’s ‘behind you,’ having to encounter your abuser in public social settings without acknowledging the transgression, the ineffectiveness of reporting sexual assault to police, and the misogynistic & sexually repressed aspects of modern culture that lead to rape in the first place, but all of those concepts exist in the film as indistinct whispers. Mostly, the rape is treated like a cheap murder mystery, with all of the typical red herrings & idiotic jump scares you’d expect in a whodunit. It’s a paralyzing trauma that has little effect on the story outside the scenes where it’s coldly detailed onscreen and the real shame is that it sours what is otherwise an excellently performed black comedy & character study by leaving very little room for laughter, if any.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Episode #24 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Elephant Man (1980) & Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor Melodramas

/ swampflix / 25 Comments

inaworld

Welcome to Episode #24 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twenty-fourth episode, CC makes Brandon watch David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) for the first time in light of John Hurt’s recent passing. Also, CC & Brandon discuss Douglas Sirk’s infamous run of Technicolor melodramas produced by Universal-International Pictures in the 1950s. Enjoy!

-CC Chapman & Brandon Ledet

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

fivestar

German filmmaker Douglas Sirk has dozens of titles to his name as a director, but the influence of his career is often condensed down to his handful of Technicolor melodramas produced by Universal-International Pictures in the 1950s. I had never seen a Sirk film in my life until recently, but the cultural impact of those Technicolor pictures was so significant that I could easily recognize their echoes in works as disparate as Far from Heaven, The Fly (1958), Polyester, and Gods & Monsters. Perhaps the most iconic title among Sirk’s most well-known American works is the Rock Hudson/Jane Wyman melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Dismissively categorized at its time of release as a “woman’s picture,” All That Heaven Allows may not have been fully appreciated in its initial run the way Sirk’s Imitation of Life eventually was just a few years later, but its reputation as an intricately constructed art piece has only grown in the decades since. I can only report that even after having seen its visual aesthetic assimilated & absorbed in a countless number of films throughout my life, All That Heaven Allows still makes for an intense, powerful first-time watch as a modern viewer. I’m in awe of its craft & its efficiency and still a little tipsy as I’m writing this from drinking in its lush, color-soaked artistry. I think I’m an instant Sirk fan, an immediate convert.

The story told here isn’t necessarily what’s important to the film’s appeal. Despite being 38 years old at the time of production, Jane Wyman plays a middle aged widow worried that her life is heading towards a lonely end. Her social circle of sycophantic elbow-rubbers & town gossips can only offer her calculated cocktail parties & polite company. Her bratty children, a Freudian scholar daughter & a brutish meathead son, selfishly plot for her to live a life alone in front of the television, described in-film as “the last refuge of a lonely woman.” Everyone seems to have concrete ideas about what the widow should do with the rest of her life and they circle around her, ready to pounce on any misstep she makes in choosing her path. Imagine their shock, then, when the woman allows herself to be seduced across class lines by her much younger gardener, played by the movie star handsome (and famously closeted) Rock Hudson. Will she leave behind her life of stuffy cocktails in the parlor for the raucous lobster boils her young beau shares with his equally money-ambivalent friends? She wants to value romance over social status, but the town’s prying eyes & her selfish kids’ disapproval make the decision difficult. The hot young landscaper offers her a more natural, fulfilling life than the self-conscious one she leads and the film’s central conflict lies in whether she’ll have the courage to accept the offer before it’s too late.

Keeping the story a thinly structured narrative frame is a smart choice, as it allows plenty of room to focus on the film’s real draw: a nonstop visual feast. Sirk lights his interiors with only the harshest, deep cold blues clashed against the most breathtaking yellow warmth. It’s like watching giallo, except with romance instead of murder driving its central mystery. Just watching a character transition from a candlelit parlor to ice cold moonlight, the lighting swapping roles between those spaces to match their movements, is enough to make you gasp. Sirk’s eye for exterior settings & Nature is just as hyper-real. Studio lot suburbia (sets that were later reused for episodes of Leave It to Beaver) looks like impressionistic paintings. Rock Hudson serves as our gateway to this Natural dreamworld, hand-feeding deer in his own backyard and drawing the audience’s attention to the trees that populate his impossible, artificial landscape. I haven’t seen colors this breathtakingly deep and sets this cinematically dreamlike since I first witnessed the Criterion restoration of The Red Shoes. It’s truly a marvel and Sirk’s camera knows how to frame & capture its most savory pleasures. By the time All That Heaven Allows was over, I felt as if I were drunk. Not too bad for “a woman’s picture,” huh?

It’s so easy to get swept up in this film’s beautiful homes, costuming, and interior lighting that time begins to take on a different pace altogether. All That Heaven Allows flew by for me. It worked like a quickly-paced seduction montage set to a sweeping orchestral score, as if Rock Hard Hudson were sweeping the entire audience off its feet, not just the hot to trot widow he takes a fancy to. It’s tempting to attribute a lot of the film’s entertainment value to its production design & its intense Technicolor dreaminess, but Sirk shows a masterful hand in matching that cinematic artifice to a concisely told, rapidly paced, delicately tragic seduction story. All That Heaven Allows is a perfect object, the ideal version of what it sets out to achieve. I doubt that’s the last time I’ll say that about a Douglas Sirk film, but it’s still an inarguable fact.

-Brandon Ledet

The Playgirls and the Vampire (1960)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

campstamp

Sometimes a movie is only useful in illuminating what makes its better version so successful. Last December, I was so floored by the unexpected greatness of The Vampire and the Ballerina that I immediately sought out another title in its general vicinity in a desperate search for a similar gem. Both The Playgirls and the Vampire & The Vampire and the Ballerina are 1960 Italian horror erotica about a group of oversexed professional dancers being terrorized by vampires in an isolated, crypt-like castle. Only one of those films is at all entertaining or artfully constructed, though. The Playgirls and the Vampire is the exact kind of deflated trash I expected to watch when I was surprised by the startlingly artful The Vampire and the Ballerina. It’s a thoughtlessly tossed-off cheapie with all the naked skin & bloodshed of its superior contemporary, but none of the eroticism or sense of style.

I had high hopes for The Playgirls and the Vampire after its opening shot: a long, quiet pan over a drastically lit crypt that ends when a hand moved the lid to a coffin from within. This is more or less when the film’s interest in thoughtful cinematography ends. A bus load of exotic dancers are derailed on the way to their performance due to a storm. The master of the castle where they take refuge shows a peculiarly intense interest in one of the girls, who looks suspiciously like a painting of an ancient woman on one of the walls. Long vampire cliché short, this girl is converted into his vampire queen and her fellow dancers are hunted individually over the film’s short, slight runtime. Nothing in the plot matters nearly as much as finding excuses to show skin. Girls sleep corseted, there’s some leering shots of their stocking-clad gams, and when the playgirl vampire appears in the dark to drain her former manager’s blood there’s a brief glimpse of her bare breasts (which I guess was risque in 1960, even for European genre cinema). In that last scene, the vampire playgirl is lit interestingly to initially obscure her naked body and the film concludes with an amazing practical effect where the castle’s master ages Dorian Gray-style over an animated series of mat paintings. Everything else is forgettably bland, though, even when the girls are stripping to dance for the camera, and those two moments would be better served as .gifs than as parts of the larger, less interesting whole.

I wanted to find some kind of camp value in The Playgirls and the Vampire, but the film was stingy even with that potential mode of entertainment. I guess I was amused by the way the goofball manager’s English dub included such classic Italian phrases as “Wassa matter?” & “Wassa matter you?” and the way the dancers roamed the castle chasing kittens or unlocking secret doors by suggestively stroking axe handles could be occasionally amusing, but those moments weren’t nearly enough to turn me around on the film’s overall limp sense of style, humor, and sexuality. The only real value I found in The Playgirls and the Vampire was personal validation that The Vampire and the Ballerina really was that good and I wasn’t exaggerating its accomplishments. If anyone ever questions my love for that movie I now have a perfect point of contrast to show them how the exact same formula could be executed disastrously wrong.

-Brandon Ledet

Heidi Kozak: Undersung Scream Queen

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

There’s a lot to be shocked about in February’s Movie of the Month, Brian Yuzna’s satirical class politics body horror Society, but long before the incestuous, gore-soaked surrealism of the film’s climactic shunting began I found one of my biggest shocks in a very minor casting choice. The protagonist’s Valley Girl brat girlfriend was a very much unexpected face, the same actress who played the drummer in one of my favorite discoveries last year: Slumber Party Massacre II. Heidi Kozak has a tidy little career as a television actor to her name, most notable from her arc on the long-defunct drama series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Her feature film career, however, is much more limited. After a single scene debut as a street tough in the Sharon Stone/Adam Ant cop thriller Cold Steel, Kozak enjoyed a brief run as an undersung scream queen in three 80s horror classics: Slumber Party Massacre II, Friday the 13th Part VII – The New Blood, and, of course, Society. Her respective roles as Sally, Sandra, and Shauna in these films were never big enough to snag top bill or make her anything close to a household name, but Kozak did find a way to leave a huge impression on horror schlock as an art form in just a few years’ time.

EPSON MFP image

Sally

I ran through the entirety of the Slumber Party Massacre trilogy twice last year, not because each entry in the series blew my mind, but because the second film in particular was a life changer. Slumber Party Massacre II is an MTV-inspired fever dream of slain teenagers & nightmarish hallucinations that completely reinterpreted its straightforward slasher predecessor as a kind of surreal live action cartoon. All four girls in the film’s central garage rock band (a surprisingly decent The Go-Go’s knockoff) who embark on the titular doomed slumber party road trip are exciting to watch as performers. Courtney’s got the Final Girl timidity, Amy’s got the Best Friend sincerity, Sheila’s got the Rock Star sex appeal: each are entertaining in their own right. Still, I’d argue that Heidi Kozak’s performance as the band’s drummer, Sally, is a definitive show stealer. She not only features prominently in the movie’s most stomach-churning practical effects showcase (just one of her two onscreen deaths in the film), but she also brings a distinct Valley Girl cheese to the character that would make the actor so easily recognizable in her later horror works.

We don’t know much about Sally as a character except that she’s boy-crazy and she’s a drummer. The drumming part is something Kozak sells hilariously unconvincingly, endlessly miming the same repetitive motions with her drumsticks while the soundtrack does its best to make her seem competent. She does sell the character’s boy-crazy delirium quite well, though, chiming in as often as she can with announcements like, “I met this outrageous guy! He was such a babe,” and “I know what Courtney’s getting for her birthday . . . a boyfriend!” Sally seems to be her social group’s air headed cut-up, prone to shouting half-formed thoughts like, “Someday we’re going to be in movies and rock videos and everything,” and “Do anything you want to! Good times!” It’s easily the most dialogue Kozak is afforded in any of her works as a minor scream queen and she makes Sally out to be such a fun, bubbly character that every moment she’s onscreen is a gift. This is especially true of the first of her two onscreen deaths in the film, when Courtney hallucinates that a pimple Sally’s been worried about all weekend grows to encompass the entirety of her face and explodes all over the bathroom. It’s hideous, highly effective gore work and a much more memorable moment than when she’s later impaled by the killer’s phallic guitar drill. Poor Sally.

Most Killer Outfit: In the pillow fight scene, Sally sports a yellow crop top with Daisy Duke cutoffs and an asymmetrical ponytail. It’s the perfect outfit for any summertime sleepover, but it’s especially sporty for when you might need to flee from a demonic sex monster and his giant, guitar-shaped drill.

Sandra

A year after her scream queen debut in Slumber Party Massacre II, Kozak hit it big time (as far as mainstream horror franchises go). Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood practically lifted the Sally character wholesale from her previous film, only leaving behind her beloved drum kit. I can’t say that I especially enjoy this late-in-the-game franchise entry, but I do appreciate that it occupies the sillier end of Jason Voorhees lore that makes movies like Jason X and Jason Takes Manhattan, some of my favorites of the series. In this loosely sketched out version of Crystal Lake mythology, Jason’s dead body is reanimated & freed from its watery grave when a troubled young teen accidentally exercises her Carrie-like telepathic abilities in his general vicinity. Unfortunately, the film finds a way to make this ludicrous premise punishingly dull, despite some promising ideas about Jason functioning as a supernatural curse. There’s only two worthwhile aspects to The New Blood once the plot gets stuck in its by the books slasher rut: an inventive kill in which Jason smashes a girl zipped up in a sleeping bag against a tree (a kill later satirized to even greater effect in Jason X) and the casting of Heidi Kozak as inevitable victim Sandra.

Again, there isn’t much difference between Sandra & Sally in terms of character work, except that Sandra actually gets to act on her boy-crazy teen horniness while Sally only got to gush about it. In her introductory scene, Sandra is shown sunbathing and ogling a nearby hunk. In her second scene, she’s screwing a different boy, her boyfriend, in the back of a van, essentially marking herself as ineligible for Final Girl status, a surefire victim for Jason’s swinging machete. It’s in this romantic pairing that we get to see a different side of Kozak that wasn’t already covered in Slumber Party Massacre II. Because her wealthy boyfriend is hosting a teen party at his uncle’s Crystal Lake cabin, Sally winds up playing party mom during a large portion of the film’s first act. She’s still operating within her usual ditzy Valley Girl caricature, but now with a flustered sense of responsibility that has to negotiate between her oversensitive boytoy and some rowdy teens who just want to get drunk & screw. She makes no show of hiding why she’s with the wealthy dipshit either, answering his question, “When did you fall in love with me?” with a teasing, “The first time I saw the enormous size of your beautiful . . . wallet. The bulge in your pants was calling my name. Sandra, Sandra!” Unfortunately, Sandra’s life on this Earth is cut short when she gets the idea to go skinny dipping in Crystal Lake, one of Jason’s biggest pet peeves. She watches in horror as her boyfriend is decapitated on the shore and her naked body double is subsequently drowned. It’s a shame too, because she was one of the few compelling characters in a film that desperately needed more of them, yet she was one of the first to go.

heidikozakf13vii

Most Killer Outfit: In accordance with her status as a more horned-up replica of Sally, Sandra sports a skimpier version of the yellow crop top & short jorts outfit from the previously mentioned pillow fight in her big skinny dipping scene. This time, however, it’s paired with a nude body double instead of an asymmetrical ponytail.

EPSON MFP image

Shauna

Society is easily the strangest film in Kozak’s trio of horror outliers, depite each work being uniquely goofy in their own unique ways. Kozak reprises her Valley Girl routine for one final go-round in Brian Yuzna’s cult classic body horror, but not as a participant in the gore-soaked “shunting” climax, neither as a victim nor as a wealthy mutant “sucking off” the life force of the lower class. Instead, Shauna is a total outsider to the entirety of the plot. She’s just as clueless as the film’s protagonist as to what supernatural evils lie under the surface of the film’s well-to-do Society, but instead of investigating the Truth, she spends the entire film trying to join the ranks of a ruling class that has no use for her. Her character traits aren’t much different than Sally’s or Sandra’s, but Shauna’s ditzy, boy-obsessed teen routine is put to a much stranger use, likely because Society itself is much less structurally formulaic than the two straightforward slashers she worked on previously.

Shauna has exactly one goal in Society: to earn an invitation to rich cad Ted Ferguson’s party. She does not succeed. The high school cheerleader schemer pretends to be so into and in love with the protagonist, Bill, but her interest in him seems to be a political move based on his football star social status and potential election as senior class president. When Bill finds himself entangled with a potential love interest that actually wants to have sex, Shauna is incensed not because she’s jealous of the affair, but because she wasted so much emotional work with Bill and never earned that Ted Ferguson invite she wanted so badly. Once their romance is fully dissolved, Shauna’s storyline is left by the wayside and she disappears before the climactic shunting, forever an outsider, never to be heard from again.

As an actor, Heidi Kozak similarly disappeared. Her work as a minor scream queen dissipated within three glorious, but short years and it’s doubtful she’d be remembered for any other popular media contributions, except maybe by the most dedicated Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman fans. I’d say she fully deserves to be remembered now, though. All three of her horror projects have proven to be such strange genre outliers with unexpected cult status longevity and she makes a striking presence in each instance. She’ll never enjoy the status of a Neve Campbell or a Jamie Lee Curtis, but she’ll always be a cherished scream queen to me.

Most Killer Outfit: In the scene when Shauna confronts Bill for his cheating ways, she shows up at his house in a skin tight denim dress, paired with a candy red sports car. She looks incredibly powerful in that getup and Bill was a fool to let her go in his pursuit of the truth about the shunt, especially since his eventual fate was entirely unavoidable.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, the satirical class politics body horror Society, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at its highly questionable DVD-mate Spontaneous Combustion (1990).

-Brandon Ledet

Shivers (1976)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

When watching the recent psychological/philosophical horror High-Rise, a movie that ranked very highly as one of my favorite films of 2016, I could only think of one viable comparison point for why it worked so well for me: Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic The Exterminating Angel. The class system resentment & nonstop-party terror of The Exterminating Angel informs so much of what makes High-Rise a deeply unnerving picture, but something I had initially overlooked was how Cronenbergian the film was at the same time. The unspoken, unexplained psychology & philosophy that terrorizes audiences in High-Rise is very much reminiscent of the best of David Cronenberg, which is no surprise once you consider that Cronenberg is an avid fan of J.G. Ballard, who penned High-Rise‘s source material (as well as the source material for Cronenberg’s Crash). In fact, Cronenberg had made a film, his very first feature no less, that closely resembles High-Rise even more than The Exterminating Angel, especially in its narrative structure & visual palette, presumably because it was inspired by Ballard’s text.

Much like High-Rise, Cronenberg’s debut film Shivers is set entirely within a high-rise condo community where residents have very little reason to ever leave the convenience of their homes. An opening slideshow, narrated liked an advertisement, takes the audience on a guided tour of the high-rise, making a big deal out of its convenience commodities like swimming pools, medical facilities, and recreational sports courts. Unlike with High-Rise, however, the catalyst for this self-contained society devolving into an orgy of uninhibited bloodlust is never left ambiguous or open for interpretation. This particular community is torn apart when a mad scientist perverts an experiment meant to supplant traditional organ transplants with a bio-engineered parasite that can be made to assume an organ’s functions by making that parasite a kind of aphrodisiac & a stimulant. This experiment gets out of control when the mad scientist’s teenage mistress spreads the parasite through copious amounts of promiscuous sex and the entire building devolves into zombie-like behavior, except with a lust for sex instead of brains.

It’s fascinating to see a young, scrappy Cronenberg working within the framework of a drive-in exploitation horror before honing his craft in more focused, better funded works like The Fly or Videodrome. Although the usual Cronenberg themes of body horror & unexplainable paranoia are certainly present throughout, Shivers becomes a fairly standard creature feature once the venereally-spread parasite is let loose onscreen. Even the creature itself, which looks like a monster’s detached & wriggling tongue, is a far cry like from the special effects mastery of later Cronenberg works. You can also feel the cheap exploitation edge to the film in its various alternate titles, which are very un-Cronenberg: The Parasite Murders, They Came from Within, and (the shooting title) Blood Orgy of the Parasites. Unfortunately, Shivers is mostly notable because of its cultural significance as proto-Cronenberg & an early glimpse at what would later be perfected in High-Rise. On its own, it’s only a moderately interesting slice of exploitation cinema where a mad scientist torments an entire apartment building (including horror legend Barbara Steele among his many victims) because humanity has “lost track of its instincts” and would supposedly be better served engaging in “a beautiful, mindless orgy.”

The sexual nature of the violence in Shivers, as fascinating as it is in relation to venereal disease paranoia, means the film is far from a “fun” watch. Also, the budget of a first time filmmaker means Cronenberg couldn’t push the mayhem anywhere close to the scale of High-Rise‘s dissent into widespread madness. I can only recommend Shivers to those interested in the humble beginnings of Cronenberg & the influences of one of last year’s more unnerving (and incredibly divisive) horror films. It’s most interesting as a telegraphed version of better work that was to follow. That’s not to say there’s no value to that kind of entertainment, though, and Shivers worked best when it deepened my appreciation for movies that I already loved.

-Brandon Ledet

Beware the Slenderman (2017)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

threehalfstar

One of the most common complaints that documentaries suffer is the accusation that they exploit their human subjects for artistic (and financial) gain. It’d be difficult to argue against that accusation in regards to the recent HBO Docs release Beware the Slenderman, which turns the real-life stabbing of a twelve year old girl into a midnight movie creepshow & a jumping point for internet age fear mongering. Although I could comfortably call Beware the Slenderman exploitative, it’s exploitation cinema done exceedingly well. The first hour of the documentary is highly effective as bone-chilling horror, opening with a Blair Witch-style dramatization of the titular “creepy pasta” the Slenderman in a heavily pixelated version of the woods. As the film tracks the legend of the Slenderman from online fiction to amateur video games to Tumblr fan art to YouTube mainstay, it makes some really interesting and genuinely unnerving points about the evolution of memes as a collective “virus of the mind” and the function of online folklore as “digital fairy tales.” It’s when the film instead focuses on the 2014 stabbing of a young Wisconsin girl that it veers into the more exploitative True Crime territory and loses track of its Candyman-esque fascination with the nature of urban legends. I definitely found one side of that divide far more satisfying than the other, but watching Beware the Slenderman navigate this confusing tonal clash and gleefully cross some ethical lines to get its point across made for a unique documentary experience.

Two twelve year old girls are taken into custody and tried as adults for stabbing their friend 19 times in the woods of Wisconsin suburbia. As there has been no decision made in their first-degree attempted murder trial to this date, a charge that could possibly earn them each 65 years in prison, the two girls’ story has, by design, no conclusion. All we know upfront about the stabbing is that the victim thankfully survived and that the accused have made no attempt to hide the fact that they are guilty. The crime is introduced in-film through media coverage montage and long-form interviews with the accused’s parents, which tells their entire life story to a backdrop of home video footage. The parents describe mostly normal childhoods outside stray sociopathic reactions to pop culture media (specifically the infamously devastating scene from the beginning of Bambi) and a gothy tinge to their daughters’ online activity. There’s a lot of frustration and empathy in those interviews as the parents struggle to make sense of children they thought they knew, an internet culture they completely underestimated, and the earliest signs of mental illness in otherwise normal-seeming childhoods. The problem is that they aren’t the only interviews the documentary is structured around. In a much sleazier line of inquiry, Beware the Slenderman integrates long stretches of the two girls’ confessions/police interrogations from mere hours after the stabbing. Watching two children describe the stabbing of a third child in cold-blooded terms is just about the most exploitative thing I’ve ever seen in True Crime media, but it serves the material well, especially in the way it deepens the creepiness of the film’s titular monster, the Slenderman.

Originally penned as a creepy pasta, but earning a full-blown urban legend status through online folklore, the Slenderman is a tall, lanky being with long arms, claws, and retractable tendrils. He is faceless, always wears a suit & tie, and is naturally drawn to young children. Adults see his attraction to children as a threat of harm, but children (especially bullied outsiders) see it as welcoming & protective. As one interviewee puts it, “Often in the adult world, we can forget how much it sucks to be a kid.” This modernized version of the Boogeyman or the Pied Piper offers alienated children the promise of protection & community. The scary part is that some kids truly believe he’s real, real enough for them to stab a friend 19 times to “prove themselves worthy” and to “prove the skeptics wrong.” By their logic they had no choice but to slay a human sacrifice for the Slenderman, explaining, “I didn’t want to do this, but I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.” Richard Dawkins is brought in as an evolution expert on the way memes spread & adapt. Brothers Grimm scholars attempt to contextualize the phenomenon in the tradition of fairy tale folklore. None of the talking heads are nearly as effective as seeing for yourself how the Slenderman is represented in online multimedia art and hearing what the fictional character’s devotees are willing to do “for him” in the real world. It may be a question of my general genre preferences with all media, but I think this documentary works best when it pursues this type of urban legend horror aesthetic instead of playing with the ethics of True Crime narratives.

I’ll admit that as an audience, my biggest hurdle with Beware the Slenderman was its length, not its ethical dilemmas. At two full hours, the film outwears its welcome a bit by the concluding 30min stretch, which started to feel as pedestrian as an episode of Dateline NBC. I’m always advocating for my horror cinema to limit its runtime, though, and it’s that genre distinction that allowed me to enjoy the documentary despite its occasionally objectionable sense of morality. Using the near-murder of a young girl by her peers for shock value or an audience hook is certainly questionable, especially if the ultimate purpose of your works to creep adults out with technophobic warnings about what children are getting into online. That’s not even to mention that the film liberally appropriates artwork from those same children for its imagery without pay or credit. I expect that kind of unethical alarmism in my horror media, though, and I really like the way Beware the Slenderman tried to make phenomena like the Ice Bucket Challenge, planking, and YouTube reaction videos into just as sinister of a force as CandyCrush is in #horror and Skype is in Unfriended. Before the easy fact checking days of the internet, people used to believe films like The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Cannibal Holocaust were genuine documentaries, real life recordings of actual incidents. Beware the Slenderman works best as a continuation of that horror tradition by actually filling that role as a document of a real-life event. It’s a little overlong, a tad sensationalist, and mundanely sleazy in some of its True Crime touches, but it’s also a great horror film, especially for a documentary.

-Brandon Ledet

Cross-Promotion: The 2016 Phantom Awards on The Bangers n’ Mash Show

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

inaworld

I was recently invited to contribute to The Bangers n’ Mash Show’s annual Phantom Awards episode to once again highlight the Best Films of 2016. According to the episode description, “Mr. Bangers and Mr. Mash welcome the new year with [their] annual tradition: The Phantom Awards! As [they] do every January, [they] gather to give awards out to the best sci-fi, horror, and fantasy films of the previous year.” I submitted a few audio clips to the episode along with several other contributors (including Crushed Celluloid’s Marcus Jones) to throw some much deserved praise towards the Kevin Spacey talking cat comedy Nine Lives, the under-seen home invasion thriller Emelie, and my beloved The Neon Demon.

Give a listen to the 2016 Phantom Awards below! And if you like what you hear, give a listen to more episodes of The Bangers ‘n Mash Show on their YouTube playlist.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood Diner (1987)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

see no evil

fourstar

campstamp

“While it is a sad fact that mass homicide and practitioners of Blood Cults infest our society, the producers of this film wish to express that they do not condone, nor do they want to inspire, any of the human butchery or violence portrayed in this film. If you feel you will be offended by such material, please leave the theater at once . . .”

Opening with that grave, overly serious warning, you might expect Blood Diner to have the gritty grindhouse exploitation vibe of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (an obvious point of reference for that tongue-in-cheek disclaimer). However, the truth is that Blood Diner is much more in line with the energetically violent slapstick comedy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, except that its humor is a lot less shrill and the movie does a much better job of distancing itself from its own predecessor. 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.

Two young children play in a Pee-wee’s Playhouse version of the 1960s, complete with kitsch toys, Cadillacs, and a radio broadcast of doo-wop singers maniacally crooning “Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy” on a seemingly endless loop. This nostalgic reverie is disrupted when their serial killer uncle, announced on the radio to be responsible for the “Happy Times All Girls Glee Club Slaying” & “armed with a meat cleaver in one hand and his genitals in another” bursts through the door like Leatherface to say his final goodbyes before the police gun him down. In this final exchange, he takes the time to make sure that his ancient blood ritual religion has stuck with the children. Boy, did it ever. The brothers grow up to be screwball sociopaths, casual serial murderers who think nothing of ending a life for the sake of a punchline. They resurrect their uncle after a 20 year delay by grave-robbing his somehow still-intact brain & eyes and storing them in a mason jar in their hip vegetarian restaurant. Their uncle’s brain continues to brainwash them (ugh) from the comfort of its jar, pressuring them to collect female body parts from fresh victims to resurrect the ancient goddess they worship for an all-important “blood buffet” that’s ultimately staged at the city’s slimiest rock club. Their mission is, for the most part, a success.

Essentially, none of this matters. Minus the part where the brothers serve human meat to their vegetarian restaurant’s loyal patrons, the plot of Blood Diner falls somewhere between the female body reassembly of Frankenhooker and a version of Weekend at Bernie’s where every character is a potential corpse to play with. It’s somehow treated with less reverence than either of those titles. This is a film that survives entirely on a diet of small moments & constant sight gags. A mannequin is treated like a normal human character, his nature as an inanimate object never being mentioned. A shovel to the back of the head pops out a victim’s eyeballs with ease. One of the chef-brothers gets to live out his dream of becoming a pro wrestler and takes on a heel named Jimmy Hitler in the ring. A shitty new wave concert erupts into a nonstop orgy of metaphysical violence. This kind of irreverent mayhem can often feel grotesquely misogynistic, like when a nude aerobics class is gunned down by a killer in a Ronald Reagan mask. Even that line of gore comedy can be deliciously amusing, though, like when a female victim’s head is deep fried and emerges looking like a gigantic hush puppy. Taking a ZAZ-style approach to its live action cartoon cruelty, Blood Diner throws so many stupid jokes at the wall that eventually you’ll let your guard down enough for a fair number of them to stick and you’ll earn a hearty laugh.

It’s possible that because Blood Diner is so cheaply made and so blatantly stupid that I’m giving it more credit than it deserves, overlooking some of its more glaring, misanthropic faults. I’m definitely the kind of audience that’s willing to forgive the mistakes made by a scrappy production written around a terrible “blood donor” pun just so I can indulge in some aggressively juvenile humor about unwitting cannibalism and nudist Kung Fu. Blood Diner feels like a genuine version of The Greasy Strangler that was discovered in the wild instead of designed in a lab. It’s the experience I expected to have with Tobe Hooper self-parody in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II instead of the the disappointing one I got, a rare schlock cinema balance where the grotesque humor is exhaustingly inane, but still impressive in its success rate. I’m curious to see what other atrocities Jackie Kong unleashed upon the world in her heyday, because she seems to have a strong comedic mind for someone who only managed to get a handful of projects off the ground. Even if Blood Diner is her only success, though, it’d still be a career worth being proud of, thanks to a grotesque cinematic prank that’s an outright miracle in the way it tests patience, outwears its welcome, and spits in the viewer’s face, while still feeling oddly endearing in its own dinky way.

-Brandon Ledet