brandon ledet

Kink (2014)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

There’s a crippling sense of pointlessness at the heart of Kink, a recent documentary about the BDSM pornography company Kink.com. It’s not just that anyone who would be inclined to watch the film in the first place is already likely to be on board with its “kink porn is not unhealthy” message; it’s also that the film plays more like a long form advertisement than a proper documentary. Kink is more akin to an infomercial, a DVD extra, or a decade-late episode of HBO’s Real Sex than it is to a fully invested exploration of the subject at hand. By focusing on a single production company’s output & ethos, it feels less like a document of where kink porn is today and more like an aggressive PR assertion of where Kink.com is today, which is not necessarily as worthwhile of a subject.

As practicing sadists, Kink.com is obviously very much worried about coming across as “axe wielding maniacs”, so much of the run time is softening that image. Actors are shown expressing “pain” & then practicing the expression of “pain” off-camera. There are a lot of looming hard-ons bouncing around the set, but they’re slapped & tickled in an irreverent manner that says “We’re having fun here, y’all! I swear! So much fun!” The producers try to pose the company as a sort of mom & pop operation that started in a college dorm room (every young perv’s dream) and somehow blossomed into a successful business. But not too successful, though. They want you to know that in comparison to other porn giants, they’re the small-time outsiders, saying “If pornography was high school, we would be the goth table. We’d be the art kids.” All of this aggressive PR is supposed to make the company’s scary flogging, spanking, and out-of-control fuck machines more palatable to a wider audience, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s winning anyone over who wasn’t already down with what it’s selling.

Preaching to the choir is not the only problem with Kink’s assertion that Kink.com’s brand of BDSM porn is a-okay. It also just doesn’t have much to say once it establishes that consensual BDSM play is healthy. That’s not to say the film is completely devoid of entertainment. If nothing else, it’s kind of cute in its matter-of-fact pre-coitus negotiations of what will & won’t go down. As I mentioned in my review of The Duke of Burgundy, the sub is firmly in charge in most BDSM scenarios, despite what most people would expect, so it’s amusing here to watch them call the shots before shooting scenes.  Even at a mere 80min, however, this message isn’t enough to carry the film and there’s a lot of redundant feet-dragging that sinks any good vibes it had cultivated along the way. The closest the film comes to challenging itself is in a brief questioning of how money muddles consent and (after its assertion that BDSM porn doesn’t promote rape) the filming of a home invasion scenario that is very much a distinct rape fantasy. Otherwise, it lets its subject off the hook. As a documentary, Kink is mostly harmless. I was a little bored with its repetition, a little cynical of its blatant advertising, and very much annoyed with the obnoxious, wailing orgasm moans that droned on & on & on, but its biggest fault is that it didn’t push itself harder, instead opting to cover one small facet of a truly fascinating topic that deserves a closer, more critical look.

Side note: When the end credits revealed that Kink was “Produced by James Franco” I thought to myself, “Of course it was.”

-Brandon Ledet

Outcast (2015)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

hobbit

onehalfstar

campstamp

This is not the first time I’ve been burned this exact way before, but there’s an incredibly cruel lie in Nic Cage’s top billing in the period action cheapie Outcast. If anything, Cage’s role in the film is as a glorified cameo, mostly leaving Hayden Christensen & a cast of unknowns to their own lackluster devices. There’s some vague traces of entertainment value to be found in seeing a once-a-moody-teen Anakin Skywalker all grown up, high on opium, and getting pissed on, but by the time Nic Cage returns late in the film, ravenous for scenery to chew, it feels like a huge cheat. At one point a character admonishes Adult Anakin’s opium addiction by reminding him that the drug “dulls a man’s senses.” He responds that, “Some things are better dulled.” This is advice Outcast takes way too close to its exceedingly dull heart, over-stuffing the screen with long traveling sequences and underwhelming martial arts when all I really wanted as an audience was Nic Cage sporting a terrible wig & accent. Normally it’d be unfair to punish a movie for not being what you expected, but when you promise Nic Cage antics as your main attraction, you best deliver.

Here’s what we are afforded, Cage wise: early in the film he appears sword-fighting in knight’s armor; he then disappears for an entire hour, returning only for a few, sparse, bizarrely hilarious speeches that make you wish his character (“The White Ghost”) were the focus of the film, as promised. Seeing an armored Cage wield a sword definitely has a novelty to it, as I don’t think it’s something I’ve ever encountered before, but the moment is fleeting. When he returns to sweat & curse & act like a martial arts pirate it’s a godsend. He describes things as being “thick as flies on a farting goat’s ass”, tells crazy stories about his human prop wife, and makes direct references to his distractingly artificial hair. If we had a whole film of this stuff, it might’ve actually been worth the time & money. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Unlike actually-enjoyable films like Vampire’s Kiss & The Wicker Man, which are done a disservice by being reduced to memes, Outcast might be best viewed as a YouTube highlight reel. Endless traveling montages & a piss-soaked, opium addicted, too-adult Anakin Skywalker are all well & good in their own place & time, but it’s just unfair to deliver such trivialities when there’s a foul-mouthed pirate Nic Cage just begging for more screen time. Stylistically, the film doesn’t have much going for it either, recalling a decade-late Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon knockoff with enough superfluous Dutch angles to give Battlefield Earth a run for its money. That could be a forgivable offense, though, if they had just delivered what they promised.

Side note: The score’s main theme sounds hilariously similar to Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart”. Either that or I was just desperately looking for ways to occupy my mind.

-Brandon Ledet

A Dozen Tawdry Sex Jokes from Crimes of Passion (1984)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

It wasn’t until after I selected Ken Russell’s acidic sex farce Crimes of Passion as our Movie of the Month that I realized just how unavailable the movie is nowadays. Not currently streaming on any major services and never making the jump from DVD to Blu Ray, used copies of the film have reached absurd second-hand prices. Convincing folks to track down a film with that inflated of a price tag is a tough proposition nowadays, especially since video rental stores have essentially gone extinct and Netflix doesn’t seem to have it stocked on DVD.

To help convince you that Crimes of Passion is worth the effort, I’ve listed below a dozen tawdry sex jokes from the film. As we noted in last week’s Swampchat, Russell’s high art meets low trash aesthetic is in full swing here and any highfaluting ideas the movie explores about the pitfalls of monogamy are severely undercut by the endless onslaught of cheap sex jokes. Of course, cheap sex jokes have their own kind of inherent draw, and I feel like I could share a dozen choice one-liners here without spoiling any of the film’s more artistic merits (or even a fraction of its abundant sex humor, really). Also, even out of context, I believe these jokes reveal a great deal about the combative nature of the film’s view of heterosexual monogamy.

Anyway, here’s a dozen dirty jokes from Crimes of Passion:

1. “I’d rather get fucked by a vibrator than your cock any day; it’s honest, loving, and I don’t have to make breakfast for it in the morning.”

2. “Getting her to make love is like asking her to run the Boston Marathon. And in those times that we actually go through with it, I don’t know whether to embrace or embalm her.”

3. “The secretary says to the boss, ‘Could I use your Dictaphone?’ And he says, “No! Use your finger like everybody else.”

4. “If you think you’re getting back in my panties, forget it. There’s one asshole in there already.”

5. “I never forget a face. Especially when I’ve sat on it.”

6. “I happen to be a very giving lover.” “Yeah, you’re giving alright. You’ve given half the city the clap.”

7. “You’re the head of your class, or is it the class of your head?”

8. “Why don’t you assume the missionary position, Reverend?”

9. “I make a great Joan of Arc, can’t you tell?” “I imagine you do spend a lot of time on your knees.”

10. “Cathy just got a new video recorder. It cost her $1,000. She says it’ll do anything she wants.” “Well, for that price, it should go down on her.”

11. “Fuck you, Hopper.” “I do. Every night. Me & my jar of Vaseline.”

12. “Adam & Eve had just had sex, right? And God says to Adam, ‘Where’s Eve?’ So Adam says, ‘She’s down at the stream washing off.’ And God says, ‘Damn, now I’ll never get that smell out of those fish.’”

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, 1984’s Crimes of Passion, visit last week’s Swampchat on the film.

-Brandon Ledet

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

threehalfstar

A lot of comparisons Ana Lily Amirpour’s vampire-themed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has been garnering are to indie director Jim Jarmusch’s 80s work. Indeed, Girls Walks Home has a stark, black & white look to it as well as a preference for a laid-back cool over plot momentum that resembles Jarmusch, who made his own vampire movie last year with Only Lovers Left Alive. However, I found myself thinking of an entirely different film while watching Armipour’s debut feature, albeit another work from the 80s: Kathryn Bigelow’s classic vampire Western Near Dark. Near Dark has a similar style-over-substance ethos shared by Amirpour & Jarmusch, but it fits in with Girl Walks Home a lot closer thematically than any other work I can recall. This thematic similarity is apparent in the gender-swapped vulnerability in characters’ sexual desire. Both A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night & Near Dark feature a young woman venturing alone in public after sunset & being solicited by strange, potentially dangerous men. Normally, the woman would be perceived as the vulnerable party in these situations, but their hidden vampirism disrupts the power balance and complicates the tension.

An essential difference between the films is that Near Dark abandons the idea of vampiric, gender-swapped nightstalking early on to focus on unconventional ideas of family, while A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night develops the concept into a feature length film. Much like its title, the film itself has a quiet, dangerous sort of beauty to it that is amplified by its Iranian setting. Pantomimed felatio, prostitution, and concerns about the impropriety of being alone with the opposite sex feel all the more dangerous when considered in the context of the draconian culture that surrounds them. A decidedly feminist bent turns the tables on these vibes and makes victims out of the men who would be the most likely perpetrators in these situations. The film’s central vampire punishes pimps & rapists and scares children into being good little boys for the rest of their lives. She’s more of a (murderous) Batman or a Miss Meadows than a Dracula in this way. Not everything she does is right & justified (there’s an encounter with a homeless victim that calls her moral code into question), but there’s a general sense that she’s righting a wrong in her encounters with the dangerous men she haunts.

Of course, as a debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has a few kinks that could be worked out. It’s a very showy, stylish film that suggests Armipour has a lot of fascinating work in her that we’ll be treated to in the coming years. At the same time, it’s a little misshapen & awkwardly paced and its showiness occasionally risks a sort of indie movie triteness. Its imagery milks a lot of atmosphere out of stray cats, spinning records, skateboarding, and heroin abuse that sometimes works extremely well & sometimes comes off a little like a 90s Calvin Klein ad. When it’s firing on all cylinders, though, such as in a particularly effective makeup application scene or when the vampire is casually flipping through a victim’s CD collection after a kill, it’s a very memorable, humorous, and visually gorgeous work that will be likely to stick in the public consciousness for a while to come. The distillation of my favorite aspect of Near Dark & its working-class vibes in lines like, “Idiots & rich people are the only ones who think things can change,” also combine to make it an endearing film to me, personally. Based on what I’ve seen here, I’m very much excited to see where Armipour’s efforts go in the future.

-Brandon Ledet

The Zero Theorem (2014)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

fourstar

The most frequent complaint about The Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam’s latest film, is that it’s “more of the same” without adding much more to the conversation. That is to say that it borrows too much form Gilliam’s own oeuvre, specifically the themes & imagery established in two of his biggest works: Brazil & 12 Monkeys. Honestly, I find it hard to fault a director for exploring “more of the same”, when “the same” is such a delicious plethora of weird ideas & images. Gilliam has an absurd talent for making outlandish, mind-melting worlds feel authentically lived-in and The Zero Theorem does not disappoint in that way. The future world portrayed here not only feels reasonable, but almost probable. This is partly because it’s sketched out in small, intimate spaces instead of the grand, sweeping strokes typical to Gilliam’s work. This not only makes the film feel oddly believable; it also helps to fix a problem I usually have with his work: pacing. For me, Terry Gilliam films, despite being impressive & entertaining, tend to feel about 6 hours longer than their actual run times. By narrowing its focus The Zero Theorem is more of an effortless breeze to watch than his usual fare, feeling much more concise in its narrative. It may be “more of the same” visually & thematically, but structurally it’s a much tighter execution than Gilliam’s normal mode.

The world Gilliam builds in The Zero Theorem is overwhelming, but not at all unlikely. Glowing screens dominate the landscape, allowing advertisements to follow humble number cruncher Qohen (Christoph Waltz) to his oppressive office job where he sits before even more screens. Although the imagery is overstuffed with weird machines & high pop art fashion, there’s a lived-in grey grime that covers the surface of The Zero Theorem that makes its vision of the future feel authentic. An especially telling scene shows a house party where all of the celebrants are dancing to their own individual music players, headphones in ears, eyes affixed to the computer tablets in their hands. The isolation of technology & cubicle work is by no means a new concept, but Gilliam pushes it to an extreme here. At first Qohen is on a humble quest to work from home (due to a perceived Joe Vs the Volcano “brain cloud” type disease), but then he finds himself trying to prove that the Universe & life itself are meaningless. As Qohen attempts to make sense of the film’s swirling black holes, weird machines, and futuristic sex work, he proposes that “Nothing adds up.” He’s corrected, “You’ve got it backwards. Everything adds up to nothing.” Ultimately, the film works that way as well. There’s a lot of ideas & themes about romance, technology, corporate dystopia, and the surveillance state floating around The Zero Theorem, threatening to amount to a grand statement about life, love, and nature, but ultimately the film decides that everything means nothing and we are each alone in our plights.

It’s the small-scale implications of The Zero Theorem’s plot that anchor its larger, more philosophical thoughts on the emptiness of everything. Although Qohen is trying to uncover the basic significance of the universe at large, it’s the goings on inside his hermetic abandoned church home that constitute most of the run time. The focus on Qohen’s struggle for self-acceptance, his embarrassing attempts at a love life, and his slavish, Waiting for Godot dedication to a potential incoming phone call provides a steady foundation for the film’s more ludicrous, throwaway concepts like virtual therapy and The Church of Batman the Redeemer. Waltz also does a great job of anchoring the film with a quiet, unassuming performance that’s far from his over-the-top hamming in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes. He leaves that hamming up to relative newcomer Lucas Hedges, who easily steals the back half of the film (which is no small feat, considering that half features a rapping Tilda Swinton).  In a lot of ways The Zero Theorem is more of the same from Terry Gilliam, but its narrowed focus & intimate setting affords it a more concise-feeling execution of ideas & images he’s explored before rather than an exact retread. It’s not the greatest thing he’s ever done, but it’s by no means an inconsequential work either. Instead, it’s another great, intentionally overwhelming film from a director who’s built a storied career full of them.

-Brandon Ledet

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

EPSON MFP image

onehalfstar

campstamp

The worst part about hating Jupiter Ascending is that I was really rooting for it. I’m not a Wachowskis super fan or anything (I barely know of their work outside The Maxtrix & Speed Racer); I just liked the movie’s basic concept & attributes. The idea of a sci-fi action-adventure with a female lead hit a lot of my sweet spots right out of the gate, but every one of those elements in the final product fell embarrassingly flat. The female lead, played by Mila Kunis, is for the most part a passenger & an observer while the action swirls around her (she’s a literal princess in need of saving, even). The action itself alternates from occasionally engaging to just painfully awful, anchored mostly by an against-all-odds unsexy Channing Tatum figure skating through the air (thanks to some kind of goofy laser boots) while terrible CGI obstacles crash & burn in his wake. That leaves the film’s sci-fi concepts to carry the load, which they occasionally do in a Richard Kelly kitchen sink fashion, but even those fade to long stretches of unimpressive action sequences. In short, Jupiter Ascending is a failure, when I really, really didn’t want it to be.

I’m just one dude, though! There’s a lot floating around in the film for people to latch onto. Beautiful, futuristic landscapes & architecture are populated with (unbelievably dumb-looking) alien weirdos like CGI lizard minions & humanoid owl things (that look like Ron Perlmen in Beauty and the Beast). Eddy Redmayne gives a (laughably) memorable performance as an evil alien dictator (who is just a wig & a sashay short of a killer drag routine). The aforementioned Richard Kelly brand of too-plentiful ideas contrast an undocumented immigrant’s life as a servant on Earth with distant & lavish alien aristocrats (who cares). There’s some (mildly amusing) honey bee worship (à la Upside Down) that results in the line “Bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty.” Other lines like “Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry,” and “Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe,” also have a sort of a staying power (even if it’s as a joke). There’s a whole lot to love in Jupiter Ascending, but if you’re like me and have problems arriving on its wavelength, that excess gets ugly quickly.

If I had to boil what’s wrong with Jupiter Ascending down to a single fault it would be that it’s just so thoroughly uncool. I could be wrong and the movie’s late 90s Hot Topic raver aesthetic could be vintage enough to be cool again (if it was ever cool), but from my POV it just feels painfully outdated, like watching your stepdad desperately try to be hip. Imagine if The Fifth Element arrived 20 years late, dead serious (or at least not funny), and about as exciting as The Ice Pirates. Maybe a list of the character names will give you an idea of what I’m describing here: Jupiter Jones, Titus Abrasax, Phylo Percadium, Gemma Chatterjee, Stinger Apini, etc. If these names belong anywhere (and I’m not sure that they do) it’s on a TV screen, clogging up a low-rent Battlestar Galactica knockoff. Much of the film operates this way, feeling like a television show whose special effects budget was afforded way too much money and not nearly enough time to get the details right. I sincerely hope that there are people who have positive experiences with Jupiter Ascending, as I do find it interesting in concept, but it’s a movie I would love to never see or think about again. This might work out just fine, as even while I was watching I felt like it had been released nearly two decades ago.

-Brandon Ledet

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

There’s a delicate balance at work in Bulletproof Monk (which easily could also have been titled Tibetan Punk! or Monks & Punks) that a lot of lesser films fail to achieve. Judging solely by the basic monks & punks premise and the cheesy early 00s imagery, it’s by all means a bad movie. At the same time, however, it resists nearly all negative criticism by being such a delightfully goofy bad movie that’s very much self-aware in its vapid silliness. In a lot of ways the film sells itself as a action-comedy cash-in on the cultural & financial success of martial arts choreography-fests The Matrix & Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it also has its own charms as a unique intellectual property, which are mostly dependent on the natural charisma of its costars Yun-Fat Chow (as the monk) and Seann William Scott (as the punk, naturally).

The story begins in a Tibetan monastery where an elderly monk plays right into the classic one-day-from-retirement trope and is brutally murdered in a hailstorm of bullets. What kind of a bastard would murder a kind, old monk, you ask? Why, a Nazi bastard, of course. In addition to the film’s already preposterous buddy dynamic of a Tibetan punk and a New York City punk, Bulletproof Monk also makes room for aging, power-hungry Nazis, a shirtless British rapper named Mr. Funktastic, and the red-hot daughter of a Russian crime lord. It’s a quite silly hodgepodge of mismatched characters, but they have more in common than you’d expect. For instance, both aging Nazis & shirtless British rappers enjoy hanging out in underground smokeshow lairs that split the aesthetic difference between steampunk & Hot Topic. Also, New York City pickpockets who inexplicable live in millionaires’ apartments above adorable single screen cinemas and pious Tibetan monks both share a deep passion for Crouching Tiger-type martial arts & Matrix-era bullet time, which the former learned from the movie theater and the latter from his lifetime dedication to protecting an ancient scroll that’s incredibly important for some reason or another.

The critical consensus at the time of Bulletproof Monk’s release was that it was a disappointing comedy saved from being a total wash solely by the virtues of Chow Yun-Fat’s martial arts skills. I’m not sure if its campy charms have just improved with time or if I’m just more able than most to excuse a movie’s faults sheerly for the purity of its goofy attitude, but it’s hard for me to fault a movie that features Chow Yun-Fat performing gymnastics on a mid-flight helicopter’s landing gear or the line “Lucky for you this crumpet’s come begging for some of my funktastic love.” Seann William Scott is also surprisingly convincing as a no-good punk with a heart of gold and there are some genuinely striking images of him learning/practicing kung fu in front of a movie screen. Bulletproof Monk may have been a disappointing development for Chow Yun-Fat’s fans after the heights of his John Woo collaborations & career-defining performance in the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, but for a fan of goofy buddy comedies, bizarre cultural relics, and Nazi war criminals getting their due, it’s quite a treat & surprisingly just as impervious to criticism as it is to bullets.

-Brandon Ledet

X/Y (2015)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

It’s not the film’s fault, but I had a hard time appreciating X/Y after seeing a similar backdrop & story played out so excellently in the recent break-up drama Appropriate Behavior. The two movies aren’t even that much alike. They do both begin at the end of a relationship between a young couple in NYC, but while Appropriate Behavior closely follows the emotional fallout of a single protagonist, X/Y tracks the ripples of the dissolution in a series of vignettes that details how four friends’ lives are affected by the change. In light of their disparate structural differences, it’s far from fair of me to compare the two films, but there’s just something really special about Appropriate Behavior that makes X/Y feel inessential in its wake. The lack of a connection between the film’s free-floating segments (each named after the character they follow) didn’t help either.

“Mark”: The first segment concerns Mark as he deals with his recent break-up with Sylvia by flirting with strangers, working out, and drinking to excess. We also follow him to a business meeting where he’s trying to sell a script to a major film studio and his agent provides him the advice, “Don’t fuck it up with this ‘I went to film school so I have to make art’ bullshit.” We’re most likely supposed to identify with Mark in this moment (who I guess is a stand-in for writer/director Ryan Piers Williams?) but at the same time it’s easy to see how X/Y could’ve benefited from the same advice.

“Jen”: The “free spirit” of the group, Jen is the only character in the film not in an emotional tailspin from a recent break-up, but instead suffers from the emptiness of single life. Jen is currently between jobs, between romantic flings, and between moments of knowing what to do with herself while she’s alone. As she stares wistfully into her own city-life isolation while a Chromatics song gradually gets louder on the soundtrack, we start to get a clear picture of what the movie is aiming for.

“Jake”: Jake is the thematic bridge between Jen’s free spirit sadness & the Mark/Sylvia break-up. He’s a fashion model/EDM DJ/aspiring photographer/casual sex magnet that seems to “have it all” but is just as miserable as everyone else profiled here, as he struggles with both a less-recent break-up of a long term relationship and a quest for a solid personal identity. When Mark angrily asks him, “Who are you? You’re like five different people,” it feels like his entire character in a nutshell.

“Sylvia”: Sylvia is dealing with her break-up very similarly to Mark (alcohol, flirtation, exercise) except that she’s getting laid a lot more frequently. Her segment adds the least thematically to the movie, but instead is a sort of callback to the original conflict that’s supposed to tie everything together.

So, there you have it. Four NYC sad sacks drift in & out of each other’s days while all nursing broken hearts, a lonely sounding Chromatics song playing in the background to help flesh out their big city sense of isolation. It’s by no means a terrible film; it’s pleasant enough in its small scale ambitions & comfortably sullen character studies. It’s just not an especially essential film either. I feel like a real piece of shit for saying this, because the comparison is mostly unwarranted, but if you’re going to see one post-break-up NYC drama this year, make it Appropriate Behavior. That one is a real doozy & X/Y mostly just is.

-Brandon Ledet

Unfriended (2015)

/ swampflix / 18 Comments

fourstar

campstamp

Sometimes the most effective horror films are the ones that can find terror in the mundane. It’s all well & good to be terrified of humanoid freakshows like Michael Myers & Jason Voorhees, but there’s a degree of separation with monsters like that. You can imagine them stalking you in the dark, but they’re not a part of your everyday life. It’s the films that turn the familiar into threats that can cut a little closer to home. Jaws scares us about what’s lurking in water. It Follows scares us about the vulnerability of sexual encounters. Alien scares us about venturing into outer space. You know, everyday stuff. Of course, attempting to milk the mundane for scares can end up making a film out to be a punchline, like in the case of The Lift (an 80s cheapie about a haunted elevator) or in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It’s a fine line to draw, but if a movie can turn something ordinary into something sinister it’s a lot more likely to stick with viewers once they leave the theater.

Surprisingly, the laptop-framed live chat horror flick Unfriended has it both ways. It’s so ludicrously invested in its gimmickry that it comes off as kind of a joke, but the commitment also leads to genuinely chilling moments that remind the audience a little too much of their own digital experiences. As a dumb horror flick filmed entirely from the first-person POV of gossipy teen operating a laptop, it’s both way more fun & way more affecting than it has any right to be. Unfriended uses real-life programs like Facebook, Chat Roulette, and Skype to lure audiences into the sense of a familiar online experience, but what’s incredible is how it turns those brands into something sinister. Its greatest trick is how it finds terror & suspense in a lagging video stream or a program that stubbornly acts on its own. The frustration & helplessness of those situations are common to a lot of digital experiences, but they generally aren’t caused by a murderous, revenge-bent ghost. Much like with other intangible spaces like television static & the isolation of outer space, there feels like there’s a legitimate possibility of a ghost chilling there. If a ghost were to exist somewhere, a haunted Facebook account or Skype session seems to be as hospitable of a place as any.

Of course, as its ridiculous trailer indicates, Unfriended is just as faithful to horror genre clichés as it is to its real-time laptop viewpoint gimmick. Just like every sound & image on display is a direct result of the laptop’s user (or the ghost that haunts them), every character’s wretched personality & grisly death feels preordained by horror movie rules, as if the know-it-all dicks from Scream were calling the shots. The teens in Unfriended are cruel, air-headed twits that deserve what’s coming to them: contrived deaths-by-appliances that range from being as goofy as the rogue soda machine in Maximum Overdrive to some truly grotesque demises. It takes an already-won-over fan of the slasher genre to enjoy the space Unfriended occupies between legitimately freaky and violently goofy. It’s not going to win over casual passersby with insightful musings on teen bullying & the vulnerability of our online presence the way titles like It Follows & The Babadook attracted larger audiences with their respective explorations of teen sexuality & mental health. It’s not nearly as intelligent or tasteful as either of those films. Instead, it pushes a gimmick that could easily outwear its welcome into some really creepy territory, while keeping in mind that its limitations require it to be cheap thrills entertainment above all else. Despite my moderate-at-best expectations going in, I found this balance to be surprisingly rewarding and encourage fans of the genre to give it a shot, regardless of how they felt about the laughable ads.

-Brandon Ledet

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2015)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

The ads for the recent horror comedy Wyrmood: Road of the Dead had me expecting a low budget, “sweded” version of Mad Max: Road Warrior, not necessarily because it was filmed in Australia or included the word “Road” in its title, but because of the film’s costume design. The characters were shown suited up in makeshift armor composed of protective sporting gear like hockey masks & football pads, as if they were preparing to play some kind of Mad Max-themed organized sport. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what’s going on here. Instead, Wyrmood apes a completely different genre franchise: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy. Had I better prepared myself for the film’s zany zombie comedy tone, I may enjoyed it slightly more than I did, but there’d still be the underlying problem that at this point in time, the world isn’t in any particular need of another straightforward zombie exercise, goofy or not. There are surely still die-hard fans of the genre that will enjoy Wyrmwood for its undead antics, but for everyone else the film has a lot of potential to feel almost entirely pointless.

That’s not to say there aren’t some original concepts in Wyrmwood’s zombie-infested world. There are some entertainingly outlandish ideas about using zombies as an alternative fuel source, a still-alive human who can control the zombies through a telepathic mental connection, and how a person’s blood type can affect their chances of infection, but a few fresh details aren’t really enough to distinguish the film from the run-of-the mill titles of its genre. This more-of-the-same vibe is most apparent during flashbacks to the initial outbreak, a story we’ve all seen told many, many times before. The best chances the film has of standing out on its own as a unique property are in its goofball humor or its incredible costume design, but as mentioned before, even those elements feel familiar to the work of Army of Darkness’ Sam Raimi or Mad Max’s George Miller. The most unique element in the entirety of the film, then, is a mad scientist who schedules disco breaks in his back-of-a-truck laboratory (when he’s not torturing both the alive & the undead), but his presence isn’t of enough consequence to make too big of an impact.

I’m willing to chalk up my disappointment with Wyrmwood as a personal problem and the film’s. I’m sure there are plenty of people for whom another straightforward zombie comedy sounds like a fun-enough endeavor (even with its preference for CGI blood splatter over practical effects). I’ve even enjoyed a few recent ones myself, like the zom-com titles Warm Bodies & Life After Beth, but I felt like those brought a lot more fresh ideas to the table. Wyrmwood is more concerned with having fun than having something interesting to say, which is a generally admirable approach to any genre, but just doesn’t add up to enough here. It would take someone with a certain level of reverence for the inherent charms of the zombie genre to not mind watching more of the same at this point, goofy antics or not. I just didn’t have it in me.

-Brandon Ledet