brandon ledet

Wishmaster (1997)

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By the 1990s it feels as if the official Hall of Fame for iconic horror movie villains had already shut its doors to new inductees.  If your movie monster hadn’t already earned one-namer status like Freddy, Jason, Chucky, or Pinhead, it only got exponentially more difficult to get a cloven hoof in the door.  A few iconic movie monsters did fight their way into the official Horror Villain Hall of Fame that decade—Ghostface, Candyman, Leprechaun, etc.—but there were countless, blatant attempts to create new haunted-household names that just didn’t survive the Blockbuster Video rental era.  You’re unlikely to find a more blatant attempt to create an all-timer movie monster that failed as decisively as Wishmaster.  Yes, Wishmaster racked up enough box office and video store revenue to justify three sequels, but its goals were obviously much loftier and unfulfilled.  It very obviously wanted its evil djinn antagonist to earn his place among the horror greats who slayed before him, and instead it feels as if the movie has been largely forgotten by horror nerdom . . . unless you’re like me, and happened to catch the film as an easily awed child who was technically too young to see it when it first hit home video.

When I say there’s very blatant reverse-engineering of an iconic horror villain going on here, I’m mostly referring to the staggering amount of Big Name horror talent who put their weight behind the Wishmaster‘s production and promotion.  It’s not enough that hall-of-famer horror auteur Wes Craven produced the film, he also lent its VHS box covers the precious “Wes Craven presents . . .” seal of approval.  Phantasm‘s Angus Scrimm provided the narration track.  Surrealist special effects wizard Screaming Mad George produced oil paintings for its set decoration.  The film also boasts a who’s-who of horror icon cameos in minor roles to help legitimize its place in the canon: Robert Englund, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, Ted Raimi, etc.  Director Robert Kurtzman cut his teeth on special effects work in the horror industry, and that background shows not only in the film’s wildly imaginative practical gore but also in his Rolodex of horror legends he was able to assemble for the relatively meager production.  Given the talent behind it, t’s a film that’s perfectly targeted at horror convention nerdom, but it somehow failed to make the leap from popular video store rental to T-shirt & Funko Pop mainstay in the decades that followed.

If Wishmaster made any obvious missteps in its bid to conjure a brand-new horror icon, it was in nailing its titular djinn’s look.  The movie goes out of its way to say, “Forget Barbara Eden, forget Robin Williams”—stopping short of declaring “This ain’t your grandma’s genie in a bottle”—but at least those previous examples of wish-granting pop culture genies had instantly recognizable visual designs.  You can’t sell a Wishmaster brand Halloween costume the same way you could market a bloody hockey mask or a striped sweater/fedora combo; there’s just nothing that distinct about his iconography.  A leathery ghoul with elongated earlobes and a penchant for ragged cloaks, the Wishmaster himself is just about as generic as movie monsters come.  His lethal promise of (extremely literal) wish-fulfillment to his victims is basically just Pinhead without the leather bar sex appeal, an absence that zaps the franchise of its long-term marketability.  Luckily, though, while Wishmaster‘s imagination was limited & short-sighted in the design of its titular monster, it was much more actively creative in the djinn’s individual kills.

Wishmaster may not have succeeded as a launching pad for an all-timer horror villain, but it mostly holds up as a dumb-fun practical effects showcase.  Its quality and sensibilities are pretty standard for trashy novelty horrors of its era, but its “Careful what you wish for” evil genie set-up allows its imagination to run wild from kill to kill instead of being limited to the generically “scary” visage of the Wishmaster himself.  While on his wicked quest to grant three wishes to our Final Girl heroine (a living-single jewel appraiser who charitably coaches a girls’ basketball team in her spare time), the Wishmaster amuses himself by turning the puny peons in his way into skeletons, mannequins, snakes, and piles of cancerous tumors – granting their deliberately misinterpreted desires in exchange for their eternal souls.  Some of these lethal wish-fulfillments are rendered in embarrassingly outdated 90s CGI, like when Kane Hodder is transformed into a pane of shattered glass.  However, most of them are achieved in wonderfully grotesque, tactile gore, with Kurtzman & company showing off their deep horror industry roots with a genuine zeal for the nastier, practical details of the genre.  The film’s tone, villain, and central drama can all feel a little deflated from scene to scene, but its actual kills are often a stomach-turning spectacle you won’t find anywhere else on dusty video store shelves.

Wishmaster makes total sense as a Wes Craven production, since the nightmre logic of the Elm Street kills work the same way as this series’ evil wish-granting surrealism (even if it does fall below Craven’s usual standard of quality).  Its lack of a significant cultural footprint also might help make it feel fresh to new fans who missed it in its heyday and are on the hunt for a 90s nostalgia fix.  At the very least, it felt refreshing to return to this as a real-deal specimen of the vintage media we only now see spoofed & homaged in goofy-on-purpose throwbacks like Psycho Goreman.  The only thing it’s missing is a more distinct, compelling monster to help carve out its place in the Hall of Fame horror canon.  Even if I end up indulging in all three of the Wishmaster sequels, I doubt I’d be able to pick the ghoul out of a line-up of generic demons from episodes of Buffy, Xena, or Power Rangers.  That’s a pretty significant problem for a movie so clearly invested in weaseling its way into the Horror Hall of Fame, but it doesn’t detract at all from the grotesque novelties of its much more distinct, inventive kills.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Ginger Snaps (2000)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the lycanthropic puberty horror Ginger Snaps (2000).

00:00 Welcome

00:50 We Need to Do Something (2021)
10:40 Ghost Stories (2018)
13:30 Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988)
15:25 Possession (1981)
20:20 In the Earth (2021)
23:00 The Langoliers (1995)
26:00 Lifeforce (1985)
29:45 Candyman (2021)
36:15 Lamb (2021)

40:00 Ginger Snaps (2000)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Episode #145 of The Swampflix Podcast: Phantom of the Paradise (1974) & Horror Musicals

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Welcome to Episode #145 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four classic horror movie musicals, starting with Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974).

00:00 Welcome

01:00 Picture Mommy Dead (1966)
04:20 The Wicker Man (1973)
07:00 The Amityville Horror (1979)
14:00 A Cat in the Brain (1990)

18:00 Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
42:24 The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
1:07:00 Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
1:26:40 The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

The Thrill Killers (1964)

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I have a bottomless affection for the kinds of vintage Z-grade horror pictures that were regionally marketed under different titles depending on what drive-in double bill they were plugged into, like how Shivers is also known as Blood Orgy of the Parasites or The Exotic Ones is also known as The Monster and the Stripper.  Few—if any—of those regional re-brands can compete with the marketing strategy for Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Thrill Killers, though, which was re-released a couple years into its run under the title The Maniacs Are Loose!.  I don’t know if the title change itself was much of an improvement on Steckler’s original vision, but the re-brand also included an incredible theatrical gimmick of William Castle proportions.  The Maniacs Are Loose! opens with a “professional hypnotist” named The Amazing Ormond who puts the audience under a spell so we can hallucinate axe-wielding maniacs stalking our very theater while the movie plays.  The Amazing Ormond’s hypnosis technique involves a red-spiral “hypnodisc” that re-appears throughout the new edit of the film, the only flashes of color in the otherwise cheap-o black & white print (and also a callback to the hypnotic spirals of Steckler’s calling-card film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies).  Whenever that image flashed during screenings of The Maniacs are Loose!, Steckler himself would run around the theater with a prop axe to scare the freaked-out, teenage audience, reprising his onscreen maniac-killer role (under the All-American pseudonym “Cash Flagg”) in the flesh.  Now that‘s entertainment!

Besides helping to pad out its meager 70min runtime, that Criswell Presents-style framing device makes a lot of sense as a cheap way to accentuate The Thrill Killers‘s best qualities.  Steckler is absolutely horrifying as a cold-hearted skinhead killer, looking like a straight edge punk scene prototype for Michael Myers.  As a director, Steckler tries to top the proto-slasher grime of Hitchcock’s Psycho by releasing three violent escapees from “The State Asylum for the Criminally Insane” to stab, shoot, and decapitate the citizens of Los Angeles at random, just for the thrill of it.  All three of the main killers are intimidating brutes but are so generic in their menace that you remember them by their weapon of choice rather than their character names: Knife, Gun, and Axe.  Steckler himself makes the biggest impression as Scissors, the gang’s rogue, wordless accomplice who mostly operates outside the main plot until its action-packed finale (which oddly shifts away from cutting-edge horror to Old Hollywood Western territory).  As a whole, The Thrill Killers is sloppy & sluggish but impressively mean as a cheap echo of Psycho in an urban setting.  It’s a decent genre picture but doesn’t offer much that you couldn’t find better executed in The Honeymoon Killers, Spider Baby, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or even smutty roughies like She Mob.  The one major exception is Steckler’s deeply creepy performance as one of the on-the-loose maniacs, and I imagine seeing him emerge in the flesh during his kill scenes only heightened that terror (despite the goofy novelty of the hypnodisc gimmick).

The theatrical gimmickry of The Thrill Killers‘s maniacs-on-the-loose rebrand not only accentuated Ray Dennis Steckler’s terrifying performance, but it also accentuates his adorable enthusiasm for filmmaking as a profession.  For all its decapitations & stabbings, the most shocking aspect of the film is how much of it is directly about the self-fulfilling joy of making bad movies.  Its maniacs are specifically on the loose in Hollywood, California, allowing Steckler plenty of room for metatextual jokes & jabs at the expense of his own drive to make movies that no one else really cares about.  The film’s square-jawed hero is a failed actor whose slow path to success is testing his wife’s patience & his own sanity, so that an omniscient, Ed Woodian narrator can explain how years of trying to “make it” in the film industry can destroy your relationships with family & reality.  There’s some obvious frustration in Steckler’s dialogue about the unrelenting “hunger to be a movie star” and Hollywood’s function as “the world of non-reality”, but he stops short of suggesting that the killer maniacs on the loose are all failed actors who never quite made it in the industry.  By the end of the film, it’s clear that he has way too much fun making his dime store genre pictures to disparage the industry that way.  And if even if it weren’t clear then, it must’ve been clear when he traveled with a print of the film, dressed in-character, waving around a prop axe to scare local crowds in-person.  The Thrill Killers itself is only a moderate delight as a sickly, sloppy proto-slasher, but Ray Dennis Steckler’s enthusiasm on both sides of the camera is so infectious that I can’t help but be charmed by it (especially in the loose-maniacs version).

-Brandon Ledet

Nightmare Sisters (1988)

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Maybe the trick to becoming a genuine, enthusiastic fan of David “A Talking Cat!?!” DeCoteau is to watch as many of his low-budget, low-effort novelties as possible, even if you don’t especially enjoy them.  Individually, each DeCoteau film I’ve watched to date has been a disappointment, failing to live up to the full camp potential of their absurd premises.  And yet, I’ve become fonder of the horndog galoot with every subsequent letdown.  If nothing else, I’m in awe that he’s managed to direct 174 features over the past four decades despite never showing any detectable passion for his craft.  DeCoteau conveys none of the unflappable zeal for filmmaking that you’ll see from other underfunded but manically persistent auteurs like Matt Farley, Don Dohler, or Ed Wood.  He’s become most infamous in genre schlock circles for his profound laziness, filming his modern straight-to-streaming novelties in his living room & backyard with no attention paid to changing up the décor to suit the setting of individual productions.  It’s an incredibly frustrating dispassion to encounter in a relatively famous horror auteur at first, if not only because it’s the exact opposite quality I’ve been trained to expect and appreciate in my outsider-artist genre filmmakers.  And yet, the more times DeCoteau disappoints me the more my affection & admiration grows.  I’m starting to love that he gets to make his stupid little anti-effort genre comedies from the comfort of his luxuriant home, that he’s been lazing about on the payroll of notoriously hard-working schlockmeisters like Roger Corman & Charles Band.  If nothing else, it’s just nice to see someone live the dream.

The best way I can track my reluctantly growing appreciation for DeCoteau is to compare my recent reaction to his topless novelty horror Nightmare Sisters to my reaction to his near-identical topless novelty horror Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama just two years ago.  Both films use an uncomfortably racist caricature (in this case, an Indian palm reader) as a launching pad for nudist shenanigans among a coterie of low-level 1980s scream queens in sorority drag.  Whereas Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama torments its VHS-cover babes with a wisecracking puppet, Nightmare Sisters transforms its spooky pin-ups (Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, and Michelle Bauer) into the monsters themselves.  They start the film as nerdy sorority sisters who can’t land dates, but a run-in with a cursed crystal ball transforms them into topless bombshell succubi who bite off frat boys’ dicks.  It toes the same thin line between horror comedy & softcore porno as Slime Ball Bowl-o-Rama, but it’s a lot more honest & upfront about what it’s doing – staging its most memorable scene in a clawfoot bathtub so the horned-up succubi have an excuse to monotonously scrub each other’s bodies while giggling at nothing in particular.  The film is by no means great, but it is often adorably quaint as a VHS-era nudie cutie with a soft Halloween theme.  It’s got all the exact highlights and lowlights of Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, except this time around I found those details cute instead of annoying, something I can only attribute to my growing affection to the goofball behind the camera.

Besides his trademark laziness, DeCoteau’s calling card as a schlockteur is his cutesy, sexless brand of homoeroticism – which usually just amounts to casting twinks & chiseled-abs jocks in ostensibly straight roles, giving each film the feeling of a gay porno that just never fully came together.  Because Nightmare Sisters is a Reagan Era comedy aimed specifically at teen boys’ libidos, it’s unsurprising that the frat boys villains’ go-to insults for the nerdy pledges under their thumbs are an unimaginative barrage of homophobic slurs.  Those jocks are punished for their crimes by having their dicks bitten off by the anti-heroine succubi, whose sorority house is decorated with tighty-whitey beefcake postcards of celebrities like Tom Selleck flexing their hirsute muscles.  More to the point, Linnea Quigley’s big song-and-dance number when she transforms into a punk-rocker succubus is a love tune in which a woman pines for a gay prostitute, directly contrasting the straight-boy sex appeal of the flesh on display with the much more substantial homoeroticism flowing just beneath the surface.  The central conflict of Nightmare Sisters is that the frat boys & sorority girls can’t have sex without magical intervention, because they’re just too nerdy to admit what they want or to go for it.  Considering the girls’ and boys’ mutual disinterest in each other and the much more pronounced tension of the frat house hazing rituals that get in their way, their problem might be that this tits-and-blood horror comedy is just too gay to allow them to hook up.  It’s all so campy and insincere that it makes the heterosexual mating rituals of the American college student feel like retro kitsch.

Like with Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, my favorite parts of Nightmare Sisters were its opening credits (including a rockin’ song with the lyrics “Suck you, suck you, succubus” from a band called Haunted Garage) and its A+ poster.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that the two films share so many merits and faults, since they were apparently filmed the very same week with most of the same cast & crew.  What is surprising is how much more fun I had watching this lazily tossed off DeCoteau novelty when its better-funded, slightly more effortful predecessor left me so cold.  Maybe if I watch a couple dozen more of his shameless, passionless frivolities I’ll even get around to calling one “good”.

-Brandon Ledet

Bit (2020)

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After watching the retro erotic thriller The Voyeurs and the teen vampire wish-fulfiller Bit in the same week, I’m starting to come to terms with the terrifying reality that the house style of The CW has become one of the major cinematic influences of our time.  The channel’s decades of flat digi cinematography and robotic line deliveries from an endless parade of hard-bodied hotties has now seeped out into the wider cinematic bloodstream, so that all low-to-mid-budget #content aimed at youngsters looks like an unaired pilot for a CW series.  Let’s call Bit the modern successor of shows like Buffy & Charmed, a gothy but harmless horror primer for teens turned off by the macho gatekeeper end of the genre (slightly retooled for a post-Riverdale world).  It even opens with a affectionate potshot at the Twilight saga, which very well might be the birthplace of the CW’s unholy stylistic reign on the big screen.  It’s all very cheap but cute, making up for what it lacks in momentum, tension, and scares with a gothy wish-fulfilment sense of cool.

A trans teen vacationing in Los Angeles is inducted into a hipster lesbian vampire coven who target male predators around the city.  She occasionally feels remorse over abandoning her family & friends for this new social circle (self-described as “Bite Club”) and reluctance to drink blood to sustain herself, but for the most part everything’s safe & comfortable.  At its core, this is a teenage fantasy about a small-town outsider who finds her all-accepting, empowering clique in the big city.  Our bloodsucking heroine repeatedly muses that “This feels like a movie,” or “My life’s like a horror movie,” to point out the daydream happenstance of her stumbling into a feminist vampire collective her very first night in L.A.  Her vampire elders offer her a tantalizing power fantasy in “a world where every woman is a vampire” and “men are the ones who are afraid to fucking jot at night.”  There’s some infighting about how the coven’s No-Boys-Allowed policy applies to her brother, some changeups in local leadership, and a few run-ins with vampire-hunting MRAs, but that’s not really what excites Bite or its baby-goth target audience.  The film is much more wrapped up in its venting-into-the-void misandry, chaste lesbian make-outs, and trips to see The Death Valley Girls live in concert.  It’s a hangout film for the teenage horror nerd set who grew up watching a certain broadcast-television station and are now ready to see its programming aged up with some swearing & gore.

Despite its on-the-surface feminist politics, Bit is more adorable than it is searing or provocative.  I would’ve enjoyed it best in high school, but I happened to grow up with The Craft instead.  I can’t say with any authority that The Craft is necessarily any better than Bit in terms of its . . . craft, no more than the generations before me could say the same about The Lost Boys or, I dunno, I Was a Teenage Werewolf.  Each generation deserves their own teen-goth induction ceremony movie, and this entry in that canon just happens to be aimed at kids young enough to appreciate an off-handed Cheetah Girls reference. 

-Brandon Ledet

Candyman (2021)

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Now that the Delta Surge is receding and local vaccination numbers are looking robust, I’m personally getting comfortable with returning to movie theaters.  Anecdotally, I’m also seeing larger crowds testing those same waters than I did this summer when I briefly showed up masked & vaccinated at the local multiplex just before Delta sent me right back into my turtle shell.  Luckily for me (and unluckily for movie theaters), the film distribution pipeline hasn’t yet caught up with that return of consumer confidence, which means there hasn’t been a flood of major new releases to wash out the big-ticket movies I missed in the past few months of extended seclusion.  So that’s how I got to see Nia DaCosta’s Candyman reboot on the big screen in the weeks leading up to Halloween, even though it was initially released in the summer.  By now, professional critics and terminally online horror nerds have already talked the merits & faults of Candyman ’21 to death (and the bee-swarmed mirror realm beyond it), so I expected there was no room left for discovery or interpretation in my late-to-the-game viewing of the film.  And yet, I was pleasantly surprised by the new Candyman despite my tardiness – both in how much I enjoyed it and in how well it works as a direct, meaningful sequel to the Bernard Rose original.

I remember hearing a lot of chatter about how the new Candyman is blatant in its political discussions of the continued gentrification of Chicago, but I somehow missed that those discussions are linked to an ongoing, generational trauma echoed from events of the original film.  This latest update could have been justifiably titled Candyman 4: Candyman, since it directly recounts and expands the lore of the original film through audio recordings & shadow puppetry.  By the end, we’ve seen & heard several characters from the original cast dredging up the most painful details of that shared past, landing DaCosta’s film more as a “reboot” than as a “remake” despite the expectations set by its title.  However, rather than developing Candyman lore by transferring the Candyman character to exotic cultural locales (New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebrations in Candyman 2 and Los Angeles’s Day of the Dead celebrations in Candyman 3), DaCosta instead expands the boundaries & definition of Candyman himself.  Building off his body’s occasional form as a gestalt of bees, Candyman is explained to be a buzzing hive of various tormented Black men throughout American history instead of just a single murderous ghost with a hook for a hand.  He’s a symbol for Black pain fighting its way from under the boot of this country’s long history of racist violence, and the terror in this particular chapter is in watching our troubled-artist protagonist get absorbed into that history despite his mostly charmed life.

Personally, I don’t mind that the new Candyman is transparent in its political messaging & metaphor.  It’s at least conceptually sturdy in how it chooses to examine the generational & cultural echoes of trauma, which is a much more rewarding mode of “haunting” for this particular horror icon than it would’ve been if he latched onto another lone victim like Helen Lyle.  Its art gallery setting is a brilliant choice in that paradigm, as it both functions as a physical symbol of gentrification and as an open forum where heady ideas about art & symbolism are totally justified.  Candyman is first summoned by white art snobs in a gallery showing of political Black art that they do not take seriously (beyond its economic value), presenting him as a significant yet volatile form of Black representation in popular media.  If there’s any lesson taught in his re-emergence and his eventual absorption of the painter who gives him new life on canvas, it’s that the pained, racist history that he represents should not be evoked lightly.  DaCosta seems careful not to revive Candyman for a cheap-thrills supernatural slasher; she wants to genuinely, directly contend with what place he holds in the larger pop culture zeitgeist.  I believe she finds plenty of worthwhile political substance to contend with there, so I don’t understand the supposed virtue of being subtle about it.

My only sticking point with the new Candyman, really, is how often it shies away from depicting onscreen violence.  The greater cultural & political violence that Candyman represents is sharply felt when the film is viewed as a whole, but individual kills are often obscured through mirrors, wide-shots, and physical barriers in a way that often undercuts their in-the-moment effect.  It plays like a PG-13 television broadcast of an R-rated film, except in this case the network forgot to bleep the cusses.  DaCosta is way more concerned with the meaning behind Candyman than she is in the physical consequences of his presence, which makes the film feel like it was intended for an audience who appreciates the social commentary aspect of horror without all that icky horror getting in the way.  She totally nails the eeriness & tension that a good horror scare can build, especially in her expansion of the buzzing bee & mirror realm imagery that made Candyman iconic to begin with.  She just also seems disinterested in (or maybe even politically opposed to) the cathartic release of an onscreen kill shattering that tension to shards.  At its most visually upsetting, Candyman makes room for the slowly-building body horror of a bee sting that festers beyond control.  Mostly, it’s upsetting in its concepts & politics, which isn’t going to satisfy most audiences looking for the latest, most exciting big-screen scares.  I’m honestly surprised I was satisfied with it myself, violent catharsis notwithstanding.

-Brandon Ledet

Lamb (2021)

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It’s difficult to define what qualifies something as Movie Magic, but the dark fantasy film Lamb is electric with it . . . for its opening half-hour.  The first of the film’s three “chapters” builds all its magical-realist tension on our curiosity over what, exactly, is going on with its titular child-creature and the lonely farmer couple who raise it as their own.  Isolated on an Icelandic farm with only sheep to break up the monotony of their quiet, daily chores, a married couple adopt a newborn lamb and swaddle it as if it were a human baby.  We peer into the lamb’s crib wondering what’s going on under those tightly wrapped blankets, what makes it any different from the other lambs who’re routinely born in the barn. We’re invited to look into the eyes of the older sheep on the farm, anthropomorphizing their intellectual & emotional responses to the humans who feed & shepherd them.  The longer we stare, the more they begin to look like expressive, reactive puppets instead of natural creatures, blurring the line between documentary footage and Movie Magic.  The loss of that boundary sets up an endless realm of possibility in what’s going on with the one lamb the couple has decided to raise inside their home, the one that the camera obscures so that our own imagination can fill in the details.  Then, when the baby lamb is shown in full, the magic vaporizes.

My heart sank in Lamb‘s second chapter when it had to stop obscuring its centerpiece creature.  Conceptually, I am onboard with this low-key fairy tale about an isolated couple’s desperation to be parents despite the lingering pain of past attempts, but the practicality of visualizing the human-lamb hybrid they adopt onscreen is a mood-killer.  Specifically, it’s the choice/necessity to supplement its practical effects with CGI that really zaps the Movie Magic out of the picture.  This is the kind of film that really needs the tactility of the Babe animatronics or even the surreal stop-motion of Little Otik to work. Instead, we see a tactile human body toddle across the screen with a cheaply animated CG head superimposed on top of it, never convincingly integrating with the physical world it supposedly occupies.  In close-up, when the lamb-child is napping or quietly observing her adoptive parents, she’s perfectly believable as a real, tangible creature that has magically appeared in the couple’s lives – which is why her more obscured presence in the first chapter works so well.  It’s when the camera pulls back to show her hybrid body structure in full that the spell is instantly broken, leaving Lamb with all the Movie Magic of a Geico commercial.  And since this film isn’t working with a Babe-level Hollywood budget, I’m convinced that the only way to fix it would have been to crudely superimpose her parents’ heads onto different actor’s bodies to level the uncanny playing field.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to Lamb besides the magic of its titular creature-child.  It’s a quiet, unrushed film with very little plot or dialogue.  If you can’t gaze in wonder at the little lamb baby for all three chapters, there isn’t much else to do except wait for the credits (or hope for a scene where the lamb’s “mother” timidly asks her husband “Did . . . did you have sex with our sheep?”).  For a more truly magical narrative about an isolated, troubled Icelandic couple in which human actors dance with unconvincingly animated CG animals, I’d recommend watching Björk’s music video for “Triumph of a Heart”.  There’s way more heart, humor, chaos, and magic in those five minutes than there is in this entire two-hour snooze.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Wailing (2016)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the menacingly ambiguous Korean horror epic The Wailing (2016).

00:00 Welcome

01:20 Frenzy (1972) on the Horror VS Reality podcast
06:06 Til Death (2021)
09:55 Scare Package (2020)
19:19 Rose Plays Julie (2021)
23:15 Zola (2021)

26:26 The Wailing (2016)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew