horror comedy

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

Destroy All Neighbors (2024)

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I have developed parasocial relationships with several of the key collaborators behind the retro splatstick comedy Destroy All Neighbors, which has me rooting for its success.  I met one of the film’s writers, Charles Pieper, at a local horror festival a few years ago, and we established one of the most sacred bonds two people can share: social media mutuals.  The film’s score was also co-produced by Brett Morris, who produces and co-hosts several podcasts I’ve regularly listened to for over a decade now, which is arguably an even stronger (one-sided) bond.  Several of the central performers—including Jonah Ray, Alex Winter, Jon Daly, and Tom Lennon—have all maintained the kind of long-simmering, low-flame cultural longevity on the backburners of the pro media stovetop that also encourages that same kind of parasocial affection, the feeling of rooting for someone to continue to Make It just because knowing of their existence feels like being privy to a deep cut.  It seems appropriate, then, that the film is about the kind of long-term, stubborn hustle artists must maintain to complete any creative project in a town like Los Angeles, and how that LA Hustle mindset can also get in those poor souls’ own way.  There’s a tricky balance between the lonely self-determination of seeing a project through even though no one else fully believes in it and the simultaneous need to foster collaboration & community to achieve success.  The people who made Destroy All Neighbors appear to understand the difficulty of that balance down to their charred bones because they’re all struggling with it in real time; all the audience can do is cheer them on from the sidelines.

Jonah Ray stars as the avatar for that LA Hustle mindset: a prog rock musician who has been tinkering with the inconsequential details of his unfinished magnum opus album for years, with no sign that he’ll ever walk away from the project.  Like all frustrated creatives, he blames his creative block on the minor annoyances of anyone within earshot, from the untalented nepo-baby hacks who cash in on their industry connections for easy success to the mentally ill homeless man outside his jobsite who’s just angling for a free croissant.  Things escalate when he finally lashes out at one of these annoying distractions from his “work”, a cartoonishly grotesque neighbor with an addiction to wall-shaking EDM (played by Alex Winter under a mountain of prosthetic makeup and a Swedish Chef-style goofball accent).  What starts as a neighborly spat quickly snowballs into a full-blown killing spree, and the frustrated musician’s Nice Guy persona is challenged by his weakness for violent white-nerd outbursts.  His grip with reality becomes exponentially shaky as his body count rises, and the film slips into a Dead Alive style approach to comic chaos and goopy puppetry, regularly delivering the kinds of practical effects gore gags that earn “special makeup effects” credits in an opening scroll.  Does the troubled prog nerd finish his unlistenably complicated rock album before he’s brought to justice for his crimes? It doesn’t really matter.  What’s more important is that he learns how to get along with the people around him instead of lashing out while he’s trying to tinker with his art project in peace.  It’s just a shame that by the time he figures that out, most of the people around him are reanimated corpses and cops with their guns drawn.

In horror comedy terms, Destroy All Neighbors falls somewhere between the belligerent screaming of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the nostalgic throwback to old-school splatstick of a Psycho Goreman.  If it does anything particularly new within the genre, it’s in its use of cursed guitar lesson YouTube clips instead of cursed camcorder found footage.  Jon Daly regularly appears on the prog nerd’s phone as the host of evil YouTube tutorials, filling his brain with poisonous ideas about how if people “get” or “enjoy” your music, you’re automatically a failure and a sellout.  He’s just one of many abrasive characters who live in the musician’s head rent-free, though, and to blame the murderous rampage on that one rotten influence would be to misinterpret the film’s overall push for communal art collaboration.  Otherwise, Destroy All Neighbors is just impressively gross in a warmly familiar way.  It’s playful in its willingness to distract itself from the main narrative just to have some fun with the tools & personnel on hand, exemplifying exactly what the nerd-rage prog boy needs to learn if he’s ever going to finish his magnum opus.  What’s amazing is that we’re still rooting for him to pull it off even after the liner notes for his unfinished album now include an “In Memoriam” section.  Regardless of whether you’ve ever tried to Make It in LA, anyone who’s ever worked on a noncommercial art project for a nonexistent audience should be able to relate (give or take a couple murder charges, depending on your personal circumstances).

-Brandon Ledet

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Head of the Family (1996)

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One distinctly American subgenre is the backwoods family horror, which shocks the audience simply by introducing them to a family of reclusive weirdos who live in the rural South.  Defined by such low-budget, high-visibility titles as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Spider-Baby, and Mudhoney, the backwoods family horror tradition continued in an increasingly goofy fashion in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, the later Basket Case sequels, Nothing but Trouble, and in pretty much every movie directed by Rob Zombie.  And since the intersection of unrestrained goofiness & unoriginal genre filmmaking is the exact sweet spot of the American home video label Full Moon Features, they of course made a backwoods family horror of their own for the mid-90s video market.  Head of the Family is a variation on the Texas Chainsaw weirdo-family subgenre, reconfigured to fit into Full Moon Features’ house specialty: R-rated movies for children.  It has everything an unsupervised child could possibly want out of a late-night movie snuck past their sleeping parents: cussing, sex, and a house full of weirdo freaks.  Adults might not be as impressed with those goofball transgressions, but Full Moon doesn’t really make horror movies for adults anyway.  That ground was already well covered by Tobe Hooper.

Head of the Family is built entirely on one visual pun.  The “Head” in question is just that: an oversized human head.  He pilots his wheelchair around his family home with the tiny limbs that extend from the liminal space where his neck and torso should be.  The other three members of The Head’s family make up a set of telepathically-linked quadruplets.  Naturally, The Head is the brains of the operation, and his similarly mutated siblings help make up the rest of his deconstructed body: The Eyes (a spy with hyperactive senses), The Muscle (a towering brute enforcer), and The Body (a buxom bimbo honeypot).  They all share thoughts & senses as a collective, but The Head makes all of their decisions – until The Muscle eventually rebels.  Not much is done with the disembodied body horror of this premise, which is a little disappointing when it comes to the three brothers vicariously experiencing sexual pleasure through the dalliances of The Body.  Mostly, the movie coasts on the initial shock of introducing the audience to the horrid little monster inspired by its titular pun, and then letting us get to know his fucked up family as they go about their busy routine (of collecting & torturing local, unsuspecting citizens in the dungeon under their Grey Gardens mansion).

One thing this entry in the backwoods family horror canon gets exactly right is the genre’s inherent Southerness.  The Head is a bitchy Southern dandy, constantly rolling his eyes at the comparative unintelligence of his fellow conversationalists as if he’s constantly four martinis deep.  To be fair, the dialogue offered by his intellectually inferior foes is remarkably vapid, including such astute observations as “This is some kind of weird bullshit” and “Sometimes I feel like a big ol’ turd in a small toilet”.  The audience is forced to spend a half-hour with these low-life dolts before we’re graced with the refined Southern gent presence of The Head, patience that it is only somewhat helped along by most of their lines being delivered mid-coitus.   Once The Head arrives, though, the Full Moon dream factory makes the most of his hideous visage, dwelling on the horror of watching him accomplish simple tasks in confrontationally tight close-ups: slurping soups, wetting lips, licking nips, etc.  When the novelty of that image wears off, the movie mostly just kills time in order to achieve feature length.  At one point, The Head forces his dungeon captives to put on little stage plays for his amusement, as if to make fun of how bad of an actor everyone else is except him.

In case you were unaware you had stumbled into a Full Moon Feature, the label’s house composer Richard Band opens the production with the most acrobatically goofy score of his career – employing violins, harps, glockenspiels, vibraslaps and percussive cheek pops to achieve the Fullest Moon sound ever recorded on VHS.  Head of the Family also promises to deliver on another definitive Full Moon Features trope: the sequel no one asked for.  Just a couple years ago, Full Moon teased promotional art for a decades late follow-up titled Bride of the Head of the Family, coming soon to a Tubi app near you.  It makes sense that a sequel to this picture would have to expand the size of the Family with new, hideous members, since there isn’t much to this genre beyond getting to know the insular, often incestuous little freaks who populate it. 

-Brandon Ledet