horror comedy

It’s What’s Inside (2024)

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This is a movie that it’s really best to go into as blind as possible. I was supposed to see this one back in March at SXSW, and it (along with I Saw the TV Glow) was one of the ones I was most excited about, even though I ended up getting bumped from both of them by passholders (such is the nature of being a townie). I avoided reading anything more about it until it premiered on Netflix this week, and it was all that I could have dreamed of and more. I’ll put up a spoiler warning before I get into anything that gives too much away, but I’d recommend you skip this review if you haven’t seen it yet, and avoid any other reviews that might reveal too much about the film’s plot. 

Shelby (Brittany O’Grady from White Lotus) and her boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini) have been together for nine years, and it’s less than blissful. Shortly before they travel to attend a wedding of one of their old college friends, Shelby attempts to seduce Cyrus while wearing a blonde wig, a fantasy of his that she was less than enthused about. When she enters the room, however, she catches him masturbating to a gangbang video, having (unbeknownst to her) just navigated two tabs over from the Instagram account of Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Cyrus’s longtime crush who was part of the same circle of close knit friends and who is now an influencer of some notoriety. The groom to be is Reuben (Devon Terrell), who is soon to marry a woman named Sophia, but, the night before the wedding, he’s hosting a final party at the home of his late mother, an artist who purchased a stately manse and turned it into a living exhibit, meaning that one might go down a corridor and end up in a room that looks like an inside out disco ball, with a light pulsating at the center. Also in attendance are stoner Brooke (Reina Hardesty), modern day flower child Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), and trust fund kid and Post Malone wannabe Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood, of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina). An eighth friend, Forbes (David W. Thompson), is mentioned, and the falling out that he had with Dennis is revealed in flashback. Forbes was invited but never responded, although he does surprise the others by showing up at the party, carrying a suitcase that holds something mysterious inside. 

There’s a similar “trapped a party that you can’t leave” vibe here that’s reminiscent of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, although the twists and turns that each film takes are starkly divergent. As a setting, Reuben’s mother’s house and all of its installations make for a film that, despite being set almost entirely in one house, manages to remain visually interesting throughout. Odd sculptures and light fixtures litter rooms that feel as if they were designed to make it feel like you’re inside of a beating heart. There’s even a literal glowing sign that says “TRAUMA,” even though this is not that kind of movie. The tension between Cyrus and Shelby is palpable and real, and his lack of interest in getting married or even engaged is something that other characters take note of and comment upon, and Cyrus’s defensiveness only draws attention to what a terrible boyfriend he is. Not only does he not respond when Shelby tries to give him one of his fantasies, but he’s also clearly lying about how often he’s jerking it on PornHub despite having promised to save his sexual energy for his partner. When she’s not around, he complains to his old buddies that she’s always trying to get him to go out and “have new experiences,” his voice dripping with disdain when he mentions that she tried to get him to go dancing. He’s not evil; he’s just selfish, withholding, and dishonest. Once they get to the estate, it becomes more and more clear that there’s a lot of that going around. Despite it being the night before his wedding, Reuben is clearly still in love with Maya, whom he dated years earlier, and there’s also romantic history between Dennis and Nikki, which further complicates things. And boy, are we going to get to explore every angle of these sexual and romantic dodecahedron. 

Ok, this is your last chance to get out before spoilers. You have been warned. 

As we find out in a story that is told to Shelby about a party in college that she didn’t attend, Forbes and Dennis got into a fight years earlier when Forbes brought his high school aged sister, Beatrice, to a party, where she got too drunk and the cops were called, resulting in Forbes being expelled. After that he moved out west, got involved with tech, and hasn’t really been in contact with the others since. In the present, Forbes opens his suitcase to reveal a device that he convinces the others to try by putting electrodes on their temples, promising a “twenty second experience.” What then happens is a full on Freaky Friday, in which all of the members of the group swap consciousnesses for a brief period of time. Although Shelby is understandably freaked out about the fact that Forbes shuffled everyone’s minds around without really explaining what he was about to do, Cyrus pressures her into playing a game that Forbes proposes. Similar to Mafia or Werewolf, the eight party-goers swap consciousnesses with one another, with Forbes acting as DM. If you guess who someone is, they have to admit the truth and wear a Polaroid of who’s “inside,” but if you guess incorrectly, you must reveal yourself and get no further guesses.

The first round ends up being a success for everyone but Cyrus. When a guess is made that Cyrus is in Dennis’s body, the true occupant, Forbes, pretends that this is correct, leaving Cyrus, who is in Reuben’s body, to be forced to play along that he’s actually Forbes in Reuben’s body (confused yet)? Although Cyrus-in-Reuben first tries to use this to his advantage when he realizes that Reuben’s old flame Maya is in Nikki’s body—Maya-in-Nikki is hot for Reuben while Cyrus-in-Reuben is hot for Nikki—he quickly weirds her out, then is forced to watch as Shelby-in-Brooke has a good time with Dennis-in-Cyrus. For Shelby, she’s having the subjective experience of being with her boyfriend(‘s body), but one who’s fun-loving and willing to dance with her, and when she starts to loosen up and joke about Cyrus’s porn habits, he’s forced to continue to pretend to be Forbes-in-Reuben. After everyone switches back, it’s now Cyrus’s turn to be the one who doesn’t want to play, while Shelby tells him that she’s actually having a good time. When he insists that they work out a sign between them that will let the other know who they really are, she reluctantly agrees, but once the second round begins, none of the other participants returns the sign, so Cyrus-in-Forbes wanders the party, sullen and miserable. Things really take a turn for the worse when two of the group sneak off and hook up, again per the same mutual inner-attracted-to-outer situation as Cyrus and Maya in the first round, and they end up falling to their deaths. Now, two people find themselves unable to return to their own bodies, leading to friction between them and the others who have bodies to return to, while Forbes realizes that he’s made a huge mistake and attempts to simply take the device and flee. From here it’s a twisting, turning game of manipulation as each person tries to figure out where they’ll end up once they all sit down from the game of mindswap musical chairs. 

The visual language of the film is a lot of fun. Early on, one of the partygoers mentions that she has been working on a new art form, wherein she draws images of people inside of images of other people, which are revealed by placing colored plastic over the drawings that filter out the top image and show what’s underneath. This neatly sets up later scenes in which we the audience, looking through different panes of glass in the mansion, see who’s inside of whom at certain points. The flashback to the night that Forbes and Dennis had their falling out is told through a series of monochromatic still images that look like Instagram-ready party pics, with a mini-Rashomon playing out as Brooke and Maya recall certain details slightly differently as the images change in real time to reflect the corrections from each storyteller. It’s also an interesting choice that we spend most of the film with Cyrus, regardless of which body he’s in, as he moves through the party, given that he is, for all intents and purposes, one of the antagonists of the film, at least when it comes to the way that he treats Shelby. His narcissism drives the narrative, and it’s satisfying to see him get his comeuppance, even if his punishment far outweighs his actual sins. I don’t want to give any more away; just go watch!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990)

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There will be countless reviews of Coralie Fargeat’s high-style gross-out The Substance that point to the body horror titles of the 1980s & 90s that influenced its over-the-top, surrealistic practical effects.  Instead of echoing those shoutouts to Yuzna, Cronenberg, and Hennenlotter—the gross-out greats—I’d like to instead highlight a different VHS-era relic that telegraphs The Substance‘s peculiar brand of horror filmmaking.  While Fargeat’s most memorable images result from the squelchy practical-effects mutations of star Demi Moore’s body as she takes extreme measures to reverse the toll that aging has taken on her career, long stretches of the film are less body horror than they are 1980s workout video.  Moore’s aging body is her entire livelihood, given that she hosts a retro, Jane Fonda-style morning workout show in a leotard, stripping & exercising on America’s television screens.  When she gives monstrous birth to her youthful replacement in Margaret Qualley through Yuznian transformation, the show zooms in even tighter on the workout host’s body – featuring aggressively repetitive closeups on Qualley’s gyrating, lycra-clad ass.  At least half of The Substance is essentially a horror-themed workout video, so any recommendations of vintage schlock primers for what it’s achieving should include horror movies that cashed in on the 1980s gym culture craze.  There are a few standout workout-horror novelties to choose from there, most prominently Death Spa and Killer Workout.  However, there’s only one horror novelty that matches The Substance‘s full-assed commitment to spoofing 80s workout video aesthetics: a VHS collectible titled Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.

Linnea Quigley was only in her early 30s in the early 90s, but her workout video spoof already finds her panicking about the encroaching expiration date for her onscreen career as an object of desire, like Moore’s gorgeous 50-something protagonist in The Substance.  Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is ostensibly a Jane Fonda workout video parody in which the titular scream queen leads slumber-party-massacre victims & poolside zombies in low-energy, high-sleaze workout routines.  It’s more cheesecake than it is instructional, starting & ending with a nude Quigley screaming directly at camera during her pre-workout shower.  Having hit the nude scene quota that would satisfy horror-convention attendees who need to buy something for the perpetually topless actress to autograph, Quigley then takes the time to satisfy her own needs.  Much of the hour-long runtime is a highlight reel of her most outrageous performances, including clips from schlock titles like Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoids, Assault of the Party Nerds, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama.  Her most iconic scene as a punk stripper on the graveyard set of Return of The Living Dead is only shown in still images, sidestepping expensive licensing fees, so that most clips are pulled from her collaborations with David DeCoteau.  She’s directly making an argument to her salivating fans that she’s just as much of a scream queen icon as a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Heather Langenkamp, even if her filmography is laughably low-rent by comparison.

Smartly, Quigley constantly invites you to laugh at both that filmography and the workout video wraparound, preemptively mocking the entire exercise with her own shamelessly corny Elvira quips.  During a slideshow of her double-chainsaw striptease in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she complains, “Ginger Rogers had Fred Astaire . . . and I get Black & Decker?!”  Later, when she breathily encourages the audience at home to sweat with her during a workout, she jokes “That’s right, stretch those muscles . . . Not THAT muscle!”  Of course, most of the self-deprecating jokes are at the expense of the workout video’s dual function as softcore pornography, making it a kind of proto-J.O.I. porno.  Her first, solo workout routine finds her doing absurdly erotic poses in a metal-plated bra and black fishnet stockings, an outrageously inappropriate sweatsuit alternative that Quigley herself mocks while making the most of its prurient benefits.  She looks great, she proves she’s self-aware about where she’s positioned in the grand cinematic spectrum of respectability, and she does a good job promoting her legacy as a horror legend while maintaining a sense of humor about it all.  The only sequence of the video that doesn’t quite work is her instructional “zombiecise” routine where she leads a small hoard of graveyard zombies through limp choreography at the edge of a backyard pool.  It’s a visual gag that doesn’t really go anywhere once the initial novelty wears off, but it does eventually drone on long enough that it achieves a kind of deliberate anti-comedy, so all is forgiven.  It’s also followed by a much more successful speed-run through a tropey slumber party slasher and a mid-credits blooper reel, guaranteeing that the video leaves you with a smile.

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is beautifully, aggressively vapid, much like the repetitive Pump It Up with Sue dance video sequences in The Substance.  Whether it qualifies as a proper feature like The Substance is debatable.  At times, it’s essentially the horny horror nerd equivalent of those looping Yule Log videos people throw on the TV around Christmas, a connection it acknowledges with occasional, lingering shots of an actual fireplace (presumably lit to keep the half-dressed Quigley warm).  It’s just as much of an appropriate double-feature pairing with Fargeat’s film as the more commonly cited titles like Society, The Fly, and Basket Case, though, as The Substance is just as much a horror-themed workout video as it is a comedic body horror, and there’s only one previous horror-themed workout video that truly matters.

-Brandon Ledet

The Substance (2024)

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What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after). 

Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety. 

That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me. 

Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before. 

Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Front Room (2024)

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The term “A24 horror” refers to such a wide range of the distributor’s festival acquisitions and in-house productions that it doesn’t accomplish much of anything as a genre distinction.  The only thing you can be sure about with an A24 Horror movie, really, is that its marketing will be effective but misleading.  Whatever quibbles you might have with the brand’s reputation as a taste signifier among the Letterboxd userbase, you have to at least appreciate its ability to always tell the exact right lie to get wide audiences in the door to watch movies with limited commercial appeal.  At the start of the A24 Horror trend, that meant selling Robert Eggers’s calling-card debut feature The Witch as a scare-filled haunted hayride instead of what it actually is: a Häxan-style illustration of spooky academic research.  A decade later, it means selling Eggers’s brothers Max & Sam’s debut The Front Room as a Get Out-style “social thriller” instead of what it actually is: a post-Farrelly Brothers toilet-humor comedy.  Usually, that misleading marketing only upsets The Fans, who show up to movies like The Witch expecting jump scares and are annoyed that they’re instead prompted to think and interpret.  This time, the marketing has seemingly upset The Critics, who have complained that The Front Room is more silly than it is scary, as if that wasn’t exactly its intent.  I’d even go as far as to argue that The Front Room plays like a deliberate self-parody of the A24 Horror brand, like a Scary Movie update for the Elevated Horror era . . . but there just isn’t enough connective tissue between those modern metaphor-first-scares-second horrors for a genre spoof to land with any specifics or coherence.

To be fair to the naysayers, The Front Room‘s tonal misdirection extends beyond its extratextual marketing.  For its opening 15 minutes, the film goes through the motions of pretending to be a middling post-Get Out horror about racist microaggressions, starring 90s popstar Brandy Norwood as a college professor whose career is stalled by her white colleagues.  Then, the movie reveals its true colors as a Southern-friend psychobiddy gross-out comedy when it introduces its racist macroaggressions in the form of actress Kathryn Hunter.  A in-tongues-speaking Evangelical Daughter of the Confederacy, Hunter is perfectly calibrated as the loud-mouthed comic foil to Brandy’s quietly dignified academic.  The two women play emotional Tug of War for dominance over their shared home while Brandy’s hilariously ineffectual husband (Andrew Burnap) cowards from all responsibility to stand up to his demanding, demonic stepmother on his wife’s behalf.  Like in most familial, generational battles, Hunter weaponizes her inherited wealth to shame her stepson and his wife into walking on eggshells around her while she gets to do & say whatever she wants, no matter how vile.  When Brandy refuses to politely play along, Hunter weaponizes her own bodily fluids instead, smearing the house with piss, shit, and bile until she gets her way.  This battle of wills is, of course, complicated by the birth of Brandy’s newborn baby, so that the stakes of who emerges from their flame war as the home’s true matriarch are about as high as they can get (and should be familiar to anyone who’s had a pushy parental figure tell them what to do with their own bodies & family planning).

The Front Room is very funny, very gross, and very, very misleading.  I can see how critics might dismiss the film as a rote A24 Horror update to Rosemary’s Baby if they only stayed engaged for its opening few minutes, but as soon as Kathryn Hunter enters the frame it quickly evolves into an entirely different kind of beast.  The way Hunter thuds around on her two wooden walking canes and intones all of her racist tirades in an evil Tree Trunks lilt is obviously comedic in intent.  She might start her attacks on Brandy’s personal dignity with realistically offensive terminology like “you people” & “uppity”, but she comically escalates those attacks whenever called out by whining “I’m a racist baby! Goo goo, ga ga, wah wah!”.   I laughed.  I also laughed every time she yelled “I’m an M-E-Double-S mess!” while spreading her bodily filth all over Brandy’s house & possessions, but I understand that potty humor is an acquired taste.  What I don’t understand is how audiences have been so stubbornly determined to take this movie seriously despite that outrageously exaggerated performance.  It’s like studying Foghorn Leghorn speeches for sound parental advice and legal standing; of course you’re going to find them lacking.  The racial tension in its central dynamic is genuinely tense, but it seeks its cathartic release in laughter, not scares.  A lot more people would be having a lot more fun with it if they thought of it more as John Waters doing Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? than Jordan Peele doing Rosemary’s Baby, despite what the tone of the marketing (and the first act) leads you to expect.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Lake Michigan Monster (2018)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the aquatic slapstick creature feature Lake Michigan Monster (2018), from the creative team behind Hundreds of Beavers (2024).

00:00 The Swampflix Top 100

09:16 Metropolis (2001)
13:56 Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
18:30 The Store (1983)
24:37 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
29:18 The Deliverance (2024)
33:15 Strange Darling (2024)
40:10 Alien Romulus (2024)
47:48 Last Things (2024)
51:24 Frogman (2024)

55:27 Lake Michigan Monster (2018)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

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I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded. 

It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again. 

I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III. 

When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find. 

The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check! 

This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cemetery Man (1994)

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No one understands dream logic quite like an Italian horror filmmaker.  The 1994 horror comedy Cemetery Man might visually recall fellow zombie splatstick titles like Evil Dead & Dead Alive, but it updates that sensibility with a distinctly 90s sense of apathetic cool and then heavily distorts it through the Italo-horror dream machine.  Director Michele Soavi’s calling-card films Stage Fright & La Chiesa unmistakably belong to a tradition of post-giallo schlock in which the surreal scene-to-scene whims of his narratives are an expected part of the territory, but Cemetery Man is just generic-looking enough that those impulses feel remarkably out of place.  A contemporary of fellow horror-dreamers Dario Argento & Lucio Fulci, Soavi makes films that are just as logically sound as Suspriria or The Beyond, which can be confounding when you’re expecting the standard beats of a non-Zombi zombie film.  It’s the perfect midnight movie in that way, its lingering memory indistinguishable from the movie your dreaming mind would have assembled if you fell asleep halfway through.  It would be redundant to say that trying to remember it is like trying to remember a dream, since it very clearly is a dream that just happens to be on celluloid.

Rupert Everett stars as the slacker caretaker of a small cemetery where the dead have an annoying habit of rising from the grave within 7 days of burial.  He’s been working the job long enough that he’s bored with the routine, barely bothering to turn around from his writing desk to shoot the undead ghouls in the head and put them out of their supernatural misery.  That indifference to his work is somewhat surprising, given that there’s no real consistency to the zombie phenomenon.  Some of the “Returners” can continue talking & operating as a severed head, while most just groan incoherently and die the instance their heads are damaged.  The 7-day rule also has no real effect on who rises when, since Soavi is much more invested in the momentary pleasures of a visual gag than he is in the overarching logic of his narrative (an attitude a lot of movies would benefit from adopting).  The part of Everett’s job that really bothers him is that he has to pretend to be impotent so that local townies don’t assume he’s being sexually inappropriate with the corpses.  This gets in the way of his romantic life, of course, placing the handsome young bachelor on the same level of desirability as his unwashed, mentally disabled assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro).  Cemetery Man starts with standard zombie attacks, then swerves into sweaty nightmares about male sexual performance anxiety, then swerves again into existential crisis for a last-minute stab at profundity.  I haven’t been this jostled by a movie’s narrative trajectory since I watched Argento’s Opera in the exact same movie theater last October, a huge smile beaming on my face in both instances.

If there is any unifying theme to Cemetery Man that ties it all together, I do think it’s lurking somewhere in its detached, apathetic 90s slackerdom.  Everett spends the entire movie grumbling about working a boring job where nothing he does natters, to the point where there’s “no difference to being alive or dead.”  Later, he tests this theory by actively sending fresh corpses to his workplace as a mass murderer (after some quippy negotiations with Death itself) and is frustrated to find that there are no consequences to his actions.  Every time he confesses his crimes to the local detective, he’s met with bemused chuckling.  Overall, there’s no rhyme or reason to the rhythms of the plot, but that pointlessness plays directly into the disaffected nihilism of the slacker era.  Everett’s line reading of “I’d give my life to be dead” first sounds like a clever play on words until you realize it doesn’t actually mean anything, and then that lack of meaning starts to mean Everything.  When he spends his evenings reading the phone book as if it were literature, it’s mostly a joke about how he only sees other living people as potential Returners that he’ll later have to execute, but it’s also a joke about the banality of his daily routine.  All jobs and lifestyles are ultimately boring, I guess, regardless of their supernatural circumstances.

The poster for Cemetery Man promises “Zombies, guns, and sex, oh my!”, and I suppose the movie technically delivers on all of those promises.  Anyone looking for a non-stop splatstick free-for-all based on that tagline would likely be much better served by Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, though.  Cemetery Man is a much calmer, more slippery kind of vintage zombie novelty: the kind best experienced half-awake on late-night cable, so that you’re tormented for years with vague questions if the movie actually exists or if you made it up in a dream.  Its limited distribution over the past couple decades has only amplified that effect, but there’s now a Severin restoration making the theatrical and home video distro rounds, so there’s evidence that this movie does, in fact, exist and is just as weirdly dreamy as you remember.

-Brandon Ledet

Abigail (2024)

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The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigail reported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand.  Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there.  No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series.  Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background.  The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year.  The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.

To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu.  The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father.  She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time.  Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth.  The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first.  There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby. 

In short, Abigail is corporate slop.  The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage.  I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect.  Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be.  Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them.  At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one.  That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.

-Brandon Ledet

Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

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Tim Burton was the very first director I recognized as an auteur, long before I knew the word.  Growing up with Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in constant rotation made Burton’s ghoulish subversion of suburban utopias as easily brand-recognizable as Disney’s white-puff VHS cases.  Or so I thought.  My developing baby brain would often confuse off-brand titles like Casper, Coneheads, and Addams Family Values for genuine Burton films, something I wouldn’t clear up until I matured enough to pay attention to the credits.  Had the new Cole Sprouse zomcom Lisa Frankenstein been released 30 years ago, I’m sure I would’ve confused it for a Burton film as well.  The title indicates a mashup of classic creature-feature horror with cutesy late-80s Lisa Frank kitsch, but in practice it mashes up the cutesy-ghoulish sensibilities of opposing suburban auteurs Tim Burton & John Hughes.  There’s nothing especially new to be mined from that heavily nostalgic genre blending—especially not in a world where Heathers was around to do that work in real time—but there’s always a fresh batch of developing-baby-brain audiences out there who need their own intro to this stuff, and they could do a lot worse (mainly by watching modern era Burton).

Kathryn Newton steps in to replace Winona Ryder as the starter-pack goth girl inspo protagonist, the titular Lisa.  Adjusting to life at a new school with a new family, following the violent death of her mother, Lisa has become a quiet loner with a chip on her shoulder and an aesthetic addiction to black lace.  Armed to the fangs with Diablo Cody dialogue, she refers to her peers as “skeezers” & “beer sluts”, while thinking of herself as belonging to a special class of “people with feelings” who listen to college radio.  The only person she’ll open herself up to is a Victorian corpse played by Cole Sprouse, whom she initially meets by chatting with his gravestone and eventually resurrects from that grave through a freak, supernatural rainstorm.  The walking, grunting corpse becomes a kind of safe boytoy figurine she can confide in and play dress-up with . . . until her self-assigned outsider status gets out of control and the unlikely pair go on a killing spree.  They justify the violence by collecting functional body parts for the rotting Creature, but it’s really just an excuse to dispose of the poor souls at the top of Lisa’s personal shit list: her icy stepmother, her handsy would-be date rapist, the bad-boy crush who turns down her own advances, etc.  In short, it’s wish-fulfillment fantasy for the angstiest people alive: gothy suburban teens.

I’m no longer a gothy suburban teen myself, but I like to think I’m still young enough to remember the appeal a movie like this can hold.  One of the smartest touches of Cody’s script is the way it allows Lisa to be morally in the wrong, but in a relatable way that recalls the audience’s own lingering teen angst (while also, again, recalling Veronica Sawyer’s).  First-time director and promising young nepo-baby Zelda Williams also appeals to an older crowd in her aesthetic nods to Suburban Outsider ephemera from the past, including Burtonized dress-up montages, Smashing Pumpkins-style homages to Georges Méliès, 80s-goth needle drops, and a soul-deep fear of the tanning bed.  Unfortunately, though, the movie’s not quite zippy enough to compete with the decades of suburban horror comedies that precede it, from cultural juggernauts like Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to VHS-era curios like Bob “The Madman” Balaban’s My Boyfriend’s Back.  Lisa Frankenstein is thankfully playful enough to avoid becoming the next victim of Age Gap Discourse despite the century’s difference between its romantic leads, which is good news for the teens who haven’t yet seen its dozens of obvious predecessors.  It’s just not funny enough to overcome its lax editing & scoring, which allow too many of its zinger punchlines to rot in dead air. 

This movie’s undeniably cute, but there’s something missing in it that pushes greatness just out of its reach.  Maybe it needed a tighter, zippier edit.  Maybe it needed the Danny Elfman touch that made Burton’s early triumphs sing.  Or maybe I just needed to be 13 again to fully love it.  With my 40s swiftly approaching on the horizon, decades after I’ve needed gateway-horror Burton titles to introduce me to the basic concepts of cinematic style, I’m okay with just liking it.

-Brandon Ledet