brandon ledet

Always for Pleasure (1978)

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fourhalfstar

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a near-impossible phenomenon to capture in art. There’s a magical, revelrous spirit to it that defies a strict, all-encompassing definition. As one interviewee explains in the documentary Always for Pleasure, Mardi Gras is not a spectator sport. It’s something you have to engage with & participate in to truly grasp, which might be a significant reason why capturing its spirit on film or in words is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

Filmed in 1977, the Criterion-approved Les Blank documentary Always for Pleasure truly is the best introduction to New Orleans culture that I could possibly imagine. Where else are you going to find soul legend Irma Thomas sharing her red beans & rice recipe and Allen Toussaint explaining the significance of jazz funerals & second lines? There’s also glimpses of crawfish boils, Mardi Gras Indians, Jazz Fest, above-ground cemeteries, St. Patty’s Day celebrations in the Irish Channel, brass bands, street cars, Dixie beer, Congo Square, and what essentially amounts to music videos for Wild Tchopitoulas & Professor Longhair. At just less than an hour in length, the film is an easily digestible crash course in local charm & hedonism. An interviewee in Always for Pleasure describes New Orleans as “The City that Care Forgot” & “The last city in American where you can feel free to live,” and the supporting images that surround those claims make it feel like he might be onto something.

What’s most remarkable about Always for Pleasure, though, is how close it comes to the near-impossible task of capturing the totality Mardi Gras in a single work. There’s a little bit of historical context provided about how the holiday developed as “a lustful time before a time without” both within & without religious connotation. For the most part, though, the film is smart not to over-explain. It mostly just documents. With the shoulder-mounted shakiness of a local news camera investigating a crime scene, Blank’s movie takes you into the nooks & crannies of the Carnival season. If Mardi Gras is not a spectator sport, the reason Always for Pleasure succeeds is because it feels authentically participatory. It grabs you by the hand & leads you through the parades & celebrations in a playful, drunken “sea cruise” of excess & time-honored tradition.

There pretty much is no substitution for the all-encompassing sampling of New Orleans culture in Always for Pleasure. The only significant aspect of local flavor I can think of that’s missing from the film would maybe be some culinary delights: gumbo, king cakes, beignets, etc. . . . and, of course, the rampant political corruption. And because the city is so hellbent on preserving & passing down its traditions from one generation to the next, the documentary still feels eerily fresh today. Honestly, not much has changed in the past three or four decades except for the fashions. This is the New Orleans I know & love. This is the meandering magic of Mardi Gras preserved for posterity in a work of art. That’s no small feat, I assure you, so this ends up being the film I return to on an annual basis to get into the spirit of the season.

-Brandon Ledet

Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.: Iron Man 3 (2013)

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Superhero Watching: Alternating Marvel Perspectives, Fresh and Longterm, Ignoring X-Men, or S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X., is a feature in which Boomer (who reads superhero comics & is well versed in the MCU) & Brandon (who reads alternative comics & had, at the start of this project, seen less than 25% of the MCU’s output) revisit the films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of someone who knows what they’re talking about & someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue.

Boomer: In 2014, director Jon Favreau released the indie critical darling Chef, in which he appeared as a man who tired of the world of elite haute cuisine that values style over substance, a man who forsakes that world to fix up an old food truck and take a more “back to basics” approach to food. As has been pointed out by other critics, this can be seen as a metaphor for Favreau’s fatigue with the Iron Man franchise, as he bowed out of directing the third film, although he reprised his role as Hogan (if spending 80% of the film comatose can be considered a reprisal). Instead, the reins were handed over to Shane Black, whose resume as a writer includes Lethal Weapon, Monster Squad, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and as such was already well-regarded before he began directing with 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

In 2007, British TV producer Drew Pearce created the cult hit No Heroics, a sitcom focusing on the downtime of troubled British superheroes, and the series aired in late 2008. The surprise cult following of the show led to some interest in an American adaptation during the shaky post-Heroes years in which many stations were looking to ride the superhero wave to the top. An American No Heroics pilot was shot, but ABC ultimately passed on the project (although they greenlit No Ordinary Family, a show that should have gotten a hard pass, just a few years later). Still, this had been enough to bring him to the attention of stateside production companies, and Pearce was initially hired to write the film adaptation of Marvel series Runaways. Although that film’s production stalled out, he was invited to co-write IM3 with Black. The resulting story took large chunks from Warren Ellis’s work on the popular “Extremis” arc from the Iron Man comics (homage is paid in the film by naming the president, played by William Sadler, after Ellis).

Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, and Paul Bettany(‘s voice) reprise their roles from previous films, and the post-credits gag features a cameo from Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner. New faces include Ben Kingsley as Mandarin, Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, and Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen. As the lead-in to what Marvel Studios called “Phase Two,” IM3 follows up on the events of The Avengers, showing a Tony Stark who is traumatized and living with the aftereffects of the Battle of New York. And, since Shane Black is involved, the film is set at Christmastime for no real reason.

Brandon, what did you think?

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twohalfstar

Brandon: Because I had heard that director Shane Black had taken over Jon Favreau’s directoral duties for the third Iron Man installment, I had gotten my hopes up that it might be the turning point where I started liking the Iron Man franchise at large. Black’s darkly comic work on properties like Lethal Weapon, The Last Action Hero, and The Monster Squad seemed to position him as a perfect fit for taking the Iron Man films into a new, more purposeful direction. I can recognize flashes of that newfound sense of purpose straining to break through this feature’s bogged down mess of a narrative, but ultimately Iron Man 3 felt like just as much of a mixed bag as Iron Man 2.

The film opens with America’s Favorite D-Bag Tony Stark tooting his own horn to Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” & referring to the absolute worst era in popular culture (the late 90s, *shudder*) as “the [good] old days” (which, appropriately enough, is when his bad boy schtick & awful facial hair might’ve actually felt fresh). Things get worse from there. The film’s completely-besides-the-point Christmastime setting allows Stark to move on from his previous soundtrack of AC/DC dad jams to dance club remixes of Yuletide carols, which is, musically speaking, my worst nightmare. Tony’s snarkiness has also gotten worse, since the success of the character had apparently lead Feige & company to believe that what the world wanted more of was exchanges like [from a pretty lady] “Where are we going?” “To town on each other,” [to a lady on fire] “I’ve dated hotter chicks than you,” and [to a boy who’s been abandoned by his father] “Guys leave. No need to be a pussy about it.” There are other ways in which the Iron Man franchise has improved in a general sense, but its billionaire playboy protagonist might be a bigger piece of shit than ever here and the worst part is it still feels like the movies are asking its audience to celebrate him for it.

The frustrating thing is that there’s so much of Iron Man 3 that does work, especially elsewhere in the cast. I was a little dubious at first about the series’s return to its War on Terror roots, but Don Cheadle’s transition from toeing the water as The War Machine to full-blown superhero status as The Iron Patriot was encouraging to see. Ben Kingsely’s villain, who I’m pretty sure he was told was supposed to be named Osama Bin Nixon instead of The Mandarin, also has some entertaining moments in the film. I particularly enjoyed the following monologue that accompanied one of his terrorist-funded propaganda films: “True story about fortune cookies – They look Chinese. They sound Chinese. But they’re actually an American invention, which is why they’re hollow, full of lies, and leave a bad taste in the mouth.” The MVP for me, though, believe it or not, was Gwyneth Paltrow as the surprisingly endearing Pepper Potts. I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about Paltrow as an actress, but get the sense that her performances in these films aren’t especially popular among diehard MCU fans, which is a shame. Iron Man 3 allows Potts the opportunity to try on one of Stark’s mech suits, which made for a kinda awesome (and on a personal note, oddly sexy) moment when she gets to save the day for a change. Better yet is her climactic freakout moment, which releases a feral side to Paltrow’s screen presence I didn’t know she had in her (although it was teased in her line-reading of “Are you out of your mind?!” in Iron Man 2).

Speaking of the suit-sharing, Iron Man 3 features more Iron Man suits than ever, which, when combined with remote-controlled automation, makes for some absolutely killer action sequences involving an Iron Man army, some ludicrously complicated suit-hopping/exploding choreography, and a sublimely corny, parachuteless freefall rescue that played nicely into the film’s comic book origins. It’s a shame that none of these charming moments or character beats ever amount to a satisfying whole, though. Repeating the exact same mistakes of Iron Man 2, the film splits its time between two villains, a formula that bogs down its plot, only to make a third act decision to follow the least interesting of the pair to the conclusion. Iron Man 3 even takes this mistake a step further and retroactively ruins its most interesting threat, reducing Kingley’s monstrous terrorist from an Osama bin Nixon to a buffoonish Russell Brand archetype. What a waste. And to think, they casually kick him aside in favor of a fire-breathing version of Val Kilmer’s generic Dieter Von Cunth villain from MacGruber. It’s not a good sign when your film’s lead antagonist most closely resembles a character meant to spoof the genre you’re working in.

Once that shift occurs, Iron Man 3 devolves into generic superhero action cinema. The last 40 minutes of the film feel like a total waste, despite the suit-hopping heroics & Pepper Potts silliness mentioned above. Every now & then Iron Man 3 would throw out a fistpump-worthy moment or two (Stark taking out a helicopter by hurling a grand piano comes to mind), but for the most part the film felt like a mess of compromises & disappointments with half-cooked references to A Christmas Carol that went more or less nowhere & an entirely unnecessary performance by series-vet Jon Favreau as The World’s Shittiest Comic Relief. At best, it’s a generic mixed bag of an action film that almost gets its shit together before completely losing track of what makes it special. At worst, it’s a disappointingly low entry to Shane Black’s catalog, whether or not it helped him gain some notoriety for the strange body of work he had quietly put together prior.

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fourstar

Boomer: A lot of people really disliked this movie when it came out, citing the appearance of a kid sidekick character and the purported ruination of The Mandarin. Personally, however, I have to say that this is probably my favorite of the Iron Man flicks. I’ll admit that the kid sidekick character doesn’t really bother me in the slightest (and he appears onscreen for such a short period of time that his presence is virtually negligible). As for the way that the film used The Mandarin… I actually think that it was a bit of an ingenious move. I understand that this is a character into whom a lot of people have invested time and emotional energy, and I can understand the outrage because I felt much the same way when Star Trek Into Darkness sprang a whitewashed terrible Khan on the audience. The difference, however, is that the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch’s character is Khan contributes nothing to the film other than a familiar name, whereas the Mandarin reveal in Iron Man 3 actually serves to further the plot in an interesting way, and the film does well to play that reveal close to the chest up to the point where we finally meet Trevor Slattery. This was a neat twist that played on expectations of comic book fans and mainstream filmgoers alike, and I think a lot of people were simply caught off guard by the revelation and overreacted to it.

As for other issues viewers took with the film, I don’t really lend a lot of credence to what could be called the Avengers Problem, or, more loosely, the Shared Universe Problem. For some, once a shared universe is established or canonized, there is a need to ask why such-and-such character doesn’t appear in so-and-so’s film. I don’t really understand this impulse on the part of the audience to criticize this element of a work; it’s not as if every character spends all of their downtime together, nor is it a far-fetched idea that a person like Tony Stark who is accustomed to self-reliance would, in a period of self-doubt, try to fix all of his problems without calling on his superfriends. It’s not a problem for me that Banner shows up after the fact and only for a chat, and I feel that a lot of people were looking for elements of the film to complain about, as the honeymoon patina of the MCU was starting to wear thin. All of this is to say: this is a movie about a man who is pried loose from his moorings and forced to confront both his mortality and his potential for failure, and ends up being the least cliche of the Iron Man movies as a result.

There are problems, of course. The film is smart to focus on Tony and his one-man journey, but Paltrow and Cheadle end up underutilized this time around as a matter of consequence. Although Kingsley’s performance as both Slattery and The Mandarin is fantastic, Hall’s botanist character ends up feeling underdeveloped, and we never get a real feeling for her motivations. Pearce’s motivations are also less than perfectly defined, but he stands out as still being a better villain than either Hammer or Whiplash from Tony’s last solo outing. The deus ex machina elements of Pepper’s superheroics at the end of the film are a little on-the-nose, but it was nice to see her get to have more agency this time around, especially since her appearance early in the film painted her in a less than stellar light.

Still, I liked this one. The film largely restrains its elaborate set-pieces to the film’s back half, instead focusing the first half on character building and establishing the new relationships between all the characters, new and old, and the film benefits greatly from this structure. The humor here isn’t derived solely from trying to elicit envy of the Tony Stark way of life, which is a refreshing change of pace. Furthermore, making Stark more vulnerable provides Downey with additional ways to approach the character, which makes both actor and character come off as more likable than in previous installments. It’s a different approach, and the non-standard format of the film’s narrative sets a good example for the way that this film and the five that followed it would change the tone of the MCU at large.

Lagniappe

Boomer: It’s super weird to me that the MCU has a white president. It’s something that felt strange the first time I saw it; normally, I wouldn’t bring it up, but with recent news that Marvel bigwig Ike Perlmutter donated a hefty chunk of money to the Trump campaign, it does raise some questions. Also, it’s a bummer that we don’t hear about Extremis or see any of the fallout in the films that follow. Pepper’s newfound superherodom doesn’t even get a line of dialogue in Age of Ultron, even though she is mentioned. It’s strange, given the fact that the movie seems to set her up as a new power player–not that we needed another character in Ultron gumming up the works.

Brandon: Here’s where I praise Iron Man 3 for what it gets exactly right. Part of what’s been bugging me about the MCU as a cohesive unit of films is that outside of the Avengers crossovers the individual properties haven’t interacted with each other in any significant way. Iron Man 2 was better than most MCU properties on that front, mostly in the way that it gave outside characters Black Widow & Nick Fury something more significant to do besides popping up for a post-credits cameo. Iron Man 3 finally works the Marvel Universe at large into its core narrative, though, which posits it as the most well-integrated MCU property yet (well, outside The Avengers, which is integration by nature).

In the film, Tony Stark is suffering from PTSD after the “gods, aliens, other dimensions,” and robots caused so much mayhem at the climax of The Avengers. He confesses to Potts, “Nothing’s been the same since New York” and in a nice change of pace his ego is put into check by nightmares & panic attacks that can occasionally become life-threatening, especially once he begins operating mech suits in his sleep. I love this sense of progression. It finally feels like a standalone MCU property is actually, significantly affected by the preceding films outside its realm. I look forward to seeing more of the franchise function this way.

Curiously, although Iron Man 3 is the most well-integrated, non-Avengers MCU film so far, it feels like it brings its narrative to a close by the end credits. Everything feels thoroughly wrapped up, finite, as if Tony STark’s time with the franchise were over. If I didn’t know any better, I’d believe that “I am Iron Man” would be Starks’s final word to tie a neat little ribbon on his entire d-bag story arc. What’s even weirder is that after all this finality & integration, the film reverts back to a meaningless post-credits cameo for Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner. Again, the film is the definition of a mixed bag.

Side note: Did anybody else find it strange that this film found time for references to Joan Rivers, Downton Abbey, and the Home Shopping Network? I don’t know what to make of those nods other than to say they felt bizarre in this context.

Combined S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. Rating for Iron Man 3 (2013)

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three star

-Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X.

Slumber Party Massacre III (1990)

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three star

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The Roger Corman-produced “Massacre” film series, which had its origins in the not-intended-to-be-connected The Slumber Party Massacre & Sorority Party Massacre, is such an intrinsically-1980s franchise that it really had no business extending itself into any other decade. That’s why it sorta makes sense that both films individually enjoyed a last-gasp sequel in 1990, one final return to the well for a dying enterprise. Sorority  House Massacre II was a mess of a generic slasher, one that confused the origin story of its source material to the point where it was downright impossible to tell what, if any, film it was supposed to follow. Released the same year, Slumber Party Massacre III is a run-of-the-mill genre exercise as well; it’s just one with enough sense & clarity to stand as a logical disciple of its predecessors. Honestly, if it weren’t for the deliriously goofy heights that Slumber Party Massacre II took the franchise to, it might’ve even stood as one of the best of the franchise. As is, it’s serviceable.

Is there any need to go into the details of the plot of Slumber Party Massacre III? There’s a pretty solid formula to these things. Teen girls with access to an empty house decide to throw a girls-night slumber party. Horny teen boys attempt to crash the party in hopes of causing sexual mischief. A mysterious killer murders them one at a time, leaving only a few survivors to promise/threaten the potential of a sequel (despite the sequels typically abandoning characters/plot-lines from earlier films anyway). The killer in question is different in all three of the Slumber Party films, but the murderous creeps do all share the same weapon of teen destruction: a massive (& massively phallic) power drill. Throw in some gratuitous nudity & lingerie-clad lounging and you have the basic structure of any & all Slumber Party Massacre films laid out in detail. Slumber Party Massacre II complicated this set-up with some Looney Tunes-level screwball comedy & classic MTV cheese, but the first & third films in the franchise are more or less entirely straightforward. As long as you’re not looking for anything too unique or remarkable in the formula (besides the loaded imagery of that power drill) you’re likely to enjoy Slumber Party Massacre III for what it is: a no-frills VHS-era slasher.

There are a few variations that Slumber Party Massacre III brings to the table, though. The first thing I noticed was that it introduces a lot of exterior space to the equation. The film begins with the girls playing volleyball in high-waisted bikinis on the beach. Once their game is over, they’re trailed, chased, and spied on in a way that recalls a lot of traditional slashers’ mode of terror that was missing in the earlier films, setting up the voyeuristic killer dynamic that will haunt their sleepover party later. The films’ living room dance party/strip tease is nothing new, but the way it’s crashed by a bonehead gang of dudes’ Halloween mask prank is interesting. I’ve also championed this series as a whole for feeling remarkably feminine for a slasher property despite the inherent softcore porn salaciousness of their titles (going along with the franchise’s tradition of female directors this one was helmed by a Sally Mattison), but Slumber Party Massacre III stands as the first & only film in the franchise to reference both cunnilingus & female masturbation. I found that somewhat surprising.

What really makes Slumber Party Massacre III stand out, though, is the way it fully engages with the phallic imagery of its gigantic power drill murder weapon. The drill-wielding killers in the earlier films are escaped mental patients & mystical sex demons who command the phallic power of their murder weapons without much thought given to their reasoning. The killer in Slumber Party Massacre III, as a change of pace, has a legitimate reason for using the drill the way he does. He has access to an uncle’s lumber yard where he would conceivably be able to obtain a drill of that size. He also suffers from an embarrassing case of early onset impotence which makes the meaning behind the giant drill kills all the more disturbing (especially in a gruesome, climactic seduction/murder). The kills are also more sexualized in order to play into this theme, including an early murder in which the maniac moves the drill back & forth into his victim rhythmically (Gross.) and in a hilarious death involving a bathtub & a plug-in vibrator.

As potent as those predatory sexuality themes are in Slumber Party Massacre III, the movie is, of course, a largely goofy trifle. There’s plenty of campy touches to the film’s proceedings. A dressed-in-black D&D nerd described only as “the weirdo” shows up only to be creepy & promptly disappear unexplained along with at least one other potential-but-not-actual killer. When the girls arrive to party at the house, they bring along one six pack of beer to split between them that seems to last forever. The cans read “Beer” in plain letters, just like their brandless pizza box reads “Pizza”. One particularly buffoonish victim is eliminated by being impaled on a real estate agent’s yard sale sign. You get the picture. Slumber Party Massacre III is a goofy home video horror with a few gruesome kills, some deliciously corny acting/dialogue, and sexual energy that alternates from girlishly playful to deeply uncomfortable. If you’re looking for anything more than that from a film of this ilk, I highly recommend checking out Slumber Party Massacre II instead. It’s easily the most worthwhile film in the series to track down.

-Brandon Ledet

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

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fourhalfstar

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Four films into the Roger Corman-produced “Massacre” collection & I feel like my efforts have finally payed off in a significant way. Sorority House Massacre was a delightfully dreamlike slasher, but it was cheap & derivative in a way that kept it from achieving anything too special. The Slumber Party Massacre was a by-the-numbers genre exercise with brief flashes of feminist-bent satire that were exciting, but mostly lost somewhere in their translation from script to screen. Sorority House Massacre II bridged the two properties, mixing & confusing the plots of the two original features to the point where no sense could be made of their central mythology (which, I assure you, was never intended to be shared). Slumber Party Massacre II, thankfully, brings a sense of purpose & unique charm to the (very loosely connected, if connected at all) Massacre franchise. It’s the first film of the series I’ve seen that felt like something truly special, the exact kind of bonkers midnight monster schlock that’s so mindlessly trashy & gratuitous that it approaches high art.

Courtney, the younger sister of one of the few nubile survivors of the original Slumber Party Massacre, ditches visiting her traumatized sibling in the hospital (“But Mom! It’s my birthday! I don’t wanna go to a mental hospital!”) in order to practice for The Big Dance with her all-girl New Wave garage band an at unsupervised (and unfurnished) condo. Of course, a group of goofball boys crash the party in order to make out & cause mischief. Despite warnings from her sister (who speaks to her through nightmares) to not “go all the way”, Courtney does the deed with the hunkiest of the bonehead beaus anyway, an act that releases a killer sex demon bent on killing everyone in the condo (seriously). Before having sex, Courtney falls into a routine of seeing nightmare images that recall the loopy flashbacks I enjoyed so much in Sorority House Massacre, but pushed to a much goofier extreme (severed hand sandwiches, killer raw chicken, a mutant zit spewing a river of puss, etc.) only to have everything snap back to normal when she calls for help. Her buddy/drummer asks, “Are you on drugs or something?” and Courtney responds with a perfect, gravely serious deadpan, “I wish I was, Sally.” It isn’t until after she has sex that these horrors become “real” & Slumber Party Massacre II devolves into supernatural horror/screwball comedy antics.

Slumber Party Massacre II gets everything right on its approach to slasher-driven mayhem. The origins & specifics of its killer rock n’ roll sex demon are just flat out ignored. All you know, really, is that he kinda looks like Andrew Dice Clay (although I’m sure they were aiming for Elvis) with a Dracula collar on his leather jacket & a gigantic power drill extending from the neck of his electric guitar (or “axe” in 80s speak). He mercilessly disembowels & impales teen victims on his monstrously phallic weapon/musical instrument all while shredding hot licks & doling out generic rock ‘n roll phrases like “This is dedicated to the one I love” & “C’mon baby, light my fire” before each kill. The best part is that this irreverent killer antagonist, although supernatural & unexplained, feels clearly purposeful. He not only plays directly into the slasher genres teen sex = instant death trope in a hilariously exaggerated way, he also stands as a perfect fit for the film’s overall aesthetic of a dirt cheap MTV relic. The film’s nightmare sequences & playful girlishness intentionally mimic/mock cheap music videos (right down to the smoke machine & bare bones sets) so it makes perfect sense that the killer would be a rock video knockoff with a phallic guitar murder weapon. Early in the film the girl band dreams of big success in ambitious statements like “Some day we’re going to be in movies & rock videos & everything,” and “MTV here we come!” What they didn’t expect is that MTV would come to them, wielding a gigantic power drill & an endless abundance of cheesy rock ‘n roll one-liners. All this & the camera taking the POV of a television while the girls watch the sister-Corman production (and flawless masterpiece) Rock ‘N Roll High School & dance around the living room in their undies (or less).

There are isolated moments that made the three Massacre films I had watched prior feel occasionally worthwhile, but Slumber Party Massacre II puts them all to shame. Written & directed by Deborah Brock, Slumber Party Massacre II includes everything recommendable in the earlier films, only pushed to their most exaggerated extremes. Its kills are bloodier. Its self-parody is funnier. Its nudity is more enticing. Its characters & dialogue, although awful, are far from memorable. I even have favorite characters in this film (a power couple of the impossibly attractive/horny Sheila & the perfect cad/Adam DeVine prototype T.J.) when I couldn’t name you a single character in any of the Massacre films I had watched before. So far in this franchise I’ve been championing Sorority House Massacre as a favorite due to its surprisingly strong femininity (for a slasher, anyway) & loopy dream/deja vu imagery. Slumber Party Massacre II outdoes it on both counts. The music video nightmare imagery is far more plentiful/bizarre than anything to be found in Sorority House Massacre & its mock sexiness (although it mimics male masturbation fantasies like pillow fights & car washes for a comical effect; at one point some male lookers-on exclaim “I didn’t know girls really did this stuff!”) is far more playfully feminine in an authentically girly way. It even achieves all this without airlifting its killer from John Carpenter’s Halloween with little to no changes in his backstory the way Sorority House Massacre does, opting instead to bother creating its own monster to terrorize its buxom, half-dressed teens (R.I.P. Sheila). Barring the highly unlikely event that Slumber Party Massacre 3 is an even better turn for the franchise it feels safe to say that this film is the most worth tracking down under the “Massacre” imprint. More importantly, it’s one of the most deliriously fun VHS era slashers I’ve ever seen, within or without the franchise. I highly recommend checking it out no matter how much you care about the “Massacre” films as an enterprise.

– Brandon Ledet

The Boy (2015)

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fourstar

“We’re running a dead motel, son. These rooms just don’t know yet.”

I first heard of the 2015 horror The Boy when James included it in his top films of the year list on the first episode of our podcast. I, of course, had a hard time differentiating between the film & the recent evil doll horror flick The Boy. 2016’s The Boy & 2015’s The Boy couldn’t be more dissimilar in their approaches to horror cinema. Although I enjoyed them both both a great deal, it’s remarkable that they even share the same medium, let alone the same title & genre. As much as I was amused by the trashy goofiness of the more recent The Boy, it’s a shame that it ended up being a higher-profile release, since the confusion between the titles is sure to do the artsier film a great disservice.

An arthouse slowburner about a murderous child, The Boy sits firmly in a category of films I like to call Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Have Kids, which includes titles like The Bad Seed, The Babadook, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. More specifically, though, The Boy is a firm warning against raising a child in isolation & limited means . . . unless you’re looking to birth a serial killer. Living alone with an emotionally absent, spiritually broken father (played by character actor David Morse) in a remote, vacant motel in the desert, a young child (who could easily pass for a forgotten Culkin brother) is left to fend for himself in terms of entertainment & socialization. His best friend, sadly enough, seems to be a yellow bucket. His favorite activities include stealing “weird adult stuff” (tattered issues of Playboy, old Polariod cameras, etc.) from the motel’s infrequent guests & trapping small animals/vermin for pocket change that his father pays him from the motel’s desolate till. His playground is a nearby junkyard & drainage pipe. His days are mostly empty. It’s only natural, then, that his animal-trapping graduates to human prey, beginning with snaring a suspiciously guarded drifter (Rainn Wilson) so he’ll have someone, anyone to interact with. The pile of victims & monstrosity of his intent only escalates from there.

Much like the empty, existential trudge of life at its desolate motel setting, The Boy brings its pace down to a slow crawl for most of its runtime. Most of the film plays like a lowkey indie drama that turns the idea of morbid fascination into a mood-defining aesthetic. It isn’t until the last half hour so that the film becomes recognizable as an 80s slasher version of Norman Bates: The Early Years. It takes a significant effort to get to the film’s horror genre payoffs, but allowing the film to lull you into a creepily hypnotic state makes that last minute tonal shift all the more satisfying. If you’re looking for a generic, straightforward horror picture, you’re likely to get more out of the evil doll The Boy from 2016. Last year’s The Boy is a lot more akin to a gloomy mood piece, one that culls its terror from such unlikely sources as road kill, deer antlers, and a towheaded child with no friends & a yellow bucket. It’s a much more challenging film, for sure, but the payoff is all the more satisfying because of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 1: Life Itself (2014)

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After viewing & reviewing every feature film in Russ Meyer’s catalog over the last few months, I’ve found myself in need of a new film-watching project to break up the monotony of chasing down every newer release that hits the theaters. I’m getting some fulfillment on that end with the Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. MCU retrospective I’m tackling with Boomer, but I’m in the need of something more ambitious & longerm. Recently, reading the excellent Russ Meyer biography Big Bosoms & Square Jaws a second time finally lead me to tackling Roger Ebert’s autobiography Life Itself, an endeavor that’s been intimidating me for years due to the potential emotional toll. Something I noticed while reading Life Itself was how eclectic & intimidating the list of movies Ebert references in the book is. Among titles I have already seen one hundred times (The Wizard of Oz, Reservoir Dogs, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, etc.), there were a ton of Important Movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years (Citizen Kane, Casa Blanca, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) & even more films I’ve never heard of (Bwana Devil, French Peep Show, Breakheart Pass and so on).

So, as a means of self education, I plan on visiting all 200+ films referenced in Life Itself, both the book & the documentary of the same name. Unlike the Russ Meyer project, which took just a few months to complete, I expect putting myself (and whoever’s reading) through Roger Ebert Film School will take at least two years to complete. I do believe it is a worthwhile effort, though. Since Ebert naturally referenced these films in his writing instead of assembling a definitive list (like his Great Movies feature), they should be a very interesting overview of cinema’s highest highs & lowest lows. I’m looking forward to both ends. That being said, let’s get started. The class bell has effectively rung.

Where Life Itself (2014) is referenced in Life Itself: On the cover, naturally.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Unfortunately, he died before it completed filming, so he didn’t get a chance to see the final product.

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As I said, I had been avoiding reading Ebert’s autobiography, Life Itself, for years by the time it was adapted into a feature length documentary by Steve James in 2014. James’ movie gave me an excuse to delay the inevitable even longer. I’d be able to digest Ebert’s life story & indulge in some healthy sobbing all within two hours’ time, then walk away from the ordeal. I even made a sort of party out of it, dragging a group of friends to Chalmette Movies to watch it on the week of my 28th birthday. Having since read the book, I can happily report that James’ film is an excellent adaptation, considering the length of its runtime. It touches on nearly all of the topics covered in the print version of Life Itself, but with understandably less depth than the way they’re explored by Roger’s pen (except, of course, the more up to date health problems & eventual death that occurred during filming). James could’ve easily expanded Life Itself to match the massive runtime of his seminal work Hoop Dreams, if not longer, but as is the film is a touching, concise overview of Roger’s life & career from start to end.

Besides expediting the process of reviewing Ebert’s life story, the film version of Life Itself offers something inarguably valuable for the life story of a man who spent so much of his time in cinemas: imagery. Photographs, movie scenes, interview footage, and clips from Ebert’s fellow Chicagoan critic Gene Siskel add a whole layer of depth to Life Itself that the autobiography couldn’t afford due to the limits of its medium. The book version of Life Itself is 100% Roger’s voice, which at times can be overly humble or self-deprecating (especially when discussing his alcoholism) in a matter of fact sort of way. The film, on the other hand, is more concerned with his legacy. Talking head interviews with his loving wife Chaz & filmmaker heavyweights like Scorsese & Herzog make Ebert out to be a perfect angel in a way that would’ve made him blush had he been alive to see the final product. It’s very telling that the film also only lightly skims his relationship with perv auteur Russ Meyer, an area where Roger’s life most likely saw its most salacious lows. What’s most invaluable here, though, is the contentious outtakes of Roger going at it with Siskel. In the book he tends to sugarcoat the nastier side of their rivalry, which is entirely understandable given that his friend & colleague was deceased when he wrote it. The movie paints a much more complicated picture & it’s fascinating to watch the extremes of their brotherly (in a thoroughly competitive way) dynamic play out for the camera.

As a documentary divorced from the instant-likability  of its subject, I’m not sure that Life Itself is necessarily a grand feat in modern filmmaking. James’ camera is fearless in capturing Ebert’s hard-to-stomach bouts with cancer, as was Roger himself for putting those struggles on public display. There’s also the strange detail that passages from the book are read by an eerily accurate Ebert impersonator, so it feels as though you’re being spoken to from beyond the grave (not unlike the digitized Marlon Brando in Listen to Me Marlon). For the most part, though, Life Itself is firmly a Wikipedia-in-motion type of documentary. It adds some new information not included in its source material, especially when discussing how Roger championed small voices in filmmaking & opened doors for names like Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay, Werner Herzog, and Steve James himself. Life Itself mostly works as a companion piece, though. Ebert’s autobiography is loaded with priceless ponderings on the nature of cinema and, well, life itself. James’ film matches imagery to those ideas & boils them down to an easily digestible morsel.

A filmmaking feat or not, Life Itself is a very moving portrait of one of America’s all time great writers in any medium. It’s a film that has moved me to tears on all four of my viewings (this time it was DuVernay’s story about meeting Roger as a child that choked me up). It may not be a mold-breaking or technically ambitious film, but is an undeniably indispensable one. Highly recommended for those who’ve yet to have the pleasure.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Persona (1966)

-Brandon Ledet

#horror (2015)

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fourhalfstar

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Imagine if The Bling Ring were a cheap slasher film directed by Tim & Eric and you might have a decent idea of how jarring #horror is as a feature film experience. An explosion of emojis, group texts, cyber-bullying and, oddly enough, fine art, #horror is an entirely idiosyncratic film, a sort of modern take on the giallo style-over-substance horror/mystery formula, with its stylization firmly in line with the vibrant vapidity of life online in the 2010s. It’s such a strange, difficult to stomach experience that it somehow makes total sense that the film premiered as The Museum of Modern Art in NYC before promptly going straight to VOD with little to no critical fanfare. That’s exactly what #horror is in a nutshell. Simultaneously functioning as a cheap horror flick & a precious fine art piece, it’s the exact kind of compromise between high art & low trash that always wins me over, even when its deeply flawed . . . especially when it’s deeply flawed.

Centered on a slumber party between a group of wealthy, spoiled, precocious brats, #horror aims for the same kind of cyberbullying-as-horror aesthetic achieved in last summer’s Unfriended, except that instead of adopting the look of a live group chat it works more in the realm of viral videos & cheap social network games. This particular crew of 12 year old girls are even more vicious than the usual Mean Girls™ stereotype. While taking selfies, playing dress-up, and experimenting with the vice of vodka cranberries, they constantly insult & tear each other down, submitting each verbal jab online for posterity. Their attacks on each others’ character & looks are rewarded with “points” & “likes” on the fictional social media video game they’re hopelessly addicted to. They push this cruelty as far as they possibly can, twisting the knife with statements like “I’d cry too if I were you. Actually, I’d just kill myself,” and making fun of each other for everything from overeating to grieving for their mother’s death. This is horrifying enough on its own, but it’s made even more disturbing by a mysterious slasher’s killing spree that disposes of the girls one victim at a time.

Although the film occasionally deals with such hefty subjects as cutting & bulimia, it also caters to an overwhelming sense of satirical parody. Mimicking the distracted, scatterbrained mania of social media obsession, #horror is a feat in hyperactive editing. The kaleidoscopic emoji color palette of its central video game gimmick combines with indie pop songstress EMA’s intense soundtrack work to make for a truly eccentric, singular experience I can’t say I’ve ever seen on film before. The thing #horror gets exactly right are the way it turns 12 year old’s concerns into tangible horrors. Older men are horrifying threats. Your online reputation means everything. The idea of putting your phone away for an hour is beyond reason, etc. Because of the compromised art-trash tone, though, this aspect sometimes devolves in to full-blown camp, like in a scene where a girl runs frightened in the woods while mean tweets & hashtags pop up on the screen as if they were chasing her. #horror is a bizarre work of mixed tones, as strange of a mashup of style & presentation as seeing a Lisa Frank depiction of a gruesome murder framed & hanging in a stuffy art gallery. I think I loved it? It’s near impossible to tell. What I can say for sure is that it was fascinating.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Big Business (1988)

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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 Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and Erin watch Big Business (1988).

Britnee: Many years ago, there was a local video rental shop in my hometown called Slick Sam’s (sounds more like a dirty sex shop), and that’s where I first came across one of my all-time favorite movies, Jim Abrahams’ 1988 comedy, Big Business. I can still see that sun-damaged, styrofoam-stuffed VHS cover sitting on the shelf just waiting for me to grab it. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that no one in the Swampflix crew had seen Big Business before, so I was able to make it my Movie of the Month selection for February. There’s not much love out there for this comic masterpiece, and it really does deserve some recognition.

In a small town called Jupiter Hollow, two women give birth to two sets of identical twin girls at the same time at a local hospital. One woman, Binky Shelton (Deborah Rush), is a big city snob that just so happened to go into labor while passing through Jupiter Hollow with her husband, but the other woman, Iona Ratliff (Patricia Gaul), is a local. The Sheltons and the Ratliffs coincidentally both name their twin daughters Rose and Sadie, and a kooky old nurse mixes up the sets of identical twins. About 40 years later, Sadie and Rose Shelton (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are rich business women living in NYC while Sadie and Rose Ratliff (Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin) are country bumpkins living in Jupiter Hollow. Eventually, the two sets of twins end up in NYC at the same time, and all sorts of wacky things happen.

The performances by Midler and Tomlin are insanely impressive in this film. Midler plays a bitchy NYC snob (Sadie Shelton) and a kind small-town girl looking for adventure (Sadie Ratliff), and Tomlin plays a sweet, softspoken city girl (Rose Shelton) and a rough n’ tough country gal (Rose Ratliff). Portraying such different characters must’ve been such a difficult task for these comedy queens, but they both deliver.

Brandon, were you impressed by the versatile performances from Midler and Tomlin? Or were they just mediocre?

Brandon: I mean, Midler & Tomlin are both phenomenal personalities in general, so it’d be a total lie to say that anything they do or say is mediocre. However, it’s pretty clear that they both had a part they had more fun playing. It’s difficult to say which performance stands out most here between the two actresses, not because there isn’t a clear winner, but because the movie splits their performances into four quadrants: Rich Sadie & Poor Sadie (Midler) and Rich Rose & Poor Rose (Tomlin). There’s a definite, old fashioned nature>nurture mentality at work in Big Business, though, so the individual sisters who lucked into being raised in their “rightful” class environments are the more fun characters to watch, because their confidence is infectious. Poor Rose is certainly amusing in her bossy-but-small-minded local yokel skepticism. It’s Rich Sadie, however, who steals the show for me. As the Reaganomics-personified antagonist of the film, she’s allowed to be the most devious and, because Bette Midler is such a fabulous comedic performer, she strikes just the right tone of evil bitch that this film needed. Midler’s performance as Rich Sadie is just short of being a world-class drag routine. The way she saunters & pouts, insulting people’s outfits by saying “You look like a blood clot” while rocking the world’s largest shoulder pads is just begging for a drag-themed floor show revival. Poor Sadie has a couple of funny moments, mostly in a scene where she milks a cow to the beat of a country song & in her unholy fusion of Carribean-themed yodeling, but it feels like not nearly as much effort went into her character as the over-the-top vamping of her wealthy counterpart. The same could be said of Rich Rose. Tomlin & Midler are both fantastic in this film, but as far as versatility goes, it’s easy to see which characters got more attention.

Besides the easy likability of Midler & Tomlin in this film, something that really stood out to me is how old-fashioned everything feels. The swapped-twins plot of Big Business feels like it’s straight out of an Old Hollywood comedy, the kind that Fred & Ginger might’ve starred in if it had been released 50 years earlier. The nature-over-nurture value system of the movie is very much an antiquated line of thinking and (although there’s some confusion about who winds up with whom at the end) the film’s intense concern with finding each sister a potential mate is very much in line with the structure of a traditional comedy. Instead of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Big Business is more like A Million Beaus for Four Sisters. As the two sets of mismatched twins find themselves nearly-but-never-quite bumping into each other while all staying at the same hotel, I felt like I was watching a Marx Brothers movie. Hammering the point home, Midler even recreates the infamous Marx Brothers mirror gag from Duck Soup in the scene where her two characters finally meet for the first time. Fred Ward’s oblivious-to-homosexuality line reading of “You guys are alright” reads a lot like the classic “Nobody’s perfect!” zinger in Some Like It Hot. There’s even a gag where a homeless drunk rubs his eyes in disbelief when he sees both sets of twins walk by, immediately tossing away the bottle he’s clutching. I’m not sure that cinematic gags get much older than that.

What do you think of this film’s classic Hollywood callbacks, Boomer? Were they an intentional homage to the Old Hollywood era or just a strange coincidence for a comedy that happened to be old-fashioned by nature?

Boomer: I’m not much of a fan of comedies of error in which the humor relies too heavily on farcical near-misses, and there was a point in this movie where I lost heart as I realized that the film was saving the inevitable serendipitous union of the City and Country Mice for the end of the film. Once I had this epiphany and stopped waiting for the film to get to that point, I found myself enjoying the movie more straightforwardly, and was pleased that the mistaken-identity elements weren’t played for cringe-comedy as much as I had expected. As has been noted, this is a classic Hollywood farce, which really serves to demonstrate to what extent Old Hollywood was still working from a centuries-old storytelling paradigm; this isn’t really an Old Hollywood Farce so much as it is a Old Globe Farce, based on William Shakespeare’s genre-defining Comedy of Errors. In essence, Big Business is a throwback to a time when films were based almost entirely on dramas that were ancient even then, making the film old-fashioned by default, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. My major problem with the film comes from the way that its antiquated nature shows through in the film’s moral.

When viewing the four main characters, only Poor Rose and Rich Sadie seem truly suited for their positions in life, with Rich Rose and Poor Sadie being reasonably well-adjusted but largely unfulfilled. Ignoring the two women who are in their “rightful” lives, Poor Sadie’s desire for a more exciting life than pig wrasslin’ and yodeling can provide evokes more empathy for her than the audience can really muster for Rich Rose, who certainly has the financial means to forsake her supposedly incomplete life for the purported pleasures of rural domesticity. As such, Rich Rose is the character who gets the least characterization, really only developing once Roone shows up in the third act. This would be a fine exploration of the nature/nurture dichotomy, were it not for the fact that, ultimately, Poor Sadie comes to the decision that not only is the way of life in Jupiter Hollow worth preserving, it’s worth praising as well; she forsakes her biological sister’s urban and urbane world to return to performing percussive cow milking alongside toothless men whose musical expertise is limited to playing moonshine jugs, and we, as an audience, are supposed to feel gratified by this conclusion. Rural living is the right fit for everyone, except the shrewish antagonist.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I got plenty of laughs out of Tomlin and Midler’s performances here, and even the potentially painful farce worked for me. I was just hoping for one more twist (for instance, that the Sadies were actually the children of the Ratliffs and that the Roses were the Sheltons’ daughters) that would make the film less overt in its praise for downhome simplicity over metropolitan cynicism. To a man, all of the New York-based characters that are not Rich Rose are foppish, conceited, untrustworthy, manipulative, and greedy, with the implication being that Rose feels unfulfilled because she is genetically predisposed toward “goodness,” being the child of salt-of-the-earth outlanders. But the “goodness” of rural living is enough to almost completely deprogram Poor Sadie, who is tempted by the carnal delights that ensnare and comprise Rich Sadie’s identity and existence but is able to reject them. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

Erin, am I reading too much into this, or allowing my perception of the film to color my enjoyment of it too much? Is there something that mitigates this seeming moral that I may have overlooked? And what do you think about the Old Hollywood elements–do they work?

Erin: Boomer, I feel a little differently about the portrayal of country vs. city life, and I think that I came to slightly different conclusions about Big Business‘s moral assessment of both. I’d have to say that in true farcical fashion, both city life and country life are portrayed with an eye to their preposterous sides – yodeling and “making love in the back of a recreational vehicle” versus designer women in designer sneakers and the pompousness of grapefruits under silver lids.

Where I feel differently is that the on-screen portrayal of urban life seems to be much more positive than the portrayal of rural life. The Welcome to New York Montage, while funny, adheres pretty closely to the cinematic trope of New York as a vibrant, wonderful city (thought this might be more related to the visual presentation of Poor Sadie’s desires). Big Business‘s New York seems to be entirely made of the Plaza hotel and satin, even if its denizens are amoral and greedy. Rural life has gingham, and large, poor families.

If the moral of the story really is that rural life is better, I think it balances strangely against the onscreen portrayals of the rural and urban worlds. In a way, I think that starts to answer the second part of your question about the Old Hollywood elements (or the Old Globe elements, Big Business is truly a Shakespearean farce). I agree that that the movie reads as an old-fashioned screwball comedy and is pretty simple in terms of plot. On the other hand, I think that Big Business reads extremely well as an 80s movie. It’s got Bette Midler as a Power Lead (in TWO roles!), Big Business as the Big Bad, and steel drums lining the streets of New York.

What do you think, Britnee? To continue Boomer’s line of question, does Big Business manage to read well as an 80s movie? Does the old fashioned plot work well amongst the shoulder pads and polka dots of the 1980s?

Britnee: I’ve always viewed Big Business as a prime example of an 80s comedy. It’s packed with cheesy humor, wacky facial expressions, pumps and power suits, and of course, Bette Midler in her prime. It’s an 80s explosion! It wasn’t until this discussion that I realized that there are quite a few Old Hollywood elements present in this film. Now that I’m looking at the film through a much different lens, the movie is more interesting and much smarter than I initially thought. Creating a film that contains classical comic film features for an 80s audience mustn’t have been an easy task, but it’s a match made in heaven.

I know that this is completely off track, but I think that the film’s music deserves a bit of discussion. There are only two major lyrical songs in the film: Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and George Benson’s “On Broadway.” Both songs work well in the film (they’re so New York!), but as for the film’s instrumental tracks, they’re all kinds of ridiculous. It’s the type of music that belongs in a department store’s training video. Part of me feels as though the music was a bit too much, but another part of me thinks that the obnoxious tunes contributed to the film’s campiness.

Brandon, did you find the instrumental music in the film to be annoying or am I overthinking this?

Brandon: I don’t know if “annoying” is the word I would use. Maybe “cheesy”? Maybe “eccentric”? It’s undeniable that the background music of Big Business is always present, always noticeable, and perhaps even always awful, but I found it somehow added to the film’s charm. The soundtrack is another one of the areas where the film feels trapped between two times. Its big band music (which is mostly contained in the 1940s prologue) & countryside yodeling are decidedly old-fashioned, but the department store pop songs Britnee mentioned & the endless droning sax are so 80s it ain’t even funny (well, it’s a little funny). I don’t know if it was the exact DVD copy Britnee & I were watching or if the film was intentionally mixed this way, but the soft sax rock aspects were particularly noticeable (in that they were deafening) & particularly amusing. What really got me laughing, though, was the obnoxiously dramatic drum fills that crash the scene at the film’s climax. It’s as if Neil Peart had dropped in at the sound booth to add some last minute touches for the soundtrack.

Going back to that 1940s prologue for a second, the film starts in the old-timey countryside town of Jupiter Hollow, which prompted me to write “Stars Hollow” (the fictional town from Gilmore Girls, of course) in my notes. It was a surprise, then, that Gilmore Girls vet Edward Hermann (who, sadly, passed away a little over a year ago) appears in this film, delivering one of many great performances. It was also cool to see Seth Green run around as a raucous baby (almost literally) as well as the weird coincidence that both of the Roses’ beaus are future Tremors compatriots (Michael Gross & Fred Ward). All of this and Deborah Rush, aka Jerri Blank’s mom. The cast of supporting characters is surprisingly stacked, as long as you care about the niche pop culture properties they’re best known for.

Boomer, were there any supporting roles in particular that stood out to you as a favorite? Midler & Tomlin easily get the most to do, but I feel there was plenty enough opportunities for the other actors to shine.

Boomer: It’s funny, I was delighted to see Deborah Rush in this film, as she’s always an absolute delight, especially when she’s playing a terrible mother figure (Jerri Blank was a hot mess before she ever showed up, but Piper Chapman’s insufferable insulated white privilege nonsense is all on Rush’s padded shoulders). I was pretty disappointed that she disappears after her part in initiating the plot, but she does make the best of her limited screen time. I also really enjoyed watching tiny Seth Green run around as a screaming terror, and got a kick out of seeing Michael Gross, who will always be doomsday prepper Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise to me (although I didn’t make the Fred Ward connection that Brandon did). My favorite minor role came from Mary Gross, Michael’s sister, who played the soft-voiced secretary working for the Sheltons; as an actress, she’ll always have a place in my heart because of her involvement in Troop Beverly Hills. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I looked up the name of the actor who played the put-upon desk clerk, Joe Grifasi, but I couldn’t place him in any memorable roles based on a quick scan of his IMDb page; he must simply be one of those classic “that guy” actors.

It was a very minor role that has really stuck with me since watching the film. The narrative saw fit to include a vagrant character who oversees the comings and goings of the Plaza. This is a well-worn comedy cliche: a drunken vagrant sees some unbelievable sight, looks at the bottle in his hand, back at the unbelievable sight, and then tosses the bottle behind him. Normally, this character is never seen again, but this film brings back our friend a few times; we watch him catch sight of the Roses and Sadies coming and going multiple times. All in all, it seems like he gets more screen time than some of the lesser love interests. From the outside, this mostly low-stakes (give or take the fate of Jupiter Hollow, which is easy to forget in all the identity confusion shenanigans) rom com farce occurs entirely outside of the context of this character; as a result, his story plays out as a window into an existential horror that he can only passively observe. The Plaza: if you stand outside long enough, you’ll see yourself come out of there. And then he does! That’s some In The Mouth of Madness… um, madness.

While prowling through the sparse information that the internet has to offer about this film and its development, I read that the sets for the film were so expensive that ABC created an entire television series to use the sets in an attempt to recoup their losses. The series flopped and never made it out of its first season. It does make one wonder, though; would Big Business have worked as an ongoing series? It seems like it would, what with the potential to have stock twin hijinx intersect with stock cultural differences plots.

What do you think, Erin? Would this idea have legs? And in what stock sitcom situations would you most like to see the Shelton-Ratliff sisters (recast for a TV budget, of course)?

Erin: Boomer, I can definitely see at least a two-season Big Business show combining stock twin hijinks and stock cultural differences.  It would take a deft hand to extend the premise outside of the obvious shenanigans.  I’m envisioning a Green Acres meets Beverly Hillbillies situation.  Shoulder pads on the farm!  Country Rose get mixed up with big city Mafia!  Mistaken identities galore!  Pie and jam competitions at the fair!  Rich Sadie turns out to be a heck of a pig-caller!  Moonshine!  Country twins accidentally attend the Met Ball!

There’s at least half a season right there.  The challenge would be extending the premise into something stable and complex enough to keep a show on the air, but the promise of the ensemble cast might make it work.  I wonder if it’s cheaper to find multiple sets of twins or to constantly produce a double effect through camera and editing tricks.

I think that that my best description of Big Business would include words like madcap and zany.  It was definitely a lot of fun to watch, and it looked like the cast was also having a great time during filming.  That always makes a movie better for me.  All in all, I think that it was a solid entry in the filmography of the 1980s.  It’s charming and fluffy, with few dull moments and lots of shoulder pads.

Lagniappe

Erin: The fashions worn by the two sets of sisters are almost characters in themselves.  Big Business is almost worth watching just for the clothes!

Britnee: I really like Poor Sadie’s initial yodeling number that she performed at the Jupiter Hallow fair. “Well, hello, Jupiter Hallow. I know you’re doing fine. Every day you work the factory, every night a jug of wine,” is what immediately enters my head when I think about Big Business. I’m not a big fan of yodeling, but Midler has one of those voices that can make anything catchy and enjoyable.

Boomer: I was a bit disappointed that Sadie Ratliff ended up with (as I interpreted it) Sadie Shelton’s ex husband. They barely shared a scene or two, and she had much more chemistry with the desk clerk.

Brandon: Going back to what Boomer was saying about the vilification of city life vs the deification of the countryside, that push & pull didn’t bother me too, too much, but I will say that the evil “big business” end of the equation felt a lot more convincing & well-developed. I especially appreciated the Reaganomics-speak of the NYC twins’ inherited company, Moramax: “More for America”. As far as satire goes, that specific phrase easily ranks up there with Robocop & Gremlins II: The New Batch in poking fun at the state of class structure in the 1980s, even if most of the film’s message boils down to a simple rich = stressed out & snooty, poor = sweet & serene.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
March: Erin presents Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
April: Boomer presents My Demon Lover (1987)
May: Brandon presents Girl Walk // All Day (2011)

-The Swampflix Crew

Sorority House Massacre II (1990)

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twohalfstar

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So here I am defending Sorority House Massacre against accusations that it too closely resembles its tangentially-related predecessor The Slumber Party Massacre (although I can’t fully excuse how heavily it borrows from Halloween), when Sorority House Massacre II has to turn around & make me look like a fool. Sorority House Massacre II is such a blatant, subpar ripoff of The Slumber Party Massacre that I had to check the title on the DVD sleeve several times just to make sure I hadn’t watched the wrong sequel by mistake. Completely ditching the vengeful sibling backstory of Sorority House Massacre, this sequel instead shows what I swear is exact footage from the killings in The Slumber Party Massacre. Like, exact. By the time the killer was hiding under a blanket or dangling a large power drill between his legs I felt like a crazy person. To make matters even more muddled, the killer from The Slumber Party Massacre (who most certainly doesn’t belong in this film’s backstory) is given a completely different name & origin than either killer in the two Massacre films that precede this mess. Besides being written & shot over the course of a single week, this discrepancy about which film is being followed up here exactly can be cleared up by recognizing that all three productions were handled by Roger Corman, who was no stranger to cutting corners financially at the expense of his films’ narrative continuity.

As best as I can make clear from the Sorority House Massacre II‘s jumbled mythology, a group of college girls purchase a sorority house for dirt cheap due to a mass murder that had occurred on the property five years prior, only to have the killings (shocker!) repeat themselves over the course of one bloody night. Whether this is supposed to be the bloodstained sorority house from the first Sorority House Massacre or the suburban home from The Slumber Party Massacre or neither house at all is solidly up for debate. No matter. The plot is, duh, a largely inconsequential inconvenience for the film to deliver its main concerns: nudity & gore. What I enjoyed about the first Sorority House Massacre was how surprisingly girly it was for a film that promised a blood-soaked softcore porn in its title. It relied on  bizarre dream imagery instead of lady-stabbing for most of its terror and, although it certainly wasn’t shy on the gratuitous nudity front, its dress-up & make-out montages were far from hyper-masculine masturbation fantasy material. Sorority House Massacre II, on the other hand, delivers loads more slasher genre hedonism on both counts. The film’s power tool murders, which range from the aforementioned drill to kookier instruments like bear traps, are plentiful & plenty bloody. Its nudity is also heavy on the leering, filming girls as the soap up their breasts in the shower, individually dress in skimpy lingerie, and give each other massages in high-waisted thongs. Whether or not the film is narratively in line with the first Sorority House Massacre, it certainly outdoes its predecessor in tastelessness, yet never aproaches its weirdo deja vu-inspired visual ideas (despite a last minute supernatural twist that does little to complicate its straightforward genre trappings).

Besides being in line with The Slumber Party Massacre in terms of narrative backstory & softcore porn salaciousness, Sorority House Massacre II also matches The Slumber Party Massacre‘s intentionally self-aware goofiness in its Ouija board & toilet bowl swirlies tomfoolery, its references to the fictional slasher Strip to Kill Part 7, and in lines like “This place would give Boris Karloff the creeps! […] I love those old horror movies & stuff like that.” I can see how the atrocious acting & dialogue and the shameless blood & tits formula of Sorority House Massacre II could make it more readily enjoyable for the boozy midnight crowd than the first Sorority House film, but I believe that the earnestness & the visual experimentation of the first film makes it the more interesting entry in the franchise. A followup to Sorority House Massacre II, Sorority House Massacre III: The Final Exam, was promised/threatened as recently as the 2000s, but I suspect any third entry in the franchise will skew even further to the winking parody end of the slasher spectrum, which is fine, but not nearly as exciting as the first film’s genuine weirdness. The real question is how a third film would pull together the narrative trainwreck Sorority House Massacre II made of its franchise’s continuity. As a run-of-the-mill genre exercise, Sorority House Massacre II is pretty alright, but not especially worthy of a recommendation. As a sequel meant to hold its series’ narrative throughline together in an A-B progression, it’s a total mess.

-Brandon Ledet

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

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three star

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When I stumbled across the surprisingly loopy Halloween knockoff Sorority House Massacre, I discovered the popular opinion that it was an inferior film in comparison with the Roger Corman production The Slumber Party Massacre. It’s easy to see why the two films are closely associated with one another. Besides the shared word in their titles, both are female-directed slashers, which is a rarity in the genre (assuming that Sorority House Massacre‘s mysterious Carol Frank was/is female), that depict groups of nubile teens being picked off one by one by an escaped mass murderer during a sleepover party. That latter, narrative similarity can almost be completely excused by the context of their shared genre, though, as there’s nothing especially unique about their respective set-ups. In fact, although Sorority House Massacre was released four years after The Slumber Party Massacre & is largely considered to be the derivative work, I’d argue that it’s the much more ambitious & experimental of the pair. The Slumber Party Massacre might have a larger fan base due entirely to is heavier reliance on nudity & gore, but none of those cheap thrills compare to the strange deja vu/dream imagery that Sorority House Massacre employs for a cheap, but sincerely unnerving effect.

What might be holding The Slumber Party Massacre back from being particularly remarkable as a genre film is its compromised tone. Written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown to be a parody of the slasher genre, the film was produced by Corman’s New World Pictures imprint to play as a straightforward genre exercise. There are some flashes of satiric brilliance left in Brown’s screenplay straining to make their way to the surface. Lines like “It’s not how big your mouth is. It’s what you put in it that counts,” or gags like a girl motioning to make out with her beau only to knock his decapitated head down from its perch feel like leftovers from the slasher parody The Slumber Party Massacre was intended to be. Then there’s the impossible-to-ignore, loaded imagery of the film’s villain attacking a group of young women with a gigantic power drill that he sometimes dangles between his legs. If the film’s originally intended form had been pushed a little further to the parody end of the spectrum, I might’ve been a little more on board with what it delivers. As is, these comedic moments feel like occasional respites form a pretty run-of-the-mill slasher picture. There’s nothing especially surprising about what transpires in The Slumber Party Massacre. It’s an enjoyable, but entirely predictable gore fest, complete with the eyeroll-worthy jump scare fake-outs instigated by cats, surprise house guests, and (most amusing of all) someone drilling a new peephole in the front door.

It’s hard to tell exactly why The Slumber Party Massacre has gradually earned a cult following as one of the “best” slashers of the 1980s. Which end of the film’s dueling, compromised tones is winning over people’s hearts? I suspect some folks are latching onto the remaining whiffs of feminist-leaning parody leftover from the script’s early stages, but the film’s top two “plot keywords” tagged on IMDb are “girl in bra & panties” and “female rear nudity”, so who knows? The film definitely delivers a lot more that Sorority House Massacre on the shameless nudity & grossout gore end. It’s easy to see how its group showers, severed limbs, lingerie, and power drill slashings would make it play better as a goofy midnight movie group viewing among boozed out friends in comparison with Sorority House Massacre‘s less salacious, dreamlike creep-outs. Still, I think that Sorority House is the superior Massacre, for what it’s worth. In the end, splitting hairs about which tangentially-related, genre-derivative, softcore porn-esque slasher from the VHS era is slightly better than the other probably isn’t a super effective use of my time (nor yours, for that matter), but dammit, this is all I got, so humor me. Sorority House Massacre reigns supreme. The Slumber Party Massacre is . . . pretty okay.

-Brandon Ledet