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Son of Kong (1933)

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Most discussions of cheap cash-in horror sequels are framed as if they were a phenomenon born of 70s & 80s slashers that have carried over to the modern day. The truth is that it’s a time-honored tradition almost as old as horror cinema itself. For a classic example of the shameless cash-in horror sequel, 1933’s Son of Kong serves as a fascinating specimen. Rushed to market just nine months after the 1933 creature feature classic King Kong, Son of Kong is a massive, kaiju-scale step down from masterful to cute. At a mere 70 minutes, this incredibly thin sequel aims for a lighter, more comedic tone than its predecessor to cover up the fact that it couldn’t match that picture’s scale of production. Grand sequences of stop motion spectacle depicting tribal warfare & a dinosaur stampede were cut for time & budget, leaving the film hanging without a third act. The titular monster was also a goofy echo of the original film’s infamous ape, offering audiences a cutesy, infantile version of a creature they once feared (like, less than a year earlier). Baby Kong’s adorability is almost irresistible as a novelty, though, and the film that contains him is likewise charming in its own limited, misshapen way. Like most modern horror sequels, its genuine thrills are cheap echoes of its predecessor’s former glories, but there’s something amusingly absurd about the lengths it goes to keep an already concluded story alive & open to profit.

The disappointing thing about Son of Kong is that, on a script level, it has a decent foundation for an interesting King Kong sequel. A month after the city-destroying tragedy of the previous film, Kong capturer/promotor Carl Denham is left in unfathomable debt & legal trouble for the damages caused by his now-dead super ape. It’s the logical fallout of an illogical conflict, one the movie talks itself out of as it constructs a reason for Denham to return to Skull Island to meet Kong’s orphaned baby. Exhausted by his status as a public pariah and fearful of rumored criminal indictments, Denham again sails on an explorer’s mission that leads him back to Skull Island in search of legendary (and nonexistent) treasure. There, he’s met with the consequences of his greedy transgressions in the first film: a mutinous crew that refuses to return to the dangerous island, native tribes that embargo the entrance of white colonists because of his theft, and most notably Kong’s helpless baby ape who can barely fight off the island’s other monsters as a goofball orphan with no parental projection. Denham bonds with this pitiful, adorable creature (as well as a female musician he picked up along the journey), feeling immense guilt for the harm he inadvertently caused it. The trouble is that the return of his presence on the island is still unwelcome and puts Baby Kong in just as much danger as his dead ape father.

Although the reduced shooting schedule & budget wiped out her planned third act spectacle, screenwriter Ruth Rose did a commendable job of both keeping the mood light and upping the active involvement of the female co-lead, dampening the original film’s damsel in distress dramatic impulses. The jokes are plentiful and often surprisingly funny, especially in a pure anti-comedy sequence where a musical band of trained monkeys perform for unenthused bar patrons for a relative eternity. Other deadpan reactions like “My father is dead.” “What a tough break,” and a stammering “Well, uh, captain, uh . . . about that mutiny,” also play surprisingly well as the movie often finds genuine humor without delivering outright jokes. Still, it’s difficult to determine exactly how humorous Baby Kong is intended to appear, as many of his action sequences are repeats of the exact stop-motion dino fights that served as genuine special effects spectacle in the first film. Son of Kong is essentially the opening, island-set half of King Kong without the third-act payoff of the city-destroying conclusion, except now everything is twice as goofy & half as visually impressive. The sequel unfortunately also echoed the racist impulses of the first, even adding to its depictions of native savages & undertones of interracial romance paranoia by introducing the character Charlie the Chinese Cook. As amusing as the film can be at any given moment, its faults are both plentiful and glaring.

Cheap sequels have long relied on audiences’ contentment (and even enthusiasm) for reliving former pleasures on a smaller scale and with a goofier flavor. Yes, the creature battles in King Kong are more technically impressive and lead to a more spectacular end, but Son of Kong still features a sequence where a giant ape fights a giant bear in an all-out brawl. Take your entertainment where you can get it. It also helps that the film is at times genuinely humorous in a way that suggests its overall camp value may be somewhat intentional (for those willing to be a little forgiving). It’s difficult to imagine looking at Baby Kong’s exaggerated, googly-eyed mug and suppose the filmmakers were looking to deliver a serious-serious masterpiece, even if is ultimate trajectory is dramatic. Comparing Son of Kong to the original King Kong does it no favors, but it still has an interesting enough premise for a sequel to a film that obviously didn’t need one. In this way, it persists as a mildly delightfully oddity, which has been more than enough to justify fandoms of other cheap, rushed horror sequels released in the decades since. At the very least, I’d like to submit the film’s musical monkeys scene as a genius stroke of proto-Tim & Eric anti-humor, a 90 second stretch of pure cinema bliss that more than justifies the rest of the film’s existence:

-Brandon Ledet

Double Agent 73 (1974)

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One of the most oddly entertaining aspects of Doris Wishman’s first collaboration with the impossibly buxom Chesty Morgan, Deadly Weapons, was how frustrating it was in its avoidance of delivering on its premise. As the title suggests, Deadly Weapons was billed to feature Chesty Morgan dispensing of bad-guy criminals by killing them with her enormous breasts. It’s a novelty that only occurs twice onscreen in the film, absurdly late into its comically short runtime. Wishman’s punk amateurism & effortless ability to de-sex the sexploitation genre carried the movie through as a bizarre delight, and the film was followed up with a “spiritual sequel” in Double Agent 73. There’s only one boob-related kill in Double Agent 73, and it involves Chesty’s chest being smothered in poison instead of crushing or suffocating her criminal victim. Her titty-enabled espionage takes on an entirely different flavor in this follow-up, one that elevates the entire concept to an even more absurd level of camp cinema delight. Here, Morgan’s weaponized bosom is made to be an espionage tool instead of a lethal weapon. Through surgery, her rack is fashioned into essentially being the world’s largest, most conspicuous “hidden” camera. The results aren’t as sexy as they may have been intended to be, but they are far more hilariously absurd & more plentifully deployed than the killer tits conceit of Deadly Weapons, which stands out as the lesser Wishman-Morgan collaboration (a minor distinction, but an important one).

Chesty Morgan stars as the titular Agent 73, a James Bond-modeled international spy who hides in plain sight as a burlesque dancer. Her latest mission is to assassinate an evil syndicate of heroin dealers headed by the mysterious crime boss Toplar (sometimes humorously referred to as “Mr. T” for short). Toplar’s true identity and Agent 73’s descent down the heroin crime ring rabbit hole are obviously not the main draw in this soft-core nudie thriller. The glory of the movie’s hook it that a spy camera is surgically implanted in the buxom agent’s ample breasts. She’s instructed by her higher-ups to assassinate several men within the heroin ring and to take a picture of every kill after completion, a mission that conveniently requires her to frequently strip to the waist. Her camera isn’t necessarily aimed at anything in particular when she snaps these photos and every deployment of it is matched with a loud shutter sound that consistently elicits giggles. It’s difficult to pick a favorite deployment of the titty-cam conceit in the film: The post-surgery nurse-kill where she takes a picture even though the camera is still covered by a bandage? The scene where she sneaks into a criminal’s office to whip out her titties over a stack of top secret documents? The Deadly Weapons callback with the poison bosom? Double Agent 73 gets a lot more mileage out of its booby-themed espionage than its predecessor, while still sticking to that sweet, sweet 70min runtime.

I’m still getting accustomed to what distinguishes A Doris Wishman Film from other examples of blissfully absurd sexploitation, but Double Agent 73 more than earns her signature cartoon title card in the opening credits. Wishman has a distinctly anti-erotic approach to filmmaking that’s on full display in this movie’s uncomfortable close-ups, heavy breathing, and bizarre intrusions of bloody violence. A trip to a nudist camp recalls her early nudie cutie works like Nude on the Moon. A bizarrely edited homage to the shower scene from Psycho recalls her total-meltdown slasher A Night to Dismember. The snazzy jazz & sped-up fistfights recall her roughies like Bad Girls Go to Hell and Another Day, Another Man. In its own way, Double Agent 73 might be the distilled ideal of a Doris Wishman film: it’s short, blissfully absurd, oversaturated in aggressively unerotic nudity, and follows through on its over-the-top premise in a way more of her films could stand to. There’s a consistency to Wishman’s D.I.Y., unerotic filmmaking craft that never changed over her decades as a schlockteur, for better or for worse. The gems in her catalog, then, are naturally going to be the ones built on ludicrous premises like Double Agent 73’s. It’s not only her best collaboration with Chesty Morgan; it’s likely one her most worthwhile films overall.

-Brandon Ledet

Swamp Women (1956)

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I’ve come to think of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as my childhood “bad” movie training wheels. It’s a crutch I no longer need to enjoy my Z-grade schlock, thanks to years of training under the tutelage of the show. As much as I appreciate that schlocky schooling, it often bums me out that the show has become an unavoidable authority on many of the public domain B-pictures they’ve covered, to the point where if you google the picture most immediate results will be jokes the sarcastic robots made about it. The early Roger Corman directorial effort Swamp Women (also known as Cruel Swamp and, on MST3k, Swamp Diamonds) is one such picture, which is unfortunate because I find the movie interesting enough on its own terms to not need the distraction of MST3k’s commentary diluting it. It’s a difficult position to defend, though, since Swamp Women hits so many of my personal obsessions as a trash-gobbling movie nerd. A cheapo Roger Corman crime picture about cop-hating “bad girls” misbehaving in Louisiana swamps, Swamp Women hits about as close to home as possible to my specific cinematic interests without including drag, witchcraft, pro wrestling, or outer space. The film is far from a knockout, but it is very much my thing. It’s easy to see how someone who’s not a New Orleans-based trash hound could need a little extra help from MST3k to make its basic premise enticing, but those days are long behind me.

An undercover police woman conspires with a prison warden to infiltrate a locked-up girl gang. The plan is to trick the girls into exposing their stash of stolen diamonds. She helps the hardened criminals stage a jail break (with only performative resistance from the warden) and, in return, they allow her to tag along in recovering the diamonds from their deep swamp hiding pace. Along the way they capture an innocent couple touring the Louisiana wilderness, reducing the cast to five women and one tied-up man – an indication of the level of sleaze that persists throughout. Swamp Women is incredibly faithful to its “bad girls” crime template, entirely obedient to the tropes & rhythms of a genre that would be later perfected in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. What it lacks in narrative innovation, though, it more than makes up for in how perfectly cool its central girl gang comes across onscreen. When they first break out of jail they have two immediate concerns: regret that they didn’t get a chance to shoot back at the cops and how soon they’ll be able to find “something decent to wear and some lipstick.” They look incredible even as they pick fights & trudge through the gator-infested swamp, sporting perfectly coiffed hair, razor sharp Joan Crawford eyebrows, and gigantic knives holstered in tight blue jeans. There’s nothing the film can manage to stage plot-wise that can match the pleasure of hanging out with these badass women, something that’s practically admitted aloud in an absurdly long sequence where they get drunk to brunch jazz and convert their tight jeans to cutoff hot pants with their comically large knives. Corman only barely pretends that out interests & sympathies aren’t supposed to lie with these degenerate women, but with the undercover cop who’s there to take them down. Why bother?

Because Swamp Women is so genre-faithful, its most distinguishing characteristic is its choice of locale, something even heavily referenced in its (unenthused) contemporary reviews. This was only Corman’s fifth directorial effort (in his second year of filmmaking, because he’s a beast), so he was still at a stage in his career when he was personally traveling the country selling his films directly to distributors. Around this time, New Orleans had just opened its first drive-in movie theaters, the owners of which were also interested in getting into film production. Corman gladly took their money, filming Swamp Women on location in Louisiana (and thanking New Orleans mayor deLesseps Morrison in the credits for the city’s cooperation). Because it was a Corman production, the actors were required to perform their own stunts in the actual Louisiana swamp, putting themselves in danger of the same gators & snakes the movie itself uses as thrilling threats to its misbehaving girl gag. I’m sure it was a miserable shoot, but the gator footage & moss-decorated trees really do make for a more interesting backdrop than a sound stage or urban environment ever could have (even if the live gators and their intended victims never do share a single frame). In my favorite example of the film padding its own runtime, Corman also opens this 70min feature with roughly ten minutes of touristy, people-watching Mardi Gras footage. Playing documentarian, Corman captures the 1950s Krewe of Rex rolling down Canal Street (in color!), followed by masked revelers—all looking exactly the same as they would in the 2010s (except with maybe fewer outright racist costumes, which are featured front & center here). Even if the movie’s bad-girls-gone-worse plot holds little interest for you, the footage of 1950s Louisiana might be enough to make the film worthwhile.

With or without the MST3k commentary, I cannot issue an open recommendation for Swamp Women, an exceedingly minor trifle of a picture. I can only report that I was personally charmed by its depictions of cop-hating “bad girls” on a swampy crime spree and fascinated by its inadvertently documentarian record of a 1950s Louisiana. Maybe this is the exact kind of minor pleasure that deserves to be remembered only through the MST3k lens, but I personally found enough to enjoy in the film on its own to not need the sarcastic robots to hold my hand through it. Other schlock-hungry reprobates with any personal affinity with Corman and/or New Orleans have a chance of feeling the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Truth or Dare (2018)

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There are two competing gimmicks at war with each other in the gleefully idiotic trash-horror Truth or Dare?. As suggested in the title, one gimmick involves a supernatural, deadly version of the schoolyard game truth-or-dare that drives the film both to explorations of contrived ethical dilemmas and to even more contrived novelty indulgences in demonic possession clichés. As delightfully silly as a haunted truth-or-dare game is for a horror movie premise, though, it’s not the gimmick that most endeared the film to me. It’s Truth or Dare?’s stylistic gimmick as The Snapchat Filter Horror Movie that really stole my trash-gobbling heart. Whenever demonically possessed participants prompt contestants in the titular game to answer “Truth or dare?” their faces are altered with cheap digital effects to display a sinister, impossible grin. It’s a design that unmistakably resembles a Snapchat filter, which is explicitly acknowledged in the dialogue when a character reports, “It looked like a messed-up Snapchat filter.” I’ve already exhaustively stressed in the past how important high-concept/low-budget horrors about the evils of the Internet are for being willing to document what modern life online looks & feels like in a way that classier productions would tend to avoid. Films like Unfriended, #horror, Afflicted, and so on are doing more to preserve the history of modern online communication than they’re given credit for, specifically because they’re willing to exploit pedestrian trash mediums like Skype, Candy Crush, and webcasting as foundational gimmicks for feature-length narratives. For its own part, Truth or Dare? has earned its place in cheap horror’s academic documentation of online discourse by exploiting Snapchat filter technology as a dirt-cheap scare delivery system. As silly as its titular gimmick can be, it wouldn’t have deserved camp cinema legacy without that secondary Snapchat filter gimmick backing it up.

It’s tempting to bail on enjoying Truth or Dare? in its initial setup & character introductions, which make for a very shaky first act. In an opening sequence so cliché it was parodied in The Cabin in the Woods a half-decade ago, a group of college age friends embark on their Last Spring Break Together and are met with a supernatural evil on the journey. Lured into a drunken, late-night round of truth-or-dare by a mysterious stranger in an even more mysterious abandoned Mexican church, the group is locked into a demonically-possessed version of the schoolyard game that follows them home and threatens their lives. Taking turns in several rounds, each character is challenged by hallucinations of the Snapchat Filter Demon into following through on truth-or-dare prompts or violently dying in refusal. Besides a closeted gay character and hilariously oblivious party bro (“I can’t say no to shots. Everybody knows that.”), none of these College Kid archetypes especially stand out as distinct individuals. They’re instead used as personality-free placeholders for the movie’s deployment in awkwardly staged moral dilemmas. The dares indicated by the film’s title are almost exclusively acts of lethal violence, but the real hook of the premise is in exposing the truth behind people’s desire to be seen as charitable & good. The demonic game of truth-or-dare forces characters to act out their unspoken desires and to confess their most shameful secrets in grand displays of public humiliation. The hidden selfishness of the self-righteous is a particular fixation of the game, as characters are challenged to back up statements like “I didn’t have a choice” or to prove claims that they’d sacrifice their own lives to save many strangers’. Honesty is the most highly valued virtue in Truth or Dare?’s worldview and it’s one the movie searches for in the most gleefully cruel ways possible.

Although the initial setup is a little labored (a probable side-effect of having five writers share one screenplay), Truth or Dare? gets exponentially more ludicrous (and, thus, fun) as its titular game escalates, ending on a surprisingly ambitious note with implications that are incredibly far-reaching & clever, considering the film’s lowly starting point. It’s possible to find more fully committed versions of the film’s central gimmicks in better works. The pitch-black exploitation comedy Cheap Thrills offers an even more cruel indulgence in depicting a series of violent dares gone out of hand. While Truth or Dare? verbally admits its Shapchat filter gimmick in the dialogue and adopts cell phone aspect ratios in its opening credits, it has nothing on the fully-committed Sickhouse, which is essentially a The Blair Witch Project remake staged through a series of Snapchat posts (and originally posted on the Snapchat app itself). Nerve might even be a better midpoint between the two gimmicks, where a series of escalating dares are filtered through the language of social media. The acting & character work in Truth or Dare? are aggressively bland. The music feels like faux-inspirational Chariots of Fire/allergy medicine commercial runoff. The PG-13 rating indicates both its potential for truly disturbing violence and its loyalty to genre cliché. On the Blumhouse scale, this film is more Happy Death Day than Get Out. On the Evil Internet horror scale, it’s more Friend Request than Unfriended. Still, its specificity as a Snapchat filter horror (as opposed to a Snapchat platform horror) distinguishes it from previous app-based schlock and its follow-through on the implications of its demonic truth-or-dare premise wholly makes up for its first act unease. If nothing else, I can report that the film’s ending is the most satisfying trash-horror resolution I’ve seen since the evil doll cheapie The Boy, a reference I intend as the highest of compliments (it did rank high on our collective Top Films of 2016 list, after all). Between leaving me on that high note and generating its terror through a disposable mode of online discourse, Truth or Dare? very easily endeared itself to me. I wish more people were having this much fun with it.

-Brandon Ledet

Isle of Lesbos (1997)

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Growing up, I had a very limiting an idea of what drag is, thanks to the way the scene has seemingly been in New Orleans my entire life. I can’t claim to be a New Orleans drag historian or anything, but the city’s drag aesthetic has always struck me as a deliberately tacky, old-fashioned affair that skipped over the weirdo high fashion & ball culture innovation of cities like New York & San Francisco to maintain what’s now referred to as a “pageant queen” tradition. (The documentary The Sons of Tennessee Williams is a great snapshot of the aesthetic I’m describing here.) That Southern drag pageant tradition can be a blast on its own merits; if nothing else, The Gay Easter Parade where local drag queens dress like Metairie Moms in Springtime is one of the more absurd highlights of my calendar year. I do have to admit, though, that it’s been a welcome eye-opener to have fresh influences like the local arrival of the Vinsantos-run New Orleans Drag Workshop & the national popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race expand my understanding of what drag is as an artform in recent years. Part of that is looking beyond the pageant & comedy queen acts I’ve long been familiar with to more high-fashion and avant-garde interpretations of the artform. More importantly, I’ve come to better understand what the artform of femme drag itself is: a heightened subversion of gender performance that even cisgender women can participate in (though, the genuinely-accepted term for that, “faux queen,” does have a kind of dismissive tone to it). It’s like when you first realize that punk is an ethos & not a sound; you start seeing it everywhere: bounce music is punk, Agnès Varda is punk, drag is punk, and so on. If I had first watched the microbudget musical Isle of Lesbos a few years ago I likely would have still gotten kick out of it, but I wouldn’t have seen it for what it is: women doing femme drag at top volume and not caring who doesn’t get it. It’s also, not coincidentally, punk as fuck.

Isle of Lesbos is a politically angry, deliberately offensive, post-John Waters, queer as fuck movie musical with deep roots in drag & cabaret traditions. Its (extremely limited) press materials posit the film as “Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Oklahoma,” perhaps as a warning to the audience that there will be musical theatre-style song & dance, but I found the film to be more of a grimy, Desperate Living meets The Wizard of Oz proposition. Like the matriarchal shanty town Mortville in Desperate Living, the titular lesbian utopia in this makeshift production design spectacle is a mean, lurid immersion in femme grime & glamour. The intensely apparent artificiality of the hand-built sets is much closer to the low -budget staging of the sci-fi drag gem Vegas in Space than the magical illusion of Oz, but its titular utopia’s dichotomous opposition to the fictional small town of Bumfuck, Arkansas could not be more clearly modeled after the Technicolor classic (likely as a sly “friends of Dorothy” hat-tip). Like most drag, the movie is more than a little offensive, especially in its gleeful use of racist iconography & homophobic slurs; its tagline even boasts that it has “A little something to offend just about everyone!” The targets of its racial & sexual satire are always the oppressors, not the oppressed, though. Race & sexuality are performed in the film, just like how gender is performed in drag at large. They’re also clashed against the intolerant Evil of straight, white, Christian Southerners who’ve made the existence of a separate, locked-away realm for homosexual women vitally necessary. For all its inherent fun as a vulgar, queer musical, Isle of Lesbos is also a deeply sad fantasy where persecuted people live on after being raped, murdered, executed, or driven to suicide by a society that condemns their sexual orientation. It’s also no coincidence that the evil town of Bumfuck was geographically located in Arkansas, home of the frequently-referenced Clintons, who were then on the wrong side of queer history thanks to political policies like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

A young Arkansan bride finds herself at the altar with a man she has zero sexual or romantic chemistry with. Scared, she runs away home to lock herself in her bedroom— her parents & fiancée beating at the door, demanding to be let it. Rather than face their scorn, she puts a revolver in her mouth and commits suicide. This act transports her through the mirror to the mythical Isle of Lesbos (as opposed to the geographical one), where she’s made to feel comfortable with admitting to herself (and her family, via interdimensional letters home) that she is, in fact, a lala-lala-lesbian. Her new, queer community of fellow straight-world exiles welcome her with chants of “A land without lesbians is no land for us,” and allow her the first opportunity in her life to seek true love. Folks back home in the “one-horse, God-fearing town” of Bumfuck, Arkansas don’t take this transgression lightly and spend the remainder of the film trying to bring her back through the mirror and declaring all-out war on the Sapphic realm that “stole” her. The contrast between the vibrant passion of queer sex in the Lesbos realm and the repressed sexual violence & racial persecution back in Bumfuck, Arkansas is a damning political screed seething with bottomless, justifiable anger. It’s also communicated through the earnest joy of musical theatre, typified in lines like “Arkansas just ain’t the place to sit on a pretty face” and “I don’t need a man to call my own; The Isle of Lesbos is my home.” That’s not to say that the Isle of Lesbos doesn’t have its own internal shortcomings to deal with; its horrific mistreatment of a single male, effeminate-homosexual slave kept around as an all-purpose janitor is deliberately reminiscent of the fascist oppression that drove the protagonist out of Bumfuck, Arkansas in the first place. Still, that problematic indulgence in oppression is small fries in comparison to the more empowered, Christian communities who made the existence of a segregated lesbian utopia necessary.

Director Jeff B. Harmon has a fascinating resume, if only because Isle of Lesbos is such an anomaly among his extensive documentary work on war atrocities. There’s an anti-war message shoehorned into Isle of Lesbos’s third act, but you’d have to squint hard to see how this brash, crass musical fits into his filmography otherwise. It’s a political film, sure, but its politics are expressed through a Michael Jackson impersonator being terrorized by the KKK, straight married home life being interpreted as a joyless nightmare, femme arm pit air & mud wrestling being interpreted as natural & wholesome, etc. Isle of Lesbos is political in the way all drag is political; it mocks the social institutions that restrict expressions of gender & sexuality by flagrantly disregarding their rules as loud & as glitterful as possible. If I had seen the film before I better understood drag I might have read it as a musical theatre version of Desperate Living (one of my all-time favorite films, so no shame there), but as it stands I see both works as unconventional participation in a larger drag tradition. There’s currently no greater threat to the social institution of a gender binary than the democratization of modern drag, which explains gender as performance & a boundary worth challenging. This gleefully vulgar, D.I.Y. punk, ramshackle, queer as fuck movie musical is a great snapshot of what that threat looked like two decades ago. As the tagline promises, it does have “a little something to offend just about everyone,” but it’s also an open invitation to laugh in the face of oppressors and then leave them behind in Bumfuck, Nowhere as you seek out more welcoming communities of your own. That’s the kind of call-to-arms that will always steal my trash-gobbling heart.

-Brandon Ledet

All About Evil (2010)

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Typically, movies made by drag queens require a little good will & benefit of the doubt from their audience. I’ve written positive reviews of dirt cheap drag productions like Vegas in Space & Hurricane Bianca in the past, but my forgiving love of drag as an artform likely made me a little lenient in discerning their merits, just like how my love of pro wrestling can lead to positive reviews of widely-hated films like Ready to Rumble. I’d like to distinguish All About Evil from that bias. Written & directed by infamous San Francisco drag queen Peaches Christ (under her boy name, Joshua Grannell), All About Evil is a genuinely well-made participation in B-movie schlock tradition. The film features performances from legitimate camp cinema players (and friends of Grannell’s, presumably): Natasha Lyonnne, Mink Stole, and Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson, an admirably unholy trinity. While Peaches Christ appears in the film in full drag (as herself!), the story isn’t especially concerned with the artform; it’s a natural part of the San Francisco setting, nothing more. The production values are about on par with most drag cinema indies (I’m thinking specifically of outsider art made by drag queens, not major productions like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert or To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar), but its ambition aims much higher than most camp comedies of its ilk. Most importantly, tough, All About Evil displays a deep, knowledgeable love for the horror cinema refuse it imitates & pays homage to. As the screen fills with references to Blood Feast, The Wasp Woman, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, The Pit and the Pendulum, and so on, All About Evil’s midnight movie credentials are beyond legitimized and it transcends its drag cinema pedigree to become something else I’m strongly biased to enjoy: over-the-top horror schlock.

Although its title is a play on the name of a Bette Davis picture and there are plenty throwaway references to other cult horror works, All About Evil most resembles the Roger Corman classic Bucket of Blood in its basic plot. Natasha Lyonne (telegraphing her later re-emergence in weirdo horror cheapies like Antibirth & #horror) stars as a mentally unstable librarian who inherits a repertory movie theater form her deceased father. Her business struggles to stay afloat until security footage of her murdering her father’s shrill widow is projected on the screen for an unsuspecting midnight audience. The gore hounds in the crowd mistake the violent act as a fictional work of outsider art, commending her for creating a few found-footage subgenre they call “surveillance slaughter” and eagerly awaiting her next homemade short film. She continues to build her local legacy from there by committing more murders for the camera, often punishing her victims for faux pas like disparaging horror as an artform or using their cellphones in the theater. There might be vague correlations to be made between horror audiences’ insatiable bloodlust and the film’s movie theater goths mistaking murder for art, but the premise is mostly an excuse to have fun while celebrating horror as a communal joy. In true drag queen tradition, Lyonne’s short film slashers are given ridiculous pun titles like “Slasher in the Rye” & “Gore and Peace.” Popcorn machines & library books are fashioned into ridiculous murder props. The gore flows freely in practical effects indulgences instead of settling for the cheaper, lazier route of CG blood splatter. All About Evil is a genuine specimen of gleeful horror fandom. Like with the TV persona of bit part actor Elvira and the stage performances of Peaches Christ herself, it’s always wonderful when that quality can convincingly intersect with the world & art of drag. For an enthusiastic fan of both like myself, it’s all too easy to get swept up in the joy of that combo.

The one thing that tempers my appreciation of All About Evil is its choice of protagonist. Instead of detailing Lyonne’s mental unraveling from her own perspective, the film is told mostly from the POV of a teenage horror bro who arrives on the ground floor as one of her biggest fans. He makes sense as a choice for inserting an audience surrogate into the narrative, but like in Joe Dante’s embarrassing Burying the Ex misfire, can often unintentionally display some of the fandom’s worst macho tendencies. His relationship with a horror-hating Feminist Nag is particularly troubling, especially in an exchange where he mansplains to her that Lyonne’s deranged killer is “important” because there’s (supposedly) never been a great female horror director before. The statement is, at best, misinformed, devaluing the the cult classic films of women like Stephanie Rothman, Doris Wishman, Jackie Kong, Roberta Findlay, and Mary Lambert. It’s even more cringeworthy once you consider the fact that Cindy Sherman’s Carol Kane slasher Office Killer is by far a superior example of the exact mousy-homebody-turned-vengeful-killer aesthetic All About Evil aims towards; a woman has essentially made a better version of the movie that’s telling its audience no woman has ever made a truly great horror film before. It’s a frustrating claim to stomach. Office Killer also didn’t feel the need to tell its story through the eyes of a goth bro, keeping its perspective solidly anchored to Kane even as she descended into gory madness (which is partly why it’s a better film). I wouldn’t have been so taken aback by the character’s misguided horror bro mindset if it weren’t so clearly meant to be a mouthpiece for the audience. All About Evil is such a gleeful celebration of cult horror subculture (and women in general) otherwise that it was disappointing such a misguided choice made it to the screen in the process.

Being mildly offended is honestly just as natural to drag culture as bad puns & glitter, though, so I wasn’t too bothered with All About Evil’s slightly off-center feminist politics. It also helps that I saw the film in one of the best possible environments: with Peaches Christ present for a Q&A in the back room of a local bar. The screening was preceded by a few B-movie friendly drag performances (including a Female Trouble-themed act from fellow Krewe Divine member CeCe V Deminthe) and was supervised by local drag workshop instructor Vinsantos (a friend of Peaches Christ’s who also provided the film’s low-fi score). The entire evening was reminiscent of old school art cinema screenings, where weirdos would pile into unconventional spaces like bookstores & dive bars to struggle to hear avant-garde experiments over the roar of a nearby whirring projector. In this case the projector had an inaudible, digital-era hum, but the environment was still the same. The similarities between the drunken drag enthusiasts in that barroom and the gore-thirsty goths calling for the peril of Natasha Lyonne’s victims onscreen were apparent & plentiful. I’m much more suspicious of that environment’s effect on my enthusiasm for the film than I am with my general drag cinema leniency. Still, Peaches Christ delivered an impressive love letter to campy, gore-drenched schlock in All About Evil. The film was clearly a blast to make, but far from the lazy, self-indulgent hangout it easily could have been (and many microbudget horror comedies are). I’d without question recommend it to anyone with a voracious love of B-movie history, whether or not they’re familiar with Peaches Christ as a real-life persona or drag as an artform. That’s more than I can say for pictures like Vegas in Space, as much I as I love those for their own sake.

-Brandon Ledet

The One (2001)

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The Hong Kong action cinema boom typified by explosive auteurs like John Woo & Tsui Hark saw its heyday in the mid-80s to early 90s. By the 90s that movement’s highly stylized action aesthetic had become a lucrative export, with many of its best directors being employed & imitated in Hollywood productions. By the early 2000s, it was essentially a dying art form, having given way to an entirely different style of Chinese cinema export, typified by epics like Hero & Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The Jet Li sci-fi vehicle The One happened to arrive in that too-late dead space. At the time, Jet Li was a Chinese-market martial arts star who was poised to make it big in America, but hadn’t quite gotten there yet. The film’s director, James Wong, was a Hong Kong-born American citizen who had more experience making American thrillers than anything resembling Hong Kong action cinema (having been responsible for two of the better Final Destination films). The hilarious thing about The One is the way it compensates for this late arrival & awkwardly inauthentic pedigree by making its soundtrack relevant to the time. The film attempts a slick, futuristic aesthetic within its late Hong Kong action cinema paradigm, but overloads its soundtrack with nu metal acts that instantly date it in the early 2000s: Drowning Pool, Papa Roach, Disturbed, etc. By the time Jet Li is fighting off an entire room of future-police to a remix of “Down with the Sickness,” The One blissfully reaches an ill-advised, self-contradictory sci-fi action cinema aesthetic of its own, one that only becomes more amusing with time.

There are more than 100 versions of Jet Li in The One’s universe(s), or at least there were before the movie’s prologue. As the opening narration explains, “There is not one universe. There are many, a multiverse.” Jet Li stars as both an interdimensional criminal hellbent on killing all other 100+ versions of himself across the multiverse and the sole good-cop version of himself left on the kill list. To put it in Hong Kong action cinema terms, it’s essentially his version of Jackie Chan’s dual role performance in Twin Dragons. This murder spree is frowned upon by the government of the Peoples of the Multiverse, who send future-cops hired to restrict interdimensional travel to catch the evil version of Li and sentence him to life on a dystopian prison planet in the Hades Universe. This proves to be a difficult task, as the remaining versions of the parallel dimension criminal become stronger with each kill, to the point where the final two copies of Jet Li are essentially in-the-flesh gods. The movie has more fun with this incredible super-strength than it does with staging scenes between the Jet Li doubles. In its most iconic moment, Evil Jet Li smashes a cop between two motorcycles like pancake, wielding the machines as if they weighed nothing, one in each arm. All this interdimensional mayhem builds to a climactic battle between the two remaining Jet Lis, of course, a minutes-long fight staged in what Ebert would frequently call a Steam and Flame Factory, the preferred setting for most action movie climaxes.  No one is entirely sure what will happen if either version succeeds in killing the other and successfully becomes the titular One. One character hilariously ponders, “Some people think you’ll explode. Some people think you’ll implode.” I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to report that the movie never decides if either is true. It instead ends with Evil Jet Li trapped on the previously-mentioned Hades Universe prison planet, fighting off thousands of weaker enemies while Papa Roach sings, “It’s in our nature to destroy ourselves” on the soundtrack. Incredible.

The One drops the ball in fully exploiting its deliciously bonkers premise, mostly in denying the audiences a montage of the 100+ previous Jet Li self-kills and in delaying its Jet Li-on-Jet Li action for as long as possible. It’s so fascinating as a nu-metal era relic, though, that those shortcomings are almost beside the point. Weird jokes about an alternate dimension Al Gore presidency & gratuitous indulgences in The Matrix’s “bullet time” CGI humorously date the supposedly futuristic film just as much as its Papa Roach soundtrack. Jet Li’s on-his-way-to-stardom casting as the film’s lead(s) is just as adorably dated as a WWE-era The Rock being considered for the same part(s) or baby Jason Statham being cast as his foil. There are less-fun ways that film recalls the early 2000s as well, like the casual (and entirely extraneous) transphobia or the way it establishes its future setting by tinting everything a sickly blue. For the most part, though, it’s the film’s hilariously incongruous nu metal soundtrack that makes it an amusingly dated watch. For instance, Evil Jet Li is made to be just as much of an audience surrogate badass as Good Jet Li, serving as the ultimate power fantasy; we know this early on because when he steals a car in the first act he changes the radio station away from the oldies in disgust, preferring to listen to “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” or whatever the fuck. This dark, wicked Jet Li gets an insane amount of screen time for a murderous villain, because we’re not supposed to see him as a villain at all. He’s just a fellow nu-metal junkie who can’t get enough of those sweet Papa Roach licks, just like us. The One’s over the top parallel dimensions premise may not fully live up to the heights of Hong Kong action cinema absurdity or even the supernatural spectacle of Wong’s work in the Final Destination series, but the way that futurism dorkily clashes with its instantly dated nu-metal aesthetic is golden for a solid, campy action movie romp. It could have been great, but instead it was greatly cheesy, which is its own kind of pleasure.

-Brandon Ledet

The Greatest Showman (2017)

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“Does it bother you that everything you’re selling is fake?”
“Do these smiles look fake?”

One of my favorite recurring SNL characters in recent years was Andy Samberg’s portrayal of Hugh Jackman: The Man with Two Sides. The joke was essentially that Jackman’s public persona was bizarrely bifurcated between his gruff performances as a muscled-out action star and his more delicate, fanciful performances as a man of the stage. 2017 might have been the year when the Two Sides of Hugh Jackman both reached their most absurd extremes. Early in the year, Jackman’s long-running lone wolf/tough guy act as Wolverine in the X-Men franchise got so somber & manly in Logan that the film could easily pass as an adaptation of a late-career Johnny Cash ballad. Jackman then followed that grizzled performance up in December with the silliest, most frothy performance in his entire musical theatre career. Jackman stars in the movie musical biopic The Greatest Showman as an eternally chipper P.T. Barnum, whom the movie posits as the inventor of modern showbusiness. The Greatest Showman is less remarkable for contrasting Logan as an exercise in pure, unembarrassed musical theatre than it is for contrasting it as a disingenuous, 100-minute-long commercial where the product being sold is joy. Just as I cried a solitary, manly tear as Logan toyed with political exploitation & deep-seated daddy issues, I also totally bought into the joyful, bullshit product Jackman peddles in The Greatest Showman. He’s a very talented salesman, no matter which one of his Two Sides is doing the talking.

Calling The Greatest Showman a biopic is a little misleading. I’m not sure Jackman’s portrayal of P.T. Barnum shares much in common with the real-life showman outside a name and an affiliation with the popularization of the traveling circus. The revisionist narrative the film peddles is just as surreally artificial as its nonstop barrage of green-screened backdrops. Barnum begins the film as a working-class upstart whose belief in the American dream (and skills at lying to bank lenders) catapults his family from rags to riches as he unknowingly “invents” modern show business (think Vegas variety show). His “aha!” moment that transforms a failing wax museum packed with dusty curios to a lucrative enterprise of populist entertainment is a decision to exploit the local outcasts & physically disabled as tourist attractions, essentially inventing the profession of “circus freak.” The Greatest Showman often attempts to posit Barnum’s relationship with his disenfranchised employees as tenderly familial, but it’s much more convincing in the stretches where he profits off their labor, yet locks them out of the visibility of the high-society circles they afford him access to. The film’s moral lies somewhere in celebrating your inner (and outer) weirdness instead of desperately wanting to be accepted by the snobbish hegemony, a lesson Barnum supposedly learns several times throughout (by way of gaudy, pop-minded showtunes, of course).

There are dual romance storylines that distract from The Greatest Showman’s Let Your Freak Flag Fly messaging and overall value as a crassly populist spectacle. One involves Barnum repeatedly ignoring his wife (Michelle Williams) and children in his blind pursuit of high society respectability, something that falls a little flat if not only because his wife’s inner desires are left vague & unclear. Early on, Barnum sings passionately about his dream of creating the ultimate form of entertainment, while his wife’s only expressed desire is that he share that dream with her and allow her to tag along. A second, interracial romance among Barnum’s employees (Disney Channel vets Zack Effron & Zendaya) is a little clearer in its place in the story, though it’s ultimately just as inconsequential. Neither romance is nearly as satisfying as the time spent with Barnum’s stable of “freaks,” whose determination to be visible & respected while being themselves is the most convincing thread in the film’s overall sentimentality. I’ll admit that even as crass & silly as this movie is in every single frame, I got a little teary-eyed at the circus performers (especially the bearded lady) singing about how they’re “Not scared to be seen” in the Oscar-nominated tune “This is Me.” The characterizations of the circus performers can be just as insultingly artificial as the romances and the revision of Barnum’s exploitative history and everything else in the film (the bizarre vocal dubbing of the cast’s sole little person is especially egregious), but that’s all part of The Greatest Showman’s tacky sense of proto-Vegas fun. It also does little to distract from the endearing, all-accepting, freaks-are-people-too messaging.

The debut film from director Michael Gracey, The Greatest Showman was likely a movie-by-committee proposition, very much in the tradition of blatantly commercial movie musicals like Moulin Rouge & Xanadu. It proudly wears that populism on its ruffled sleeve, though, directly calling out potential critics as “prigs & snobs” before they even have a chance to file a negative review. Barnum goes even further by calling the entire profession of entertainment criticism inherently hypocritical, as he becomes morbidly fixated on a “critic who can’t find joy in the theatre.” That insult stuck with me, not because it was especially insightful as a look into the practice of art criticism, but because it made clear exactly what product this obnoxious, crass, overlong, deeply silly advertisement was trying to sell me: joy. I greatly respect The Greatest Showman for the honesty of its populist spectacle & out-in-the-open commitment to artifice. I also believe that, besides maybe Barnum himself, there are few hucksters who could have sold its joy-product more convincingly than Jackman, even if he was outshined by the circus performers’ storyline and could only employ one of his distinct Two Sides in the task.

-Brandon Ledet

The Commuter (2018)

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The sole kernel of fun in last year’s over-hated natural disaster thriller Geostorm was its function as a conservative fantasy in which one white, middle aged tough guy fights off a massive conspiracy all on his lonesome. The latest action vehicle for Liam Neeson, who knows a thing or two about middle aged white guy power fantasies at this point in his career, pushes that same dynamic to a much more satisfying, deliriously inane extreme. Director Jaume Collet-Serra already reframed Neeson’s defining late-career gimmick in Non-Stop, which was essentially Taken on a Plane. His latest collaboration with the forever-slumming-it actor, The Commuter, flips the script again with the paradigm-shifting concept of, wait for it, Taken on a Train. Neeson stars as the titular commuter, a hardworking family man struggling to maintain an upper middle-class lifestyle without a proper safety net. Just when his job, his family, and his sense of security are taken away from him, he’s offered a quick, sleazy way to make a cool $100k on his commute home. He must make a choice: blindly go along with the flow or stand up for the little guy and take down a massive conspiracy network one bare-knuckled punch at a time. The Commuter isn’t exactly capital “R” Republican in its politics; at the very least it musters a lot of residual anger from the 2008 market crisis, even including the line, “Hey, Goldman Sachs! On behalf of the American middle class, fuck you!” The film’s pro-cop philosophy, “Millennials, huh?” patronizing, Info Wars-style paranoia, and general macho swagger are all informed by a conservative tinge, though, and it’s perversely fun to watch that sensibility stretch to such absurd lengths in this kind of disposable, low-rent/high-concept thriller.

Freshly let go from his unglamorous job as an insurance salesman by a heartless Corporation, our ex-cop Hero Dad has little to lose as he sullenly rides home on a packed commuter train. He’s a hardworking man who plays by the rules in a mind-numbing routine, but he gets screwed anyway because the system is rigged. In this moment of desperation & financial despair, he’s approached by a mysterious organization and offered $100k to do something he is uniquely qualified for: pointing out a fellow passenger “who does not belong” on the train he rides every day. This setup does not entirely make sense, as he’s both tasked to single out an out-of-place stranger and told that there are other strangers on the train watching his every move, which you would think just muddles the assignment. It doesn’t take long or the focus to shift away from this original moral quandary (which feels somewhat like an exhausted, late 90s John Woo adapting The Box). Neeson’s middle-aged toughie quickly realizes he’s being blackmailed into committing unwitting acts of Evil and the rest of the film details his David vs. Goliath heroics in taking down the mysterious, all-powerful Organization responsible for his predicament from within the speeding train. His triumph as the hero hinges both on his ability to see through the Fake News & truthiness of the world and on the brunt force of his traditional masculinity, something that’s been eroded by the daily Corporate grind of commuting by train in a cheap suit to provide for his family. I’m not sure how much longer Neeson will be able to coast along in these ludicrous Tough Dad action thrillers, but The Commuter hits a nice sweet spot where he’s still virile enough for the violence to be passably convincing and the premises must reach far beyond rational thought to keep the formula novel. It’s fun trash.

Much like Collet-Serra’s fun-trash shark pic The Shallows, The Commuter feels a little unnecessarily labored & delayed in its setup. Once his aggressively idiotic plots get cooking, however, they capture a distinct 90s thriller spirit that used to light up summertime marquees, but have since been ghettoized on a straight-to-VOD release path. Even The Commuter’s gloriously cheesy tagline, “Lives are on the line,” feels like a relic from an ancient mode of blockbuster filmmaking. Where that 90s thriller throwback vibe might disappoint is in this film’s general deficiency of action. Besides an inevitable special effects climax involving the train itself, there are only a few moments of genuine action that make appropriate use of the train setting’s close quarters combat tension. The most memorable of these involves Neeson fighting off a guitar-wielding conspirator with a fire hatchet, in what’s effectively an axe-on-axe fight. Mostly, though, The Commuter is less entertaining for its Loud, Dumb Action than it is for its Loud, Dumb Ideas. The film recalls high-concept thrillers like the David Fincher joint The Game or the M. Night Shyamalan-penned Devil in its paranoia-driven sociology experiments where every character is an anonymous archetype and no one is to be trusted. I probably shouldn’t take so much delight in how films like Geostorm & The Commuter adapt that conspiracy theorist hero worship to the Fake News, Alex Jones era, but I just find it so damn silly. There’s a whole legion of dangerous white, American men out there who believe they’re living in some kind of rigged, The Matrix-type system where they’re the only dude in the world smart enough to crack the code of What’s Really Going On, when they’re actually just, for instance, some boring ex-cop who got laid off from selling insurance. Watching that kind of outsized power fantasy play out onscreen to its most illogical extreme should probably be frightening, but instead it tickles me immensely.

-Brandon Ledet

Tower of Terror (1997)

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Expectations can make or break a movie-watching experience if you allow them too much headspace. I try to approach every film with an entirely blank slate, but it can be difficult to achieve that intellectual distance. For instance, watching a mid-90s Steve Guttenberg helm a made-for-TV kids’ movie based on a Disney World theme park attraction comes with its own expectation baggage that’s difficult to leave at the door. To be crassly honest, I expected a pile of shit. 1997’s Tower of Terror movie is a thoroughly pleasant surprise, then, shirking the stench of its compromised pedigree in nearly every scene. Even as a cheaply made VHS era kids’ horror starring The Gutte, the film is a massive improvement over Disney’s other haunted house amusement park ride adaptation, the miserable Eddie Murphy comedy The Haunted Mansion. It’s a charmingly silly, mildly spooky comedy that delivers just as much genuine entertainment as it does unintentional camp. I can’t parse out how much of my enjoyment was a surprise result of setting my expectations low, but that ultimately does not matter. What matters is that, against all odds, Tower of Terror is a good movie.

Steve Guttenberg stars as a sleazy photojournalist for a National Enquirer type publication, where he publishes hoax stories of alien autopsies & ghostly apparitions. Child actor (turned indie darling) Kirsten Dunst co-leads as his accomplice & niece, helping The Gutte fulfill his obvious destiny as a Goofy Uncle archetype. The pair get in over their heads when a mysterious old woman rope them into investigating a real life paranormal mystery, a 1939 incident at the infamous Hollywood Hotel that occurred on Halloween night. That evening, during a glamorous Halloween party (complete with big band swing music) a Shirley Temple/Baby Jane Hudson archetype mysteriously disappeared along with her drunk parents, her nanny, and a bellhop when the elevator car was struck by magic lightning. The answer to the mystery of what caused this supernatural event is explained upfront with the old lady’s tales of evil witchcraft and a Book of Souls MacGuffin. As Dunst & The Gutte search for this all-powerful talisman in the haunted hotel, however, the source of that witchcraft is called into question and the ghosts of the missing weigh in on what really happened that Halloween night. It all has very little to do with the actual Tower of Terror ride, but as a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by way of Hocus Pocus or Jumanji plot, it all works out as a perfectly entertaining children’s creepshow.

The actual Tower of Terror at the Disney amusement park is also shaped like a 1930s hotel and was actually utilized for the film’s frequent exterior shots to establish setting & mood. The ride is Twilight Zone-themed, however, which is a licensing choice this made-for-TV venture couldn’t afford to make. Instead, the hotel is utilized as a kind of standard issue haunted house contraption where headless figures brandishing meat cleavers, singing child ghosts dressed like the twins from The Shining, and elevators full of hellfire pop up from around corners to startle the audience. Instead of treating the film like a single trip through this haunted space like an amusement park ride, however, its ghostly mystery & fascination with witchcraft is spread over several days. This allows for long, bizarre speeches about “banishing children to the underworld” and how the lightning “half-zapped” everyone in the elevator, trapping them in limbo. Director D.J. MacHale doesn’t have many credits to his name, except that he helmed twenty episodes of the Nickelodeon horror anthology Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which almost makes him overqualified for the task. For better or for worse, the movie plays like a feature length episode of that show that just happens to star two recognizable faces (along with exciting bit players like Melora Hardin & John Franklin) and is based off an amusement park ride (complete with mimicking the ride’s elevator drops at its climax, naturally). Expectations aside, it’s a form of entertainment I’ve been trained to appreciate for nearly my entire life.

Somewhere around 2015, as with all Disney properties (including The Haunted Mansion, somehow), there were talks of remaking Tower of Terror as a new, presumably better-funded feature. You can easily see how the studio would find easy potential in that idea, even if they nuke this original version out of existence & return to the property’s Twilight Zone roots. If that idea is dying along with the theme park attraction (which is gradually being replaced with some kind of Guardians of the Galaxy ride), however, the original will still persist as a perfectly entertaining, family-friendly haunted house tour starring Dunst & The Gutte. Even that kind of a modest success exceeds expectation, which is as good of a litmus test for a movie’s worth as anything, I suppose.

-Brandon Ledet