I’m currently watching Sex and the City for the first time without ever having much interest in it until now, and it’s instantly become an all-time favorite show. It turns out it makes a lot more sense once you hit your thirties. Who knew? In the last episode I watched, Charlotte confesses to her brunch buddies that her gynecologist prescribed a mild antidepressant to help get a vaginal infection in-check, pouting in a hushed panic “My vagina is depressed!” That kind of candid sexual humor was a large part of what made the show such a cultural phenomenon in the early aughts, when it was a lot less common to hear women openly joke about their genitals on national television. Before then, you had to go digging in smut to find that kind of ribald women’s humor, as evidenced by 1977’s (incredibly well-titled) talking vagina comedy Chatterbox! being directed by gay porno auteur Tom DeSimone. Chatterbox! only qualifies as a softcore porno if you squint at its AM Gold soft-rock lovemaking scenes with the most puritanical eye. Its main-attraction talking vagina never even makes an appearance on-screen, whether to avoid an X rating or to avoid the practical mechanics of gynecological puppetry. Still, it’s got a mildly naughty pedigree as an out-of-time, post-hardcore nudie cutie. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that you could hear women joke about their vaginas having minds of their own on the HBO sitcom equivalent of Seinfeld. Before then, you had to go see a dirty movie, even if not in the same sketchy theaters where they played DeSimone’s true trenchcoaters.
Most contemporary reviews of Chatterbox! dismissed it as a low-brow, juvenile sex comedy and a masturbatory fantasy for men. They were only half right. Yes, the jokes are idiotically crude, like when Virginia the Talking Vagina greets her mother with the zinger, “You didn’t even kiss me hello!” or when a potential sex partner responds to her propositions with “You didn’t even move your lips!” It’s all harmless schtick, but it’s schtick all the same. Still, the hapless hairdresser who happens to be attached to Virginia, Penelope, reacts to her supernatural genital predicament with such embarrassed horror that it’s difficult to imagine someone treating the film as pure masturbation fodder. As much fun as Virginia is having seducing every man (and most women) in their presence, Penelope is mortified that her crotch is getting so much attention, especially by the time the pair become late night talk show regulars as a kind of side show act. The film is pitched more directly to the women in the audience than you might expect, playing less like a macho fantasy than an adolescent stress dream about showing up to school naked. Its closest comparison point is The Peanut Butter Solution—a childhood nightmare about rapid hair growth—not the rearranged-female-body misogyny of Deep Throat. Penelope’s talking, misbehaving vagina is presumably voicing her sexual id, but it does little to bring her out of her shell as a sexual person. The two are mostly at odds with each other and struggle to find an equilibrium they’re happy with, much like Charlotte York whining about her depressed vagina to friends at brunch.
Chatterbox! is the kind of ramshackle production where the boom mic is onscreen so much it deserves its own character credit. At one point, Rip Taylor—a total pro—stealthily swats it out of the frame in annoyance for stealing his moment. The film’s sub-mainstream production values and other titles director’s back catalog (including gems like Swap Meat and Confessions of a Male Groupie) might raise questions of why it didn’t go full-porno, but I personally admire its decision to launch directly into its premise with no funny business. Virginia starts talking immediately in the first scene, complaining about Penelope’s longtime boyfriend’s lovemaking skills because Penelope would never voice those complaints herself. It’s not long before they make their debut on stage & television, after Penelope quickly manages to convince her friends & psychiatrist that Virginia really does have a mind of her own. That efficiency leaves room in the tight 70min runtime for Virginia to launch a star-making career as a disco singer, including multiple performances of her nonsense hit single “Wang Dang Doodle.” This is an aggressively silly, unsexy sex comedy about a woman’s war with her own body, like a Doris Wishman prototype for How to Get Ahead in Advertising – one with a lot less to say but a much more interesting place to say it from. I’m sure there are so-bad-its-good cult movie obsessives who think they’re laughing at the movie’s expense—the A Talking Pussy!?! jokes write themselves—but it appears to know exactly how silly and misshapen it is, to the point where it’s always in on the joke. In a word, it’s a hoot.
Also, in case you’re wondering, Penelope is a Charlotte but Virginia is a textbook Samantha. And, yes, I plan on ending every review with this exact analytical lens until I get this show out of my system.
It’s generally hackneyed for Western critics to compare any (or, in some egregious cases, all) modern anime directors to the legacy of Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s especially hackneyed to invoke that name when praising Makoto Shinkai, who’s been slapped with the ill-fitting label “The Next Miyazaki” at least since he made 5 Centimeters per Second two decades ago. I am a little guilty of this hack behavior myself, having compared the way Shinkai lovingly illustrates the beauty of urban settings with the way Miyazaki illustrates the majesty of Nature – twice, when reviewing both his breakout hit Your Name. and its lesser loved follow-up Weathering with You. And even though his latest film, Suzume, is partially set in the Japanese city of Miyazaki and features a direct shout-out to the Miyazaki-penned Whisper of the Heart, I really need to break the habit of typing that name every time a new Shinkai picture rolls through American cinemas. We all do.
At this point, Shinkai’s closest comparison point might be someone who only occasionally dabbles in animation: Wes Anderson. The 50-year-old industry long-timer has tripled down on his schtick so hard since Your Name. broke out in 2017 that his stubborn resistance to explore new visual or thematic territory has become endearingly stubborn in a distinctly Andersonian way. I know exactly what I’m going to get from a Makoto Shinkai picture long before I buy a ticket and accompanying popcorn bucket: a supernatural romance between youngsters distanced by Japan’s urban/rural divide – their lives eventually united though fast-moving trains, widespread disaster, and the transformative power of love. Shinkai’s non-existent lenses will “flair” across his CG-smoothed train rides and exquisitely detailed hand-drawn backdrops in the exact same way every single picture, and the only question, really, is what supernatural device he will use to keep his lovelorn teens apart. He’s been so consistent in his recent output that he’s inspired his own crop of shameless imitators (as evidenced by other, lesser teen romances like Fireworks & I Want to Eat Your Pancreas) the same way that Wes Anderson’s retro, symmetrical wit inspired aggressively unwitty flicks like Garden State & Napoleon Dynamite. The thing with both directors is that no matter how familiar & insular their respective filmmaking styles have become, they’re both still delivering vividly entertaining work every project. I don’t know that Shinkai will ever match the soaring teen emotions of Your Name., but the artistry of his two triple-down follow-ups still coasts miles above most modern animation. Like with Anderson, his work remains impressively gorgeous & earnest in the moment even if it’s no longer surprising or novel in the larger context of his career.
In this particular game of Makoto Shinkai Mad Libs, a rural teenager stumbles across a magical doorway guarded by a stone cat figurine that her touch brings to life. When the impish cat-god scampers away, the unguarded door opens to unleash gigantic flaming tendrils from The Other Side that slam down on her unsuspecting hometown, threatening to destroy everything & everyone she knows in devastating earthquakes. A college-age hunk she immediately crushes on teaches her how to close & lock this dangerous door, then joins forces with her to return the cat-god to its rightful station. Only, the little feline prankster turns the hunk into a talking chair, which makes the heroic pair’s already awkward romance even more uneasy. From there, Suzume and her wooden-chair beau chase the kitten around Japan, closing all the doorways to the afterlife that open without its protection along the way. The wide-scale tragedy of the resulting earthquakes is treated seriously and is eventually tied to the 3/11 tsunami disaster that devastated Japan in 2011. That historical context piles a lot of emotional heft onto the youngsters’ flirtatious relationship, but it’s also lightened by the physical awkwardness of their predicament. In some ways turning the older boy into a talking chair makes him a less threatening object of desire for his teen-girl counterpart, but the movie still has cheeky fun in moments when he is visibly flustered that Suzume sits in his “lap.” When she asks, vacantly, “Um, why are you a chair?” in perfect teenage aloofness, Shinkai is winking a signal that it’s okay to giggle at the outlandish premise. Even so, the physical object the boy inhabits is eventually afforded its own emotional heft in Suzume’s backstory, so that his transformation is rooted in a tsukumogami Japanese folklore tradition instead of a LOL, So Random flippancy. By the time Suzume crosses the gates of Hell to rescue her chair from the afterlife and defeat the flaming earthquake tendrils for good, there’s no question how seriously we’re supposed to take their relationship.
As easy as it is to become jaded about Shinkai’s tendency to repeat himself, there’s also no denying that he’s good at what he does. By the film’s fiery emotional crescendo where Suzume is struggling to dislodge her new chair friend from his Arthurian stone prison while the world ends around them, it’s incredible how breezy the journey to get there felt in retrospect. It’s as if you were so distracted by the frustrations of retrieving an escaped kitten that you didn’t even notice you opened the forbidden Hell door from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland during the frantic search (a formative film that I beg you not to scan its production credits, to spare me further self-inflicted accusations of hackiness). Shinkai has a way of building to immense wonder & awe even if you start out assuming you’ve seen it all before, and I’m starting to hope he never changes course. I want him to follow the Wes Anderson career path where every subsequent Makoto Shinkai movie will be the most Makoto Shinkaingest movie the world has ever seen. May we all survive the disasters of climate change long enough to see his anime equivalent of The French Dispatch in 2032.
Welcome to Episode #184 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee celebrate Tax Day with a grab bag of movies about dramatic tax audits & tax evasions, starting with Juzo Itami’s A Taxing Woman (1987).
00:00 Welcome
02:08 Suzume (2023) 04:55 Enys Men(2023) 13:18 Passion of the Christ (2004) 20:55 Ernst Lubitsch 27:21 John Wick: Chapter IV (2023) 32:00 The Women (1939)
37:30 A Taxing Woman (1987) 56:15 The Laundromat (2019) 1:16:20 3 Hearts (2014) 1:36:00 Exotica (1994)
I had an unusually difficult time pinning down the intended purpose of the early-aughts punk culture documentary D.I.Y. or Die, despite its multiple subtitles’ attempts to provide context. The DVD copy of the film I picked up at my neighborhood thrift store was titled D.I.Y. or Die: Burn This DVD, proposing that this low-budget, low-effort documentary was intended to function as a kind of motion-picture zine, to be shared freely among aspiring punk artists who would benefit from its scene-specific insights & inspiration. The more official subtitle on its IMDb & Wikipedia pages is D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, which proposes that it’s more of a how-to guide for those sure-to-be-struggling punk artists, desperate for pointers on how to keep their half-shaved heads above water. The third, most robust title that populates under heavy pixelations and antiqued digital film grain effects in the movie proper is D.I.Y. or Die: “A documentary by Michael W. Dean on the means, modes, and methods on independent American artists in different genres & mediums.” That last one at least hints at the college-essay structuring of the piece, which includes an intro thesis paragraph delivered by Director Dean before he asks generic, rigidly segmented “What inspires you?” questions to an admittedly impressive collection of artists he’s roped in as talking heads. It’s the bragging rights of assembling those interviewees that gives the film its true sense of purpose, as evidenced by its DVD cover art attempting to squeeze each of their faces into a gargantuan Brady Bunch grid. D.I.Y. or Die is not the only place you can hear always-welcome punk proselytizers like Ian MacKaye, Richard Kern, and Lydia Lunch pontificate about the virtues of maintaining a D.I.Y. ethos in your outsider art, but it is a convenient check-in on how they were all holding up in the early aughts.
None of the writers, painters, sculptors, poets, musicians, or software developers interviewed here actually provide useful tips on how to survive as an independent artist. The closest the film comes to achieving that stated goal is in a DVD extra where longtime punk grumpa Steve Albini explains that it’s naive to expect a large enough audience will want or need your Art that you won’t have to maintain a day job to sustain yourself. The practicality of that sentiment is directly opposed to the vague anti-corporate rhetoric of the interviews that made it into the final edit, which mostly consist of artists wistfully explaining why they create, not how they eat or pay rent. For an actually useful guide on how to survive as an independent artist in the internet age, there’s no better resource than Matt Farley’s auto-fictional Local Legends, which sketches out a practical roadmap of how artists can have fun strategically “selling out” in minor, playful ways that keep the lights on. For its part, D.I.Y. or Die is a time capsule of the last possible minute when the countercultural betrayal of “selling out” meant something about your integrity, back when the internet was mostly made of fan pages & message boards and hadn’t yet turned the users ourselves into product via social media. There’s a tipping point between physical zine culture and intangible online ephemera incidentally documented here, both in how the DVD extras include “weblinks” to long dead URLs and how the founder of Craigslist is included alongside Ian MacKaye’s self-operated Dischord record label as if both companies were born of the same punk ethos. A more honest integration of what self-distributed art looked like in the early internet age would have included amateur pornographers instead, who are not represented here (unless you want to squint at Lunch & Kern from the most reductive angle possible). At the very least, I can’t imagine it would’ve been hard to track down Annie Sprinkle for a quick Q&A, considering how many of the contributors were filmed in NYC. Whether it’s because Dean didn’t think through why he was grouping together these exact interview subjects beyond how cool they’d be to talk to or it’s because D.I.Y. culture itself was in a confused, liminal stasis at the time, D.I.Y. or Die is unclear on what it wants to say about the state of punk culture in the early 2000s beyond “Fuck yeah.”
I don’t relish being a cynic here, two entire decades after this hour-long tribute to art-for-art’s sake creativity last meant something to anyone. If anything, I’m likely a little touchy about its intellectual laziness because it’s so similar to my own for-its-own-sake hobby of running this film blog & podcast. As an independent artistic project, Swampflix is equally confused about how to carry over zine culture ethos & aesthetics into the digital age, and I do sometimes worry that my casual, Xeroxed blogging stye comes across as the same kind of performative laziness that’s passed off as “punk” here. There’s something about the director presenting himself in wrinkled t-shirts and presenting his interviewees in unflattering, unconsidered angles & lighting that really bothers me. It’s often charming when an artist leaves noticeable fingerprints on a rough-around-the-edges work, leaving in mistakes and glimpses of the tools of production. It’s annoying when “punk” is misinterpreted as “no effort”, though, and I’m always looking for artists to use their available resources—no matter how limited—in the most passionate, effective ways possible. D.I.Y. or Die is from an earlier, easier era in online culture when self-distributed art like this motion-zine DVD could actually reach a wide, excited audience, because the digital landscape wasn’t so constantly flooded with #content — independent, corporate, or otherwise. I cut a lot of corners running this website, most notably in how often I’ll recycle the same Sharpie doodle illustrations over & over again instead of drafting new ones every post. For example, the little mohawked icon at the top of this review is a slightly doctored illustration I drew when reviewing Bulletproof Monk eight years ago, hastily edited in MS Paint. I’m not using the tools available to me to make the most effective, passionate #content I can, but I’m also a sell-out with a full-time desk job who does this stuff on the side for fun, so I don’t think I should be held to the same standards of artistic integrity. Steve Albini may have been sidelined to the DVD extras, but he still inevitably won the “debate.”
All that said, there was one aspect of D.I.Y. or Die that I did find genuinely inspiring: the inclusion of punk-scene cellist Madigan Shive. Shive enjoyed some brief notoriety in the 1990s when her band Tattle Tale was picked up by the tastemaker label Kill Rock Stars and landed a single on the foundational CD soundtrack for But, I’m a Cheerleader. Around the time D.I.Y. or Die was released in the early 2000s, her mostly-solo musical act Bonfire Madigan was an even more niche interest, which I can confirm anecdotally from having attended a concert of hers in a mostly empty Zeitgeist art gallery within a year of this documentary’s release, when my high school era obsession with her music was at its most intense. Shive is adorably earnest in her interviews here, and genuinely seems like a cool, intelligent person. What most inspired me, though, was following up after the film was over to see that she still regularly plays concerts (mostly in the Bay Area, where most of these interviews were filmed) and stays engaged with dedicated fans online, two decades since I last heard anyone say “Bonfire Madigan” out loud (besides when asking me about my now-ratty Bonfire Madigan t-shirt, purchased at that sparsely attended concert). I have no intel on whether Shive had to take the Albini advice on maintaining a day job to keep herself afloat, but I also don’t think that distinction matters. She’s continued to make passionate, independent art for decades now, regardless of the ebbs & flows of audience interest & commercial appeal, which is genuinely inspiring to me as a writer with no clear incentives left to keep writing. Maybe D.I.Y. or Die didn’t include any practical tips on how to survive as an independent artist because the only real tip you need is to “Just keep doing the work” and let momentum take care of the rest. That doesn’t mean the work shouldn’t have integrity in its artistic standards beyond the punk street cred of its production, though, which is where most of my cynicism is coming from here.
We cover many flavors of schlock on this blog, but we tend to ignore one of the most popular, profitable sources of schlock around: “faith-based” Christian propaganda. Outside a one-off podcast episode where we dipped our collective toe into the frigid waters of Evangelical schlock (covering God’s Not Dead & The Shack) and Boomer’s long-dormant Late Great Planet Mirth series covering the Evangelical Rapture films of decades past, we haven’t dealt much with the cheap-o Christian propaganda that pads out new release schedules at every suburban multiplex, despite it indulging the same market-based opportunism as genres we do love, like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. That’s mostly because modern “faith-based” media preaches only to the choir, echoing predetermined conclusions that its target audience already righteously agrees with: God is real, abortion is evil, and anyone who disagrees is an agent of Satan. It’s hard to have fun with even the silliest of B-movies when their messaging is that sourly cruel & misanthropic. If anything, the micro-industry of “faith-based” propaganda has made it explicitly clear that it doesn’t want heathens like us in the audience. It doesn’t want us alive & free to walk about in public at all, a sentiment it’s more than willing to voice through fascist mouthpieces like Kevin Sorbo & Kirk Cameron into the nearest, loudest megaphone. That’s why it’s so weird that I found myself watching, reviewing, and—against all odds—enjoying the faith-based propaganda piece The Devil Conspiracy. Like God’s Not Dead before it, it’s a despicable film that asserts in every line-reading & plot beat that God is real, abortion is evil, and anyone who disagrees is an agent of Satan. Unlike God’s Not Dead, however, it’s also a fun, silly little romp and a good time at the movies.
The Devil Conspiracy represents a new evolution in “faith-based” Christian propaganda, borrowing the visual language of action-fantasy superhero epics to sweeten the bitter, hateful messaging at the genre’s core. It brings me no pleasure to admit that the gamble mostly works, which is evident in how little enthusiasm actual Catholics & Evangelicals appear to have for it. My (admittedly light) internet research attempting to gauge the film’s cultural impact revealed very little since it snuck into wide distribution this January, except a few articles detailing small Catholic protests decrying the movie as “blasphemous.” This is surprising on both sides of the Christian-heathen coin. You’d think that religious groups would embrace the film as cultural outreach, Trojan Horsing the same anti-Satan, anti-abortion rhetoric that’s usually reserved for bland message pieces “starring” Kelsey Grammer into a thrilling action film comparable to (the Thor: The Dark World era of) The MCU. You’d also think that schlock-hungry horror obsessives catching a glimpse of the word “Devil” in the title would’ve been drawn to its bonkers logline premise, of which I can do no better job marketing than to just copy & past in plain text: “The hottest biotech company in the world has discovered they can clone history’s most influential people from the dead. Now, they are auctioning clones of Michelangelo, Galileo, Vivaldi, and others for tens of millions of dollars to the world’s ultra-rich. But when they steal the Shroud of Turin and clone the DNA of Jesus, all hell breaks loose.” The Devil Conspiracy may have achieved the widest gap between wild premise and mild purpose in the history of genre filmmaking. It is the ultimate reactionary superhero film, approximating what it might be like if Zack Snyder remade End of Days for Pure Flix Entertainment. The result apparently baffles everyone and pleases almost no one, except the few freaks who find the novelty of R-rated Christian superhero propaganda inherently fascinating (i.e., me).
It might surprise you to learn that the plot to clone Jesus from his mythical DNA remnants on the Shroud of Turin isn’t a ploy to jumpstart his Second Coming. Because the world is so overrun with abortion-happy Satanists, Jesus’s DNA is instead perverted to create a suitable host body for the in-the-flesh coming of Satan, who has been awaiting his opportunity to reign on Earth since he initially rebelled. Satan’s poor mother-to-be is an unsuspecting, unmarried academic who values science over religion, to her own peril. After losing a few God’s Not Dead-style theological “debates” with enlightened clergymen, she’s kidnapped by Satanists and, in the film’s most hellish sequence, forcibly impregnated in a laboratory with the Jesus/Satan hybrid child, which essentially transforms her into a demonic hellbeast with a baby bump. It’s up to the archangel Michael and his magical sword to save her soul and save humanity before the Satan-Christ can be born in the flesh, which mostly amounts to him fighting off a few robed cultists in industrial hallways. It’s not easy staging a blockbuster superhero epic on the leftover sets & budget of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, but The Devil Conspiracy does a decent job of wringing its batshit premise for all its worth. There’s something about its scrappy brand of demon-slaying, Satanist-decapitating action-horror that helps its despicable messaging that “Science has given The Devil his way out of Hell” go down a lot smoother than it would’ve coming out of Kevin Sorbo’s equally horrific mouth, despite my better judgement. As soon as the superheroic prologue where Lucifer falls from “Heaven” (outer space) to Hell (the Earth’s core) and growls to Michael that it’s “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” there’s no appropriate response to its incendiary, Biblically metal imagery other than “This is badass.”
I should be clear here: I’m glad The Devil Conspiracy failed. Ideologically, I am opposed to everything it has to say about humanity & spiritualism. Formally, I think it hits the exact same numbing dips in novelty & momentum that most secular, crowd-pleasing superhero epics suffer. Still, there was a lot of perverse fun in watching one of these hateful propaganda pieces aim its weapons just outside its usual target demographic, seeking not just to preach but also to entertain. In a different, worse world where it became a breakout success, I’d hate seeing its army of imitators emerge from the bowels of Heaven to smite my heathen ass. As an anomalous, R-rated Christian propaganda film loved by no one, it’s got its scrappy, schlocky charms. May I never be tempted by one of these evil, hateful sermons again, no matter how spectacularly silly.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon, James, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, including the exhaustive direct-to-video erotic thriller documentary We Kill for Love (2023).
In a year when all the buzziest horror titles are slow-cinema abstractions, it feels nice to finally have one stab me squarely in the brain stem after so many near-misses. I greatly enjoyed the experience of parsing my way through The Outwaters & Skinamarink, but my response to both of those microbudget crowd-displeasers was more intellectual than emotional. Yes, Skinamarink left me tense & unnerved, but it also left me with lingering questions about how its modern digital filters interacted with or clashed against its vintage analog setting. The Outwaters is, by design, much more traditionally satisfying, delivering recognizable scares in its found footage freak-out finale, but it also leaves plenty of free time to question whether the deliberate boredom of its opening acts is worth the journey to that finale. I had no such doubts or hesitations about Mark Jenkin’s slow-cinema nightmare Enys Men. In many ways, Enys Men is even more inscrutable & disjointed than both of those digital-age D.I.Y. abstractions, since its dream-logic “plotting” makes it impossible to fully interpret in any clean, clear terms. And yet I had full confidence that Jenkin thoroughly, thoughtfully considered each of his formal & narrative choices so that instead of picking apart its eerie psychedelic imagery I was instead fully submerged in it, eventually gasping for air as the resulting tension became unbearable. When defining the effects & methods of slow cinema as a young film critic, Paul Schrader coined the term “transcendental style” as an easy go-to marker for what it could achieve. It’s immensely satisfying to finally know what that transcendence feels like, at least when it’s deployed for a purely horrific effect.
It’s a little dishonest for me to link Enys Men so closely with smaller, modernist works that just happen to terrorize audiences at the same slow-drip tempo. This Cornish folk horror about a Stone Henge-like monument to sailors drowned at sea is part of a long English filmmaking tradition, as recently documented in the folk horror compendium Wooodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. Its vintage 16mm camera equipment & 1970s setting threaten to dip into kitschy folk-horror pastiche, but instead it feels like a genuine marriage of form & content that projects a timeless, eerie familiarity rather than cutesy nostalgia. Even its version of “transcendental style” owes a lot to slow cinema giants of the distant past, with its science researcher protagonist repeating her daily field work in a distinct, methodical Jeanne Dielman rhythm (before her own fixed routine unravels to resemble the seaside ghost story of John Carpenter’s The Fog). Slow cinema has only gotten more extreme in the half-century since Chantal Akerman made The Greatest Film of All Time, though, and Enys Men‘s underlying modernity eventually shines through in the volatility of its editing style once its nameless researcher loses grip. It’s remarkable how Jenkin dredges up something that feels at once familiar yet cutting edge – a Skinamarinkian slow-cinema shocker rendered in a vintage Don’t Look Now color palette. More important, its traditionalist imagery is useful in establishing a false sense of comfort & safety among a jaded horror audience who’ve seen it all before, so that when we’re plunged into the unfamiliar in the final hour, the effect is much scarier than it would’ve been under a layer of modern digital grain.
Mary Woodvine stars as the nameless volunteer scientist who studies a small cluster of flowers on the cliffs of the titular Enys Men (a Cornish name that translates to “Stone Island”). After several lonely weeks observing “No changes” in those flowers, she notices lichen growing on their pedals, an intrusion that has an instant hallucinatory effect on her psyche. Initially isolated with only her field research and a few dog-eared paperbacks to fill her days, she’s joined by the presence of ghostly figures from both the history of Enys Men and from the history of her own life. It’s unclear where the young girl who resembles her fits into her own past (a lost daughter? a younger version of herself?), but it is clear that the drowned miners & seamen memorialized by the stone monument outside her cottage door still linger around the island as lost spirits. Or at least that’s what little sense my brain could make of the loopy, looping images Jenkin floods the screen with; there’s ultimately too little information to confidently assign any linear story to the emotional, hallucinatory journey our researcher in distress travels. Enys Men is a pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief, one where running out of your monthly supply of tea is just as devastating as losing a boatful of loved ones at sea. Like Akerman before him, Jenkin makes his troubled protagonist’s world so small & regimented that the tiniest changes in her routine mean the world in the moment. Only, assigning any logical meaning to those changes is a fool’s mission in this case, as her downfall is staged entirely inside her own mind, with the titular island serving mostly as spooky Old World set dressing.
Hesitations about individual examples aside, you have to respect that the innate marketability of the horror genre is starting to import experimental filmmaking tactics into the mainstream. Enys Men immediately picked up North American distribution after it premiered at last year’s Cannes, likely because its traditionalist folk horror aesthetic was such an easy sell. Meanwhile, Jenkin’s previous feature Bait has yet to reach wide domestic distribution despite its years of fanatic endorsement from major British critic Mark Kermode and its similar vintage visual panache. It’s likely no coincidence that Bait is a real-world drama about gentrification in a small Cornwall fishing village, which can’t help sounding like homework even if it’s just as freely, weirdly expressive as Jenkin’s follow-up. The joy of seeing movies as difficult as The Outwaters & Skinamarink break through as unlikely hits earlier this year only highlights how horror has become one of the only viable mediums where artists can Trojan Horse actual Art into mainstream venues, since the genre’s popularity is seemingly eternal. Since Skinamarink was the biggest hit of the three, it turns out that a little grassroots buzz & viral marketing on TikTok also help. It’s a shame that Enys Men missed the boat on TikTok’s momentary obsession with sea shanties a few years ago, when it was best primed to be a cult-circuit hit. It’s still wonderful that it was nationally distributed at all, though, since it’s the exact kind of sensory nightmare that requires theatrical immersion to fully work its dark, hypnotic magic.
After I happened to spend an entire day watching horror movies about motherhood at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, I found myself searching for patterns in the festival’s programming wherein the movies were communicating with each other just as much as they were provoking the audience. I didn’t have to squint too hard at my next double-feature to see their thematic connections, since the word “artifice” was already staring back at me in the first film’s title. My third & final day at this year’s Overlook was all about the tension between identity & artifice, and how the latter obscures the former. In the philosophical sci-fi horror at the top of that self-programmed double bill, the opaque surface of artifice is stripped away to reveal a complex, futuristic sense of identity underneath. In the true crime documentary that followed, the surface of artifice is removed to uncover no discernible human identity at all, which makes for a much bleaker, scarier reveal. Please forgive me for the inanity of reporting that this is an instance where the truth is stranger than fiction; I watched these particular movies hungover in a chilly downtown shopping mall, and I’m not sure my brain has fully recovered from watching two twisty thrillers about the complexities of human identity in that hazy state.
That morning’s theme-unlocking opener, The Artifice Girl, is a well-timed A.I. chatbot technothriller, turning just a few actors running lines in drab office spaces into a complex study of the fuzzy borders between human & artificial identity. Approached with the same unrushed, underplayed drama as the similarly structured Marjorie Prime, The Artifice Girl jumps time frames between acts as the titular A.I. chatbot is introduced in her infancy, gains sentience, and eventually earns her autonomy. She is initially created with queasy but altruistic intentions: designed to bait and indict online child molesters with the visage of a little girl who does not actually, physically exist. As the technology behind her “brain” patterns exponentially evolves, the ethics of giving something with even a simulation of intelligence & emotion that horrifically shitty of a job becomes a lot murkier. By the time she’s creating art and expressing genuine feelings, her entire purpose becomes explicitly immoral, since there’s no foolproof way to determine what counts as her identity or free will vs. what counts as her user-determined programming. The Artifice Girl does a lot with a little, asking big questions with limited resources. The closest it gets to feeling like a professional production is in the climactic intrusion of genre legend Lance Henriksen in the cast, whose journey as Bishop in the Alien series has already traveled these same A.I. autonomy roads on a much larger scale in the past. It’s got enough surprisingly complex stage play dialogue to stand on its own without Henriksen’s support, but his weighty late-career presence is the exact kind of hook it needs to draw an audience’s attention.
By contrast, David Farrier’s new documentary Mister Organ desperately searches for an attention-grabbing hook but never finds one. The New Zealand journalist drives himself mad attempting to recapture the lighting-in-a-bottle exposé he engineered in Tickled, investigating another unbelievable shit-heel subject who “earns” his living in nefarious, exploitative ways. At first, it seems like Farrier is really onto something. The titular Mr. Organ is an obvious conman, introduced to Farrier as a parking lot bully who “clamps” locals’ tires for daring to park in the wrong lot, then shakes them down for exorbitant piles of cash to remove the boots – making the high-end antique store he patrols a front for a much more lucrative, predatory side hustle. With only a little digging, that parking lot thug turns out to be a much bigger news story, one with fascinating anecdotes about stolen yachts, abandoned asylums, micro cults, and forged royal bloodlines. Or so Farrier thinks. The more he digs into his latest subject’s past to uncover his cleverly obscured identity, the more Farrier comes away empty-handed & bewildered. Mr. Organ is more an obnoxious Ricky Gervais caricature of a human being than he is a genuine one. He babbles for hours on end about nothing, holding Farrier hostage on speakerphone with the promise of a gotcha breakthrough moment that will never come. Organ is a literal ghoul, a real-life energy vampire, an artificial surface with no identity underneath. As a result, the documentary is a creepy but frustrating journey to nowhere, one where by the end the artist behind it is just as unsure what the point of the entire exercise was as the audience. It is a document of a failure.
Normally, when I contrast & compare two similarly themed features I walk away with a clearer understanding of both. In this case, my opinion of this unlikely pair only becomes more conflicted as I weigh them against each other. In the controlled, clinical, fictional environment of The Artifice Girl, an identity-obscuring layer of artifice is methodically, scientifically removed to reveal a complex post-human persona underneath. In the messy, real-world manipulations of Mister Organ, the surface-level artifice is all there is, and stripping it away reveals nothing that can be cleanly interpreted nor understood. Of course, the fictional stage play version of that exercise is more narratively satisfying than the reality-bound mechanics of true crime storytelling, which often leads to unsolved cases & loose, frayed ends. The Artifice Girl tells you exactly how to feel at the end of its artificially engineered drama, which is effective in the moment but leaves little room for its story to linger after the credits. The open-ended frustration of Mister Organ is maybe worthier to dwell in as you leave the theater, then, even if its own conclusion amounts to Farrier throwing up his hands in forfeit, walking away from an opaque nothing of a subject – the abstract personification of Bad Vibes. As a result, neither film was wholly satisfying either in comparison or in isolation, and I don’t know that I’ll ever fully make sense of my dehydrated, dispirited afternoon spent pondering them.
Film festival programming is a real-world Choose Your Own Adventure game where individual moviegoers can have wildly varied, simultaneous experiences at the exact same venue. Overall, I had a great time at this year’s Overlook (an annual horror festival that’s quickly become the most rewarding cinematic Cultural Event on the New Orleans social calendar), but I weirdly frontloaded my personal programming choices so that the films I was most excited to see—Late Night with the Devil, The Five Devils, and Smoking Causes Coughing—were all knocked out as a rapid-fire triple feature on the very first day. For the rest of the weekend, I wandered around Overlook in a self-induced daze, wowed by my Opening Night selections and hoping something smaller & more anonymous would match those early highs as I bounced between screening rooms at the downtown Prytania. I can’t say I ever got there (at least not in the way other festivalgoers gushed about big-name titles like Renfield, Talk to Me, and Evil Dead Rise throughout the weekend), but I did find some clear thematic patterns in my personal program as the fest stretched on. For instance, my entire second day at this year’s Overlook focused on the horrors of motherhood, a self-engineered happenstance I can’t imagine was the intent of the festival’s programmers, since they could not have known which exact Choose Your Own Adventure path their audience would lock ourselves into. While nothing on Day 2 floored me the way buzzier titles had on Day 1, they collectively gave me a lot of squicky Mommy Issues to dwell on in the festival’s downtown shopping mall locale – a theme that, come to think of it, was also echoed elsewhere on the docket in Clock, The Five Devils, Give Me an A, and Evil Dead Rise.
The best of the motherhood horrors I caught that day was the prickly pregnancy story Birth/Rebirth, which will premiere on Shudder later this year. In its simplest terms, Birth/Rebirth is a morbid little Found Family story where the family glue is composed of reanimated corpses & unethically harvested fetal tissue. Let’s call it Women in FrankenSTEM. It details the unlikely team-up of a brash, uncaring pathologist who experiments on reanimating dead bodies in her inner-city apartment and a warm, compassionate nurse from the same hospital who loses her young daughter to an aggressive bacterial infection. The two women form a makeshift family when they inevitably bring the daughter back to “life” via a serum derived from prenatal tissue, harvested through a chemical process that eventually leads to desperate acts of violence to keep the experiment going. There’s plenty of morbid humor in the film’s “Honey, I’m home,” “How was work?” domestic banter as this new family routine becomes more comfortable, but its tone & central themes are relatively heavy. For all of its upsetting surgical imagery involving needles, spines, and wombs (sometimes made even grimier through found-footage camcorder grain), the film often just engages in a very thoughtful contrast/compare debate about the differences between science & medicine. That debate gets especially heated when hospital staff maintain a cold, scientific distancing from their pregnant patients instead of treating them like human beings in need of compassionate care, a threshold that even the more humane nurse crosses in pursuit of keeping her daughter “alive.” Birth/Rebirth is refreshingly honest & matter-of-fact about pregnant women’s bodily functions and the medical industry’s indifference to their wellbeing. It’s not a great film (often lacking a pronounced sense of style or narrative momentum), but it is a satisfying, provocative one.
The worst of the motherhood horrors on my docket was the Mongolian axe-murder thriller Aberrance. Aberrance may even be the worst feature I can remember seeing at any film festival, a self-programming mistake that became apparent as soon as its opening frames foreshadow its pregnant damsel in distress running from its axe-wielding killer under a veil of cheaply rendered digital snowfall. Whereas Birth/Rebirth had smart, straightforward observations to make about how misogynist the medical industry can be, Aberrance instead follows a series of for-their-own sake plot twists that muddle any possible good-faith readings of its social messaging. At the start, this vapid, cheap-o thriller pretends to be a domestic violence story about a heroic neighbor bravely standing up to the abuser next door, who keeps his pregnant wife locked away from the world in order to “protect” her from her own mental illness. Several generic plot twists & mainstream horror tropes later, the movie appears to be asserting an extensive list of incendiary falsehoods that get more infuriating as they thoughtlessly pile up: Don’t be nosy about apparent domestic abuse conflicts in other people’s homes; don’t trust the medication prescribed to treat your mental illness; and, most importantly, if a woman is mentally ill, the best fix is for her to just have a baby. While Birth/Rebirth has incisive things to say about women’s minds, bodies, and care, Aberrance doesn’t care at all about the pregnant victim at the center of its story. She’s a mostly wordless vehicle for thematically inane, irresponsible plot twists and flashy, for-its-own sake camerawork that initially appears playful & inventive but quickly becomes dull & repetitive. The only halfway interesting thing about the movie is the cultural specificity of its Mongolian setting, but that’s not nearly enough to compensate for its boneheaded qualities as a mother-in-peril story.
Lurking somewhere between the disparate quality of those two polar-opposite motherhood thrillers is the couture-culture body horror Appendage, which will premiere on Hulu sometime later this year (likely as part of their annual “Huluween” package). Appendage‘s connections to the day’s unintentional motherhood theme are initially less apparent than the first two films’, unless you consider a woman growing a sentient, talking tumor on her hip to represent an abstract form of giving birth. The story follows a young fashion designer whose professional stress over a highly competitive, demanding job manifests in a hateful, id-indulging tumor that grows on her body and gradually develops a life of its own. It’s a fairly common creature feature set-up, especially in a horror comedy context. Think Basket Case but make it fashion (or Hatching but make it fashion, or Bad Milo but make it fashion, or How to Get Ahead in Advertising but make it fashion, etc.). The scenes featuring the rubber-puppet monster make for an adorable addition to that subgenre, but they also highlight how bland Appendage can feel when the absorbed-twin tumor is nowhere to be seen. Except, I did find its connective-tissue drama interesting within the larger theme of the day, if only through happenstance. By the end of the film, it’s clear that our troubled fashionista’s self-negging workplace woes are less about job stress than they are an echo of her uptight WASP mother’s overly harsh criticisms of her every decision. As it chugs along, Appendage proves to have way more on its mind about its underlying Mommy Issues than it does about the fashion industry, which is mostly used as an arbitrary broad-comedy backdrop akin to the killer-blue-jeans novelty horror Slaxx. The promise of the premise is that we’ll watch a young woman spar against the monstrously abnormal growth on her body, but instead we often watch her do petty, verbal battle with the abnormal monster who birthed her.
Birth/Rebirth was my favorite selection from the second day of Overlook by any metric, and it only grew in my estimation as the day’s incidental horrors-of-motherhood patterns revealed themselves. Even so, there are brief moments of Appendage that make it recommendable as potential Halloween Season viewing, especially for anyone who’s delighted by throwback practical-effects monsters. The same cannot be said about Aberrance, an entirely useless work as both a pregnancy narrative and as an axe-wielding slasher cheapie. It’s admirable that Overlook programmed a low-budget no-namer from an underserved market like Mongolia but, much like me, they took a chance on a dud. It still helped guide & flesh out my Choose Your Own Adventure programming choices for the day, though, even if only to make the other motherhood horror titles that bookended it appear even greater by comparison.
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