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

Europe in the Raw (1963)

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By the time Russ Meyer made his fourth consecutive nudie cutie picture, the dull-yet-oddly-chaotic Wild Gals of the Naked West, his boredom with a genre he had inadvertently created was starting to show. What did not become boring to the tireless pervert, however, was large, naked breasts. As a result, Meyer’s fifth picture, Europe in the Raw, attempted to shift away from the “cutie” part of the nudie cutie format & moved the director’s work ever so closer to the much darker, stranger territory he would later revel in for decades. Unlike his later works, however, Europe in the Raw was far from unique in terms of genre. Part of what made Meyer’s debut, The Immoral Mr. Teas, such a wild, controversial success was that it for the first time combined moving pictures of naked girls with the mainstream comedy. Pre-Teas nudie films usually snuck past censors by treating their own sexual content derisively (when not vainly disguising  themselves as “documentaries” about nudist camps). An old sexploitation tactic was to get away with showing copious amounts of “depraved” behavior by demonizing the participants & punishing them for their transgressions (often pre-marital sex & the resulting back alley abortions) with a well-deserved death in the final act, in effect denouncing the very thing that made the picture fun & interesting in the first place. Europe in the Raw is hilariously guilty of this strategy.

In its opening narration Europe in the Raw boldly promises to be “undoubtedly the most unusual & intriguing documentary film every brought to the screen” that will expose “the stark realism of contemporary life in Europe.” Uh huh. What the film actually exposes is Russ Meyer’s Jingoistic/xenophobic thoughts on the sex trade in Europe (where he had learned his craft as a combat photographer during WWII) & deeply bizarre, self-contradictory relationship with women, whom he simultaneously worshipped & completely misunderstood. It’s fascinating stuff. Packing only short reels of film so they could pass as tourists, Russ & then-wife Eve traveled to a slew of major European cities to film this fiercely American diatribe: Paris, Stockholm, Hamburg, Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc. The original plan was to film candid footage on a (loudly humming) camera conspicuously “concealed” in a briefcase with a comically visible window cut out to expose the lens. This was ill-advised. Meyer soon discovered that attempting to film sex workers without their knowledge was a dangerous, life-jeopardizing tactic & decided to instead fake a significant portion of the footage once he was back on American soil. What’s left is a lot of touristy photojournaling, obviously staged footage in which the “hidden” camera itself is filmed in multiple scenes, occasional glimpses of the actually-real, actually-dangerous candid footage Meyer managed to sneak in a couple scattered red light districts (including one terrifying sequence in which he is essentially chasing a leather-clad dominatrix down the street), and some beautiful documentation of European strippers doing their thing. To borrow a phrase from Dana Carvey’s Johnny Carson impersonation, it’s weird, wild stuff.

As with Meyer’s previous four pictures, nearly all of the audible dialogue in Europe in the Raw is provided by an offscreen narrator, in this case Vic Perrin (who would return for Meyer’s next picture & final nudie cutie Heavenly Bodies!). Perrin’s industrial film intonations are strange glimpses into Meyer’s self-contradictory thoughts on both women & Europe, two subjects on which he is far from qualified to comment upon. Meyer’s simultaneously straight-laced & perverted views on these two subjects feel uncomfortable as soon as the opening monologue, where he states that Europe is, like a woman, a “land of many moods […] On the surface it is usually cheerful & happy, but somewhere underneath this pleasant exterior lies cruelty & lust,” going on to describe the continent as “sometimes a virgin, sometimes a libertine.” This is the first true glimpse into the bitter, bizarre war of the sexes that would populate nearly all of Meyer’s future works, to an almost obsessive degree. Europe in the Raw is full of these strangely acidic, but openly salacious musings. In one passage, he describes Amsterdam as “the most prostitute-infested Dutch city” where women are “displayed like sides of beef in the windows of a chop house”, potrays one red light district as “a cesspool of cheap hotels, tawdry bars, and wanton women”, and says of another that “The street clamors with the sound & fury of unbridled passion & manufactured lust, peddled wholesale at outrageous prices.” Worst of all he claims that in these supposed moral cesspools every sexual aberration can be bought except for rape, because every woman walking the street was for undoubtedly for sale. What an vile, insane thought. As enjoyable & transgressive as Russ’ films could be, he was always eager to remind you that at heart he’s a hopelessly cruel misanthrope & a bully, a real piece of shit.

What’s so peculiar about Meyer’s vilification of “women of easy virtue” & his skewed view of a Europe where “exhibition is the rule rather than the exception”, of course, is that he himself is, in essence, a peddler of smut. It’d be much easier to believe Europe in the Raw‘s prudish dialogue if its writer/director hadn’t previously made a fortune selling pin-up photographs & inventing the nudie cutie, essentially establishing himself as a remarkably talented softcore pornographer. For instance, when the narrator half-heartedly scorns European beaches for being “infested with bevies of bikini busters,” the first things that comes to mind is “Bikini Busters!”, the openly-drooling, dubious history of the bikini segment in Meyer’s previous film Erotica. Part of what makes Meyer’s best work so fascinating is this absurd sense of self-contradiction, especially in his treatment of women. Despite the often misogynistic war of the sexes vibes that infect much of his work, Meyer has a God-given knack for making women look powerful on film, (Tura Satana’s turn as Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! being the most infamous example). Although Meyer speaks ill of sex workers & burlesque dancers in Europe in the Raw, he also films them beautifully from drastically low angles that make them look gigantic & powerful. He had a way of verbally tearing women down in his films & in the press, but his obvious reverence for the gender permeates his visual work in an undeniable way and that bizarre dichotomy is noticeable for the first time in his career in Europe in the Raw.

With Europe in the Raw, you can feel the real Russ Meyer starting to show his true colors, hideous warts & all. Even so, he manages to incorporate some of the hokey humor from his previous nudie cutie work, like in an extended ping pong match staged at a (ridiculously fake) Dutch nudist camp, a gag where a chamber pot is emptied on a passing pedestrian, a scene where the Leaning Tower of Pisa rotates full circle like the hands of a clock, and (my personal favorite) an ungodly long sequence of German street signs that feature the words “Fart” & “Fahrt”. Speaking of the “Fart” sequence, finally coming into its own here is Meyer’s talent for blinding, rapid-fire editing. Flashes of European street signs, advertisements, food, bikes, toilets, neon lights, fine art and, of course, bare breasts overwhelm the viewer in a bewildering assault that would eventually reach a fever pitch in his 1970 picture Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Commercial vessels, automobiles, and steel architecture are also filmed in the same low, reverent angles the director films his burlesque dancers, establishing an aesthetic that what would eventually solidify itself as Russ Meyer’s America. All of the basic building blocks of Meyer’s ouevre are present for the first time in Europe in the Raw, right down to the lingering brutality of WWII. Meyer even once described the film (which he was evidently not too proud of, despite its obvious superiority to dreck like Eve & The Handyman and Wild Gals of the Naked West) simply as “Tits and War”. Honestly, if you had to boil the man’s entire career down to just two words, that wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Similarly, if you wanted to watch the majority of Meyer’s career without tuning in for the stinkers between the milestones, Europe in the Raw wouldn’t be a bad place to start either.

-Brandon Ledet

Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

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After the vignette structure that loosely held together his third “nudie cutie” picture, Erotica, Russ Meyer returned to feature length narratives for his fourth film, Wild Gals of the Naked West. Unfortunately, the same narrative slightness that worked well enough for The Immoral Mr. Teas to become a breakout success & singlehandedly launch the nudie cutie genre had become tiresome as soon as Meyer’s second picture, the impossibly dull Eve & The Handyman, and near sadistic by the time Meyer made Wild Gals of the Naked West. Wild Gals expands upon the strange quick cuts & surreal pastel-colored voids that distinguish Meyer’s work from other Mr. Teas imitators, but outside of a couple sparse visual quirks there’s nothing too remarkable about the film. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Wild Gals was more or less an an excuse for Meyer & friends to play Western-themed dress up in the desert. And, of course, to display bare breasts.

Our host for this burlesque take on playing cowboys & Indians is an old, drunken Western coot played by Jack Moran. Moran had previously provided the besides-the-point narration that made Erotica a mildly enjoyable, disorienting experience, but this was his first full collaboration with Meyer, both as an onscreen presence & as the sole credited screenwriter. Moran would later go on to pen some of Meyer’s best work of the 1960s (including the cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), but it’s hard to see too much promise in the razor thin screenplay he provides for Wild Gals of the Naked West. Even less dignified than his razor-thin screeplay is his onscreen portrayal of the old coot narrator, decked out in a hideously cheap costume complete with horrendously fake-looking eyebrows & mustache.

Much more exciting in her introduction to the Russ Meyer landscape is the actual old coot Princess Livingston, a toothless howl of a loon that would later appear in notable Meyer pictures like Mudhoney & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (not to mention an appearance in the Pufnstuff movie, of all things). Princess Livingston has a wild authenticity to her, making crazy eyes for the camera, cackling like a drunken witch, and calling to mind future featured players in Meyer-devotee John Waters’ films like the late, great Edith Massey. Wild Gals of the Naked West tries its best to cultivate a sense of unbridled chaos in shoddy, vaudevillian gags involving gorilla costumes, crossdressing, and pranks involving outhouses, but none of the film’s thematic shenanigans can even approach the cinematic lunacy Princess Livingston commands simply by being her wonderful self.

Besides the introductions of Jack Moran & Princess Livingston, Wild Gals is mostly significant in its over-indulgence in the pastel voids that made The Immoral Mr. Teas‘ hallucinogenic glimpses of nudity quaintly fascinating. Here, all visions of Old West saloons & brothels are confined to these otherworldly, pastel-colored spaces, populated by quick cuts of hand-drawn pianos, pasties-covered breasts, hideous drunks downing untold gallons of liquor, strange rubber masks, and six-shooters going off indiscriminately. If the entirety of the film’s action was contained in these nudity-filled bursts of drunken chaos, Wild Gals of the Naked West might be among the best of Russ Meyer’s nudie cutie work. Instead it’s severely bogged down by hokey gags involving the aforementioned gorilla suit, sex workers lassoing johns onto second floor balconies, and truly awful Native American caricatures (although I did admittedly enjoy the ones where the Native men were operating WWII gear like grenade launchers & Tommy guns). All in all, Wild Gals may be mildly fascinating for a Russ Meyer completist looking for early glimpses of Jack Moran, Princess Livingston, and the director’s trademark rapid-fire editing, but after previously watching three similarly vapid nudie cuties from Meyer in a row, I found the ordeal somewhat tiresome.

-Brandon Ledet

Sinister (2012)

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three star

Horror is one of those genres where you honestly don’t have to try too, too hard to succeed. Yes, it’s of course preferable that any film would stand out as a unique property that breaks all expectations of its context & genre, but it’s never that big of a deal when a horror film shrugs off that kind of ambition. With its own set-in-stone tropes & built-in audience, horror allows a lot of breathing room for films to just sort of coast on the long line of work that came before them. Innovation isn’t entirely necessary for each individual horror picture as long as they deliver a few basic elements: suspense, some good scares, maybe a memorably creepy creature or two, etc. As long as they play by the rules, all a passably decent horror film really needs to do is not drop the ball. In a lot of ways, Sinister is such a film.

There’s nothing really too special about Sinister. Ethan Hawke plays a “true crime” journalist who moves into the house of a slaughtered family in order to research his new book, some kind of In Cold Blood derivative. Of course, the house is haunted. Of course, the project drives him mad. Of course, there’s a Boogieman-type demon helming the entire horrid affair. Well, the film actually takes that last part quite literally. Known to historians as Bughuul & to possessed, homicidal little demon children as “Mr. Boogie”, The Boogieman is a real character in the film, orchestrating all of the haunted goings on from the protective distance of some super 8 films mysteriously discovered in Hawke’s attic. It’s curious that, since he exists largely in the imaginations & drawings of little children, Mr. Boogie isn’t represented here as I would’ve drawn him in my youth (a man-sized booger in a trenchcoat) but instead appears as some sort of Industrial Goth enthusiast in corpse paint. No matter. Despite Bughuul’s prominence in Sinister‘s mythology, he’s entirely nonverbal and doesn’t do much besides makes some guest cameos in the haunted super 8 films to look all goth-like & mean. The children under his spell do most of the heavy lifting & are much more effective at producing some great onscreen scares.

The haunted super 8 films that drive Ethan Hawke’s true crime journalist mad depict The Boogie Man’s child army calmly, methodically executing their respective families for the benefit of home video in a variety of unsavory ways: drownings, fires, lawn mowers, etc. These films are where Sinister excels most as a unique property, almost functioning as an old-fashioned horror anthology. There’s a lot of visual care that goes into depicting the projection equipment that screens the films and in other minute details (such as throats being slit in the reflection of Hawke’s glasses as we’re watching him watch a projection) that’s otherwise missing from the film’s more run-of-the-mill haunted house & creepy children formula. During these screenings the film’s sound design also takes on a special importance (including a kickass soundtrack) , reaching for some deeply unnerving vibes that can’t be accomplished simply through gore makeup & jump scares. Sinister may take a while to build up its own mythology & its central Nine Inch Nails Superfan villain may be a little underwhelming, but its haunted films concept is satisfying enough to make for a decent horror picture once the ball is finally rolling. Besides, creepy, murderous children are always an easy sell for fans of the genre, which allows the film to more or less coast.

-Brandon Ledet