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House of Whipcord (1974)

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threehalfstar

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“This film is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment….”

What happens when moral standards are taken to the extreme? Director Pete Walker explores this idea in one of the most interesting horror exploitation films I’ve ever seen. I expected House of Whipcord to be a hot mess, but it was actually a pretty solid horror film with exceptional acting from just about every cast member. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the crème de la crème of horror cinema; it’s still super campy and goofy.

In an abandoned prison located in the English countryside, there’s a couple of sadistic older women who have turned the building into a phony correctional facility for corrupt young girls. The leader of the facility is an elderly blind man who is mentally in a different century, believing he’s some sort of judge that determines the life or death of imprisoned women. His wife, the reincarnation of the devil himself, and her son, Mark E. DeSade (hmm, sounds a bit similar to Marquis de Sade . . . ), are major sadists who purposely get the imprisoned girls in trouble so they can get off on their punishments, particularly flogging. Mark lures sinful women from the city by offering to bring them to his beautiful home in the countryside (aka the abandoned prison). The film focuses on a French model, Anne-Marie DeVarnet (Penny Irving), who is Mark’s latest prey. She seriously has the worst French accent ever, but she’s a pretty good actress nonetheless. There are lots of twists and turns that occur once Anne-Marie enters the prison, and it all leads to a very surprising ending.

I truly appreciated the 70s low budget charm in House of Whipcord. Shoddy camera work, high-pitched screams, eerie background music, and unnecessary nudity are plentiful, but there’s not a lot of gore, which is surprising for a film about torture and punishment. According to a few articles and reviews I’ve read about the film, it was supposed to make a political statement about censorship and right-wing policies on capital punishment. I guess I can sort of see where it touches on the absurdity of capital punishment, but that’s not the main focus of the film. This is a horror movie and I see it as nothing more than a horror movie. Ultimately, House of Whipcord is a horror film that delivers and does not disappoint.

House of Whipcord is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Phase IV (1974)

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fourstar

When I’m prompted to imagine a film about murderous insects, I think back to the atomic creature features of the 1950s. I picture close-ups of actual insects scaling miniature models of suburban homes crudely combined with shots of victims screaming for their lives in the grasp of the invader’s oversized paper mache pincers. In my imagination, the insects become monsters through massive size alone, a tradition carried down all the way from 1957’s The Deadly Mantis to 2002’s Eight Legged Freaks. A refreshing deviation from this norm, 1974’s Phase IV surprisingly makes a threat of its murderous ants without blowing them out of proportion, but instead giving them a much more dangerous attribute: intelligence.

The killer ants in Phase IV are shrewd, organized, and scarily adaptable. They attack their predators preemptively, methodically killing spiders, praying mantises, and then humans as if they’re assassins taking orders. They turn automobiles into bombs, dismantle computers, and weaponize reflected sunlight in a vengeful reflection of a bored child with a magnifying glass. When sprayed with poisons, they purposefully evolve to include the toxins in their next mutation. The nature footage the film manages to cull is very impressive. It’s rare that this brand of sci-fi schlock would be perplexing on a technical level, but Phase IV kept me guessing. Sure, there were the inevitable close-up shots of ants eating cut with images of a collapsing set, but a lot of the film had me scratching my head as to just exactly how they got their footage. Did they dye the mutant ants? Was some of the action achieved though stop-motion animation? Did they write the movie around the kind of footage they could influence? I had a lot of questions about the production of Phase IV that I normally wouldn’t have in other films of its caliber.

Of course, Phase IV has its campy charms as well. The scientists that study/go to war with the ants bring a lot of good ole sci-fi nonsense like geodesic domes, futuristic hazmat suits, decontamination steam, and very sciency bleep bloop machines along with them. The opening narration is accompanied by outer space animation that recalls the ridiculousness of The Adventures of Hercules. The film also occasionally adopts the ants’ POV through a honeycomb-patterned kaleidoscope lens probably best described as “ant cam”. The cheap Western landscape setting (which resembles the remote communities where the atom bomb was developed) gives the film an automatic otherworldly look, which combines effectively with the ants’ naturally alien features in the nature footage close-ups. The queen ant is also provided some red/blue Creepshow lighting, which does wonders for her appeal as a villain and the film’s appeal as a silly diversion. It’s easy to see why Phase IV was given the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, but I feel like that brand of mockery is selling its other merits a bit short.

Visually bizarre, technically impressive, tonally unnerving, and backed by a wickedly cool soundtrack of droning synths (recently made available 40 years late by Waxwork Records), Phase IV is a thoroughly strange film. Its loose, psychedelic ending was apparently cut short by butchers at Paramount Pictures (with some of the more bizarre surviving footage thankfully preserved in the trailer and elsewhere on YouTube), but the remaining effect is an open-ended conclusion that’s rare for this genre & era. The film isn’t exactly on an Under the Skin level of obfuscation & psychedelia, but it’s not far off. As far as sci-fi schlock about murderous insects goes, Phase IV is an impressive oddity with a killer soundtrack and some highly effective nature footage backing up its inherently campy appeal. It’s tempting to brush it off as a silly trifle based on premise alone, but there’s something much more peculiar going on here. It’s a shame that first-time director Saul Bass, known mostly as a graphic designer in his work on movie posters & title sequences, would never follow it up with a second feature. He had a great knack for striking visuals & eerie moods that could’ve translated into a long, interesting career if given the chance to flourish.

-Brandon Ledet

Dream Lover (1994)

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Thrillers and James Spader are two of my favorite things, but they do not come together harmoniously in Dream Lover. The film’s director, Nicholas Kazan, seemed to be more interested in making this a chic, sexy movie instead of a genuine psychological thriller and that was a bad move on his part. Many thrillers, especially those in the early 90s, have sexual elements that enhance their appeal, but something went terribly wrong with this one. Dream Lover isn’t a well-balanced film, but it was sort of enjoyable because it was so crappy (hence the Camp Stamp).

Ray Reardon (James Spader) is a successful businessman that becomes instantly attracted to Lena Mathers (Mädchen Amick), a beautiful woman he meets at an art gallery. They partake in a passionate love affair and after sleeping together a few times decide to tie the knot. Of course, after marrying Lena and not knowing much about her past, Ray finds himself in a marriage filled with mystery and deception. He has recurring clown nightmares that reflect his crumbling love life and I absolutely hated them. They didn’t blend in with the rest of the film and are insanely annoying. It quickly becomes obvious that Lena is psychotic and after Ray’s money, but her plan to get her hands on his money doesn’t surface until the end of the movie. Thankfully, Kazan allows the audience to have a little bit of fun attempting to figure out Lena’s diabolical plan.

Uncovering the mystery of Lena’s scheme was a bit fun, but the film was ultimately a very unsatisfying, predictable thriller. There weren’t many surprises or unexpected twists, which are some basic components to a decent thriller. Spader was the best thing about the film because his acting was flawless (as always), but it wasn’t enough to save the film from falling into the depths of bad movie Hell.

Dream Lover is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

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fourstar

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Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is of the rare breed of old school shlock that lives up to the promise in its ridiculous title & premise. That’s no small feat. As I noted in my review of the similarly surprising in quality camp fest The Brainiac, “Like with all art forms, it’s difficult to find a great ‘bad movie’. For every transcendently awful Plan 9 or Troll 2 you have to sift through a hundred mind-numbingly dull Hobgoblins”, but on the other hand “When a B movie is firing on all cylinders, enthusiastically exploring every weird idea it has to their full potential, there’s really nothing like it.” Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, (which is also known by the titles Frankenstein Meets the Space Men, Mars Attacks Puerto Rico, Mars Invades Puerto Rico, and Operation San Juan) is firing on all its batshit crazy cylinders, squeezing a surprising amount of camp value out of its limited premise & budget.

Let’s get the film’s most peculiar detail out of the way: neither Dr. Frankenstein nor his monster appear in the flesh. The “Frankenstein” in the title is instead a government-created bionic astronaut that is horrifically scarred in a botched space launch. As his circuitry goes awry, he turns from ideal soldier to confused monster and haunts the coast of California, murdering its inhabitants indiscreetly. Although the interpretation of “a Frankenstein” is loose here, the practical effects in the gore surrounding the monster are pretty chilling. In an early scene his scalp is peeled back so scientists can tweak his malfunctioning circuitry. Later, the make-up on his disfiguring facial scars are a lot more horrifying than you’d expect based on the precedent of, say, Lobo in Bride of the Atom or the astronaut gorilla in Robot Monster. The other monsters in the film are only slightly less terrifying, including the titular “Space Monster” (who looks like a member of GWAR) and the space alien Dr. Nadir (who looks an awful lot like Bat Boy all growed up). Dr. Nadir may not be as physically threatening as his fellow monsters, but he steals the show with his effete love of his own cruelty, like a dime store Vincent Price.

The film is surprisingly technically proficient considering its circumstances. It boasts a similar premise and overreliance on stock footage as the camp classic Plan 9 from Outer Space, but thoroughly succeeds on both fronts, as opposed to Plan 9’s thorough failures. When the evil space princess that commands Dr. Nadir announces that they are to proceed with “Phase 2 of our Plan: capture of the Earth women” (a.k.a. “bikini babes”) it’s more amusing than embarrassing. You can feel the crew having a fun time making this thing, which is reflected in its music cues, among other things. Almost all of its outer space scenes are accompanied by a spooky theremin score, but its Earth scenes (whether a dance party, a murder, or an alien abduction) are almost all accompanied by a surf rock soundtrack, which gives the film a beach party vibe. The title of the film itself sounds like a ready-made name for a surf rock song and I’m surprised no one’s jumped on that opportunity in the 50 years since the film’s release.

I could go on, but describing what makes the movie work on a technical level is somewhat futile. I doubt I can mount a sales pitch that match the just-the-facts plot summary from the film’s Wikipedia page, so here it is in full: “All of the women on the planet Mars have died in an atomic war, except for Martian Princess Marcuzan. Marcuzan and her right-hand man, Dr. Nadir, decide they will travel to Earth and steal all of the women on the planet in order to continue the Martian race. The Martians shoot down a space capsule manned by the android Colonel Frank Saunders, causing it to crash in Puerto Rico. Frank’s electronic brain and the left half of his face are damaged after encountering a trigger-happy Martian and his ray gun. Frank, now ‘Frankenstein’, described by his creator as an ‘astro-robot without a control system’ proceeds to terrorize the island. A subplot involves the Martians abducting bikini clad women.” If that description alone doesn’t sell you on watching an ancient, goofy sci-fi horror I’m not sure what will. Also we are very different people.

-Brandon Ledet

WolfCop (2014)

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twohalfstar

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I really wanted to love WolfCop. A low-budget, crowd-funded Canadian indie horror comedy about a werewolf cop is just begging for my adoration, especially considering the glowing reviews I’ve given titles like Zombeavers and Monster Brawl. As James pointed out earlier today in his review of Housebound, “Horror comedies are always a high wire act.” It’s difficult to strike the right balance between terror & humor and WolfCop is all the more frustrating because it’s so close to getting the formula right I can smell it even without superhuman/canine scent. The film’s premise is killer; its bodily gore is impressive; there’s a plot-summarizing rap song in the closing credits (which is always a plus no matter what anyone tells you); there’s just something essential missing in the final product.

If I had to pinpoint exactly what’s lacking in WolfCop, my best guess is that there just isn’t enough werewolf policing. The origin story segment of the film lasts entirely too long as we follow Sergeant Lou Garou through a series of wicked hangovers that eventually lead him to awaking a changed man. Lou struggles to suppress his newly found werewolf form in long stretches, which is fine for a man who’s trying to survive, but not too exciting for the audience that follows him. Becoming a werewolf does little to curb Lou’s drinking, but it does make him a better cop, but initially only in the sense that he starts doing paperwork & researching the history of the occult in the town he polices. By the time Lou is busting up meth labs & preventing armed robberies in werewolf form AND a police uniform, which is essentially the main draw of the film, the runtime is more than halfway over. There are some great exchanges in those segments, like when a gang member asks “What the fuck are you?” and the WolfCop responds “The fuzz,” but they’re honestly too few too late and soon fade in favor of a story about an evil cult that doesn’t really amount to much more than a distraction.

There are certainly more than a few glimpses of brilliance in WolfCop. The practical effects in the gore are the most winning element in play, featuring gross-out bodily horror like close-ups of hair growing like porcupine quills, several disembodied faces, pentagrams carved into bellies, a switchblade piercing an eyeball and the most blood I’ve ever seen pass through a urethra in a particularly brutal scene where Lou transforms into a werewolf dick-first. There’s also a hilarious sex scene seemingly inspired by The Room that marks the first time I’ve ever seen a werewolf go down on a bartender or enjoy a post-coital cigarette. A couple of these moments are spoiled by some winking-at-the-camera gimmicks (like the much-hated-by-me CGI blood spatter on the camera lens effect), but for the most part the main problem is that they’re isolated highlights and the film that surrounds them is kind of a bore. I get the feeling that WolfCop works better as a highlight reel than a feature, seemingly peaking with its trailer or its poster. That’s not even that big of a deal, though. The trailer & the poster are honestly true works of art at a level a lot of horror comedies fail to reach even in advertising. There’s so much promise & potential in WolfCop as a concept, that even though I wasn’t completely sold on the first installment, the post-credits promise of a WolfCop II arriving in 2015 still excited me. My hope is that now that the origin story has been taken care of, we can get straight to the business of werewolf policing. Give the people what they want. Our demands are simple: we merely want more wolf-cop in our WolfCop.

-Brandon Ledet

Monster Brawl (2011)

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We here at Swampflix love wrestling movies. We love horror & gore. We also love low-budget/high-concept camp. It should come to no surprise then that the low budget camp fest Monster Brawl, within which famous monsters fight to the death in a graveyard wrestling tournament, is a huge hit with us. It’s the perfect example of a high-concept thoroughly explored and a modest-at-best budget pushed to its limits. The movie so firmly in our wheelhouse that I’d suspect it was secretly made with us in mind if it weren’t released four years before our modest blog was born.

If you’re asking yourself why famous monsters would meet to wrestle in a literal death match in an American graveyard the answer is simple: to determine the most powerful ghoul of all time, of course. Monster Brawl is filmed like a televised wrestling promotion: the company’s logo appears in the bottom of the screen, each competitor boasts about their monstrous abilities in individual promos, and an announcing team calls the matches live as they happen. For a small-time promotion that started in someone’s mom’s basement (seriously) Monster Brawl secured a surprisingly deep, talented roster. The Undead Conference features The Mummy, Zombie Man, Lady Vampire, and Frankenstein (“Technically it’s Frankenstein’s monster if you want to be a dick about it”). Wrestling for The Creatures Conference we have Werewolf, Cyclops, Witch Bitch, and Swamp Gut (a local boy as it were; Swamp Gut is an obese, Louisiana-tinged knockoff of The Creature from the Black Lagoon). The monster make-up and the in-the-ring gore looks great, seemingly eating up most of the film’s budget considering the range & scope of the limited locations & actors. A lot of time & energy went into the monsters, which was the right decision, and it pays off in gags like hieroglyphics playing under The Mummy’s incomprehensible promo and the Cyclops’ face-searing laser beams (or “mythical laser blasts” if you will).

Narrating the action, Monster’s Brawl’s ringside announcers feature Kids in the Hall vet Dave Foley as a barely-functioning alcoholic and character actor Art Hindle as former Monster Brawl champion Sasquatch Sid Tucker. Foley & Hindle seem to have a lot of fun with the absurdity of their lines, which include gems like “We underestimated this monster. He must have been trained in vampire slaying techniques” and “For the first time in professional sports, folks, we’re witnessing the dead rising from their graves to attack Frankenstein.” Monster’s Brawl gets a lot right about the more ridiculous aspects of pro wrestling: the former-wrestlers-turned-announcers, the inconsequential refs, the outside-the-ring action, etc. Because the film’s “death matches” are quite literal the action can include violence that the more family-friendly WWE cannot: chair shots to the head, inter-gender matches, murder. The spirit of wrestling is captured well and even includes small roles for former NWO member Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan’s former blowhard manager “The Mouth of the South” Jimmy Hart. In addition to Hart’s ecstatic shouting & the announcing team’s endless drunken blathering the film features a third level of narration: the disembodied voice of the legendary horror staple Lance Henrikson, who is billed here simply as “God”. Henrikson only occasionally interjects on the action, punctuating particularly gruesome wrestling moves with words like “Majestic.”, “Appalling.”, “Tremendous.”, and “Discombobulating.” in what has to be a parody of the narration in Mortal Kombat gameplay.

Just as Monster Brawl gets wrestling right, it also nails the tone of horror flicks. Instead of cheesy entrance music that usually accompanies performers, the famous monsters get the eerie horror soundtracks they deserve. The action of the film also devolves into complete chaos in its final act, which is pretty standard for a creature feature. We were fairly cruel to Monster Brawl director Jesse Thomas Cook’s most recent film, the “hideous poo beast” monster movie Septic Man, but Monster Brawl gets so much right about both its pro-wrestling-meets-classic-horror premise, that it’s impossible not to love it (given that wrestling or gore-soaked horror are your thing). Scripted & shot like a broadcast of a wrestling promotion every disturbed ten year old wishes existed, Monster Brawl is camp cinema at its finest.

-Brandon Ledet

The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown (2015)

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threehalfstar

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As I noted in my review of Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery, professional wrestling & animation were practically made for one another. Their shared love for campy violence, garish costumes, and corny jokes make them a heavenly pair. Crossing over the WWE brand with characters from the classic Hanna-Barbera universe is even more of a genius move, as it allows for some of wrestling & animation’s most over-the-top personalities to coexist in a single space. Characters like Scooby-Doo, Barney Rubble, The Undertaker, and “The Devil’s Favorite Demon”/”See No Evil” Kane are ridiculous enough in isolation. When they share a screen it’s downright magical (in the trashiest way possible). In Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery this pungently cheesy combination allowed for John Cena’s superhero strength & Sin Cara’s apparent ability to fly match the Mystery, Inc. gang’s seemingly supernatural monsters (in that particular case a “g-g-g-ghost b-b-b-bear”). In The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown the combo not only connects both The Flintstones’ Honeymooners-style comedy and the WWE’s complete detachment from reality with their roots in working class escapism, it also revels in the most important element in all of wrestling & animation, the highest form of comedy: delicious, delicious puns.

Let’s just get the list of Stone Age wrestler puns out of the way early. The Flinstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown features the likes of CM Punkrock, John Cenastone, Brie & Nikki Boulder, Marble Henry, Daniel Bryrock, Rey Mysteriopal, and Vince McMagma. CM Punk & Mark Henry even adapt their catchphrases to the Stone Age setting, calling themselves “The Best in the Prehistoric World” & “The World’s Strongest Caveman” respectively. Daniel Bryan makes no adjustments to his go-to “Yes! Yes! Yes!” chant (not a lot of room for wordplay there) but it’s put to great comical use anyway. Speaking of refusing to play along with the Stone Age puns, The Undertaker appears in Stone Age SmackDown simply as “The Undertaker”. I’m not sure if they had problems working a great pun in there (Try it at home. It’s a tough one.) but the side-effect is kind of charming anyway: it makes it seem as if The Undertaker has been alive forever, just sort of skulking around graveyards, waiting for a wrestling match.

In the Scooby-Doo crossover the WWE Superstars are already world famous and idolized, even more so than in reality; they even have their own WWE City complete with a Mount Rushmore style tribute to the championship belt. In The Flinstones crossover they’re just working class Joes (with impeccable physiques) that live milquetoast lives before a wrestling promotion is built around them. The wrestling promotion in question is FFE (Fred Flintstone Entertainment). Fred builds the enterprise from the ground up as a get-rich-quick scheme meant to fund a couples’ vacation to Rockapulco. As a WWE stand-in, FFE does a great job of poking fun at itself. At one point Fred is giving a pep-talk to his Superstars, urging them to “tear each other’s heads off . . . in a family-friendly way, of course,” satirizing WWE’s self-contradictory brand of PG violence. FFE differs in WWE in other ways, of course, as it’s a very small organization just trying its darnedest to put on a good show for the folks out there in the audience, which is a far cry from the real-life juggernaut’s billion dollar industry. There’s a good bit of blue-collar workplace humor towards the beginning of the film that recalls the The Flintstones’ Honeymooners roots and that vibe carries on nicely into the mom & pop wrestling promotion Fred creates once the plot picks up speed.

The only thing Stone Age SmackDown gets horrifically wrong from the original Flinstones series is Barney Rubble’s voice. The other characters aren’t perfectly imitated, but they’re at least passable. Barney is just not the same person at all, trading in his dopey baritone for a nasally “wise guy, eh?” voice that feels like a violation of the original character’s nature. The rest of the film is pretty much on point, though. In addition to the rock puns & working class humor mentioned above, the movie features enough Rube Goldberg contraptions, dinosaurs as appliances, visual gags (“We’ve got bigger fish to fry” is a pretty great one that you can probably imagine without the image), and swanky-kitsch music that feel true to the original cartoon. In a lot of ways, Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery brought the Hanna-Barbera characters to WWE’s world and Stone Age SmackDown is almost an exact reversal, with pro wrestlers making the time-traveling journey to Bedrock. There are a few modern updates to the Flintstones’ visual language (like wall-mounted TVs and computer tablets), but they don’t do much to distract from the show’s classic charms. In fact, the digital HD update provides the format a very vivid, vibrant look that intensifies the original series’ pop art appeal immensely.

Even though the movie is mercifully short it still makes time for fun tangents like CM Punkrock’s world-class promos, history’s first cage match (between The Undertaker & Barney Rubble of course), and some absurd sexual leering at “The Boulder Twins”. It’s a much quicker and less complicated film than the Scooby-Doo crossover and all the better for it. Plus, I really need these crossovers to work out long enough to get that Stardust Meets The Jetsons movie I’ve been clammering for. I desparately need that to happen so, as Fred puts it in Stone Age SmackDown, “Let’s yabba dabba do this” y’all. Keep these goofy wrestling cartoons coming.

-Brandon Ledet

White Bird in a Blizzard (2014)

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three star

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White Bird in a Blizzard is a very curiously compromised movie. On one hand it has an intense visual style & a killer late 80s soundtrack that makes the film feel effortlessly cool in its most enjoyable moments. On the other hand its stilted narration & affected try-hard tone makes it feel like all too many recent, underwhelming YA adaptations. It’s both a run-of-the-mill YA coming-of-age tale and a dreamily spooky Lifetime Original thriller. At times I loved every frame I was watching and at other times I felt like I was light-years outside the intended target audience. One thing I can say is that it works a lot better as a campy thriller than as a straight-forward indie drama.

Let’s get the film’s negative influence out of the way first: the acting, mainly Shailene Woodley’s. I have a very difficult time getting on her wavelength. The film begins with her wooden delivery of the line “I was 17 when my mother disappeared” and it’s difficult to tell if her emotionless reading is entirely a choice to portray the character’s teenage faux nonchalance or if she’s just a terrible actress. I can sort of justify her flat, uninteresting vocal style because of the narration’s framing device of a therapy session (those are usually pretty awkward, right?) but she’s not much more relaxed when hanging out with her friends (a demographically diverse pair that’s mostly there to accessorize her white, middleclass background). Once the film’s trashier, Lifetime Original Movie plot twists regarding the days & months that surrounded her mother’s sudden disappearance get to laughably overwrought heights, the labored acting matters a lot less. In fact, it might even help the film’s case. It’s just part of the Lifetime territory.

To the film’s credit, camp or otherwise, director Gregg Araki injects a lot of otherworldly touches to counterbalance the film’s more contrived tendencies. The film’s winterscape dream sequences & leering glorification of shirtless teen flesh (both male & female) feel like glimpses into a much more intense, respectable film. Although Woodley’s narration rarely transcends its dreadful, dispassionate effect, it is put to great use in lines like this description of her parents’ unhappy marriage: “They just went on like that: my mom never coming, my dad jacking off in the basement, all the while pretending everything was fine.” Araki seems to know just what kind of movie he’s making here, mixing the sublimely artful with the dismally tawdry, but I’m not sure he’s entirely successful in getting the point across.

Even though the film doesn’t consistently nail the perfect tone in its dialogue, it does have a perfect soundtrack. There are few ways to win me over quicker than to play a Cocteau Twins song in the opening credits (“Sea, Swallow Me” in this case). The soundtrack is perfect moody 80s teen music through & through, featuring the likes of Siouxsie & The Banshees, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, This Mortal Coil and more. It’s surprising competent touches like the musical cues & Araki’s imagery that make me want to give the film a pass for being so relentlessly cheesy, even early in the proceedings when the YA ennui is in full, obnoxiously self-absobed swing. Once the mystery of the missing mother gets a little more gaudily complicated the movie also becomes a lot more engaging. As a heartbreaking family drama White Bird in a Blizzard fails miserably. As a spooky, oddly artful Lifetime movie with a killer 80s soundtrack, it’s definitely worth a watch.

-Brandon Ledet

Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery (2014)

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scooby-doo

three star

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Look out, garbage lovers & overgrown children everywhere. WWE Studios has officially gotten in the business of making cartoons. It’s a brilliant move by all accounts, since professional wrestling itself could be described as a sort of live-action cartoon. The garish costumes, over-the-top personalities, and campy approach to violence should all be familiar to fans of animation and the two worlds have, of course, crossed paths before. Wrestling cartoons have generally been Saturday morning cartoon fodder, with dire projects like Hulk Hogan’s Rock & Wrestling and ¡Mucha Lucha! bringing no discernable level of prestige to the genre. As the WWE is currently in its long-lived, so-called “PG Era” (in which the company intensely markets its content to children) and its movie-making division WWE Studios is churning out more feature-length content than ever before, it’s a beautiful work of synergy that the company has gotten into bed with Hana-Barbera for a few proper straight-to-video animation crossovers.

Last year’s gloriously titled Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery was the first of the WWE/Hanna-Barbera crossovers. In the film, which is more fun than it should be, the Mystery, Inc. gang is dragged to WrestleMania against their will by the overenthusiastic Shaggy & Scooby. The film sets up an interesting mark/smark divide here, as the characters engage with the product in a variety of different ways. At one end of the spectrum, Shaggy & Scooby are completely obsessed with WWE’s brand of sports entertainment, sinking endless time & energy into the company’s video games and worshiping the talent like living gods. Fred takes an interest in pro-wrestling as a subject for his photography, eager to take some “wicked action shots.” Daphne falls in love with wrestling’s masculine sexuality the second she witnesses a wrestler (John Cena, specifically) removing his shirt. Velma’s all the way on the other end of the mark/smark divide, attempting to engage with the product on a purely intellectual level. She researches the history of the sport in favor of actually losing herself in the matches until the sheer spectacle of the WrestleMania main event wins her over into a little bit of mark territory and she becomes a true fan. To be fair to Velma, it is an especially spectacular main event. John Cena, Kane, Sin Cara, Shaggy & Scooby all join forces to fight a gigantic robotic ghost bear or, as the boys would put it, a “g-g-g-ghost b-b-b-bear”.

The ghost bear is a formidable threat, but nothing too out of the ordinary considering the history of Mystery, Inc. What is out of the ordinary is the sheer amount of pro-wrestling personalities that get involved in the proceedings. In addition to Cena, Kane, and Sin Cara (who get the most screen time), the movie also includes the likes of Triple H, AJ Lee, Brodus Clay, Santino, The Miz, and The Big Show (as well as cameos from Sgt. Slaughter & Jerry “The King” Lawler curiously portrayed as if they were still in their youth). Ringside announcer Michael Cole even gets in on the fun (lamenting the loss of his “favorite” table when Big Show gets smashed through it), as does WWE chairman & CEO Vince McMahon. McMahon is treated like some kind of deity by the boys, who do a “we’re not worthy” Wayne’s World routine at the billionaire’s feet. However, despite McMahon’s idol worship, Sin Cara’s apparent ability to literally fly, “See No Evil” Kane’s portrayal as a true-to-life demon, and AJ Lee’s brute strength that earns her the boys’ fearful concession that she’s “like Kane with lipstick”, no one gets quite as much ego massaging as longtime face of the company John Cena. Cena’s persona as an unstoppable superhuman can get tiresome on a weekly televised basis, but it’s kind of adorable here. He can seduce a beautiful woman with the mere removal of his shirt, conquer Indiana Jones-sized boulders and undead bears with just his hands, and is an instant friend to everyone, because he’s just so gosh darned likeable. It would be sickening if it weren’t so ridiculous. On the raw end of that deal, The Miz is just utterly abused here. His character pops in for some occasional goofball comic relief, which is totally fair all things considered, but looks absolutely nothing like him. Just no resemblance at all to the money-maker. If it weren’t for the sound of his voice or the cartoonish narcissism it would be near impossible to tell it was him.

For fans of either Scooby-Doo or pro-wrestling, the movie should be a fairly easy sell. It’s not a mind-blowing feat of animation, but it is remarkably likeable. In some ways the WWE does glorify itself a bit here, even if it’s tounge-in-cheek. For example, within the story the company has its own fully-functioning WWE City, which features a Mount Rushmore style tribute to the heavyweight championship belt. At the same time, both Hanna-Barbera & WWE poke a good bit of fun at themselves as well. Shaggy jokes that the gang wears the same outfits every day, so they have no need to pack for their trip to WrestleMania and there are also surprising references to WWE City’s environmental impact on the forest surrounding it & more realistically, former wrestlers’ career-ending injuries. The film also features some ridiculous asides like Scooby wrestling mutated junk food in outer space and Sin Cara telling the gang “The Legend of the Bear” through interpretive dance. It’s a very silly, inconsequential movie all in all, so it’s difficult to fault it for any shortcomings. Personally, I look forward to the upcoming WWE/Hanna-Barbera crossovers (which include a Flinstones picture as well as a Scooby-Doo sequel) and hope that they’ll go on at least long enough for a Stardust Meets The Jetsons feature. That’s the dream anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

The Adventures of Hercules (1985)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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fourstar

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Following a day of Mardi Gras festivities and sustained alcohol consumption, I found myself mindlessly channel surfing through the wasteland of basic cable when an image of a neon green dinosaur battling a blue gorilla in outer space exploded on to the screen, convincing me that someone had spiked my PBR with a large dose of acid. I sat mesmerized but perplexed as the seizure-inducing images of The Adventure of Hercules continued to wash over me. In a flash it was over, like a fever dream implanted by some extraterrestrial life force, but the after effects were strong.

Combining science fiction with a very loose interpretation of Greek Mythology, the sequel to 1983’s Hercules stars the original Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno as the titular god who must rescue seven thunder bolts from a group of renegade gods in a plot so preposterous that it takes 26 lines of text to summarize it on Wikipedia. The Adventures of Hercules begins with a ridiculous, almost 8 minute long prelude that consists of flashbacks to the original film, including fights with various robot animals and a magical chariot ride through space. It also features a concise retelling of the formation of the universe and still somehow manages to sustain that insane tone throughout the rest of the film. The movies’s strange, hyper-kinetic images and bombastic trippiness will make many viewers reach for the nearest bong.

We are also treated to cheap CGI that must have looked dated even in 1985, an extreme overuse of neon, unnecessary screen swipes (I counted three in 30 seconds during one scene), and the kind of bad dialogue you would expect from a movie whose lead actor can barely speak English. But that only scratches the surface of the insanity found in The Adventures of Hercules. There’s also fire monsters, slime creatures, ice swords, a Medusa cameo, and nonsensically psychedelic journeys through space and time. A hidden gem for camp lovers, The Adventures of Hercules is the cinematic equivalent of a bong rip. Woah, dude!

-James Cohn