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Burying the Ex (2015)

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onehalfstar

Joe Dante is, without question, one of my favorite directors. Just a genuinely fun filmmaker. Where would my childhood have been without the subversively satirical live-action cartoons of Small Soldiers & Gremlins II: The New Batch? I shudder to think. As I got older, self-aware genre titles like Piranha & The Howling revealed themselves to be well within my wheelhouse and the genre-defiant fare of Explorers, The Hole, and Matinee have won my heart even as recently as last year. That’s why it hurts me so much to admit that Dante’s latest work, Burying the Ex, is such a crushing disappointment. At a mercifully short 90min, the film is a grueling test of patience, never even coming close to satisfying either the horror or the comedy side of its horror comedy genre. Worse yet, it dabbles in some light, MRA-type misogyny that suggests that Dante has transitioned from the youthful prankster role he’s filled for decades into some unbecoming grumpy curmudgeon territory. It’s truly sad to witness.

As suggested by the “burying the axe” pun from the title, Burying the Ex centers around a troubled romantic relationship that just will not end until the protagonist schlub puts his love & their differences to rest (literally). Max, played by a hoarsely bland Anton Yelchin, finds it difficult to end a longterm relationship with the beautiful Evelyn (Ashley Greene), despite their glaring, irreconcilable differences. This dilemma is complicated even more by Evelyn’s sudden death by speeding bus, which preempts Max’s final attempt to break it off. Somewhere in there is the cool nerd Olivia (Alexandra Daddario) who offers Max a glimpse into what a relationship with someone who shares his geeky interest in oldschool horror films could possibly be like. In comparison, Olivia makes Evelyn look like a megabitch. Evelyn’s violent mood swings, rampaging jealousy, disregard for Max’s monster movie memorabilia, and self-satisfied conviction that she’s saving the world through “green” blogging all make her out to be some kind of a monster, a position that’s only slightly amplified when she rises from the grave to reveal herself as Max’s crazy, undead zombie (ex)girlfriend. Olivia, on the other hand, is more or less just one of the guys.

Zombies as a metaphor for romantic relationships that just won’t die is not only a somewhat unoriginal idea, it was one that one done much better as recently as last year’s Life After Beth. However, the lack of an original concept could’ve been easily overcome if Dante’s typical zaniness had run the show instead of the faintly sexist “Aren’t women just crazy?” vibes that spoil the fun. That’s not even taking into account the nerd fantasy fulfillment that two beautiful women (undead or not) would be fighting over the protagonist Max, who is hopelessly mediocre in both looks & personality (I’ve enjoyed Yelchin elsewhere, just not here). The only part of Burying the Ex that does work is its loving references to older, better monster movies, including shout-outs to The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, Plan 9 from Outer Space, I Walked With a Zombie, Cat People, and the list goes on. When Max explains that horror films are important because they “challenge us to stop accepting the world & face our inner monster & find strength to conquer it,” you really want to find common ground with the film if not only to fulfill that admirable sentiment. However, Burying the Ex never faces its inner misogyny monster, thoroughly misidentifying the enemy as Crazy Women & Their Crazy Ways. All that’s left, then, is cheap, unfunny gags & some last second gore. Whoopee. It’s a highly undignified position for Dante to be in & I hope that this isn’t the part of a larger downward trend in quality for the director, who really should’ve known better than to make this film in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

The Visit (2015)

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three star

The only way I can think to summarize my thoroughly conflicted feelings about The Visit is to recreate The Simpsons‘ take on the shopkeeper scene in Gremlins. The Visit had a surprisingly amusing trailer, but a lot of the best gags were included in the ad. Ooh, that’s bad. But the last half hour is a riot! That’s good. The hour leading up to it is a snooze. That’s bad. But the film ends in a plot-summarizing rap song, one of my all-time favorite movie tropes. That’s good! It’s also a found footage horror movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan . . . That’s bad. Can I go now?

Besides the automatic groans induced its by-the-numbers found footage format, part of what makes The Visit so frustrating is its annoyingly precocious leads. A fifteen year old documentarian & her younger white rapper brother eat up almost the entirety of the film’s runtime, testing my patience in every scene. The pint-sized white rapper is obviously the easier target to pick on here, especially when he’s displaying his cringe-worthy craft for the camera. He boasts to his clueless grandmother, “Do you know who Tyler the Creator is? People say I’ve got that kind of sound,” (Fuck this kid.) but the truth is that he’s a decade-late Aaron Carter at best. Thankfully, his sister calls him out on his bullshit fairly often, calling him “ethnically confused” & describing his art as “songs of misogyny” (he’s particularly fond of punctuating songs with the words “bitch” & “ho”), but the truth is she’s not much better. More arrogant poser than accomplished auteur, she’s prone to saying things like “I hate sappy movies. I find them torturous,” that remind me way too much of the asshole, know-it-all personality I’m glad (or I hope) that I left behind in my teens. It’s a fairly insufferable combo.

The good news is that they’re punished for their shortcomings . . . eventually. Hurting from an early separation from their father, the kids suffer from some crippling neuroses: the documentarian has a disgust with her own self-image and the lil’ rapper struggles both with germophobia & a tendency to freeze under pressure. In an attempt to heal old wounds in their mother’s life & to fill the familial void left by their absent father, the kids decide to document a week-long visit with their estranged grandparents. Subverting the old hat horror trope that kids are usually the creepy ones (something exploited as recently as the Sinister franchise), the grandparents’ “sundowning” & dementia make them out to be a horrific threat that gets increasingly dangerous as the week drags on. The grandparents honestly don’t say too much for the first two-thirds of the film, which is a damn shame, because they’re infinitely more interesting than their would-be victims. What starts out as warning signs like catching them naked, scratching door jams like a cat sharpening its claws & hoarding used diapers in a locked toolshed eventually escalates to A Big Showdown worthy of an 80’s slasher flick. In the movie’s last minute chaos, the kids’ debilitating nueroses are literally thrown in their faces as they’re confronted with mirrors & germ-infested feces in way that finally, finally delivers on some of the potential of a immensely promising premise.

In a lot of ways it’s the typical Shyamalan plot structure that makes the full experience of The Visit so conflicting. The tyranny of The Last Minute Twist drags the film down so hard, evoking far more boredom than tension as you wait for the hammer to finally fall. There’s a little fun to be had before the twist, like when the grandmother chases the kids through a crawl space like a wild animal only to cheerily announce “I’m making chicken pot pie!” when she catches them. Speaking of food, her constant offerings of cookies, bread pudding, cheddar biscuits, and whatever else give the film a distinct Hansel & Gretel vibe, one intentionally landed by her insistence that one of the kids climb into the oven “to clean it”. There’s also some laughable horror movie tropes, like the fact that they’re trapped in an isolated, one cop town with no Wi-Fi or cellphone reception. By the time the film finally devolves into geriatric mayhem, which includes divine moments like the lines “I have the deep darkies. You have to laugh to keep the deep darkies in a cave,” & “I see the veiny, deformed face of the world,” as well as the world’s most tense game of Yahtzee (“We picked teams! Young vs. old.”), I find myself wondering why it couldn’t have been that fun the entire time. Shyamalan’s dedication to springing a surprise on his audience in the final act is needlessly frustrating. Why not have The Twist arrive earlier in the sparsely populated runtime to make room for more senior citizen terror? Why not give the people what they want early & often?

I left my visit with The Visit firmly on the fence with how I felt about it. Although I wished more of the film was like the bonkers final half hour, that type of non-stop old folgey mayhem was already delivered decades ago in the straight-to-VHS gore fest Rabid Grannies. Although the film suffers under the Tyranny of the Twist, Shyamalan knowingly alludes to how frustrating that plot structure can be & teases possible out-there twists like underwater aliens & “the white thing with the yellow eyes” in a admirably prankish attempt to screw with audience expectations. Although I found the main characters to be unbearably dull & precocious (far beyond what I believe was intended), I also found their character arcs to be sufficiently satisfying by the film’s conclusion. It wasn’t until I was standing outside the theater, overhearing a stranger complain, “We’ll that’s two hours I’ll never get back” that my opinion instantly became slightly more positive than my initial indecision. Out of pure spite & pettiness for that offhand comment, I thought to myself “You know what? I’ve seen way worse. It was alright.” You could probably attribute half a star of my rating to that little bit of vindictive eavesdropping. Otherwise, I’d still be exactly divided on how I felt.

-Brandon Ledet

D.E.B.S. (2004)

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three star

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I wish that I could have really, really loved this movie. D.E.B.S. is a perennial IFC favorite, and even though there was a period of time where this movie seemed to be on several times a week, I never managed to catch it. It’s a quirky movie with a great cast and a smart concept, and although it has a great stride once it hits it, it takes so long to get there that I can’t give it 4 stars based on the last act alone.

The premise of the film is that there is a secret test within the SATs that measures a person’s aptitude for espionage. Women who pass the hidden aptitude test are recruited into the D.E.B.S. (Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength), a clandestine spy academy where everyone dresses like Catholic schoolgirls and learn to be superheroes. Amy Bradshaw (Sara Foster) is the posterchild of the D.E.B.S., as she made the “perfect score” on the D.E.B.S. test, but she dreams of going to art school in Barcelona. Max Brewer (Meagan Good) is the trigger-happy leader of their quartet, joined by chain-smoking French sexpot Dominique (Devon Aoki) and perpetually ditzy Janet, who has yet to earn her stripes. Amy has recently broken up with her boyfriend, Homeland Security agent Bobby (Geoff Stults), a bro who refuses to accept that it’s over, when the D.E.B.S.’s handler Mr. Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan) assigns the squad to surveil notorious supervillain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), in whom Amy has an academic interest.

Lucy is a criminal mastermind, the last scion of a syndicate family who loves to steal, with diamonds, naturally, being her speciality. She’s back in the states and meeting with “former KGB” assassin Ninotchka Kaprova (Jessica Cauffiel); unbeknownst to the federal agencies tracking her, Lucy’s rendezvous is actually a blind date engineered by her bodyguard and adorably-devoted BFF Scud (Jimmi Simpson). When Bobby’s pettiness accidentally reveals the D.E.B.S. and other agencies to Lucy, a shootout ensues and she escapes, running into a warehouse where she and Amy have a pistol standoff/meet cute. Amy lets Lucy get away, and the latter realizes she’s falling for the enemy. After a few more encounters, Lucy stages a bank heist to meet Amy again, and the two abscond to be together. The rest of the D.E.B.S. organization (minus Janet, who knows Amy went willingly and begins a cyber-friendship with Scud) goes into scorched earth mode scouring the world for Amy, who’s happily shacked up; when they eventually discover the two and retrieve Amy, the D.E.B.S. Boss (Holland Taylor) agrees to cover up the incident to maintain the agency’s reputation, forcing Amy to denounce Lucy publicly at the senior prom, er, “Endgame.” Meanwhile, Lucy realizes she would rather live without crime than Amy, and sets to righting her wrongs and winning her back.

D.E.B.S. is often described as a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, but that comparison doesn’t track very well for me. The Angels were more like private detectives than spies, for one thing (at least in the original show). D.E.B.S. has more in common with Austin Powers than either the 70s Angels TV series or the godawful 2000 film adaptation (or its somehow-worse 2003 sequel) and, despite having a cast full of beautiful women, never feels like it was made with the male gaze in mind. The relationship between Amy and Lucy feels organic, if a little corny, and is never played for titillation or exploitation. There’s also a little bit of Josie and the Pussycats thrown in for good measure, with lots of colorful visuals and the third-act-squad-breakup plot development that was so popular from roughly the mid-nineties through the early-aughts, although it lacks that film’s subtlety and social commentary. As much as I enjoyed the movie once the romantic plot got rolling, overall, the film is ultimately too inconsistent to really leave a mark. As it turns out, combining clunky gags (there’s a callback joke about what Max and Amy said to each other on the first day of training as well that really thuds, as well as a one-liner about Amy going off book in her final speech) with sublime ones (Lucy and Scud lip-synching to Erasure’s “A Little Respect” over a montage of them returning stolen goods is a treasure, and the D.E.B.S.’s house’s security field having the same tartan pattern as their uniforms is a good visual joke) doesn’t work. And that’s not even getting into the inexplicably odd things that happen in this movie. Why do the D.E.B.S. top brass teleport in and out of every scene? Are they teleporting, or are they holograms?

The movie performed abysmally, making less at the box office than the average twentysomething owes in student loans. It didn’t even break six figures! But what can you really expect when you release a film that’s this uneven? Still, it’s definitely worth a watch. The soundtrack is great (there’s even a Postal Service track playing when Lucy decides to give up her life of diamond theft and doomsday lasering), which is always a plus. Brewster and Simpson make a really great on-screen pair with believable chemistry and comic timing, even if the D.E.B.S. (Amy included) are one-dimensional and kind of bleh. If you can get past some of the worst CGI gun sparks ever committed to film, this is a refreshing twist on the indie-tinged lesbian love story that was such a big draw ten years ago, just make sure you see it through to the cliché but cute conclusion.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

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twostar

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After the vignette structure that loosely held together his third “nudie cutie” picture, Erotica, Russ Meyer returned to feature length narratives for his fourth film, Wild Gals of the Naked West. Unfortunately, the same narrative slightness that worked well enough for The Immoral Mr. Teas to become a breakout success & singlehandedly launch the nudie cutie genre had become tiresome as soon as Meyer’s second picture, the impossibly dull Eve & The Handyman, and near sadistic by the time Meyer made Wild Gals of the Naked West. Wild Gals expands upon the strange quick cuts & surreal pastel-colored voids that distinguish Meyer’s work from other Mr. Teas imitators, but outside of a couple sparse visual quirks there’s nothing too remarkable about the film. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Wild Gals was more or less an an excuse for Meyer & friends to play Western-themed dress up in the desert. And, of course, to display bare breasts.

Our host for this burlesque take on playing cowboys & Indians is an old, drunken Western coot played by Jack Moran. Moran had previously provided the besides-the-point narration that made Erotica a mildly enjoyable, disorienting experience, but this was his first full collaboration with Meyer, both as an onscreen presence & as the sole credited screenwriter. Moran would later go on to pen some of Meyer’s best work of the 1960s (including the cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), but it’s hard to see too much promise in the razor thin screenplay he provides for Wild Gals of the Naked West. Even less dignified than his razor-thin screeplay is his onscreen portrayal of the old coot narrator, decked out in a hideously cheap costume complete with horrendously fake-looking eyebrows & mustache.

Much more exciting in her introduction to the Russ Meyer landscape is the actual old coot Princess Livingston, a toothless howl of a loon that would later appear in notable Meyer pictures like Mudhoney & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (not to mention an appearance in the Pufnstuff movie, of all things). Princess Livingston has a wild authenticity to her, making crazy eyes for the camera, cackling like a drunken witch, and calling to mind future featured players in Meyer-devotee John Waters’ films like the late, great Edith Massey. Wild Gals of the Naked West tries its best to cultivate a sense of unbridled chaos in shoddy, vaudevillian gags involving gorilla costumes, crossdressing, and pranks involving outhouses, but none of the film’s thematic shenanigans can even approach the cinematic lunacy Princess Livingston commands simply by being her wonderful self.

Besides the introductions of Jack Moran & Princess Livingston, Wild Gals is mostly significant in its over-indulgence in the pastel voids that made The Immoral Mr. Teas‘ hallucinogenic glimpses of nudity quaintly fascinating. Here, all visions of Old West saloons & brothels are confined to these otherworldly, pastel-colored spaces, populated by quick cuts of hand-drawn pianos, pasties-covered breasts, hideous drunks downing untold gallons of liquor, strange rubber masks, and six-shooters going off indiscriminately. If the entirety of the film’s action was contained in these nudity-filled bursts of drunken chaos, Wild Gals of the Naked West might be among the best of Russ Meyer’s nudie cutie work. Instead it’s severely bogged down by hokey gags involving the aforementioned gorilla suit, sex workers lassoing johns onto second floor balconies, and truly awful Native American caricatures (although I did admittedly enjoy the ones where the Native men were operating WWII gear like grenade launchers & Tommy guns). All in all, Wild Gals may be mildly fascinating for a Russ Meyer completist looking for early glimpses of Jack Moran, Princess Livingston, and the director’s trademark rapid-fire editing, but after previously watching three similarly vapid nudie cuties from Meyer in a row, I found the ordeal somewhat tiresome.

-Brandon Ledet

Shock ‘Em Dead (1991)

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threehalfstar

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Traci Lords has had one of the strangest careers in Hollywood. How often do you hear about a person transitioning from porn to an actual acting career? Sure, Ron Jeremy may be a household name (in certain households, anyway), but he never became a legitimate actor, and his appearances in films and on television are usually in cameos or roles that reference his fame as one of the most prodigious and well-endowed performers in the realm of “blue” movies. Recently, porn actor James Deen attempted to make the transition to mainstream(ish) cinema in director Paul Schrader’s The Canyons, a terrible erotic thriller penned by shoulda-known-better novelist Bret Easton Ellis, a movie that is only differentiated from poorly plotted direct-to-video softcore erotic thrillers of yesteryear by the presence of a nude Lindsay Lohan (and whose sole redeeming feature was three minutes of Nolan Gerard Funk in a glistening Speedo). But Traci Lords is something altogether different; after being one of the most sought-after porn actresses of the eighties, it was discovered that a great deal of her work had been made while she was underage, resulting in an infamous scandal that saw the adult film industry spending millions of dollars on recalls and withdrawals. Lords then enrolled to study legitimate method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, before establishing herself as a legitimate actress by appearing in John Waters’ Cry-Baby in 1990, although I will always remember her as a late addition to millennial sci-fi series First Wave, having been born in 1987 and having no real frame of reference for her career before that.

That’s a bit of a long-winded introduction, but it does help explain how Traci Lords came to be in the schlocky 1991 love(?) letter to metal that is Shock ‘Em Dead (aka Rock ‘Em Dead), a horror comedy featuring some of the best examples of the worst sartorial mistakes in music history. I’m not here to pass judgement on Metal as a genre—after all, as far as devotees to a particular musical style are concerned, metalheads are some of the most aggressive, fanatical, defensive, and insular, and I’m not looking to get my head bashed in by a guy (and let’s be clear, it would be a guy) who has willingly and purposefully refused to listen to anything that came out after the demise of Vinnie Vincent Invasion. Metal fandom is a mostly misogynistic miasma of guttural throats, thrashing, and toxic masculinity, devoted to a musical subculture that was most successful during a decade where everyone was coked out of their fucking minds, but it’s also the genre that features some of the most amazing and mindboggling musical feats ever performed on guitar, and that fact is not lost on me. Still, even the most devoted headbanger has to admit that the metal of the 1980s was performed by talented dudes who all dressed like they had wandered away from the saddest gay pride parade in the history of Marion, Iowa—all jeweltone lycra and neon jungle prints. It was a time of great musicianship, but at what cost?

Shock comes to us from 1991 as the directorial effort of Mark Freed, cofounder of StarLicks, a video production company that released instructional musical videos in which notable musicians detailed their personal stylings, which amateurs and interested parties could learn to imitate or build upon. According to the cover of the VHS tape (and the cast list on Wikipedia), the film stars Traci Lords and only Traci Lords, but this is not the case; the main character is villain protagonist “Angel” Martin, a “hideous,” mouth-breathing “young” nerd turned guitar god played by handsome, almost-40 Stephen Quadros, and the protagonist of the movie is actually uberbabe Greg Austin (Tim Moffett), boyfriends of Lords’s Lindsay. Aldo Ray and Troy Donahue, both in the twilight of their careers, make appearances as well, unfortunately, and Michael Angelo Batio makes a brief appearance as the Lord of Darkness playing a double-headed guitar as well as acting as hand double whenever the script calls for Angel to do something stunning.

Marty (Quadros) is a nobody, a terrible person going nowhere in life. He lives in a trailer park, where his shitty and never-improving guitar practicing is the bane of his landlord (Yankee Sulivan)’s life. His boss at a nondescript pizza eatery, Tony (Ray), is a verbally abusive micromanager, but Marty is also lousy at his job, licking his fingers before spreading cheese and spying on his nude female co-worker through a locker room peephole. Across town, metal band Spastique Kolon, fronted by Johnny (Markus Grupa), is having trouble finding a decent guitar player at an audition. Johnny’s getting impatient, because there’s a “big showcase” in just two days, and they have to have a guitar player by then! And, as we all know, most bands form and sign up for showcases before they have a guitar player. The band’s manager is Lindsay Roberts (Lords), girlfriend of Greg Austin (Moffett); she thinks it might be time for him to hang up his bass and take a job working construction for her dad in some backwater. Greg’s understandably not thrilled about that potential future, but he goes on a douchey ramble about how he knows he’s going to be somebody and he has the talent and “believe in me, baby,” etc. Johnny asks some random guy who happens to be there (I can’t figure out the character or actor, as less than a third of the people in this movie have photos on their sparse IMDb pages) if he knows any guitarists, and he mentions that his dad is always complaining about a guy living in the trailer park that he manages.

After getting the phone call from Random Guy, Marty ditches work and is fired by Tony. He auditions, performs terribly, and is laughed out of the studio. When Tony refuses to take Marty back and the trailer park manager evicts him from the property, effective at sundown, Marty is approached by the neighborhood “Voodoo Woman” (Tyger Sodipe), who offers him his heart’s desire in exchange for his soul. He agrees, and wishes to be the most technically proficient and famous guitar player in the world. She does some magic with an athame and potion and stabs him in the chest, leading to a dream sequence featuring zombies and the King of Hell himself, and when he wakes up, he’s got an over-sprayed mane of jet black hair, cowhide bedding, a boringly suburban McMansion, and a closet full of black leather vests, pants, and strategically ripped cotton shirts. He’s also got a “family” of hot ladies to tend to his every whim, and they are by far the best thing about this movie. Every single one of them has more character and understandable motivation than Marty, and they also have some of the best lines.

All three also sold their souls for something, with a price (other than being Marty’s reward, that is). Michelle (Karen Russell) was born disfigured and Marilyn (Gina Parks) was scarred in a horrible fire; they see their mangled visages in every mirror, and others can see them when reflected in silver. Monique (Laurel Wiley) had cancer, and she went to the Voodoo Woman for a cure, but the Voodoo Woman took her life immediately and turned her into a ghoul (as she has done to Marty), forcing her to kill and feed upon the green life forces of victims to stay alive, as normal food is toxic. Marty auditions for the band again and, naturally, gets a spot, ultimately pushing Johnny out of the band and getting Spastique Kolon a record deal, all while murdering his former tormentors and innocent groupies alike to feast on their souls. He becomes obsessed with the idea of possessing Lindsay and making her a part of his harem, which involves a Voodoo baptism ritual, but her love for Greg and Greg’s possessiveness of love for her ultimately saves the day. So, yeah, metal music + misremembered elements of Dracula + wish fulfillment for proto-MRA dorks = Shock ‘Em Dead.

This is a fun little movie, although it could have been much funnier if there had been more focus on some of the likable (if evil) supporting characters and less on the rechristened Angel Martin, guitar superstar. Lords’s character, who exists almost entirely for no other reason than to be a living McGuffin for Martin and Greg to fight over, would seem like more of an afterthought than a character in a better movie, but she and the demon girlfriends are the most interesting characters here, with backstories and desires that make sense, especially when compared to Marty’s motivations. I can’t tell if that’s part of the joke or not, but I tend to lean towards “not,” if only because Marty is too much like a real metalhead, with delusions of sex and guitar godhood in spite of reality, and this seems to be more of a spoof than a satire of that mindset. The two major songs performed by Spastique Kolon in this movie are “I’m a Virgin Girl” and “I’m in Love with a Slut,” which is pretty much a textbook case of the Madonna/Whore Complex, and I just can’t force myself to conceptualize the creators of this movie as deserving credit for that level of self-awareness. At the end of the day, that subculture and that era were dominated by socially irresponsible sexism and misogyny, and that comes across more clearly and overtly in this movie than anything else, if for no other mitigating factor than the number of undulating breasts displayed throughout. Still, it got a decent number of laughs from me, and it’s definitely worth watching on a rainy afternoon.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ejecta (2015)

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onehalfstar

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I’ll be the first to admit to having a list of certain topics & genres that always lure me in, no matter what the apparent quality of the individual pictures may be. If a film has something to do with one of my pet obsessions, such as pop music, witchcraft, pro wrestling, etc. I’m highly likely to tune in no matter what. One of the absolute easiest ways to get my butt in a theater seat, for instance, is to slap a sci-fi tag on a film. Just this year alone I’ve been burned by the likes of Jupiter Ascending, Alien Outpost, and The Lazarus Effect all because they promised sci-fi content & I couldn’t resist.

And now you can go ahead & Ejecta to the list of 2015’s shoddiest sci-fi movies that hold promise solely in the potential of their genre, delivering nothing of interest once they get you sitting in front of the screen. Getting pulled in this way has also introduced me to some great pictures that’ll stick with me for a long time coming, such as Spring, Ex Machina, and Predestination, but every now & then a slog like Ejecta will make me question whether or not those rewards are worth the pained efforts required to find the gems among the trash. The film declares its shitty quality early, opening with an on-screen blog post that reads “Tonight the universe is no larger than my head. It’s time to make room for visitors,” & following that empty sentiment with an angsty prologue about how “We’re all so stupid” (meaning we Earthlings) and so on & so forth. Well, I did continue watch Ejecta after the one minute mark, so I guess that last part is actually fairly accurate.

A found footage sci-fi horror cheapie with a framing device in which one interview flashbacks to a second, earlier interview, Ejecta is a thoroughly frustrating exercise in weak storytelling. While being interrogated by some government suits about a possible encounter with “advanced life forms”, our protagonist Bill tells his side of the story by flashing back to the day before, when he was interviewed for a documentary called Extraterrestrial Territory: Things Beyond Our Atmosphere, an exposé only the most dedicated Coast to Coast AM fans could love. As the government bullies start torturing Bill with some Disturbing Behavior-esque headgear in order to coax more information out of him, it’s all too easy to sympathize with the tormentors more than the victim. Tell us what happened, Bill! Show us some aliens already! Bill himself, played by an emaciated Julian Richings (who was much more fun playing villain in the recent Cabbage Patch horror flick Patch Town), is easily the most alien thing we’re shown onscreen for much of the film’s run time. Tormented by some kind of Freddy Krueger-like extraterrestrial invasion that occupies his mind instead of a physical space, Bill only allows himself several hours of sleep every few days or so & he totally looks it.

A competent, strange-looking lead actor can hardly support a feature film on its own, though. As much as Ejecta reaches for every out-there sci-fi idea it can think of (including alien autopsies, UFO crashes, and body snatching), watching a freaked out Julian Richings dispense one piece of info at a time without actually showing us any of the action (outside of a very brief shot of a Humanoids from the Deep-type alien filmed through wooden slats) just doesn’t cut it. The movie promises all & delivers nothing. It’s genuinely hard to believe that it only ran for 82 minutes, adding a meta layer of audience-participatory time travel to an otherwise mundane experience that I swear dragged on for several hours. It’s a terrible film & trying to piece together details of it now makes me feel just as ragged & tortured as Bill looked trying to remember his extraterrestrial experience onscreen. It’s not a sensation that I can recommend.

-Brandon Ledet

Erotica (1961)

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twohalfstar

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After the somewhat labored narratives of his first two nudie cutie films, The Immoral Mr. Teas and Eve & The Handyman, Russ Meyer stripped away a few layers of narrative pretense for his third feature, Erotica. A series of ostensibly erotic vignettes, Erotica is little more than a loosely connected series of in-motion pin-up shoots strung together to reach a feature length (barely more than an hour, all things told). After the mundane & oddly nudity-light slightness of Eve & The Handyman, however, Erotica‘s loose anthology of naked girls & disorienting narration set-ups feel like a godsend. Just as the narrator of Mr. Teas hilariously droned on about such non sequiturs as the absurdities of modern life & the history of bathing while the screen was filled with the film’s true main attraction (bare breasts), Erotica‘s vignettes are each nudity-filled exercises in dissonance, establishing a strange contrast between the images on display & the completely besides the point narration (provided by Jack Moran, who would later write one of Meyer’s undeniable classics, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) that compliment them.

The wraparound

The segment that binds this loose anthology is a self-reflective piece about the production of nudie cuties in general. In Erotica‘s opening minutes Moran rambles on about how a film evolves from an idea to an outline to a treatment to a shooting script until, eventually, “projectors explode their images across the movie screens of America.” Posing the nudie cutie to follow as a series of “intimate, moving portraits of women […] made by adults, for adults”, Erotica bends over backwards to remind you that it is but a simple, entertaining diversion that amounts to “one hour, a very small segment of the day”. In other words, don’t get your hopes up for anything too significant.

“Naked Innocence”

Perhaps the least disorienting of the film’s five segments, “Naked Innocence” makes the brave decision to actually match the off-screen narration to the action on display. A woman explains that she was, more or less, just too damned horny & tired of being stared at by strange men on city streets so she retreated to the woods to calm down. Stripping nude & enjoying an impromptu tanning session & nude dip in a stream, our narrator starts to muse about how even Nature is trying to seduce her. She describes the Sun as a “hot, burning eye probing my bareness” & the feeling of water on skin like “many hands moving against you.” Originally escaping city life to avoid the oppressive male gaze, she discovers that even in Nature she is not safe from salacious oggling. If nothing else, this is a much stranger idea than anything you’d encounter in Mr. Teas or The Handyman, but at the same time all three properties really don’t amount to much more than a reason to gawk at naked women, the very thing this character is trying to escape.

“Beauties, Bubbles”

The second vignette keeps the first’s weirdness improbably rolling with an even stranger idea. Upping the on-screen nudity from not one, but three beauties, “Beauties, Bubbles” depicts a trio of nude models bathing each other in a swimming pool in what, without the narration, could’ve just have easily been titled “Boobs, Boobies”. As with the first segment, it’s the narration that makes the accompanying images so odd. As the girls bathe each other using swimming pools, trash cans, and army helmets full of soapy water (sometimes in the pastel voids that populate Meyer’s other nudie cuties), an offscreen East Coast plumber poses the segment as a PSA to help promote the act of daily bathing in hopes of boosting work for plumbers in general. There’s a goofy dissonance between the plummer’s nonsensical words & the pin-ups in motion imagery at here that’s enjoyably disorienting . . . when it’s not testing your patience.

“The Bare & The Bear”

Speaking of testing your patience, the exact same format from the plummer’s segment is repeated in “The Bare & The Bear”. There’s only one mild variation: instead of promoting bathing, this segment is promoting the sales of bearskins by, how else, showing a nude model wearing nothing but a bearskin intercut with images of real life bears. It’s a very strange sensation to flip back & forth from monstrous bears to a woman rolling around in the nude, especially once the narrator goes off on tangents about “beatniks & coffee drinkin’,” but back to back with the plumber segment the weight of the film’s mercifully short runtime becomes a little laborious.

“Nudists on the High Seas!”

Continuing the diminishing returns of the film’s segments, a narrator drones on about “damsel deckhands” & the history of women being excluded from sailing as the titular “Nudists on the High Seas” sun their nude selves of the deck of a sailboat. It’s nothing much to speak of.

“The Nymphs”

Seemingly becoming bored with itself, Erotica completely devolves here. The narration erratically switches from rambling about subjects as varied as botanical gardens, the sex life of the amoeba, and proper card-playing etiquette, the movie just completely falls apart & loses faith in itself in an irreverent & self-referential way as the models combine previous segments’ affinity for bathing & sunbathing into a single incomprehensible vignette.

“Bikini Busters!”

Falling apart even further, Erotica concludes with a chaotic segment about the history of the bikini. In the only segment to approach the purple prose absurdity of the “Naked Innocence” opener, “Bikini Busters!” features this insane thought: “This is a bathing suit. And this is a girl. Separately these are both in a sense aesthetic, appealing, but together a certain chemistry takes place & the living compliments the inanimate.” “Bikini Busters!” is deliciously empty work that features not only Meyer’s affinity for visually comparing a well-built woman to a well-built steel structure, but it also calls back to both the half-hearted disgust with the male gaze of the first segment (this time featuring the only on-screen men of the film, all ogglers) & the self-referential musings about the nature of the nudie cutie in the wraparound segment, making direct nods to the two Meyer pictures that precede Erotica by displaying their advertisements poolside. “Bikini Busters!” follows the history of the bathing suit from the time the biblical Eve first covered herself with a leaf through a possible future of space-age pasties, a very silly & improbable endeavour that I doubt was well-researched.

By the time an over-excited Russ Meyer (presumably playing himself) falls into a swimming pool trying to film the nude models on display & breaks his (amusingly fake-looking) camera at the end of “Bikini Busters!” Erotica reveals itself as what it truly is: a light romp without too much of anything on its mind outside of bare breasts & cheap jokes. It’s neither the height nor the depth of Meyer’s nudie cutie work, but it is occasionally amusing in its narrative dissonance & surprising attacks on the male gaze in its opening & closing segments (considering that the film itself is an act of leering). However, you could easily cut out at least three of the film’s six segments & retain its full range of amusement, which isn’t exactly high praise for an anthology film that barely lasts an hour from front to end.

-Brandon Ledet

Eve & The Handyman (1961)

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Russ Meyer’s goof of a debut film, The Immoral Mr. Teas, made the future cult cinema giant a filthy pile of money for something that was basically a pin-up picture in motion. Even Meyer himself, usually prone to larger than life arrogance, admitted that Teas was  dumb idea that happened to get lucky due to excellent cultural timing. He once explained to biographer David K. Frasier, “It musn’t come across as some kind of great planning. I did it as I went along. […] Teas was a fluke, an absolute fluke. I had no real idea when I started. All I had was [Bill] Teas, three girls, and my dentist and my attorney for assistants.” Filmed over just a few days with limited resources, Mr. Teas, fluke or not, earned a name for Meyer & established an entire new genre of exploitation film-making: the “nudie cutie” (essentially a mainstream, winking, soft-core version of the stag film). It’s no wonder, then, that Meyer immediately returned to the Mr. Teas format & basically imitated his own creation for his next five features. There are varying levels of quality to Meyer’s Teas-imitating, by-the-numbers nudie cutie pictures, but it’s fairly safe to say that his second feature, Eve & The Handyman, is the worst, most unimaginative one of the bunch.

The titular Eve of this nudie cutie stinker is no other than Eve Meyer, the second (but by no means the last) wife of the film’s pervert director. In his pre-movie career, Russ had a ball photographing his buxom wife in the nude for “glamor magazines” & pin-ups. When it came to committing her body to moving pictures, however, Russ refused to deliver the goods & hides her top model body behind a loose-fitting trench coat for much of the film. The only charm that overlaps with Mr. Teas is in Eve’s off-screen narration (which she reportedly wrote herself, despite Meyer’s “written by” credit at the film’s beginning) which coos vague phrasings like “I’m a big girl in a big town with a big job” as she silently spies on a handyman for reasons that are withheld until the film’s final gag. There’s much less nudity than there was in Mr. Teas (with none contributed by the titular Eve), which means that the strange pastel voids that added a visual flair to most of Russ’ nudie cutie work is mostly absent, save a few isolated scenes. When it comes to the climactic moment that the extended burlesque act has been building to, Eve drops the spy act & removes her trenchcoat, revealing herself to be a “Strump Brushes” salesman hunting down the titular handyman for a business deal. It’s possible that revealing that gag in this review may have spoiled the movie for you uninitiated, but I promise watching it in real time spoils the experience even more.

Eve & The Handyman is, above all, a waste of time. The film starts with an ungodly gag in which a shrill alarm clock rings incessantly despite attempts to turn it off. At first I was turned off by this incessant annoyance, but by the end of the picture I was desperate for the alarm clock to return & make me feel anything at all. The best laugh I got of out of the entire film was the opening credits, in which Russ thoroughly makes sure that you know he produced, directed, wrote, photographed, and edited the picture himself. As for Eve Meyer, she was far from a captivating screen presence here, but her contributions to Russ’ sexploitation work thankfully didn’t stop with this nudie cutie stinker. Eve went on to produce nearly all of Russ’ 1960s films under the moniker Eve Pictures well after the dissolution of their marriage, proving to be extremely useful both in taking financial risks on his batshit insane visions and in nailing down distribution deals & getting deadbeat cinemas to pay up their share. I hope that Eve & The Handyman served as some kind of cherished compensation for all she did for Russ down the line (especially considering how awful he could be to women), because it’s doubtful the film will bring much pleasure to anyone other than Eve herself.

-Brandon Ledet

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)

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threehalfstar

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In more ways than one, The Immoral Mr. Teas is a right place, right time kind of motion picture success. Long before legendary cult movie director & eccentric asshole Russ Meyer set the world on fire with films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls & Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he was a combat photographer that found a post-WWII career shooting pin-up models for “glamor magazines”. With nudist camp “exposés” & the high class pornography of Playboy magazine paving the way for mainstream acceptance of nude modeling on film, it was only a matter of time until someone brought nude photography out of underground screenings of stag films to much more visible (not to mention more profitable), conventional cinemas. With The Immoral Mr. Teas, Russ Meyer simply filled a need. While many exploitative sex films of the time heavily moralized & scolded the very salaciousness they depicted in order to sneak pass the censors, The Immoral Mr. Teas combined moving pictures of naked girls with the comedy genre for the first time since the Hays Code first took its chokehold on Hollywood. Although it’s hard to see exactly what the fuss about the relatively tame & decidedly hokey film was in the context of modern sensibilities, Mr. Teas essentially opened the floodgates for playful nudity on film, giving birth to a genre adorably named “the nudie cutie” & fighting many a censorship battle across the country, from which Hollywood would later benefit greatly.

Presented as a sort of comedic documentary on modern living, Mr. Teas only thinly pretends to be anything more than an excuse to display naked breasts. As the only dialogue heard throughout the film is a hilariously overwritten narration, the film’s endless visual gags & gradual stripteasing call to mind both the artforms of vaudeville & burlesque. The titular Mr. Teas, played by Meyers’ war buddy Bill Teas, is a horny, bargain basement version of Charlie Chaplan’s Tramp. Early in the film Teas openly oggles the barely-covered breasts of dental assistants & barkeeps in a leering way that well earns his “immoral” moniker in the film’s title. True to burlesque fashion, Meyer’s camera gradually reveals more & more female skin as the nudity escalates. What starts with cleavage escalates to a leg being bared to a pin-up photo shoot on the beach (as a nod to Meyer’s profession/passion) where breasts are cleverly obscured from the audience behind objects like a well-placed elbow or a camera. After a loosely defined incident at the dentist that leaves Teas magically altered by Novocaine, our peeping tom protagonist is suddenly struck by intense reveries that overrides his mind with hallucinations of every woman he meets in the nude, giving birth to the “nudie cutie” picture. At this point, the narration fades a great deal, leaving us alone with a shrill, accordion-heavy soundtrack & what will eventually become Meyer’s onscreen calling cards: insane editing choices & strikingly large breasts.

Although lighthearted nudity in motion obviously doesn’t hold the same shock value today that it would’ve fifty-six years ago, there’s plenty of jarring weirdness to The Immoral Mr, Teas that makes it worthwhile as a cultural relic. Much of the charm is dependent on the overreaching narration, which adds a level of snarky commentary on the absurdities of modern living that feels very much in tune to the early works of (my favorite band of all time) DEVO. Much like the gradual escalation of nudity, the narration ratchets up its absurdity over time. It starts by contrasting the calming nature of rocks & trees to the much more constricting traffic, pills, and tight underwear of modern man, but eventually gives way to over-the-top, Criswell-esque statements like “Modern man must, in the course of his endeavors, always keep his eyes on the future. For who knows how the windy zephyrs of fate may twist & cross two lives?” & “And so ends another day, another seeming eternity in the complex scheme of things.” I think the best laugh I got from the entire film was when the off-screen narrator, voiced by Edward J. Lasko, droned about photosynthesis, the density of water, famous discoveries made by sea, and the history of bathing all to justify Teas peeping on women as they skinny dip. It’s a ridiculous, disorienting moment & a tactic that Meyer will repeat several times in his five redundant nudie cuties that immediately followed Mr. Teas.

In addition to the film’s historical significance & ludicrous narration, Mr. Teas is also an early glimpse into the visual weirdness Meyer would eventually push to absurd extremes in Faster, Pussycat & Beyond the Valley. His odd Dutch angles, rapid cuts of mechanical equipment & ample bussoms, and general sense of feverish horndoggery are all present in the film, just on a smaller scale. In order to avoid having the film’s shoots shut down for indecency, he also filmed all of Teas’ hallucinations indoors, placing the film’s naked women in these strange pastel-colored voids that feel like they exist outside of space & time. It’s a genuinely strange touch that, like the besides-the-point narration, would be repeated incessantly in his five nudie cutie follow-ups to Teas. You can tell that Meyer had a ball filming & editing his first foray into motion pictures & it’s no coincidence that the director’s cameo in the film is as a rowdy strip club patron shouting emphatically at a burlesque dancer. The Immoral Mr. Teas is nowhere near the heights (or the depths, honestly) of where Meyer’s career would eventually go, but it is an appropriately silly start for a man whose passion was making movies about large breasts.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood Massacre (1991)

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twohalfstar

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On the last Sunday of each month, the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz in downtown Austin screens straight-to-VHS movies for their “Video Vortex” series. For August, this film was an almost forgotten flick helmed by venerable Baltimore-based director Don Dohler. Dohler was a cinephile from an early age who took a brief career detour into working on the underground comix circuit before founding Cinemagic magazine, which was purchased by long-running genre mag Starlog in 1979. In 1976, Dohler made his first film, The Alien Factor (released in 1978), with a reported budget of less than $4,000; the film was a Ted Turner cable staple throughout much of the 1980s. The Alien Factor, like most of Dohler’s work, was a B-grade creature feature about an alien crash-landing in/near Baltimore and proceeding to be a murderous nuisance. After going in a slightly different direction with 1980’s Fiend (in which an evil spirit possesses the corpse of a piano teacher in order to wreak havoc), Dohler returned to the “alien crashes, deadly hijinx ensue” mold with 1982’s Nightbeast and 1985’s Galaxy Invader (the former of which featured an original score composed by sixteen-year-old J.J. Abrams, who corresponded with Dohler after becoming a fan of Cinemagic and essentially begged to be involved in a future production of Dohler’s).

According to Alamo art director and programmer Joseph A. Ziemba, Dohler’s early work on the film that would become Blood Massacre was shot on video but piqued the interest of several film investors, who asked that he shoot the rest of the picture on film, including reshooting the 45 minutes that had already been produced. He later presented them with an incomplete working print of the film in 1988, and was told that they would get back to him. They never did. After quite some time, Dohler walked in to a video rental outlet in 1991 and discovered that the incomplete film had been released on VHS without his knowledge when he saw it sitting on a shelf. Dohler wouldn’t make another film for eleven years.

This is, presumably, the reason that the plot structure of Blood Massacre seems so out-of-joint. The transitions between scenes are often abrupt, and it sometimes feels that there is more filler dialogue than final dialogue being spoken onscreen. Consequently, the anti-hero protagonist of the film (Charlie Rizzo, played by frequent Dohler collaborator George Stover) suffers from inconsistent characterization, which isn’t helped by the fact that portraying jovial everymen is well within Stover’s acting range—Rizzo’s post-‘Nam grizzled nihilism, not so much. Stover’s not a bad actor, but he fails to have the kind of screen presence required to make Rizzo believably disturbed, and the inconsistency in the movie’s tone doesn’t help. Rizzo kills two people in the film’s opening scene with little provocation and for virtually no consequences in order to steal a small wad of bills; later, his bank-robbing partner has an emotional crisis after the collateral death of one person during a robbery that nets barely $700 dollars. In another scene, Rizzo supposedly murders a woman in an extremely violent way, but it’s hilariously apparent that he is repeatedly stabbing the table next to her, complete with repeated wooden thunks. There’s a pretty decent story in the film, which might have been saved with proper editing, but the reach far exceeds the grasp of the film’s budget and troubled production, and it’s a shame that viewers never got a chance to see Dohler’s complete vision of this narrative.

The film opens with Rizzo, a Vietnam veteran, being thrown out of a bar after aggressively berating a waitress for collecting his not-quite-empty beer can. He waits in the bar owner’s car; after they close for the night, he murders the man and his wife. After the title, we meet a young woman (Lucille Joile) approaching the home of the Parkers, a farming family with a room for rent. She introduces herself to the family’s daughter, Chrissy (Grace Stahl), and explains that she is an art student who has come to the countryside for the landscape painting opportunities it provides. She also likes the family matriarch’s stew, which seems like a throwaway line but becomes important later. (This character does not appear again before the final act, and it would seem that most of her scenes were planned but not shot, although I can only infer that this is the case.) Elsewhere, Rizzo returns to his fellow criminals:Jimmy (James DiAngelo), whose life Rizzo saved in the war; Pauly (Thomas Humes), Jimmy’s brother; and Monica (Lisa DeFuso), Jimmy’s girlfriend, who openly despises Rizzo. Following an aborted bank robbery, the foursome robs a video store (Rizzo picks up a copy of Nightbeast, which is a nice touch), killing a female clerk in the process. Their car breaks down, and Pauly and Monica take off on foot to find gas before flagging down a car being driven by Elizabeth (Robin London), who happens to be the elder daughter of the Parker family. The gang takes her hostage and forces her to take them back to her home, and the interesting part of the film, obviously inspired by the late Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, begins.

Rizzo and company meet Mr. (Richard Ruxton) and Mrs. (Anne Frith) Parker, and there’s some general strangeness about them. Pauly searches the rest of the house and says that there’s no one else there aside from the family, and there’s no mention of the young painter from the earlier scenes. Elizabeth in particular is an odd duck, displaying no apparent fear and seeming, if anything, bored (and slightly aroused) by her captors. She showers and seduces Rizzo, and the two exchange in a truly kinky sex scene (Google “bloodplay fetishism” if you’re curious–on second thought, don’t). A detective (Herb Otter, Jr.) comes to the Parker farmhouse, but Mr. Parker convinces him to leave while a gun is held to his back. Realizing that the heat will be on soon, the thieves prepare to skedaddle, but not before checking to see if the Parkers have anything of value worth stealing. What they actually discover, however, is the young art student from the beginning of the film, who is locked in a closet. They free her; she warns them that the Parkers are cannibals, then runs for her life. She doesn’t make it far, however, as she is captured and killed by Mr. Parker, as is the detective. Only Rizzo survives long enough to hide overnight in the woods, where he sets to work crafting homemade mines and building an impromptu long-range weapon that is basically a sling shot that shoots blades for a handheld circular saw. He returns the next night to exact his revenge.

Like I said, there’s a some decent plotting on display here, and it’s impossible to look back after two and a half decades and say how much better the film might have worked if Dohler had been allowed to smooth the film’s rough edges. As it stands, there are some neat visual elements (Rizzo’s nightmare sequence in the woods is a standout montage of experimental editing) and some that are… not so great (Dohler couldn’t resist revealing that the Parkers are monsters of some kind, although the pulsating air bladders in the Mr. Parker monster head are sickeningly effective). The film’s score is also quite good, featuring great snare drum work and an early synth leitmotif that really deserves to be in a better film. As a whole, however, Blood Massacre shows its seams as an aborted feature. The only reason you or I have access to this movie is because of a broken promise, and above all else, it really shows. If you manage to catch it on late night cable or it materializes on Netflix, check it out, but don’t go out of your way to track it down.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond