Movie of the Month: Alligator (1980)

June 1, 2016June 26, 2016 / swampflix / 12 Comments

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer & Brandon watch Alligator (1980).

Britnee: There’s a popular urban legend about alligator sightings in the streets of major U.S. cities. It’s said that city dwellers would bring back baby alligators as souvenirs from trips to Louisiana and Florida, and once they grew tired of the baby gators, they would flush them down the toilet. The baby alligators would then grow up in city sewers and become giant mutant gators. Lewis Teague brings this myth to life in his 1980 sci-fi horror flick Alligator.

Campy creature features were a hot commodity around the time Alligator was released (Piranha, Humanoids from the Deep, C.H.U.D., etc.), and usually the film gets thrown into that group. Yes, there are many campy moments in Alligator, but it’s actually an excellent, well-rounded film. I would go as far as to say it’s close to being on the same level as Jaws.

Upon recently re-watching the film, I found myself to be really let down by the fact that our leading lady, Marisa (Robin Ryker), didn’t have even the smallest emotional connection with the star of the film, an alligator named Ramón. In the beginning of the film, a young Marisa has baby Ramón as a pet in a pretty lame reptile tank setup (crappy neon pebbles included). Her douchebag of a father flushes Ramón down the toilet, sending him to live a horrible life in the disgusting garbage-filled sewers of Chicago. The film then flashes forward to 20 years later, and Marisa is a reptile expert that assists a police officer, David (Robert Forester), in hunting down Ramón, who has become a giant, mutated alligator that is terrorizing the city. Marisa never realizes that the mutant gator is in fact her childhood pet Ramón, and that just didn’t sit well with me. I’m all about a good human-animal connection in film, and I think just a small moment where Marisa sees a spark in Ramón’s eye and realizes who he is would make this film so much better.

Brandon, were you also a little let down by the lack of a connection between Marisa and Ramón? What did you ultimately think of Ramón? Was he really the film’s villain?

Brandon: Okay, I am stoked that we’re getting into this question of Ramón‘s morality this early, because there’s a lot more to unpack there than you might expect. As a mythically gigantic, bloodthirsty reptile you might expect that Ramón was pure evil (or at the very least a chaotic neutral force of Nature). However, there’s a spirit of moralistic vigilantism to some of his kills that makes him more akin to the nuanced antiheroism of folks like your Bruce Waynes or your Don Drapers or your Walter Whites. We are unclear as to who Ramón‘s first victim is, as all the police discover is a severed limb in a Chicago sewer. His second victim is a wicked pet store owner who kidnaps neighborhood dogs, sells them to a crooked science lab, and disposes of their bodies in Ramón‘s underground home. Later, in one of the film’s most spectacular scenes of alligator mayhem, Ramón also hunts down & dismantles the science lab employees that cruelly abused these discarded animals in the first place at a stuffy wedding party. There’s also a tangent where Ramón gets payback on a sleazeball big game hunter meant to take him out.

If Ramón is the hero of Alligator the proof is in these moments, which position him as some sort of sewer-dwelling vigilante who punishes evil Chicagoans who flush their pets down the toilet. It’s only when police & news reporter investigations drive Ramón out of the sewers & disrupt his shit-stained habitat that he resorts to killing innocents, including cops & children. As these are the exact kinds of victims people tend not to forgive, this greatly complicates the question of Ramón‘s moral compass.

Another thing that complicates how we see Ramón as a misunderstood friend or a murderous foe is in the surprising high quality of Alligator‘s special effects. He’s just too spectacularly terrifying to take lightly. I think the effects also cloud the issue of whether or not Alligator qualifies as camp cinema, as Britnee was concerned with above. There are some larger-than-life caricatures in this film, not least of all the sentient sausage/cigar hybrid police chief & the nastily creepy pet store owner that make Alligator feel far short of Jaws (a movie it openly riffs on) in terms of quality, no doubt. However, on a technical note, the combination of real-life gators & gigantic gator puppets are near seamless. As many times as I was tempted to scoff at certain moments (the spinning toilet cam when baby Ramón is first flushed comes to mind), I was also just as impressed with some technical achievements in Ramón‘s gator attacks, especially once he emerges above ground. Watching the mutant gator smash through city streets, destroy cars with its massive tail, swallow victims whole, and completely raise hell at the aforementioned wedding party were all more visually impressive moments than I what I expected from this film, given its sillier flourishes. The movie wastes no time opening with a gator attack, so I expected it to be violent, but I didn’t expect the violence to be so well crafted on a technical (or budgetary) level.

There were also ways Alligator could’ve gone even further in a campier direction, such as a more formal, on-the-nose reunion with Ramón & the adult Marissa or more attention paid to the evil science lab that made Ramón so large in the first place. I would’ve loved to see Ramón & Marissa have their moment of recognition or the results some of the experiment’s other failed test subjects, but either detail would’ve undoubtedly played as a silly indulgence. The resulting tone, then, is somewhere in the middle. Alligator is at times very silly, and at times well-crafted & darkly grotesque.

I have a hard time imagining one of us reviewing this film & not slapping a “Camp Stamp” on it, but I’m also the mostly likely contributor around here to apply that label to any movie. What do you think, Boomer? Where does Alligator fall in or outside the spectrum of camp cinema?

Boomer: I don’t know that I would call this a camp film, actually. It has its fair share of campy ideas, but the general seriousness of the situation and the brutality of the onscreen deaths (particularly that of the child who is killed at some kind of costume party) make up for the sillier elements. There are certainly some deranged elements that threaten to push the film over the edge into full on camp, like Marisa’s excitable and possibly crazy mother and the archetypal irascible police chief’s Mentat-style eyebrows, but Alligator has something that a lot of genre satires don’t: respect for the source material that is being referenced. The Jaws parallels mentioned above are the most obvious, as the film is unabashedly aping that film’s style and plotline right down to mayoral corruption, here the result of the unnamed mayor’s relationship with the pharmaceutical chief whose company’s experiments indirectly led to the alligator’s mutation rather than an attempt to preserve the summer tourism economy boom. There’s a lot here that’s played for laughs, but the film manages to do so without irrevocably breaking the tension, which is a refreshing change of pace from other pastiche parodies. Even if we disregard contemporary rubbish parodies like Date Movie or Meet the Spartans and only consider genre classics, great movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun don’t really work as legitimate examples of disaster film or cop drama when divested of their parodic elements; in contrast, even if you were to somehow never seen or heard of Jaws, Alligator would still hold up as a surprisingly decent example of the “giant animal” horror subgenre.

I also particularly liked that there was a reason given for why Ramón was so large, and that this reason tied this mutation back to human involvement. There’s nothing about Jaws that makes him a victim at all, but Ramón is surprisingly sympathetic for a swamp monster that’s literally a dinosaur. We see that the environment he was born into would have eventually led to him being wrestled by humans regardless of whether or not your Marisa had taken him as a pet; he was displaced from his natural habitat and transplanted to a city sewer, where the only food he was able to find consisted of castoff, hormone-injected puppy corpses. Everything that mankind reaps in this movie is, as Brandon points out, sown by them, even though a few innocent people get caught up in the midst of his vengeful rampage. Jaws, on the other hand, never explains how the titular shark managed to grow to such an absurd size (ten feet longer than the average male Great White) or why he has such an insatiable hunger for human flesh; this doesn’t make this a better film than Jaws at all, as that movie is at least partially about the terror of the unknown, but it does add a different element to Alligator that differentiates it from being a straightforward rip-off. It’s not clear how or why Ramón knows to go to the Slade mansion and devour guests (or why he knows to specifically target the lead scientist and Slade), but that doesn’t matter. At least the film didn’t take the same approach as the novelization of Jaws: The Revenge, which indirectly gave us the term “Voodoo Shark.”

One of the things that amused me most about this movie was the way that everyone, hero and villain alike, had nothing but disdain for the journalistic community, and the primary antagonistic reporter, Kemp, obliged them by being as weaselly as possible. What did you make of this element, Britnee? And, further, were you creeped out by the relationship between Robert Forster and Robin Riker, given that he is supposed to be roughly 40 and her character is at most 26?

Britnee: Before getting into the ridiculousness that is Kemp’s character, I just want to point out how insane his eyebrows are. Of course, Kemp wasn’t the only person in this movie with giant caterpillar eyebrows. As Boomer pointed out, Chief Clark had crazy eyebrows too! Maybe I’m overthinking this similarity, but there could be a possible good versus evil eyebrow battle occurring deep within the film. If so, it’s obvious that Chief Clark takes the cake.

Kemp’s character serves as the stereotypical reporter that would do anything to get a good story, even if it means exploiting someone’s personal tragedy. Of course, we know that not every journalist is as savage as Kemp, but I feel as though the film was attempting to convey some sort of message to the audience in regards to the authenticity of mass media. I can’t help but think of the title of one of my favorite Barbra Streisand songs, “Don’t Believe What You Read.” Not all media outlets are necessarily reliable, and Kemp is a representation of the deceitful side of the world of journalism.

As for the intimate relationship between Robert Forester and Robin Ryker’s characters, it did throw me a little off-guard at first. Mainly because Robert Forester gives off some really intense dad vibes. Marisa’s dad was a total jerk that flushed Ramón down the toilet, so she obviously had some underlying daddy issues. If David’s character was played by another actor, such as Harrison Ford, I think their love affair would have sat better with me. Honestly, I love a good age-gap relationship in movies. Harold and Maude and White Palace are two fantastic, unconventional romantic films that come to mind, and Alligator could’ve been on their level if Robert Forester wasn’t so dad-like.

Brandon, watching the film again recently got me to focus a little more on the terror that is Colonel Brock (Henry Silva). While he is definitely one of the film’s villains, he is probably one of the funniest characters in the movie. The scene in which he is awkwardly flirting with the television reporter was by far one of the funniest scenes in Alligator. Did you find Colonel Brock to be as comedic as I did? If so, did his unique brand of humor add value to the film? Would a more serious character have been a better choice?

Brandon: I love the cartoonish cad energy the dastardly hunter Colonel Brock brings to the film. He struck me as an odd combination of Jumanji‘s safari hunter Van Pelt & Empire Records‘s Neil Diamond surrogate Rex Manning, a sleazeball dandy plucked directly from either a children’s film or a 50s big studio epic. I also love the transparency of his presence within the film. Once Ramón dispenses with the crooked pet store owner & the evil science lab technicians, there aren’t many potential victims for his vengeful reptilian chomping. Colonel Brock is a perfectly calibrated last minute injection for the film because he gives the audience one more sleazebag to want to see dead. Ramón, of course, wastes no time obliging that bloodthirst and swallows the self-important goon whole in spectacular fashion. I could see how someone treating the film with a more serious tone could want more significant villainy that what Brock delivers, but I’m perfectly happy with his whole silly ass deal.

As much as I’m willing to view this movie through the trashy goofery of a camp cinema lens, there’s no denying that it’s a largely grotesque, hateful work. The alligator attacks start immediately from the outset & upon watching a man’s limbs ripped to shreds in the opening seconds a little girl wants to take one of the little beasts home. Once flushed down the toilet, Ramón‘s newfound home is a disgusting lair of trash & human filth somehow made worse by a greedy scientist lab willing to abuse & discard puppies in the most heartless way imaginable. At one point a mentally unstable suicide bomber is ridiculed & turned into a police station punchline. At some points it’s even difficult to rejoice in Ramón‘s revenge on the wicked because his means are so brutal (see: him devouring a child). I love the film’s more cartoonish, sillier moments (there’s a genuine star wipe transition between shots at one point, for God’s sake), but there’s so much ugliness mixed in that the clashing tones are downright jarring.

Boomer, is there an particular moment of shocking alligator mayhem or cruel human folly that sticks out to you as especially ugly that we haven’t covered here yet? There was so much nastiness going around that we surely haven’t touched on it all.

Boomer: We’ve already talked about the devoured child, which was the big violent moment that I didn’t expect. For the most part, Ramón was sticking to either enacting vengeance on his oppressors in a way that was, conceptually, more human than animal, or against people foolish enough to wander into his lair, which is a very animalistic and understandable reaction (RIP Officer Rookie, we hardly knew ye). And Brandon really has a point with his notation that the people in the film are cruel and hateful, like the police officers who mock the erstwhile suicide bomber; in fact, the general lack of empathy among the human characters in this film is what stood out to me more than Ramón‘s appetite and the things he did to sate it.

What stood out to me were the vendors who appear at the site of a mangling where police officers are tossing depth charges into a small body of water while trying to get the gator’s attention. It seems that, in universe, the peddlers of cheap wares have named Ramón “Alexander the Alligator” and arrive at the scene of a horrible tragedy in an attempt to capitalize on it with foam hats and plastic gator trinkets. It’s been a long time since I rewatched Jaws, so I’m not sure whether or not this particular element was included there or not, but this capitalistic opportunism in the face of human misery shocked me much more than the casual violence of Ramón, whose swathe of killings are motivated more or less by base instinct. It’s merely one more layer on this film, reminding us that people are the real monsters.

Lagniappe

Boomer: I notice that we mentioned that this film takes place in Chicago, and the Wikipedia page for the film also states that this is the case. This is never mentioned in the film, however; I kept trying to figure out where the film was set, and even googled “Marquette Place” when a sign with that name showed up on screen. Apparently, we only know this because it is mentioned in the director’s commentary. Before seeing the movie, I always assumed it was set in New York, which is probably the result of having long ago seen the Growing Pains episode in which Ben makes a movie that is, essentially, Alligator.

Britnee: During the scenes in David’s apartment, there are prints on the wall by Ramón Santiago (obvious inspiration for the alligator’s name). I was unaware of Santiago’s work prior to noticing the prints in the film, and I have to say that this guy has some phenomenal art. Not only is his art featured in the background of Alligator, but his art can also be found in the insanity that is the 1981 film Tattoo. According to Santiago’s website, he stated, “my paintings are what dreams are made of.” I would say that’s a pretty accurate description of his work. Unfortunately, I haven’t stumbled across an Santiago gator paintings yet.

Brandon: Alligator is a near-perfect slice of nasty 70s schlock (despite its early 80s release date) that begs to be loved for its faults instead of in spite of them. However, I do think that Britnee was onto something when she was wishing for a rewrite where a more solid connection between the now-monstrously large Ramón & the adult Marissa was established. However, instead of them sharing a moment of recognition at the film’s climax, I would’ve somehow implied that the body parts first discovered in the sewer belonged to Marissa’s father. Instead of an unidentified victim kicking off the police investigation that drives Ramón out of the sewers, Ramón killing Marissa’s father would both help explain her mother’s deranged state & add another name to Ramón‘s revenge list. One of the most fascinating concepts at work in Alligator is the idea of its titular monster intentionally seeking revenge on those who’ve wronged him, so it would’ve been incredible to see him devour the wicked brute that flushed him down the toilet as a baby. I enjoy the movie’s misshapen, incomplete feeling in general, but I do think that detail alteration would’ve improved the significance of Ramón‘s first recorded kill, however on-the-nose it would’ve been.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
July: Boomer presents Citizen Ruth (1996)
August: Alli presents Black Moon (1975)
September: Brandon presents The Box (2009)

-The Swampflix Crew

Pulgasari (1985)

May 13, 2016May 13, 2016 / swampflix / 4 Comments

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There’s a fascinating-looking book I’ve been meaning to read about the true life story of a couple who were effectively held hostage by now-deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and forced to make big budget propaganda films at his whim (A Kim Jong-il Production:The Extradordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power). South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife/actress Choi Eun-hee worked against their will to create North Korean versions of films Kim Jong-il, a huge movie buff, was obsessed with, except with a government-positive message at their center. This concept is already difficult enough to wrap my mind around in the abstract, but it’s even harder to reconcile with the reality of the one Shin Sang-ok movie I’ve seen from the era, the 1985 Godzilla knockoff Pulgasari.

Even without its exceedingly surreal context as a document of unlawful imprisonment under Kim Jong-il’s thumb, Pulgasari would still be highly recommendable as a slice of over-the-top creature feature cinema. I’m far from an expert in the hallmarks of kaiju cinema, but the film felt wholly unique to me, an odd glimpse into the way the genre can lend itself to wide variety of metaphors the same way zombies, vampires, and X-Men have in American media over the years. The titular monster ranges from cute to terrifying, from friend to enemy over the course of the film, which is a lot more nuanced than what I’m used to from my kaiju. Most of all, though, Pulgasari is fascinating in its self-conflicting nature as both a brutal tale of political unrest and a cheap thrills indulgence in goofy monster movie camp. The film’s bewildering backstory aside, I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

Just like how the size of its titular kaiju grows exponentially throughout its runtime, the budget of Pulgasari surprisingly expands as the plot trudges along. Beginning with an isolated village not unlike the bare bones sets of Yokai Monsters: Spooky Warfare, Pulgasari first appears to be a dirt cheap production. Its story is consistently engaging even through these humble beginnings, however. A small farming community on the brink of starvation due to a bad harvest & governmental over-taxing sees many of its young men taking up arms among mountainside bandits to raid government storehouses for survival. The government does not respond well to this transgression. The village is seized, its farm equipment melted down in order to forge military weapons & all suspected mountain bandits cruelly jailed. The oldest, widest member of the village prays with his dying breath for the gods to save the human race from government cruelty & the gods send Pulgasari. The demonic savior first appears as a miniature threat, but eventually balloons monstrously large, as does the film’s budget. Huge, large scale battles loaded with expensive special effects & tons of extras take over what initially feels like a limited scope fairy tale and ultimately blooms into a full-blown epic.

Let’s take a minute to discuss the awesomeness of Pulgasari himself. When he’s first brought to life through dying prayers & blood magic, he’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and is so ridiculously cute. Pulgasari’s costume is a little more flexible than Godzilla’s, so when he moves around he looks like a dancing toddler in a lizard’s costume & his miniature set includes the oversized props of films like Attack of the Puppet People. He grows from there by eating iron, taking bites directly out of government weapons, establishing himself as a hero of the people despite his demonic visage. Pulgasari grows large & terrifying, eventually looking like a cross between a lizard & a bull, and proves to be impervious to all weaponry. The visual charm of the monster wears of by the time he’s mountain-size and a scene where the government attempts to set him on fire stands as one of the most hellish, metal images I can remember seeing on film in a good while. Eventually, Pulgasari grows too large for his own good, unfortunately, and starts to strain the people he once protected’s limited resources with his unquenchable thirst for iron.

You might think that the way Shin Sang-ok made this film subversive was by portraying an evil, totalitarian government that drained the life out of its people, but that idea actually belonged to Kim Jong-il. The dictator saw that message as a warning of the dangers of capitalism when it goes unchecked. Okay. Shin Sang-ok, instead, stabbed at his captor’s legacy by likening him to Pulgasari, a hero to the people that would eventually betray them by growing too large & too greedy. Either way you read the film, it’s fascinating that that it was ever made under North Korean watch & I’m now all the more curious to read A Kim Jong-il Production as soon as I get the chance. Pulgasari doesn’t need that context to stand as a remarkable work, however. If you went into the film blind there’d still be plenty of spectacle & clashing tones to stick with you in a way more generic, non-Japanese kaiju novelties wouldn’t. This is not the by-the-numbers vagueness of Reptilicus. It’s something much more essential & idiosyncratic.

-Brandon Ledet

The Flesh Eaters (1964)

April 29, 2016April 29, 2016 / swampflix / 4 Comments

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“There’s something in the water that eats flesh! I said ‘eats flesh’! People!”

The 1980s were undeniably the glory days of gore in horror cinema, but they weren’t necessarily the root of extreme on-camera violence. George Romero is often credited as being the godfather of gore, ushering in the era of special effects that paid great detail to exposing the insides of horror’s actors/victims. Romero’s seminal work, The Night of The Living Dead, was released as early as 1968, well before onscreen gore reached its Reagan-era fever pitch. Before The Night of the Living Dead hit the theaters, however, it was originally titled The Night of the Flesh Eaters and subsequently changed its moniker to avoid confusion with a film simply titled The Flesh Eaters released just four years prior. The Flesh Eaters shares no resemblance with the zombie-centric plots of Romero’s Living Dead series in even the vaguest sense, but it does beat the director to the punch somewhat in terms of onscreen gore, so it’s somewhat appropriate that they almost shared a name.

The Flesh Eaters is horrifically violent for a mid-60s creature feature, paying great attention to the special effects of its blood & guts make-up. Many credit the film as being the very first example of gore horror & it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The anachronistic-feeling intrusion of extreme violence in what otherwise feels like a standard Corman-esque B-picture is beyond striking. Although I’ve seen far worse gore in films that followed in its wake, the out-of-place quality the violence has in The Flesh Eaters makes the film feel shocking & upsetting in a transgressive way. I don’t know for sure if Romero was at all inspired by The Flesh Eaters or if he even had seen it before making The Night of the Living Dead, but his work certainly wasn’t the first gore-soaked spectacle in town, not by a long shot.

A drunk movie starlet, her overworked assistant, and a cocky airplane pilot are temporarily marooned on a small, mysterious island. It’s there that they encounter a creepy scientist fella experimenting with a microscopic, weaponized life form that greedily eats human flesh clean off the bone. At first the only evidence of these tiny mutant bastards is the washed-up skeletons that arrive picked-clean on the shore. Soon they reveal themselves as tiny spots of nuclear glow that can only be described by their potential victims in the vaguest of terms: “that shiny stuff”, “that little silver stuff”, etc. Without revealing too much, I can promise that these tiny, evil, glimmering somethings eventually snowball into a much bigger, stranger problem that a small crew of shipwrecked amateurs stand very little chance of surviving.

Directed by the guy who voiced Papa Racer on the 60s Speed Racer cartoon (Jack Curtis) & partially funded by his winnings on a long-forgotten television game show, The Flesh Eaters is largely a labor of love. There are some details to what it delivers that relegates it to a camp cinema context: some nonsensical asides about Nazis, a beatnik caricature that would’ve made even the extras in Corman’s Bucket of Blood blush, some bathing suit oggling, a William Castle-style distribution gimmick in which audiences were armed with “instant blood” to feed the flesh eaters in case of attack, etc. As goofy as The Flesh Eaters can be in moments, however, what truly makes it unique is the ahead-of-its-time attention paid to its special effects. Holes are poked into film strips themselves to indicate the flesh eaters at work. Blood & gore ooze out of victims in a horrifically stark black & white. The scale of the third act mayhem far exceeds what you’d reasonably expect based on the budget. The Flesh Eaters suffered many setbacks, including years-delayed distribution & a hurricane disrupting production, but it was well worth the effort. It eventually stood as a must-see landmark of horror cinema that would in its own way predict where the genre was headed in the decades to come and it still plays remarkably fresh today because of that grotesque innovation.

-Brandon Ledet

Stung (2015)

February 14, 2016 / swampflix / 1 Comment

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A lot of people were harsh on last year’s winking-at-the-camera B-picture Zombeavers for being a little too try-hard & calculated. Personally, I’m a little more forgiving on silly, made-for-cult-audiences trifles than most, so I enjoyed its SyFy Channel-type camp well enough. What saved the picture for me more than anything was the handmade beaver puppets. The film’s dialogue was never quite as amusing as it wanted to be, but the slightest appearance of a zombie beaver puppet could have me howling.

Toeing the exact same line between terrible dialogue/acting & delightful special effects is the recent horror comedy Stung. The directorial debut of German special effects artist Benni Diez, Stung is a fairly basic creature feature about mutant wasps that brutally disrupt a stuffy garden party. Much of the film is bland & sloppily slapped together, but a few bonkers plot twists in the third act & a refreshing focus on handmade practical effects save it from feeling like another hopeless CGI-heavy cheapie like a Lavalantula! or a Sharknado 3. If you have little to no interest in monster movie creature effects, you’re likely to spend most of the film bored & frustrated in the wait for bodies to drop & the credits to roll. The only attraction featured here is the giant mutant wasps themselves.

Remove the mutant wasps from Stung & you basically have the world’s worst episode of Party Down. A small catering company handles a quirkily pathetic garden party while experimenting with a will-they-won’t-they romance that no one could possibly care about. The lead is a painfully unfunny physical comedian with a whiny “But I’m a Nice Guy”/friendzoned approach to romance. His love interest is a Type A Bitch™ we’re supposed to deride for caring more about her flailing small business & personal survival than getting laid by a bartender/clown/employee. The best bet for finding a worthwhile character is among the party guests, since the leads are such dull wastes of time. My vote for MVP (or maybe Only Valuable Player in this case) goes to genre film veteran Lance Henriksen as a drunken small town mayor.At the very least he gets a couple decent one-liners out, like when he quips “This party needs an autopsy” (before the killings start) and when he responds to the correction, “Those are not bees, those are wasps” with “Who gives a shit?” Even Henriksen’s world-weary irreverence does little to liven up the proceedings, though, and most of the film’s time that’s not filled by killer wasp mayhem feels like a huge waste of effort.

It’s a good thing, then, that there’s so much killer wasp gore to (excuse the expression) chew on here. Stung‘s gigantic mutant wasps click & screech like insectoid pterodactyls. When they sting their prey they use the victim as a flesh vessel to incubate even larger wasps. These transformations are massive, wet, disgusting, and above all else entertaining. The mayhem gets even more gnarly from there, especially in the film’s go-for-broke third act stupidity. Gigantic nests, wasp-controlled human drones, wriggling larvae, and flaming monsters all make for a wickedly amusing good time as long as you pay more attention to what the creatures are up to than anything said or done by their entirely-forgettable victims. Stung is to be enjoyed for its Them!-style monster puppets & 80’s Peter Jackson gore, not for its sense of narrative or tonal nuance. About the only thing that qualifies as a successful joke in the film is when one character carries around a can of bug spray as an in-vain mode of protection, but even that gag qualifies as a triumph of the costume department. Stung is all about its puppets & gore and nothing else. That just happened to be enough to make it worthwhile for me.

-Brandon Ledet

Attack the Block (2011)

January 23, 2016August 29, 2024 / swampflix / 4 Comments

Are we all pretty much done talking about Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens at this point? If so, please forgive me for the following preamble. One of the most exciting aspects of the film for me was the introduction of relative newcomers Daisy Ridley as the oddly-controversial Rey & John Boyega as the absurdly affable Finn. They both do an excellent job of holding down the protagonist end of the film in a remarkably deft tag team effort for two actors who aren’t too used to headlining multi-million dollar tentpole epics. More astute sci-fi fans might not have been as surprised as myself by Boyega’s part in that effort, though, given that he already had put in a rewarding lead performance in a deliriously fun action film a few years prior to The Force Awakens. Attack the Block finds John Boyega in a much quieter, more stoic leading role than he’s asked to play with Finn (who is often employed as comic relief), but even as a babyfaced teenager he was prepared to prove himself to be leading man material.

As stoic & as straight-faced as Boyega plays its protagonist, Moses, Attack the Block is anything but a grim horror picture. An urban sci-fi horror comedy about an alien invasion that targets the unlikely ground zero of a housing project in London, Attack the Block is a wildly fun creature feature with an exceptional knack for practical effects monster design & sleek music video aesthetic. Its ragtag group of barely-out-of-diapers youngsters that fend off the otherworldly invaders are an amusing gang of pothead ruffians (the kind that would inspire Liz Lemon to involuntarily shout “youths!”), mostly harmless in their overly-macho, self-aggrandizing indulgence in vulgarity & hip-hop swagger. Their accents border on being incomprehensible for an American outsider such as myself, but that foreign aspect can also be insanely charming, recalling the early 2000s raps of Dizzee Rascal & The Streets. Even more incomprehensible are the alien beasts that attack these kids. Kinda bearish, kinda canine in nature, these creatures are too dark to get a good look at, unless they’re baring their glow-in-the-dark fangs. The audience isn’t alone in not knowing what to make of the aliens. They’re described most accurately described in the film as “big alien gorilla wolf motherfuckers” & “Maybe there was a party at the zoo and a monkey fucked a fish?”. The difficult-to-pin-down creature design of the aliens pairs nicely with the highly specific cultural context of their victims & the film’s overall silly horror comedy tone to make for a remarkably memorable & unique picture.

Attack the Block turns a small cast & a limited budget into something truly special, a trick that can only be pulled off by fans of the genre it works in. Indeed, the film even goes as far as to shout out properties like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, and Pokemon by name, not to mention the close involvement of Nick Frost & the producers of the cult favorite Shaun of the Dead. The budget might be somewhat limited, but the film pulls a remarkably unique visual language from such simple visual sources as fireworks, smoke, swords, and motor scooters. What’s more important, though, is that it nails the monster attacks aspect of its appeal, which are plentiful without being overly gore-heavy (despite a stray decapitation or throat-tearing here or there). And the film gets major bonus points for achieving most of this mayhem with practical effects, a minimal amount of CGI seamlessly mixed in for bare bones support.

There are plenty of reasons for sci-fi & horror fans to give Attack the Block a solid chance. It’s a perfectly crafted little midnight monster movie, one with a charming cast of young’ns, a wicked sense of humor, and some top shelf creature feature mayhem. The film doesn’t need John Boyega’s teenage presence to be worthy of a retroactive recommendation & reappraisal, but that doesn’t hurt either. In just two films, Boyega has carved out a nice little name for himself in genre-cinema. If you enjoyed his turn as Finn in The Force Awakens, you should definitely check out his earlier work in Attack the Block. The truth is, though, that you should check out Attack the Block even if you hated The Force Awakens. It’s an undeniable crowdpleaser, a commendable entry in the horror comedy genre that will endure long after the novelty of seeing a babyfaced Boyega in action wears off.

-Brandon Ledet

Cloverfield (2008)

January 18, 2016 / swampflix / 8 Comments

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News broke late last week that sometime after J.J. Abrams had wrapped filming on Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, his production company Bad Robot had “secretly” filmed a “blood-relative” followup to his 2008 production Cloverfield. I personally had a mixed reaction to the revelation that a second Cloverfield film is headed our way. I absolutely hated the original Cloverfield film when it was released in 2008. Loathed it. A sequel (or a “blood relative” semi-sequel) would not likely be something I’d be interested in, then, except that the trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane is so thoroughly badass that it made me reconsider my stance on the original entirely. So, for the third time in eight years I decided to give Cloverfield a chance to grow on me. I’m bummed to report that although my hatred for the film has calmed down a great deal, it’s still not my thing.

Found footage horror films are a dime a dozen (almost literally; their attractively low production costs are a large part of why they’re so plentiful). Cloverfield is a step above the rest in terms of what it accomplishes with the limited scope of the found footage horror as a genre. On the monster end of the equation, the movie nails everything it aims for. Its lumbering, Godzilla-sized creature is a sight to behold (whenever you can get a good glimpse of it) and the broad strokes of its threat on New York City is complimented nicely by an evil army of tiny insectoid (baby?) versions of the larger creature. The movie is smart not to over-detail exactly why or how the monster arrived. Is it from the ocean floor? Is it from another planet? These questions are asked, but never answered. Instead, Cloverfield focuses on detailing the mayhem: rockets launched, buildings demolished, oil tankers tipped & set aflame. It’s honestly not at all hard to see why so many people have latched onto Cloverfield as a breath of fresh air in the creature feature genre.

What sinks the film for me is the human end of the equation. The characters are understandably panicked by the sight of a grand scale monster tearing the city down around them, but their shrill, frantic reactions are relentless & honestly, annoying. As an audience member it’s far more entertaining to focus on what the gigantic (alien?) beast is up to instead of hearing someone shriek “Rob’s got Beth on the phone! Rob’s got Beth on the phone! Rob’s got Beth on the phone!”, especially since Rob & Beth are so vaguely defined that they’re barely more than total strangers. It’s an exciting feeling to be chased down to a creature you barely comprehend, but when you’re only interacting with the damned thing through brief flashes & the creatures you do spend time with are just as barely-comprehendible New York City nobodies, the whole ordeal can be very frustrating. Despite the presence of future-greats Lizzie Caplan & T.J. Miller, the human toll in Cloverfield feels greatly deserved, a debt well paid. I wanted (most of) these characters to die at the monster’s hands(? tentacles?). I doubt that was the desired effect.

Still, I find myself excited for 10 Cloverfield Lane. Maybe it’s the narrative remove from the found footage format that’s working for me in that ad? Cloverfield aims for a kind of authenticity that I’m not sure it achieves. It bends over backwards to make sure there’s a reason why the cameraman (Miller) would be filming in the first place (a going away party for Rob! Rob! Roooooooob!). It goes way overboard on that end, though, with the cameradude explicitly saying “This is going to be important. People are going to want to see this.” There are also some eyeroll-worthy instances of coincidence (like the Statue of Liberty’s head rolling to a stop at these exact characters’ feet) & terrible self-survival choices (even for the horror genre) that compromise the film’s attempts to feel like a document of a “real” supernatural event. Really, though, what doesn’t work for me in Cloverfield is its human casualty stockpile. It’s especially sad that they’re so blandly represented & so unable to generate sympathy even though the monster mayhem doesn’t start until 20 minutes into the runtime & the characters in question never leave our sight. They’re always around, waiting to baffle & annoy. 10 Cloverfield Lane promises almost the exact opposite experience: three characters trapped in a small space through a cinematic lens instead of a faux documentary one. I expect that set-up (and what promises to be one intense John Goodman performance) will be a much more satisfying experience. I believe this despite optimistically giving the first Cloverfield a shot three separate times, with my opinion only being raised from white hot anger to mild displeasure. That’s still progress, I guess.

-Brandon Ledet

Big Ass Spider! (2014)

November 21, 2015 / swampflix / 1 Comment

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I was tabling at last week’s NOCAZ Fest when two brothers (I’m guessing between the ages of 10 & 14?) named Beau & Joey let me with a film recommendation I promised I’d look into ASAP. I forget exactly how we got on the subject, but it probably had to do with our Marabunta Cinema zine, which is a collection of reviews of movies about killer ants. Beau, the younger of the pair, enthusiastically described the gruesome scenes of a Z-grade creature feature in which a gigantic spider melted the faces off patients in a hospital. When it came to telling me the title of the film, however, he sheepishly deferred to his older, quieter brother, due to a mild expletive in its title. Joey’s response? “Big Ass Spider!“.

Big Ass Spider! is perfectly suited for Beau & Joey’s demographic. It’s got the intentionally campy, Z-movie feel of a Syfy Channel Original but, as the title suggests, its tongue-in-cheek violence is slightly racier than what you’d typically find in the Sharknado format. The titular big ass spider melts faces, stabs chest cavities, and devours victims after grabbing them with its web like Mortal Kombat‘s Scorpion. All of this mayhem is promised as soon as the opening prologue, where the spider is going full King Kong at the top of a Los Angeles skyscraper, soundtracked by a down-tempo cover of “Where Is My Mind?” (in a little bit of borrowed Fight Club cool). Schlock fans are unlikely too find too much new or surprising here, except maybe in the detail that the spider grows exponentially in size by the hour, but the film is intentionally goofy enough to work & I can attest to at least two testimonies of it serving as a decent introduction to the creature feature as a genre.

By the way, speaking of the Syfy Channel, director Mike Mendez’ project immediately following Big Ass Spider! was the previously-covered Lavalantula, a Syfy movie about spiders that spew hot volcano lava at Steve “The Gutte” Guttenberg. Big Ass Spider! may have landed Mendez the job for Lavalantula, but distinctly feels more like a personal pet project for the director. Because he couldn’t afford a casting director, for instance, Mendez supposedly cast the entire film using his Facebook friends list. That means that Mendez is Facebook friends with Lin Shaye (best known for her work in Detroit Rock City & the Insidious franchise), Ray Wise (best known to me from Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!), and Lloyd Kaufman (best known for blessing/cursing the world with Troma Video). Sounds like a cool dude to me. Mendez also stuck to his guns when distributors wanted to rename the film Dino Spider or Mega Spider, claiming that “Big Ass Spider! is the right title for the movie. I felt it in my heart and soul.” I can’t argue with him there. A lot of Big Ass Spider!’s charm is in knowing the whole time that there is a real-life movie called Big Ass Spider! and that you’re watching it.

Despite a couple missteps like an uncomfortable Hispanic stereotype sidekick, a stale “Hide your kids, hide your wife” reference, and some Da Hip Hop Witch-style street interview ramblings, Big Ass Spider! gets by enough on its inherent charm to stand out as an enjoyable, occasionally gruesome diversion. In short, if it’s good enough for Beau & Joey, it’s good enough for me.

-Brandon Ledet

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)

November 14, 2015 / swampflix / 3 Comments

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If anyone tells you that you need something more than just a few cool monsters to make a great film, they’re spreading lies. Sure, over-the-top creature design works best when it’s paired with an intricate narrative structure, as is the case with John Carpenter’s immortal The Thing. It’s not a necessary combo, though. One of my favorite discoveries this past year, for instance, was the creature-laden Monster Brawl, which was essentially just famous monsters murdering each other in graveyard pro wrestling matches with little to no narrative embellishment. The monsters were impressive enough & the premise was silly enough for the movie to work on that bare bones formula. The sensation of watching Monster Brawl brought me back to the days of banging action figures together on the carpeted floor of my childhood home, imagining epic battles between fantastic monsters & superhuman muscle men.

That same childish exuberance for fantastic monsters is what won me over wholeheartedly in the late-60s Japanese film Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (aka The Great Yokai War). The second installment in a series of three Yokai Monsters movies released in just one year’s time (alongside One Hundred Monsters & Along With Ghosts), Spook Warfare was the most popular film of its trilogy, as it focused more on the personalities of the fantastic monsters at its core instead of the humans that live in their presence. For Japanese audiences, the film has a built-in historical context for each of its monsters, but for American audiences unfamiliar with the intricacies of Japanese folklore, the film’s oddball collection of “apparitions” read like psychedelic precursors to the work of such luminaries as Jim Henson and Sid & Marty Krofft. Where I see sentient umbrellas, (literally) two-faced women, and a ladies with snake-esque necks that stretch like Mr. Fantastic, native audiences see very specific legends from the jokingly-titled “Apparition Social Registry” with names like Kappa, Futakuchi-onna, and Kasa-obake.

I say “apparitions” instead of “creatures” because the “spooks” in The Great Yokai War are not quite monsters, but the ghosts of ancient monsters, which adds a whole other fascinating level of awesomeness to their peculiarity. To provide a conflict for these apparitions to combat, the film brings to life a “several thousand years old” monster from the ruins of Babylonia named Daimon. Daimon is a bird-like humanoid wizard prone to blowing himself up to kaiju proportions & possessing the minds of local magistrates in order to turn them into godless tyrants. Daimon is pretty bad-ass, but he stands no chance against the water-nymph bird-fish (who could pass for a bassist in the animatronic Chuck E Cheese band), his long-tongued umbrella, and the ghosts of a hundred of their closest friends. Besides the general disruption of peace & order the ghost monsters are insistent on putting a stop to Daimon’s evil deeds post haste because “Shame will be brought upon Japanese apparitions” if they don’t.

Perhaps the strangest detail about the ghost monsters in Spook Warfare is just how kid-friendly they look. I didn’t use the comparison to the soon-to-follow work of Jim Henson and Sid & Marty Krofft lightly. Many of the creature designs are just aching for plushie doll or action figure merchandise, a sensation backed up by the film’s broad physical comedy & the fact that they befriend children in the film. What’s strange about this is that so much of the film would be a nightmare for certain young audiences. Ghosts take shape from magical, colored mists in spooky swamps. Buckets of giallo-crimson stage blood is spilled in the film’s many brawls. Adult language like “damn”, “bastard”, and “hell” are liberally peppered throughout the script. This is all jarring at first, but when I think back to staging action figure battles on the living room carpet, that sort of violent crassness actually makes total sense. Children can often be goofy & violent in the same breath, so then it’s really no surprise that Spook Wars was somewhat of a cultural hit upon its initial release. Even as an (admittedly goofy) adult, the mere sight of the film’s gang of monsters was enough to win me over as a fan, effectively bringing out my inner child enough to sidestep any concerns with plot or general purpose. Sometimes monsters brawling really can alone be enough to make a great film & Spook Warfare stands as a prime example of that maxim.

-Brandon Ledet