camp stamp

Bring It On (2000)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

campstamp

The cartoonish cheerleader comedy Bring It On is one of those films I watched way too many times as young lad merely because it was one of the few movies my sister & I could agree on (other titles on that short list included Clueless & My Cousin Vinny). Nostalgia can be a blinding force when it comes to judging art on its own merits, though, so I was pleased to discover on a recent drunken night after a friend’s wedding that Bring It On still holds up as a high-functioning farce. This cinematic time capsule fits in with its eras finest high school comedies: movies like Clueless, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 Things I Hate About You, and But, I’m a Cheerleader!. Although there’s an imperfect choice of POV that somewhat weakens its central message (more on that in a minute), Bring It On is wholly committed to its camp value in an endearing way, moves at a breeze of a swift/efficient pace, and has its heart in the right place even if it missed out on making a solid socio-political statement. It also opens with one of the greatest musical numbers ever put to film, a two minute-long performance I could gladly watch into infinity.

Instead of adopting the typical ugly duckling/beautiful swan makeover story structure that dominated much of the 90s high school movie landscape (spoofed recently in the underappreciated Mae Whitman comedy The DUFF), Bring It On follows a traditional sports movie formula and tracks the progress of a Californian cheer squad as they work their way up to the all-important, ESPN-televised “Nationals.” Although the film does include a superfluous will-they-won’t-they love triangle, it’s at heart about ethics in cheer choreography. Bring It On‘s head cheerleader, cinema’s most prominent Torrance (brought to bubbly life by my lifelong celebrity crush Kirsten Dunst), deals with the fallout of the discovery that her former captain had been stealing routines from an predominantly black school in East Compton. Crushed by the betrayal, Torrance has to reconcile with the fact that her “entire cheerleading career is a lie.” When reminded that it’s only cheerleading, Torrence retorts, “I am only cheerleading.” It’s true, too. Her squad had become her sole identity, a concern that overrides any anxieties about her education or the boys chasing after her. (I particularly enjoyed the way that latter conflict was deflated with the line, “Do us all a favor and get over yourself and tell her how you really feel.”)

I’ll give kudos to Bring It On for making its romance plot a backseat concern in relation to a sports movie conflict involving white teens ripping off black artists without recognition. It’s kind of a gutsy choice for an innocuous teen comedy from nearly two decades ago. Where the film falters is in failing to give said black cheerleading squad much to do in a story about their own artistic exploitation. A Bring It On told from the POV of the East Compton Clovers would most likely serve this story of artistic integrity & cheerleading ethics much better. From the mostly white, well-to-do Toros’ perspective, it instead become a story about white guilt & “trying to make it right.” As much as the film could’ve handled its socio-political inquiries better, though, it does find a way to completely sidestep any shameless white knighting and its Big Competition conclusion is a satisfying end for both the Toros & the Clovers in a genuinely earned moment of feel-good movie magic.

Although I’m focusing on the implications of Bring It On‘s narrative here, what makes the film such a winning success is not its sense of storytelling, but its deliriously saccharine sense of humor. I get a dreamlike sense of an overwhelming sugar rush in this film, one matched only by titles like Josie & The Pussycats and Cool as Ice. Ant-Man director Peyton Reed establishes a punishing sense of rhythm in the film’s pacing, delivering campy humor in a nonstop barrage of rapidfire dialogue set to a “You Wouldn’t Steal a DVD”/Run Lola Run style of pop music production. UCB co-founder Ian Roberts drops by as a painfully corny/horny hired gun choreographer who derails the Toros with a Fosse-obsessed “spirit fingers” routine. There’s also plenty of delightfully inane cheerleading humor like in the line, “This is not a democracy; it’s a cheerocracy,” and and in the concept of “cheer sex” (eyefucking a member of the audience during a routine). Despite a stray joke or three threatening to indulge in body shaming or sexual assault and a pair of wallet chain-sporting nu metal bozos, Bring It On never fully sours on its cheery worldview. It manages to feel like a live action cartoon in details like rigorous.toothbrushing, religious reverence for something called a “cheer stick”, and a disgusting younger brother character straight out of Teen Witch. It’s thoroughly endearing & more than a little overwhelming in is high fructose energy, a tone that fits its subject nicely.

It’s a little shallow to say so, but I really do believe Bring It On‘s entire argument for cult following legitimacy as a campy delight hinges on its opening dream sequence cheer routine. It’s a beautiful, aggressive, surreal splash of cold water that happily indulges in its own inanity, as typified in the line, “Hate us because we’re beautiful, but we’ don’t like you either. We are cheerleaders.” It’s as iconic of an opening as film could ever ask for even before it reaches its Golden Age of Hollywood musical number conclusion. Bring It On might’ve stumbled in how it handled some of the political implications of its narrative (mostly in the diminished role of the Clovers), but it’s a wildly confident camp comedy that finds its own surreal voice in its manic cheerleading humor. If you need any proof that the film is worth a look, I urge you to watch the opening number in the clip below. It’s the same kind of cinematic perfection that won me over with “Floop’s Floogies” in Spy Kids, a perfect encapsulation of what makes the film such a rare, bizarre treat.

Side Note: How weird is it that the film’s titular line is actually “Bring It.” and not “Bring it on.”? It’s a very minor distinction, but it’s one I find fascinating, not only because the studio likely found that the one word difference tested better for some strange reason, but also because the line has been culturally altered by various & plentiful spoofs that read it as “Bring it on.” Really makes you think.

-Brandon Ledet

Frightmare (1983)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

My curiosity in watching Frightmare began & ended with my most recent visitation of the Richard Kelly cult classic Donnie Darko. In the scene where Donnie sits alone in a desolate cinema with his sleeping girlfriend & the time travelling bunny that haunts his hallucinations, the theater’s marquee advertises a double feature of John Carpenter’s classic slasher Halloween & the (deservedly) much less frequently referenced Frightmare. Curious about what that film could have to add to Donnie Darko’s already overstuffed mythos, I discovered that it’s a Troma-distributed supernatural horror cheapie written & directed by (the totally fake-sounding) no-namer Norman Thaddeus Kane. For a cheap horror flick distributed by one of the most questionable schlock peddlers around with only a ridiculous portmanteau title & a tenuous connection to a decades-down-the-line sci-fi indie, however, Frightmare’s not all that bad. In fact, in isolated moments of supernatural spookery, the film even nearly touches on genuine greatness. Presuming its inclusion in Donnie Darko wasn’t simply a tossed-off detail (as nothing ever seems to be in the director’s work), it’s fairly easy to see how a young Richard Kelly could’ve grown up with a dedicated affection for it.

Frightmare partly mirrors the narrative conceits of the Vincent Price films Madhouse & Theatre of Blood. A typecast horror actor (falling somewhere between Price and Christopher Lee), seeks revenge on a world he feels wronged him from beyond the grave. At first he casually murders directors, casting agents, and producers who’ve ghettoized his talent as a legitimate stage actor into a one-note joke who’s stuck in a career-length role as Dracula. This setup is mostly meta wish fulfillment, though, as it leaves little room for drive-in audiences to be scared (unless they also happen to be big shot movie producers). That’s presumably why a college campus film society steals the deceased actor’s body from a mausoleum, providing a fairly solid reason for the actor to be murderously angry with a group of horror’s favorite victim type: horny teens. Our naïve dumdums desecrate the corpse of their favorite 80s Bela Lugosi knockoff, which opens them up for a world of pain when the actor’s corpse reanimates, now equipped with telepathic command of the fires of Hell (not unlike my favorite Marvel hero, The Son of Satan).

The idea of a beloved horror icon rising from the dead to attack his most dedicated fans is a pretty interesting launching point for a horror film and Frightmare takes great delight in the supernatural implications of that scenario. The actor literally explodes out of his coffin using the fires of Hell. His supposedly pre-recorded messages speak directly to visitors at his wake & his neon-lit mausoleum with eerie statements like “Thank you, friends, for coming to my funeral.” He telepathically decapitates an idiot teen so that a mysterious crow can pick at their scalp. If Donnie Darko is any way thematically connected to Frightmare it’s in these otherworldly creep out moments. In particular, both films suppose supernatural ways for their main players to affect the living world after their deaths, serving as slices of high concept attending-your-own-funeral wish fulfillment, the kind that comes with revenge against your worst bullies. Frightmare’s post-mortem revenge tale might come with mood-cheapening one-liners (when the actor kills a director he dislikes he quips, “Take 20”) that directly conflict with Donnie Darko’s heart on the sleeve earnestness, but the connection’s still there.

Oddly enough, though, it wasn’t the supernatural terror that interests or unnerves me in Frightmare. The most striking sequence of the film, by far, is when the college campus film club parties with their hero’s limp corpse. They waltz with him romantically, feed him spaghetti, take portraits with him, and even go as far to make out with the lifeless legend (*cue “Chrissy Kiss the Corpse”*). And all of their morbid pranks are set to a soaring orchestral score while the camera spins and the young, foolish, soon-to-be victims don rubber Halloween masks & drink themselves into oblivion. It’s a shockingly lyrical moment in a film that can often be intentionally silly. If Frightmare spent more of its time chasing that art house take on Weekend at Bernie’s it might’ve been a cult classic title that landed itself on fictional double bill marquees a lot more frequently. I enjoyed the silly, ramshackle film well enough as is, but something about that party scene had me curious about the kind of work that Norman Thaddeus Kane (who I refuse to believe is a real person) could be capable of with a bigger production budget & more dedicated focus on real-world scares.

-Brandon Ledet

Multiple Maniacs (1970)

/ swampflix / 21 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

campstamp

I’ve seen a few John Waters classics like Desperate Living & Pink Flamingos projected on the big screen before, usually with a midnight crowd, but I’ve only had two experiences watching his work for the very first time in a proper movie theater: 2004’s A Dirty Shame & the 2016 restoration of his 1970 forgotten gem Multiple Maniacs. Surely, there’s a bias factor that should be considered when reviewing a work from your favorite director/artist/human being after experiencing it for the first time large & loud with a receptive film fest crowd. My personal devotion to Waters aside, though, Multiple Maniacs is still an excellent slice of go-for-broke shlock cinema. A smaller, arguably nastier provocation than Pink Flamingos, it answers a question I’m not sure I ever would’ve dreamed to ask: what if John Waters made a horror film? It’s impossible to divorce the context from the content in this case, because Waters is such a highly specific stylist & works so closely with a steady cast of nontraditional “actors,” but even if the director had never made another feature in his life I believe the world would still be talking about Multiple Maniacs all these decades later. Horror films this weird & this grotesquely fun are rarely left behind or forgotten and, given the devotion of Waters’s more dedicated fans, I’m honestly surprised it took this long for this one to get its proper due.

I guess I should clarify up front exactly what I mean when I call Multiple Maniacs a horror film. Unlike the subversive horror comedy leanings of Serial Mom, this is horror in the way titles like Spider Baby & Mudhoney qualify. It’s a grimy uncovering of an outside-of-society crew of murderous weirdos, the kind of picture that eventually lead to more conventional slasher genre space carved out by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but didn’t quite have its own established tradition at the time of its release. Waters displays no shame in his getta-load-of-this-freakshow dynamic, opening his film with a literal freakshow: Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions. A carnival barker advertises “acts against God & Nature” to entice the audience & passersby inside the tent, all while feigning mock disgust. There’s gleeful puke-eaters, bicycle seat humpers, and actual real-life homosexuals (the horror!); but the real star of the show is Divine herself, Waters’s most infamous collaborator and, arguably, the greatest drag queen of all time. Divine’s freakshow act is simply her own fabulous being. She holds her audience at gunpoint, bullies all of her employees, and lounges nude in the mirror to give full reverence to her own beauty & divinity. Her turbulent romance with David Lochary’s carnival barker, with its cop-killing violent streak & dual indulgences in adultery, drives the isolated freakshow into the general public, where Multiple Maniacs turns into a legitimate monster movie. Not only does Divine herself transform into an inhuman monster with a formidable body count, the film also makes room for an appearance from a giant monster movie-style lobster just for the sake of it.

It’s tempting to believe that this early glimpse at John Waters’s regular crew of degenerate collaborators, The Dreamlanders, would mostly benefit the already-converted. Surely it’s exciting to see these weirdos in their artistic infancy. Edith Massey seems particularly fresh & unpolished in her natural habitat as a barkeep. It’s weird to know that David Lochary’s look as Raymond Marble in Pink Flamingos was something he exuded all the time. Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, and Divine are all playing prototypes of the characters who would later be cartoonishly exaggerated in other Dreamlander collaborations, with Divine’s monstrous transformation in particular being explained in-film with the line “Every minute she’s alive she’s getting worse & worse!” Waters even draws conscious attention to this “cavalcade of perversions” by naming the characters after their real life counterparts: David, Mink, Cookie, Edith, etc. There’s no doubt that longtime fans of the director’s work would get a kick out of this overlooked gem’s babyfaced cast that newcomers might not tend to care about in any particular way. However, the film does have a recognizable appeal as a genre film artifact even outside of that context and it’s a dynamic largely due to its nature as deliberately campy horror.

Seeing Waters’s “cavalcade of perversions” at work so early in his career is valuable both to fans & newcomers alike because it calls attention to the fact that The Dreamlanders were straight up punks in the era of hippies & suburban sprawl. The surf rock soundtrack, beat-up Cadillacs, crossdressing, and leopard print get-ups of Multiple Maniacs construct a rock & roll nightmare incongruous with its then-current counterculture of hippie niceness. This is a playfully mean movie, one crawling with cartoonish rape humor, gleeful violence, and the single most blasphemous use of a prayer rosary imaginable. It’s no wonder that in Divine’s final moments of mania she’s treated like a Godzilla-esque monster complete with fleeing crowds & an armed military response. The world wasn’t quite ready for her particular brand of perversion and her very existence reads on the screen as a criminal act, one amplified by the film’s microfilm-reminiscent opening credits scroll. That shock value even holds power today, somehow, as I’ve never attended a John Waters screening that didn’t inspire at least one walk-out. Even in a film festival environment there were three hurried walk-outs during Multiple Maniacs. I don’t know if that speaks more to Waters’s reputation as The Hairspray Guy, the aggressive specificity of his sense of humor, or his unique ability to push buttons, but it’s honestly kind of incredible that any film from 1970, before the grindhouse heights of drive-in grotesquery, can disgust people into fleeing in horror in 2016, especially one this unabashedly silly.

Waters is obviously an inexperienced filmmaker in Multiple Maniacs. He catches his players wildly out of focus, he wears his influences proudly on his sleeve (including a poster for Russ Meyer’s Vixen!), he relies heavily on details like nudity & (absurdly unrealistic) rape scenarios for easy shock value, etc. However, the film holds up surprisingly well as a proto-punk provocation, maybe even one with wider commercial appeal than the more consistently celebrated Pink Flamingos, due to its genre thrills as an eccentric horror comedy of sorts. I’ll likely have very few more chances to catch one of his films for the very first time in a public audience environment & this one did not disappoint in the slightest. In an ideal world all of Waters’s back catalog would get this careful restoration treatment.

-Brandon Ledet

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

ghost

threehalfstar

campstamp

Between Battleship, Clue, and now Ouija: Origin of Evil, I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie based off a board game that I did not enjoy. It’s a strange feeling, considering how many awful movies based on action figures, video games, and comic books have been released over the years. My best guess as to why the board game movie has a fairly high success rate, besides not having a large number of chances to shit the bed, is that there’s a playfulness inherent to the sub-subgenre that calls for a kind of in-on-the-joke campiness that deflects a lot of potential criticism with a casual wave of the hand. The trailers for Ouija: Origin of Evil signaled to me, “Hey, we’re just having fun here. No pressure,” and the film itself followed through on that cavalier attitude. I’m not saying that Origin of Evil was the kind of lazy, winking affair you’d find in a Sharknado or a Lavalantula, but it did have a playful smirk in the way it chose to deliver its genre thrills, one that undercut any of its generic formula and made me wonder if I might be a fan of the board game movie as an artistic medium.

If there’s anything unfortunate about the ad campaign that hooked me into watching Origin of Evil, it’s that it revealed a little too much. Not only was every potential scare up until the last half hour thoroughly spoiled in the trailers, but the film’s few major narrative reveals were also spelled out in the campaign. Since we know ahead of time that a family of scam artist “psychics” who fake communication with the dead will be taught a harsh lesson by actually communicating with the dead through the titular haunted board game, there’s not much room left for the film to surprise in terms of unexpected story beats. Worse yet, the ads revealed that the youngest, most adorable member of the family would suffer a Linda Blair-style demonic possession that causes her to do & say all the freaky Creepy Kid Horror things we’ve been seeing on film since all the way back to Village of the Damned (if not earlier): spooky voices, inhuman contortions, ice cold precociousness, etc. Where Origin of Evil makes these already-expected tropes worthwhile, then, is in how willing it is to have fun with the very familiar space it carves out for itself.

Like with a lot of recent horror films, Origin of Evil sets its haunted house/board game horrors decades in the past, this time opting for the 1960s instead of the well-worn temporal setting of the 70s (like in The Conjuring & We Are Still Here). This not only makes room for beautiful sets & costuming in its production design and removes pesky horror-prevention inventions like cellphones & Google from the scenario; it also harkens back to a time when the ouija board was new & sacred. The religious adherence to rules like “Don’t play by yourself” & “Never play in a graveyard,” makes it all the more significant when they’re inevitably broken and violators are punished accordingly. Visually, the film also has a lot of fun with the detail allowed by the setting, digitally recreating “cigarette burn” reel changes & indulging in the most split diopter shots I’ve seen since Blow Out. There’s some fun touches in the dialogue that are specific to the era as well, like when a teen boy mansplains to a group of girls why we could never land on the moon & in the general Brady Bunch precociousness of the evil little girl at the film’s center as she gleefully channels the restless spirits of the dead. If set in 2016, Ouija: Origin of Evil might have been a generic, by the books blur (which, by all accounts, its 2014 predecessor Ouija was), but something about a rock ‘n roll 60s familial melodrama being invaded by an evil board game allowed a lot of room for camp horror efficiency & the film had a lot of fun playing around in that space.

It’s difficult to say exactly what I’m looking for when I go see a modern generic horror at the theater, but Ouija: Origin of Evil delivers it with ease. It’s got exactly what I felt was missing from other 2016 titles like The Darkness, The Forest, and (the worst of the bunch) Lights Out, bested only by The Boy in putting a smile on my face while supplying what I want from Modern Big Studio Horror, whatever it is. Director Mike Flanagan, who also helmed Hush & Oculus, has a great track record with making gold out of standard horror fare so far, so surely he should be given some significant credit for crafting an enjoyable prequel to a film I never plan to see here, but I also think there’s something to the board game movie as a novelty subgenre that made his playfulness possible. Using the ouija board as a centerpiece opened up a goofy-spooky playground for Flanagan to let loose in and it’s fun watching him gleefully run in circles with his camera within that environment.

-Brandon Ledet

Shark Exorcist (2016)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

onehalfstar

campstamp

According to the Internet, schlock director Donald Farmer has dedicated fans. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around that after watching Farmer’s latest release, a CG-plagued digital horror about a demonically-possessed shark. Shark Exorcist is a dirt cheap production, a winking, lazy B-picture that can’t even clear the low bar set by SyFy Channel mockbusters like Cowboys vs Dinosaurs and Lavalantula. It’s a shame, too, because the idea of Satan possessing a shark in a cheap slice of modern schlock was obviously enough of a hook to grab my attention, but the film has very little interest in following through on the potential of its own premise. Much like the carnie-esque film promoters of old, Donald Farmer seems like the kind of director who promises the world in his posters & trailers, but doesn’t care about actually delivering the goods once the tickets are sold.

A Satanic nun stabs an accuser to death near an urban lake & disposes of the body. She pleads to the water, “Lord Satan, accept my sacrifice! Send me an avenger.” Satan, the kindly obliging Lord that He is, answers her prayer in the form of a shark, or a red-tinted CG rendering of a shark. A year later a group of young girls are enjoying summertime leisure at the same lake, planning to “swim, work on your tan, just lake stuff.” One girl is bitten on the leg by the demon shark, naturally, and becomes possessed with its Satanic spirit. She freaks her friends out with her rapid recovery from the bite, sudden obsession with water, and (not least of all) serial murders using a vampiric set of shark’s teeth. A Catholic priest catches wind of the strange happenings of the demonic shark girl and makes it a personal mission to exorcise her body of the evil spirit. This lazy hybrid of The Exorcist & Jaws finally culminates with its natural conclusion, a reading of the line “We’re going to need a bigger cross!,” revealing the entire production to be a long setup to an empty punchline.

Normally, I would be all over a film with that exact plot, but Shark Exorcist is dedicated to a distinct lack of effort that makes the whole ordeal frustrating when it should be cheap fun. The bargain basement digital photography & soft core porn quality acting recall the midnight crowd favorite Birdemic, but without that film’s authentic, if misguided, sincerity. Characters in Shark Exorcist use smart phones that could easily make a higher quality picture than the one delivered (just look to last year’s Tangerine for proof). Local news reports & a reality television spoof called Ghostwalkers have a kind of Tim & Eric quality to their awkwardness in passing, but become frustratingly dull after long stretches. If this were a home movie or a high school project I might be able to give it a pass. I might even think it was kind of cute. As a production from an adult director who apparently has been making cult-minded schlock for decades, it registers as a lazy annoyance. The move is only 70 minutes long, but I got everything I could out of it in the first ten, which is not a great sign.

Still, because the premise is so damn silly, I could have forgiven all of Shark Exorcist’s sins if it had just delivered one simple thing: shark attacks. That’s all I ask. There are gallons of (embarrassingly unconvincing) blood in the film, but no true gore. After a shark bite the blood rests on the victims’ skin, with no attempt to give the illusion of a wound. Worse yet, there is not a single frame in Shark Exorcist where the demonic shark or its unsuspecting victim share the screen. The shark swims in a CG void and prepares to chomp. The victim, above water, screams. We then see their lifeless body, no point of contact depicted & no evidence of a wound.

I’m honestly curious about Donald Farmer’s career at this point, almost enough to double back and watch titles like Chainsaw Cheerleaders, Cannibal Hookers, and Vampire Cop. Surely as a man who’s been making B-pictures for decades he knows that a film this cheap needs to deliver the goods in term of gore or sex or something in order to make the price of admission worthwhile to his audience. The impression I get after watching Shark Exorcist is that he does, but he also doesn’t give a shit, which is a shame given the promise in this film’s premise. This is the rare case where a film might’ve actually benefited had its creator sold their idea to SyFy instead of making it themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

If most people had access to a single trip in a time machine, they’d likely use it to do some kind of good deed: saving a life, preventing a tragedy, correcting a mistake, etc. If I could take a single trip in a time machine, I’d waste it on something stupid, namely getting drunk with Ed Wood & attending a screening of Devil Girl from Mars. So much of Devil Girl from Mars feels like standard Ed Woodian fare that I suspect the infamous weirdo schlockmeister would’ve gotten a kick out of the film & perhaps been inspired by it to make something truly astounding. Devil Girl from Mars takes the same lofty, but empty stage play dialogue of Plan 9 from Outer Space & marries it to the same absurdly cheap, but highly memorable sci-fi visual effects. Yet, the film feels oddly flat & uninteresting for long stretches in a way that Ed Wood’s sci-fi work could never be accused of. As is, Devil Girl from Mars is an interesting trifle with a killer high camp villainess. If it had the aggressively inane guiding hand of an Ed Wood behind it, it might’ve been a trashterpiece. It already had the building blocks on hand.

Part of what makes Devil Girl from Mars so interesting, oddly enough, is also exactly what makes it dull: a false air of sophistication. A British production adapted from a stage play, the film aims for the heady B-picture space of a Village of the Damned or The Earth Dies Screaming, but falls far short of the mark. The dialogue is just as inane & inconsequential as any other 50s sci-fi cheapie you can conjure, but it’s given the utmost respect & reverence in a way that makes for both a curious watch & a disappointing slog, depending on who’s talking, human or devil girl. The stage play machinations of gathering various archetypes (an escaped convict, a lady barkeep, a square jawed alpha male, a wise professor, etc.) holed up at an isolated inn are belabored to the point of exhaustion, as if there was confusion about what kind of movie drive-in audiences would want to see: a stuffy parlor drama or a high camp sci-fi train wreck. Luckily, there’s enough of the latter to make Devil Girl from Mars worthwhile, but just barely, as the two halves of the film seem to be at war with each other.

The key to the entertainment factor in this film is, duh, the Martian devil girl herself. Our titular antagonist is dressed like an S&M take on Darth Vader, commands a lazily-constructed robot in the shape of a refrigerator, and flies around in an adorably shoddy UFO miniature. The people of Earth (or at least the people of the tavern) take her word for it that she’s from Mars without any semblance of doubt, based entirely on her sleek space dominatrix uniform, presumably. She boasts at length about her invisible force fields, her killer robot, the mental superiority of the Martian people, and rambles about the 4th dimension, the War of the Sexes, and a newly-invented organic metal; the tavern folk listen in bewilderment. I love the audacity of rambling off these giant ideas while sticking to the most bare bones cast, set, and effects imaginable. Yes, the killer fridge-bot shoots deadly laser bullets, but its arms lay limply at its sides; the film felt no need to animate them. The titular devil girl zaps men with her own atomic age ray gun, but when they disappear there’s no skeleton or goop left behind; there’s no visual effect as they fade away, only the cheap trick of removing them from the frame.

Devil Girl from Mars is mostly recommendable for the ridiculous camp of its central villain, but should be approached with patience, as it takes its mediocre dramatic setup just as seriously as its goofy sci-fi horror camp. An airplane is zapped out of the sky before the opening credits even have a chance to roll (take that, Sully), but otherwise it takes a while for the men to gather & grumble in the tavern before they’re tortured by the film’s space dominatrix & her robot sub. There’s a few stray lines that make their ludicrous bickering amusing (“I’m a scientist! I believe what my brain tells me to believe,”) but for the most part it’s too dry to be funny & too inane to be prestigious, resting somewhere in a B-movie limbo. With an Ed Wood behind the wheel, both halves of these films would shine together as one ridiculous whole, but until I get the chance to waste a trip in a time machine to make that happen we just have to settle on celebrating the good & forgetting the bad in this one. If you watch the film & Ed Wood’s name is in the credits or attached to a remake, you’ll know that my mission was a success.

-Brandon ledet

The Greasy Strangler (2016)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

How do you feel about anti-comedy? Do properties like Comedy Bang Bang or The Eric Andre Show or Xavier: Renegade Angel annoy or delight you? Your answer to that question is largely going to determine your reaction to the anti-humor horrors of The Greasy Strangler, which essentially applies the ethos of Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie to a creature feature format. Within seconds the antagonistic humor of this dirt cheap indie horror establishes itself as the definition of not-for-everyone, but it shouldn’t feel too out of step for folks who’ve spent enough time following Adult Swim’s ever-evolving line-up over the years. Personally, I found The Greasy Strangler to be an amusingly perverse provocation, one that works fairly well as a deconstruction of the Sundance-minded indie romance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who disliked the film for being cruel, grotesque, or aggressively stupid. Those claims would all certainly be valid. As a nasty slasher by way of Eric Warheim, however, that’s just a natural part of a very unnatural territory.

This is not a murder mystery. In the very first scene a father confesses to his live-at-home son that he is, in fact, The Greasy Strangler. This is a man who eats & drinks copious amounts of grease with every meal. He dips his hotdogs in tubs of grease. He asks questions like, “Why not put a little grease in your java?” At any inquiry of his grease fetish he retorts incredulously, “You probably think I’m The Greasy Strangler, don’t you?” in a tone that’s effectively a de facto confession. His son, who looks like a strange, sad hybrid between Jeffrey Tambor & Dawn Weiner, spends a lot of time around his greasy, murderous pop. He prepares most of his meals, lounges nude around the home with him, and assists in his (fraudulent) disco tour business, but doesn’t suspect at all that his father might be the local grease-covered serial murderer until deep in the third act. Such is the deliberate stupidity of this film.

As a creature feature, The Greasy Strangler undeniably delivers the goods. Although a decidedly camp-minded comedy, it boasts a truly hideous, horrifying monster that’s sickening to behold. What I find much more unique, however, is the way the film satirizes and sets aflame the modern indie romance genre. The color palette & social awkwardness of titles like Juno or Napoleon Dynamite or whatever their post-aughts equivalent would be is meticulously recreated here, but put to a grotesque effect. This is quirk employed for pure evil. Seemingly the only woman in this pastel horror show universe somehow enters a love triangle with The Greasy Strangler & his sad sack progeny. The world’s most upsetting prosthetic genitals continually bump ugly in what would usually play as a “star-crossed lovers find love in a world where they don’t belong” plot. The romance of The Greasy Strangler is just as upsetting & difficult to watch as its monstrous kills. The film pretends to strive for meticulous twee preciousness, but it doesn’t take long for its corny façade to crumble and the film becomes queasy in an entirely different, much more upsetting way.

Like with most (if not all) comedies, your tolerance & appreciation of The Greasy Strangler will depend greatly on your sense of humor. This usually goes doubly true in the case of anti-comedy, which is aggressively antagonistic in its reliance on repetition & inanity to the point where being annoyed is supposed to be part of the appeal. This film is built with several ready-to-go drinking game options, considering the ungodly number of times it forces you to watch the titular killer run his naked body through an automated car wash and the even more numerous, Gertrude Stein-esque utterances of phrases like “bullshit artist.” As someone who enthusiastically enjoyed the film, but expects plenty of dissent on that reaction, I have to offer the laziest critical advice imaginable: watch a trailer first. The Greasy Strangler’s advertising has been exceptionally blunt & honest about the film it’s selling and I feel like a two minute clip is more than enough to determine if this will be worth your time. I got everything I wanted out of it as a Tim & Eric-style slasher with a satirical edge in its approach to romantic indie quirk. That’s not going to ring true for everyone, but comedy is one of the most divisive genres around, so that’s to be expected.

-Brandon Ledet

Missile to the Moon (1958)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

campstamp

With recent remakes like Ben Hur, Blade Runner, and Ghosbusters, it’s easy to get into the mindset that reboot culture has recently gotten out of hand, but the truth is that it may have always been out of hand. Consider the case of Missile to the Moon. This throwaway sci-fi B-picture is a five-years-later remake of the ludicrous camp oddity Cat-Women of the Moon. Delivered by the same indie production company that made the much more fun original, Missile to the Moon merely added more moon monsters & extraneous plot lines to Cat-Women of the Moon’s exact narrative structure and casually slapped on a new title. It’s what we folks in a post-Dark Knight world would call “a gritty reboot.” Whatever you want to call it, its existence feels entirely unnecessary, especially once you start splitting hairs over the film’s baffling decision of what to keep from its source material & what to discard.

I’ll try not to waste too much time on a plot description here, since Missile to the Moon largely resembles hundreds of other B-movie space pictures & standalone episodes of serials like Roy Rogers. A rocket ship (picture the most generic toy rocket ship imaginable; you’ve got it) travels to the moon through some dangerous meteorite turbulence and once the crew lands on the alien terrain they face mysterious dangers posed by lunar monsters. In Cat-Women of the Moon these monsters only included a gigantic moon spider & a misandrist society of alien women determined to steal the crew’s rocket ship & use it to take over Earth. Missile to the Moon repeats this dynamic with only a few slight changes: the spider puppets look a little better; they’re joined by entirely unneeded Styrofoam rock monsters; the cave-dwelling women are no longer misandrists. That last point, of course, is what sucks a lot of the fun out of the source material’s dynamic. Instead of a man-hating city of women dressed in black catsuits, we get a vague harem of one or two alien baddies who are a little power hungry, but mostly in desperate need of a man’s loving company. Boring.

Much like with the case of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! dry run Motorpsycho!, Missile to the Moon is only interesting as a comparison point to a far better work that shares its basic dynamic. In the original film the lone female member of the astronaut crew is a navigator with a key role central to the plot. In the remake she’s a stowaway & a scientist’s fiancée, not even as central to the plot as a pair of escaped convict ruffians who also wind up on this lunar expedition. Her biggest concern is that the moon women might lure away her future husband, which leads her to mutter catty things like “If I knew there was going to be this much competition, I would’ve undressed for the occasion.” In Cat-Women of the Moon the titular aliens function in villainous peace & harmony; here they have petty, jealous fights over space idiot love interests who say endearing things like “Don’t think, honey. Just be beautiful.” There’s even an added moment of threatened sexual assault, you know, to liven things up. All the transgressive elements of the original are stripped from its derivative follow-up in favor of some barely-better special effects, increased violence, entirely unnecessary rock monsters, and a few baffling tweaks to the details, like swapping out the moon gold of the first film for the radically different treasure of moon diamonds. Whatever.

Everything about Missile to the Moon is secondary. As a remake, it feels purposeless and only interesting in the schlocky shadow of its predecessor. As a sci-fi horror cheapie in its own right it doesn’t even look as interesting as the other half of its double bill: Frankenstein’s Daughter. Just about the only moment of joy I got from the film was the cattily jealous fiancé asking of her leading man, “Do you think I’m prettier than that girl?” mere moments after watching her fellow crew members die a grisly death. And even the humor of that moment points to the film’s central problem: a complete lack of the playfully transgressive misandry of its predecessor.

-Brandon Ledet

The Vampire’s Coffin (1958)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

campstamp

I think I partially didn’t enjoy this one because I wasn’t aware that it’s a sequel to El Vampiro, which is supposed to an extremely influential classic horror. The Vampire’s Coffin probably would have made more sense and I’m sure a lot of the questions I had about the plot would have been cleared up had I seen the original. I’m going to assume this was a case of the uninspired sequel money-grab. Given all of that, the plot is still a little bit of a convoluted mess, most of which is gleaned through vague dialogue.

Dr. Saldivar breaks into a grave yard. The doctor is there on a scientific mission: to steal the corpse of a vampire, Count Karl de Lavud, and study it. Dr. Mendoza has already experienced the vampire’s wrath along with Marta, a nurse at the hospital. Marta previously was the object of the vampire’s undead desire.  When the coffin is brought to the hospital, Mendoza is outraged and makes Saldivar swear not to let Marta know that Count Lavud is back. It gets more needlessly convoluted than that and works in a wax museum, cabaret dancing, and confused police officers.

A lot of problems in The Vampire’s Coffin can be boiled down to budget and bad writing. The movie is obviously a low budget production, or at least by the standards of Hollywood in that era. There are only four settings. The soundstage sets are obvious and under-dressed. The vampire’s bat form is very clearly on a wire and there are no other attempts at fantastical effects. Instead of a true horror, it comes across more as a Mexican drama with a vampire thrown in. The romantic subplot seems to have more focus than the consequences of having a revived vampire running amok.

While it’s pretty cool to see the vampire myth happen somewhere other than Europe or America, I think the cheap movie cheese outweighs that. Between the ineffectual vampire, fake bats on strings, and obvious bare sets, The Vampire’s Coffin is just another bad sequel.

-Alli Hobbs

The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

Sometimes efficiency is the most impressive quality a movie can boast, especially in the case of schlocky genre fare. From the outside looking in, The Earth Dies Screaming might not appear to be much. As an alien invasion sci-fi horror from the drive-in 60s that barely clocks in at an hour’s length, it’d be easy to dismiss the film outright as a filler title on some indistinct double bill. The film is far more interesting than its pedigree would lead you to believe, however, and one of its best qualities is that it recognizes the limits of its somewhat slight premise and chooses to stick to the point. The Earth Dies Screaming smartly avoids overexplaining the exact scope & nature of its murderous alien threat and instead uses the mystery & minute to minute deadly obstacles posed by its otherworldly dread to propel the plot forward through several unexpected gear shifts until the whole thing’s over before you know it. The film may look cheaply made & hastily produced, but you gotta respect that kind of genre flick efficiency.

Although you can pinpoint other genre films that have utilized individual elements of The Earth Dies Screaming for more fully realized conflicts, this particular cheapie achieves a very specific aesthetic by gathering all of those elements in a single, well-tuned vehicle. I kind of feel like the genre film equivalent of a fine wine snob while watching this one, detecting hints of 28 Days later, The Village of the Damned, and The Night of the Living Dead with a strong The Day the Earth Stood Still undertone rounding out the bouquet. In the film’s dialogue-free five minute opening most of the world’s population is seemingly struck dead by a mysterious gas, later revealed to have been released by a malicious alien race. Planes, trains, and automobiles crash as their individual pilots are strewn about, lifeless. The few survivors in a rural England town find themselves isolated form the world with no radio or television broadcasts seemingly able to make it through the chaos. The horrors don’t end there, though, as an army of killer alien robots is deployed to sweep the streets of any temporarily lucky survivors and, just in case that wasn’t enough, they’re followed by an undead, mindcontrolled zombie hoard. The alien threat of The Earth Dies Screaming is one thing after another, a continually shifting obstacle course that pummels its audience and its victims with just the right rhythm to remain surprising & just the right runtime to never outwear its welcome.

I guess there might be some kind of lesson at the heart of this film about the best attribute of humanity being in comradery. Our would-be victims (ranging from a drunken cad to a young pregnant woman to an all-American alpha male, all strangers) find their best chance of survival in their ability to solve their differences & work together as a unit. That aspect of the film’s formula is faint at best, though, especially when compared to more heavy-handed message pieces like The Day the Earth Stood Still or nuclear paranoia monster pictures like Godzilla or Them!. Here, the alien threat has no real discernible intent outside pure malice. There’s no source or ending for the attack and instead of worrying about context the film instead eats up its runtime with details like its robots’ Touch of Death executions & its zombies’ whiteout contacts. In the age where big budget action franchises have no foreseeable end in sight & follow a carnival act trajectory of promising the next big thing down the road without ever having to deliver a self-contained product (much like pro wrestling or, better yet, those films’ comic book source material), there’s a satisfying quality to this kind of genre filmmaking simplicity that’s more than a little refreshing. Despite what’s promised in this film’s (undeniably badass) title, the Earth could actually use a lot more of this contextless, go-for-broke efficiency.

-Brandon Ledet