Grunt! The Wrestling Movie (1985)

March 29, 2015 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Later today I will be cramped in a friend’s living room with a pile of fellow drunken weirdos shouting at a television screen as WrestleMania XXI unfolds live from Santa Clara, California. It’s an exciting, yet nerve-racking day to be a fan and a difficult feeling to describe to those who don’t share in it. I’m expecting a potent cocktail of camp & violence tonight (along with the usual variety of potent cocktails), the spirit of which is difficult to capture in words. It’s also difficult to capture on film. The allure of pro wrestling is an elusive, intoxicating, yet deeply flawed quality that’s better served experienced in a crowd than it is described on paper or depicted in film. Attempting to accurately capture pro wrestling’s appeal in a fictionalized setting and sell it back to its fans as a feature film has been a struggle for decades, a struggle that saw a significant uptick during the sport’s bloated spectacle heyday of the 1980s (as previously discussed on this site in our coverage of 1986’s Body Slam and 1989’s No Holds Barred). It’s a difficult task for several reasons, but not least of all because both the people making the films weren’t genuine fans of the sport themselves and because there’s a basic blending of reality & fantasy at play that’s entirely lost when a story is fully fictionalized.

Of the few 80s stabs at capturing this particular brand of lighting in a bottle I’ve seen so far, 1985’s Grunt! The Wrestling Movie was by far the most successful. A surprisingly funny mockumentary about the sport, Grunt! exemplifies both pro wrestling’s charms and (unintentionally) its crippling faults. You can tell the film was made by true fans of “sports entertainment” (as well as comedies like Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap). Grunt! captures both the camp and the violence of pro wrestling early and often (like in the opening scene when a competitor is comically decapitated during a match), but also has the good sense to lose itself to the action in the ring, knowing when to drop the mockumentary gimmick and “mark out” at the already-ridiculous-enough spectacle on display. It’s far from tastefully made and can at times be overwhelmingly corny, but those qualities make it all the more akin to the subject at hand.

Grunt! is a nerdy wrestling comedy made by wrestling-loving nerds, as is on full display when the director (as depicted in the film) explains, “Ever since I was a young child and I walked into my parents’ bedroom and my father said to me ‘Get out of here! We’re wrestling,’ frankly I’ve been fascinated by it.” That brand of juvenile sex humor isn’t the only thing the movie gets accurate (trust me, it’s accurate) about pro wrestling’s appeal. It also captures the chair shots, interfering managers, rings pelted with trash by booing crowds, snarling promos and shameless merchandising that surrounds the matches as well as the sport’s less savory features, like racial & cultural caricature and the embarrassing mockery of little people. Grunt! isn’t entirely purposeful in its documentation of the sport’s faults, but even when it’s incidental it’s fascinatingly accurate. For instance, the film’s absolutely horrendous rock & roll soundtrack is all too close to the reality of wrestling. Original songs that make declarations like “I’m only happy breaking bones”, “Do you wanna dance? Do you wanna body slam?”, and “Wrestling tonight! Everything is bigger than life!” are almost so bad that they’re downright punk and it’s that exact sentiment of unashamed cheese (along with the bone-crunching violence) that makes the sport appealing.

Grunt! isn’t a necessarily well-made movie, but it is one that serves its subject well. Its decision to tell its tale through mockumentary was downright brilliant in that it allowed the film to blend reality & fiction the same way pro wrestling does in the ring. There are some artistic touches to the way the actual matches are shot, especially in its disorienting reliance on a strobe light effect, but for the most part the film is a straightforwardly cheap comedy about a straightforwardly cheap sport. Much like the way Grunt! occasionally stops telling tawdry jokes and loses itself in the spirit of the in-the-ring action, there are times tonight when I will lose my grip on what’s “real” or what’s funny and lose myself in the actual consequences of WrestleMania XXXI. Even when the film’s jokes don’t land (though it’s surprising how often they do, considering its pedigree) it’s still incredible that they managed to capture that aspect of the sport on film, intentionally or not.

-Brandon Ledet

Body Slam (1986) and the Often Superfluous Nature of Bloated Spectacle in Pro Wrestling

March 23, 2015March 23, 2015 / swampflix / 3 Comments

Like most adults find themselves doing from time to time, I spent this past Friday night yelling myself hoarse at sweaty, costumed men as they wrestled each other in a middle school gymnasium. It was my first exposure to New Orleans’ own pro wrestling promotion Wildkat Sports, at an event called Wildkat Strikes Back. Sitting in a cramped, hot gymnasium with a crowd that ranged from screeching children to their elderly grandparents to hardcore, middle-aged wrestling nerds to roving gangs of way-out-of-place crust punks was a welcome alternative to the way I usually enjoy the sport: in the cold, TV-provided glow of living rooms. There was an intense, communal vibe in that gym that can be lacking in the larger, televised promotions and it made me realize just how much of a spectacle the sport can be on its own merit. When stripped down to its bare bones (sans the slapstick comedy sketches, celebrity cameos, pyrotechnics and half-baked stunts that can exhaust a more bloated program), pro wrestling is still entertaining in a genuine, visceral way.

Sometime in mid-80s pro wrestling had reached its most bloated point in history. With the rise of Hulkamania, the undeniably potent likeability of Andre the Giant, and the cutthroat business-sense of juggernaut promoter Vince McMahon, WWE (then WWF) reached the pinnacle of its cultural dominance when WrestleMania III broke the all-time attendance record of an in-door sporting event with more than 93,000 fans present in the stands (a record that still holds today). The level of sheer spectacle that accompanies events like WrestleMania is as disparate from the brand of pro wrestling you’d see at events like Wildkat Strikes Back as the difference in size of their respective crowds, but that spectacle isn’t exactly necessary to make “sports entertainment” . . . entertaining.

Arriving just a year before that record-breaking crowd at WrestleMania III (and a whole three years before WWE got into the film business themselves with No Holds Barred), the 1986 film Body Slam similarly gets confused about what makes pro wrestling entertaining, putting more value into the spectacle surrounding the sport than the sport itself. In the film’s laughably convoluted plot (it is a comedy, after all) rock ‘n’ roll manager Harry Smilac is struggling to make it with only one client under his wing (a band called KICKS) when he fortunately expands his roster by signing on pro wrestler “Quick” Rick Roberts (played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), mistakenly assuming that he is a musical act. Despite his initial repugnance toward pro wrestling, Smilac discovers that there’s good money in the sport and pretty much dives head first into the wrestling business until he (late in the film) has the brilliant idea of combining KICKS & Quick Rick’s talents and voila! Smilac gives birth to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling”. The spectacle of a live rock band playing while sports entertainers perform is treated here like the discovery of the cure for cancer. Smilac is lauded as a genius.

In Body Slam’s logic, Smilac not only improves pro wrestling with this invention, but he also improves rock ‘n’ roll. These are two forms of art that don’t need improvement. Both rock and wrestling are perfectly appealing when reduced to their most basic parts; they don’t need 80s-tinged grandstanding to make them worthwhile. It’s fitting, then, that the band Smilac manages, KICKS, is an obvious stand-in for the band KISS, who are no strangers to using theatrics & merchandising to distract audiences from their okay-at-best brand of rock ‘n’ roll. In the movie’s logic, KICKS’ songs (as well as their deep love of pyrotechnics) are not only a draw for the crowd, but they also give the wrestlers (well, the faces at least) strength to overpower their opponents. They’re breathing life into a far-from-dead brand of entertainment that really didn’t need their help in the first place.

Of course, Body Slam is a silly trifle of a film that shouldn’t be judged too harshly about what it has to say about pro wrestling as a sport, because it doesn’t have too much to say about anything at all, much less wrestling. However, the film does have some charms as a campy delight. The 80s cheese is thick enough to choke you as early as the opening scene, which features Smilac hanging out of a convertible, hair slicked back, hitting on bikini babes by showing off his gigantic car phone. There’s also some corny humor in exchanges like when a friend asks Smilac, “What are you gonna do, Harry?” and he responds “What I always do: manage!” The campy appeal of the rock ‘n’ roll wrestling plot doesn’t really get going until the last third of the film, but the montages are so worth it, especially the one that’s accompanied by the Body Slam theme song. There’s also, of course, a wide range of 80s wresters to gawk at here. Besides the aforementioned Roddy Piper, the film includes “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, “Captain” Lou Albano, “Classy” Freddie Blassie, “The Barbarian” Sione Vailahi, and several members of the Samoan Anoaʻi family (including Roman Reigns’ father Sika), among others. Besides the innate fun of seeing them all in a feature film, they’re also more or less abysmal at acting, which helps keep the mood light. With all of this 80s-specific cheese flying around, the inclusion of always-welcome Billy Barty & Charles Nelson Reilly is somehow just icing on the cake.

It’s not a great movie, but Body Slam is effective as a time capsule of the 80s as an era of corny comedies, show-off musicians, and the birth of bloated spectacle in wrestling. The time capsule aspect goes both ways, though, both funny in its quaintly out-of-date aesthetic and disturbing in its penchant for finding cheap humor in topics like misogyny, racial caricature, cross-dressing and pedophilia. Those offenses aside, there are moments late in the film when they finally get the basic appeal of pro wrestling down when during a rock ‘n’ roll wrestling performance the band KICKS is attacked by a group of heels and the whole show devolves into chaos. There’s also a particularly bloody street fight match involving chains that feels pretty close to what a lot of hardcore fans are looking for in the sport, despite an announcer’s exclamation that “This is setting wrestling back 1000 years!”

When considered from the perspective of an enterprising showman (like a Harry Smilac or an Eric Bischoff), Body Slam is an interesting case study of what outsiders often get wrong in their assumptions about what makes pro wrestling entertaining. I’m not saying that local promotions like Wildkat Sports are inherently better than their televised, large scale, rock ‘n’ roll wrestling competitors; I’ll still be eagerly watching all 4 bloated-spectacle hours of WrestleMania XXXI this coming Sunday. I’m just saying that the sport is entertaining enough on its own merit, even when stripped of the fireworks, the KISS-knockoffs, and the David Arquettes. There’s a basic appeal to its violence & pageantry that’s evident whether you’re in a middle school gym with 1,000 sweaty nerds or an outrageously packed stadium of 90,000 rabid fans. The bloated spectacle is delicious lagniappe at its best and unnecessarily excessive at its worst. In Body Slam, it’s mostly the latter, though the film argues otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Crossroads (2002)

March 21, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Shonda Rhimes is currently one of the most powerful women in television. She’s the mastermind behind programs such as Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and Grey’s Anatomy, but before all of her fame and success, she wrote the infamously terrible film, Crossroads. After attempting to figure out how Rhimes was responsible for writing such a bad movie, I came across a quote that explains everything: “I never thought the critics were going to say Crossroads was a brilliant movie. My goal was for 12-year-olds to think it was brilliant [. . .] I became a rock star to the preteen set.” She went on to say “That movie bought my house.” It turns out that she has always been a genius. In 2002, Britney Spears was a god to teenagers around the globe and Rhimes was able to make loads of money by writing this garbage.

I was a 12-year-old Britney Spears super fan when this film came out and I annoyed every adult I knew by constantly begging them to bring me to the movie theater so I could see Crossroads. The movie trailers would play on MTV all throughout the day and I never got tired of watching them. I remember thinking that by watching this movie I would be an even better and more loyal Britney Spears fan. Come to think of it, it was like being in a preteen cult. Well, someone finally caved in and I was able to see Crossroads on the big screen. I didn’t really understand most of the movie, but that didn’t matter because I was so thrilled to see Britney Spears in something other than a music video or a Pepsi commercial. I recently revisited the film for the first time in 12 years and the experience I had was very different compared to my initial one. Everything was just so embarrassing and awkward to watch, but it was slightly enjoyable due to its nostalgia value.

Lucy (Britney Spears) has lost touch with her two childhood friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryne Manning). After their high school graduation, the girls dig up an old “wish box” they created as children and they’re reminded of their past wishes and friendship. They all decide to go on a road trip across the U.S. to fulfill their wishes: Mimi, who is pregnant, wants to go to California; Lucy wants to visit the mother who abandoned her in Arizona; and Kit wants to visit her flawless fiancé in Los Angeles. They hitch a ride to California with a supposed ex-con from a local trailer park, which is such a terrible idea for 3 immature teenage girls, but since this is a tween flick, he actually turns out to be a hunky good guy who doesn’t slit their throats. Their journey brings out many horrible secrets and truths, but it really makes them all closer to each other while allowing them to sort of “find themselves.” The film ends with Britney performing “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” and the song pretty much sums up the meaning of the film.

The most memorable scene from the film would be the “I Love Rock n’ Roll” karaoke performance. The ex-con’s car breaks down near New Orleans, and no one has the money needed to fix it. They just so happen to come across a karaoke contest with a cash prize at a bar on Bourbon Street, so the girls decide to give it a shot. They do a really awkward performance of Joan Jett’s classic hit and end up winning a good bit of cash. Even though it’s the most memorable, I think this is actually the worst scene in the entire film because it’s so embarrassing to watch. Lucy, Kit, and Mimi try their best to look “alternative” and cover themselves in glitter. Mimi nervously attempts to do the lead vocals, and the audience trys to boo them off the stage. Dave Allen has a quick cameo as a bar patron that yells “Get off the stage!” and it’s pretty damn hilarious. Of course, Lucy saves the day by taking over the lead vocals, and the entire bar starts dancing and cheering them on. I cringed the entire time because everything about their performance (especially their outfits, facial expressions, and dancing) was so horrendous.

Britney Spears is a kickass performer that I still adore to this day, but she is definitely not cut out to be an actress. She didn’t seem to be very comfortable with her role as Lucy; every gesture she made and every word out of her mouth felt forced. It’s a good thing she sticks to music videos, commercials, and the occasional guest appearance nowadays. Still, I honestly think that Crossroads is worth a watch due to its goofy nature and its nostalgia value. Thankfully, it’s currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Tammy (2014)

March 19, 2015April 17, 2016 / swampflix / 7 Comments

Tammy is unmistakably a passion project for actress/comedian Melissa McCarthy. Ever since her career-making turn as a hot mess in Bridesmaids, McCarthy has been unfortunately typecasted as an obnoxious slob, so it seems peculiar that a film she personally developed with her first-time writer/director husband Ben Falcone would again have her fill that role. Instead of feeling like more of the same, however, Tammy feels like the culmination of what McCarthy has been building towards since her long line of hot mess characters began in 2011. Structurally, the film plays like a genre exercise in the vein of a standard road trip/buddy comedy that throws generic plot points at the audience as if they’re somehow still surprising despite their over-familiarity. However, Tammy’s strict genre adherence is a merely a front, a platform for the dark, irreverent working class comedy the film really is at heart.

The character Tammy (nearly every character is known by just their first name here: Pearl, Earl, Lenore, Bobby, etc.) is almost instantly familiar to the audience. As we follow her through an especially shitty day in which she loses a car, a job, and a husband, she not only builds on the personality McCarthy has developed since Bridesmaids, but she also establishes herself as a descendant of a long line of have-vs-have-nots comedic characters. Tammy is like a complicated black comedy cocktail with equal parts Strangers With Candy (sharing Jerri Blank’s near feral human-raccoon nature) , Roseanne (with her disinterest in feigning poise), Observe & Report (in her tendency to obscure her crippling depression with outsized bravado), Tommy Boy (in that she destroys everything she touches, but in an endearing way), and Freddy Got Fingered (in both her irreverence & her interaction with dead animals, though both of those factors are thankfully toned down). It’s a hilariously bitter formula that’s just as delightful as it is depressing. Tammy is an eternal fuckup with no discernible promise in her future, but she’s also refreshingly honest & super friendly. Her nature is best understood in a scene where she’s ineptly robbing a fast food restaurant while making friends & plans to hang out with the employees she holds at gunpoint. No one describes Tammy better than she does herself when she says “A little taste of Tammy and you’re going to come clammering back for more. I’m like a Cheeto; you can’t eat just one.” Her character (and in some ways the movie itself) is the personification of junk food; Tammy is cheap, cheesy, and most likely bad for you, but she’s also potently delectable.

In addition to Tammy’s penchant for finding somber humor in poverty, alcoholism, and depression, it’s also subversive in the way it swaps the traditional gender roles in the road trip & buddy comedies it emulates (the same way The To Do List subverted teen sex farces in 2013). Not only is the titular Tammy not the gender you’d expect in a crude, bumbling buffoon protagonist in this genre, she’s also surrounded by a large cast of hilarious women, with the film’s men taking largely a backseat role. The always-welcome Allison Janney & Kathy Bates both have great turns as Tammy’s uptight mother & boisterous lesbian aunt, respectively, but it’s Susan Sarandon that steals the show as Pearl, Tammy’s alcoholic, pill-addicted fuckup drunk of a grandmother. Even though it’s a story we’ve all seen told before, the film’s most heartfelt moments are when Tammy & Pearl drop the self-righteous posturing and bond as two vulnerable people, like in the scene where Pearl reveals that she was in a sexual relationship with “the wrong” Allman Brother and Tammy confesses that she got fingered by Boz Scaggs (but it’s okay, because “it turns out it wasn’t Boz Scaggs”). The film not only allows its women to misbehave in unconventional ways, it also limits the roles its male characters are allowed to fill. The only two male characters of note are played by Gary Cole, who essentially serves as a drunken bimbo for Pearl to conquer, and Mark Duplass, who plays the central character’s way too attractive & emotionally stable love interest, defined only by the depthless selflessness he offers the world. It’s an exact gender reversal of traditional slapstick farces.

Of course, Tammy is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (or flavor of Cheeto). In fact, Deadspin named it the worst film of last summer, calling it “an ill-conceived nightmare from the beginning, starting with its star’s basic misunderstanding of what makes her an appealing actress in the first place. (It’s not the pratfalls; it’s the energy and warmth behind them).” I think there’s a lot of genuine warmth & some truly bizarre energy behind Tammy’s character that you can miss if you’re not on the movie’s wavelength (despite the character’s self-explanation that she’s like junk food & her love interest’s constant reassurance that she’s lovably honest & “real”). As with most comedies, your enjoyment is ultimately going to boil down to whether or not you find the film funny. Sure, it has its faults: the heart it tries to grow at its clichéd climax is less than compelling; there is an unfortunate featured inclusion of Macklemore on the soundtrack that will surely date the film; it’s relentlessly dumb & gross, etc. However, those faults are inherent to the genre-framework it operates within. For fans of this brand of subversively dark, lowbrow, working-class farces (from the titles mentioned above to other little-loved features like Brothers Solomon & Dirty Work) Tammy has plenty of charm to spare and a refreshing take on the gender roles established by its predecessors. McCarthy may not be playing to the height of her talents here (she’s an impressive dramatic actress when given the chance), but she has constructed a character and a film that are a welcome addition to a long tradition of surprisingly bitter junk food comedies.

-Brandon Ledet

Space Station 76 (2014)

March 15, 2015 / swampflix / 2 Comments

The most surprising thing about Space Station 76 is the giant black hole in the movie’s heart. The film’s retro, space-age aesthetic has been tapped for comedy before in titles like Galaxy Quest & Mars Attacks!, but rarely for such a dark effect. Among the film’s inherent “Hey! Remember the 70s?” gags there is some really twisted humor about subjects like substance abuse, adultery, and suicide. Space Station 76 has its cake and it eats it too, displaying both the cheerful 70s vibes you’d catch from TV shows like The Brady Bunch and The Love Boat and the devastating, real-life problems of the audience that used to watch them.

On the “Hey! Remember the 70s?” side of the equation we have details like roller-skates, crayons, tracksuits, bellbottoms, Farrah Fawcett hair-dos, porn mustaches, luaus, Betamax, viewfinder toys, wood paneling, Muzak, marijuana, children named “Sunshine”, and repressed homosexuality . . . in space! On the depressing side we have two dysfunctional marriages, a woman who despises her body because she can’t conceive, a child who is ignored seemingly by everyone, petty jealousies, overreliance on Valium, and repressed homosexuality . . . in space! There’s some real pain in exchanges like when the infertile woman is told “You can have a baby. Anyone can have a baby. What are you talking about?” and the seething hatred that poisons the crew’s personal relationships is overbearingly intensified by the confined nature of the space station setting. As social etiquette deteriorates and the hatred bubbles to the surface in bursts of unusual honesty, the film becomes one of my favorite types of stories, “The Party Out of Bounds”.

It’s a testament to the cast that the movie is both funny and depressing. Patrick Wilson is amusing as the uptight captain, Jerry O’Connell is perfect as a disco-clad cad, and few people could sell emotional fragility like Liv Tyler does here, but none of those actors are the stand-out star of Space Station 76. The most essential character in the film is a retro robot psychiatrist that dispenses empty, monotone, ready-made advice like “You can’t be everything to everyone until you are something to yourself” as freely as it dispenses prescriptions to Valium. The robot psychiatrist is the film in a nutshell: an image of 70s nostalgia that inspires both genuine laughs & genuine pain in its explorations of clinical depression, familial structure, and self-denial. It’s one hell of a robot in one hell of a black comedy . . . in space!

-Brandon Ledet

WolfCop (2014)

March 13, 2015March 29, 2015 / swampflix / 7 Comments

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Housebound (2014)

March 13, 2015March 14, 2015 / swampflix / 12 Comments

Horror comedies are always a high wire act. Some titles like Dead Alive and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil find the right balance between laughs and chills, transcending their genre limitations, while others, (Kevin Smith’s latest, Tusk, for example), aim to be both scary and funny, but end up being neither. The 2014 New Zealand horror comedy Housebound, falls firmly in the former category. It’s a mishmash of genres that gracefully moves between horror, comedy, ghost story, and murder mystery.

The setup is perfect in its simplicity. Kylie, a troubled hooligan, is sentenced to eight months of house arrest following an attempt to break into an ATM. Forced to move back into her well-meaning, but clueless parent’s home, she lounges around, drinks during the day, and is a general pain in the ass. Things almost immediately start to go bump in the night. While she is initially skeptical of her mother’s ghost stories, an encounter with a maniacal, talking teddy bear convinces Kylie that the house is indeed haunted. She partners with Amos, the security guard in charge of monitoring her ankle bracelet, to investigate and discovers that there are plenty of other, more horrifying secrets waiting behind the walls of her family home.

Housebound is the writing-directing feature debut of Gerard Johnstone. His pitch-perfect script is wickedly funny without trying too hard and he shoots the film with a confident, playful style reminiscent of Sam Raimi. The film is also elevated by its strong performances. Morgana O’Reilly brings toughness, smarts, and loads of sarcasm to her portrayal of Kylie, making her female protagonist stronger than most found in the genre. Her partner Amos (Glen-Paul Waru) is a great comic foil and her gossiping, chatty mother (Rima Te Wiata) delivers plenty of laughs.

Of course it wouldn’t be a horror movie without scares and Housebound keeps the tension heightened throughout with a mix of false and very real terrors. Through his expert use of shadows and camera angles, cinematographer Simon Riera makes seemingly harmless objects like teddy bears and Jesus statues menacing. There’s also the obligatory gross-out moments, including a head-exploding bloody finale but Housebound also has an emotional core that addresses the rebellious nature of youth and learning to accept one’s parents that still resonates despite the craziness that surrounds it. It does go on for a little too long but that is only a minor fault; the film is so much fun you’ll barely notice. Offering an inventive mix of screwball comedy and white knuckle terror, Housebound is a perfectly calibrated horror comedy and one of the best horror movies of 2014.

Housebound is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

Pop Music Cinema & That Thing You Do! (1996)

March 10, 2015March 29, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

After spilling what most likely already amounts to way too much ink on pro wrestling movies, we here at Swampflix decided to collect all of our reviews & articles about the “sport” on a single page titled Wrestling Cinema. As time has gone on it’s become apparent that we have more than wrestling on our minds. We also like movies about pop music. From Björk to ABBA to KISS, movies about or featuring musicians are apparently a source of fascination for us, so we’re starting a Pop Music Cinema page to give those movies their own home as well. To commemorate the birth of our Pop Music Cinema page, I’d like to revisit one of the most delightful examples of the genre I can remember: 1996’s That Thing You Do!

The first feature film written & directed by America’s goofy uncle, Tom Hanks, That Thing You Do! is remarkable both in its effortless charm and in its perceptive mimicry & satirization of pop music clichés. The only film that’s maybe covered more pop music ground in the twenty years since its release is 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The difference is that Walk Hard, while gust-bustingly funny, is poking fun at the pop music biopic & all of its genre-trappings while That Thing You Do! proudly wears the costume of the pop music biopic, playing some jokes at its expense, but mostly honoring it through homage. It toes a fine line between honoring & making fun, between nostalgia & derision, between parody & the real thing. Tom Hanks wrote & executed a very funny, perceptive script with his first feature, something that he failed to do a second time with his back-to-college midlife crisis comedy Larry Crowne just five years later.

Part of what makes That Thing You Do! work so well is its succinct accuracy. Framed as the biopic of a single American, Beatles-imitating one hit wonder group, the story is more the biopic of every American, Beatles-imitating one hit wonder group. It follows the entire birth, rise, and fall life-cycle of the fictional group The (one hit) Wonders. The film opens with the band writing their signature song & trying to agree on a name for their group. They then win a local talent show that leads to a steady gig at a restaurant near the airport where their fan base swells to the point where they decide it’s time to cut a record. An upstart manager takes an interest in the band, gets their song played on the radio, and books touring gigs that eventually lead to them losing touch with the friends, families, and lovers they leave behind in their small town. The band bombs their first major concert, but lands an incredible record deal anyway and begin to tour with much bigger acts, groups they’ve idolized for years. While on tour their hit song climbs the Billboard charts in the inevitable climbing-the-Billboard-charts montage. They land opportunities to appear in movies & television until their popularity reaches a breaking point where their egos are far too oversized for the band to continue. They then dissolve & separate, the band of their dreams now a pleasant, but distant memory as they assume new identities as studio musicians & has-beens. As Tom Hanks himself says in the film, “It’s a very common tale.”

As cynical of a take on pop music as a business as all that sounds, the film is still remarkably celebratory. There’s an infectious nostalgia for the mic’d handclaps, groovy wardrobes, and shoddy Gidget movies of yesteryear. The hit song at center of the film is legitimately enjoyable, which is a great advantage since it plays at least a dozen times throughout the runtime- the same way you’d expect to hear a hit song repetitively on the radio. The cast (which includes Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, Liv Tyler, Giovani Ribisi and a brief early glimpse of Bryan Cranston) is thoroughly likeable. Even Steve Zahn, who can grate on me in large doses, is nothing but charming as the world’s only lead guitarist who can’t seem to get laid. His brand of smart-ass comedy is the funniest it’s ever been; the way he sells lines like “A man in a really nice camper wants to put our songs on the radio!” are among the best moments of his entire career. It’s as if the entire cast and, by extension, the film itself borrowed Tom Hanks’ likeability as if it were a pair of shoes. The main protagonist, played by Tom Everett Scoott, borrowed so much that he even eerily looks like he could be Hanks’ offspring.

That Thing You Do!‘s central message seems to be encapsulated in the line “Ain’t no way to keep a band together. Bands come and go.” It’s smart to recognize, however, that when a band is in full glory it can be a magical thing. The ecstatic look on girls’ faces as The Wonders play on television, the excitement musicians feel when meeting their idols & living their dreams, and the inevitably sappy true-love conclusion to the story all make the fleeting, somewhat meaningless success of a pop group seem like the most important thing in the world. That Thing You Do! showed me that you can be critical of how a thing works on a fundamental level while still finding a deep appreciation for its benefits. It also taught me that Tom Hanks can be terrifying when he’s acting mean. It’s not the most important film about pop music ever made, but it is an immensely enjoyable one & it’s one that has a lot to say about what the genre means as an art form. I’m sure as time goes on that we’ll cover many films that have a lot to say about the genre as well. The nature of pop music seems to be be an endlessly fascinating subject for both folks behind the camera and the rest of us here in the audience.

-Brandon Ledet

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

February 25, 2015 / swampflix / 4 Comments

I’ve been curious about The Adventures of Pluto Nash for over a decade now. It’s widely accepted that Eddie Murphy has been putting in subpar work since at least the late 90s & Pluto Nash seemed to be one of those early signs that his best days were well behind him. With a $100 million budget and a mere $7 million dollar return, the movie was one of the top ten biggest box office flops of all time. While I didn’t expect it to be a particularly great movie, I though it did have potential as a trashy gem (à la Leonard Part 6 or Howard the Duck) because of its sci-fi premise. I suspected that Pluto Nash had potential as a fun bad movie because it was a Bad Movie in Space, which gave it a distinct advantage over the appeal of the Klumps & Norbits of Muprhy’s career. Unfortunately, it instead committed the number one sin in the Bad Movie Bible: it was boring.

When I pictured a Shitty Eddie-Murphy-in-Space Movie with a $100 Million Budget, I naively expected all kinds of goofy adventures featuring Murphy exploring improbable planets & cracking wise at the expense of goofy-looking aliens. Instead, Pluto Nash bottled all of its action on the Earth’s moon and supplanted madcap adventure with run-of-the-mill gunfights & a staggering surplus of jokes about horny robots. Murphy’s Nash is a retired smuggler struggling to run a clean nightclub business where oddly costumed weirdos can line dance to Outkast songs in a futuristic version of doing the robot. His wholesome nightclub is threatened by mafia types who want to turn the moon into a tacky outer space Atlantic City and he risks his life to stop them. The movie could’ve been set on Earth in the present and not lost much in the translation.

In the rare moments when the movie is in full gear the screen is littered with cheap-looking gunfights & car chases crippled with mediocrity. When it slows down Nash literally goes into hiding and essentially watches the Moon’s version of Netflix, which has to be one of the most boring approaches to a space adventure ever conceived. Imagine if The Fifth Element were adapted as a hackneyed UPN sitcom that frivolously wasted its entire budget on huge explosions & cameos that no one asked for and you’d have a pretty good idea of Pluto Nash’s style. Even the movie’s sole set outside on the Moon’s surface is embarrassingly cheap looking, faker than even 1969’s “real” Moon landing.

It’s hard to imagine where the film’s budget went outside the cast (and the gratuitous explosions). The list of supporting players is beyond impressive: B-Movie legend Pam Grier plays Nash’s gun-toting mother; the beautiful Rosario Dawson is his unlikely love interest; Peter Boyle is his partner in crime; Jay Mohr is a pop star that narrowly avoids drinking battery acid; John Cleese is some kind of AI butler. That’s not even including the appearances of Alec Baldwin, James Rebhorn, Joe Pantoliano, Illeana Douglas and Randy Quaid (as the aforementioned horny robot). Unfortunately, this ungodly stockpile of talent is put to waste and everyone seems to be in full paycheck mode. Even Murphy himself is dead weight here, keeping the antics to a minimum & surrounding himself with a script seemingly designed to massage his ego by constantly reminding everyone how awesome he is. The only actor that has any fun with the film is the always-dependable Luis Guzmán, but Guzmán is about as consistent as they come, so it’s a fairly hollow victory.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash is an action comedy that fails both in its action and its comedy. Jokes about Hilary Clinton’s face on future money (har har) and robots desperately trying to get laid (hee hee) aren’t funny the first time around and are downright painful in their repetition. The film even unironically uses a record scratch sound effect to punctuate its action gags, lest the audience forget to laugh. It’s that dire. As I’ve pointed out before in reviews of Exit to Eden & 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it’s possible for failed comedies or action movies to still be interesting as cultural time capsules or complete train wrecks. There’s a miniscule amount of early 2000’s charm in Pluto Nash’s shoddy rap versions of corny songs like “Blue Moon” & “Dancing in the Moonlight”, its semi-futuristic nightclub attire, and its use of Space Jam-inspired font, but it’s not enough to save the film from its own self-crushing blandness. In this case the schlock is both unfunny and boring, which is a brutal combination for any audience. I should’ve left Pluto Nash where it belongs: forgotten in the past, in hiding on the Moon, watching Moonflix (or whatever) in its pajamas, and trading tired quips with oversexed robots.

-Brandon Ledet

UPDATE: The What We Do in the Shadows Kickstarter was a Success!

February 14, 2015 / swampflix / 2 Comments

Last week I wrote that the upcoming Jemaine Clement/Taika Watiti vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows was looking to fund an American theatrical release through a Kickstarter campaign. The film had already secured digital & home media distribution, but was struggling to reach American cinemas outside a couple screenings in New York & Los Angeles. At the time I wrote about the campaign to fund a wider theatrical release, it was barely more than halfway funded with only a week left to go. I am happy to report that the project has since reached its goal and will be able to hit a lot more local cinemas as a result (hopefully with New Orleans on its itinerary).

Last week, I described What We Do in the Shadows thusly: “It promises to take the same ennui employed by Only Lovers Left Alive into the satiric comedy territory of Vamps. Posed as a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary, the film follows modern day vampires as they navigate mundane activities like nightlife, dealing with roommates, and searching for a bite to eat. They clash with the likes of witches, zombies, werewolves, and plain-old humans in a loosely-plotted slice of (undead) life comedy. From the looks of the trailer, it could be quite funny as well as a fresh take on a genre I once thought hopelessly stale.” Judging by early reports it indeed is a very funny film and I hope that we will get to see & review it ourselves soon enough. Maybe even in the theater, thanks to the Kickstarter!

-Brandon Ledet