catwoman

The Not-So-New 52: DC Showcase Shorts, Pt. 1

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

When I first started this project, I knew that I would eventually have to watch these shorts in addition to the features in order to hit that magic number, 52. At that time, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max still hosted just about every DC project ever made, as a result of Warner Bros. folding the DC Universe service into HBO. All of these shorts were available there, until they were slowly offboarded from the service. Never forget what they, and by “they” I mean David Zaslav, took from you. Most of these were only released as special additions to the DVDs of the feature films, which meant that tracking them all down proved no small feat. Ironically, although I have no issue with the wider internet at large knowing that I will soon have watched all of these films, I’m not exactly hot to expose this side of myself to the ubercool clerks at my local video rental. Somehow, we got there.

The Spectre (2010), released with Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths

This short film, clocking in at just twelve minutes, is a strong start for this project. The Spectre features the voice of Gary Cole in the role of Jim Corrigan, an LAPD detective who inserts himself into the investigation into the death of a film producer. It’s not his case, as the assigned detectives and his chief remind him, but he has a vested interest in the case as the producer’s daughter Aimee (Alyssa Milano) is an old flame of his. His boss tells him to instead investigate the strange deaths of the suspects in the case of the producer’s death. The list of enemies is fairly long, but the potential motive of a few of them relates to not being hired for the guy’s most recent production. The first of these is a special effects man whose own macabre creations are animated by a spectral (naturally) being called The Spectre, an avenging spirit. The second suspect is killed while trying to flee to Mexico, as The Spectre forces him to flip his vehicle and, when he miraculously lives, repairs the vehicle supernaturally and has it run down its owner, Christine style. Finally, Corrigan confronts Aimee directly and accuses her of involvement in her father’s death, and when she manages to distract him long enough to pull out a gun, her shots pass through him without effect. Corrigan reveals that he is The Spectre, before avenging Aimee’s father by surrounding her with a cyclone composed of the money she was paid by the two dead men in order to give them the security code so that they could slip in and kill her father, killing her with a thousand cuts before the police arrive on the scene as Corrigan departs, unnoticed by the living people whom he passes by (and through) before driving away. 

This is a neat one! A sly little horror story/renegade cop pastiche that features seventies style funk music and some genuinely creepy sequences. The Spectre himself is effectively scary, and his sense of punishment-by-irony is fun. The sequence set in the special effects warehouse allows the animators to go wild, as the SFX guy gets attacked by Dracula, the Wolfman, and even a (similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from) possessed Reagan animatronic, which dutifully vomits on him. The sequence in the desert in which the second suspect meets his fate is also a lot of fun, calling to mind the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” as The Spectre’s sudden appearance in the car in the guilty man’s rearview mirror, and he proves an unshakeable avenging force. Even the death of Aimee is brutal, even if it’s mostly offscreen, as she screams to her dying breath before the windows of her father’s sleek Beverly Hills MCM mansion are coated in her blood. This short form really allows the animation team to go all in on something that would be unsustainable for a feature length film (even one that only clocks in at around only 80 minutes like most of these do) and focus on a character who would be a hard sell for a solo outing. Of these movies, over a third of them are Batman flicks, and it’s not because there were simply so many of these stories that demanded to be told; it’s purely a matter of marketing, because the Batbrand sells. The Spectre … not so much. This is the perfect bite-size story for the character and to give the team the chance to work on something different and weird. You can probably trace a clear line from this one to the darker, more horror-oriented flavor of later outings like Justice League Dark and City of Demons. Worth a watch.

Jonah Hex (2010), released with Batman: Under the Red Hood

Another strong early showing for these shorts. There’s not a huge demand for a full-length Jonah Hex animated film (hell, there wasn’t a market for the live action feature, which came out the same year), so one of these shorts was the right call to tell a little western story. In the animation, an outlaw named Red Doc shows up to a saloon, drunken and boisterous, and claims that he can outdraw any man in the place. The saloon’s proprietor, Madame Lorraine (Linda Hamilton) invites him up to her bedroom, and once he’s comfortable, she kills him, robs his corpse, and has two henchmen dispose of the body. The next day, bounty hunter Jonah Hex arrives in town on the trail of Red Doc, but the bartender at the saloon claims to have never seen the man when presented with his “wanted” poster. A bar girl (Michelle Trachtenberg) tells him that Madame Lorraine sometimes takes men up to her parlor, men who are never seen again; Hex allows Lorraine to see his billfold so that she invites him to her boudoir as well, but he knocks her out and takes care of her henchmen. When she awakes, Hex forces her to take him to the abandoned mine that she and her flunkies have turned into a mass grave pit, and Hex retrieves Red’s body to collect his bounty and leaves Lorraine in the hole with the evidence of her crime. 

Jane is doing great voice work here with Hex. He’s such a passionate fan of the character that he petitioned to play the lead in the ill-fated live action adaptation by getting a make-up artist to give him Hex’s trademark scarred face to audition for the role, losing out to Josh Brolin, so he’s bringing his A-game here to make up for it, and it shows. Hamilton’s aged rasp lends a lot of gravitas to her frontier serial killer character, and our innate association as an audience of her voice with Sarah Connor means that her world-weariness comes naturally to mind. Although this one lacks the overt horror elements of The Spectre, there’s a creep factor to it that makes this more of a “weird west” than a standard saddle-and-spurs bounty hunter story. The final images that we see of Lorraine, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her victims as her lamp slowly dies, is chilling, and it’s interesting to note that the animation team behind this studio was willing to put in such good work on something that was destined to be seen by very few people (I’ve had Under the Red Hood on DVD for years and never even considered watching this short, which was bundled with it, until this project). I might be giving too much away about when I’m writing about this, but alongside The Spectre, this one would make a great addition to a playlist of spooky season shorts. 

Green Arrow (2010), released with Superman/Batman: Apocalypse

It’s very strange to hear Green Arrow voiced by Neal McDonough. The first piece of his work that comes to mind (after this role in Star Trek: First Contact, of course) is his longtime role as DC villain Damien Darhk in the CW TV series universe, where he first appeared as the primary antagonist on Arrow in that show’s fourth season before becoming an antagonist on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s also interesting that this one, which is a little lackluster in comparison to the previous two, is directed by the same person, Joaquim Dos Santos. After this, he mostly spent time focused on TV projects (notably working on every episode of Legend of Korra in some capacity) before he went on to become one of the co-directors of Across the Spider-Verse last year. 

This short features Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen trying to get to the airport to pick up his girlfriend, Dinah “Black Canary” Lance, fiddling with an engagement ring in his pocket. He faces some difficulty in getting there on time as he’s fighting traffic that’s the result of a visit from royalty, the child princess of Vlatava, Perdita (Ariel Winter). It’s fortunate for her that he’s there, as he assists in the foiling of an assassination attempt, but the sheer number of snipers and goons forces him to protect her as they try to escape from them. As it turns out, Perdita’s father died the night before, making her the heir apparent to the throne and the only thing preventing her uncle, Count Vertigo, from ascending instead. Vertigo has hired the villainous archer Merlyn (Malcolm McDowell) to take out Perdita, and although Arrow has faced him before and been bested by him every time, he’s been practicing. 

This one is serviceable, but nothing to get too excited about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dos Santos was simply spread too thin, having to get all three of these first few shorts out, all for release in one calendar year. This one was penned by Greg Weisman, who I wrote about more extensively in my review of Catwoman: Hunted, and if you’re a Young Justice fan, Weisman has stated that this short is (essentially) in the same canon, so that may make it worth your while.

Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam (2010), released only in the DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection

This one is pretty rote. Orphan boy Billy Batson (Zach Callison, of Steven Universe fame) is living in a rundown slum after being kicked out of his foster home by his abusive parents, and he’s the runtiest of the street kids so he’s a target for bullies. The closest thing he has to a friend is Clark Kent (George Newbern), who is writing a series of articles about the boy’s struggles. When Billy is attacked by the supervillain Black Adam (Arnold Vosloo), Superman is thus close at hand to rescue him. From there, he gets an infodump from a mysterious wizard who tells him that Black Adam was once the wizard’s champion and had then been corrupted, forcing the wizard to banish him to a distant place, so far that he has spent the last 5000 years returning for his revenge. The wizard bestows his powers on Billy and tells him to speak the name “Shazam,” and you know how this goes from here. Billy turns into the adult superhero Shazam, he and Superman team up and defeat Black Adam, and he chooses to turn back into his human form and age into dust instantly rather than be banished again. And, of course, Billy gets to turn the tables on his bullies as Shazam, much in the vein of Bastian at the end of The NeverEnding Story. 

There’s nothing special about this one, I’m afraid. It’s serviceable, but not special. The only thing interesting about it is, perhaps, that this features both a previous Superman voice actor reprising the role (Newbern had previously voiced the role on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and would later reprise the role further in Superman vs. The Elite and Justice League vs. The Fatal Five) and one who would play the character in the future (Jerry O’Connell, who voices Batson’s superheroic alter ego Shazam, would portray him in all of the so-called DCAMU movies). The animation is up to par, and the narrative is sufficient. Not exactly high praise, but this one may set the tone of the exact median of quality of this whole franchise overall. Perfectly balanced, not that interesting.

Catwoman (2011), released with Batman: Year One

This one is unusual in that, unlike the others on this list, it was intended to be a tie-in to the film with which it was released. Eliza Dushku reprises her role as Selina “Catwoman” Kyle from Year One, this time on the trail of a Gotham heavy with diamond teeth called Rough Cut (John DiMaggio). After his thugs, trying to kill a cat, chase the poor thing over the edge of a bridge, it’s revealed that the cat was rescued by Selena, who recognizes the ornate collar the cat is wearing. She tracks Rough Cut down to a strip club, where a dancer named Buttermilk Skye (Tara Strong), who gets a diamond from Rough Cut as a tip, is warned by fellow stripper Lily (Cree Summer) that another girl got the same tip the week before, and no one has seen her recently. Catwoman appears through the back door and convinces the ladies to take a break, whereupon she takes the stage in her latex get-up, to much enthusiasm. Even her whip-cracking is appreciated, at least until she starts taking out Rough Cut’s lackeys. He escapes her, leading to a prolonged chase sequence that ultimately ends with the gangster driving off of Gotham pier in a hook truck, taking out the ship that was arriving to take on his latest shipment: trafficked women. One of them is a friend of Selena’s who returns her bracelet to her as the rescued women are tended by paramedics. 

Catwoman is … weird. It’s not bad, per se, but much of it feels more like late night 90s softcore than anything else. Lauren Montgomery was the director on this one, having previously directed First Flight and Crisis on Two Earths, and having been a storyboard artist on Under the Red Hood and All Star-Superman, so she’d worked on pretty much all of these projects that I enjoyed until she left this franchise in 2016. It’s an unusually cheesecake-y product for her, although given that she’s spent so much of her career working on these superhero franchises, maybe she just wanted to direct a short film that’s twenty-five percent stripping. The work is impressive; Buttermilk and Selena both move with lithe, athletic grace, which I assume is pretty difficult to capture in a short that was budgeted as the add-on to a DVD that was already destined to haunt CVSes all over the country for the next fifteen years. But it’s also intended to capture sexiness for an audience that I am not a part of, so I mostly spent that time waiting for the scene to move on. At least when Tony Soprano and the boys are at the Bada Bing, there’s some narrative happening. I recently put on a David DeCoteau film in the background for some housework (it was Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks, if you must know, because of Sean Faris), and there were so many lingering scenes of swimming pools, locker rooms, and shirtless football tossing in that one. Those sequences exist solely because those movies are just material that you can fap to but also have on the shelf in your mid-aughts dorm room without having to come out to your roommate. Maybe the problem is just that I’ve never understood erotic animation, which this very much is, but I’ve honestly dwelt on it for so long that it’s starting to feel strange, so I’ll just say: to each their own. The chase sequence that follows is pretty good, and the dock setpiece works, but overall, this one didn’t leave much of an impression. 

Sgt. Rock (2019), with Batman: Hush

This was the hardest one of these to find. Most of them were available online to stream or download on the grey market, but for Sgt. Rock I had to go out and find a physical copy of Hush to watch this on. Luckily, there was a blockwide pop-up shopping experience going on outside of my local rental shop this weekend, so I was able to get in and get out with the movie without anyone paying too much mind to my renting of something so embarrassing. And, since I was only able to rent a BluRay copy, that also meant fighting with my extremely finicky machine just to get it to play (tweezers were involved). 

This short stars Karl Urban as the titular army sergeant, who awakens in a hospital after his squad is killed in the line of duty in WWII. A superior officer tasks him with taking leadership over a small group of “unusual” soldiers to take out a Nazi base that intelligence reports indicate houses a facility that is in the middle of creating a doomsday device. Said group turns out to be the “Creature Commandos,” a trio of monster dudes: a wolfman, a Nosferatu-esque vampire named Velcoro, and a reanimated Frankenstein(’s monster). On the mission, they manage to enter the facility and discover a full Frankensteinian reanimation set-up, which the re-alived private sets out to destroy. As it turns out, this is the final weapon: undead, reanimated troops made up of the fallen enemy, with the first successes having been Rock’s previous squad, who attack their former leader and his current crew. Rock’s current forces emerge victorious, and when the Nazi major on-site teases Rock that he knows that they must be taken as captives as Rock must have been ordered to bring them in alive so that the U.S. could incorporate this research into their own war effort, Rock allows Velcoro to drain the Nazi scientists dry: “Bottoms up.” 

Again, I might be giving away too much about how far in advance I am working on this project, but this strikes me as a perfect little Halloween short, and would work great in a mini-screening with The Spectre and Jonah Hex, although it beats the hell out of me how you’re going to get ahold of this short and somehow get it onto a playlist for you and your friends. I had no idea what I was going into with this one, and when it started, I was immediately bored by yet another scene of soldiers engaged in infantry fighting, but this is really only the prologue until we get to the good stuff, like a wolfman devouring Nazi soldiers and a vampire turning into a bat so that he can fly over a wall and open the reinforced door from the other side. This is the first of these shorts that I think would have really benefited from being extended to a feature length, as this was a pretty fun little ride. 

Death (2019), with Wonder Woman: Bloodlines

Another little spooky short, this one both sweet and near and dear to my heart. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is my favorite comic book series of all time, and my favorite character within it (after Delirium) is Death, a personification of the concept and a member of “The Endless.” The Endless are not gods; they existed before mankind dreamt of gods, and are as old as the universe itself. First came Destiny, who was born alongside existence, as existence required Destiny to, well, exist. With the first living things came Destiny’s sister Death, as life does not exist without Death; she was followed by Sandman’s title character Dream, whose existence was necessitated when the first living thing to dream did so. (And so on and so forth.) Death was presented in Sandman as a perky goth lady, which has become a huge influence on the idea in pop culture and in real life, and some of my favorite stories from that series revolve around her (notably issues #43, “Brief Lives pt. 3,” and #20, “Façade,” which is my favorite Sandman story of all). It’s weird to see her being written by someone other than Gaiman, but this one was penned by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written the screenplays for Justice League Dark and City of Demons at this point, so his spooky DC credentials were already demonstrated. 

Death follows a man named Vincent Omata (Leonardo Nam), a painter who never made it. Despite his love for making art from his youth, he was discouraged by his father as well as his art school professors —one of whom told him that he had no real talent for art and should consider transferring to the university’s dental school program. As an adult, he now finds himself unable to keep a job painting gates, as in, covering the entrance gate to Arkham Asylum in a new coat of paint rather than painting landscapes with such fixtures within them. His various personal demons appear to him in the guise of fiery specters that take the shape of people who have discouraged him, speaking the harsh words to him once again. After a chance encounter with a cute goth girl who gives him her top hat, she reappears later when he sparks up a cigarette to warn him that “Those things will kill [him],” and he offers to show her his artwork. He asks if he can paint her portrait, and he does; however, even realizing that he must have worked all through the night and it should be morning, he notices that the sun has not yet risen. In reality, Vincent has died, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette, and that the woman he has painted, Death, has shown him a kind of tenderness by stopping the night from passing until he could complete one last work of art, one that he can be proud of. He begs her not to let the painting burn, and as she takes his hand to lead him to the door that opens into whatever comes after life, she does ensure that the portrait he painted of her survives, leaving it behind in the charred ruins of his apartment like that viral Stanley cup that survived the Kia Sorento fire. 

This is another entry in the horror-adjacent shorts that form this sub-franchise, but one that focuses less on fright than on the only thing that all humans share: the inevitability of death. Like Sandman before it, the short chooses to imagine Death not as an end, but a transition, and not as something to fear, but as something to accept. It’s a lovely little story, and, if you’re only ever going to see one of these, this is the one to catch. 

To be continued in … Part Two!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Catwoman – Hunted (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

There’s a moment in this movie where Selina “Catwoman” Kyle is in the middle of a heist, very early in the runtime, when—suddenly—a Batarang appears in front of her, and a cowled shape moves in the shadows. I sighed a heavy sigh; after Soul of the Dragon, nearly three hours of a Long Halloween, and the Batman-heavy Injustice, I was really, really tired of the Batman. You can’t imagine the relief I felt a few minutes later when Batwoman emerged from the shadows. At this point, I’ll take any reprieve that I can get. 

The film opens at a lavish party being hosted by Barbara “Cheetah” Minerva (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), which doubles as the onboarding of Gotham mob boss Black Mask (Jonathan Banks) into the criminal organization “Leviathan.” It’s a costume ball as well, which serves to help a woman who arrives in an old-school Catwoman outfit, catching Black Mask’s eye and prompting him to invite her to accompany his party inside. Unbeknownst to him, the woman on his arm is the real Selina Kyle (Elizabeth Gillies), and she makes her way through the party flirting and pickpocketing until she can get into Minerva’s vault. Along with her faithful feline companion Isis, abscond with the Cat’s Eye Emerald, which Black Mask brought as his buy-in on this criminal enterprise. Mask and his henchman pursue Catwoman along with Minerva’s brute Tobias Whale (Keith David), but she manages to escape, only to be apprehended by Kate Kane, aka Batwoman (Stephane Beatriz), who spirits her aboard an aircraft that Interpol has “acquired” from Penguin. There she meets secret agents Julia Pennyworth (Lauren Cohan) and King Faraday (Jonathan Frakes!), who enlist her help in bringing down Leviathan by acting as bait for Minerva et al’s cronies, promising to wipe her criminal record clean if she succeeds. 

Like Gotham Knight before it, Catwoman: Hunted is drawn in an anime style, although it was handled by a single studio rather than several, as the earlier, vignette-based film was. That studio is OLM, best known in the west for their work on various Pokemon projects, and I love the art style. Catwoman herself is adorable, as is Isis (uh, please don’t take that out of context), and the designs of all of the characters make this one a very pleasant watch, especially following so closely on the heels of more Tomorrowverse thick-line drawing and the ugly art style that was omnipresent in Injustice. Of particular note is just how cool Cheetah looks once she hulks out into her big, feline form; it makes for a much more dynamic visual experience than the rotating house styles that I had come to expect from these, and it was a pleasant surprise once the film got started. I was already pretty won over, however, as the opening credits featured a great jazz soundtrack (courtesy of Yutaka Yamada) and a fun sequence which has this grainy feeling, like the images are drawn with chalk on newsprint. It’s very 70s, and I loved it. Looking back, this film is also one in which those opening credits serve a narrative function; it tells an impressionistic story of Catwoman going to Sochi and rescuing a large group of women from some kind of imprisonment. At first, this seems to simply be a little bit of character development, to signal to potential new viewers that this Catwoman isn’t just the criminal with whom they are likely already familiar, but also establishes her moral code. Further than that, however, this event is actually the impetus for the plot, as it’s later revealed that Catwoman liberated a group of women who were being human trafficked by Minerva, and that what seemed like little more than typical Catwoman steal-a-big-jewel shenanigans was actually the first step in a more complicated plot to take down Minerva. 

I suppose it’s not that unusual for a script by Greg Weisman to be clever. I’ve sung the praises of his television series Young Justice many times in these pages. I love it so much that I put on a random episode while doing some chores the other day and ended up not only just sitting down and watching it, but also having to force myself not to spend the rest of the day like that. For fans of animation in general, Weisman’s name may be familiar because of his development of the criminally underrated Gargoyles, a 90s Saturday morning Disney product that wove mythology, magic, and Shakespeare into its text while tackling ambitious topics like prejudice, redemption, legacy, and identity. If you read the above paragraph and read the names David Keith and Jonathan Frakes(!) and you’re familiar with Gargoyles, you might have already assumed Weisman was involved, as Keith voiced lead gargoyle Goliath and Frakes provided the voice of the show’s first and primary antagonist, Xanatos. Weisman’s work has always been noteworthy, and he’s one of those writers who knows exactly what part of my brain to metaphorically reach inside of and scratch an itch with a perfectly, elegantly constructed narrative. While we’re on the topic of Weisman, this one will probably be of particular interest to fans of the aforementioned Young Justice, as the film’s interest in not just Catwoman but cat women, as evident in the choice of Cheetah as the primary villain, means that the character Cheshire shows up here, with Kelly Hu reprising her voice role. I honestly can’t think of a single thing in this movie that would contradict YJ, so if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by the series (second) cancellation, this can slot right into that continuity, if you like. 

One of the best scenes in the film involves Selina and Kate, left alone on the fancy jet that Interpol commandeered, getting surprisingly intimate for these largely sexless movies. Selina draws a bath and plays at inviting Kate to join her, clearly aware of both Kate’s secret identity and her sapphic inclination. It’s a ploy to get a piece of equipment from Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Selina isn’t into it, and in this house, we fully support bisexual Catwoman. Although Batman isn’t present in the narrative, it’s clear that he and Selina are or have been “a thing,” as Selina is hesitant to use lethal force against Solomon Grundy because of a promise she made to an unnamed friend (before she gets the go-ahead from her teammates since Grundy is technically undead), and bristles at Kate calling her “Cat,” saying that “only he gets to call her that.” Still, this is a new, fun take on the typical Bat/Cat dynamic that we’ve grown used to, and the quippy, flirtatious banter between the two is a highlight of the script. I get the feeling that this one was not well received—it’s the lowest rated of all of these movies by IMDb users (an admittedly feral and untrustworthy lot), has only a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.9 star rating on Letterboxd—but if you’re not a stick in the mud, don’t let that deter you. I’m going to give this some of the highest praise I possibly can, which is that this is one of a very short list of these NSN52 titles that, after this project is over, I might actually watch again. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quick Takes: Spring Cleaning 2022

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Between a long Easter weekend off work and being knocked off my feet by a painful gout flare-up (damn those tasty crawfish!), I have seen a lot of movies in the past few days.  Too many, even.  My normal process for this blog is to give each film a full, individualized review, but it would take me way too long to clear out this backlog before I could move onto new material. And since that sounds like more work than fun, it’s time for some spring cleaning.  So, here are a few brief, to-the-point reviews of new releases I’ve seen over the past week, ranked from best-to-least-best.

You Won’t Be Alone

Between Border, November, Tale of Tales, Field Guide to Evil, Lamb, The Other Lamb, and Hagazussa, there has been an entire industry of traditionalist folktale cinema that has emerged in the wake of The VVitch – not to mention the folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched that collects them all like Pokémon.  It’s easy to take You Won’t Be Alone for granted in such a crowded field of similar titles (which vary wildly both in quality and in creativity), but it still manages to be uniquely unnerving.  I’m not sure how many coming-of-age folktales about shapeshifting, bodyhopping witches (i.e., Wolf-Eateresses) you’ve seen in your lifetime, but this was my first.  I’m also willing to bet it was the first ever to be set in 19th Century Macedonia.

Over the course of the film we watch Old Maid Maria, the most feared Wolf-Eateress of all, train a child in the art of stealing life & likeness from human & animal victims alike.  Raised in a cave without much direct human contact (in a futile attempt to avoid this apprenticeship), the child learns how to relate to other people by unconvincingly pretending to be a Normal Human in variously shaped, gendered bodies.  Meanwhile, Old Maid Maria chides her for not rejecting humanity entirely and just snacking on human flesh for sustenance.  If You Won’t Be Alone is meant to be dealt with as a horror film, it is Imposter Syndrome Horror, where you never feel like you fit in with any community while everyone else seems to excel at it effortlessly.  Or maybe it’s just a nightmare scenario where Freddy Krueger is your adoptive mother.  If it is not a horror film, then it’s a confounding supernatural drama about all the various ways life can be miserable unless you luck into a well-nurtured youth.  I greatly enjoyed being perturbed by it, even its brand of eerie, back-to-basics folktale has become a matter of routine in recent years.

Dual

The clever dual-purpose title Dual refers both to human cloning and to duels to the death.  Karen Gillan stars as a woman who has herself cloned so her memory can live on past a terminal illness, then is forced to duel that clone when she unexpectedly recovers.  It is a comedy of passive aggression, wherein Original Sarah finds herself annoyed with how much shinier Clone Sarah’s hair is, or how she weighs slightly less, or how much more accommodating she is to friends & family – all great motivation for killing her.  It’s also a comedy of isolation, taking a macro view of all the commodified ways we’re supposed to maintain our bodies & our relationships in an increasingly passionless, distanced world.

Director Riley Stearns hammers away at the same flat, matter-of-fact line deliveries and overall comedic bitterness he played with in The Art of Self-Defense.  Characters speak in clipped, emotionless stabs; they text with abrupt punctuation.  Instead of satirizing the absurdity of traditional masculinity this time, though, he chisels at the absurdity of the self-care industry, from gym training to support groups to talk therapy.  Call it The Art of Self-Improvement.  Dual is a squirmy little black comedy about all the little ways you hate yourself and your life, with no chance for genuine change no matter how hard you try.  It’s funnier than it sounds.

The Pink Cloud

The Brazilian sci-fi chiller The Pink Cloud is also a dark film about isolation & passive aggression, but you need to get past the cosmic coincidence of its premise to contend with that.  Without reason or explanation, pink clouds rapidly appear across the globe, killing anyone who breathes them within seconds and tinting everything a pale Millennial Pink.  It’s a purely supernatural event, as the poisoned air does not pass through gaps in windows and cannot be safely filtered through masks. The clouds exist simply to force everyone inside, communicating only through social media and purchasing necessities through a system of drones & tubes.  Stuck at home for years, we watch one couple fall in and out of love after hunkering down together when the clouds interrupt what was supposed to be a one-time hookup.

I’ve seen plenty of accidentally pandemic-relevant sci-fi & horror films over the past couple years (Palm Springs, She Dies Tomorrow, Little Fish, Spontaneous, etc.), but this is the first one I’ve seen outright apologize for the coincidence.  I understand the impulse to include a title card that emphasizes the film was written & produced pre-COVID, since it includes many dead-on parallels to our last couple years of isolation & rot – from major cultural shifts like the new class system of work-from-home jobs vs. “essential” service work to the emergence of boredom-inspired fads like adult roller-skating.  The filmmakers had a lot on their minds about climate change, depression, and the general isolation of modern living, so it must be frustrating to see their work reduced to a pure-COVID metaphor.  Still, there have been enough of these accidentally-relevant genre pictures over the past couple years that it’s impossible to not be a little reductive about their collective emotional impact.  File this particular accidental-pandemic-chiller under the same anti-romantic subcategory as Vivarium, although it’s more melancholic than abrasive.

Ambulance

Michael Bay returns to basics with a retro, regressive thriller about two tough-guy criminals who steal an ambulance during a botched bank heist (one out of medical desperation, one out of greed), and enter into a wild police chase around Los Angeles in the clunky vehicle.  Ambulance is a typical 90s Bay thriller in all of the exact visual, visceral, and political ways you’d expect, except with two major updates: flamboyant exploitation of drone-camera tech and a wild-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal performance.  The cameras are piloted by young, professional drone racers, adding a nauseating velocity to even the pre-car-chase establishing shots, often for no discernible reason.  Gyllenhaal matches their gonzo energy as the ambulance heist’s main villain, playing the role as part criminal mastermind, part Nic Cagian freak show.

Gyllenhaal and the drones are enough to make Ambulance feel novel & exciting, but maybe not enough to fully justify the feeling of being bashed in the skull for 135 relentless minutes.  I was more obliterated by it than I was “entertained”, but I suppose that’s exactly what Bay’s paid to do.  He’s good at his job, the bastard.

Aline

If you are somehow unaware, Aline is an unauthorized Celine Dion biopic in which 57-year-old French comedian Valérie Lemercier plays the Québecian chanteuse from ages 12 to 54, with the aid of shoddy CGI.  I’ve been greatly anticipating Aline since professional smartasses Kyle Buchannan & Rachel Handler sang its uncanny praises at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, so it was bizarre to watch the Event Film in an otherwise empty suburban megaplex.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to stumble into it totally unprepared for Lemercier’s de-aged “transformations”, but it turns out that’s not really a valid concern, since most people don’t even know this curio exists.  Even the posters & trailers emphasize the gobsmacked blurbs from Handler & Buchannan at Cannes as its only selling point, making it clear who is likely to show up at the theater – freaks like me.

Aline is an odd mix of surrealist geek show & genuine biopic cliché.  Most movie nerds will compare it to the unconvincing early-years play acting of Walk Hard, but it reminded me more of the absurdist artificiality of Annette, sometimes slipping into the broad crowd-pleasing appeal of a My Big Fat Québecian Wedding. Questions of its sincerity & intent will linger with me for a while, but it does nail the only two things I know about Dion: she makes goofy faces, and the age she met her late manager-husband is alarming.  The movie constantly references “Aline Dieu’s” age, so we know exactly how old she is within the drama (helpful, since her face remains a static 57-years-old throughout), which only makes you dwell on the discomfort of her romance with her middle-aged divorcee manager.  When she is 12, she huffs his cologne as a private kink.  When she is 17, she lusts over a picture of him that she keeps tucked under her pillow.  When she is 20, she initiates their first, fully consensual consummation.  It was already a deeply strange, unsettling dynamic in real life, so it’s oddly appropriate that this “work of fiction freely inspired by” it is also deeply strange & unsettling.

Catwoman: Hunted

I don’t pay much attention to DC Comics’ straight-to-video animated features, but I was impressed enough with the visual imagination & propulsive energy of Batman Ninja to keep my eye out for similar releases.  Unfortunately, Catwoman: Hunted is not nearly as ambitious of an anime take on the DC brand as Batman Ninja.  It features one of the coolest comic book characters of all time doing her usual thing (jewel heists, cat puns, bisexual seductions, etc.), and it throws everything from demons to ninja assassins to mech-suit warriors in her way.  And yet the result feels tame in comparison to the last time the company dipped their toe into anime waters, which is a shame.

Thankfully, Catwoman: Hunted avoids total stylistic tedium by borrowing some jazzy cool from Cowboy Bebop.  There’s a jazz infused retro-futurism to it that makes for a fun novelty (who wouldn’t be curious to see Catwoman in a Cowboy Bebop crossover?), even if the whole thing feels pleasantly slight & forgettable.  While not exactly the cat’s pajamas, it is purrrfect viewing for a lazy afternoon (followed, of course, by a cat nap).

-Brandon Ledet