fairy tale

Lagniappe Podcast: Hatching (2022)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the coming-of-age fairy tale creature feature Hatching (2022).

00:00 Welcome

04:30 Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
11:11 Night of the Comet (1984)
17:11 Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
22:39 Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022)
26:34 Looop Lapeta (2022)
30:00 Incantation (2022)
34:04 Love and Leashes (2022)

37:00 Hatching (2022)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lamb (2021)

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It’s difficult to define what qualifies something as Movie Magic, but the dark fantasy film Lamb is electric with it . . . for its opening half-hour.  The first of the film’s three “chapters” builds all its magical-realist tension on our curiosity over what, exactly, is going on with its titular child-creature and the lonely farmer couple who raise it as their own.  Isolated on an Icelandic farm with only sheep to break up the monotony of their quiet, daily chores, a married couple adopt a newborn lamb and swaddle it as if it were a human baby.  We peer into the lamb’s crib wondering what’s going on under those tightly wrapped blankets, what makes it any different from the other lambs who’re routinely born in the barn. We’re invited to look into the eyes of the older sheep on the farm, anthropomorphizing their intellectual & emotional responses to the humans who feed & shepherd them.  The longer we stare, the more they begin to look like expressive, reactive puppets instead of natural creatures, blurring the line between documentary footage and Movie Magic.  The loss of that boundary sets up an endless realm of possibility in what’s going on with the one lamb the couple has decided to raise inside their home, the one that the camera obscures so that our own imagination can fill in the details.  Then, when the baby lamb is shown in full, the magic vaporizes.

My heart sank in Lamb‘s second chapter when it had to stop obscuring its centerpiece creature.  Conceptually, I am onboard with this low-key fairy tale about an isolated couple’s desperation to be parents despite the lingering pain of past attempts, but the practicality of visualizing the human-lamb hybrid they adopt onscreen is a mood-killer.  Specifically, it’s the choice/necessity to supplement its practical effects with CGI that really zaps the Movie Magic out of the picture.  This is the kind of film that really needs the tactility of the Babe animatronics or even the surreal stop-motion of Little Otik to work. Instead, we see a tactile human body toddle across the screen with a cheaply animated CG head superimposed on top of it, never convincingly integrating with the physical world it supposedly occupies.  In close-up, when the lamb-child is napping or quietly observing her adoptive parents, she’s perfectly believable as a real, tangible creature that has magically appeared in the couple’s lives – which is why her more obscured presence in the first chapter works so well.  It’s when the camera pulls back to show her hybrid body structure in full that the spell is instantly broken, leaving Lamb with all the Movie Magic of a Geico commercial.  And since this film isn’t working with a Babe-level Hollywood budget, I’m convinced that the only way to fix it would have been to crudely superimpose her parents’ heads onto different actor’s bodies to level the uncanny playing field.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to Lamb besides the magic of its titular creature-child.  It’s a quiet, unrushed film with very little plot or dialogue.  If you can’t gaze in wonder at the little lamb baby for all three chapters, there isn’t much else to do except wait for the credits (or hope for a scene where the lamb’s “mother” timidly asks her husband “Did . . . did you have sex with our sheep?”).  For a more truly magical narrative about an isolated, troubled Icelandic couple in which human actors dance with unconvincingly animated CG animals, I’d recommend watching Björk’s music video for “Triumph of a Heart”.  There’s way more heart, humor, chaos, and magic in those five minutes than there is in this entire two-hour snooze.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wolf House (2020)

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My single-favorite film discovery so far this year is James Bidgood’s D.I.Y. porno reverie Pink Narcissus, a transcendent fantasy piece filmed almost entirely inside the beefcake photographer’s own NYC apartment. I like to think I’d have fallen in love with the gorgeous, hand-built artifice of that film in any context, but it struck a particular chord in the earliest months of the COVID pandemic when most of us were still adhering to strict social-distancing measures. The idea that you could construct your own beautiful dreamworld inside your cramped living space with just the right amount of artistic (and prurient) self-motivation was genuinely inspiring to me back in April, when the reality of how confined the next year of my life was going to be just started to sink in. And now, a few hellish months later, I’ve been confronted with Pink Narcissus‘s spiritual opposite in The Wolf House: a relentlessly grim, ugly film made under similarly confined domestic circumstances. Instead of reaching for artistic transcendence or beauty, it’s a D.I.Y. fantasy experiment that pummels you into the dirt with the communal cruelty, betrayal, oppression of the world as it really is: a confusing, alienating nightmare that only worsens the longer you survive it.

An experiment in stop-motion animation, The Wolf House filters historic atrocities committed by exiled-Nazi communes in Chile through a loose, haunting fairy tale narrative. It’s traumatizingly bleak, often difficult to comprehend, and I think I loved it. Contextualized as a “lost” classroom propaganda film warning locals against stepping on the commune’s toes (and commune members from attempting to escape its bounds), its paper-thin story is a simple tongue-in-cheek allegory about acceptable behavior in & around an exiled-Nazi stronghold. The Colony proudly reports itself to be an “isolated and pure” oasis in an otherwise menacing South American locale, and disparages a fictional young girl who dared to dream & play for her own amusement instead of working tirelessly to maintain The Colony’s glory. Thinking herself above subservience to The Colony, she runs away to play house with her disgusting pig children in a nearby shack, gradually starving to death without the sweet subsistence provided by the commune’s main export: honey. Meanwhile, wolves lurk outside the family’s door, waiting to devour them as soon as they step outside. This allegory is rooted in specific, real-life atrocities committed by German-Chilean communes like Colonia Dignidad, which can be difficult to fully digest without a post-film Wikipedia deep dive. However, it’s all anchored to two universally familiar cultural touchstones that cut through the confusion: Brothers Grimm fairy tales and the fact that Nazis are subhuman scum.

The Wolf House is much more immediately impressive in its visual craft than it is in its narrative. It recalls a cruder, less dignified version of Jann Švankmajer’s work, as if he were a reclusive serial killer rather than an erudite who went to art school for puppetry. Most of the film is quarantined in the pig-family’s dingy shack, with characters represented both as two-dimensional figures painted onto the walls & furniture (think Adventure Time‘s Prismo) and as barely-functional paper mâché grotesqueries. The entire three-dimensional space of their decrepit home is treated as a canvas, with objects being destroyed, painted over, reconfigured, and mutated in an ever-shifting, impossibly ugly nightmare. Every crudely animated movement within that hellish space is matched to an even more hideous sound cue: pig snorts, wolf breaths, wet smacks of paper mâché bodies breaking down & reforming, etc. It’s a relentlessly grotesque display, one that fully conveys the hideous evils of its fairy tale allegory’s real-life parallels even if you aren’t familiar with that particular pocket of fascism history. The Wolf House is one of those D.I.Y. art objects that feels more haunted than inspired, which is understandable considering the cultural history it’s attempting to process. It’s the ugly mirrorworld reflection of Pink Narcissus: a contained, domestic fantasy realm driven by pain instead of pleasure, grief instead of sensual exuberance. Its vision of domestic isolation is completely fucked, something that resonates deeply right now despite the film’s more alienating allegorical details.

-Brandon Ledet

Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink, 1997)

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When we recently reviewed all of Céline Sciamma’s back catalog for the podcast, the only film in the director’s portfolio that I couldn’t fully get on board with was Tomboy. The 2011 coming-of-age drama is a quiet, bare-bones portrait of children at play that illustrates in the simplest, most direct terms possible how limiting & cruel societal enforcement of gender traits is, which is especially apparent in how young kids are taught to socialize. I enjoyed Tomboy well enough, but it was clearly the slightest effort in Sciamma’s mighty catalog – adhering to a slice-of-life docudrama style that mostly avoids the transcendent catharsis of Sciamma’s superior works (with the exception of one indulgence in care-free bedroom dancing). Weeks later, I stumbled upon a fascinating counterpoint to Tomboy in Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink), a Belgian film that had arrived more than a decade before Sciamma’s. Narratively, Tomboy and My Life in Pink are nearly identical. Both films follow a young child’s misadventures in a new school & neighborhood when they decide to introduce themselves to their peers as a different gender than what they were assigned at birth (and what their parents enforce at home). The difference between them is that My Life in Pink is the extreme opposite of a muted docudrama; it’s prone to frequent indulgences in hyper-stylized escapist fantasy, to the point where it’s practically a fairy tale. It gave me the small taste of transcendent catharsis I was searching for in Tomboy in overwhelming heaps, to the point where I was nearly choking on it. Given that the muted docudrama style of Tomboy is likely the more Intellectual approach to their shared subject, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I gobbled it up.

Ludovic is a seven-year-old child in suburban Belgium (which suspiciously looks like Tim Burton’s dreamlike vision of suburban America) who declares that she wants to live her life as a girl going forward, despite her parents’, school’s, and classmates’ insistence that she be treated and express herself as a boy. The social fallout from this self-declaration of trans identity plays out much the way you’d expect if you’ve ever seen a queer coming-of-age story before. My Life in Pink distinguishes itself less in the actions & trajectory of its characters than it does in the specificity of its style & setting. The nuclear-family suburban backdrop is perfectly illustrative of how gender is societally expressed, reinforced, and policed (even among young children, who are essentially genderless). The film opens with a rapid succession of Business Men husbands in the same suburban cul-de-sac zipping up their wives’ dresses, each in an individualistic way that perfectly illustrates their relationships with sexuality & marital tradition. Meanwhile, Ludovic is playing dress-up with his mother’s & older sister’s clothes & makeup in the family attic, a private moment of delicate self-fulfilling bliss that’s only shattered when she premieres her look-du-jour to the world and receives nastier feedback than anticipated. As an audience, we can predict everything that will happen to Ludovic & her family as her newly forming gender identity steps outside of what’s properly Allowed. Watching this particular kid navigate that painful process is still an enlightening experience, though, especially as we sink deeper into the private fantasy world she keeps hidden away from the cruel adults who’d prefer to lock her in a gender box that obviously doesn’t fit her shape.

The escapist fantasies Ludovic uses to dissociate from her cruel social conditions are the movie’s real selling point. They mostly revolve around a generic Barbie Doll-type character Ludovic is obsessed with, to the point where she frequently mentally projects herself inside the doll’s house & playset. This internal fantasyscape allows the film to indulge in bright, overly saturated colors & plastic dollhouse aesthetics as often as it pleases – blowing up a child’s inner world while playing dress-up to a worldwide playground outside their mind. It’s an aesthetic that also spills over to the stylized, ludicrously Artificial suburbia where Ludovic actually lives, given how the sunflowers are as huge as hubcaps and the neighborhood husbands all back out of their driveways perfectly in sync to start their collective morning commute. That’s not to say that My Life in Pink doesn’t take the day-to-day drama of its protagonist’s unfairly policed childhood gender identity as seriously as Tomboy does with its own. It just approaches that same subject from a more expressionistic, dreamlike lens. It very much feels like a product of its New Queer Cinema era, with a particular debt to how Todd Haynes explored real-world gay crises through a stylized fantasy lens (particularly recalling the segment of Poison about the boy who flew out the window). I don’t believe that approach is any more valuable or insightful than how Sciamma chose to frame the remarkably similar narrative of Tomboy; nor do I believe the opposite is true. Both the docudrama approach of Tomboy & the internal fantasy realm of My Life in Pink have their separate merits (and make for interesting contrast-and-compare companion viewing). I’m just such a sucker for the dollhouse fairy tale aesthetics of the earlier film that I can’t help but choose it as a personal favorite over its more stylistically muted counterpart.

-Brandon Ledet

Baby’s First The Thing

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It may have had a rocky critical & commercial start when it first arrived in the 1980s, but at this point John Carpenter’s The Thing is a verified classic, one of the unassailable titans of the horror genre. Unlike how a lot of horror classics age into being so culturally familiar they’re no longer traumatizing, however, The Thing remains . . . inappropriate for most children. No matter how many times I watch that goopy-gory practical effects showcase, I’m always taken aback by how upsetting it is on almost a cellular level. The grotesque transformations its titular shape-shifting alien beast exhibits onscreen chill me to the marrow in my bones, even now that I know through repeat viewings what’s going to leap onto the screen and when. Of course, there are plenty of macabre children who love being exposed to those kinds of age-inappropriate nightmares long before they’re mature enough to fully appreciate them in context – the kind of kids who grow up to run amateur horror movie blogs. For most children, however, the cosmic grotesqueries of The Thing would be too much to stomach; they require a far more toned-down gateway into that particular end of horror fandom before graduating to the real Thing.

Our current Movie of the Month, the 2010 darky fairy tale Rare Exports, is the perfect school age primer for future The Thing fandom. Whereas John Carpenter’s 80s classic mines the history of monster movies past (using Howard Hawks’s The Thing from the Another World as an entry point) to catch its adult audience off guard with a false sense of familiarity, Rare Exports does the same with a well-worn subject that would be just as warmly familiar to children: the myth of Santa Claus. It doesn’t take much recontextualization to make a magical world-traveling demon who constantly monitors children’s naughty behavior (and penalizes them accordingly) into something unnatural & scary. Like the more recent Michael Dougherty horror-comedy Krampus, Rare Exports rolls back “the hoax of the Coca Cola Santa” to reveal that character’s more authentic, pagan roots in the Finnish folklore of Joulupukki. The way Joulupukki is depicted onscreen in Rare Exports as an unknowable, evolving creature entirely separate from its Santa Claus corollary is much more in line with the shape-shifting alien of The Thing than it is with the set-in-stone demonic image of Krampus. Both Rare Exports & The Thing allow your imagination run wild in determining their respective beasts’ true form, but only one of them takes the time to scar you for life with surgical & animal cruelty gore in the meantime. That’s the one you probably shouldn’t burden your children with.

It admittedly does feel a little odd to recommend Rare Exports as the child-friendly version of The Thing, since it’s the only film of the pair to feature full-frontal male nudity. A good bit of it too. Although Joulupukki never reveals his finalized form in the movie, his little helper elves are essentially scary shopping mall Santas who forgot to wear their uniforms to work, chasing down little children in the snow while entirely nude. There’s nothing sexual about this nudity. The image of naked old men is played purely for childhood terror the same way the goopy surgical monstrosities of The Thing are played for deep phycological discomfort in adults. Because Rare Exports is made with a European sensibility that’s much less squeamish about nudity than Americans are in general, it doesn’t interfere too much with the feeling that this was a horror movie made specifically for children. The only way the naked male bodies on display in Rare Exports really stood out to me was in emphasizing the masculine environment of the entire picture – wherein gruff working-class Finnish men wage war against a Christmas beast in the harsh frozen wilderness. Like in The Thing, no women appear onscreen in Rare Exports, so that both movies feel like they’re about male bonding & male distrust just as much as they’re about terrifying supernatural creatures.

I’m not a parent, so I can’t speak to how that (sexless) male nudity might have played for me if I were watching Rare Exports with my own child. I’d like to think I’d feel more comfortable exposing to them to those naked old men than to Carpenter’s hideous tentacle dogs, but who knows.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, the 2010 dark fairy tale Rare Exports, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Rare Exports (2010)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Hanna made Brandon, Boomer, and Britnee watch Rare Exports (2010).

Hanna: Although I’ve always loved Christmas movies, I had a real distrust in portrayals of Santa Claus in American television as a child. It’s not that I didn’t believe he was real; it’s just that the Santa I loved in Larry Roemer’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special held little resemblance to the one described my Finnish father. That Santa wasn’t a jolly, elderly fellow in from the North Pole, but a half-goat man named Joulupukki (literally, “Christmas Goat”) holed up in a place called Ear Mountain (Korvantunturi) in Northern Finland. Obviously, I thought, the producers of the American Christmas canon were a bunch of hacks who had done no real Christmas research; how else could you mistake a place called “Ear Mountain” for the North Pole? And why didn’t Santa look anything like a goat? It was a very confusing time for me; I always hoped for an accurate portrait of the Finnish Christmas specter. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, by Finnish director Jelmari Helander, fulfilled that Christmas wish a decade later.

Rare Exports brings us to present-day Lapland, where an eccentric, Christmas-loving American named Riley is leading a team of drillers deep into Korvantunturi for reasons unexplained. Riley seems to know that something special is lurking underneath Korvantunturi, and he’s itching to unearth it. A young rural boy named Pietari (Onni Tommila), who has been spying on the suspicious activity, begins researching the mountain; he’s horrified by what he finds, and begins preparing himself, his friends, and his tortured father, Rauno (Jorma Tommila), for Christmas Yet to Come.

All told, Rare Exports gave me an hour and a half of holiday mayhem and deadpan Christmas-themed one-liners delivered by gruff Finnish men, and it was delightful. I always appreciate movies that portray a less popular version of Santa while still adhering to real cultural lore (e.g., Krampus, as opposed to an “Evil Santa” Santa Claus remix). I also love how absolutely weird this movie is (especially the final scene), and how easily the characters accept and adapt to their insane circumstances. Britnee, how does this movie compare to other Christmasy action/horror movies, especially American movies? Did Rare Exports set itself apart, or is it just some good ol’ fashioned Christmas schlock?

Britnee: Christmas horror films are typically either cheesy B-movies (like Santa’s Slay or The Gingerbread Man) or slashers about killers dressed up in Santa suits (like Silent Night, Deadly Night or Christmas Evil). The only Christmas film that I’ve seen that can be compared to Rare Exports would be Krampus. While it’s more of a dark comedy, Krampus isn’t a film about an evil Santa or a psycho dressed in a cheap Santa costume. It’s a film that brings attention to a Christmas character from Central-European folklore. Krampus is a goat demon who punishes bad children during Christmastime, which is much more similar to Joulupukki from Rare Exports than any other film version of Santa Claus. They even both use actual whips to whip bad children’s butts!

Unlike Krampus, which is one of the greatest “bad” horror movies of modern times, Rare Exports isn’t a “bad” movie at all. There are a few cheesy moments and witty one-liners (like the English translation gags during the Santa transaction), but it doesn’t stray from taking itself seriously as much as I expected it to. At first, I thought the film was going about a kid on a mission in a world of adults who dismiss his warnings until it’s too late. It sort of was like that, but the adults surprised me by capturing the “Santa” and trying to make money off of his captivity during the film’s second half. That second half is what really made Rare Exports unique, truly unlike any film I’ve seen before. So, yes, Rare Exports can be compared to American films like Krampus, but it really stands on its own it the best way possible.

Another part of Rare Exports that I really didn’t see coming was the abundance of elderly full-frontal male nudity. Perhaps the most nightmarish part of the film was the herd of naked old elves running after the pile of children in potato sacks. Brandon, were you as shook by the old nude elf men as I was? What are other parts of the film that you found to be skin crawling?

Brandon: The one isolated image that made my skeleton squirm inside my skin was those burlap sacks of writhing children. Like in modern Santa lore, Joulupukki has a fixation on transporting his Christmas goodies around in giant magical sacks here. Instead of red velvet bags of gifts, however, this “Santa” (with the help of his elves, of course) kidnaps naughty boys & girls from their homes in burlap sacks – presumably to be consumed by Joulupukki once he is fully summoned. The writhing sacks immediately look odd, but you don’t fully register what’s inside them at first glance. The whimpering protests from inside those giftbag prisons eventually start to make clear that what you’re looking at is neighborhood children being prepared for a Christmas feast, and that delayed realization makes for a truly horrific feeling. This film is just as much a dark comedy as it is a modern fairy tale, and there are few images I can think of that are darker than those writhing sacks (way more so than the wrinkly sacks hanging from the naked elves).

As much as I enjoyed its morbid humor and its willingness to go there when tormenting children, my favorite aspects of Rare Exports were mostly rooted in the way it functions as a modern fairy tale. The Joulupukki and Krampus traditions make so much more logical sense than the Christmas lore Americans are raised with, what the movie calls “the hoax of the Coca-Cola Santa.” Traditional fairy tales are usually set up as negative reinforcement tactics to scare kids into not doing dangerous (or, often enough, simply annoying) things for their own good & safety. Don’t wander alone in the woods or a witch will cook & eat you; don’t eat strangers’ food without asking or an entire family of bears will eat you; don’t talk to strangers or a wolf will dress in grandma drag and eat you, etc. It makes more sense, then, that a naughty boy or girl being monitored by a powerful, world-traveling Christmas demon would be punished by becoming dinner for that beast, not simply receiving a shittier gift than they’d get if they were good. Surprisingly, one of the most affecting parts of Rare Exports for me was the early woodcut & lithograph prints in the kids’ research about the myth of The Real Santa that reframed him in this fairy tale context. Usually, textual research montages aren’t anyone’s standout favorite moments in horror movies (if anything, they often overexplain background info that no one really needs to know), but I really appreciated it here as a crash-course history in Santa’s fairy tale origins as Joulupukki.

The elderly elves do most of the work in getting this Evil Santa legend across onscreen, of course, as the day is saved before the kaiju Santa beast has a chance to fully emerge from his Korvantunturi prison. I do agree that the image of the elves running naked towards the camera in herds was creepy, but I was personally more disturbed by their dead, child-hungry eyes than I was by their scrotums, which were just kinda . . . there. If anything, the elf scrotes only helped solidify an observation that was present in my mind throughout the film: this is a weirdly masculine movie. The central relationships between a boy and his single father, a boy and his bully/bestie, and a boy and his Christmas demon are all variances of masculine bonding or masculine conflict. In fact, I don’t recall there being a single female character represented onscreen anywhere in Rare Exports; even the neighborhood girls kidnapped as offerings to Joulupukki never escape their burlap sacks to show their faces. The elf scrotums mostly just registered to me as a matter-of-fact extension of the film’s general interest in masculine relationships & bodies, which was not at all what I expected from a dark fairy tale about Santa Claus. I’m not even saying that choice to solely focus on the lives of boys & men was a good or bad thing; it was just something I couldn’t help but notice.

Boomer, did the total lack of female characters occur to you at all during your viewing of Rare Exports? What do you make of how that choice relates to the film’s overall tones & themes?

Boomer: The lack of women in this movie is pretty astonishing, honestly. We never hear anything about what happened to Pietari’s mother at all, just that she used to make gingerbread cookies that Pietari’s father can recreate with modest success. Is she dead? Did she just leave the family? Is Pietari’s father’s harsh coldness the result of being widowed, or is his horrid personality the reason that she’s gone? I hope you’re not waiting for an answer, because we’re not going to get one. From a filmmaking perspective, I get the initial thought process of “This is a harsh and unforgiving place and thus we can reflect that by having only harsh and unforgiving men in this world,” but the moment that idea crosses one’s mind is the moment that one should both immediately rethink their understanding of gender roles and also write a woman in there, fast, before you forget! We know that there’s at least one woman in the area, since Piiparinen’s wife’s hair dryer is among the items stolen in order to facilitate Santa’s thaw, but that’s about it. Where are all the ladies? The only explanation that I can think of is that every woman nearby looked out her respective window, saw a strange naked man lumbering towards their home, and decided to skedaddle. It’s not satisfying, though. I can also see deciding to go full-tilt with the fairy tale elements, with so many of those narratives featuring a dead (or otherwise hopelessly lost) mother, but just because mom died doesn’t mean women cease to exist altogether. Even John Carpenter managed to put Adrienne Barbeau’s voice into The Thing, for goodness’s sake.

The “missing mom” narrative is well-worn, but not so much so that it annoys. While I enjoyed Rare Exports overall, I was put out for much of the film because I intensely dislike narratives that structure one of their primary conflicts around the “child believes, adults don’t listen” trope. It’s right up there with “the liar revealed” as far as dead horse plots for children’s films goes. This film feels like a “child’s introduction to horror” throwback tome, and while it would be easy to say that a scary film with a child protagonist is automatically a film for children, that’s not necessarily the case. Plenty of horror flicks with young heroes are certainly that (Monster Squad, Gremlins, The Gate), but there are just as many where the presence of a child’s viewpoint doesn’t negate that the film is not for kids (Let the Right One In, IT, The Exorcist), and of course those which fall somewhere in the middle (Child’s Play, Poltergeist, Firestarter). For me, it’s the reliance on the Cassandra plot–that the truthteller is disbelieved–that makes the film read as if written for a younger audience, not the child protagonist or the fairy tale nature of the story.

Of course, not that any of this is a bad thing. In fact, it turns the film into a child’s first Thing, which is an idea that delights me. I mentioned it above, but it bears similarities in its images, especially that of The Unspeakable Thing Beneath the Ice. Are there any other influences that you’ve noticed in multiple rewatchings?

Hanna: Rare Exports definitely falls into the tradition of male, rural coming-of-age stories with a bizarre swirl of action and horror, which seems to be of particular interest to Helander. His second feature film, Big Game, contains some of the same themes set in a more straightforward action template: as part of a male rite of passage, a Finnish teenager named Oskari (also played by Onni Tommila) is sent out into the wilderness of rural Lapland to track and capture a large piece of game (in Oskari’s case, the “big game” is the President of the United States, stranded by a plane crash en route to Helsinki). Like Pietari in Rare Exports, Oskari is boyish and meek, lacking confidence in himself and any voice of authority in his community, and ultimately finds his role through unconventional smarts. Big Game is also devoid of women; although it makes more sense in the context of that movie, I think it points to Helander’s singular focus on the development of the rural masculine identity, at the expense of other voices.

I definitely would have enjoyed Rare Exports much more if Pietari’s community had been developed a little further. I wouldn’t have minded a small, all-male cast if the men were truly isolated from any other people, but hinting at the existence of women without featuring them is a little bizarre; I think the presence of a few more women and children would have added some depth to the little herding community without sacrificing the sense of rural isolation. I also think it would have been much more effective to watch the number of children slowly dwindle down throughout the movie; instead, it was as if everyone all the kiddies had Roanoke’d before the film even began. Britnee, were there elements of the Rare Exports world that you would have liked to explore further?

Britnee: I would have loved to watch the excavation of Joulupukki. All we really get to see in regards to Joulupukki is a huge hole in the ground from where it was taken, and then we get to see it in a frozen block of ice with its massive horns sticking out. That’s it. The question of how all the elves got this massive frozen monster into a warehouse weighed heavy on my mind. Did they develop some sort of pulley system or were they all just super strong? It’s like a chunk of the movie is missing. Having more detailed Joulupukki scenes would probably have been quite expensive, but it would have made the film feel more complete.

Another element of the film that would have benefited from more exploration and detail is the bagging of the children in the potato sacks. As Brandon mentioned earlier, the children squirming around in potato sacks was pretty creepy. Having a peek into the process that the elves took to capture the children, shove them in the sacks, and hoard them in the warehouse would have heightened the film’s horror levels. The naked elves creeping into the children’s bedrooms to kidnap them for Joulupukki would have scarred me for life, and I wish the movie would have at least showed one of the kidnappings in action.

The aspect that I found to be the most unique about Rare Exports is its ending. It wasn’t really a happy ending, but it wasn’t really a sad one either. Yes, the children survive and the families involved in the destruction of Joulupukki end up wealthy, but their success is at the expense of enslaving the elves. Brandon, how did you feel about the film’s ending? Did you have any sympathy towards the enslavement of the evil elves?

Brandon: If I’m being totally honest, I 100% saw the final sequence as a happy ending on our initial viewing. I’d even go as far as calling it “cute.” The herders begin the movie at risk of losing their livelihood due to a disastrous cattle season, miserably depressed at the prospect of failing their families as providers, but at the end of our tale they’ve got a thriving new business with consistent annual demand. I guess because the elves had been acting as magical child-abducting creeps the entire film it never occurred to me that this conclusion could be seen as horrific. Their “rehabilitation” and commodification as globally-exported shopping mall Santas was such an upbeat turnaround from their naked, child-collecting mayhem that it didn’t really sink in how fucked up it was to see those humanoids (of a sort) being subjugated as a product. I saw the ending as a clever continuation of film’s function of a fairy tale, explaining where mall Santas come from the same way we explain that human babies are delivered via storks.

You’re totally right, though; the elves were in their own way just acting according to their nature & customs, and the fact that I never really felt for their plight at the end is making me feel a little like imperialist, capitalist scum in retrospect. I’ve got some soul-searching to do in how willing I am to overlook exploitation in a capitalist paradigm, even in fiction. You’ve now got me hoping for a sequel where the mall Santas rebel and return to their roots, bagging up the children who sit on their laps across the globe in accordance to their own cultural tradition and in defiance of their oppressors.

In general, I do think the film leaves more of an impression as a fairy tale & an act of mythmaking than it does an exploration of ethical or interpersonal conflicts in the modern era. Exploitation & enslavement aside, I suspect that from now on I’ll get a kick from thinking of mall Santas as child-hating demons who’ve been newly domesticated as living Christmas ornaments, their newfound good behavior tentative at best. Boomer, do you think Rare Exports will similarly affect the way you look at the ritual of Christmas in the future? Is there anything about the history or mythology of the holiday, as presented here, that is likely to stick with you every December?

Boomer:  I’m not sure I will think of traditions much differently in the future. I’ve always assumed that mall Santas were hiding their disdain for children, so imagining them as demonic entities isn’t really much of a stretch. I think I’ll probably just spend the rest of my life wondering what the adults in the village did with those giant horns. What are they good for? And what, exactly, did the Americans want to do with their giant evil Santa when they got him? Are they just the more festive branch of Weiland-Yutani, incapable of seeing something monstrous as a potential weapon? Or was there something less sinister and more ignorant going on, a metaphor for the Coca-Colonization of Santa Claus? The world may never know.

Lagniappe

Britnee: The landscapes in Rare Exports were gorgeous! The tranquility of the snowcapped mountains and snow dusted trees is a great backdrop for all the insanity that takes place in the plot.

Boomer: Like Brandon, all I could think about when those children were attached to the helicopter was just how miserably cold they must be, trapped in sacks and being whipped about in the freezing air.

Brandon: I was thoroughly charmed by our hero’s costuming throughout this movie. Pietari sports the same punk af haircut as the Swedish kids from We Are the Best!; he walks around the snow in his giant puffy coat & underwear; and his homemade sports-equipment armor is absolutely adorable, especially his butt shield that protects him from being spanked by the elves. There’s something about the attention to his costuming and how he adapts what he’s wearing to the situation at hand that makes him feel like a real, authentic little kid instead of a fictional invention.

Hanna: Ultimately, Rare Exports satisfied my need for a) a spooky Finnish Christmas movie, and b) hordes of old, diseased, elf men nudely galloping into a forest. If you’re interested in exploring the bizarre Yuletide traditions of the Nordic and Scandinavian persuasion, I would encourage you to read up on the annual arson attacks on the Gävle goat in Sweden.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
December: Brandon presents Strange Days (1995)
January: The Top Films of 2019

-The Swampflix Crew

Paradise Hills (2019)

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Like all genre films, Paradise Hills feels like a loose collection of themes & imagery we’ve all seen before. Is it exactly fair or accurate to describe it as Guillermo del Toro’s Stepford Wives set in the Queen of Hearts’s rose garden from Alice in Wonderland, featuring extras from The Hunger Games & Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Probably not, but that rambling assemblage of references at least hints to how familiar individual elements of its fantasy world feels, even if you’ve never seen them arranged in this exact configuration before. What makes Paradise Hills a great genre film is that it still feels entirely unique & spellbinding despite those pangs of familiarity. This is a dark, femme fairy tale I presume was conceived by first-time director Alice Waddinton after a poisonous tea service left her hallucinating & scared for her life. She may be painting with a familiar palette, but the resulting picture is wonderfully warped in new & exciting ways, especially considering how she conveys dread & menace through an overdose of the feminine.

An impressive coterie of young actors (Emma Roberts, Awkwafina, Danielle McDnonald, Eiza Gonzalez) square off against veteran badass Milla Jovovich in a near-future Patriarchal hell. Spurned by their parents for being too queer, too fat, too rebellious, and too difficult to control, the young women are imprisoned in a high-femme reform school that feels as if it were borrowed from a lingerie fetishist’s erotic fiction. Jovovich keeps her prisoners in line as a green-thumb dominatrix who plans to excise their offending idiosyncrasies in the same way she snips the thorns from her endless supply of roses. On the surface this femme obedience school that transforms young rebels into proper mademoiselles feels almost paradisiac. The young women’s torture is mostly a PG-rated barrage of ballet, yoga, and garden tea service. There’s a sinister sexuality & dystopic undertone of Patriarchy to their entire ordeal, though, something that bubbles up to the surface with increasing violence as the unruly students bring their rejection of traditional gender roles to a boil.

The most immediately satisfying aspect of Paradise Hills is the visual splendor of its costume & production design. Although the titular obedience school is obviously an evil force that must be destroyed, there’s an intoxicating allure to its high-femme paradise. The lacy house robes & white leather bondage harnesses that serve as the school’s uniform are their own kind of gendered prison that erase the individual women’s distinguishing features, yet are also undeniably gorgeous & covetable on their own merit. Similarly, the school itself appears to be a romantic spa getaway for the ultra-rich, not the brainwashing torture chamber that it truly is. This is far from the first fairy tale to allure characters in with a bounty of sensual pleasures only for the fruits therein to be revealed as rotten, cursed, or poisonous. In that tradition, Paradise Hills presents a fairytale Eden that’s deadly dangerous precisely because the pleasures it offers on the surface are so tempting. It would be far too easy to lose yourself in this pleasure palace – both literally and figuratively.

Many people are going to roll their eyes at how earnestly this film commits to its over-the-top, Literotica-ready premise, but I found that sincerity to be refreshing. Undercutting the absurdity of its fantasy scenario with snarky one-liners or tongue-in-cheek camp would have broken its dark magic spell. Waddington (boosted by a cowriting credit from the increasingly fascinating Nacho Vigalondo) carves out a very peculiar, particular mood & aesthetic here, even if she uses familiar genre tools to get there. Welcoming in audiences who aren’t already on the hook for the film’s high-femme fairytale mystique with ingratiating humor would only deflate what makes it special. Paradise Hills’s uncanny sense of femme menace works best if the sensual surface pleasures of its fantasy realm instantly appeal to you as a world where you could lose your sense of time and self. It’s a film you sink into, like a warm familiar blanket, until you suffocate.

-Brandon Ledet

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

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A couple years ago when Disney was making ungodly amounts of money off its “live-action” remake of its own animated Beauty and the Beast adaptation, there was an online push to remind everyone that the perfect live-action Beauty and the Beast already exists. Often cited as the inspiration for Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast, legendary French filmmaker Jean Cocteau had already transformed the fairy tale’s 18th century source material into pure cinematic magic in the 1940s, a visual achievement that has been exceeded by few films of any era or genre, much less one that tells its exact story. It turns out I was smart to procrastinate on that online recommendation for the perfect Beauty and the Beast adaptation – not only so that I wouldn’t enter the film overhyped, but also so that my first experience with it would be on the big screen at the 2019 New Orleans French Film Festival. After being confronted with its magic & majesty in a proper theatrical environment, I cannot deny the visual splendor & fairy tale magic of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête; it’s every bit of a masterpiece as it has been hyped to be, just a gorgeous sensory immersion that defines the highest possible achievements of its medium. What I didn’t know to expect, however, what its reputation as the defining Beauty and the Beast adaptation had not prepared me for, was that it would be so deliriously horny. La Belle et la Bête is more than just a masterpiece; it’s a Kink Masterpiece, which is a much rarer breed.

Opening with a classic “Once upon a time” preamble and establishing a toxic dynamic in the prologue where the titular Belle suffers at the whims of her wicked sisters and her financially irresponsible father & brother, La Belle et la Bête is on the surface a picture book fairy tale with few deviations from its genre template. Where the film’s unorthodox horniness starts to creep in is in the oddly sensual magic of the Beast’s castle. Like in the Disney cartoon most of us would be familiar with, the castle is alive & sentient. However, instead of being anthropomorphized as singing, dancing appliances, the castle is alive in more weirdly sensual ways. Stone faces carved into the fireplace silently watch visitors while slowly smoking, as if enjoying a post-coital cigarette. Muscular arms of bare flesh hold candelabras in dutiful, disembodied servitude – jutting out erect from framed adornments on the castle walls. Bedroom doors & mattresses beckon for entry in pleading ASMR whispers, luring Belle into undressed comfort. The castle isn’t alive so much as it’s thirsty, desperate for the sensual touch of a visitor. At first the production design reads as a post-German Expressionist nightmare recalling early Universal Monsters & Val Lewton sets in its impossibly tall, drastically lit interiors. Then, as the horniness & power dynamics of the film’s central romance heats up, it registers more clearly as a sentient sex dungeon – as if the Beast’s longing for sensual human contact were so strong that it started infecting the inanimate objects that house him in a kind of everlasting thirst curse.

In this unexpected kink dynamic, the titular Belle is our unlikely domme. Too beautiful to be living her life as a servant, yet cursed to be mired in domestic labor because of her father’s business debts, Belle is unfairly powerless in an increasingly cruel world. That might explain why she finds taboo pleasure in exerting power over the Beast, who is ostensibly her captor but grovels at her feet. Belle is prisoner to the Beast’s whims in the same way that all kink subs tend to exert control by ordering their doms to issue commands. He laps water out of hands like an obedient dog. He watches her eat extravagant meals in a pre-Internet version of Mukbang. He showers her in jewels & beautiful clothes yet shies away from her eye contact & compliments. He kneels at her feet, awaiting commands, flipping the power dynamic of their captor-prisoner relationship. La Belle et la Bête is a femdom fairy tale, just as much of a kink romance story as Secretary or Crimes of Passion or Belle du Jour, although its costume design pedigree allows it to hide that dynamic in plain sight. The film is genuinely creepy & beautiful as a straightforward fantasy-horror romance; there’s just also a subtly played layer of sadomasochistic kink just under its surface that made me feel a little uncomfortable with watching it in the same theater as young, French-speaking children.

As the endless possibilities of CGI allow for anything to happen onscreen, the magic of moviemaking is slipping away from us. There’s nothing especially magical about remaking an animated film in CG-bolstered live-action in the 2010s, as the tools that allow for that achievement are common to the point of being pedestrian. The practical effects, hand-built sets, and disorienting fairy tale logic of La Belle et la Bête were going to be more memorable that the 2017 Beauty and the Beast “remake” no matter what, then, as its basic building blocks & cultural context are far more unique and, by necessity, inventive. What really makes the film stand out from most modern fairy tale adaptations, however, is how unbelievably horny it feels in a kink power dynamic context. Even your average dark fairy tale corrective like The Fall or Tale of Tales tend to emphasize the violence of their source inspiration much more predominately than the sex. There are many things that make La Belle et La Bete a special, one-of-a-kind work, but I’m not sure enough emphasis has yet been afforded to tis raging, kinky libido.

-Brandon Ledet

Tigers Are Not Afraid (2018)

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I admire the Mexican indie horror Tigers Are Not Afraid for laying all its cards on the table before it even displays its title. Onscreen text explains that drug cartel violence has effectively left many Mexican cities “ghost towns,” with countless orphaned children left behind by the abducted & the murdered. Then, a classroom of children are assigned to write their own fairy tales as a creative writing exercise, just before that classroom itself is disrupted by gang violence & gunfire. In these opening moments we’re introduced to nearly everything the film has on its mind as a post-del Toro dark fairy tale about young kids navigating the seemingly empty streets cleared out by oppressive drug cartels. The “ghost town” descriptor from the opening text is made literal as the vengeful spirits of the cartels’ victims haunt the orphaned children & their deteriorating urban environments to the point where drug wars feel like an ancient, eternal Evil with no perceptible beginning or end. Tigers Are Not Afraid announces this grim scenario upfront in clear terms, but that does little to demystify the moment-to-moment discoveries of its horrific details. Hearing about it & dwelling in its consequences are two entirely different experiences.

Children not only carelessly play near dead bodies in the streets, but are literally followed home by the resulting blood, which moves with intent & apparent sentience. Recalling the fend-for-yourselves childhood narratives of George Washington, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Florida Project, and Nobody Knows, the parentless social structures established here sketch out a world where the only adults around are teachers & murderous drug dealers. Then the teachers disappear. The remaining kids are left alone in their own fight for survival against the villainous Huascas gang. Haunted by the ghosts of the dead (sometimes even the ghosts of their own families) as they call out for revenge, the kids find a balance between remaining under the killer cartel’s radar and re-establishing a semblance of justice in the world by striking back. Tales of cannibalism, Satanic rituals, magic wishes, and shapeshifting tigers complicate their understanding of the conflict, but their main concern is daily survival. An unorthodox domesticity emerges among the children in the rubble as they nomadically shift from one squat to the next, just outside the cartel’s reach. The ghosts of the dead call out for a climactic showdown between the warring factions, which is exceedingly dangerous, seeing how the children are outnumbered & outgunned.

While Tigers Are Not Afraid declares its entire dark fairy tale ghost story about drug cartels conceit upfront, it still leaves plenty of room to surprise in its details. Images of skateboards, rooftop dance parties, animated graffiti, pianos in flames, and ghosts seemingly made entirely of darkness establish an otherworldly urban aesthetic entirely unique to the picture. The film is also admirably committed to its own sense of brutality, threatening to destroy young children by bullet or by ghost without blinking an eye. Anyone especially in love with similar past works like The Devil’s Backbone or The City of Lost Children should find a lot worthwhile here, though there’s a specificity to the Mexican drug cartel context that saves the film from feeling strictly like an echo of former glories. The movie reveals few surprises in the execution of its initial premise except maybe the depths of its brutality, its willingness to incorporate conventional ghost movie scares into its fairy tale tone, and its commentary on how political corruption makes its grim world possible. I suppose its obedience to ghost story & dark fairy tale tropes elsewhere is what makes it a genre picture to begin with, but it finds plenty opportunity in its details to establish its own magical, nightmarish space.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Magic in the Mirror (1996)

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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 Brandon , Alli, and Boomer watch Magic in the Mirror (1996).

Britnee: Moonbeam Entertainment, the sub-brand of Charles Band’s Full Moon Features, produced some of my favorite children’s fantasy and sci-fi films during the early 1990s. VHS copies of Prehysteria!, Dragonworld, and Pet Shop always lingered around my family’s television, but the one Moonbeam film that I just couldn’t get enough of was Magic in the Mirror. There’s just something about the film’s wackadoodle story and low-budget quality that is both memorable and charming. Magic in the Mirror may very well be the root cause of my garbage taste in movies because, until recently reading through the overwhelming amount of negative reviews, I had no idea that anyone could dislike it.

Magic in the Mirror is a modern-day fairy tale. Mary Margaret Dennis is a young girl with an active imagination, but her botanist father and physicist mother fail to give her the attention and encouragement that she desperately needs. She spends most of her time with her imaginary friends, Bella and Donna, and doesn’t have much human interaction. After discovering a bag of magical golden berries and inheriting an antique mirror from her late great-grandmother, she crosses to the other side of the mirror. What awaits her there is a surreal world ruled by human-like mallards that have a passion for tea made of people, which is steeped for a mere 60 seconds (I usually let my Earl Grey steep for 3 minutes).

Brandon, there’s an interesting mix of science and fantasy in Magic in the Mirror. Most of the scenes with Mary Margaret’s mother involve her working on an invention (a laser beam that defies space and time) while Mary Margaret is trekking through a mallard-filled fantasyland. Is there a message being made about science versus fantasy in Magic in the Mirror? Or is it just two cool concepts combined to make one hell of a movie?

Brandon: If we’re going to single out Magic in the Mirror as “one hell of a movie,” I think we have to place the emphasis on the word “Hell.” Most of my appreciation of the film stems from the way it plays like a child’s half-remembered nightmare, so it’s funny to see it described here as “memorable and charming.” Before reading that introduction, I presumed it would be film’s nightmare quality that buried its imagery in the subconscious of 90s Kids™ who saw it young enough for it to torment them permanently, preventing it from being forgotten the way most Moonbeam Entertainment pictures have. Productions from Charles Band’s prime distribution label Full Moon (typified by franchises like Dollman, Ghoulies, Puppet Master, Evil Bong, and Demonic Toys) have always felt a little like kids’ movies that happened to feature R-rated monsters & gore. It’s only natural, then, that its (supposedly) child-friendly sub-brand would come across as an unintentional horror show. Magic in the Mirror was a production recycled from unused material for a canceled Full Moon fantasy film titled Mirrorworld (militant frugality is another one of Charles Band’s calling cards), so for all we know its magical kingdom of malicious mallards was originally designed to terrify adults, like the off-putting humanoid amphibians of Hell Comes to Frogtown. As an exercise in filmmaking craft, Magic in the Mirror possesses all of the cinematic artistry of a Wishbone episode. However, its villainous threat of humanoid ducks who boil children alive to make tea because they enjoy the way it tastes has a potency that far outweighs the limited means of its production values. In fact, the film’s aggressive cheapness somehow makes it feel even more sinister, as if we were an audience of children invited over to a D.I.Y. production of the Howard the Duck movie as a stage play in an adult stranger’s basement. By shifting the focus away from intentional monster-based scares to a children’s fantasy context, Full Moon had somehow delivered one of the most genuinely creepy films in its catalog. Until I can forget the sounds of these cursed duck beings greedily slurping their murder-tea, I’m going to be losing a lot of much-needed sleep. I can only imagine that effect would be even worse if I had caught this movie in its early VHS days (although, like Britnee, I had a strong childhood fondness for Prehysteria!, so who knows).

While I’ll concur that the film’s mixture of science fiction & fantasy as if they were two sides of the same coin was interesting, I’m not convinced the movie thought through the significance of their convergence to any great extent (unlike the recent animated gem Mary and the Witch’s Flower). The mother’s invention of an antimatter raygun almost doesn’t qualify as sci-fi at all, since its childlike logic is so far outside the bounds of reality. The divisions between those two genres seem to be present only to mirror the divisions between Mary Margaret and her mother. Mary Margaret is a fantasy-minded child with an overactive imagination. The too-serious adults in her life (especially her mother) refuse to pay her any attention because they only care about boring, rigid adult stuff like science, careers, and facts. In a way, it’s totally appropriate that the sci-fi aspect of the mother’s antimatter raygun (along with the botanist father’s cataloging of magic berries) only make sense in a fantasy context, since the film is told from Mary Margaret’s detached-from-reality perspective. Magic in the Mirror is by no means singular in its premise of a young girl learning the ways of the adult world through a nightmarish adventure in a fantasy land; a short list of similar (but more substantial) works might include MirrorMask, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Labyrinth, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, His Dark Materials, and former Movie of the Month Paperhouse. The way it captures a young child’s isolation among adults who don’t have the time of day for their imaginative whimsy has its own merits, though, especially as Mary Margaret & her mother attempt to breach the invisible barrier of the mirror to reconnect with each other, each with their own tools (the magic berries & the raygun, respectively). This belittling feeling of being ignored by the too-serious, fact-minded adults around you is very relatable for kids and it’s one I can only remember being addressed this extensively in the much classier Val Lewton picture Curse of the Cat People.

Boomer, we seem to be painting two portraits of Magic in the Mirror here. One is a thoughtful expression of childhood frustration with being ignored by the adults who lord over you. The other is a subliminal nightmare that lingers only as a fear of cheaply costumed duck-people who boil children alive for the pleasure of the taste. Did either of these qualities overpower the other in your viewing of the film or did they work perfectly in tandem, like two realms on opposite sides of the same magic mirror?

Boomer: Unlike you, Brandon, I didn’t find the ducks–excuse me, Drakes–all that scary. Maybe if I were a child the first time I saw it, I would have had a different experience, but as it is, the flappy mouths and glug-glug-glug drinking sounds were too similar to the intentionally comical appearance of the eagle-headed colonel from Danger 5 to elicit anything other than laughter from me (which it did, every time). If anything, their sped-up waddling and the terrible flying effects render them adorably pathetic in spite of their menacing tea habits. Had I been a child during my first viewing, I would have found the Mirror Minders the far creepier creatures, as the thought of an oversized manchild in drab motley watching me from the other side of my mirror is a much more disturbing thought in its abstract than being boiled alive for a mere sixty seconds. I know that they’re supposed to be charming in a Mr. Tumnus way, but their high pitched voices and the “I used to be a birthday clown but now I live in the woods” color palette aren’t exactly virtues to me. I, too, am a longtime fan of Full Moon Entertainment, and frequently find myself extolling its virtues, like the fact that it was one of the first studios to have an interconnected film universe, with the eponymous main characters from their respective films coming to blows in the crossover Dollman vs. The Demonic Toys (which also featured a shrunken nurse from one of my personal favorites, Bad Channels, as Dollman’s love interest). That doesn’t mean I’m going to give a pass to just anything that Band put his hands on (I submit my review of Dungeonmaster as evidence), but I found this film more charming than alarming, despite the Mirror Minders. There is a bit of a creep factor, but it does, as you say, work in tandem with its more traditional fantasy fare.

The way that the film steals (or “pays homage to,” if you’re feeling generous) images from other dark children’s films of the 80s and early 90s really contributes to its overall charm. The influences of Lewis Carroll’s Alice duology are obvious (and explicitly pointed out in the film’s trailer), but Magic in the Mirror carves out a place in that same rhetorical space as 80s kid flicks with a dark undertones and anchors itself there. The visual of Mary Margaret approaching her great-grandmother’s herbiary could be from any number of films, but there’s a definite NeverEnding Story vibe as the framing calls to mind the moment that Bastian finds the book with the Auryn on the cover in Mr. Coriander’s book shop. Further, although Return to Oz hews closer L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels than the 1932 musical to which it is supposedly a sequel, it carries over the same “Oz is a hallucination/dream” conceit as the Judy Garland film. Once our heroine crosses back over into Oz, she meets the witch Mombi, who is played by the same actress as the cruel woman who runs the sanitarium in Kansas; her imagined mechanical man Tik-tok is influenced by the “face” in the machine that the woman intends to use to electrocute poor little Dorothy’s brain. This wasn’t a new idea even at the time (for instance, Captain Hook is traditionally played on stage by the same actor who portrays Mr. Darling, dating back to the earliest theatrical presentations of Peter Pan), but the similar dark tone to Return works to give Magic in the Mirror perhaps more gravitas than it rightly deserves. Dragora is played by the same actress as Mary Margaret’s principal, her vizier is the same actor as her mother’s douchey assistant, and all of the characters on the other side of the mirror have names that are similar to the scientific nomenclature in the herbiary. There’s no implication that the mirror world is a fantasy in the psychological sense (especially once Dr. Dennis crosses over and meets her royal doppelganger), but if the director were to claim he’d never seen Return to Oz, his pants would likely burst into flame.

Perhaps the most important commonalities in all of these works are the dual themes of grappling with and overcoming parental alienation coupled with a desire for the retention of the comforts of childhood, which bears some inspection. Dorothy Gale is an orphan being raised by her elderly aunt and uncle, who don’t understand her worldview or imagination. Bastian Balthazar Bux is the son of a widower father who keeps his child at arm’s length due to his grief over the loss of his wife. Jennifer Connelly’s character in Labyrinth feels overlooked by her family in lieu of the attention lavished upon new baby Tobey, and isn’t ready to forsake her LARPing to fall into the role of caregiver for her little brother. Alice’s parents are never mentioned, but readers can infer her relationship with her sister to be one of guardianship, and much academic ink has been spilled over this interpretation. In every instance the fantasy otherworld seems to be an escape but ultimately proves to be a crucible that causes each character to grow and have a better understanding of both themselves and their parents, and return home to find that, in their absence, the parental figures have learned to be more accepting of the child character as well. Dorothy realizes that there’s no place like home, and is moved by Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s concern for her. Bastian learns that he can’t live entirely in his fantasies, and Mr. Bux sweeps his son into a long overdue hug after realizing that his blind grief over his wife nearly cost him his son as well. Sarah returns home with a newfound love for her brother and realizes that her fantasy world will always be there if she needs it, but shouldn’t consume her entirely; she has a pleasant interaction with her step-mother and realizes that being a big sister is an adventure all its own. The narrative of Mary Margaret and her parents follow this model so slavishly it’s almost paint-by-numbers, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The fact that these stories continue to be created and continue to be popular speaks to a near-universality of this metaphorical journey, and likely will as long as there are children whose budding maturity arouses confusing feelings of the dual but opposed desires for independence and attention, for individuality and community (so . . . forever).

My roommate has, of late, developed a fascination with soap operas. One of the reasons for this is that he loves anything that he feels like he, an amateur, could make himself. The Bold and the Beautiful so cheaply and poorly made that it captivates him, and I understand that, because that’s often how I feel about Full Moon (and Moonbeam) flicks. Other than the generally well-made puppets, there’s a pall of cheapness permeated with earnestness that lends these endeavors a charm that isn’t fully earned. As an example, I’d like to point to the scene where Mary Margaret finally meets the queen after escaping from the Drakes; you as the viewer should feel an air of majesty and magic around her, but that intended effect is completely undercut by the drabness of the dead grass all around her throne. Like, you couldn’t have sent someone out there the day before to spray paint the grass to make it uniformly, magically green? But no: this scene plays out in a field that is perfectly manicured but very, very brown. Alli, were there other parts of the film where it was obvious to you that the filmmaker’s reach exceeded their grasp? Did you find that endearing like I do, or no? What worked and what didn’t for you?

Alli: I’m going to be sadly honest here and say that this one just didn’t click for me as far as being amateurishly charming. I just thought it was bad. That being said, this discussion has given me a new angle to explore this.

Initially my reaction was that it felt like the children’s film version of Troll 2, but less fun because things that are obviously meant to appeal to children often just come across as obnoxious to me. The Mirror Minders, for instance, got on my nerves in a way that very few things can. (To get personal for a second, I think it’s something to do with the fact that Tansy reminded me of my ex.) I thought that the fact that the duck suits, while aesthetically great, were made in such a way that the actors literally couldn’t walk in them was so haphazard and ill-conceived. The whole plot felt taped together from bits and pieces that the writers found from previously scrapped ideas, resulting in an overall incoherence.

However, now I want to view it as if the purpose was to convey the feeling of a child’s point of view and how a child would approach filmmaking. I have a nephew who comes up with bizarre, horrifying ideas and plot lines that zig and zag in wild directions. If he were to write a movie, it would feel a little like this. Of course it’s a cheap aesthetic. Kids have a way of taking a book of unprotected pressed leaves and making it into a grimoire. In that way, I feel like the filmmakers here really hit the mark. It felt like they put a lot of time and energy into the ideas that really caught them and let everything else slide. For instance, the Mirror Minding chamber is a well-designed set that perfectly contrasts between the two worlds. The costumes for the queen and the Drakes are quite nice for a shoestring budget, even if waddling and running in those duck costumes seems like it was a dangerous endeavor. I feel like all of this put together would really appeal to children who hyperfocus on the ideas that they’re really in love with. And in that way, the movie works. Just not for me.

One of the things that seemed extremely undeveloped for me was Mary Margaret’s parents’ marital problems, which result in both of them trying to control their daughter’s interests and behavior whenever they happen to be paying attention to her. We see that her dad is a little bit of a depressed layabout and that her mom is a career focused scientist with her eyes on the prize, but everything else is given to us in hints. For instance, Lazlo seems to be constantly flirting with her, and the dinner scene seemed like a wildly inappropriate staging for a swinger’s party that a child was just dragged into.

Britnee, what do you think of that dinner party scene? Am I reading too deeply into this?

Britnee: The dinner party scene always seemed a little odd to me. And for a weird ass movie like Magic in the Mirror, that’s saying a lot. Mary Margaret is so out of place at that dinner. I know that’s what was intended, as parts of the film that take place in the “real world” spend a lot of time showing us how Mary Margaret doesn’t belong, but that scene just doesn’t feel right. No one recognizes that she’s a child, and she’s treated as a fellow grown up during the dinner. The dinner guests (Lazlo and his wife) do not like Mary Margaret one bit, and it’s more of a dislike of her being at the dinner rather than a dislike of her personally. The possibility of the two wanting to get it on after dinner with Mary Margaret’s parents would be a fantastic reasoning behind their strange behavior.

I wouldn’t put it past a Moonbeam feature to have some sexual innuendo sprinkled throughout the film, even though this is 100% for children. Moonbeam movies are pretty trashy for being family features, which is probably why I’m drawn to them so much. I have this image of the film crew throwing back a few beers while saying something along the lines of, “Dude, wouldn’t it be funny if, like, Mary Margret’s parents wanted to get it on with Lazlo and his wife? That would be totally sick! Let’s make it happen!” So Alli, I definitely do not think that you’re reading too deeply into the weird dinner party scene and the marital problems of the parents. If anything, you’ve pointed out the obvious.

While on the topic of the parents, I found their characters to have some gender-swapped traits, as far as most parents in 90s movies go. The dad is a very soft-spoken, artsy fellow that is a little more understanding of Mary Margaret’s creativity, but the mother is a career-minded scientist that doesn’t seem to understand her daughter at all. Most children’s films of this era have a mother who is supportive of their child’s wild imagination, while the father has a very no-nonsense type of personality. I’m not sure if a statement was trying to be made here, but if there was, it’s not a very positive one. The myth of career women not being able to be maternal seems to be purposefully implied with the mother’s character.

Brandon, what are your thoughts of gender roles of Mary Margaret’s mother and father? Do you think that Mary Margaret’s mother is villainized for being a career-minded mother?

Brandon: It’s certainly valid to read that icy mother-daughter dynamic as an indictment of women who chase career opportunities at the supposed expense of their domestic responsibilities. There’s plenty of other examples of that shrewish, disciplinarian mother trope in 80s & 90s family-friendly cinema that makes Magic in the Mirror appear to be a thoughtless participation in a sexist cultural ideology (Sally Fields in Mrs. Doubtfire immediately comes to mind, if nothing else). I’m just not convinced that the mother is villainized, exactly. She’s more in desperate need of being reminded of the value of childhood play & open-ended imagination. As potentially (and wrongfully) critical it may be of the way the mother balances home life with professional ambitions, the dynamic she has with her less . . . intense husband does recall a common, unfair expectation of women to be the daily disciplinarians of children while fathers get to enjoy the benefits of filling a kind of goofball best friend role. It’s a dynamic that’s been more purposefully explored elsewhere (Lady Bird being an excellent recent example), but I do think it has a real life significance.

What I’m struggling to interpret in retrospect, though, is how the mother’s real life relationship with Mary Margaret correlates with her mirrorworld avatar. In more classic films like The Wizard of Oz & MirrorMask, real life characters’ fantasy realm counterparts are typically amplifications of whatever anxieties they inspire in the young protagonist. In Magic in the Mirror, actor Saxon Trainor is the most significant player to pull double duty as a character in both realms: she plays the uptight scientist mother in the “real” world and the floral, despotic queen of the mirrorworld whose rule of the land is being challenged by the Drakes. Boomer, can you help me make sense of what these two characters have to say about each other in tandem? The usurping drake queen is portrayed by the same actor (Eileen T’Kaye) who appears as Mary Margaret’s schoolteacher, Mrs. Mallard, so the avatars might be saying something about the role of authority figures in Mary Margaret’s life, but it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what. The easy answer is that the dual casting was solely a Charles Band-brand, money-saving manuever, but I don’t fully buy that.

Boomer: I’ll try! In the classic ’32 Oz, Margaret Hamilton is both the horrible Elmira Gulch, a shitty neighbor who taunts Toto into attacking her in order to have an excuse to have the dog put down, and then in the fantasy world (again, I feel the need to stress the idea that Oz is a child’s fantasy as being a film-only conceit) she is the Wicked Witch of the West who is Gulch’s reflection as a figure of evil and terror, right down to threatening Dorothy’s dog. In Return, the asylum attendants who move patient beds from place to place on squeaky wheels are reimagined in Oz as the creepy Wheelers, again played by the same actors. It’s a recurring trope of fantasy, as the majority of these films present the idea that a child’s fantasy world is a rhetorical space for that child to inspect, explore, and perhaps expunge their conflicting emotions about the world as seen through their eyes. As a society, we’ve progressed far beyond the relatively shallow understanding of human psychology that characterizes the work of Sigmund Freud, but there are still elements of his theories that hold true; he was of the opinion that, until they reach a certain level of maturity, children have a very black and white view of morality, and they cannot rationalize “good” and “evil” as being constituted within the same person. This was further explored by Bruno Bettelheim (admittedly also a problematic source) in his book The Uses of Enchantment: “all young children sometimes need to split the image of their parent into its benevolent and threatening aspects.” Essentially, most of these films are modern interpretations, adaptations, or reinventions of the fairy tale, and as such they textually examine the dichotomy of the “true” parent and the “pretender” parent. We see this most often in the way that fairy tales often feature an evil stepmother, which is a sanitization of older stories in which the biological mother was the cruel one. The switch to the use of the stepmother was an invention on the part of the Grimm Brothers (check out the chapter on the absent mother in Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde for more info about this phenomena). To further quote Bettelheim: “the typical splitting of the mother into a good (usually dead) mother and evil stepmother […] is not only a means of preserving an internal all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good, but it also permits the anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother” and it also preventing the associated guilt “about one’s angry thoughts and wishes about her.”

Mary Margaret’s relationship with her mother is a textbook example of this dichotomy: her real mother, though loving, seems to have no idea how to interact with a child or even how children conceptualize the world; she even admits as much in her laboratory. As a result, Mary Margaret has a mother who cannot connect with her in the way that her father does, who has no room for flights of fancy or imagination. As Britnee noted above, Mary Margaret is essentially treated as a small adult and not a child. In contrast to her relationship with her father, who seems to work from home, have a job that even a child could understand, and have endless free time, her mother has a lab, has a job that is incomprehensible to a child (and me, really, because this anti-matter laser is fucking nonsense), has rules and boundaries that are enforced but neither explained nor understood, and is distant emotionally and often absent. With this as a source of unidentifiable (to a child) anxiety, it makes complete sense that Mary Margaret casts Sylvia as Queen Hysop in her fantasy world; the queen is an absolute authority who is likewise cold and distant, rules her kingdom with a set of seemingly arbitrary rules that are not explained, and exacts punishment without explanation. As a method of discipline, being “planted” is simply a fantasy version of being told to stand in a corner; as a worldview, a queen’s “I don’t have to listen to anything; I’m the queen” is not dissimilar from a mother’s “Because I said so.” It makes perfect sense that Mary Margaret would cast her mother in this role in her fantasy world.

Except! This isn’t Mary Margaret’s fantasy. The world on the other side of the mirror is completely real, and although Sylvia/Hysop are not the only doppelgangers/analogues on both sides, most of the characters aren’t. There’s no equivalent to Mr. Dennis on the other side, nor do Tansy or Bloom have mirror images on “our” side. Magic in the Mirror is trying to have it both ways, treating the fantasy world as a real place (like in the Oz books) while incorporating the conceits and rhetorical strategies of those works which treat fantasy worlds as literally fantasy and entirely in the mind of the protagonist (like in the Oz films). As a result, there’s a separation in the metaphorical batter that I think is causing your confusion. Alli, you mentioned that this film doesn’t work for you; I doubt that its internal inconsistency as to whether this is a fantasy film or a fantasy film is likely not the reason, but would you have preferred one or the other? Do you feel like you could have gotten more out of it if the filmmakers had chosen one tack and stuck with it?

Alli: The lack of internal consistency is definitely not what didn’t work here. I guess I just don’t have the same enthusiasm for cheaply made kids’ movies that I have for ones geared towards adults. I don’t think I can handle the unironic, saccharine acting or the film school aesthetic. There was a time and place for that in my life, and it’s sadly over.

However, if I have to choose, I think I would have preferred this movie to stick to the fantasy. I have a big soft spot for everything fantasy, and there’s really not enough fantasy films out there, which is probably why I’m such a big Del Toro fan. It’s a shame the vast majority of fantasy film is low budget and aimed at children, but I think children need fantasy and escape in their lives, however low budget it is. The idea of getting away to a mysterious land and being a hero is empowering, even in something as ridiculous as this. Whereas, a fantasy film would still be empowering, but those always have a bigger dose of the horror of self exploration. Alice learns that a dream world with a lack of focus isn’t all fun and games. Coraline learns to forgive her parents for being busy after finding out that an overbearing mom, albeit exaggerated, is terrifying. Mary Margaret never learns anything about her own behavior. She just escapes. And I like her all the better for not having changed and being the same creative, stubborn child at the end. That’s the beauty of true fantasy for children; kids find out that they were and are strong.

It would have been neat for the movie to retain both the internal fantasy elements and the fantasy/scifi elements like A Wrinkle in Time does. I know that’s a bit more elegant for fare of this kind, but I think it could have been done with a little less focus on the lives of the parents. The whole parental plot in general just felt like a placeholder for something else. Probably, more adventures and obstacles in this mirrorworld that they didn’t have the budget for or the inclination to write.

Lagniappe

Alli: I like that there’s no clear-cut good side in this story. Obviously, massive ducks bent on making tea out of other life forms is definitely bad, but who are the good people here? The queen literally plants her subjects after no trial or due process. I don’t see how that’s preferable to Queen Dragora. I guess the good side is the Mirror Minders? I don’t know, but I appreciate the subtlety.

Boomer: The fact that the main character’s name was Mary Margaret is terribly distracting. It took me a minute to realize why it was so familiar, until I remembered that this was the name of Ginnifer Goodwin’s character in the “real world” on Once Upon a Time, another piece of contemporary enjoyable-in-an-unintended-way-but-also-terrible fairy tale media that I happened to stick with for longer than I should have for reasons of my own (#swanqueen). Also, as far as a final question, what was up with the use of that county courthouse as the “castle” of Dragora and her comically sped-up waddling henchmen?

Brandon: While I might be the only member of the crew to be genuinely terrified by the look of them, I do believe the Drakes are the main reason to seek out Magic in the Mirror. Not only do they offer bizarre insights like an answer to the eternal question “What would Howard the Duck look like in lipstick?,” they they also include the laziest, most nonsensical “wordplay” you’re ever likely to hear in a finished screenplay. It’s unclear what failed puns were intended when Drakes refer to their mallardian queen as “your Quackiness” or “your Quacktitude,” but they’re laughably half-assed in the attempt. I should warn you, though: do not be fooled into watching the sequel Magic in the Mirror: Fowl Play. Despite what may be promised in its title & cover art, there isn’t necessarily any more Drakes content in that picture than there was in the first one. Also, the whole thing appears to have been filmed in a crewmember’s living room while the sets of the first film were being hurriedly broken down, which might as well be the case since both films managed to secure a 1996 release. Full Moon truly is a wonder. If, as Boomer suggests, the charm of Magic in the Mirror is partly that you, an amateur, could have made it yourself, the charm of Fowl Play is that it looks like it could’ve been made by your kids. And not even the more talented ones.

Britnee: When the mallards make their infamous people tea, the people are steeped for 60 seconds. I don’t think that a human would necessarily die from being boiled alive for a mere minute (I refuse to Google this in fear of the results), but they would be severely injured once they are pulled out of the giant duck teapot. It would be interesting to know what happens to the people after the steeping. Are they given medical attention and returned to the other side of the mirror? Are they thrown in some sort of mass grave where they will eventually succumb to their injuries? I haven’t watched Fowl Play, but I’m almost positive this isn’t explored in the film. It would just be nice to know the full story, but maybe some things are better left unanswered.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
May: Boomer presents Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
June: Alli presents Gates of Heaven (1978)
July: Brandon presents Born in Flames (1983)

-The Swampflix Crew