horror comedy

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

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When watching Last Stop in Yuma County last year, my viewing companion mentioned that he had quite enjoyed The Wolf of Snow Hollow, another vehicle for Yuma lead Jim Cummings. Cummings first gained recognition for his feature film Thunder Road, which was an extension of his earlier short film of the same name. I remember seeing the trailers for Thunder Road at the Alamo Drafthouse during that summer that MoviePass was acting as a real-life free movie hack, but its time in theaters was relatively brief and I still have not managed to check it out. Per some contemporary reviews citing Cummings’ character in Snow Hollow as merely a variation on the one that he portrayed in Thunder Road (negatively), that may be for the best, as I came into Snow Hollow with no expectations. 

The film opens on the arrival of a young couple to a short-term rental in Snow Hollow, Utah. After the two relax for a bit in the hot tub, PJ (Jimmy Tatro) goes into the house to shower (and grab the engagement ring with which he is about to propose) while his girlfriend turns off the hot tub, but she’s attacked by someone or something that tears her to pieces. The local police arrive, and it becomes clear that deputy John Marshall (Cummings) is covering for the failing health of Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster in his final film role), who also happens to be his father. John’s dealing with other issues in his family life as well, as his ex-wife serves as a thorn in his side in his relationship with his teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who is set to start college early that January on a gymnastics scholarship. Further, he’s an alcoholic in recovery, having been in AA for six years and sober for three. His fellow law enforcement officers are largely inept and lazy, pleading to let state or federal officials take on the investigation, and the only other person on the team with any real interest in stopping the killer is Officer Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome). Matters only get worse when another body pops up, this time with evidence that the victim was killed by “a wolf the size of a Kodiak bear,” and the local citizens start to wonder if there’s a werewolf in their midst. 

This is a neatly constructed little mystery, although I would have preferred if some elements of the mystery were played a little closer to the vest, or for longer. Early on, there are a lot of potential suspects for who might be the werewolf (or the serial killer, as John forcefully reiterates time and again). There’s a local dudebro (Marshall Allman) with whom PJ got into an altercation at a local watering hole over the former’s use of the f-slur; Sheriff Hadley’s medical complications may bely that his body is undergoing changes, as poor health can often be an indicator of lycanthropy in horror; the owner of the short term rental (Will Madden) is suspicious since we saw that the AirBnB had all of its knives removed at the start of the film, as if setting up a victim to have no way of defending themself; even John himself could be the “wolf,” since we see that he’s short-tempered, and lycanthropy could be used as an effective shorthand for the complete personality change that alcohol abuse brings on. Subversively, the film shows us a potential suspect whose name we never learn and only ever see from a rear or ¼ rear profile, and who mostly resembles PJ, whom we know can’t be the killer since we saw him in the shower while the first murder is committed. Later, this character dies of an overdose and, because of feasible but circumstantial evidence, the werewolf’s killings are pinned on him, but by this time we’ve seen enough of the actual killer to know that he’s still out there, even if we have yet to identify him. I was expecting the film to get a little more mileage out of the “Which characters have we met could the killer be?” a little longer, but this is still a mostly elegantly constructed mystery regardless. 

What doesn’t quite work is the way that John’s alcoholism is portrayed. After his AA self-intro that functions as his character exposition scene/thesis statement, every time that we see him afterward, he’s clearly a hothead. He pops off at the first crime scene, berates his subordinates (who, since they’re all deputies, are really his peers) at a diner, and screams at Deputy Chavez (Demetrius Daniels) at the second site where a body is discovered. We understand why he’s so stressed, but he’s not a man that’s barely holding it together in the face of tending to his ailing father while facing pressure to find a killer, and is a man who’s already experiencing outbursts of anger long before he falls off the wagon. In the midst of these pre-relapse tantrums is a sequence that actually works, when John meets his ex-wife and Jenna at a diner and the former works to elicit a promise that John will be able to be present at their daughter’s college orientation, and he remains calm and speaks directly to Jenna while clearly struggling not to lose his temper at his ex at the same time. After a second body is found, John finally digs out the beers he has stashed away in the top kitchen cupboard, but there’s very little change in the way John treats the people around him. 

Cummings has the face of a movie star from a different era; when you look like he does, you don’t have much choice but to put it up on a screen somewhere. When it comes to this particular performance, however, it remains pretty flat from start to finish, which makes it seem like he only has one setting, and that static nature of this character takes a little shine out of the movie’s luster. Where we do see some escalation from his drinking comes as he falls completely off the wagon. After collapsing on his oven door and shattering it before passing out in the detritus, there’s a scene in which Jenna comes home to find John passed out on the living room floor, and after some struggle she manages to get him upstairs and into his bed. John, completely inebriated, breaks down into barely coherent sobs about his failures while Jenna stands in the hallway begging and pleading through her own tears for her father to just go to bed, screaming that he’s scaring her. It’s harrowing, even more so than any of the murders or crime scenes we’ve witnessed. More than that, it proves that Cummings does have more than one performance style in him, and it just makes me wish that I had seen a greater degree of difference between John before and after his demons got the better of him. 

This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Junk Head (2017)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Takahide Hori’s stop-motion-animated nightmare comedy Junk Head (2017).

00:00 Welcome

03:55 Vampire Hunter D (1985)
07:07 Casino (1995)
15:31 Deadwood – The Movie (2019)
22:30 The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
38:17 The Conformist (1970)
42:32 Times Square (1980)
48:56 Devil Fetus (1982)
55:38 Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

1:01:21 Junk Head (2017)

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

Dead Lover (2025)

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Grace Glowicki’s directorial career debuted in the genderfucked stoner-comedy freak show Tito, which might very well have been the world’s first Crispin Glover drag king act. The fuckery continues in her sophomore film Dead Lover, which locally premiered at this year’s Overlook Film Festival (and, to my eye, was the best of the fest). Dead Lover perfectly exemplifies the Overlook brand of horror-themed genre films that skew more artsy than scary, delivering a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback that filters the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Glowicki has focused her eye in the years since Tito, crafting some of cinema’s most gorgeous, perverted images in recent memory. Her sense of humor has remained decidedly prankish & juvenile, though, punctuating punchlines with ADR’d fart noises and ejaculations of vomit. It’s a masterclass lesson in the refinement of bad taste.

Glowicki stars as a 19th Century gravedigger who has become lonely in her continuation of the family business, as she stinks too badly of rotting corpses for any other locals to socialize with her. Her pursuit of sexual partners despite that putrid stench does eventually prove fruitful, drawing the eye (and nose) of a nearby wealthy pervert who’s grieving the loss of his sister but still makes time to fetishize the gravedigger’s offense to the senses. They fall in love and bone like mad, but tragedy soon strikes when, as the title promises, her long-awaited lover dies by sea. She refuses to give up on her one shot at genuine romance, though, so she attempts to reconstitute her dead lover using the one remaining body part that was recovered from the shipwreck (his severed finger) . . . with a little help from the stockpile of corpses that happen to be buried around the cemetery where she works & lives.

The tension between Dead Lover‘s high-art visual style and low-trash sense of humor is also echoed in its bifurcated tone, which alternates between the extremities of camp & sincerity in erratic mood swings. Much of the gravedigger’s dialogue is addressed to a gigantic arts-and-crafts rendering of the moon, recalling the operatic poetry of Kenneth Anger’s experimental short “Rabbit’s Moon.” She confesses all of her most vulnerable yearnings to Mr. Moon, but those thoughts are frequently interrupted by hissing, selfish jags of animalistic horniness & greed. Combined with her insultingly inaccurate Cockney accent, this internal romantic/vicious struggle estimates what it might be like if Lily Sullivan’s unhinged impersonation of Bridgette Jones on Comedy Bang Bang suffered the same fate as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. My apologies if that CBB reference means nothing to you, but it really is the only accurate point of comparison.

There’s a sound-stage artificiality to Dead Lover that recalls both the perverted visual poetry of Stephen Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari and the low-budget carelessness of the graveyard set in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s a picture overflowing with bad wigs and even worse accents, as its four main players alternate through multiple sets of characters with the ramshackle energy of a sketch comedy revue. Still, there’s a lot of heart to its romantic yearning in which characters love one another for their quirks & stench rather than in spite of it. It also has surprisingly provocative ideas about the physical embodiment of gender, as the gravedigger rebuilds her male lover with indiscriminate concern for whether the corpses she sources spare parts from are male or female (or, even more strangely, whether they are related to her lover by blood). All she cares about is still being able to orgasm by the thrust of his finger; how romantic.

I was greatly amused by the strangeness of Glowicki’s debut, but this follow-up exceeded my expectations even so. In my mind, she’s now joined an elite class of high-style, low-budget filmmakers who are pushing the outer limits of how sex, gender, and desire can be represented on screen while also just goofing off with their friends: namely Cole Escola, Amanda Kramer, and Betrand Mandico. At times, it really does feel like some of the most exciting, immediate art being made right now, even though it’s an outdated genre throwback featuring a severed finger that stretches to the length of a broomstick and a potential suitor professing his love by declaring he wants to eat one of the gravedigger’s turds longways, “like a banana.”

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #228: Frankie Freako (2024) & Gremlinsploitation

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Welcome to Episode #228 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the retro horror comedy Frankie Freako (2024) and the late-80s wave of Gremlins knockoffs that inspired it.

00:00 Welcome

06:50 Frankie Freako

26:06 Ghoulies
48:25 Critters
56:45 Trolls
1:09:18 Munchies
1:23:14 Beasties
1:28:22 Hobgoblins

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

– The Podcast Crew

Local Legends: Bloodbath! (2024)

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Despite his deliberately milquetoast appearance, Matt Farley is a man of extremes. I see both the best and the worst version of myself in the Massachusetts-based backyard filmmaker, whose tireless self-promotion as a self-published artist is simultaneously admirable and diabolical.  As the world’s foremost Matt Farley scholar, Matt Farley is fully aware of this extreme duality in his own creative & professional drive, nakedly confessing to it in his self-portrait series Local Legends.  The original Local Legends was a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a D.I.Y. artist, breaking down the exact economics of how he makes a living improvising the novelty pop songs that fund the projects he really cares about: sincere rock anthems & regional horror comedies.  That film’s sequel, Local Legends: Bloodbath!, is a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a manic narcissist, breaking down the tireless self-promotion routines Farley has to maintain every waking minute to keep his Motern Media brand afloat through sheer momentum – all to satisfy his insatiable ego.  As a pair, the Local Legends films portray Matt Farley as both an aspirational figure and a cautionary tale for self-published songwriters & filmmakers.  Yes, it is possible for the average person to dedicate their entire life to their creative pursuits, but the level of self-obsession required to make that work will transform them into a grotesque monster unworthy of an audience’s admiration.

Not much has changed since the “Matt Farley” of Local Legends broke down his business model & production schedule a decade ago.  Farley’s still cranking out thousands of improvised novelty songs and carefully composed, heartfelt ballads for anyone who’s curious to listen.  The only thing that’s changed, really, is his increased demands for attention & compliments, which has escalated to him renting out music venues on his own dime just so he can feed off his half-empty audience (or half-full audience, depending on your perspective) in real time.  That personal stagnation and professional doubling-down has apparently strained every relationship in Matt Farley’s life.  His wife, his bandmates, his filmmaking partner, and even his audience regulars just can’t seem to match Matt Farley’s enthusiasm for the “Matt Farley” project, abandoning him one by one as he falls further down the novelty-song rabbit hole.  This triggers the return of Matt’s crude businessman alter-ego from the first Local Legends, who arrives on the scene to “eliminate distractions” from his production schedule.  I don’t remember the Business Matt persona looking so much like Paulie Walnuts last time, but the new look makes it all the more disturbing to watch him strangle friends & family to death for slowing down the poop-themed novelty song recording sessions that pay the bills.  Then you remember that he, too, is Matt Farley, who hilariously brands himself as “The nicest guy in showbiz!” despite all the murders.

With Bloodbath!, Matt Farley finds a way to push Local Legends under the horror-comedy umbrella that covers the rest of his output, while maintaining the original’s confessional honesty.  This genre-shifting sequel is very funny as a barrage of self-contained inside jokes, but it’s also genuinely unnerving in its honesty about every artist’s bottomless self-obsession, regardless of success or prestige.  Some of the jokes are benefited by having been fully submerged in the Motern Media filmography, like Farley’s madness being represented in his increased consumption of “coffee milk” or his businessman persona shooting lighting out of his fingertips, à la Druid Gladiator Clone.  Most are Bloodbath!-specific, though, and only become funny through repetition.  By the fifth time Farley repeats inane phrases like “statement analysis” or “No good deed goes unpunished” or leads his half-empty/half-full audience through a sing-along encore of a song about house keys, the laughs are frequent and genuinely earned.  Anyone initially uneasy with the rudimentary imagery’s hideous day-for-night greys or blown-out white balance clipping is gradually rewarded by sticking it out for what Farley is always determined to deliver: funny jokes and good times shared with friends.  Like the best of Motern’s output, Bloodbath! does a great job of making you feel like you’re part of that inner-circle friend group, building its own inside jokes without requiring knowledge of extratextual material.  Still, it’s a work best paired with its less fanciful, more documentary original, since they combine to give you the full Matt Farley experience: the praiseworthy underdog artist and the exhausting, off-putting narcissist.

-Brandon Ledet

Rumours (2024)

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Before things go to hell for the characters of director Guy Maddin’s Rumours, one of them suggests that they get down to the business at hand, citing that the G7 Summit “isn’t a summer camp.” You wouldn’t know that from the way that the so-called leaders of the so-called free world behave. For the most part, they behave like a group of high schoolers assigned to work together on a project and treat the summit with exactly as much gravitas as—or perhaps even less than—an after-school club. These two hooked up last year and one of them wants to get to work on their group statement while the other is still unrequited; one guy is content to sit back and let others put in all the work; another person thinks that they’re doing inspired, powerful work when in fact his contributions are meaningless flim-flam; and there’s the one little weirdo who wants everyone to like him and has cured meats in his pocket. You had one of those at your high school, too, right? 

This year, Germany is hosting the conference, under the leadership of Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett). After a few photo ops, the seven adjourn to a gazebo to work on their joint statement about the never-expounded-upon “current crisis,” but not before they stop off to take a look at—and get a photo with—an archaeological discovery on the grounds of the castle at which the conference is taking place. It’s a “bog body,” mummified remains over two thousand years old. Owing to the unique composition of the soil, the flesh remains intact while the body’s bones have completely liquefied. It’s noted that the corpse has had its genitalia chopped off and hung around its neck, and this is specifically mentioned to be a punishment that ancient peoples of the area practiced in rebellion against weak, inept, or otherwise failed leaders. We learn that U.K. P.M. Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) slept with the supposedly charismatic Prime Minister of Canada Maxime LaPlace (Roy Dupuis) at a previous summit, although this time around, she simply wants to focus on the “work,” such as it is. Representing the U.S. is President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), a doddering, elderly man whose sleepiness, apathy, and exhaustion are attributes clearly mocking current White House occupying chickenshit Joe Biden. French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) is a vain, self-important man whose greatest desire is to be appreciated as a deep thinker by the others, while Italy’s P.M. Antonio “Tony” Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), for whom this is the first summit, finds easy acceptance among the others through his genuineness, although he comes across as naive as a result. Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takhiro Hira) is … also there. 

Maxime has an emotional outburst just as the gazebo dinner is finished, and the rest of the group pair off to brainstorm ideas for their statement while he stalks about the woods nearby, calming himself. President Wolcott tells P.M. Lamorte that it’s not worth working on, that no one takes these statements very seriously and that it’s fine to slack off a little, leading him to regaling the newcomer with exactly the kind of “good ol’ days” talks that geriatric politicians love to spout. Broulez and Iwasaki passionately discuss a potentially powerful opening statement, but we later learn their collaboration produced nothing but meaningless buzzwords amid wishy-washy ideology. Ortmann and Dewindt likewise make little progress, as each time one of them makes a statement that expresses any strong ideas, the other cautions for the need to walk this back so as to appear nonpartisan. Things take a turn for the worse when the regrouped seven realize that they are completely alone, and that no staff has appeared for some time. The nearby catering set-up is long vacant and the castle in which all their aides and staff should be is empty, quiet, and locked. From here, things get surreal and bizarre, as the seven try to find out what is happening and make their way back to so-called civilization despite their isolation. More bog bodies start popping up, potential pagan rites are performed and witnessed, there’s a giant brain in the woods, and an A.I. chatbot designed to entrap potential child predators may have gained sentience and decided to destroy mankind. 

If Rumours is only two things, it’s both funny … and toothless. One Gets The Point very early on, and that drum is beaten over and over again. Perhaps this obviousness is the point. After things have gotten very strange and dangerous, one of the characters comments on the potential of viewing each of the world leaders in attendance as a microcosm of their represented nation and that the events playing out before him is an allegory. Of course, this comes at a time when France is being hauled around in the woods in a wheelbarrow, revealing that the film’s Canadian director may have little respect for the boot-shaped nation. That observation doesn’t hold up, however, and this might have been a stronger film if it had gone fully allegorical and used the summit as an opportunity to play out personified international relations, but that’s not what Maddin is aiming to do. What was advertised as a satire is more of a farce. It’s funny that, upon viewing a photo of the hatchback sized brain that Maxime discovered in the woods, three of the male delegates comment that it must be a woman’s giant brain because “it’s smaller than a man’s giant brain would be,” despite this being a completely novel event. We’re meant to laugh at the inherent sexism of the patriarchy, and we do, but it has no bite to it. Characters behave like they’ve reunited for, as noted above, a summer camp getaway, with special attention being paid to everyone being sad that this is likely Maxime’s last summer at camp with them; he’s facing legal trouble for an utterly (and realistically) banal monetary scandal. Tonally, it’s like he’s being punished by his parents and not being allowed to come back next year, and the rest of the leaders treat his serious legal trouble (which is legitimately unethical) with the frivolous dismissal of the kind of low-level mischief that might cause a kid to be grounded from going to camp. 

The comedy works, but ironically, its aim is as broad and meaningless as we are meant to find the film’s characters’ lukewarm politics to be. Again, that may be the point, but that justification doesn’t move the barometer for how much I like the piece in a positive direction. When the humor works best is when it plays a little dirtier. Maxime gets a text message, supposedly from a girl named Victoria, and Dewindt tells him that he may be chatting with an A.I. chatbot that was created in order to ensnare pedophiles by messaging potential sex criminals, citing that people in their positions of power are statistically more likely to be sex pests. Hilda suggests that they play into the scenario, as if they “trip the alarm,” so to speak, the authorities will trace the phone, and they can use this to be rescued. However, on the off chance that they may be speaking with a real child in need of help, they must also play down the creep factor to avoid psychologically harming Victoria. This observation about the frequency with which power overlaps with sexual abuse is one of the only times that the film is really cutting, taking aim not just at the facile nature of empire and its pageantry but at the seductive and corrupting nature of invisibility and immunity. That this leads into a good running gag in which the group must brainstorm messages that are creepy and gross (but not too creepy and gross) seems almost indicative of the fact that if the film leaned harder into the satire and less into the farce, the jokes would land with more punch. 

This isn’t really the kind of film that you can spoil, but this film does end in an apocalypse. There’s a big stew of what might be happening: the bog bodies rise from the earth as (compulsively masturbating) reanimated undead, with the implication that there might be something primal and supernatural at work; “Victoria” may have gained sentience and masterminded a cleansing of the earth in order to start anew; the big brain in the woods and its psychic effect on those around it may be related to the latter or could be another concurrent apocalyptic scenario. It doesn’t really matter if these are connected or not, as the group makes its way back to the castle and, covering themselves in the reflective silver emergency blankets that they find in their G7 gift bags, prepare to give their joint statement. Maxime, using scissors and tape, rejects a statement that “Victoria” has created and covers it with excerpts from the various things that different characters have managed to scribble down over the course of the movie. There’s Biden’s Wolcott’s sleep-talking nonsense about “need[ing] a slip to go to the sleep tank,” dutifully transcribed by Lamorte. There’s sections from another character’s ramblings that begin with a metaphor of marriage for international relations before devolving into a revealing glimpse at an attempt to negotiate for non-sexual physical intimacy with a disengaged partner. Throughout the film, characters express reverence for previous G7 Summits and the “powerful” declarations thereof, citing passages that are perhaps pleasing to the ear but ultimately hollow. As the film ends, they stand on a balcony to make their address to an empty lawn, their blankets reflect an orange sky and distant pillars of smoke, making the mirrored surface look more like translucent plastic that contains nothing of substance. The statement is delivered with gusto but signifies nothing, their drama observed only by the undead, one of whom seems to be mocking them by masturbating over their self-congratulatory nonsense. 

The film is a decent success as a comedy, although it lacks the unusually-expressed but nonetheless palpable sentiment that makes something like My Winnipeg work. I’d call it a cynical meanness, but it’s not nearly cynical or mean enough. As a result, it’s not a success as a satire. You’ll laugh, but it’s unlikely to stick with you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The SubstAnimator

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Coralie Fargeat’s entertainment-industry body horror The Substance has hung around in theaters for way longer than I expected it to, likely propelled by its eye-catching marketability on social media platforms like TikTok & Instagram.  While I’ve been struggling to catch the blink-and-miss-it local runs for similarly small, artfully grotesque oddities like Guy Maddin’s Rumours & Adam Schimberg’s A Different Man, I still have multiple daily options to rewatch The Substance, which premiered here weeks earlier.  That kind of theatrical longevity is great for a genre film’s long-term reputation (just look what it did for Parasite), but in the short-term it does lead to some pretty annoying naysaying online.  The two most frequently repeated, hack critiques I’ve seen of The Substance as it lingers weeks beyond its expected expiration date is that 1. “It’s not really a horror movie; it’s more of a body horror,” and 2. It’s a shallow movie that believes it’s deep, as indicated by its set-decor’s multiple allusions to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining.  I’m not entirely sure what to do with the pedantic hairsplitting that makes you believe the body horror subgenre is a separate medium than horror filmmaking at large, but I do believe both of those lines of critique would fall apart if the nitpickers would just . . . lighten up a little.  Yes, Fargeat’s monstrous tale of the self-hatred that results from the unrealistic, misogynistic beauty standards of mass media does carry a lot of heavy emotional & political weight in theme, but in execution the film is functionally a comedy.  Specifically, it is a horror comedy, which I cannot believe I have to clarify still counts as horror.  It’s a grotesque picture with a righteously angry message, but it’s also meant to be a fun time at the movies, which I assume has a lot to do with how long it’s hung around on local marquees.

When The Substance‘s loudest detractors fixate on its background nods to the carpet patterns & bathroom tiles of The Shining, they’re deliberately looking past the large, glowing sign in the foreground pointing to the movie’s entertainment value as an over-the-top goof.  Early festival reviews out of Cannes did Fargeat’s film no favors by likening it to the headier body horror of a Cronenberg or a Ducournau, when it tonally falls much closer to the traditions of body horror’s knucklehead class: Hennenlotter, Yuzna and, most prominently, Stuart Gordon.  Its echoes of Gordon’s work ring loudest, of course, since the titular substance Demi Moore injects into her body to release her younger, better, monstrous self is visually modeled to look exactly like the “re-agent” chemical in Re-Animator.  Both substances are green-glowing liquids injected via a comically oversized syringe, and both are misused to reverse the natural bodily process of aging – the “activator” serum of The Substance by releasing a younger form of the user and the “re-agent” serum of Re-Animator by reanimating the corpses of the recently deceased.  As the attempts to cheat aging (and its kissing cousin Death) escalate in both films, the violence reaches a spectacular practical-effects crescendo, in one case on live television and in the other case at the morgue.  The entire scripting of The Substance might as well have resulted from a writing exercise teasing out what would happen if you injected the re-agent serum of Re-Animator into a still-living person (a question with a much less satisfying answer in Re-Animator‘s own wisely deleted scenes).  Fargeat’s background references to The Shining might have underlined the more somber themes of isolation & self-destruction her film shares with the Kubrick classic, but there’s a bright, glowing signal in the foreground telling the audience the exact kind of horror she was really going for here: blunt, gross, funny, excessive – just like Re-Animator.

Funnily enough, Re-Animator needed its own signal to the audience that it’s okay to laugh & have a good time with its morbid, literary mayhem as a Lovecraft adaptation.  That signal arrived in the goofy musical stylings of Richard Band, who has over a hundred credits as a composer under the Full Moon brand run by his brother, Charles.  Gordon might be the only horror auteur outside the Band family that’s made extensive use of Richard Band’s signature carnival music compositions, partly because his Saturday-morning children’s TV melodies are a poor fit for more serious horror movies and partly because his brother keeps him too busy to stray elsewhere.  According to Band’s interviews about the making of Re-Animator, he was the first member of the creative team to suggest that it should be played as a horror comedy instead of a straight horror.  When watching early rushes and trying to come up with a motif to match, he remembers urging Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna to see how silly and over-the-top the movie was, that even if they played it as a super-serious gore fest it would still make the audience laugh.  Band credits himself for highlighting the sillier notes of Re-Animator in both his “quirky” riff on the Psycho score and his music’s influence on the final edit.  Since every project Band, Gordon, and Yuzna have made since their early success with Re-Animator has continued its violently silly tone, it’s a difficult anecdote to believe.  No matter what they tried to make on a script level, it likely would’ve come out goofy on the production end anyway.  That’s just how they are.  Even so, Richard Band’s quirked-up Psycho spoof cuts through as a loud signal to the audience that it’s okay to have fun no matter how thematically dark or viscerally fucked up Re-Animator gets as it escalates.  I wonder if there were grumpy horror-nerd audiences at the time who were pissed about that score’s allusions to a Hitchcock classic, as if it were trying to convey something deep instead of something cartoonishly goofy.  Thankfully, we don’t have to know.

There are two major advantages that Re-Animator has over The Substance, and they both have to do with time.  One is that Re-Animator doesn’t waste a second of its own time, skipping right over the “Sue” segment of The Substance‘s evolution to get to the “Monstro ElisaSue” mayhem of its third act, shaving off an hour of runtime in the process.  That will never change.  The other is that it’s been around for four decades now, so that all of the most annoying bad-faith takes that it was met with in early release have all faded away, drowned out by celebrations of its over-the-top horror comedy delights.  The Substance will eventually get there too, as evidenced by how long audiences have been keeping its theatrical run alive against all odds.

-Brandon Ledet

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