brandon ledet

Grandma (2015)

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three star

Director Paul Weitz has a confusing list of credits. The only connection I can draw between his works (which include American Pie, About a Boy, Down to Earth, Little Fockers, and Being Flynn) is that they tend to be underwhelming films with phenomenal casts. There’s nothing particularly distinct about Weitz’s aesthetic or choice in projects, but he has had the good fortune of working with such diverse talents as Robert DeNiro, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, John C. Reilly, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Paul Dano, Julianne Moore, and the list goes on. Too bad few (if any) of his films have been worthy of the talent involved. It’s no surprise, then, that I was drawn to the theater for Weitz’s latest picture, Grandma, based on the strength of its two leads alone. It’s also no surprise that the film was okay at best & survived solely on the strength of its lead performances & long list of cameos. If Weitz has a shtick or a calling card as a director, that reaction was pretty much par for the course.

Always dependable comedian Lily Tomlin plays Grandma‘s titular matriarch, a misanthropic lesbian poet who was “marginally well known 40 years ago”, but now suffers an over-the-hump slump of nonproductive self-deprecation in the wake of her longtime partner’s death. Saddled with the lingering debt of her deceased partner’s medical bills, Tomlin’s poet protagonist barely gets by on one-off gigs as a guest lecturer on college campuses. This perilous financial situation is strained even more by the unexpected appearance of her teenage granddaughter Sage (Electrick Children‘s Julia Garner), who only has a few hours to raise over 600 dollars for an appointment to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. What results is a sort of Day in the Life roadtrip comedy-drama as Sage tags along on her miserly grandma’s attempts to hit up ghosts from her past for spare cash. Grandma not quite as funny or as transgressive as the multi-generational roadtrip debauchery-fest Tammy or the frank abortion comedy Obvious Child, but it is a mildly enjoyable picture that leaves room for welcome extended cameos from folks like Laverne Cox, Judy Greer, John Cho, and Sam Elliott, not to mention the killer lead performances from Tomlin & Garner.

When I say that the cast is what drew me to the theater for Grandma, what I really meant is that I wanted to see more from Julia Garner, who was absolutely stellar in Electrick Children, a film I loved enough at first sight to be the first title included in The Swampflix Canon. She’s honestly just as effective here, even if the quality of the material is far from comparable. Grandma is, of course, also a rare treat as a star-vehicle for Lily Tomlin, who hasn’t headlined a film in nearly three decades. Tomlin is funny enough in the titular role, but her character is a bit much to handle for long stretches of time, given her tendency to slip into curmudgeony rants about Kids These Days with their Googles & their Ebays & whatnots. In a telling exchange, Tomlin’s flower child poet is annoyed that her granddaughter has never heard of The Feminine Mystique, while Sage is equally annoyed that her grandma doesn’t know that Mystique is also an X-Men character. It’s not too hard to see who the film sides with there.

Worse yet are casual platitudes like, “I like being old. Young people are stupid,” “Where can you get a reasonably priced abortion these days?”, and the biting, career-specific insult, “You’re a footnote.” Tomlin’s protagonist is the first to admit that she’s “a horrible person”, but her constant attempts to be seen as a hip grandma (including her dragonfly tattoo, her old Dodge hotrod, casual marijuana use, and incongruous affinity for rap music), all downplay the heft of those statements. Although they’re given a lot less to do, most of the film’s pathos is conveyed through turns from Julia Garner, Sam Elliott, and Judy Greer, who help balance out Tomlin’s more jaded notes of emotional detachment, age-specific bitterness, and outdated feminism. Grandma is an enjoyable, modest film with its own interesting visual language (poetic in the dragonfly imagery, subtly funny in visual gags that include a polar bear painting & a toy Jeep) as well as an admirably casual/balanced approach to its themes of abortion & sexual autonomy. If you’re looking for a calm, pleasant picture with a rarely-seen featured performance from either Tomlin or Garner, Grandma is serviceable. As with everything else I’ve seen from Weitz, it’s a decent enough film with a stacked cast of actors that could probably do much better. I’m not sure that the film would pass The Gene Siskel Test (“Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?”), but at the very least it’s a close call.

-Brandon Ledet

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

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fourhalfstar

There was something about the laughter in the audience I saw The Diary of a Teenage Girl with that really freaked me out. Yes, the movie is funny, but it’s funny in an uncomfortable way that recalls difficult works from Todd Solondz like Welcome to the Dollhouse & Happiness moreso than any laugh-a-minute yuck ’em ups. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a rare picture that manages to incorporate effective black comedy into its beautiful visual artistry & the brutal, unmitigated honesty suggested by its confessional title. Adapted from a graphic novel by the same name, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the story of a vulnerably naive 15 year old comic book artist who gets wrapped up in a sexual affair with her mother’s much older boyfriend in 1970s San Francisco. It’s a difficult film to stomach at times, but it’s one told with an intense attention to verisimilitude & vivid incorporations of top notch comic book art, all held together by a career-making performance from Bel Powley, who plays the exceedingly endearing, but deeply troubled protagonist Millie. I’m willing to chalk up a good bit of the laughter from the theater where I watched the film to discomfort with the subject matter, something I’m more than sure was intended by first-time writer/director Marielle Heller, but I often found my own reactions to what was happening onscreen to be far more complicated than mere ribald laughs. It almost felt transgressive to watch the movie with a large group of vocal strangers, as if I were actually hearing the private diary of a complete stranger being read aloud in public. It’s a starkly intimate work.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl opens with a leering shot of Millie’s denim-clad butt as she struts through a public park populated with 70s San Fransiscan hippies, weirdos, bellbottoms, and mustaches. Amidst this time warp fashion show, Millie proudly declares, “I had sex today. Holy shit.” We soon learn that her newfound sexual exploration isn’t quite as positive of a development as she believes. Not knowing the full extent of what she was getting herself into (how could she?), Millie intentionally seduces her mother’s boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), initiating a longterm affair that eventually drives some irrevocable wedges between her & her mother (Kristen Wiig). Her reasoning for acting out on her lust for Monroe? “I was afraid to pass up the chance because I may never get another.” Millie is full of these self-deprecating, sadly funny “truisms”. After sleeping with Monroe, she asks “Is this the way it feels for someone to love you?” She later yearns, “I want someone to be so in love with me that they would feel like they would die if I were gone,” and makes ridiculous declarations like “I want to be an artist so school actually doesn’t matter that much for me,” & “Hookers have all the power. Everybody knows that.” Her naiveté can be amusing when she gets teen-deep in her sexual philosophizing, but it also indicates a terrifying vulnerability that Monroe was a monster to take advantage of.

While Millie pines over Monroe in a typical “he loves me, he loves me not” fashion, he treats her more like a younger sister, incorporating an uncomfortable amount of childish horseplay in their flirtation. She’s a shameful fling in Monroe’s mind. She’s also, according to him at least, completely to blame for the affair. The movie does little to sugarcoat the realities of its mid-70s setting, establishing a very specific cultural mindset with references to the Patty Hearst kidnapping controversy (which Wiig’s flower child mother refers to as “fascist misogynistic bullshit”), the rise of sexually androgynous milestones like Iggy Pop & The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the omnipresence of Fruedian psychology (represented onscreen by Christopher Meloni), depictions of teens freely ordering drinks in barrooms, the drugged out loopiness of H.R. Pufnstuf, and era-honest inclusions of casual racism & homophobia. It’s tempting to say that an affair with a 15 year old in that context would not have been as big of a deal as it is now, it being “different times” & all, but c’mon . . . Monroe feels intense guilt for the affair, because he knows it is wrong. Still, he blames Millie for his own transgression, as does every other person who learns of the affair (another indication of the times). When Monroe becomes increasingly frustrated with Millie’s adolescent behavior, he explodes “You’re a fucking child!” Well, he’s not wrong there, which is a large part of why he should’ve known better & why he’s so much at war with his own conscious.

To her credit, Millie is often blissfully unaware of just how detrimental her affair with Monroe actually is. Convinced that Monroe is only continuing to sleep with her mother to avoid suspicion, Millie mostly worries about whether or not he loves her back, not how much longterm damage he’s causing her psyche. In a lot of ways, Monroe is just one part of Millie’s coming of age story, which also involves experimentation with ditching class, hard drug use, bisexuality, self body image, skinny-dipping, prostitution, running away from home, and attempts to connect with her favorite comic book artist, Aline Kominsky (a real life talent & real life wife of Robert Crumb). Stuck halfway between an older man who can’t keep up with her overactive libido & her teen sexual partners who aren’t nearly as good in bed (not to mention often freaked out by her pursuit of her own orgasms), Millie is alone in a crowd. She both makes intentionally provocative statements like “I hate men, but I fuck them hard, hard, hard, and thoughtlessly because I hate them so much,” & hypocritically shames friends who are struggling with the same pursuits of sexual & personal autonomy.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl pulls no emotional punches as Millie perilously navigates these deeply troubled waters, often lightening the mood both with its protagonist’s endearing sense of humor & teen-specific lack of self-awareness, but never letting its characters off the hook for their often-cruel transgressions. All of this heft is backed up by a vivid visual collage format that allows ink drawings to come to life, wallpaper to transform into a jungle, and a bathtub to suddenly expand to an ocean, making great use of that concession without it ever outwearing its welcome. What results is an incredibly adept debut feature for Marielle Heller & an remarkable display of range for actress Bel Powley. I’m just as excited to see where their careers are headed in the future as I am to revisit this film as soon as I can get my hands on the novel (and experience it with a more intimate, on-my-wavelength audience).

-Brandon Ledet

Sinister 2 (2015)

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three star

In the first Sinister film children were often seen, but not heard. This is because Ethan Hawke’s protagonist lived in a house crawling with ghosts of the silent, but murderous tykes and kept this most unsavory detail to himself, struggling with the kids’ fucked up pasts on his own instead of involving his family. The film took a long time to get its mythology nailed down, but by the end it established that there was a real life “Boogieman” that recruited kids to murder their parents & join him in some sort of vague, blood-soaked otherworld. Part of what made the movie work was that the details of this set-up were kept vague & mysterious, revealed one at a time to an increasingly freaked out Hawke until he himself was confronted with one of The Boogieman’s pint-sized foot soldiers. Of course, it’s difficult to keep up this air of mystery in a sequel once the beans have already been spilled & the more Sinister 2 tries to flesh out the details of its predecessor the more it makes itself out to be an amusingly goofy slice of schlock by comparison.

Taking an exact opposite approach to the first film, Sinister 2 depicts The Boogieman’s recruitment tactics from a child’s POV instead of an academic one. This is a world where The Boogieman is very real, actually in your closet, and referenced in ancient texts “across all cultures” (sometimes known as Bughuul to his friends). The first film presents the idea that The Boogieman mayhem spreads when people living in a house where a family was once murdered by one of his child sentinels move to a new place. The first film also made it seem that this was a linear progression, that The Boogieman hopped from House A to B to C without ever looking back. Well, that idea’s thrown out the window here & apparently all the old Boogieman haunts are eligible for new victims. On top of that development, he’s now also able to haunt laptops through creepy computer viruses, because why not? There was also no indication in the first film as to why little kids were filming themselves brutally murdering their own families in the first place except that super 8 video looks really cool & grainy and it drove the too-curious protagonist crazy. Here, it’s given a purpose: the kids are filming their bloody deeds as gifts to The Boogieman, a sadistic sort of sacrificial offering, an “aesthetic observance of violence”, “murders captured in art”. For a thousands year old demon who manipulates children into becoming murderers & dresses like a Industrial Goth jackass, you gotta admit that his penchant for collecting art at the very least affords The Boogieman some cool points. At least his mayhem has some sort of a purpose (although it worked perfectly well in the first film without one).

The super 8 films are, of course, the main draw of the Sinister franchise and, as I stated in my review of the 2012 original, they sort of pose the series as a kind of throwback anthology horror with an extensive narrative wraparound. Sinister 2‘s super 8s open with a bang. An especially creative ghost kid, formerly a real kid, shows off a fishing trip where he tied up his family & fed them to a gator. I’m going to repeat that. This vile little tyke fed his entire family to a fucking gator. It’s a gnarly image & although there’s some really gruesome, inventive deaths involving electrocution, crucifixion, and ancient dental tools elsewhere in the film, I feel like the gator entry really drives home the half goofy, half . . . umm, sinister vibe the film achieves on the whole. The super 8s are where the movie’s terror is most effective & otherworldly, relying heavily on a grindhouse-era sound design & some meta reflections on the nature of the horror film as an artform. It’s also where the film is most enjoyable in pure surface pleasures.

Although there’s also some thought given to the cycles of domestic abuse & how the patterns of physical violence can be learned & passed down in a family here, it’s somehow still very apparent that there’s a lighter, goofier tone at play in Sinister 2 than there was in the original. A lot of credit for that tone goes to actor James Ransone (who’s had some wonderful turns as Ziggy Sobotka on The Wire, the pimp Chester in Tangerine, and Dingy Dave in John Waters’ A Dirty Shame) for being able to balance the sillier lines of thought with the distinct horror of occult-style massacres. Partial credit for keeping the tone light also goes to Shannyn “A Knight’s Tale” Sossamon’s awful Southern drawl for helping me remember to not take the film too seriously. This balance between goofy horror movie & something more affecting is also reflected in the film’s two distinct kinds of scares: the cheap jump scares & the legitimately creepy vibes of the grainy super 8s. Sinister 2 has its cake & eats it too. It’s not nearly as tasteful or artsy as the first movie, but it sort of goofs its way into earning just as much horror movie goodwill through its lighter tone & the fact that all we really wanted to see as an audience was more of those super 8s, anyway. I mean, that kid fed his entire family to fucking gator. How cool is that?

-Brandon Ledet

The Perfect Guy (2015)

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three star

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I’ve mentioned a couple times recently that there seems to be a trending return to the erotic thriller format of the 1990s, this year alone represented at the very least in the films The Boy Next Door, Fifty Shades of Grey, and My Mistress. The latest contribution to this genre throwback is The Perfect Guy, which is somewhat similar to the JLo vehicle The Boy Next Door in that it genderswaps its stalker & villain roles. Traditionally played by dudes like Michael Douglas in oldschool erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction & Basic Instinct, the victim is much more disconcertingly vulnerable when cast female. When the protagonist Leah (Sanaa Lathan) complains to friends & police officers that she is being stalked & harassed by an ex-boyfriend, they make it seem as if she is overreacting, playing a game of “blame the victim” that is all too real in the context of how we typically treat domestic abuse. This female victim/male perpetrator dynamic of The Boy Next Door & The Perfect Guy bring the erotic thriller genre into some distinct 80s slasher territory, one that’s met with some inevitable, but satisfying revenge plot machinations in the third act. It’s a genuinely fun formula, given that you enjoy watching well-funded versions of the kind of dreck that used to play on late night Cinemax. I know I do, anyway.

What most distinguishes The Perfect Guy from its fellow erotic thriller throwbacks is the over-the-top aspects of the villainous Carter, played for optimum cheese by Michael Ealy. Although Ealy’s stalker/killer is not as well-defined in his motivations as, say, Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom, he is a remarkable collection of disquieting quirks that make the picture way more fun than it has any right to be. Early in the film Carter is portrayed as, well, the perfect guy, a viable alternative to Leah’s go-nowhere relationship with a more reserved boyfriend with commitment issues (Morris Chestnut). Carter is literally to good to be true. After an ice latte meet cute, he fights off unwanted lechers who hit on Leah at bars, refers to motherhood as “the most important job on the planet”, charms her parents more than any other man she’s ever taken home, and generally makes the facial expressions of a mischievous kitten. He also has a little bit of a bad-boy edge, taking Leah to secret backalley clubs & introducing her to the joys of fucking in public. When Leah jokes, “This is the part of the movie where you kidnap me & sell my organs.” she has no idea just how sour things will eventually turn. About a half hour into the film, Carter snaps in a pure fit of jealousy & viciously beats a stranger for merely talking to his girl. The maudlin romance music suddenly gives way to hair-raising violins & things really start to get fun.

Carter is a total weirdo. Once Leah breaks it off with him, he sneaks into her house to sensually kiss the lipstick smears she left on her dirty wine glasses, huff the smells from her bedroom pillows, stare at her from behind closed closet doors, and longingly suck on her used toothbrush. Of course, he also uses his professional background in “corporate espionage & IT protection” to install spyware on her computer & set up hidden cameras in her bedroom. When he’s not following Leah around or sneaking into her home, he’s brooding in the cold blues of his internet dungeon, watching from a remote location. As if this weren’t enough of a creepy violation of privacy, he even goes as far as to silently hide under Leah’s bed as she’s boinking her old beau. The sole police officer who works to protect Leah from this dangerous freak amusingly observes, “He’s a robot,” but I feel like the movie had something else in mind completely. Brief shots & mentions of wild coyotes roaming Leah’s neighborhood poses her stalker’s behavior as oddly animalistic. As Carter transitions into full serial killer mode in the film’s second hour, often appearing in the misty ambiance of a full moon to close in on his kills, I kept thinking to myself “I wish, wish, wish that it were revealed that he was a werewolf this whole time.” It would’ve made a lot more sense than you’d think & it would’ve exulted the film from moderately fun to one for the ages.

Alas, there are no werewolf transformations in The Perfect Guy & the film follows a fairly strict genre trajectory of slowly escalating revenge that eventually results in a Final Showdown, Leah finally taking control of a situation that makes her unusually vulnerable for a normally self-sufficient woman. The story is undeniably told from Leah’s female perspective, its erotic aspects leering far more on her two admirers’ sweaty back muscles than it ever does on her own body (although, curiously, there is no onscreen man-butt). In fact, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the film would fail the gender-reversed version of The Bechdel Test. The only times men are depicted alone in conversation, they’re discussing Leah & their relationships with her. It’s only right, then, that Leah gets her revenge arc, refusing to accept Carter’s “If I can’t have you, no one will” proposition/threat. Watching her smash up his internet dungeon, compromise his employment, beating him mercilessly with kitchenware, and otherwise besting him at his own game is certainly satisfying in the context of the erotic thriller genre. I just can’t shake the feeling that a werewolf transformation would’ve escalated the entertainment factor a thousandfold, especially considering how much of Carter’s presence was so far outside the realm of typical human behavior. Maybe the werewolf angle is something Michael Ealy can actively search out in a future project, making good use of those creepily pretty eyes & Skeletor cheekbones. As is, the werewolfless The Perfect Guy is a perfectly satisfying, breezily watchable erotic thriller, one content to skip long periods of time (including entire months, funerals) to speed up its ludicrous harassment & violence. Anyone who had fun watching The Boy Next Door earlier this year is likely to find equal (if not bested) pleasure here, especially in Michael Ealy’s eccentric performance.

-Brandon Ledet

Lorna (1964)

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twohalfstar

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With 1963’s Heavenly Bodies! Russ Meyer effectively brought the nudie cutie chapter of his life to a close, summarizing nearly all of his post WWII pin-up work in a single, enjoyably frivolous (but financially disastrous) picture. Having effectively invented the nudie cutie with The Immoral Mr. Teas & more or less running into the ground with the five films that followed, it was high time for a change in Meyer’s career path, one telegraphed by his curmudgeony “documentary” on European sex trade Europe in the Raw. What was next for the moustachioed pervert was much darker territory than the playful narration & pastel voids of his nude comedies. Meyer would spend his next four or so features pioneering an entirely new kind of sexploitation picture: black & white “roughies.” Far from the hokey vaudevillian gags of nudie cutie titles like Mr. Teas & Wild Gals of the Naked West, roughies were vicious, often hateful pictures that would lean toward the violent & the salacious, but were also quick to damn the very characters they leered at with (in the films’ view) well-deserved deaths for their transgressions. Russ Meyer may have not made the very first roughie (many attribute that milestone to fellow schlock peddler David Friedman), but it was a genre he would eventually damn near perfect with his cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

Although Lorna may not have technically been the first roughie, it was easily one of the first recognizable & successful examples of the genre. A twisted tale about sexual inadequacy, adultery, and betrayal, Lorna paints an ugly, ugly picture, one that’s only made more ugly by the harshness of its vivid black & white cinematography. In the film’s opening minutes a preacher stops the camera from cruising down a desolate highway to ramble vague, Biblically-themed warnings about loose morals. The following scenes feature a pair of rough drunks following an intoxicated woman home, only to beat & undress her once she spurns their sexual advances (thankfully leaving the scene before it escalates to rape). As the horrifying, leather-faced bully Luther (played by Meyer-newcomer Hal Hopper) rolls out his dim accomplice in tow, his victim shouts “You bastard! You dirty bastard!” & a lounge lizard song (composed & sung by Hopper) about the titular Lorna overtakes the soundtrack. All of this unpleasantness before we even meet the main characters. With this slap to the unsuspecting audience’s face Meyer effectively drove the last nail in the coffin of the nudie cutie & revealed the weirder, meaner brute that had been lurking under his surface all along. And he hadn’t even really gotten started.

The central couple in this sordid tale is Jim (a square-jawed James Rucker) and his wife, duh, Lorna (a most buxom Lorna Maitland), prototypes of what would eventually solidify as the typical soldiers in Meyer’s never-ending war of the sexes. Jim is ostensibly a nice guy. He’s sweet to his wife, studies to better himself, etc., but these character traits actually play like flaws in Meyer’s fucked up sense of logic. In Meyer’s view, Jim is an irredeemable weakling who gets less & less admirable with every “I love you” he coos to his nonplussed wife. Jim’s major malfunction is that he’s bad in bed. In an early scene Lorna lies in post-coital boredom, musing about her husband’s “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” approach to lovemaking, asking “Why can’t he make love to me the way he should?”, and slyly suggesting that he just flat out does not provide her orgasms. There’s some classic Russ Meyer insanity in these moments, like when disorienting shots of running water appear as Lorna recalls a more lustful time in her relationship with Jim or when her daydreams about moving from their remote marital cabin to the big city devolve into rapid-fire montages of the well-endowed actress drunkenly dancing topless among flashing neon signs. It’s in these moments that Lorna shines brightest.

Unfortunately, the generally sour vibe of the roughie format drags the film down a great deal more than it should. When Jim leaves for work it’s revealed that his co-worker is none other than Hal Hopper’s leather-face Luther, a real prick who incessantly teases Jim about his white-hot wife & the distinct possibility that she might be committing adultery behind his back. This tension amounts to an on-the-job fistfight & near-fatal stabbing. Meanwhile, an unattended Lorna actually does become an adulteress at the roaming hands of an escaped convict (Mark Bradley). More than happy to play house for a “real” man, Lorna invites the convict home & into the bed she shares with her husband, which eventually leads to (of course) their infidelity being uncovered & nearly everyone involved getting fatally wounded in a bodycount-heavy finale that’s faithful to the chaos of a traditional stage tragedy. Somewhere in the kerfuffle the Grim Reaper makes an onscreen cameo & the preacher from the opening monologue returns to babble about the definition of adultery & the fate of Lot’s wife. It’s fairly straight-forward stuff, unpleasant or not.

Shot in just two weeks with a five man crew, Lorna featured Russ Meyer’s biggest budget to date & marked the first time he shot a feature on 35mm film. Meyer’s most vocal critical supporter & improbable friend Roger Ebert calls this picture the start of the director’s “Gothic period” & some credit it as the first mainstream film to combine the nudie picture with high stakes drama. Prosecuted in vain on obscenity charges in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida (courtroom battles that later New Hollywood productions would greatly benefit from), Lorna is unfortunately much more interesting as a historical milestone than it is as an actual film. There were elements of Lorna that really worked & you could tell that Meyer was really stretching himself thin trying to grasp for something new & exciting, but much of the film reads dull at best and heartlessly cruel at worst. The best five or so minutes of the picture arrive very early, when Lorna’s daydreaming about better orgasms & dancing topless in an urban, neon-lit fantasy world. Meyer would later learn how to better consolidate these more out-there moments with a feature-length narrative, but Lorna never quite reaches an enjoyable cohesiveness, which feels just out of its reach, thanks to the constraints of the newly found roughie genre holding it back.

-Brandon Ledet

Heavenly Bodies! (1963)

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three star

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In the four years following the breakout success of Russ Meyer’s debut film The Immoral Mr. Teas, the director mired himself (pun intended) in soulless repetition, churning out a mostly dull sequence of Teas-imitating nudie cuties that nearly broke his spirit by the time he made his fourth picture, Wild Gals of the Naked West. Obviously bored with his own creation, Meyer began to branch out genre-wise in the delightfully hateful shockumentary Europe in the Raw & started to show his true colors as an eccentric misanthrope. That, however, didn’t stop him from returning to the well one last time for a fifth & final nudie cutie, the enjoyably low-key Heavenly Bodies!. Meyer was reportedly not particularly proud of the way Heavenly Bodies! came out, both because of his growing boredom with the nudie cutie as a genre & because of the public’s similar boredom that lead the film to flop financially, but I find that to be a shame. Heavenly Bodies! is not quite as historically significant as The Immoral Mr. Teas or Europe in the Raw, but it does feel like a warm, fond farewell to the director’s pin-up & nudie cutie work, effectively closing that chapter of his life before the next, darker saga began.

Heavenly Bodies! is such a fitting tribute to the culmination of Meyer’s previous works that the subject of the film itself is a love letter to nude photography. It opens with intense close-ups of belly buttons, hair, kneecaps, and (of course) breasts while an industrial film-style narrator (Vic Perrin, who also voiced Europe in the Raw) helpfully explains that “You have just seen the component parts of a woman, a very voluptuous woman.” Meyer’s script goes on to espouse lofty platitudes about how nude models have been the main focus of photography since the invention of the camera & even the most beautiful paintings from fine art masters of the past can’t match the beauty of a nude photograph. Meyer isn’t even content to stop there, continuing to claim that nude photographs, the kind that he himself produced for “glamor magazines”, were the backbone of the US economy. Perrin dryly intones, “It is by no means far fetched to state that America’s entire vast fabric of prosperity, from automobiles to frozen foods, depends on this affinity between beautiful women, camera, and cameraman.” Why is that “by no means far fetched”? Because sex sells, dummy.

Although Heavenly Bodies! is by all means Russ’ love letter to himself, one that even name-checks the director as “Russ Meyer, one of Hollywood’s best known glamor photographers,” it at least vaguely pretends to be something more significant: a documentary on nude photography as a business. An early reenactment in the film retraces “glamor photography” back 30 years to stage a silent film shoot on the beach featuring Meyer vet Princess Livingston rolling around in a swimsuit. Anyone familiar with the elderly Princess Livingston’s toothless, maniacal screen presence (first seen in Wild Gals of the Naked West) should have a ball picturing the lovable coot sarcastically pretending to vamp it up for the camera. Another sequence depicts a pin-up cameraman who learned his trade as a combat photographer in the Army Corps during WWII (just like Meyer) feverishly snapping “glamor” photographs of two beautiful models lounging poolside & (in a particularly intense moment) jumping rope. All the while, the narration rattles off long, detailed lists of camera equipment that the Russ-surrogate is using, drooling just as much over the gear as it is over the bare breasted models. Another excursion involves Meyer himself & his real-life 166th Signal Corps war buddies retreating to the woods with two more cuties to snap more “glamor” photos and drool over more top notch analog camera equipment. The narrator cheekily asks, “Was your class reunion ever like this?” The film more or less goes on this way.

In these scenes, all of Meyer’s pin-up & nudie cutie calling cards are present: the rapid-fire editing, the swanky music, the besides the point narration, the self-glorifying cameos & bit roles for his war buddies, the otherworldly pastel voids, the navel gazing philosophy on the nature of photography, and the lingering effects of WWII. By the time he made Heavenly Bodies! Meyer may have have become bored with the nudie cutie as a format, but he also became extremely adept at injecting his eccentric personality into these by-the-numbers pictures, something he had struggled to do since he created the genre in The Immoral Mr. Teas. In every silly, frivolous minute, Heavenly Bodies! is easily recognizable as a Russ Meyer film, something that’s difficult to say about long stretches of lesser titles like Eve & The Handyman & Erotica. It’s by no means a mind-blowing picture, but it is a fairly enjoyable one.

-Brandon Ledet

12 Rounds 3: Lockdown (2015)

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twohalfstar

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In the first two 12 Rounds films, disgruntled domestic terrorists set up convoluted twelve round scavenger hunts (very similar to the one in Die Hard: With a Vengeance) as a means to teach lessons about perceived wrongs from the past. In the first film pro wrestler John Cena plays a police officer whose journey through the twelve round gauntlet works as a makeshift guided tour through New Orleans’ vast sea of tourist traps. In 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded pro wrestler Randy Orton plays an EMT whose scavenger hunt experience functions as an elaborate anti-drunk driving PSA, one with a bodycount. Curiously, 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown discards the twelve round scavenger hunt concept completely. Pro wrestler Dean Ambrose stars as the film’s good cop protagonist, John Shaw, who finds himself locked inside his own precinct with a gang of crooked narcs looking to end his life before he can expose evidence of their illegal deeds to the proper authorities. In this scenario, the “12 rounds” of the title refers to the dozen bullets in the sole gun Ambrose’s cop has to protect himself with as he faces an armed to the teeth gang of officers who are somewhat similar in character to the gang of DEA scumbags Arnold Schwarzenegger helms in Sabotage.

Removing the high concept silliness of the twelve round scavenger hunt was a huge mistake for 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown. Limiting the action to a single space & replacing the first two films’ mind games with a periodic reminder of how many of Shaw’s twelve bullets are left in the clip (“9 rounds left,” he vocally reminds himself, completely for our benefit) makes the film to be somewhat of a bore. All that’s left to distinguish the film, then is Dean Ambrose’s disappointingly underwhelming screen presence & an unusuallly large stockpile of dead cops. After the guided tour of New Orleans in the first film & the anti-drunk driving diatribe of the second, it’s interesting that 12 Rounds 3 tries to make up for its own narrative shortcomings with an onslaught of bloodshed & gunfights that result in a slew of deceased police officers. Shaw is surprisingly crafty in his cop-killing ways, careful not to waste a single one of his precious twelve rounds. In one scene he beats an officer to death with weights in the presinct’s gym. In another he ends a fight with a vicious head-stabbing. Other kills make thrifty use of electically charged doorknobs & his enemy’s own grenades. My personal favorite moment is when Shaw uses a taser to activate the body of an already dead cop to squeeze the trigger of an assault rifle resting his lifeless hand, creating enough cover fire for Shaw to escape through a comically small air vent. As much as these MacGyver shenanigans can be amusing, it never becomes clear why Shaw doesn’t collect guns or ammo from the crooked cops he kills & instead relies so heavily on those precious twelve bullets of the title.

Dean Ambrose has recently established himself as somewhat of a fan favorite in his run at the WWE. Posed as a sort of pretty boy Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ambrose is a chaotic nuetral element in “sports entertainment”. His character is a whirlwind of bad boy chaos that (heterosexual) female fans seem to find irresistibly attractive, despite the slight hint of a comb-over meant to mask not only the beginnings of male pattern baldness, but also the damage to his forehead left over from his history of extreme, hardcore “death matches” in minor wrestling promotions. Lockdown only makes minimal use of Ambrose’s wrestling background, which (like the disregard for the original 12 Rounds concept) is a damn shame. It is funny, as a fan, that women are the only characters who are nice to his down-on-his-luck cop Shaw in the film and during a boyfight in the precinct’s locker-room there’s a shot of him bodyslamming an opponent through a wooden bench that almost had me chanting “We want tables!,” but otherwise there aren’t nearly enough references to his wrestling career here. Who do they think is watching this movie?

Ambrose’s performance is a calm, brooding sort of good guy bravado that makes little use of the explosive, rebellious personality that makes him so compelling in the ring. Also, although these pro wrestlers are always understandably adept at selling pain during their martial arts sequences, it always surprises me that no use is made of their signature wrestling moves in their motion picture vehicles. The only time I can remember ever seeing that done was The Rock delivering a Rock Bottom to Jason Statham in Furious 7 earlier this year. Why couldn’t Lockdown find a way to work in an Dirty Deeds for Ambrose? It certainly bent over backwards to make its ludicrous locked-inside-a-precinct concept work. Even an elbow drop would’ve been nice, preferably with Ambrose taking out ten opponents at once, as he is known to do. Watching him conserve bullets, hack into the mainframe, and search for a cellphone signal aren’t nearly as entertaining as a little old elbow drop could’ve been. In fact, the film’s villain (Roger R. Cross) is far more exciting than Shaw, providing a full-form example of Roger Ebert’s Talking Killer trope to an often hilarious degree (favorite line: [after punching Shaw] “That was my good cop. Wait til you see my bad cop.”). That’s not to say that Ambrose is entirely underwhelming in Lockdown. At the very least he’s far more compelling than Randy Orton was in12 Rounds 2. It’s just that the film’s muted, stardard action movie concept & his protagonist’s restrictions as a consummate “good guy” make for an overall dull combo that all the dead cops in the world can’t seem to overcome, whether or not their corpses are being tased or exploded.

-Brandon Ledet

Burying the Ex (2015)

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onehalfstar

Joe Dante is, without question, one of my favorite directors. Just a genuinely fun filmmaker. Where would my childhood have been without the subversively satirical live-action cartoons of Small Soldiers & Gremlins II: The New Batch? I shudder to think. As I got older, self-aware genre titles like Piranha & The Howling revealed themselves to be well within my wheelhouse and the genre-defiant fare of Explorers, The Hole, and Matinee have won my heart even as recently as last year. That’s why it hurts me so much to admit that Dante’s latest work, Burying the Ex, is such a crushing disappointment. At a mercifully short 90min, the film is a grueling test of patience, never even coming close to satisfying either the horror or the comedy side of its horror comedy genre. Worse yet, it dabbles in some light, MRA-type misogyny that suggests that Dante has transitioned from the youthful prankster role he’s filled for decades into some unbecoming grumpy curmudgeon territory. It’s truly sad to witness.

As suggested by the “burying the axe” pun from the title, Burying the Ex centers around a troubled romantic relationship that just will not end until the protagonist schlub puts his love & their differences to rest (literally). Max, played by a hoarsely bland Anton Yelchin, finds it difficult to end a longterm relationship with the beautiful Evelyn (Ashley Greene), despite their glaring, irreconcilable differences. This dilemma is complicated even more by Evelyn’s sudden death by speeding bus, which preempts Max’s final attempt to break it off. Somewhere in there is the cool nerd Olivia (Alexandra Daddario) who offers Max a glimpse into what a relationship with someone who shares his geeky interest in oldschool horror films could possibly be like. In comparison, Olivia makes Evelyn look like a megabitch. Evelyn’s violent mood swings, rampaging jealousy, disregard for Max’s monster movie memorabilia, and self-satisfied conviction that she’s saving the world through “green” blogging all make her out to be some kind of a monster, a position that’s only slightly amplified when she rises from the grave to reveal herself as Max’s crazy, undead zombie (ex)girlfriend. Olivia, on the other hand, is more or less just one of the guys.

Zombies as a metaphor for romantic relationships that just won’t die is not only a somewhat unoriginal idea, it was one that one done much better as recently as last year’s Life After Beth. However, the lack of an original concept could’ve been easily overcome if Dante’s typical zaniness had run the show instead of the faintly sexist “Aren’t women just crazy?” vibes that spoil the fun. That’s not even taking into account the nerd fantasy fulfillment that two beautiful women (undead or not) would be fighting over the protagonist Max, who is hopelessly mediocre in both looks & personality (I’ve enjoyed Yelchin elsewhere, just not here). The only part of Burying the Ex that does work is its loving references to older, better monster movies, including shout-outs to The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, Plan 9 from Outer Space, I Walked With a Zombie, Cat People, and the list goes on. When Max explains that horror films are important because they “challenge us to stop accepting the world & face our inner monster & find strength to conquer it,” you really want to find common ground with the film if not only to fulfill that admirable sentiment. However, Burying the Ex never faces its inner misogyny monster, thoroughly misidentifying the enemy as Crazy Women & Their Crazy Ways. All that’s left, then, is cheap, unfunny gags & some last second gore. Whoopee. It’s a highly undignified position for Dante to be in & I hope that this isn’t the part of a larger downward trend in quality for the director, who really should’ve known better than to make this film in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

The Visit (2015)

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three star

The only way I can think to summarize my thoroughly conflicted feelings about The Visit is to recreate The Simpsons‘ take on the shopkeeper scene in Gremlins. The Visit had a surprisingly amusing trailer, but a lot of the best gags were included in the ad. Ooh, that’s bad. But the last half hour is a riot! That’s good. The hour leading up to it is a snooze. That’s bad. But the film ends in a plot-summarizing rap song, one of my all-time favorite movie tropes. That’s good! It’s also a found footage horror movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan . . . That’s bad. Can I go now?

Besides the automatic groans induced its by-the-numbers found footage format, part of what makes The Visit so frustrating is its annoyingly precocious leads. A fifteen year old documentarian & her younger white rapper brother eat up almost the entirety of the film’s runtime, testing my patience in every scene. The pint-sized white rapper is obviously the easier target to pick on here, especially when he’s displaying his cringe-worthy craft for the camera. He boasts to his clueless grandmother, “Do you know who Tyler the Creator is? People say I’ve got that kind of sound,” (Fuck this kid.) but the truth is that he’s a decade-late Aaron Carter at best. Thankfully, his sister calls him out on his bullshit fairly often, calling him “ethnically confused” & describing his art as “songs of misogyny” (he’s particularly fond of punctuating songs with the words “bitch” & “ho”), but the truth is she’s not much better. More arrogant poser than accomplished auteur, she’s prone to saying things like “I hate sappy movies. I find them torturous,” that remind me way too much of the asshole, know-it-all personality I’m glad (or I hope) that I left behind in my teens. It’s a fairly insufferable combo.

The good news is that they’re punished for their shortcomings . . . eventually. Hurting from an early separation from their father, the kids suffer from some crippling neuroses: the documentarian has a disgust with her own self-image and the lil’ rapper struggles both with germophobia & a tendency to freeze under pressure. In an attempt to heal old wounds in their mother’s life & to fill the familial void left by their absent father, the kids decide to document a week-long visit with their estranged grandparents. Subverting the old hat horror trope that kids are usually the creepy ones (something exploited as recently as the Sinister franchise), the grandparents’ “sundowning” & dementia make them out to be a horrific threat that gets increasingly dangerous as the week drags on. The grandparents honestly don’t say too much for the first two-thirds of the film, which is a damn shame, because they’re infinitely more interesting than their would-be victims. What starts out as warning signs like catching them naked, scratching door jams like a cat sharpening its claws & hoarding used diapers in a locked toolshed eventually escalates to A Big Showdown worthy of an 80’s slasher flick. In the movie’s last minute chaos, the kids’ debilitating nueroses are literally thrown in their faces as they’re confronted with mirrors & germ-infested feces in way that finally, finally delivers on some of the potential of a immensely promising premise.

In a lot of ways it’s the typical Shyamalan plot structure that makes the full experience of The Visit so conflicting. The tyranny of The Last Minute Twist drags the film down so hard, evoking far more boredom than tension as you wait for the hammer to finally fall. There’s a little fun to be had before the twist, like when the grandmother chases the kids through a crawl space like a wild animal only to cheerily announce “I’m making chicken pot pie!” when she catches them. Speaking of food, her constant offerings of cookies, bread pudding, cheddar biscuits, and whatever else give the film a distinct Hansel & Gretel vibe, one intentionally landed by her insistence that one of the kids climb into the oven “to clean it”. There’s also some laughable horror movie tropes, like the fact that they’re trapped in an isolated, one cop town with no Wi-Fi or cellphone reception. By the time the film finally devolves into geriatric mayhem, which includes divine moments like the lines “I have the deep darkies. You have to laugh to keep the deep darkies in a cave,” & “I see the veiny, deformed face of the world,” as well as the world’s most tense game of Yahtzee (“We picked teams! Young vs. old.”), I find myself wondering why it couldn’t have been that fun the entire time. Shyamalan’s dedication to springing a surprise on his audience in the final act is needlessly frustrating. Why not have The Twist arrive earlier in the sparsely populated runtime to make room for more senior citizen terror? Why not give the people what they want early & often?

I left my visit with The Visit firmly on the fence with how I felt about it. Although I wished more of the film was like the bonkers final half hour, that type of non-stop old folgey mayhem was already delivered decades ago in the straight-to-VHS gore fest Rabid Grannies. Although the film suffers under the Tyranny of the Twist, Shyamalan knowingly alludes to how frustrating that plot structure can be & teases possible out-there twists like underwater aliens & “the white thing with the yellow eyes” in a admirably prankish attempt to screw with audience expectations. Although I found the main characters to be unbearably dull & precocious (far beyond what I believe was intended), I also found their character arcs to be sufficiently satisfying by the film’s conclusion. It wasn’t until I was standing outside the theater, overhearing a stranger complain, “We’ll that’s two hours I’ll never get back” that my opinion instantly became slightly more positive than my initial indecision. Out of pure spite & pettiness for that offhand comment, I thought to myself “You know what? I’ve seen way worse. It was alright.” You could probably attribute half a star of my rating to that little bit of vindictive eavesdropping. Otherwise, I’d still be exactly divided on how I felt.

-Brandon Ledet

Unexpected Horror in the Romance Novelist Rom-Coms She-Devil (1989) & The Boyfriend School (1990)

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While we were discussing September’s Movie of the Month, the Steve Guttenberg/Jami Gertz will-they-won’t-they comedy from Hell The Boyfriend School, we had a hard time pinning down the film’s exact genre. Ostensibly a traditional rom-com, the film had some painfully awkward stretches of cringe comedy that clouded the issue. Even stranger yet, the romance novelist character played by Shelley Long was a terrifying, overbearing presence that overstepped her bounds as a quirky sister/side-character & ventured into some truly horrific torture-tactics territory. Her meddling was at least somewhat well-intentioned; she wanted to help her brother, played by Guttenberg, recover from a near-fatal battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma (told you it gets rough) by reshaping him into an alpha male biker trope straight out of one of her romance novels. The problem is that the transformation is emotionally painful for The Gutte & it leads to a really nasty line of deception that he finds difficult to escape once the ball gets rolling. Shelley Long’s romance novelist is the source of all the film’s non-Hodgkin’s related conflict & creates an amped up level of dread that’s not typically present in a traditional, lighthearted rom-com, making for one very strange little movie.

While The Boyfriend School isn’t exceptionally unique in its genre play that takes dimestore romance novel tropes into unexpected territory, it is at the very least part of a small crowd. Perhaps the most well-known romance novel-themed comedies are the Robert Zemeckis films Romancing the Stone & its little-loved sequel Jewel of the Nile, but those are more oriented towards action comedy (as is typical with Zemeckis) than the unusual discomfort & horror of The Boyfriend School. I could only find one picture that explores unexpected horror in a romance novel-themed romcom similar to the dread Shelley Long’s meddling creates in The Boyfriend School. 1989’s She-Devil, an underloved gem starring Meryl Streep, Roseanne Barr, and Ed Begley Jr., injects a surreal sense of horror into the romcom format, at the same time making sure to lampoon the very idea of romance novels, as well as the illusion & cruelty of unfair beauty standards and the competitive wedges that are driven between women who would benefit much more from a sense of camaraderie. She-Devil may, in fact, be a far supreior film than The Boyfriend School, because its writing is so pointed & satirical that its horror can only be read as intentional, whereas the terror of The Boyfriend School sometimes seems to exist outside what the film’s creators intended. I assume that we were supposed to leave The Boyfriend School feeling great that The Gutte got the girl, but I was honestly more in a state of shock & disbelief than anything, whereas in She-Devil the horror element is promised right there in the title.

She-Devil stars Roseanne Barr in the titular role as a frumpy housewife who goes on a violent quest for revenge when her husband leaves her for a wealthy romance novelist played by Meryl Streep. Streep reveals herself to be hilariously adept at playing the butt of the joke here & the movie has a field day poking fun at her in a much more obvious way than The Boyfriend School attacks Shelley Long’s very similar antagonist. First introduced as “The Reigning Royal Highness of Romance” by none other than Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous‘ Robin Leach (who also provides voice over work for the film’s trailer), Streep’s bodice-ripping novelist Mary Fisher is a genteel bore with more than thirty novels to her name, a boy toy butler who does more boytoying than butling, and a vast fortune she vainly tries to enjoy despite her crippling loneliness. In a very early plot development, she seduces the husband of Roseanne’s housewife frump (played by Ed Begley, Jr.) under the guise of hiring him as her accountant. Begley’s accountant is hilariously dedicated to seeing the world in terms of his profession, constantly making offhand remarks about electric bills, tax writeoffs, and balanced checkbooks whenever a vague opportunity arises. When he finally breaks things off with his wife (who was knowingly, but patiently suffering through his adultery) he describes himself as having four assets in life (his home, his family, his career, and his freedom) & exactly one liability: her. That alone would be cruel enough, but he punctuates the conversation with this ugly diatribe: “You’re a bad mother, a lousy wife, and a terrible cook. In fact, have you looked in a mirror recently? I don’t even think you’re a woman. Do you know what you are? You’re a she-devil!”

Watching Roseanne’s much-humiliated wife suffer through this indignity is a horrifying moment, something the film is smart to immediately acknowledge. After her husband’s abusive tirade a visible change takes place in her. She turns to her make-up mirrors, which provide an amusing sort of fun house effect, and Mario Bava-esque horror movie lighting takes over the screen. She’s shown with glowing red eyes & accompanied by fire. Her transformation into the titular She-Devil is very much the kind of classic horror movie theatrics you’d expect to accompany the birth of the Frankenstein monster. This is also when the mood of the film shifts. No longer feeling loyal to a man that has taken her for granted, the She-Devil systematically destroys every one of her husband’s assets (his home, his family, his carreer, his freedom) until he’s broken down to a literal prisoner & not even Mary Fisher wants to pick at the crumbs. To her credit, the She-Devil does not attack Mary Fisher directly, although she does have wicked thoughts about her, like “I hope your pink palace crumbles into the sea. I hope your delicate white skin breaks out in hives and your shiny blond hair falls out at the root.” Instead, she attacks the verbally abusive, adulterous man that takes advantage of both Fisher & herself and even goes as far as to start an employment agency that gives all of the other disenfranchised, unglamorous, non-Mary Fishers of the world a chance to stand up for themselves in a society that’s systemically stacked against them.

Despite the horror movie lighting & the “She-Devil” moniker she’s awarded, Roseanne’s protagonist is actually pretty inspiring. Even though she’s presented in the context of becoming a monster, her transformation makes for a subtly feminist revenge-fantasy spin on the romcom genre that feels almost like a spiritual opposite of the deception & violation that’s played for uncomfortable laughs in The Boyfriend School. Unlike The Boyfriend School, She-Devil adopts a woman’s POV and has pointed things to say about sexual politics & the nature of romance novels as an art & a product (at one point calling them “nothing more than softcore porn for bored housewives”) that extend beyond the basic jab that they’re silly. When a woman complains in the film that, “Men get away with murder, you know. It seems like if you’re a woman, there’s just no justice in the world” the evil She-Devil of the title refuses to accept those terms & (gasp!) makes her own justice. The horror! Besides these thematic charms there’s also some great visual playfulness, like direct references to Psycho & What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a scene transition that cuts from a blowjob to a violent cucumber chopping, and a brief appearance from GLOW: The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Both The Boyfriend School & She-Devil subvert the romance novel genre by portraying it as a horror show (it’s surprisingly rare that it’s portrayed in rom-coms at all), but The Boyfriend School‘s subversion feels cruel & unintentional while She-Devil‘s is much more winkingly transgressive. They make for an interesting double feature either way, one with much more terror & discomfort than you’d expect from a pair of late 80s rom-coms.

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, 1990’s The Boyfriend School, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet