brandon ledet

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

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three star
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“Alright, scouts. Let’s kick some zombie ass.”

Man, these zombie horror comedies really do seem to write themselves. Here’s the basic premise of Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (as if you couldn’t infer it from the title alone): three teenage boy scouts try to get laid while the world (or at least their small town) crumbles around them into zombie mayhem. You can pretty much tell from there whether or not you’re on board with the movie’s grossout gore gags & sexual bro humor, which for better or for worse plays out exactly as you’d expect it to.  Imagine Superbad with extras from the “Thriller” video eating half the cast & you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. All its genre faithfulness aside, at least Scouts Guide doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of films like this: wimping out on the gore & sex jokes. It’s a very raunchy teen sex comedy & a very gory zombie flick, both elements over the top in their crassness. Fans of bro humor & disgusting splatter fests may know what they’re getting ahead of time, but are likely to leave somewhat satisfied.

Despite what you may assume from the title, Scouts Guide never provides a list of rules on how to survive the zombie apocalypse like the one Jesse Eisenberg reads off in Zombieland. The plot is much more straightforward in structure. After establishing that teenage boy scouts are unsexy nerds who can’t get laid, the film stages a 28 Days Later-type viral outbreak that shakes up their world enough to allow rites of passage like squeezing their first breasts, viewing their first strip tease, and (on a sweeter note) receiving their first kiss, all on the same night. And because they’re hormone-addled teenage boys, it just barely bothers them that these moments of intimacy are soaked in gore & viscera. Even though that gore is pretty standard in terms of zombie movie mayhem, it is at least enthusiastic enough in its details to make the effort worthwhile. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure it was the first time I had ever seen zombie cats, zombie deer, zombie scientists, zombie scout leaders, zombie cops, and zombie strippers all in the same film, And true to form, in terms of teenage boy sex humor, the movie also makes time to include zombie hand jobs, zombie rim jobs, and zombie cunnilingus while it was at it. It’s all very tasteless,  but it’s also just silly enough to work.

Even though I enjoyed Scouts Guide for what it was, I’m struggling to recall details that distinguish it from its zombie comedy peers. The reason I watched the film in the first place was that the star role was filled by the incredibly gifted Tye Sheridan. It was nice to see him have fun for a change, since most of his work to this point has been in grim dramas like Mud & Joe. Other supporting roles from familiar faces like David Koechner, Blake Anderson, and Cloris Leachman were wall pretty much on par with their previous comedy work, but nothing out of the ordinary. Only the strip club cocktail waitress played by Sarah Dumont stood out as a particularly bad performance, but what’s the point of a zombie movie if you don’t sneak at least one of those in there?

The rest of the film’s charms are a stray sly joke or two, like a strip club named Lawrence of Alabia, a zombie wearing a “YOLO” shirt, a pissant dude bro taking selfies with corpses, a grown man’s beyond-obsessive shrine to the fabulous Dolly Parton, etc. You’ve more or less seen everything else before: the chest-caving moment from The Thing, the landscaping equipment brutality of Dead Alive, you know the drill. If you can deal with a couple stray poop jokes, gratuitits nudity, and bros being bros (often with resulting punishment), Scouts Guide is an amusing, low stakes horror comedy. It also gets instant bonus points for valuing practical effects over CGI. It could’ve easily substituted details like zombie cat puppets & elastic zombie dicks with computer graphics, but instead they for the most part took the time to mimic the golden era of the genre in its gore effects, a dedication to the (admittedly trashy) craft that I truly appreciate.

-Brandon Ledet

Steve Jobs (2015)

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threehalfstar

If you want to learn about the recently deceased Apple CEO/visionary Steve Jobs, there’s a new documentary called Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine by Alex Gibney that should be of use to you. If you want to watch a well-written, well-acted movie about a mythological Steve Jobs  who most likely never existed, the Danny Boyle film named after him is probably more your speed. As with most scripts by Aaron Sorkin, Steve Jobs is not really about Steve Jobs at all. Just like with his work on the David Fincher Facebook movie The Social Network, Sorkin is much more concerned with myth than he is with truth, often using the likeness of real life people as a mirror through which he reflects on his own personal shortcomings. The basic Sorkin archetype is an emotionally combatant man baby who would much rather be judged by the merits of his work than the way he interacts with the outside world. Sorkin’s subjects are often twisted to fit this mold instead of the other way around & your enjoyment of Steve Jobs may be hinged on how much you’re willing to give in to that conceit.

Basically, what I’m saying is don’t expect a straightforward biopic from this film. It has a strange, fractured structure to it, setting its three vignettes in the minutes before the 1984 product launch of the Macintosh home computer, the 1988 launch of the NEXT (“the single biggest failure in the history of personal computers”), and the 1998 launch of the iMac, posed here as Jobs’ first true taste of success after years of struggle. Just before he takes the stage to shill his wares in each instance, Jobs is interrogated by the same six people in his life. his personal & professional shortcomings put him on an Ebenezer Scrooge type of existential trial. Everyone’s a combatant in Jobs’ vicious, stubborn, megalomaniac eyes, as be believes that, “The very nature of people is something to overcome.” This dialogue-heavy three act structure allows for a darkly humorous actors’ showcase & Michael Fassbender is a force to be reckoned with in the titular role. His position as the head figure in The Steve Jobs Revenge Machine (there’s a band name for you) might just go down as one of the actor’s finest performances, even though he doesn’t at all resemble the famous public figure until the black turtle neck & jeans costume and TED Talk format of the third act.

What doesn’t work so well is when the film isn’t fully committed to the gimmick. It’s so nice to have a picture like this allow the dialogue to breathe in luxuriously long stretches, building a delicate sort of verbal venom that can’t be established in short, one-off scenes. It’s a shame, then, that Steve Jobs breaks up its vignettes with flashbacks to brief scenes of forced past drama. I found the film’s flashbacks awkward & rushed, which is a damn shame because the rest of the film is paced so nicely. That doesn’t mean these brief tangents are entirely wastes of time. Some of the film’s best one-liners come from a past argument between Jobs & seminal programmer Chris Wozniak (portrayed here by Seth Rogen), like when Wozniak asserts, “Computers aren’t supposed to have human flaws. I’m not going to build this one with yours,” or in the exchange, “Computers aren’t paintings,” “Fuck you, yes they are,” (after Jobs’ compares his own work with that of a fine artist). I don’t think the movie would’ve been improved with these exchanges left out completely; I just wished they could’ve been worked into the script without disrupting the tension of the three pre-launch timelines.

To an outsider such as myself, Apple looks & feels like a cult that I just never bought into. Boyle & Sorkin seem to have caught the same vibes, posing Steve Jobs as The Man Behind the Curtain, functioning here like Phillip Seymore Hoffman’s L Ron Hubbard stand-in in The Master. Even the infamous 1984 Macintosh Superbowl commercial that the film heavily references has the sinisterly religious feel of a Dianetics DVD. As portrayed in the film, Jobs is fully aware of this effect his products & his personality have on consumers. He strives for “end to end” control on both his computers’ “locked doors” hardware & on the way they’re presented to the public, treating his supporting players like instruments in his tool kit instead of respect-worthy collaborators. I’m not sure that the Steve Jobs presented in Steve Jobs ever actually existed, but it’s fascinating to watch him balance his cruelty for those closest to him with his love for the public as an abstract concept. Sorkin’s version of Jobs will be downright vicious to an innocent little girl in one breath, but then yearn to make computers “warm” & friendly again (after cold Hollywood villains like HAL 9000) by getting them to say “Hello” in the next. Between Sorkin & Fassbender’s work here, the myth of Steve Jobs is most certainly an arresting contrast between genius & emotional sadism. He’s a true to form Sorkin protagonist who’s better judged by his work than his persona. I’m not sure I left the film knowing any more about the real Steve Jobs than I did going in, but I’m also not sure that matters in terms of the film’s failure or success.

-Brandon Ledet

Missing People (2015)

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fourstar

I first heard of the visual artist Roy Ferdinand when I attended his one-man show In Your Fucking Face at Barrister’s Art Gallery (when it was still on Oretha Castle Haley) sometime in 2004, As the title of that show suggests, Ferdinand’s work is aggressively crude & transgressive, assembling a unique document of New Orleans at the height of the city’s fever pitch crime rates in the 90s & 00s. An self-taught, outsider artist along the lines of a Henry Darger or a Daniel Johnson, Ferdinand drew portraits of the city & its inhabitants at their most cruel & vulnerable moments. His art is somehow both immediately digestible & impossible to ever shake once seen. The imagery sticks with you in a deeply affecting way, both in its violence’s absurdity & honesty, despite a lack of honed technical skills you’d expect from a more traditionally trained artist.

Roy Ferdinand may have been a somewhat financially successful artist, but he’s far from a household name & information on his personal life is scarce at best. That’s why I was stoked to discover that a documentary about Ferdinand was screening at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art as a part of the 2015 New Orleans Film Fest. Super stoked. Indeed, Missing People was a rare chance to see interview footage of Roy Ferdinand talking about himself, his city, and his art. However, it was far from the film that I was I expecting. Instead of being a documentary about Ferdinand outright, Missing People follows the story of Martina Batan, an art collector & curator who obsessively amassed hundreds of Ferdinand’s pieces for reasons that even she had difficulty understanding. It would be incredible to see a documentary strictly about Ferdinand & his work, but Missing People is not that film. Instead, it serves as a document about the way his art can deeply affect someone in a personal way. And after seeing the film it’d be difficult to argue that it’s ever affected anyone nearly as much as it has Martina Batan.

Described by a close friend & comic book artist Dave Carino as “a cross between Wednesday Adams & Holly Golightly”, Martina Batan was once a young art student with a Joey Ramone haircut in NYC’s highly influential late 70s punk era. The polaroids depicting her energetic youth are a stark contrast with her current life as a middle age divorcee & professional art curator. Living alone with two elderly dogs in Brooklyn, NY, Baton is a deeply depressed, anxious soul, one that rarely sleeps or, ostensibly, enjoys herself. One thing that haunts Batan in an ever-increasing intensity is the decades-old violent stabbing death of her teenage brother, a tragedy that tore her family to shreds. One of the ways Batan processes her grief over the loss of her brother, of course, is through collecting Roy Ferdinand’s artwork.

Batan first discovered Ferdinand while volunteering in New Orleans’ post-Katrina recovery shortly after the artist’s premature death in 2005. She soon became possessed with the task of collecting what she describes as “a greatest hits” of the artist’s work. Although Missing People is by no means a straight-forward documentary on Ferdinand & his art, it does feature hundreds of his pieces, by far the most I’ve ever seen, thanks to Batan’s tireless obsession as a collector. Besides the drawings, Batan also collected various ephemera from Ferdinand’s life, including a cowboy hat, boots, and unwashed socks Ferdinand’s two living sisters had entrusted to the owner of Barrister’s Gallery (a detail spookily echoed in Batan’s collection of her slain brother’s similar ephemera). Speaking of Ferdinand’s sisters, as a pair they offer one of the few points of insight into the deceased artists’ life & personality, outside stray interview footage of Roy in 1997, a few anecdotes from Barrister’s Gallery owner and, of course, the work itself. Roy’s sisters are particularly endearing in their dismissive laughter after hearing their brother describe himself as “an OG retired”. Whether or not roy was a certifiable “original gangster”, his self-declared role as a “journalist” & a “documentarian” that lead him to record “simple portraits of neighborhood characters” suggests that he at least had some kind of first hand experience with New Orleans’ crime element. As Roy himself puts it, he felt compelled to depict “guns, drugs, violence, and church” in his work because that’s what happens in a city where you constantly see “cops shooting at drug dealers, drug dealers shooting at cops, drug dealers shooting at each other.” Leave the scenic streams & meadows to the artists who live where that’s the reality. Although Roy’s sisters couldn’t corroborate his self-image of a “retired” hard criminal, they did admit that he often sold his paintings as a means to support his crack cocaine habit, saying “When he did his most eye-popping pieces, he was high as a kite.”

Not enough is really known about the “true” Roy Ferdinand to support a full-length documentary in the traditional sense (not that I wouldn’t love to see someone try). As one interviewee puts it, Roy was somewhat of a “performance artist”, adapting to many personas over the course of his lifetime: cowboy, voodoo practitioner, crack addict, fine artist, limo driver, French Quarter eccentric Chicken Man’s “official bodyguard”, etc. Although Missing People makes little to no attempt to offer a full portrait of the artist as a man, it does wonders to establish his role as a docuementarian. Roy explains the reasons he depicts the victims of horrible acts of violence is to preserve their likeness beyond being a mere headline in a news story. He says, “If it wasn’t for me, nobody would remember that these people existed.” Perhaps that sentiment is the essence of Martina Batan’s personal connection with Ferdinand’s work, seeing as how her long-deceased brother suffered a similar fate to many of Roy’s subjects, just in New York instead of New Orleans. The movie offers little in the way of answers.

As Martina struggles with her brother’s mysterious death, with her own failing health, and with an uneasy relationship with Roy’s sisters (who are justifiably suspicious & jealous of her collection of their brother’s work), Missing People paints a bleak, complicated picture. Much like Roy Ferdinand’s artwork, the documentary is painfully honest in an absurdly open, vulnerable way, refusing to play by the rules. Missing People documents the life of a great, little known artist not by offering a traditional biography, but instead focusing its attention on a few people still actively engaged with his work a decade after his passing. It works in the same way that Room 237 revealed a lot about the power of ambiguity in Kubrick’s The Shining by exploring the crackpot theories the film inspired instead of documenting the production of the film itself. As I said, as a fan of his work I would love to watch a proper, full-length documentary about Ferdinand (if that’s even possible), but that’s not at all what Missing People is aiming for. Instead, Roy is just the connective tissue in a story about the people living in his wake. It’s a bold & often frustrating choice, but in a lot of ways the film is more fascinating & satisfying for it.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Class of 1999 (1989)

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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 Boomer made Britnee, Brandon and Erin watch Class of 1999 (1989).

Boomer: Class of 1999 is a strange little movie. For readers who haven’t had the pleasure, the film is set in the titular year, less than a full decade after its release date. In this “distant” future, inter-gang violence has become so overwhelming that the areas around high schools have become dystopian free fire zones, but these violent, Mad Maxian teenagers still submit to going to campus every day for some reason. The movie’s protagonist, Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg), is a former gangmember paroled and returned to school. Unbeknownst to the student body, the principal (Malcolm McDowell) has agreed to allow an obviously mad roboticist (Stacy Keach) to install three former military androids (Patrick Kilpatrick, John P. Ryan, and goddess on this earth Pam Grier), “reprogrammed” as educators, as new instructors. Culp tries to stay out of trouble, but his narrative arc is complicated by his romance with the principal’s daughter (Tracy Lind). The androids decide that the best way to create a stable educational environment is to rid the school of violence by creating a war between the two rival gangs, even drawing in Culp due to the false flag death of his brother (Joshua John Miller, who was also the annoying kid brother in Teen Witch). As you would expect, this culminates in the two gangs putting aside their differences to defeat the Terminator. I mean the teachers.

I love this movie. It’s a perfect encapsulation of worst case, slippery slope thinking with regards to teen violence, a misplaced jeremiad warning of dark days to come–won’t someone please, please think of the children? Bradley Gregg, star of many of my adolescent fantasies (and one of the dream warriors from Nightmare on Elm Street 3), parades around in an outfit that manages to be both utterly ridiculous and strangely sexy, featuring skin-tight leather pants emblazoned with the word “war” over and over again and a form-fitting tee under an oversized babydoll jacket. He has nothing on Keach, of course, who struts around in this film with a platinum ponytail and matching (painful looking) contact lenses, while still somehow managing to play this ludicrous role as straight as possible. Throw in the other stars in the cast, like Grier and McDowell, and it’s a surprise that this Terminator ripoff made barely half of its relatively low budget back in ticket sales.

The Keach/Culp dichotomy of seriousness and campiness is one of my favorite things about Class. On the one hand, the film features ridiculous gang warfare with oversized vehicles in one scene, followed by dark domestic trouble in the form of Angel and Cody’s mother’s truly frightening drug addiction in the next (before she completely disappears from the film). Somehow, this intermix works for me, although I can admit it probably shouldn’t. What do you think, Britnee? Is this tonal inconsistency a drawback, or a feature?

Britnee: I think the mix of the film’s outlandish features and serious moments made Class the unique and unforgettable film that it is. If anything, the serious moments of the film, such as the mother and son drug brawl, amplified the film’s campiness, and that’s always a good thing. When serious, dramatic situations are placed in such a ridiculous setting (post-apocalyptic 1999), they bring out this sick and twisted type of humor that makes us all think, “I really shouldn’t be laughing at this.” Being able to successfully pull off this type of humor and create such an uncomfortable mix of emotions is the greatest achievement that a film can accomplish. Unfortunately, Class did not have as many of those wonderful Lifetime movie-like moments as I hoped for, but I think that may be the only complaint I have about the film. It was that good.

Something that I just can’t stop thinking about from Class is the gang warfare between the Blackhearts and the Razorheads. The film’s street gangs are made out to seem like these awful groups of mixed-up teens who will never escape their miserable, violent lifestyle, but under their rough and tough exterior, they’re just a bunch of kids searching for a little bit of love and understanding. This really comes through when the Blackhearts and Razorheads stop killing each other and team up to fight the evil robotic teachers. The bad guys (Razorheads) join the not-as-bad guys (Blackhearts) and ultimately become the good guys. At this point, the gang lifestyle actually seems more acceptable and becomes a little appealing. I mean, if I was stuck in some crazy life-or-death situation where I was forced to join a gang, I would definitely let the Blackhearts jump me in. 80’s new wave couture, Nine Inch Nails dance parties with machine guns, and a gnarly black heart tattoo are enough to win me over.

Erin, what are your thoughts on the two opposing gangs joining forces to fight the evil robotic teachers? Was this one of the few heartwarming parts of the film? Or is it just another cheesy moment to add to the list?

Erin: I thoroughly enjoyed the Class of 1999 experience . . . but I’m not sure that I found the gangs joining forces to be terribly heartwarming.  I think that if they hadn’t been in an automatic-weapon fueled fire-fight, I might be with you.  Had they been engaged in an old fashioned fist-fight-style rumble, I think that I would be more sympathetic to their situation.  As it was, it seemed like the gang side of The Warriors and the terrorist robot side of The Terminator got together and forgot to bring a side helping of the humanity from The Outsiders (I’ll take 1980s movie title conventions for $500, Alex).

I think that Class of 1999 is trying to communicate a series of relationships to the viewers: the difference between the viewers and the post-apocalyptic kids,  the difference between the rival gangs, and the difference between all of the kids and the inhuman robots.  I think that the movie does a great job showing us the first relationship, but stumbles with the second two.  The gangland teens are pretty reprehensible, truly living up to the premise of the movie that youth gangs have turned American urban centers into warzones.  The movie makes a very clear break from reality with its set up and presentation of the its own world.

Cody is really the best glimmer of humanity out of the entire movie, in my opinion.  He’s the only example of a multi-dimensional character, with his dark side trying to survive in a gangland and his sweet side of falling in love with a certified Nice Girl.  We don’t get that multi-dimensionality from other members of the Blackhearts, much less from the punks in the Razorheads.  It’s really hard to root for any of them.  Perhaps Cody is supposed to stand out as the Last Sane Man?

In any case, it’s hard for me to see myself in the gang members as they make a stand against the Teachernators.  Yes, they’re scrappy kids coming together to take on psychotic military robots, but minutes earlier they were trying to kill each other with machine guns! On the other hand, the Roboteachers are out-of-their-minds inhuman, which is made evident early in the movie by their behaviors and later in the movie by their physical transformations into walking weapons.

What do you think, Brandon, does Class of 1999 struggle to humanize the human characters?  Is there a clear enough difference between the terrible actions taken by the gangs and the Teachbots?  Does the audience get an avatar to insert themselves into the movie, or are we just supposed to watch the carnage?

Brandon: Simply by the nature of what it’s trying to portray, I totally have to agree that all basic humanity has been stripped from this movie’s ultraviolent teens. Cartoonishly over-exaggerating adult fears about out of control young adult behavior, Class of 1999 poses a grim, larger than life portrait of teen rebellion that is far beyond anything you’d expect to see in any conceivable human being, young or not, even in a worst case scenario, ten years down the road cyberfuture. Yeah, teens can be perilously obsessive over getting their hands on drugs, beers, sex, and cool cars at times, but usually not in the way Class of 1999‘s teens mix those simple pleasures with guns, bombs, landmines, and missile launchers. The first half or so of the film plays like a particularly paranoid parent’s warped nightmare about what their teen is up to while they’re out with their bonehead friends. A great example of this is the warehouse concert scene. I’ve been to quite a few concerts in my time & while many may have involved industrial music dance parties, I can’t remember ever witnessing a gang beating in the moshpit, machine gun fire set off to the rhythm of the songs being played, or the venue being lit by carefully placed barrel fires. I’m sure that as my parents first let me out of the house to experience live music for the first time, however, their worst fears of what was going on weren’t too far off from that image.

The trick here is that Class of 1999 is smart to spoof both sides of the teen rebellion coin. Because teens are perceived as such violent, out of control animals, authority figures take an automatically adversarial position against them. Late in the film when Principal Malcom McDowell complains about his army of roboteachers, saying, “They’re waging war with my students!”, he’s met with the response, “Isn’t that what all teachers do?” If the film indeed has any specific sort of point it’s trying to make & we’re not supposed to just, as Erin suggests, sit back & “watch the carnage”, I think it’s to be found somewhere in that exchange. Even if real life teens are as bad as portrayed in this film (they’re not), they’re still far more sympathetic than the (robotic) adults that brutally murder them by snapping their necks or forcefeeding them glass vials of superdrugs. There’s an oppressive, prison-like atmosphere in the film’s educational system (complete with “RESPECT”, “OBEY”, “LEARN” commands that could’ve been directly lifted from John Carpenter’s They Live) that feels like a direct indictment of privatized, militarized schooling that treats kids like violent threats instead of young, eager minds. The cyberfuturism of Class of 1999‘s killer robot “tactical education units” may not be readily recognizable in today’s flesh-bound educational units (public school teachers), but they do feel like a blown-up, exaggerated version of the way we systematically tend to treat children as a threat & a nuisance.

Boomer, how much do you think Class of 1999 is a movie of its time? Do you think that there’s a bit of historical, late 80s gang violence context here that would drastically change if there were to be a Class of 2025 released in 2015? Or would the same basic adult fears of teen rebellion & a privatized, militaristic educational system be eligible for lampooning today (with CGI bloodsplatter unfortunately subbed for the practical effects gore, of course)?

Boomer: One of the great truths about western culture is that each generation that reaches the level of becoming “the establishment” seeks out and pontificates about the fatal flaws in the generation that follows. This is nothing new; adults of today are “concerned” about the isolating effects of handheld devices, just as my parents were “concerned” about the isolating effects of the Discman, or their forebears were concerned about the invention of this thing or that thing, going back to concerns that the invention of the phonograph would lead to fewer people being interested in learning to play instruments. There are a lot of sociological and anthropological reasons for this, but most of it boils down to the universal constant that we will only get older, coupled with the fear of obsolescence and fear-mongering about “the youth,” and treating them, as Brandon notes, as a threat or nuisance.

The other major factor in the genesis of 1999 is that the late eighties and early nineties saw a very visible rise in gang violence, something that couldn’t simply be dismissed, so the news media had to address it. However, the “establishment” couldn’t acknowledge that disenfranchised people turn to crime because of systemic problems related to class and privilege, especially not when people were basically walking down the street accidentally poking others with their raging pro-wealth Reaganomics hard-ons. As a result, the majority of Americans, ignorant of the real causes of gang violence and its apparent meteoric rise, had nothing to cling to but their filtered and incorrect understanding of social problems, reinforced by the cyclical nature of youth-blaming.

What’s so interesting to me is how 1999 manages to be both an indictment of that mindset and the apotheosis of it at the same time, and, although I may be giving it too much credit here, I think that this is intentional. The darkness that permeates Culp’s world represents all the things that the parents of 1989 feared about the future, a horribly violent place where those nasty (scary) teenagers with their loud music and their dirty fingernails rule over a scorched suburbia because no one took a stand against teenage skullduggery when there was a chance! But it also holds up a mirror to that absurd frame of mind, pointing out the flaws in that kind of fearful, conservative nightmare by showing how unrealistic and silly such a future would be. Also, there are killer robots, because who doesn’t love that? And, if your kids are running around doing drugs, they probably learned it from watching you, mom or dad!

So, the answer is “yes,” 1999 is a very much a product of its time and of the politico-cultural environment from which it sprung, and there would have to be significant updates to remake this movie, although I could see how it could be done in a couple of different ways, depending upon which of Joann and Cletus’s fears you wish to highlight and mock. Political correctness is often a good place for conservative muckrakers to stir up some passion: “In the future world of 2025, schools no longer teach facts, they teach feelings. They no longer teach science, they teach sensitivity. And they only teach the ‘corrected’ version of history.” And, like, instead of robot teachers, there’s an AI that seeks to “purge” students of their hopefulness or individuality or whatever by teaching them about all of American history, atrocity alongside progress, and by teaching them self-control and tolerance. Cody Culp would be a secret bigot who teaches his androgynous and sexless peers, long having been made soft of mind by those damn SJWs, to fight back against the machine of liberal indoctrination by being politically incorrect and proud, or whatever. To be honest, though, I don’t know that this would be recognized as a satirical interpretation of a conservative’s nightmare of the future; it would be more likely to be seen as a prescient vision of a world to come, ruled by the “libtard.” Or maybe I’m just on a tangent; who knows.

The real truth is this: the way education is enforced in the west is not the best method for schooling, and we all pretty much know that. The priorities are all skewed, and the eight-hour, rigidly-structured schoolday that has been the model for a long time isn’t based on the best pedagogical or psychoeducational practices but on the model of a workday; it forcibly instills in children a willingness to accept the drudgeries of pyramid capitalism, essentially, rather than encouraging critical thought, technical acumen, interest in knowledge for its own sake, or any kind of prioritization of variety in educational forms. You can see that small changes are taking place today, but for the worse; as an educator, I toured a new charter school just a year or two ago that was filled with classrooms that didn’t look like classrooms. They looked like call centers. So even if Class of 2025 were to be made in the way that I poorly pitched above, a Republican nightmare of social justice gone mad, it would still be nothing like the schools of the future, just as my school in 1999 was not a war zone of apocalyptic proportions.

Britnee: What do you think about a Class of 2025? Does your conception of what Class of 1999‘s thesis was differ from mine, and if so, how do you think your interpretation would be updated for a contemporary audience?

Britnee: When watching Class of 1999, I did realize that there was a connection to the large amount of youth gang violence occurring around the time the film was released, but I really didn’t think much of it. I saw the film as being loads of stupid fun without much depth, but your perspective really got me thinking about the whole “youth-blaming” and “conservative nightmare” aspects that the film definitely illustrates. Loud music, fast cars, leather jackets, heavy eyeliner, and funky haircuts were a conservative parent’s nightmare in the late 80s/early 90s, and the teens in 1999 are an explosion of this stereotypical degenerate youth. The whole film actually reminds me of a lost Billy Idol music video. It’s just so “Rebel Yell.” These types of teens were going to cause the world to become a post-apocalyptic cesspool of crime, violence, and pure filth. Unfortunately, the world did not become that exciting by 1999. There were many changes that occurred within those short 10 years, but at the same time, much remained the same.

Now, to think of what my interpretation of 1999 would be for a contemporary audience. 1999 did play on the fear of what the future would be like for the youth of that time, and now it seems as though one of the biggest fears for today’s youth is the lack of importance placed on quality education. A modern 1999, or as Boomer stated, 2025, would deal with the absence of general education and the emphasis on some sort of super strict social class-based structure. Children will be sorted into military, white-collar, or blue-collar positions at birth, like in the movie Antz when newborn ants are assigned to be workers and soldiers. Who knew that such a horrible movie would be so insightful? Each group would have their separate type of school, but they would be more like training academies. Only the elite would receive a quality education, and they would use it to coerce obedience and conformity on the youth. Those that do not have elite status would live in squalor and have all sorts of chemicals in the air and water that dope them up, making them ultra submissive to authority. I feel as though the teen rebellion wouldn’t be as violent as one would expect. They would rely more on outsmarting the authority and only shooting them up from time to time instead of a constant machine gun blowout like in 1999. At this point, weapons would probably have lasers instead of bullets, so the battle scenes would be a little more on the calm side.

Erin, speaking of weapons, did you think that it was strange that the weapons in 1999 weren’t very futuristic? Come to think of it, not much was futuriscitc about this film that was set in the future. Is the budget to blame for this or is it something bigger?

Erin :  Britnee, someone remarked during our viewing of Class of 1999 “Oh no!  They didn’t invent cell phones in the future!” as two characters were forced into a situation with no way of contacting each other.

In some ways, yes, I think that budget has something to do with why the weapons and other parts of the film weren’t very futuristic.  Clearly, the bulk of the effects budget went to the Teachbots and their final set-chewing rampage.  Honestly, I think the bulk of the general budget may have gone to that last scene.

In other ways, I think that a few things inhibited Class of 1999‘s presentation of the future.  First of all, it could make logical sense that the teen gangs in the movie only have access to older, out of date technology and weapons. Teens in 1999 might have had pagers, but in my community were only on the cusp of common cellphone ownership.   Admittedly, this theory falls apart a little in the way that the administrators are not seen using futuristic technology either.

Secondly,  one of the difficulties of setting a movie in the near future is hitting the right pitch for technological advancement.  I think that the rapid development of computer and internet culture, where even impoverished  families have internet access and at least one computer, and the ubiquity of personal electronics such PDAs and cellphones might have been impossible to see from late 1980s.  From where we stand, it seems obvious and inevitable that the future would look like it does (or did, in 1999).  For the writers and audiences at the time, that might have seemed as outlandish as Star Trek’s communicators and tricorders.

And thirdly (and most likely, I think), placing Class of 1999 in the near future is a nice way to hand wave away the complete ridiculousness of the world that the movie inhabits.  The future setting means that the filmmakers have to take much less responsibility for portraying any kind of real life anything, from the physical sets to the interactions of the characters.  Honestly, I think that’s a sloppy use of what can be an effective story-telling tool.  Science Fiction as a genre is also used as a means of giving us the distance needed from reality to discuss difficult issues.  By setting Class of 1999 in the future, the filmmakers were able to explore both the dual fear of out-of-control youth and out-of-control education institutions with removal from the actual educational landscape of 1989-90. (I’ll insert here that I think Class of 1999 is more a fantasy rather than a proper Science Fiction movie.)

The unreality of the movie not withstanding, there are some moments that resonated with me as “real”.  When Cody’s mother and brother fight over drugs, I was reminded that the late 80s had seen crack cocaine strike urban areas like an epidemic.  Many cities were still suffering from botched urban renewal plans and the hemorrhagic flow of residents to suburbs.

What do you think, Brandon, where do you see realism in this movie?  Is searching for reality even relevant?

Brandon: I feel like we’ve already run through a great deal of the film’s startling realism here: the cultural context of 80s gang violence (as portrayed in the media); the broken, unnecessarily adversarial education system; the shocking jolts of harrowing drug addiction & attempted sexual assault that break up the fun, etc. Something that does stand out to me, though, is the budding romantic relationship between our beloved teen protagonists Cody & Traci. Okay, it’s a little ridiculous that that the movie made time for a romantic subplot in the midst of battle droid educational units liberally murdering teenagers in the guise of discipline, but it’s also a somewhat believable ridiculousness. If you combine already heightened teenage libidos with the kind of tumultuous situations that naturally tend to bring people together (say, your gym teacher removing his arm to reveal a subdermal rocket launcher, for instance) it’s only logical that a romantic bond or two will arise. Thankfully, the one delivered here is accompanied with such great exchanges as Cody coolly responding to the question “You gonna call me or what?” with “Yeah. Both.” and hilariously teasing Traci to “Open up those suburban eyes” to the danger they’re facing. I’ll make no guesses as to how realistic that exact dialogue is, but the situation is at the very least more believable than an army of robotic teachers that get away with viciously spanking (not to mention disembowling & setting aflame) their students with out so much as a peep from the PTA.

Lagniappe

Erin: The least believable part of this whole movie is that these kids are still showing up for school.  With the exception of Cody’s probation requirement, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to show up. Why?  Why are they there?

Britnee: Of all the strange yet amazing moments in Class of 1999, the one that I just can’t forget is when Mr. Hardin (John P. Ryan) exposes his claw machine hand for the first time. As he sinks his creepy claw into the skull of an unfortunate teen, he says one of the greatest lines in the film: “I love to mold young minds.” Those obnoxious arcade toy machines will never be the same!

Brandon: One of the oddest details in a movie where they’re in no short supply are the ordinary objects of a banana & glass of milk. Character actor Stacy Keach does an excellent job of chewing scenery as the evil “Megatech robotics specialist” Dr. Robert Forrest, who provides the technology for the evil teacherbots. He gets obvious perverse pleasure from watching his creations discipline their students (which is especially alarming during one particular robospanking), deriving even greater joy when their “discipline” escalates to murder, and he just generally looks like an evil lab rat that killed so many other lab rats that he was honorarily dubbed a scientist because people were afraid to put him down. What I love most about Dr. Forrest, who is an all around great villain, is that on top of these unwholesome characteristics, he seems to enjoy incongruously wholesome snacks. Watching someone so evil & so fake-looking casually chew on a banana & gulp a glass of milk is a hilarious, unsettling sight gag that beautifully complicates his character in a way that’s almost too good to have been scripted. I like to imagine that Keach came up with his own onscreen snack regimen himself, insisting on enjoying his milk & his banana (surely obtained from craft services) on camera in order to give his character a whole other layer of perversity. No matter whose idea it was, though, it totally worked & after the movie I ended up thinking just as much about those snacks as I did about the film’s roboviolence, which is really saying something.

Boomer: The DVD for this movie is as light on special features as you would expect for a niche-but-not-quite-cult classic film such as this, but it amuses me that the DVD cover foregoes the Terminator-esque cover of the VHS in favor of an image that looks like Shaq in Steel. Almost every trailer on the disc, however, is for some film that echoes Terminator in some way, however, which is good enough. Also, nothing tells you more about the film-makers’ misconception of the teaching profession than Traci’s comment that women never buy just a sexy bra or pair of panties, that they treat themselves. Because teachers make soooo much money with which to treat themselves, am I right? That’s why I’m still a teacher–no, wait, I quit because even working a second job didn’t net enough to get by on. Sorry, Traci, not all of our academically employed fathers are getting grant money from crazed scientists.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
December: Brandon presents The Independent (2000)
January: The Best of 2015

-The Swampflix Crew

The Thing from Another World (1951)

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three star

In a lot of ways John Carpenter’s 1982 technical marvel of a creature feature The Thing is a one of a kind movie. If nothing else, the titular creature in the film presents itself in many uniquely complex-grotesque forms, each worthy of being preserved & displayed in a museum. As unique of a picture as it is, Carpenter’s The Thing is just one of several adaptations of the same novella, Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. Three decades before Carpenter got his hands on the story, prolific Hollywood producer Howard Hawks had already loosely adapted the work in a film titled The Thing From Another World. Carpenter was undoubtedly a fan of this older incarnation, as he borrowed its title & the look of its title card, but the two films are fundamentally different in their approaches to telling Campbell’s space invasion story. While Carpenter’s The Thing dazzles viewers with complex, constantly evolving forms of its alien beast, Hawks’ The Thing From Another World keeps its monster mostly under wraps until the last third of the film, instead building its narrative more around the paranoid infighting that plagues the crew dealing with the otherworldly presence.

Set on the exact opposite side of the globe as Carpenter’s The Thing, the film begins in Anchorage, Alaska, where a crew of poker-playing, dame-talking military men are sent on an expedition to the North Pole to investigate a potential UFO sighting, a newspaper man in tow. Once there, they discover a massive flying saucer buried in the ice & attempt to melt it free, accidentally destroying the ship in the process. What they manage to preserve instead is a frozen alien being, one roughly shamed like a human male, except over 8ft tall. In Carpenter’s The Thing, the crew’s paranoid in-fighting revolves around the creature’s ability to imitate other life forms, thus making every team member a suspect for being “the thing”. In The Thing From Another World, the conflict is more concerned with balancing the need for scientific research with the more immediate concerns for self-preservation. As the gigantic humanoid alien monster proves itself to be a threat to the crew, they must decide whether to destroy it for their own safety or to attempt to peacefully contain it for further research, as instructed by the military higher ups.

Although the titular thing in Hawks’ production isn’t quite as visibly alien as Carpenter’s eerily unrecognizable shapeshifter, its humanoid form is merely a deception. The beast is eventually revealed to be a highly evolved form of plant life, one that feeds off of blood rather than water, like Aubrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. There’s a great sense of unnerving ambiguity in the gradual way the film’s isolated crew of scientists & military men piece together exactly what makes the thing ticket. There are also a couple of moments of special effects spectacle in the film, like in a sequence involving a severed arm and an extreme scene of violence in which the thing is set aflame & escapes into the snow. For the most part, though, where Carpenter established the terrifyingly alien nature of his creature’s biology through visual technique, the 1951 adaptation of the same story builds the same effect through a slow burn of dialogue, saving its creature feature surface pleasures for the final half hour. It’s not quite as exciting or satisfying as Carpenter’s picture, but fans of The Thing are likely to get a kick out of The Thing From Another World, both for the surprisingly adept dialogue and for the  fun of comparing & contrasting.

-Brandon Ledet

The Vampire Mafia of Innocent Blood (1992) vs. The Zombie Mafia of Shrunken Heads (1994)

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One of the stranger details of our Swampchat discussion of October’s Movie of the Month, John Landis’ 1992 horror comedy Innocent Blood, was that we couldn’t think of a single other film that featured a vampire mafia. You would think that another movie or a TV show or a comic book out there would’ve covered the topic before. The truth is that there very well may be an example out there that we’re over-looking, but it just hasn’t reached one of the four of us yet. Britnee & Erin suggested that there were similarities in the Canadian horror comedy Blood & Donuts‘ formula, but from what I understand that film is about a vampire navigating a world of modern day criminals, not about a world of modern day criminal vampires. After searching my brain for closer points of comparison over the past few weeks, I still couldn’t recall any other instances of a fictional vampire mafia, but I did happen to recall something somewhat similar: a zombie mafia.

It turns out Innocent Blood‘s undead criminals kissing cousin was under our noses all along, depicted in a film Britnee reviewed for this site several months ago: Shrunken Heads. Written/produced by infamous schlock-peddler Charles Band & directed by Danny Elfman’s brother/former bandmate Richard Elfman, Shrunken Heads is a goofy horror comedy featuring an undead ring of organized criminals, but is very much different from Innocent Blood in tone & purpose. While Innocent Blood feels like a perfect marriage of a Scorsese knockoff & a goofy vampire horror comedy, Shrunken Heads feels like a slightly edgy kids’ horror that went straight to VHS, which is pretty much the speciality of Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment brand in general.

In the film, a trio of young lads upset the day-to-day business of a teenage crime  boss who acts like a slightly-too-old leftover from Bugsy Malone. Not one to be fucked with, he promptly has the pre-teen offenders murdered in a vicious hail of gunfire. They’re then promptly resurrected by a voodoo priest/newspaper salesman who turns their remains into magical, flying shrunken heads who zip around, avenging their deaths by murdering their mobster hitmen & raising them from the dead to attack the aforementioned teenage crime boss. And there you have it: zombie mobsters.

Of course, there are some glaring differences between Shrunken Heads‘ undead mafia & that of Innocent Blood. The most essential difference is that Innocent Blood‘s vampire mafia remained somewhat organized after their transformation while the zombie mafia in Shrunken Heads disassembles their crime ring in acts of undead mutiny. Still, the films’ basic undead mobster shenanigans & goofy horror comedy mayhem make them prime candidates for a tangentially-related double feature, one backed up by the nearness of their release dates. I don’t think Innocent Blood‘s vampire mafia aesthetic has been matched by any other slice of media, but I do think Shrunken Heads may have come to closest to hitting that benchmark.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, 1992’s Innocent Blood, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this snapshot of the vampire-crowded box office that buried it, and last week’s look at John Landis’ list of works in the horror genre.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Witch Hunter (2015)

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witch

three star

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So a witch, a priest, and an assassin walk into a bar . . . And if you want to see the punchline of that joke play out, you’re going to have to lend two hours of your time to The Last Witch Hunter. I guess the question is whether or not the movie is funny enough to be worth that effort. How do you even critique a film like this, really? Do you judge it based on its merits as a self-serious action fantasy ostensibly aiming to build a franchise that certainly isn’t coming? Or do you enjoy it for what it truly is: a trashy throwaway trifle you enjoy once & then immediately forget? I’ll admit to enjoying the film well enough as a one-time-use trifle, but your own personal mileage may vary by how much enjoyment you automatically derive from bloodthirsty witches & an immortal Vin Diesel wielding a flaming sword (an image so inherently metal I could practically hear Slayer playing in my head both times it appeared onscreen). For me, that’s a pretty easy sell.

I will say this much on The Last Witch Hunter‘s behalf: it’s cartoonish inanity is far from half-assed. The movie’s sense of self-mythology is amusingly complex, as if it were trying to squeeze in volumes of source material comic books into a single feature film. In fact, since the movie is flopping hard enough to guarantee that no sequels will follow (despite its desperate wishes), a comic book adaptation might not be the worst future for this property. The story begins in The Dark Days of the Witch where Vin Diesel’s titular witch hunter gets his start by stabbing his flame sword into the chest of The Witch Queen, an evil hag made of tree roots who plans to wipe out the human race with The Black Plague in order to make room on Earth to expand her personal garden (seriously). In her dying breaths, she curses the newly crowned witch hunter to live forever, which eventually leads to a truce between witches & witch killers and the establishment of The Axe & The Cross, a spooky UN-type organization meant to ensure that “The peace endures” (a phrase that serves as the movie’s version of “May the Force be with you.”). Of course, this all leads to Diesel’s witch hunter being Double Axed & Double Crossed in modern day NYC when a strange figure similar to WWE’s Bray Wyatt or an extra from the first season of True Detective upsets the status quo by reintroducing black magic into the world,  a force explained to be “beyond evil.”

I’m getting exhausted trying to capture everything going down here & I haven’t even touched on ideas like “dreamwalkers”, “The Witch’s Council”, “The Witch Prison”, or the fact that folks like Michael Cain & Elijah Wood somehow got involved in this silliness. And I’m pretty sure I’ve mostly just included concepts introduced in the first act. As a whole, the movie has the convoluted mythology of a years-old game of D&D (something Vin Diesel is reportedly a huge fan of). The film also has a somewhat complex visual palette depicting a magical version of NYC with the general ambiance of a metropolis-sized absinthe bar. This is sharply contrasted with the old world witchcraft of insects, tree roots, fire, and endless voids. It’s all too easy to root for the witch’s side of the equation here (as if it’s ever not), since their evil queen’s dream of a worldwide garden is much more appealing than modern magic’s much more frivolous uses of selling cupcakes & promoting witchy fashion shows. Also, when The Witch Queen reminds the witch hunter that since witches pre-date humans, “You are trespassers on our world,” it’s a very convincing argument.

In a way, that’s what’s wrong with The Last Witch Hunter in a nutshell: too much witch hunting, not enough witches. Instead of constantly depicting witchcraft in action, the movie is much more interested in serving as a temple to Vin Diesel’s awesomeness as a mumbly action movie god the same way films like Commando used to do for Schwarzenegger in the past. It’s a lot of fun in this way. Diesel plays the part as a buff, action hero David Blane. He seduces witchy women, winks at curious children, rocks a Cracker Jack decoder ring, and uses MacGyver-esque tools like a glass of water & a floating staple in his leisurely witch hunts. In a lot of ways his cursed immortality undercuts a lot of the film’s potential conflict, but The Last Witch Hunter cheats enough on that detail to make it work. This is a hopelessly dumb film, to be sure, but it’s also complexly, ambitiously dumb, making for a mostly amusing trip to the theater. If you’re into Vin Diesel, wicked witches, D&D, and flaming weaponry, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot, but I’d also recommend bringing booze.

-Brandon Ledet

Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

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fourstar

Over the last few years the 2007 horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat has joined the ranks of titles like Hocus Pocus & The Monster Squad as one of the films folks in my age range dutifully watch every Halloween season. Curious about the hype, I finally gave the film a shot & was pleasantly surprised to find a mostly goofy, sometimes bloody horror comedy that turns the spirit of my second-favorite holiday (no offense; Mardi Gras is still king) into lore of urban legend proportions. Although the film is far from perfect in terms of consistency & tone, its reverence for Halloween as a social & spiritual institution makes it a perfect candidate for the annual revisits I usually reserve for The Monster Squad & The Worst Witch. As soon as one of the first characters introduced is brutally murdered for offense of griping, “I hate Halloween,” and talking down their decorations a day early, the film establishes its mission statement: to protect the sanctity of dressing up in costumes & eating candy at all costs.

One of my favorite things that Trick ‘r Treat does is punishing the grumps & chumps that casually disparage the sacred holiday of All Hallows Eve. All of the following transgressions against the most unholiest of holidays are punished in the film: ignoring the “take one” signs on candy jars, not costuming, couples bickering instead of having fun, curmudgeons refusing to hand out candy to trick or treaters, horny dudes using the occasion as an excuse to hit on girls in skimpy costumes, snot-nosed punk kids mindlessly smashing jack o’ lanterns, bullies taking scare-pranks a step too far, and (as mentioned) taking down decorations a day early out of fatigue with the holiday. There’s probably more offenses that I can’t even recall. The film takes the sanctity of its temporal setting very seriously. It also puts a lot of stock into the power of urban legends, constructing new legends like The Halloween School Bus Massacre and turning old traditions like the classic “trick or treat” rhyme into a deadly ultimatum. Even the candy that holds the whole holiday together is given an almost religious significance, sometimes saving lives (when dispensed properly) and sometimes ending them (through poison & razor sharp shards brandished as weapons).

There’s only a minimum amount of genuine scares to be found in Trick ‘r Treat, mostly achieved through the confusion of real life ghouls & monsters mixing in with the drunken, costumed crowd. The film’s much more concerned with trope play & subverted expectations than scares. Victims turn out to be killers; killers turn out to be victims; when you think you’re getting one kind of famous monster the film delivers another, etc. Also surprising is the way Trick ‘r Treat interconnects its vignettes so that they’re all smoothly part of one large narrative, a rare ambition for an anthology horror. As for the individual players in the story, only actor Dylan Baker stands out in his performance, building nicely off his dark comedy work in past films like Happiness & Fido. I guess it’s also remarkable that Anna Paquin was put mostly to good use here, as she is always eager to remind the world that she is, objectively speaking, a terrible, godawful, not good at all actress. I was also relieved that besides brief use of Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” the film avoids devolving into the late 90s-early 00s mall goth aesthetic that ruins films like American Mary for me. Instead, it builds most of its visual palette off of the inherent spookiness of the holiday (in details like blood moons & jack o lanterns) as well as the comic book framing that worked so well for classic anthology horrors like Creepshow & Tales from the Crypt in the past. What works most for Trick ‘r Treat, though, is the effortless reverence it shows for Halloween traditions & urban legends. That’s surely the aspect of the film that has opened it up to annual cinematic traditions, despite its tepid reception upon its initial straight-to-DVD release almost a decade ago.

-Brandon Ledet

American Mary (2012)

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twostar

campstamp

Maybe the reason that the late 90s, early 00s nu metal Hot Topic mall goth aesthetic hasn’t yet returned in any significant, nostalgic way is that it never died a proper death. Not that I’d recommend the experience, but if you tuned in to a modern rock radio station, you’ll notice that not much has changed in the last fifteen years. A couple outliers like Tame Impala & The Black Keys aside, a lot of mainstream hard rock sounds like the kind of dreck I would’ve greedily eaten up in my KoЯn/Slipknot/Limp Bizkit-loving days as a wee lad. That’s partly why the half-hearted, cheap-o slasher American Mary feels so awkwardly uncool. If it were released closer to 1999, it’d be a lot more likely to deserve a former mall goth cult following like the actually-pretty-great werewolf movie Ginger Snaps. Since it was released just three years ago, however, the film feels like stale leftovers from a nu metal yesteryear. It’s not just in the shitty soundtrack either. The whole film feels like it could’ve been jointly sponsored by Hot Topic, Spencer’s, The Family Values Tour, and Ozzfest. Obviously, there’s still a market for that aesthetic, but I personally found it difficult to stomach.

The titular Mary in this nostalgia trip to a time no one misses is a young medical student who falls down the bizarre rabbit hole of performing voluntary body modification procedures thanks to a strip club named Bourbon-a-Go-Go. Unable to support herself financially while attending medical school, Mary auditions to be a stripper at Bourbon-a-Go-Go & somehow the interview devolves into her performing life-saving surgery in her fancy lingerie, a ridiculous display I suppose was meant to be titillation for surgery fetishists. It certainly didn’t deliver anything valuable in terms of gore. Shortly after this strange turn in her life, Mary is drugged & raped at a mentor surgeon’s house party (a moment that feels grotesquely out of place in what is for the most part a horror comedy) and the film then briefly combines my two all-time least favorite movie genres: the rape revenge & the torture porn. Fun. All of this nonsense eventually leads to Mary finding a second life as an unlicensed body modification surgeon who specializes in tongue splitting, teeth filing, implants, gential modification, voluntary amputation, and the like. She spends the rest of the film trying to balance this newfound vocation with the day-to-day complications of a besides-the-point budding romance & police investigation. Gore-light, gothy hijinks ensue.

To her credit, the actress who plays Mary (Katharine Isabelle, who also played Ginger in the aforementioned Ginger Snaps, appropriately enough) is mostly charming here, with her mod goth bangs & ironic, Daria Morgendorffer-style sense of emotionally-detached humor. Other female characters, including a woman who’s had more than a dozen elective procedures in order to look like her favorite cartoon character & a fetish model who wants to become as flat as a Barbie doll to sidestep sexual objectification, are equally fascinating. What doesn’t work is the grotesquely macho world that surrounds them. The film’s tendency towards a meat head nu metal aesthetic opens it up to leering lipstick lesbianism, thoroughly unsexy fellatio, sexual assault, and trashy-at-best strip teases that ruin the good vibes that a few interesting characters here or there can’t sustain on their own. American Mary desperately wants to be an ironically detached horror comedy & sometimes it works. The fact that our lovely mod goth protagonist earns the moniker “Bloody Mary” is amusing, as are other tossed-off details like an early scene where a mentor praises her surgical skills with the line, “You’re going to make a great slasher.” Most of the film is far from self-aware in this way, though, and instead drags on endlessly through macho goth nonsense sure to please every thirteen year old out there who’s still rocking studded bracelets & wallet chains, but not many others.

For the morbidly curious looking to dive into this dated aesthetic, I recommend instead checking out the somewhat-similar-in-tone Starry Eyes, in which a young actress falls into the rabbit hole of Hollywood casting couch politics. Starry Eyes is far from a horror comedy, but its earnestness earns much more interesting, bizarrely grotesque results than American Mary‘s overbearing sense of detachment. Starry Eyes has a lot of American Mary‘s nu metal posturings, but puts them to much better use, going for full-on horror instead of this half-ironic, half-brutal, fully-tepid stinker with a late 90s hangover.

-Brandon Ledet

Goosebumps (2015)

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fourhalfstar

I say this with total sincerity, friends: the Goosebumps movie is pretty damn great. The same way films like The Monster Squad, Hocus Pocus, Witches, The Worst Witch, and (on a personal note) Killer Klowns from Outer Space have introduced youngsters to the world of horror (and horror comedy) in the past, Goosebumps is an excellent gateway to lifelong spooky movie geekdom. The Scholastic book series & 90s television show of the same name are now far enough in the past that their original pint-sized audience are old enough to have children of their own, which means that the film could’ve easily coasted on nostalgia to sell tickets & not given much thought to a longterm shelf-life. Instead, Goosebumps strives to stay true to its half-hokey, half-spooky source material, resulting in a film that’s genuinely funny from beginning to end, but still packs a sharp enough set of teeth that it might just keep a tyke or two awake at night. It’s a horror comedy for youngsters that resists the temptation of talking down to its audience the way lesser, similarly-minded films like Hotel Transylvania 2 would. The only film from the past decade that I could think to compare it to is ParaNorman, another well-balanced kids’ horror that I hold in high regard for universal enjoyability that allows for children & adults alike to bond over a love of famous monsters & spooky laughs. What could be more admirable than that?

The story at the heart of Goosebumps isn’t all that important, which is in its own way an important lesson for children to understand what to expect from their monster movies. A Regular Dude, his crush The Girl Next Door, and an annoying Third Wheel Nerd named Champ/Chump accidentally release an epidemic of horror movie creatures on the small town of Madison Delaware (which may as well have been Eerie, Indiana) when they tamper with R.L. Stine’s original Goosebumps manuscripts. The film is genuinely enjoyable before the monsters’ arrival (the first pleasant surprise), establishing a world of dumb small-town cops, single mothers trying their best, high school principals hell-bent on outlawing twerking (“If anyone is caught dancing with their butt facing their partner, they will be sent home immediately. Immediately!”), and kooky aunts with Etsy shops & relationship issues.

The only detail out of place in this well-manicured suburbia is the hermetic “Mr. Shivers”, a reclusive, nerdy creep who soon revealed to be the R.L. Stine. In a way, this detail itself is an intro to the meta horror of films like In the Mouth of Madness & Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but it’s just a single facet of a larger crash course in horror as a genre. The film’s deep cast of spooky creatures include ghosts, aliens, zombies, werewolves, mummies, abominable snowmen, evil dogs, gigantic killer bugs, killer toy robots that would make Charles Band proud, (Wu-Tang) killer bees, and the list goes on. The only glaring absences I noticed were of vampires & Frankenstein monster types, but they honestly could’ve easily slipped by in the midst of the mayhem. The film also aims to collect classic monster movie settings as much as it does the creatures, making sure to hit up spooky graveyards, empty supermarkets, abandoned amusement parks, and The Big Dance in a sequence that recalls films like Prom Night & Carrie. It’s incredible how much ground the film manages to cover in its relatively short, remarkably tidy runtime.

Goosebumps holds an obvious reverence for its source material, a series of novels for horror-minded young’ns that the movie explains aren’t kids’ books, because “Kids’ books help you fall asleep. These books keep you up all night.” Although the film hosts some great work from lovely people like Jillian Bell, Ken Marino, and Danny Elfman (whose theremin & violin-heavy score is pitch-perfect), it’s Jack Black who stands out as the physical embodiment of that child-adult bridge. Black is a hoot as R.L. Stine, portrayed here as a dastardly nerd so intense in his reclusiveness that his imaginary creations became real (the monsters take shape from black swirls of ink when released from their manuscript prisons). I particularly like his situational one-liner “I have a deadline . . . literally,” and his indignation with being compared to Steven King. Black is also given the opportunity to cut loose in his secondary voice performance as an animatronic ventriloquist doll named Slappy (who appeared in no less than ten novels). Most outright “bad” jokes in the film are attributed to the dummy, which makes total sense logically,  but also further solidifies Black’s central role as Goosebumps‘ hokey-scary vibe personified, thanks to the fact that dolls are effortlessly creepy & just the worst.

If there are any longterm Goosebumps fanatics out there who remember the specific details of the dozens of title in the catalog, I’m sure that there pare plenty of in-jokes and winking references ready to delight you. Certain details (like a levitating poodle & an invisible prankster) went way over my head, but the titles I did remember from my schoolchild, such as The Haunted Mask & The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, were also prominently featured in the movie. There’s also a concluding credits sequence that pays loving homage to the series’ wonderful cover art. What’s more important than Goosebumps‘ fielty to R.L. Stine’s past, however, is its loving reflections of the past of horror at large.

Obviously, mileage may vary based on individual kids’ personalities & tastes, but I have no doubt there will be large swaths of young children growing up with fond memories of this film the same way my generation fondly looks back at The Monster Squad as an early horror favorite. I noticed at least five walkouts during my screening of Goosebumps (not to mention that the film is sadly struggling to earn back its budget), but there were plenty of other kids in the audience intensely invested in the goofy mayhem. Of course, I personally would’ve preferred if  Goosebumps had been anchored more by practical effects rather than its somewhat tiresome CGI (although there were some genuinely effective visual cues like a beautiful funhouse mirror sequence & a sad little box labeled “Dad’s Stuff” in the film) but the younger generation of kids in the audience are highly likely not to care about that distinction. For them, the film is more or less perfect as a primer for horror & horror comedy as a genre, CGI warts & all and, honestly, that’s all that really matters.

-Brandon Ledet