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Evils of the Night (1985)

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At the center of every early 80s slasher is a self-contradictory attitude towards sex. As a genre, slashers are obsessed with teenage horniness. However, they also reinforce old-fashioned values towards sexuality by punishing teen libidos with swift deaths, usually before the desire is consummated. The slasher is an evolution of the classic “road to ruin” exploitation picture in that way, allowing its audience to indulge in the thrill of young people (especially women) misbehaving, only to be brutally punished for the transgression. The 1985 sci-fi horror Evils of the Night starts as a brilliant subversion of that prudish, self-contradictory moralism. Evils of the Night begins the way most slashers do: gawking at teens as they make love in the woods, then are attacked by a mysterious, masked assailant. What’s different is how far the violence-inciting lovemaking goes. Implied cunnilingus & a young woman licking her male partner’s chest hairs immediately indicate that Evils of the Night is willing to push its prurient obsession with teenage horniness beyond the sheepish boundaries of the typical slasher. Then the young dummies start fucking, like, for real. The sex is likely simulated, but it is graphic, falling an insertion shot short of hardcore pornography. A dimwitted teen is still choked to death by an off-screen killer mid-coitus, so the movie easily qualifies as a genuine slasher specimen. It’s also a softcore porno, though, one where 80s pornstar Amber Lynn is joined by the likes of aged television personalities John Carradine, Julie Newmar (Catwoman), and Tina Louise (Ginger, of Gilligan’s Island). And as if that weren’t enough bizarro energy for a 74 minute horror cheapie, the movie is also overrun with 1950s-style space aliens, just because.

On Wikipedia, Evils of the Night is listed as a “science fiction/porno horror” hybrid. This is technically accurate, but it’s difficult to say if any one of the three genres listed in that descriptor are fully satisfied by the film as a finished product. The first half of Evils of the Night is a delightful novelty. Most cheap horror films are usually criticized for having porn-level acting & sets anyway, so it’s oddly refreshing to see one follow through on that (usually unintended) atmosphere. Suntanned idiots pound cheap beer & skinny-dip in a secluded campsite lake while an 80s pop music soundtrack inanely rattles, “Boys will be boys, that’s how they’ll always be.” The only thing that feels out of place is that the genre’s juvenile fixation on naked breasts is dragged out to an absurd length, to the point where two girls are sensually rubbing suntan lotion on each other’s areolas in a display of true, helpful friendship. This gaggle of horned-up teen idiots are incrementally thinned out by elderly garage mechanics in ski masks, who abduct them in small batches and sell them alive to a nearby “hospital” run by space aliens who trade gold coins for teen blood. The sci-fi costuming of the hospital nursing staff looks like an Atomic Age diner-themed strip club uniform, but the nurses themselves never get in on the lurid sex action enjoyed by the pre-abducted teens (outside some mild lesbian caresses). Instead, they shoot stun gun laser beams out of their space alien finger rings and await orders from the bombshell doctor in charge (Newmar), as if this were a colorized Ed Wood picture instead of a slasher-spoofing “porno horror.” Unfortunately, the two halves of the film, the sex slasher and the retro sci-throwback, never converge with any satisfaction. Instead, the movie is seemingly zapped of all its energy (and budget) midway through and wastes an alarming portion of its runtime in the wicked mechanics’ garage, patiently waiting for the credits to roll.

The first shot of Evils of the Night is an impressive special effects display of a UFO landing in the woods, teasing a grand sci-fi spectacle the movie has no intention to deliver. By the time you realize the entire third act is going to be staged in an unadorned garage, however, it becomes clear that special effects footage was lifted from a better-funded production. Had the sci-fi portion of the film led to the hospital staff’s grotesque practical effects transformations into alien beasts it could have made a substantial mark as a late-right cult film oddity. Instead, it drops the two things that make it notable as a variation on the slasher genre (the aliens and the sex) and concludes with two greasy creeps wielding phallic industrial drills, a display we’ve seen pulled off before (and better) in titles like Slumber Party Massacre & Body Double. It’s almost bizarre enough in that opening, pornographic stretch to make the third act’s doldrums worthwhile, though. Evils of the Night only becomes bland once it stops having sex and starts playing its straight-forward slasher beats as if they were inherently interesting on their own. With a more punched-up conclusion (either through space alien transformations or more lakeside skin-lotioning) it could have been a midnight movie classic. Instead, it’s the kind of midnight movie that starts as perversely thrilling, then puts you to sleep halfway through.

-Brandon Ledet

Druid Gladiator Clone (2002)

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Slipping further back into the Motern Media catalog of Matt Farley film productions, I was beginning to worry that I was wasting time & energy in search of the initial high I found in standout titles like Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas and Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!. A self-funded, microbudget “backyard” filmmaker, Farley has been making movies with his friends & family for decades to little outside fanfare, but something in his D.I.Y. auteurism really clicked when he reached his creative apex in Manchvegas & Riverbeast. It’s difficult to know even where to start when digging through Farley’s pre-Riverbeast titles, as their quality varies wildly (despite their shared financial ceiling). It’s difficult to even discern what qualify as his “official” releases. Most sources cite Freaky Farley as the official Motern Media debut, perhaps because of that film’s (largely unsuccessful) push for film festival submissions. Farley himself lists at least three prior full-length pictures on his own website, all available on YoutTube. IMDb, to the contrary, lists the first Matt Farley production to be Druid Gladiator Clone from 2002, a homemade movie that feels like it was designed for YouTube streams, even though it predates that site by years (and its current form only has about 1,000 views on YouTube to date). Seemingly captured on MiniDV camcorders and boasting special effects work that appears to have been pulled off with Apple’s pre-loaded iMovie software, Druid Gladiator Clone would appear from a distance to be an entirely skippable frivolity, even in Matt Farley’s microbudget terms, something not even worth its IMDb listing. Miraculously, Farley managed to turn it into a bizarre delight decidedly of its era, something as essential to Motern Cinema as the 16mm summertime slasher spoof of Manchvegas or the start of his modern digital era in Riverbeast. Druid Gladiator Clone is a dangerous film, because it’s one that might convince you that all Matt Farley productions are worth giving a chance, even the “unofficial’ castaways.

Farley & career-long co-conspirator Charles Roxburgh somehow transform the budgetary limitations of their camcorder equipment by leaning into its significance in early 2000s pop culture. Druid Gladiator Clone is staged with the fish eye lens “tracking” shots & “candid” camera techniques of a late 90s skateboarding video, aligning it with significant MTV media of its time like the Jackass series & The Tom Green Show. The movie is essentially a prank show made entirely harmless because its pranks’ “victims” are featured players who are in on the gag. Matt Farley stars as a modern-day druid named Farley, naturally, who zaps unsuspecting victims with his lightning-like “Beams of Goodness.” It’s initially very difficult to pinpoint exactly what this inane mythology means. Every time Farley shoots cheap CGI lightning out of his fingertips, the unsuspecting recipient of his Beams of Goodness immediately falls unconscious, appearing dead. Farley even lifts & drops the arm of each victim three times with bizarrely methodical repetition to ensure their zonked state. This effect is only temporary, though, and victims of his supernatural pranks tend to recover within a half hour of being struck by his fingertip lightning. In true Motern Media fashion, this mildly sinister set-up is then made weirdly, aggressively wholesome as Farley discovers that his lighting beams can be used to put his victims in a good mood instead of zapping them unconscious. This development contradicts what his druid superior (Motern regular Kevin McGee) trained him to believe. This shift from menacing pranks to learning the power of positivity occurs in the first third of the movie, leaving a full hour of runtime to be eaten up by romantic sitcom mix-ups, “gladiator battles” between fellow druids in latex Halloween masks, and Farley “fighting” the cloned version of himself promised in the title (by challenging him to a round of H-O-R-S-E on the basketball court). Mostly, Druid Gladiator Cone is a series of non-sequiturs where a shirtless Matt Farley runs wild in unsuspecting New England neighborhoods while trying on various dyed “cloaks” (bedsheets). It’s like an unusually wholesome Tom Green sketch somehow stretched to a 90min runtime.

As with all of Matt Farley’s productions, part of the joy of Druid Gladiator Clone is the accomplishment of its own completion. The college setting apartments & classrooms recall the art project ambitions most young twenty-somethings have about making full-length movies with their family & friends. What’s miraculous about Farley & crew is that they had the dedication to follow though on those ambitions and have been making backyard movies on a semi-regular schedule for over two decades running. What’s even more miraculous is that nearly all these pictures, even the ones stretching back to the Motern family’s college days, are not only watchable, but even worth enthusiasm. I wouldn’t suggest anyone begin their Matt Farley journey with Druid Gladiator Clone, but if you already have an affinity for Motern’s house style & find joy in seeing repeat players show up like old pals (this film is particularly humanizing for Kevin McGee, even though he plays a villain), it’s a surprisingly rewarding experience. The idea of a Jackass-style candid camera prank show where everyone’s in on the ruse and no one gets hurt is so weirdly wholesome & earnest, especially once applied to an unnecessarily complex supernatural mythology about “druids” (shirtless, magical boys) learning how to become better people. Structurally, Druid Gladiator Clone is barely held together in a sketch anthology style, recalling horrendous microbudget productions like the Blair Witch Project spoof Da Hip Hop Witch. The main difference is that Farley & crew are naturally, genuinely funny, something that doesn’t require much structure or budget to feel worthwhile. My enjoyment of this wholesome college prank show makes me fear that I’m too deep under the Motern Media spell to effectively watch any of Farley’s output with a critical eye. I’m so on hook for their eternally juvenile antics that I’m in awe of the commitment it took to capture the low-budget spectacle of this camcorder sketch comedy anthology, even with its defiant inattention to basic craft & exploitation of dirt cheap special effects software. Someone send help.

-Brandon Ledet

Freaky Farley (2007)

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I’ve gotten to the point in my recent Matt Farley obsession where the only movies I’ve watched in the past week have been Motern Media productions. As I slip further & further into his back catalog of microbudget genre films, it’s getting difficult to remember a time where I wasn’t hanging around the kitchens, backyards, and nondescript shopping districts of New England nowhere with Farley and his recurring cast of friends & collaborators. The initial joy I found in the weirdly wholesome titles Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas and Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! did drop slightly when I got to Farley’s “first” signature film, however. Freaky Farley is often reported to be the very first Matt Farley production, but it’s the third title listed in his IMDb credits and Farley himself includes links to two full-length features on YouTube that predate even those (and YouTube) on his own website. It does in some ways feel like an Official Debut, though, one where Farley & friends graduate from staging prankish, small-scale comedies on MiniDV camcorder footage to making a “real,” film fest-ready movie. It also feels like the debut of a since-solidified formula that Farley hadn’t quite yet perfected, just barely missing the sweet-spot of what makes his later works so idiosyncratically enjoyable. Manchvegas & Riverbeast are “horror” movies that do not care about delivering horror, instead functioning as absurdly wholesome hangout films that are occasionally interrupted by monsters & crazed killers. That’s what make them so fun & distinct in comparison with other no-budget “backyard” horror movies, which tend to lean into nastiness & gore in an attempt to transcend their limited means. In that tradition, Freaky Farley is closer to a true horror film, one that does not skimp on blood or kills, which exactly what makes it notably less special than the Motern Media productions that immediately followed.

That’s not to say that Freaky Farley is any less silly than a standard Matt Farley picture. This is a deeply silly movie. Farley stars as the titular killer (duh), a peeping tom who gradually graduates to murderous mayhem. Imprisoned in a mental institution, Farley teases an interviewer (and the audience) with his full backstory, sneering, “You want to figure out how my sick mind works.” The details are absurd, as you might expect, painting a picture of a child driven mad by his overbearing father (Kevin McGee, perhaps Farley’s most committed recurring player; certainly his most muscly), who forces him to pointlessly dig & refill the same backyard hole in perpetuity as punishment for various slights. The repetition of this . . . abuse? drives Farley mad until he becomes widely recognized as a laughable kook, on par with the local witch, the local ninja, and the local “bearded hobo.” His unseemly behavior begins with spying on women through their uncurtained windows as they undress, typical peeping tom behavior. It then graduates to full-on murder spree once his weirdly muscly father pushes him over the edge, devolving the back half of the film into stage blood mayhem that feels jarringly incongruous with Farley’s larger catalog. A series of violent stabbings with a pumpkin carving tool does seem totally at home with the microbudget slasher genre Farley & co. are parodying (or paying homage to, depending on how their tone hits you). However, it feels entirely foreign to the wholesome hangout pictures that would immediately follow in the Farley oeuvre, where murders are a genre inconvenience that get in the way of his oeuvre’s true joys: flatly delivered, overwritten dialogue & novelty song dance parties. What interrupts these murders does feel in-line with Farley’s later works, though; moss-covered woodland monsters called Trogs. Just like the Gospercaps & Riverbeasts that followed in the next two pictures, the Trogs are cheaply costumed beasts that tie the whole picture together in a delightfully inane spectacle, saving Freaky Farley from its own nastier impulses.

The one major advancement Freaky Farley introduced to the Motern Media filmography was a jump from DV camcorder technology to actual 16mm film. The grime & grain of late 70s microbudget slashers is more convincingly staged in this format, especially in sunlit natural environments, pushing Freaky Farley visually closer to the Sleepaway Camp & Friday the 13th sequels territory it reflects in its atypically violent tone. That 16mm visual aesthetic was later put to much better use in Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas, however, where its 70s slasher grime was tempered with the tone of a summer camp slideshow depicting good natured, harmless pranks. It’s that exact good-natured harmlessness that’s missing from Freaky Farley. Without it, the movie feels a little too close in tone with the microbudget horror genre it’s spoofing/lauding. There are still plenty of Farley-specific touches to enjoy here despite that more familiar tone, however. Flatly delivered lines like “I’m suddenly quite ashamed of my nakedness” & “All guys are suckers for a girl in a witch costume” hang in the air with pitch-perfect awkwardness. Similarly, the final cut of each scene drags on just a beat or two longer than it should, subtly affording the film a kind of Tim & Eric anti-humor without fully tipping its hand. Although Farley’s signature novelty songs are sadly infrequent here, there’s an excellent plot-summarizing ballad played over the end credits that make up for some of that lost time. Farley also seems to be genuinely wrestling with condescending parental sentiments like “It’s okay to have dreams, but better to have a regular paycheck” in the film, which offers an interesting self-reflection on his life’s work of making backyard movies about witches, ninjas, and trogs with consistently underwhelming success. I just don’t see much here that wasn’t substantially improved in his next production, Manchvegas, making Freaky Farley one for the Motern Media die-hards only. If you’re new to the Motern catalog, it’s better to instead watch the sweeter, more distinct picture from his two-film 16mm era, the one that immediately followed.

-Brandon Ledet

Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas (2009)

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One of the most endearing aspects of Matt Farley’s backyard film productions is how aggressively wholesome they can be. When paying homage to Roger Corman creature features in Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, Farley is far less concerned with gruesome monster mayhem than he is with what is a considerate amount of potato casserole to eat at a backyard wedding and how disputes can be settled with dance parties instead of fisticuffs. His summertime slasher send-up Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas, the Motern Media production that directly precedes Riverbeast, similarly shows very little interest in the violent mayhem promised in its title. The movie doubles the murderous threats presented in Riverbeast, terrorizing its small New England community with both a serial killer who only targets fiancées and a woodland species of yeti-like monsters called Gospercaps. Neither threat is treated with any kind of tonal severity, nor are they allowed to eat up much of Manchvegas’s runtime. The horror genre background setting is a selling point to get eyes on the screen, so that Farley can pursue his true passion with his friends & family (who populate his cast & crew): summertime fun. The slayings are so sparse & delayed that it’s easy to forget you’re watching a microbudget horror film at all. Instead, a weirdly wholesome, D.I.Y. comedy about “good natured, harmless pranks” guide the tone of the film as it gleefully distracts itself with “teen” romances, impromptu basketball games, and frequent visits to the lemonade stand. On the summertime horror spectrum, Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas is much closer to an irreverently spooky episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete than it is to the nasty violence of a Sleepaway Camp or Friday the 13th sequel. It stubbornly withholds the genre goods, choosing instead to excel as a weirdly wholesome frivolity.

Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas starts with a slideshow of summertime antics befitting of a carefree preteen, but enjoyed instead by three revelers who appear to be in their mid-30s. This juvenile trio is a “gang” known as the Manchvegas Outlaw Society, a small crew of jovial pranksters who have as much fun as they can in the summertime heat before they must deal with the inconvenience of nearby serial killers & woodland monsters (who are essentially 6 foot-tall Ewoks). M.O.S. gleefully operate outside the mechanisms of the film’s true plot, in which an entirely unconnected summertime romance is threatened by both a killer who only targets recently engaged women and the entirely superfluous Gospercap monsters who stalk the woods nearby. Eventually, M.O.S. has to get involved before the killings get out of hand and they save the day through a series of weaponized pranks. For the most part, though, they just live out the slobs vs. snobs routine of a classic 1980s comedy with their most grotesque local nemesis (even going as far as attempting to recruit his butler into their “gang”). It’s very telling that once the crises of widespread deaths wrap up, the harmless pranks & romantic flings continue to their own resolutions, as they were always the film’s main priority anyway. Like with individual entries into the MCU or isolated episodes of a soap opera or pro wrestling show, it’s difficult to assess the value of a specific Matt Farley picture on its own without considering the larger impact of his catalog as a whole. If you have no prior knowledge of Matt Farley’s oeuvre it’s entirely possible that the absurdly wholesome frivolity of Monsters, Marriage, and Murder in Manchvegas will leave you frustrated, especially if you enter it looking for the traditional genre thrills of a microbudget horror film. If you’ve at least seen Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! before, if not any of his other films, it’ll feel like reuniting with old friends you only see once a year at summer camp. It’s just a camp that happens to occasionally be invaded by monsters & murderers.

While Manchvegas isn’t quite the crowning achievement Farley later reached with Riverbeast, it does best that film in a couple notable ways. Most immediately apparent, its visual aesthetic is much more distinct. In the early slideshow montage, I assumed a digital filter was added to afford the film a grainy 1970s look, but Manchvegas was actually shot on 16mm film. It was a choice that played beautifully into both the film’s late-70s slasher influence and its general home movies vibe, but it’s also an absurdly labor-intensive, cost-prohibitive choice I respect Farley & co-conspirator Charles Roxburgh for foolishly undertaking. Besides its more distinctive look, Manchvegas also packs its runtime with far more of Farley’s novelty pop songs (which pay his real-life bills through tens of thousands of Spotify streams). Major examples like a plot-summarizing rap song that plays over the end credits (perhaps my all-time favorite movie trope) and a montage set to a chorus of “I’m catching a killer by faking an engagement, yeah!” stick out as notable examples. What I really love, though, is the way Farley scores entirely inconsequential scenes of him playing basketball with his M.O.S. friends with a song that repeats the phrase “basketball fun, basketball fun” for full, carefree redundancy. Manchvegas also leans into Farley’s regionally specific sensibilities even in its title, which is a local, ironic joke about the glitz & glamor of Manchester, New Hampshire. The entire point of including that joke in the title is likely to grab the attention of New England locals who would be delighted that it was a term that somehow made its way into a movie. It’s the same tactic Farley uses when he adopts a creature feature or slasher genre hook to lure horror audiences into watching a backyard movie about harmless summertime pranks, or when he titles his Motern Media pop songs with search-optimized meme terms that will lead you directly to him even if you’ve never heard of him (and you likely haven’t). If you spend too much time with Farley once he has you on the hook, whether it’s with Manchvegas, Riverbeast, or a forty-second song about diarrhea, you might even sink far enough under his Motern Media spell to be convinced that he’s a certifiable genius. Two films into his catalog, I’m already a goner.

-Brandon Ledet

Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! (2012)

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One film into his self-financed oeuvre, I’ve already come to understand Matt Farley both as a kindred spirit and as a new personal hero. I’m sure he’d be surprised to hear either, as he churns out his weirdo art projects under the Motern Media umbrella from a small apartment in New England, more than a thousand miles from where I’m writing this in New Orleans. As someone who makes zines, podcasts, and runs an amateur film criticism blog in the late 2010s, I recognize myself in Farley’s dedication to his miniature media empire. Producing any kind of online content without a major outlet boosting your signal (even media that would have simply been considered Art pre-internet) is essentially just shouting into the digital void, listening to the hollow sound of your own echo. That’s why it’s essential to collaborate on a personal level, to make and share your projects with your friends. The only reason we’ve been able to keep Swampflix going over the last three years is that we’re our own little community, one that doesn’t necessarily need outside feedback to feel worthwhile. Three years is a minor pittance in Matt Farley time, though. Farley has been producing microbudget “backyard” movies with his own community of collaborators for nearly two decades now. He has an obsessive need to create that has spread from filmmaking to podcasting, making zines about long walks he takes in his Manchester, NH neighborhood, and throwing annual 6 hour-long concerts for an audience of dozens. He’s even managed to turn the music production end of Motern Media into a livable salary, uploading tens of thousands of novelty songs to Spotify with search-optimized titles to make fractions of pennies off every stream. All this effort, yet hardly anyone has ever heard of Matt Farley. I hadn’t heard of him myself until a couple weeks ago; that’s exactly why he’s my new personal hero.

Between writing torrents of novelty songs to support his family, Matt Farley has managed to produce seven “officially” released feature films since 2003. Each star (and are crewed by) family, friends, and fellow employees of the local group home for teens where he used to work. There’s an authentic John Waters energy to his productions as a result. The accents, cultural references, and shooting locations are aggressively local to Farley’s small town New England surroundings, which he treats with a reverence few outsiders could ever understand. Also like with John Waters’s films, much of the joy of his work is in watching these amateur players flatly deliver intentionally-overwritten dialogue, but not with any perceptible winking-at-the-camera irony. They each carry a strange screen presence that cannot be found elsewhere in all of cinema, but they’re earnestly trying to put on a good show, even if a goofy one. There’s also an aggressive dedication to politeness & good manners in Farley’s work that separates it from Waters’s more decidedly nasty aesthetic, but there’s an obsessiveness & localized specificity to their respective works that links them all the same. To fully understand John Waters or Matt Farley fandom is to immerse yourself in their obsessions, to spend multiple films soaking in the isolated worlds they’ve built by hand with family & friends and no outside input. As a result, it can be difficult to know exactly where to start in their respective catalogs or even how to judge an individual film’s merits isolated from the larger whole, as it’s the total, cumulative effect of their lives’ work that makes them so endearing. Much like how Waters’s early career had its Pink Flamingos, though, Motern Media does have its own calling card picture that serves as a gateway to understanding his brand of lovably wholesome amateurism: 2012’s Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!.

Matt Farley stars as the protagonist of Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! himself (duh), a public pariah in a small Massachusetts town who’s returning after a years’ long absence. He suffers constant ridicule for his past insistence on the existence of a mythical “riverbeast” that stalks the nearby woods. Thanks to a William Castle-style introduction that warns us of exactly when & where the riverbeast will appear, we know the monster’s existence to be “real”, so that his reputation as an embarrassment & a kook is entirely unearned. What’s most charming about this set-up is that the riverbeast itself is almost entirely inconsequential to the movie, only appearing occasionally to interrupt the small-town drama as a kind of Roger Corman-inspired act break. Between the riverbeast’s rubber suit visage and the movie’s warnings of exactly when it will appear, there’s no sense of danger or dread established by the movie’s stubbornly infrequent monster attacks. Matt Farley is barely interested in the conventional thrills of a creature feature, if at all. That genre structure mostly serves as an excuse to pack the screen with small-town weirdos, comedic non-sequiturs, and tangential novelty songs about the river. The real centerpiece of Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! is not any of its monster attacks in the woods, but rather a lengthy wedding sequence staged in a backyard that starts with a petty argument over potato casserole and ends in a minutes-long dance party. Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! is at its core a hangout film, in that it’s a document of friends hanging out & staging gags around the non-existent legend of a non-existent monster & the public triumph of the one man who believed it to be real. It’s the story of Matt Farley’s miniature media kingdom in a microcosm, as it’s the story of a man possessed by a singular obsession finding himself at odds with a world that could not care less.

If you only watch the microbudget end of genre cinema for MST3k-style, “so-bad-it’s good” heckling, you’re likely to find little joy here. Admittedly, the score is cruelly repetitious, the acting is preposterously amateur, the story is stitched together through voiceover walk n’ talks, the volume varies wildly from scene to scene, and the entire plot is re-explained in the dialogue roughly every three minutes. Still, as with most misunderstood B-pictures, Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! is far less valuable as a punching bag for cynics than it is as a genuine example of outsider art. Its bizarre references to a mysterious family activity called “helicopter hamburger,” lengthy lectures on breakdancing & cat litter, and dedication to novelty song dance parties recall the similarly amateurish antics of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but again with a wholesome earnestness that show could never match. Making fun of Matt Farely’s movies would be entirely beside the point, as the core purpose of his productions in the first place is to have fun with his family & friends (immortalized for all to see, usually at full-length on YouTube). That’s a difficult concept to grasp in just one feature, so I’m not sure the full impact of Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! could ever fully sink in on a first viewing without any prior knowledge of Matt Farley’s oeuvre. It’s only after getting more familiar with his insular, hand-built world in a few other movies that Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!’s significance as a calling card for the Motern Media empire becomes crystal clear. Of course Farley, perhaps the most self-aware man in the world, knows exactly how significant it is within the larger Motern picture. He even brings out the titular riverbeast (usually his director/collaborator Charles Roxburgh in costume) for dance parties at his annual Motern Day Extravaganza concerts to jive with his crowd (of dozens). He really is a hero, even if he’s one that must suffer mockery to get his outsider art into the world.

Last week I spent four consecutive days in a massive convention hall distributing zine versions of collected Swampflix works to librarians from all over the country. It was a bizarre way to attempt to connect with people, but it was at least a more tactile experience than a typical day of running an amateur film criticism blog in the late 2010s. Over those four days of talking with other zinesters and trying to grab the attention of passersby, I often thought of Matt Farley’s aggressively localized media empire. Out of every dozen or so people who stopped to talk to us about our zines (or to learn about zine culture in general), there were only one or two who enthusiastically got what we were doing and found great joy in talking about movies with a stranger. Similarly, I doubt every person who heard the Important Cinema Club podcast’s (essential listening) episode on Matt Farley followed through to check out his work online, even though most of it is readily available on sites like YouTube. Farley had to chip away at the B-movie, independent film market for over fifteen years before that message even reached me and there was a high chance even I wouldn’t put forth the effort to check out his work once I heard it (the episode did initially get released over a month ago, after all). What I love most about him is that I have no doubt that he would likely continue to make these films with or without a growing, dedicated audience. Like all of Farley’s films, Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You is a work born solely of passion & dedication, outsider art with no reward beyond seeing its completion and connecting with the few people outside your insular community who get it. I recognize that same stubborn obsessive dedication within myself, which makes me think of him as a kindred spirit. I also know that it will be nearly impossible to keep my own tiny film criticism community going for a full decade, let alone two, which is what makes him a true hero.

-Brandon Ledet

Batman Ninja (2018)

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Stretching back to the 1940s serial shorts, there have been over seven decades of Batman cinema to date, which makes adaptations of the unfathomably long-running comic book series common enough to be considered their own separate movie genre. As such, there are plenty of tropes & verbatim repetitions of scenes in onscreen Batman content that have become punishingly familiar to audiences who regularly seek this stuff out. No Batman movie need ever show a young Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents’ murder in a back alley again, for instance, as it’s an image that’s been deeply chiseled into our minds over the decades (right down to his mother’s broken strand of pearls skittering across the pavement). Many recent Batman movies have reached for a more distinctive novelty in their narratives as a result, especially the animated DC movies. 2018 alone has already seen the release of a film where Batman teams up with Scooby-Doo, one where he battles Jack the Ripper in a steampunk arena, and one where he crosses over into the treacherous, transcendent world of anime. It’s that last example where Batman cinema has likely reached its most absurd novelty to date, even promising in Catwoman’s opening dialogue, “You think you’ve heard every Batman story? I promise you haven’t.” The story Batman Ninja proceeds to tell after that tease is indeed one I’ve never seen before. What’s up for debate is whether it’s, factually speaking, a story at all, as opposed to a chaotic collection of incongruous tangents & flights of fancy. What’s clear, either way, is that it’s admirably bonkers in a way more Batman movies could stand to be, animated or otherwise.

The concept of mashing up Batman with anime sounds like a nerd’s wet dream, a juvenile pleasure impulse Batman Ninja attempts to live up to in every self-indulgent frame. With intense character redesigns from Japanese manga artist Takashi Okazaki and an impressive team of traditionalist animators, the movie is almost well-crated enough to pass itself off as an art piece instead of what it truly is: nonstop over-the-top excess, a shameless sky-high pile of pop culture trash. The film begins with Batman being transported back to feudal Japan with “a time displacement device,” where he must stop anime-redesigned versions of his infamous foes from taking the country over & rewriting history. The Joker, Poison Ivy, Two Face, The Penguin, etc. are introduced like Pokémon selections in a video game. Each present a different setting-appropriate challenge to the Caped Crusader as he anachronistically drives his shape-shifting Batmobile around feudal Japan. The movie chases its own impulsive whims from moment to moment in these barely-connected conflicts as Batman subdues his enemies one by one, struggling most to conquer The Joker, as always. The resulting spectacle is pure lunacy. Batman sumo-wrestles Bane in a mech suit. The Joker’s goons manifest as samurais in welded clown masks. An army of monkeys assembles to form one giant monkey that challenges a similar gigantic Batman gestalt (composed of bats, naturally) to a climactic kaiju battle. I don’t know that I can praise Batman Ninja as disciplined comic book storytelling, but it’s certainly a novelty as visual spectacle, something that must be seen to be believed.

Ostensibly, there’s a long-running connection to ninja training in Batman’s origin story that could potentially be used to justify this absurd indulgence. If nothing else, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins could’ve easily been retitled Batman: Ninja School without much of a fuss. The truth is, though, that Batman Ninja seems entirely unconcerned with justifying its own for-their-own-sake impulses. Its experiments in the newly discovered artform of Batmanime seem to be born entirely of “Wouldn’t it be rad if __?” daydreaming. It’s a refreshing approach to Batman storytelling, as most of the character’s feature-length cartoons are much less comfortable with fully exploring the freedom from logic animation affords them. In an era where memorable novelty is essential to keeping Batman narratives viably fresh, it’s difficult to imagine Batman Ninja being outdone on a measure of pure imagination, even if it makes zero goddamn sense.

-Brandon Ledet

Hotel Artemis (2018)

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There was a long period of time where slick crime pictures with deliberately overwritten dialogue felt distinctly like post-Tarantino drivel. The post-Tarantino thriller was a far-too-common manifestation of macho posturing where fresh-out-of-film school cinema bros could indulge in style-over-substance “subversions” of genre flicks – mostly to their own delight. Now that the artform of the Tarantino knockoff is much less ubiquitous, however, it’s evolving into something much more adventurous. Free Fire remolded the overly-talky Tarantino formula into an absurdist meta comedy about how audiences should be feel bad about being endlessly entertained by gun violence. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (embarrassingly) attempted to graduate it to the level of Oscar Bait Melodrama™. Neither were nearly as satisfying as the post-Tarantino sci-fi comedy Hotel Artemis, which has evolved the medium into something I never thought I’d see it become: adorable.

Set in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles where Jodie Foster is clearly tired of your shit, Hotel Artemis details a single night of backstabbing, thievery, and bloodshed among chatty, professional criminals. A sprawling cast that somehow includes Foster, Dave Bautista, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Sterling K. Brown, Charlie Day, and Zachary Quinto mingles in the titular art-deco-meets-steampunk hotel while a historically massive riot rages on outside. Stray references to a border wall and the exorbitant cost of clean water detail the general state of the decaying, overpopulated world outside, but Hotel Artemis mostly concerns itself with the John Wickian criminal society that walks its wallpapered halls. “Hotel” is kind of a misnomer, as the space these organized, warring thieves occupy is in fact an underground hospital run by Foster: a rules-obsessed nurse who does not suffer fools gladly. She and Bautista, who acts as her enforcer yet fancies himself “a healthcare professional,” struggle to maintain order on this particularly chaotic night at the Artemis. Various criminal members with barely-concealed agendas talk shit & start deadly fights throughout the increasingly bloody night, counteracting the hotel’s intended function as a hospital for critically injured reprobates. As the situation worsens by the minute, Foster seems more annoyed than disturbed, passing off the rules-breaking violence around her as just another busy Wednesday shift, her least favorite night of the week.

Unlike most overwritten, post-Tarantino crime thrillers, this film is genuinely, consistently hilarious. With the hotel setting and absurdist mix-ups of an Old Hollywood face, Hotel Artemis embraces the preposterousness of its exceedingly silly premise in a way that more cheap genre films could stand to. Foster & Bautista have the adorable rapport of a local news segment on a raccoon that made friends with a baby elephant. Foster shuffles down the hotel’s hallways with animalistic determination & a distinct old-lady waddle that might go down as the comedic physical performance of the year. Bautista brings the same matter-of-fact line deliveries that are so endearing in his role as Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, somehow making lines like “I will unheal the shit out of you” endearingly warm despite the physical threat of his massive body. Even the general rules of the film’s world-building are treated as a kind of throwaway joke. Characters repeatedly exclaim their surprise at the hotel’s existence, claiming they thought it was a myth, despite the massive neon sign that reads “Hotel Artemis” on the building’s roof. The entire film plays like that, casually breaking with logical consistency for the sake of a gag, relying on the easy charm of its cast and throwaway action movie one-liners like “Visiting hours are never” to pave over any jarring bumps in the road. It’s a gamble that totally worked for me, as I watched the entire movie with the same wide, stupid grin throughout.

I don’t know that I would recommend Hotel Artemis for sci-fi fans specifically. Besides shallowly explored concepts like 3D organ-printing & medically employed microbial robots explained in lines like “Yeah yeah yeah, I know what nanites are,” the movie’s genre beats are more consistently defined by its old-timey hotel setting and its clashes between various criminal elements. There’s minimally-employed CGI and even less world-building exposition, so I’m not sure a true sci-fi nerd is going to get the genre payoffs they’re looking for. Similarly, fans of the Tarantino & John Wick aesthetics the movie superficially echoes in its chatty crime world setting are likely to walk away unsatisfied, as the movie lacks the macho energy of either influence (and is better for it, in my opinion). It’s hard to know who to recommend Hotel Artemis to at all, given its bafflingly low critical scores and the fact that I was the only audience member laughing in my theater (for the first time since . . . Spy? Chappie?). The joys of watching Jodie Foster waddle around the Artemis and lovingly tell patrons they look “like all the shades of shit” are very peculiar & particular, which means that Hotel Artemis will have surprisingly limited appeal for a movie with this objectively wonderful of a cast. That kind of highly specific appeal can be a blessing in disguise for a scrappy, over-the-top genre film, though, and I can totally see Hotel Artemis gathering a dedicated cult following over time. I hope that appreciation doesn’t take too long, though, as Foster & Bautista’s adorable chemistry in this picture deserves to be recognized as a Cinematic Event.

-Brandon Ledet

Show Dogs (2018)

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Show Dogs is the most bizarrely problematic talking animal film I’ve seen in theaters since the Kevin Spacey talking cat pic Nine Lives two summers ago. It’s so problematic, in fact, that its own studio has since censored scenes of the film deemed dangerous for children’s well-being, something I learned was going to happen a mere hour after I left the cinema. Dangerous, censored, transgressive art is far from the first descriptor that leaps to mind when you set expectations for a children’s movie starting Ludacris as a rapping Rottweiler, but the original unedited version of Show Dogs is now effectively a renegade, outlawed production officially deemed morally unfit for public consumption. Its uncensored form, which screened in theaters nationwide only for the span of a week, has been orphaned as a lost art scene moment, a cinematic event. Banishing its real-world evil back into the pits of Hell was a necessary action Global Road Entertainment should be proud of taking, as the message its deleted footage was sending kids was genuinely risking their safety. Its deletion is also beneficial to adults looking to the ill-advised production for a stray whiff of absurdism, raising the film’s value from sub-Air Bud atrocity to a The Day the Clown Cried type Holy Grail. Show Dogs is now one of the premier cinematic events of 2018, if not only for what footage it’s lost.

The rapping Rottweiler voiced by Ludacris is an undercover cop from a confusing universe where animals can talk, but humans don’t understand them. Their flapping CGI mouths form full sentences and they hold real jobs in offices and everything, but humans just hear barks & meows and so on. At one point a dog even complains, “Why can’t people understand what dogs say?” I don’t know; you tell us. It’s your confusing universe. Anyway, the toughest cop on the force is assigned to go undercover as a show dog (Hey, that’s the name of the show) in a heist plot to rescue a stolen, abused baby panda from underground dealers of rare & exotic animals. Keeping with the tropes of every buddy cop movie ever, he’s teamed up with another hard-ass hothead (Will Arnett in full TMNT mode), a human partner who must learn to collaborate with the canine cop & trust his instincts. The reluctant partners build a heist team meant to prepare the undercover pup for passing as a primped & groomed show dog, most notably including Natasha Lyonne as a pet stylist (with an incredible sense of style of her own; she looks fantastic here) & Stanley Tucci as a former Best in Show champion chihuahua with a snotty French sensibility. The team pull through to save the day, never discovered as frauds, and return the stolen baby panda back to its family (in captivity, weirdly). They even learn a few life lessons (and scar a few thousand children who caught the film early enough in its run) along the way.

The thread that has been removed from Show Dogs is one about grooming, but not the kind you might expect given the film’s setting. One of the cop-dog’s biggest hurdles in remaining undercover as a show dog is the Judge’s Inspection segment of the competition, in which dog show panelists must physically handle the dogs’ genitals. A street-tough police dog, Ludacris’s canine lead Max struggles to endure this indignity without instinctively turning around to bite the person invading his privacy. He’s coached out of this instinct by Arnett & Tucci, who train him to “go to his happy place,” mentally dissociating while his “private parts” are being handled without his consent. The climactic triumph of the film is a sequence in which he mentally transports to a psychedelic Eden where Arnett & Lyonne tell him he’s a good boy and reenact the climax of Dirty Dancing with him against a background of kaleidoscopic fireworks . . . all while his genitals are being inspected by a stranger. Can you see why this might be a dangerous life lesson to teach impressionable children? It wasn’t lost on the concerned parents of the mommy blogosphere. One (rightfully) alarmist piece written by Terina Maldonado of East Mesa Macaroni Kid gained enough traction to have Global Road Entertainment pull the footage from the film. The “happy place” tactic is explained in that piece to be a very real method that real-life child molesters use to “groom” their young victims into unquestioning compliance, a factoid I can’t believe I typed without vomiting. Maldonado’s account of Show Dogs is extremely (and understandably) fixated on this aspect of the film’s plot, making me assume it was going to be a consistent throughline throughout the film. Instead, it is (or was) contained to a single training montage & a climactic exchange with the dog show judge. At first, the limited amount of “private parts inspection” footage made me question just how potentially impactful the film’s grooming message really was. When the judge’s inspection is met with a dead-silent horror atmosphere where the soundtrack is overwhelmed by the dog’s pounding heartbeat, however, there’s nothing you can qualify the exchange as but a rape scene. In a kids’ movie. About talking animals. Evil, but also incredible that it ever screened at all.

The dark truth about Show Dogs is that even with the genital molestation/”happy place” narrative thread removed, the film is still deeply flawed on a moral level. At its heart, this is a film about toxic masculinity (You thought it was about adorable talking animals? Fool!), but it’s also a perpetuator of toxic masculinity. Max is “a street dog with a temper” that has to learn life lessons like “Maybe it’s not the worst idea to get some help,” which is a much more adorable sentiment to convey to kids than the one that’s been censored into oblivion. What’s uncomfortable about his gradual change of heart is the way this “alpha” dog (speaking of canine terms that have evil cultural contexts elsewhere) is characterized in opposition to the implied frivolity & vanity of the show dog world, something more femme than his masc sensibilities can handle without embarrassment. It’s weird enough that other dogs allude to the size of Max’s dick, that a lady-pigeon (voiced by Kate Micucci) fawns over his gruff masculinity in lines like “He can flip this bird any day,” and that he’s taught humility in a scene where Arnette & Lyonne wax his anus (again, without consent). What’s really fucked is where he & Arnett finally bond when the owner chooses to not force him to breed against his will with an over-the-top flamboyant pup voiced by RuPaul. Now, in-film, RuPaul’s character is gendered as a female dog, but the gag plays as bizarrely homophobic anyway, as his over-the-top vocal performance (which includes a number of Drag Race catchphrases) disgusts Max in a way that reads distinctly as gay panic humor. Like with all of Show Dog’s sins against good taste & morality, its homophobia & toxic masculinity are bizarrely complex to the point of absurdity.

There are plenty of standard, cheap camp thrills to be found in Show Dogs’s minor joys as a 2010s, theatrically released talking-dog movie, a leftover relic from another time. I could try to sell this movie to you as an absurdist joy for watching Ludacris’s talking cop-dog perform impossible acrobatic maneuvers through cheap CGI or deliver hacky one-liners like “This is ludicrous!” or “I’m about to take a bite out of crime.” The truth is, though, that minor pleasures like Shaq voicing a Zen sheepdog named Doggy Lama or CGI dogs dabbing are just background noise for the film’s main draw: its propensity for real-world evil. Even with its “private parts inspection” narrative rightly removed, Show Dogs still has a genuinely menacing, toxic undertone that’s impressive in both its audacity & its cluelessness. Although its absurdist joys are minor, it’s a movie that must be seen to be believed (especially its original, intact “grooming” cut), as it’s tough to fathom how this many people, from the executives at Global Road down to the on-set catering crew, allowed it to happen. It’s more of a man-made disaster than a feature film in that way and all we can do as audiences is rubberneck at the wreckage. Don’t allow children to gaze at this atrocity, however; what they see could be scarring.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Spa (1989)

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Within the opening two minutes of Death Spa I was already aware that I was in the presence of trash cinema greatness. The only other film I had previously seen from director Michael Fischer was the uninspired Teen Wolf knockoff My Mom’s a Werewolf (one of three releases he completed in ’89, along with something titled Crack House), so I didn’t expect to fall in love here so easily. Everything there is to love about this deranged supernatural horror is succinctly represented in the opening credits, though, immediately setting a very high expectation for over-the-top schlock being married to intense attention to craft, a dynamic I was delighted to discover the film lives up to. Death Spa is essentially what would happen if Chopping Mall were given the full arthouse, Suspiria treatment, the exact low premise/high execution dichotomy I look for in all my genre cinema. The film opens with an exterior shot of a Los Angeles gym with a lit neon sign that reads “Starbody Health Spa.” Lightning strikes the sign, leaving only the title “d ea th Spa” lit as the camera travels into the cursed building in an ominous tracking shot. Spooky synths & neon lights overwhelm the senses as the camera finds the only soul alive in the gym, a woman dancing alone to rhythmic music that we cannot hear. One gratuitous nudity scene later and she’s being cooked alive by a sauna gone haywire, activated by an off-screen killer. It’s immediately apparent in this opening sequence that Death Spa is exploitative sleaze. It’s also just as apparent that it’s fine art worthy of any pop culture museum that would house it.

The gym is a creepy place, presumably doubly so for women who’re working out alone after hours. Early in its runtime, Death Spa appears to be a shrewd exploration of that common fear, exploiting the vulnerability of publicly navigating a space designed to intensively focus on the human body among a wealth of potentially dangerous strangers. The camera takes on the first-person POV of a slasher film or a giallo, stalking vulnerable women in its neon & spandex health club setting. It even teases potential personal & financial reasons why several suspects would be committing the rampant murders (framed as accidental deaths) that start plaguing the gym. I was totally onboard with the grounded killer-on-the-loose horror teased in Death Spa’s earliest motions, but even more pleased by the deranged absurdity that unfolded instead. It turns out Death Spa isn’t about a psychopathic killer at all, but rather one of my very favorite genre film subjects: Evil Technology. In the film, a vengeful ghost hacks the computer systems of automated gym equipment as a means of real-world vengeance. This is more of a haunted house movie than a slasher, except that the house in question is a health spa with very specific methods for causing lethal damage: rogue weightlifting machines, loose diving boards, flying shower tiles, the aforementioned sauna steam, etc. It even telegraphs a Chekov’s blender gag at the gym’s smoothie bar later echoed in one of my most beloved Evil Technology horrors: Unfriended. There’s very little thought given to the inherent vulnerability of gymnasiums & voyeurism, something that plays like an afterthought at best in the movie’s true mission statement of staging a supernatural horror at a novelty fad location specific to its era. Instead of playing off real-world dread or having its characters at least figure out that a gym with lethally faulty equipment might not be worth their patronage, the movie instead gradually intensifies its computer-ghost mayhem as it builds to a climactic event where many patrons can be locked inside & slaughtered at once: a “Mardi Gras” costume party. In Los Angeles. At a health spa. At night. Insane, but adorably so.

In addition to the lunacy of a ghost hacking automated gym equipment, Death Spa also chooses to reveal the identity of the undead spirit/real world terror through a recurring nightmare of a disabled woman on fire, adding to the film’s menacingly surreal vibe. That nightmare logic is matched by overactive camera work that puts much more care into its movement, angles, and lighting than what’s typically afforded trash cinema of this caliber. That high art cinematography clashes harshly with the bargain bin quality of acting on-hand, with cult cinema vet Ken Foree standing out as the only notable performer. The spooky synth soundtrack also occasionally gives way to an incredibly misguided mouth harp sound effect, turning potentially effective scare scenes into total jokes. While the cast & the soundtrack occasionally show the seams of Death Spa’s budget, though, the film’s commitment to practical gore effects & the sheer lunacy of its plot is more than enough to carry it through. When the ghost hacks a shower head or a blender or romantically whispers to their victim, “Come with me into the inferno. Let’s die together and live forever in Hell,” it’s all but impossible to resist Death Spa’s delirious, over-the-top charms. It didn’t take much for the movie to win me over as an instant fan. Its swirling mix of synths, neon, and self-amused gore was more than enough to steal my trash-gobbling heart at first sight. The true joy of Death Spa, though, is that its cheap thrills don’t stop there. The movie pushes its evil health spa premise to the most ridiculous extreme it can manage on a straight-to-VHS 80s budget, a dedication in effort & craft I wish Fischer had also poured into My Mom’s a Werewolf. In fact, all movies in all genres could stand to be a little more like the heightened absurdity achieved in Death Spa, not just the ones about health craze fads & pissed-off computer-ghosts.

-Brandon Ledet

My Mom’s a Werewolf (1989)

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The way I Was a Teenage Werewolf’s influence has trickled down throughout genre cinema is a fascinating thing to track. Both the teen horror genre and the term “teenager” itself were relatively new concepts when that landmark feature arrived in 1957 and it was the first film to truly make something substantial of that cultural shift. In most teen-marketed sci-fi & horror films of the drive-in era, young audiences watched their peers flee in terror from adult or alien monsters. I Was a Teenage Werewolf changed the game by making the teenagers themselves the monsters. It was the first film to metaphorically connect creature feature transformations into heinous, violent monstrosities to the hormonal powder keg of puberty, something that’s been exhaustively explored by countless horror pictures in the decades since. The most common descendant of that device is the modern teen-girl transformation horror, where young women transform into uncanny beasts immediately following their first menstruation: Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Raw, Blue My Mind, etc. Other examples of the film’s descendants don’t even bother to gender-swap or shift the context of the film at all, functioning almost as straight-up remakes: Teen Wolf, Cursed, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, etc. My Mom’s a Werewolf is a wrung even lower on the I Was a Teenage Werewolf devotee ladder. Not only does the film ruin the puberty metaphor by reverting the premise back to the monstrous adults of the 1950s, it’s also a blatant knockoff of the 1980s Teen Wolf franchise—essentially a copy of a copy. The same could also be said of the other notable, femme Teen Wolf knockoff Teen Witch, but that film had a delirious sense of Reagan Era absurdity & a sugary onslaught of MTV-inspired musical numbers. My Mom’s a Werewolf can’t compete with that, nor does it even try to.

As fascinated as I am with I Was a Teenage Werewolf’s influence on the horror genre, My Mom’s a Werewolf would have been much better served by dropping the teenager pretense entirely. The teen daughter indicated by the title is mostly present as an audience surrogate, spying in on a parent’s storyline that doesn’t particularly need her POV. The film does find an interesting angle by making the brat & her cash-starved bestie out to be horror nerds who pour over every detail of Fangoria magazine & attend dingy genre film conventions for weekend fun. It’s cool to see female characters occupying that archetype, as the 1980s (if not the 2010s, really) considered that kind of fandom to be strictly boys’ stuff, but they’re mostly present as observers & a distraction. The true center of the story is an overworked suburban mother with an emotionally distant husband & a pain-the-the ass kid. Ignored & taken for granted by her own family, she finds herself being wooed by a creepy pet shop owner who lavishes her with praise & kisses on the hand, when all she wanted was to purchase a flea collar for the family dog. Coerced partly through hypnotism and partly through her unaccommodated housewife libido, she flirts with the idea of having an affair with this creep while her daughter covertly spies on her from a distance. This is abruptly halted when the pet shop creep bites her on the toe (which, in a visual gag, is employed as a euphemism for cunnilingus), beginning her transition into a shapeshifting momwolf. It’s a very long journey until she’s a full-blown lycanthrope, though. Most of her symptoms surface as increased horniness, half-hearted nightmares, and a frequent need to shave her now-hirsute (hersute?) legs, making it a very long road to her werewolf form’s appearance at the climax. Just as much as it’s a letdown that her transformation is framed through her teen brat daughter’s POV, her werewolf form also can’t help but be a letdown when it’s finally revealed, as it’s a no-effort rubber mask Halloween costume with some mom clothes draped on top.

If My Mom’s a Werewolf holds any fascination on its own merits outside its novelty as a knockoff of a more popular I Was a Teenage Werewolf knockoff, it’s in its depiction of a middle-aged woman’s sexual awakening. A modern remake of this premise would have rich metaphorical material to work with as an exploration of an overworked, overlooked suburban wife rediscovering her body & her libido through a werewolf transformation, an entirely different angle on the conceit than the teen puberty horror we’re used to seeing. As is, the film can be frequently amusing in the way it mixes blatant sex jokes & pantomimed cunnilingus (both in the toe-biting scene & in a separate hand-licking exchange) in what otherwise feels like a kids’ movie. When the husband affectionately refers to his wife as his “little bran muffin,” she retorts, “Your little bran muffin misses your big cucumber.” When she later visits a dentist to file down her new werewolf fangs, he asks in heavy breaths, “Are you here for a drilling or a filling?” The film is not subtle. Everyone in My Mom’s a Werewolf is horny as heck except the one person who’s supposed to be fucking the momwolf (her husband) and their sex-neg daughter who disapproves of her newfound libido from the shadows.

This isn’t supposed to be a comedic softcore picture about a lonely, adulterous, housewife, though. The title promises some werewolf action the budget can’t convincingly muster, leaving My Mom’s a Werewolf a terrible movie with a great concept/poster. Sometimes the film’s cheapness can be adorable, including absolute garbage titles like Galaxina & Deathrow Gameshow in its teen nerds’ horror fandom & achieving a bargain bin bastardization of Sirk in its blatantly artificial suburban exteriors. Mostly, though, the absence of a legitimate budget is huge hindrance. A psychic’s palm-reading business is staged as a loose collection of scarves in an otherwise empty room. The only performers of note are last-second afterthought cameos from Kimmy Robertson & Marcia Wallace (who also had a small role in Teen Witch that same year). The 60s AM radio gem “Li’l Red Riding Hood” must’ve been the most expensive thing they sprung for, given how many times it repeats on the soundtrack. Most damning, though, is the rubber mask Halloween costume effects for the titular werewolf, which are just as cheap as they are lazy. To be more than a Teen Wolf knockoff curio, the film really needed to do a better job by its titular momwolf—by design, by POV, by everything really. Momwolves deserve a better movie. Teen-wolf daughters (and sons) have already had theirs many times over.

-Brandon Ledet