There’s nothing punks and metalheads love to debate more than authenticity and scene cred, so that’s the only critical lens I could think to apply to the no-budget slasher Blood Sick Psychosis. Set in Philadelphia’s D.I.Y. metal scene, Blood Sick Psychosis is a dual throwback to SOV camcorder horrors and the earlier metalsploitation trend of the Satanic Panic era. So, I’d argue it loses a few punk authenticity points for indulging in retro genre pastiche instead of being true to its era. It clearly admires no-budget horror “classics” like the Canuxploitation slasher Things, Tina Krause’s surrealist headscratcher Limbo, and the Paloma Brothers’ home video gross-out Hallucinations, only modernizing its feature-length homage to that era with an updated crust-metal soundtrack and a few stray shots of cellphones. It’s a loving copy of a pre-set SOV slasher template, presented in the exact way most of the movies it emulates are seen by modern audiences: frequently interrupted by ad breaks on subscription-free streamers like Plex. Whether you find that style of pastiche charming is a question of taste, but the movie opens with its villainous lead having a Crispin Glover-sized emotional breakdown while wearing a River’s Edge promotional t-shirt, so you can’t say you were not warned.
Where Blood Sick Psychosis racks up its punk-cred authenticity points is in the way it continues the true mission of retro SOV slashers: documentation of its filmmakers having a good, wholesome time. Like all great regional, no-budget horrors, it’s basically community theatre. Blood Sick Psychosis drags its audience through a guided tour of the drive-in movie theaters, squat basement music venues, and cheesesteak shops of modern Philadelphia, all presented through the prism of VHS tape warp. No detail in its plot about a depressed metalhead loner who goes on a senseless killing spree with his acid dealer matters as much as its survey of a local D.I.Y. show starring the Philly-based black metal band Spiter, who encourage their audience “to kill yourself for Satan” before serenading them with the mantra “Suicidal bloodfucker, vampiric bloodsucker”. This is an on-the-ground document of a scene and, even though I’ve never been, I’ve always gotten the impression that Philly is the exact performatively cold & cruel D.I.Y. subculture captured in this gnarly self-portrait. Even when the camera cuts away from reality to indulge in LSD vampirism, paranoid rants about bodily mutations, and the ritualistic slaughter of animals, it still plays like a charming little caricature of the City of Brotherly Love.
Punk infighting about posers & stolen valor has always been incredibly tedious, and I don’t mean to participate in it with any sincerity. I just thought it would be fun to pick at this movie from that angle, since it’s about the exact scene-obsessed dipshits who would care about that kind of thing. In its most telling scene, our two LSD-crazed serial killers chat outside the Spiter show about how annoying it is that punk screenings of Extreme Cinema are all tagged with trigger warnings now, both voicing a genuine frustration with modern punk culture sensitivity and, by the time the conversation reaches its punchline, mocking the reprobates who would oppose that sensitivity. Its playdough claymation credits, Jackass-style “creepy crawl” home invasion pranks, and spectacularly lazy Dave “The Rock” Nelson cameo (seemingly a direct homage to legendary pornstar Amber Lynn’s half-hearted participation in Things) are all overt signals to the audience that it’s just having a laugh, often at its own expense. That willingness to self-satirize really helps smooth over the overtly retro genre nostalgia and slasher-standard misogyny that creeps in at its weakest points. Personally, I’d be more interested in a version of this movie that actually reflects the tools & textures of its digital-video times, but this movie wasn’t made for me. It was made for the cold-hearted metalhead brutes of Philly, who appear to be having a lot of fun.
Welcome to the Swampflix Podcast Halloween Special. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror movies about evil surgeons, starting with the major studio body horror Body Parts (1991).
0:00 Welcome
01:51 Fascination (1979) 04:20 See for Me (2022) 09:05 Blood Sick Psychosis (2022) 12:40 The Night Porter (1974)
16:44 Body Parts (1991) 33:45 The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) 46:33 Scalpel (1977) 59:25 The Skin I Live In (2011)
Just like all other major entries in decades-running horror franchises, David Gordon Green’s Halloween was sharply divisive among genre fans as soon as it hit theaters in 2018. Even so, its reputation has only declined in the five years since, especially as it has become the go-to, defining example of mainstream horror’s current “legacy sequel” trend. Not only does the Halloween reboot have to answer for its own revisions of Laurie Strode & Michael Myers lore, but it also now carries the weight of horror nerd complaints against more recent offenses like 2019’s Child’s Play, 2021’s Candyman, and this year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s also been reduced to a scapegoat trendsetter for the Trauma Metaphor Horror wave that has followed in its wake, while artsier, standalone titles like Hereditary & The Babadook have maintained much steadier, more prestigious reputations in the same context. It doesn’t help, of course, that Green has diluted his Halloween legacyquel with two follow-up films that have only alienated the Michael Myers purists even further as the series stumbled along. I opted out of the David Gordon Ween discourse when Halloween Kills opened to white-hot angry reviews last year, but now that his theatrical mini-series is over and the online vitriol has been directed elsewhere (mostly at Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which is practically a legacy sequel to Stepford Wives), it finally felt safe to return to Haddonfield to see how his take on Halloween has evolved.
Personally, I was really impressed with Green’s “original” Halloween in 2018, and I still think it holds up well when considered in isolation. Regardless of its role as a harbinger for the next five years of mainstream horror trends, it still a really scary movie about self-fulfilling prophecies and obsessive thought spirals. Okay, yes, Laurie Strode is haunted by the same metaphorical Trauma Monster that stalks most modern horror heroines (this time in a road-worn William Shatner mask), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any dramatic complexity to how that internal battle with trauma plays out. We’re told that in the 40 years since Laurie was hunted by the infamous killer Michael Myers in the John Carpenter original, she’s been mentally stuck in the events of that one night in a way that has defined & limited every other minute of her life. Faced with senseless violence from a heartless, near-catatonic killer, Laurie has attempted to make sense of her life’s story by convincing herself it’s fate that she will have a final showdown with Michael once he inevitably escapes captivity. It’s the same way that doomsday preppers always appear to be looking forward to the apocalypse they supposedly fear. So, when Michael does escape, Laurie (along with other Michael-obsessed weirdos like “The New Dr. Loomis”) does everything in her power to make sure she & Michael have their “final” showdown in her D.I.Y. death-trap compound at the outskirts of Haddonfield, even though that’s exactly what she’s been dreading for decades. Michael just mindlessly kills whatever’s in striking distance; Laurie is the one that makes the confrontation happen, totally unaware that she’s willing the fight into existence. It’s chilling.
Green’s Halloween trilogy loses its way in the 2021 sequel Halloween Kills, which zooms out the scope of Michael’s function as a Trauma Monster from his effect on Laurie to his effect on Haddonfield as a community. I choose to interpret the word “kills” as a noun here, since this second entry is a feature-length montage of Michael slashing his way through the streets, homes, and pubs of Haddonfield while Laurie recovers from their “final” showdown on a hospital bed, listening in from the sidelines. Michael proves the point of the 2018 film’s self-fulfilling prophecy arc by making no effort to visit Laurie’s hospital room; he just lumbers from kill to kill in the most mindless fashion ever seen from a slasher villain. If Halloween Kills is “about” anything outside the monotonous rhythm of those murders, it’s in how the community of Haddonfield tries to make sense of Michael’s senseless violence by making themselves the collective hero of the “story.” I very much appreciate Halloween Kills‘s disgust with small-town America’s fetish for gun-toting vigilantism, given how many ordinary, ill-equipped Haddonfieldians approach Michael with deadly weapons—the same way real-life gun freaks dream of personally intervening in active-shooter crises—and are immediately destroyed for their trouble, either by Michael’s knife or their own petard. It’s just a shame the movie is spread too thin across Michael’s hometown to ever truly feel scary. Its larger scope means that it keeps intercutting between the tension of individual scenes so that we’re never properly immersed in any one of them. It doesn’t really matter that its political assessments of small-town America are goofily unsubtle; it could have easily gotten away with that if it weren’t so scatterbrained.
After the frantic scrambling of Kills, the more sincere, dramatic approach of Halloween Ends can’t help but feel like a relief. With his final entry in the series, Green returns to the low-key indie dramas that first earned him name recognition before he started making major studio slasher sequels & stoner comedies. Halloween Ends may not be as Great as the first film in its trilogy, but it’s at least coherently structured and (mostly) functions as its own standalone movie, which is an embarrassingly low bar that Halloween Kills does not clear. It’s also custom-designed to alienate & infuriate die-hard horror fans the same way that Halloween III: Season of the Witch was when Carpenter was still actively involved in the franchise, since it also does not focus on the senseless killings of Michael “The Shape” Myers. Instead, we follow an equally iconic horror villain: Cory, the lonely mechanic with a troubled past. Cory is dubbed “the new Michael” by the surviving citizens of Haddonfield, who essentially radicalize him into becoming a mass murderer in their continued attempts to make a clear, sensical narrative out of Michael’s mindless violence. Meanwhile, Cory keeps The Old Michael as a pet in the sewers below Haddonfield and “feeds” his bullies to the hibernating killer the same way little Jamie feeds his bullies to the “tra-la-logs” of The Pit. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are frustrated by the tonal & narrative inconsistencies between each of Green’s Halloweens, but I do love that there’s still room in a post-MCU world for individual movies in a big-budget franchise to take unique directions from each other – even if it’s strange to get that from a series with a consistent creative team at its core. Cory’s story isn’t nearly as compelling nor as scary as Laurie’s, but at least Green & company found a way to make Halloween intimately personable again after the aimlessness of Kills.
The bigger problem is not the inconsistency across this series; it’s that it didn’t need to be a series at all. Laurie Strode’s story is so neatly contained & emotionally impactful in the 2018 Halloween that there’s no reason for her to return for two more entries. Kills feels lost by comparison, aimlessly wandering the streets of Haddonfield in search of a new emotional hook. To its credit, Ends finds that new hook (by conjuring a new central character out of thin air), but it has no chance of fully standing on its own, since Laurie is still hanging around Haddonfield, distracting from its new sense of purpose. After Cory’s own storyline is neatly wrapped up, Laurie steps back in for another “final” showdown with Michael, as if they’re ultimate fight to the death was meant to be, undoing all the good work of Green’s “original” Halloween. After two entire films of Laurie hanging around a hospital room (Kills) and absentmindedly narrating her memoir (Ends), that last minute return to her vendetta with Michael can’t help but feel like an afterthought that dilutes the impact of both her story and Cory’s. That’s largely what makes Halloween ’18 a great film and Halloween Ends an okay one. And the purposeless ambling of Kills only makes them both look stronger by comparison.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Lucio Fulci’s surrealist horror whatsit The Beyond (1981), set at the gates of Hell just outside New Orleans.
0:00 Welcome
02:22 Halloween Ends (2022) 09:14 Halloween II (1981) 14:10 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 16:22 Hellraiser (2022) 19:10 Bride of the Re-Animator (1989) 24:38 Smile (2022) 29:09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) 33:20 Dark Glasses (2022)
Something finally clicked in my brain during the opening 20 minutes of Climaxwhere I’m now on-board with everything Gaspar Noé is putting out. It’s not the most dignified position to be in, I know, but I like to think it’s because Noé is hitting a new visual & emotional maturity in his recent work – not that I’m backsliding into a juvenile edgelordism that would make his usually flashy, trashy ways appealing. This year, Noé has released a pair of cursed sister films that stretch out De Palma’s signature split-screen sequences into feature length. In Vortex, that side-by-side framing is used as a somber visual metaphor for the ways an aging couple can live separate, isolated lives in a shared, intimate space. In Lux Æterna, Noé drops the thematic pretense and instead simply deploys the split-screen format to actively attempt to melt the audience’s minds. It’s the most authentically “psychotronic” movie I’ve experienced in a while, a signal that Noé still has a little Enter the Void pranksterism left in his bones even if time has softened his sharpest edges.
Lux Æterna opens with arthouse actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beatrice Dalle casually chatting about the cultural misogyny that overlaps between the modern film industry & Old World witch trials. We then see that misogyny in action. Dalle struggles to exert directorial control over a chaotic film shoot of a ritualistic witch burning – featuring other film fest regulars Abby Lee, Karl Glusman, and Félix Maritaud as self-parodic caricatures. As Dalle’s authority is constantly undermined by her cast & crew, all semblance of a functional workplace falls apart horrifically and spectacularly, recalling other recent feature-length stress-outs like Black Bear, Birdman, andHer Smell. Only, Noé uses that familiar set-up to conjure a vivid vision of Hell, likening the scenario to Häxan more than to other behind-the-scenes film set dramas. This culminates in a stunning technical breakdown of the set’s LED screen backdrop, which flashes alternating strobes of red, green, and blue in a blinding finale designed to be suffered more than enjoyed. In LuxÆterna, filmmaking is witchcraft, in that pure-evil supernatural forces can be summoned from the most mundane rituals, and women are always the ones who are burned.
In Vortex, Noé reckons with the pains & limitations of his body, particularly the ways his heart & brain will inevitably fail him after years of hedonistic drug abuse. Here, he reckons with the pains & limitations of his profession. Lux Æterna is a horror film about the stress of behind-the-scenes film set squabbling, a nightmare about a bad shift on the clock. Since it was sponsored by the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, though, it still has to make those shifts from Hell seem cool, and it ends up being just as much an aesthetic celebration of strobe lights, leather jackets, and sunglasses worn indoors as it is a workplace nightmare. It never returns to the laidback mood of its opening, where two badass women chat about movies & witchcraft, but even its eye-scorching conclusion is beautiful & hip in its own vicious way. It’s an all-around stunning experience, one that mercifully lasts less than an hour to spare the audience unneeded suffering. It also helpfully opens with a warning for anyone vulnerable to epileptic fits, so make sure to consult your doctor before subjecting your brain.
2022 has gradually shaped into Dario Argento’s comeback year, something I never dared to expect from the 82-year-old Italo horror legend. The low-key giallo revival Dark Glasses is Argento’s first directorial credit in a decade and easily his best in twice as long. He was also shockingly great as the lead performer in Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, his first acting credit outside cameo roles & narration tracks. Of all the various ways Argento’s comeback year has taken shape, though, the least surprising has got to be his in-name-only producer credit on She Will, cosigning a younger artist’s work. Not only is Argento making movies again; apparently, he’s also entering his “Wes Craven Presents” era.
That stamp of approval goes a long way in Charlotte Colbert’s debut feature, especially since it’s an indictment of the macho, abusive brutes who occupied every director’s seat when Argento first started making artsy horror pictures in the 1970s. Is Malcolm McDowell’s pretentious, villainous abuser-auteur supposed to be a stand-in for Jodorowsky, for Polanski, for one of Dario’s fellow giallo greats? It doesn’t matter much, since the film is less about his behind-the-scenes crimes than it is about his victim’s delayed revenge. Alice Krige headlines as an ice-queen film actress whose star has faded; she channels her lingering resentments from that child-actor abuse on McDowell’s sets into a witchy, supernatural revenge. The mechanism of public #MeToo callouts simply isn’t enough; only black magic evisceration will do.
I very much vibe with She Will‘s burn-it-all-down political anger, so it’s a shame I couldn’t also vibe with its filmmaking aesthetics. Between its ominous shots of the woods and Krige’s mutually destructive relationship with her young nurse (helping her recover from a double mastectomy), it just ends up playing like a watered-down, VVitch-ed up version of Saint Maud. It’s well considered thematically, like in how the soil at Krige’s Scottish health retreat is enriched by the ashes of locally burned witches, strengthening both her skin and her witchy powers. Its most exciting ideas are just presented in the limpest nightmare-sequences around, with time-elapse nature footage edited together in the Elevated Horror equivalent of an Ed Wood montage. I almost want to say the film is worth it for Krige’s performance as the icy lead, but truth is she had a lot more to do in this same register as the mentorial witch in Gretel & Hansel. There just isn’t much to see here that hasn’t been covered by its sharper, more vivid contemporaries.
Regardless, I still think a “Dario Argento Presents” project is, by default, a more exciting turn for the actor-director-producer’s late career phase than an actual Dario Argento film. Dark Glasses is only interesting within the context of his larger catalog and can only feel like a faint echo of former glories. By contrast, throwing his name by newcomers like Colbert helps them get platformed at film festivals like Overlook and streaming services like Shudder, where She Will has earned a lot more sincere praise than I’m giving it here. It’s an investment in the future of horror filmmaking instead of a victory lap for its faded past, which according to this film was a lot more spiritually & morally bankrupt than we’ve ever fully reckoned with.
Welcome to Episode #171 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror films banned by British censors on the infamous “Video Nasties” list, starting with the racial-tensions home invasion thriller Fight for Your Life (1977)
00:00 Welcome
01:15 Twister (1996) 07:15 The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) 12:45 Sissy (2022) 14:45 Deadstream (2022) 17:00 Medusa (2022) 19:40 Evilspeak (1981)
23:21 Video nasties 34:45 Fight for Your Life (1977) 49:45 Don’t Look in the Basement (1973) 1:15:20 Flesh for Frankenstein (1974) 1:28:50 The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)
It used to be that Hellraiser movies went straight to VHS. Now they go straight to Hulu. Most entries in the decades-running cosmic horror franchise are remembered as late-night, ill-advised video store rentals, the kinds of disposable novelty horrors you’d squeeze in between viewings of titles like Ice Cream Man & Dr Giggles. In 2022, the series has been upgraded to prestige television instead, with David Bruckner’s Hellraiser playing like the HBO series version of Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart. The new Hellraiser is unrushed, low-lit, and plotty. It’s shot in the same bespoke-leather browns as Nü Gössïp Gïrl, offering the same post-CW melodrama as this year’sThe Batman. It might be television, but it’s at least high-quality television, which means it eventually reaches some euphoric highs once it’s done wrapping up an overlong prologue – like that new show your coworker insists gets great three seasons in if you just stick with it.
Hellraiser achieves a gruesome delirium once it fully lets loose, so it’s a shame all the elaborately gnarly images from its final half hour are in service of such an overall restrained, somber drama. It could have been a real stunner if it just lightened up a bit, both literally & figuratively. Considering that Bruckner’s previous films The Ritual & The Night House weren’t exactly lighthearted romps either, it’s clear he delivered exactly what he was hired to here, so it might just be an awkward pairing of auteur & source material. Bruckner continues his participation in the modern Metaphor Horror trend with a story of a recovering drug addict whose illness drags her friends & family into a symbolic hellworld. Instead of being drawn to the Hell Priest’s puzzle box as a painful gateway to horny transcendence, she sees it as an easy score to pawn off for drug money and, later, as a weapon to be wielded against the fake friends & BDSM demons it unleashes. I’m not sure what the point of making a Hellraiser film is if you’re not interested in the ways prurient desire and the overlap of pain & sexual pleasure can lead to personal destruction, but I guess Bruckner fills the time well enough with his own preoccupations with Trauma Metaphors and expansion of the puzzle box’s “Lament Configurations” lore.
After a full hour of place-setting & narrative justification, the new Hellraiser finally reconfigures into its best self: a haunted house free-for-all. While the original 1987 picture is a domestic melodrama that mostly plays out in a cramped attic, Bruckner sets his cenobites loose in a gigantic Eyes Wide Shut mansion, with plenty of darkened corners for the freaky little fuckers to hide behind. All of the new cenobites are exquisitely designed; Jamie Clayton is a stunning presence as Nü Pïnhead; and there are enough “degloving events” to gross out even the most jaded gore hounds. You just have to push past a lot of modern muck to get there, from the sexless, humorless addiction metaphor at its core to the eye-scorchingly bright ad breaks that violently disrupt its murky prologue. This might be the best Hellraiser movie in decades, but it’s just as indicative of the worst horror trends of its time as the direct-to-video sequels that feature cenobites growing camcorders & CD players on their heads. The industry just happens to be in a good enough place right now that television-level mediocrity is still relatively top-notch.
Like a lot of film nerds, my October ritual is to cram in as many new-to-me horror movies as I can before Halloween passes by. Outside of attending film festivals, Spooktober is my favorite time of year to share titles & takes with my online movie buds, but it can be an exhausting, self-defeating effort if you don’t find enough balance in your movie diet. You cannot watch 31 new-to-you slashers or 31 new-to-you zombie comedies without getting sick of the genre. So, that search for balance often sends me to the outer limits of what can comfortably be categorized as horror, which is where you find genre-defiant headscratchers like Medusa. A loose, dreamworld descent into hedonism & blasphemy, Medusa indulges in some Saved!–style Evangelical satire, purgatorial coma ward occultism, hints of Exorcist body possession, and violent street attacks from history’s least-cool girl gang. It only qualifies as horror because that’s the only genre that can accommodate its loopy nightmare logic. Thankfully, that edge-of-horror grey area is where the greatest movies ever made tend to dwell.
The thing holding Medusa back from achieving that greatness isn’t its resistance to categorization; it’s the high bar set by its fellow genre-defiant South American contemporaries like Good Manners, Ema, Bacurau, and Electric Swan. It’s visually striking throughout, relying on some tried-and-true neon lighting & synthpop aesthetic cues to trigger a pithy “Pure Cinema” Letterboxd review or two. There’s just not much that actually happens between its opening & closing bookends, when we meet a misogynistic Christian girl gang in a near-future Brazil and when they’re collectively possessed by the feminist spirit of a wanton woman who’s been wronged by their kind. Like the demonized, sexually liberated woman they fear so much, the movie effectively slips into a coma between those two points, lucidly dreaming about Evangelical vocal choirs, spon-con influencer videos, atheist dance parties, and sex in the jungle. It gradually emerges from that comatose delirium as feminism & hedonism spread through the woman-beating girl gang like an infection, culminating with the girls finally snapping out of it in high-pitched screams to the camera. I was anxious for them to wake up & reorganize the entire runtime, but I guess if I wanted to watch a sharper, more propulsive version of this story I could always just revisit Ema.
Comparisons to other recent South American genre-benders are easy to make here, since that industry has continued to share a post-Buñuel dream-logic approach to narrative structure, each film lightly surreal in its loose progress of events. The slow-motion music video loopiness of Medusa likely shares more in common with Jennifer Reeder’sKnives & Skinthan any of its localized contemporaries, though, and it often feels like a bigger-scale, slightly bigger-budget version of that American indie. It just also not any more coherent or streamlined. The runtime crosses the 2-hour barrier for no particular reason other than its dripping-IV momentum never allows for its badass images to flow to the screen with any urgency. Still, the Christian girl gang’s conversion to feminist liberators is a satisfying emersion from that pious, medicated dreamworld. It may not be the most finely tuned example of its kind, but it’s at least one of the few body-possession horrors you’re likely to find that isn’t just another riff on one of the usual suspects:Body Snatchers, The Exorcist, The Thing, etc. If you watch enough horror movies, that kind of novelty is invaluable, especially this time of year.
There are two immediately obvious reasons why the special effects horror comedy Monkeybone is worth revisiting in 2022: its director and its star. Henry Selick’s upcoming Wendell and Wild is his first feature film since 2009’s cult favorite Coraline, and it appears to be perfectly in rhythm with the stop-motion nightmares for kids that have defined his career. Not only is Monkeybone Selick’s only live-action film to date, but it also happens to feature another beloved 90s figure who’s making a comeback this year: Brendan Fraser, who’s soon to launch a Best Actor awards campaign for Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser is in his wacky, live-action Looney Tunes mode in Monkeybone, as opposed to the dramatic vulnerability mode he brings to films like Gods & Monsters and, presumably, The Whale. Trapped in a literal nightmare-world induced by a coma, Fraser’s comic book artist protagonist goes to war with his own cartoonish creations in a physical version of the Hot Topic mall-goth fantasyscapes Selick made his name on in A Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Tim Burton directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one made even more fascinating by the fact that it flopped hard on its initial release – investing $75mil on a $7mil payoff.
To my shame, I don’t want to spend much time praising what Selick nor Fraser achieve in Monkeybone. No, I want to praise Chris Kattan. I outright groaned when Kattan’s name showed up in the opening credits, expecting the SNL veteran to be voicing the titular, annoying cartoon monkey sidekick character as an extension of his Mr. Peepers sketches. It turns out that Kattan is totally innocent on that front; Monkeybone is voiced by John Turturro, the scamp. He’s also supposed to grate on the audience’s nerves, as evidenced by Fraser’s constant efforts to get him to shut up & go away every time he opens his obnoxious little mouth. For his part, Kattan doesn’t show up until about an hour into the runtime, playing the corpse of a gymnast who died in a horrific accident. Through convoluted cosmic circumstances that involve a deal with Death herself (played by Whoopi Goldberg, naturally), Fraser’s comatose cartoonist takes over the gymnast’s body mid-organ donation and flees the hospital into an unsuspecting world. Kattan’s physical acting as an animated corpse with a broken neck and organs plopping out of its open body cavity had me absolutely howling with laughter. It was the quickest I’ve ever turned around on a famous actor’s presence in a film, encountering Kattan’s name with dread, then finding his performance so deliriously funny that I almost threw up from the physical exertion. I suppose it’s also worth pointing out that another 2022-relevant actor played a major part of that movie-stealing gag: Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk as the perplexed surgeon who trails behind the undead gymnast, continuing to harvest his organs as they fall to the ground behind him. It’s sublimely silly.
As screechingly funny as Monkeybone gets during Kattan’s third-act zombie run and as wildly imaginative as Selick’s coma-induced Land of Nightmares set designs can be, its legacy mostly resonates with a what-could’ve-been melancholy. Selick might have become a household name if this film didn’t flop so spectacularly. Or at least we wouldn’t get his work confused with Tim Burton’s quite so often. Grimmer yet, Fraser, Kattan, and Rose McGowan (playing a humanoid-cat cocktail waitress, of course) have all gone public with stories of behind-the-scenes sexual abuse from major Hollywood players in the #MeToo era, haunting the film with questions of where their careers might have gone in a better world. In the aftermath of those revelations, Fraser’s getting his late-career comeback, McGowan’s become a self-appointed spokesperson for the movement, and Kattan has continued to live in relative, semi-retired anonymity (give or take an affectionate shoutout in this summer’s Nope). I don’t know that Kattan deserves the same red-carpet career revival as his co-stars, or if the actor would even be interested in a proper Kattanissance if it were an option. I do know this, though: his performance is absolutely the highlight of Monkeybone, somehow outshining all of the cheeky monkeys, cyclops babies, Guernica bulls, and Nazi Mickey Mouse prison guards that Selick packs into the frame. It would have been an interesting relic even without Kattan, creating an amusement park dark ride version of the kinds of grotesque cartoons that only aired on late-night Comedy Central in the 1990s. Still, Kattan’s late-in-the-game intrusion is what pushes it over the line from interesting to essential.
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