horror

The Body Snatcher (1945)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

By the mid-40s, the decline in popularity of the horror genre had left a gaping hole in the careers of Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi, two actors who earned legendary status in their respective roles as the Frankenstein monster & Count Dracula in Universal Pictures’ famous monsters classics. This lack of genre work left its mark on the pair, who became increasingly resistant to working with one another & were generally relegated to less-exciting fare like the gangster brain-swap picture Black Friday & the radio play comedy You’ll Find Out whenever they could get their shit together. Thankfully, their eighth & final collaboration was somewhat of a return to form. The Body Snatcher was the first of the spooky duo’s films together to aim for a true horror aesthetic since their early collaborations The Black Cat & The Raven. Although The Body Snatcher would sadly be Lugosi & Karloff’s final joint effort, it would also prove to be one of their best.

In the film, Karloff plays Captain Gray, a boisterous grave robber who sells stolen corpses to a medical facility for a small profit. Decked out in Jack the Ripper garb very similar to his costume in Gift of Gab, Karloff is deliciously cruel in his role as the titular body snatcher. He’s particularly heartless in the way he embarrasses the doctor who serves as his reluctant business partner, throwing his weight around & parading his dealings with the well-respected man of medicine in a way that recalls Michael Gambon’s performance in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Gray even blackmails the doctor into performing an experimental spinal surgery on a paralysed little girl simply because he can, creating an immediate need for fresh subjects that drives Gray to cold-blooded murder. All this is told from the perspective of a young medical student eager to learn “the poetry of medicine.” Instead, his mentor teaches him that “a real man & a good doctor” deals in grave robbing & murder in the name of medical research.

Directed by Robert White (who later helmed the classics The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, Star Trek: The Movie, and Sound of Music, among others), The Body Snatcher has a distinctly well crafted look to it, particularly in the production design of its external settings. Especially spooky is a sort of one-woman Greek chorus, the angelic singing of a street performer who haunts dark alleys in hopes of spare change. When her voice is suddenly silenced the effect is deeply chilling. Gray’s evil lair where he conducts his grave-robbing business & strokes a cat like Dr. Claw in Inspector Gadget (or like Karloff’s former role in The Black Cat, come to think of it) is a beautifully uncomfortable vision of squalor. White brings a quality of production & a cinematic eye to The Body Snatcher that had largely been missing from Karloff & Lugosi’s collaborations since The Black Cat more than a decade before.

As for Lugosi’s contribution to The Body Snatcher, he’s once again relegated to playing Karloff’s second fiddle, but he’s at least afforded a featured part in one of the film’s most memorable scenes. After eavesdropping on the doctor & discovering the exact nature of his partnership with Gray, Lugosi’s lowly assistant foolishly confronts Gray alone & unarmed in the graverobber’s home. He says, “I know you kill people to sell bodies. Give me money or I tell police you murder the subjects,” in a line that has to consist of at least half of Lugosi’s total dialogue in the film. Gray pays the assistant the requested blackmail money, but then gets him drunk & murders him with his bare hands. As far as the ongoing, onscreen meta rivalry between Lugos & Karloff’s characters over the years goes, this display of violence easily ranks among the most brutal & extensive, topped only by Lugosi skinning Karloff alive at the climax of The Black Cat. The Black Cat may surpass the quality & novelty of The Body Snatcher in a few ways, but that’s unfair ideal for a film to have to live up to. The Body Snatcher is surely one of the best of Karloff & Lugosi’s collaborations and a fitting note for the pair to end their work together on. The film’s promotional material promises The Body Snatcher to be, “The screen’s last word in shock sensation!” which might not be true for cinema at large, but is at least literally true in the context of Lugosi & Karloff’s appearances together on film. It was the final word.

-Brandon Ledet

You’ll Find Out (1940)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

inaworld

three star

campstamp

I was pretty harsh on the concept of the ensemble cast radio play comedy in my review of The Gift of Gab, the single Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff collaboration that brought me no joy. Perhaps it was the fact that Lugosi & Karloff were only two of thirty featured Universal Pictures stars fleshing out the vaudevillian vignettes meant to support the Phillip “Gift of Gab” Gabney vehicle. Perhaps I was just too high coming off the glorious heights of the pair’s first & best collaboration, 1934’s The Black Cat, and Gift of Gab was a letdown of a follow-up. Maybe it’s just a terrible movie. Either way, after less awe-inspiring titles like Son of Frankenstein & Black Friday, another Lugosi-Karloff ensemble comedy doesn’t play nearly as disappointingly. You’ll Find Out is far from the most exciting project Karloff & Lugosi worked on together, but since it came from a time after the decline in popularity of Universal’s famous monsters brand that made their careers, it’s about all you can ask for in terms of Karloff-Lugosi content. You’ll Find Out exceeds Gift of Gab both in quality & quantity; what was essentially minuscule cameos in Gab are fleshed out into featured parts as antagonists here. They also threw in a part for Peter Lorre, making this the only instance that he & Lugosi appeared together onscreen despite their shared Hungarian origins & similar career paths. A nice piece of lagniappe, that.

Unfortunately, You’ll Find Out isn’t exactly a Karloff-Lugosi vehicle like The Black Cat or The Raven. Instead, the film was meant to capitalize on the popularity of real-life radio personality Kay Kyser. Kyser was famous for hosting a music quiz called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (oh God, don’t focus on the first three letters of that acronym). On the program, Kyser, often dubbed “The Ol’ Professor” & dressed in a scholar’s cap & gown, asked live audience members for bits of musical trivia and followed up their answers with obnoxious, “humorous” questions like “What’s the difference between a weasel, a measel, and an easel?” (in tandem with a rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel, of course), much to the delight of an easily-pleased public. Har har. As this was during the height of big band music’s peak popularity, Kyser & his live orchestra rode the success of the craze for all it was worth, including just as many feature films that Lugosi had managed to film together in their unlikely, rivalrous collaboration – eight.

Kyser & his wacky crew are a little shrill & old-fashioned in the outdated comedy shenanigans that threaten to sink You’ll Find Out. If it weren’t for Lorre, Karloff, and Lugosi, the film would be a total wash. In a flimsy plot involving the Kyser clan entertaining an heiress during a part she’s throwing at a spooky castle (“What a beautiful spot for a murder!”) the band ends up saving her life from three oldschool horror creeps (guess who) conspiring to take hold of her inheritance. Karloff plays a seemingly congenial judge & friend of the family who pretends, poorly, that he has the heiress’ best interests in mind, despite being an obvious creep. Lugosi has the much more entertaining role of a turban-wearing mystic named Prince Saliano. Saliano insists that he communicates with the dead & that “The spirits are strongly displeased with the skeptical,” a sentiment that gives him free reign to torture the party guests. Lorre, for his part, plays a supposed “psychic expert”, brought in by Karloff’s corrupt judge to “expose” Saliano as a phoney to the unsuspecting heiress. Lorre is obviously not who he says he is & the three creeps are obviously in creepy cahoots.

The best moments of You’ll Find Out are the mere pleasure of seeing Karloff, Lorre, and Lugosi share a single frame. This happens exactly twice in the film: once when they’re quietly conspiring in a study & again at the climax when they’re holding the entire party hostage at gunpoint. In that second instance, Karloff & Lorre are brandishing pistols while Lugosi, again establishing himself as the ultimate horror movie badass, is sporting a fistful of dynamite. Although Lorre & Karloff are billed before Lugosi, Lugosi delivers what is by far the most interesting performance of the trio. As the same fate also befell him in The Raven, Son of Frankenstein and, arguably, even The Black Cat (although that last one is easily the most well-balanced of his Karloff collaborations in terms of sharing the spotlight), that distinction seemed to be his curse. Not only does Lugosi’s Prince Saliano get his own secret dungeon packed with high-tech gadgetry in You’ll Find Out; he also gets to put all the gadgets to use in the film’s centerpiece – an over-the-top séance in which he plays with Tesla coils, shows the heiress a vision of her dead father, and tries to kill her with a falling chandelier. During this séance, Lugosi delivers the film’s best line: “Presently I shall assume a state of trance in which the outer mind merges with the astral portion of the human ego. The Spirit of Evil is trying to enter this room, but the Fires of Death will guard us.” There’s also a great moment in the climactic scuffle where all of his séance equipment goes off at once, making the mansion look like an automated haunted house on the fritz.

You’d be forgiven for believing that You’ll Find Out is a trfile of an antiquated studio comedy. It most certainly is, especially in early scenes that focus on Kay Kyser’s hokey big band shenanigans. Any oldschool horror fan with a little bit of patience will have plenty of fun with the Lorre-Karloff-Lugosi trio’s dastardly villainy, though. It’s true that Lugosi steals the show in You’ll Find Out (doesn’t he always?), but the image of the three horror greats working together is the rarest of treats, something well worth putting up with a failed vaudeville gag or two depending on how much you love Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and -the most loveable of them all- Bela Lugosi.

-Brandon Ledet

Non ho sonno (aka Sleepless, 2001)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

fourstar

Like Stendhal Syndrome, this one surprised me. The overwhelming consensus is that Dario Argento’s latter day work is universally abysmal, and after Phantom of the Opera, which is unequivocally one of the worst movies I have ever seen, I had little hope for what lay ahead. Unlike Syndrome, however, this is one that I can recommend without the same kind of reservations about problematic sexpolitik that permeated that film. Non ho sonno (Sleepless) was released in 2001; this is the inaugural Argento giallo of the 21st Century, but its success lies in the way that it revisits the director’s standard bag of tricks, reinventing some while playing others straight.

In 1983, Chief Detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) promises young Giacomo Gallo, a boy who just saw his mother murdered, that he will find the killer, even if it takes the rest of his life. The evidence indicates a person of small stature, and horror novelist Vincenzo de Fabritiis (Luca Fagioli), a neighbor who happens to be a little person, is convicted and dies while serving his time. Nearly twenty years later, a prostitute listens one night as an eccentric client babbles in his sleep about having committed the crimes of which Vincenzo was accused. In her haste to escape, she accidentally absconds with the killer’s envelope of newspaper clippings about the “Dwarf Killings,” as they were called; she boards a train and thinks she’s safe, but the killer silences her before she reaches her destination, although not before she tells another passenger about her discovery. He relates this information to the police, led by Inspector Manni (Paolo Maria Scalondro; the character shares a surname with both Asia Argento’s Inspector Anna Manni of Syndrome and the shoplifter whose murder opens Tenebrae which is an oddity worth remarking upon, even if it doesn’t amount to anything).

Manni visits the now-retired Moretti, looking for insight. A former department legend, Moretti’s mind has been clouded by age, and his sole companion on the road to dementia is his pet parrot. At the same time, the now-adult Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi) gets a call from his childhood friend Lorenzo (Roberto Zibetti), who tells him about the murder, prompting Giacomo’s return to Turin. Lorenzo’s father (Gabriele Lavia, who previously portrayed two separate characters named Carlo in Profondo rosso and Inferno) disapproves of Lorenzo’s aimless wanderlust and laziness, and has sent the younger man all over the world to different schools, hoping to ignite some passion in him. Giacomo strikes up a romance with harpist Gloria (Chiara Caselli), also a childhood friend, but he spends most of his time with Moretti; the two team up to find the killer, and an encounter with Laura de Fabritiis (Rosella Falk), the late Vincenzo’s mother, leads the duo to wonder if this copycat murderer is a copycat after all.

The circuitous mystery is secondary to other cinematic elements that Argento rarely explores but are of larger import in this film. His decline in quality as a director is arguable, but the sparsity of the bombastic, provocative, and imaginative use of color, space, and composition in comparison to his older works is empirically evident. Tenebrae and Phenomena were more deliberately monochromatic, setting off a trend; Opera was dominated by shadows and earthtones, but was visually sumptuous and engaging in other ways, with each film that followed being more drab than the last, looking cheaper and shoddier with every passing movie. Sleepless isn’t necessarily a return to form with regards to inventive cinematography, but it does feature several set pieces that effectively ramp up the tension while also being visually dynamic in a way that the director hadn’t shown an aptitude for in the nineties–not even once. The first of such set pieces, the chase aboard the train, stands out as being particularly remarkable, and may be one of the best from the director’s entire career.

More surprising than the upswing in cinematic sensitivity is the focus on character here, an element in which Argento has heretofore never demonstrated much interest. Of course, one of the biggest problems with being an American Argento fan has always been dealing with the dubbings of the film into English, some of which are decent but uninspiring and others of which are simply terrible. When an actor’s body language is inconsistent with the line readings of his or her dialogue, it really spoils the moment for the viewer and makes it that much more difficult to suspend disbelief and immerse oneself in the narrative. It’s more distracting in some films than in others (Phantom is, unsurprisingly, the worst with regards to this phenomenon, especially given that Julian Sands isn’t dubbed, throwing the bad dubbing of others into even starker relief), and it’s a consistent issue that I haven’t really addressed to this point because of its ubiquity, although I do try to make a point of noting when viewers have the better option of subtitles. I point this out because, in many cases, this causes his films that already feature unremarkable characterization and little-to-no subtlety to seemingly have no character development at all. In contrast to other Argento protagonists, Moretti is very well-defined, a man whose best days are behind him and with nothing ahead of him save the slow shuffle toward death; his struggles to remember potentially important details and clues from such an old case are fascinating to watch, and von Sydow sells the hell out of this script like the professional that he is.

His relationship with Dionisi’s Giacomo is also a welcome change, as romantic and/or sexual entanglement has dominated the relationships between characters in every one of Argento’s films since Opera. Like the pairing of Arnò and Giordani in Cat o’ Nine Tails and McGregor and Jennifer in Phenomenon, Giacomo and Moretti are a pair of intergenerational investigators, and their strengths and weaknesses complement each other while their history lends the investigation more emotional weight than it would otherwise. This relationship isn’t the only homage to earlier films, either. There’s a lot of Profondo rosso and Tenebrae in Sleepless‘ DNA. As in Profondo, there is a red herring killer, again played by Gabriele Lavia, and the killer’s leitmotif revolves around nursery rhymes while the killings themselves feature frenetic calliope music of the kind emitted by children’s toys. What’s particularly exciting about the revisitation of older ideas is that it lulls you into a false sense of security with regards to other repeated elements, allowing Argento to play with them. Every clue leads you to believe that there are two killers, as in Tenebrae, but the surprise is that there is only one. Most of Argento’s murderous villains begin to kill only when some repressed memory is awoken; here, the killer is supposedly dormant for seventeen years, leading an audience familiar with these films to assume that some traumatic event has triggered the spree. Instead, the  the captured killer admits at the film’s conclusion that no one considered that he or she could have just been somewhere else.

It would be misleading, however, if I didn’t point out that Sleepless pales in comparison to those two films. There are problems here, most of them revolving around the identity of the killer, whose bad dubbing is notable even in this film, which features some of the more egregiously bad synching outside of Phantom. I also prefer when there is some logic to the selection of victims on the part of the killer, as in Trauma with its revenge list and Profondo, where each death is covering the tracks of an older crime. When the killings are more random or circumstantial, as in Phenomenon and Opera, there’s an added dimension of danger but less emotional investment, and I’ll take the latter over the former any day.

Still, so much of this film works that I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. It’s hard not to see a little bit of Argento in Moretti, an aging genius facing irrelevance and failure in his twilight years, but one whose facilities grow subtly sharper and stronger when he finds himself immersed in his craft once again. Goblin returns to provide the soundtrack for the film (for what is, to date, their last collaboration with Argento), which further gives the movie the feeling of having fallen through a crack in time from an earlier point in the director’s career. There’s also no CGI here (at least any that I can recognize), and the murders are well-done and convincing; as far as practical effects go, the killing of Giacomo’s mother as he watches from his hiding spot is probably one of the best from Argento’s entire oeuvre. It’s worth tracking down, especially as a not-as-good-but-still-noteworthy companion piece to Profondo and Tenebrae.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star
campstamp

“Alright, scouts. Let’s kick some zombie ass.”

Man, these zombie horror comedies really do seem to write themselves. Here’s the basic premise of Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (as if you couldn’t infer it from the title alone): three teenage boy scouts try to get laid while the world (or at least their small town) crumbles around them into zombie mayhem. You can pretty much tell from there whether or not you’re on board with the movie’s grossout gore gags & sexual bro humor, which for better or for worse plays out exactly as you’d expect it to.  Imagine Superbad with extras from the “Thriller” video eating half the cast & you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. All its genre faithfulness aside, at least Scouts Guide doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of films like this: wimping out on the gore & sex jokes. It’s a very raunchy teen sex comedy & a very gory zombie flick, both elements over the top in their crassness. Fans of bro humor & disgusting splatter fests may know what they’re getting ahead of time, but are likely to leave somewhat satisfied.

Despite what you may assume from the title, Scouts Guide never provides a list of rules on how to survive the zombie apocalypse like the one Jesse Eisenberg reads off in Zombieland. The plot is much more straightforward in structure. After establishing that teenage boy scouts are unsexy nerds who can’t get laid, the film stages a 28 Days Later-type viral outbreak that shakes up their world enough to allow rites of passage like squeezing their first breasts, viewing their first strip tease, and (on a sweeter note) receiving their first kiss, all on the same night. And because they’re hormone-addled teenage boys, it just barely bothers them that these moments of intimacy are soaked in gore & viscera. Even though that gore is pretty standard in terms of zombie movie mayhem, it is at least enthusiastic enough in its details to make the effort worthwhile. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure it was the first time I had ever seen zombie cats, zombie deer, zombie scientists, zombie scout leaders, zombie cops, and zombie strippers all in the same film, And true to form, in terms of teenage boy sex humor, the movie also makes time to include zombie hand jobs, zombie rim jobs, and zombie cunnilingus while it was at it. It’s all very tasteless,  but it’s also just silly enough to work.

Even though I enjoyed Scouts Guide for what it was, I’m struggling to recall details that distinguish it from its zombie comedy peers. The reason I watched the film in the first place was that the star role was filled by the incredibly gifted Tye Sheridan. It was nice to see him have fun for a change, since most of his work to this point has been in grim dramas like Mud & Joe. Other supporting roles from familiar faces like David Koechner, Blake Anderson, and Cloris Leachman were wall pretty much on par with their previous comedy work, but nothing out of the ordinary. Only the strip club cocktail waitress played by Sarah Dumont stood out as a particularly bad performance, but what’s the point of a zombie movie if you don’t sneak at least one of those in there?

The rest of the film’s charms are a stray sly joke or two, like a strip club named Lawrence of Alabia, a zombie wearing a “YOLO” shirt, a pissant dude bro taking selfies with corpses, a grown man’s beyond-obsessive shrine to the fabulous Dolly Parton, etc. You’ve more or less seen everything else before: the chest-caving moment from The Thing, the landscaping equipment brutality of Dead Alive, you know the drill. If you can deal with a couple stray poop jokes, gratuitits nudity, and bros being bros (often with resulting punishment), Scouts Guide is an amusing, low stakes horror comedy. It also gets instant bonus points for valuing practical effects over CGI. It could’ve easily substituted details like zombie cat puppets & elastic zombie dicks with computer graphics, but instead they for the most part took the time to mimic the golden era of the genre in its gore effects, a dedication to the (admittedly trashy) craft that I truly appreciate.

-Brandon Ledet

The Thing from Another World (1951)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

In a lot of ways John Carpenter’s 1982 technical marvel of a creature feature The Thing is a one of a kind movie. If nothing else, the titular creature in the film presents itself in many uniquely complex-grotesque forms, each worthy of being preserved & displayed in a museum. As unique of a picture as it is, Carpenter’s The Thing is just one of several adaptations of the same novella, Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. Three decades before Carpenter got his hands on the story, prolific Hollywood producer Howard Hawks had already loosely adapted the work in a film titled The Thing From Another World. Carpenter was undoubtedly a fan of this older incarnation, as he borrowed its title & the look of its title card, but the two films are fundamentally different in their approaches to telling Campbell’s space invasion story. While Carpenter’s The Thing dazzles viewers with complex, constantly evolving forms of its alien beast, Hawks’ The Thing From Another World keeps its monster mostly under wraps until the last third of the film, instead building its narrative more around the paranoid infighting that plagues the crew dealing with the otherworldly presence.

Set on the exact opposite side of the globe as Carpenter’s The Thing, the film begins in Anchorage, Alaska, where a crew of poker-playing, dame-talking military men are sent on an expedition to the North Pole to investigate a potential UFO sighting, a newspaper man in tow. Once there, they discover a massive flying saucer buried in the ice & attempt to melt it free, accidentally destroying the ship in the process. What they manage to preserve instead is a frozen alien being, one roughly shamed like a human male, except over 8ft tall. In Carpenter’s The Thing, the crew’s paranoid in-fighting revolves around the creature’s ability to imitate other life forms, thus making every team member a suspect for being “the thing”. In The Thing From Another World, the conflict is more concerned with balancing the need for scientific research with the more immediate concerns for self-preservation. As the gigantic humanoid alien monster proves itself to be a threat to the crew, they must decide whether to destroy it for their own safety or to attempt to peacefully contain it for further research, as instructed by the military higher ups.

Although the titular thing in Hawks’ production isn’t quite as visibly alien as Carpenter’s eerily unrecognizable shapeshifter, its humanoid form is merely a deception. The beast is eventually revealed to be a highly evolved form of plant life, one that feeds off of blood rather than water, like Aubrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. There’s a great sense of unnerving ambiguity in the gradual way the film’s isolated crew of scientists & military men piece together exactly what makes the thing ticket. There are also a couple of moments of special effects spectacle in the film, like in a sequence involving a severed arm and an extreme scene of violence in which the thing is set aflame & escapes into the snow. For the most part, though, where Carpenter established the terrifyingly alien nature of his creature’s biology through visual technique, the 1951 adaptation of the same story builds the same effect through a slow burn of dialogue, saving its creature feature surface pleasures for the final half hour. It’s not quite as exciting or satisfying as Carpenter’s picture, but fans of The Thing are likely to get a kick out of The Thing From Another World, both for the surprisingly adept dialogue and for the  fun of comparing & contrasting.

-Brandon Ledet

The Vampire Mafia of Innocent Blood (1992) vs. The Zombie Mafia of Shrunken Heads (1994)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

One of the stranger details of our Swampchat discussion of October’s Movie of the Month, John Landis’ 1992 horror comedy Innocent Blood, was that we couldn’t think of a single other film that featured a vampire mafia. You would think that another movie or a TV show or a comic book out there would’ve covered the topic before. The truth is that there very well may be an example out there that we’re over-looking, but it just hasn’t reached one of the four of us yet. Britnee & Erin suggested that there were similarities in the Canadian horror comedy Blood & Donuts‘ formula, but from what I understand that film is about a vampire navigating a world of modern day criminals, not about a world of modern day criminal vampires. After searching my brain for closer points of comparison over the past few weeks, I still couldn’t recall any other instances of a fictional vampire mafia, but I did happen to recall something somewhat similar: a zombie mafia.

It turns out Innocent Blood‘s undead criminals kissing cousin was under our noses all along, depicted in a film Britnee reviewed for this site several months ago: Shrunken Heads. Written/produced by infamous schlock-peddler Charles Band & directed by Danny Elfman’s brother/former bandmate Richard Elfman, Shrunken Heads is a goofy horror comedy featuring an undead ring of organized criminals, but is very much different from Innocent Blood in tone & purpose. While Innocent Blood feels like a perfect marriage of a Scorsese knockoff & a goofy vampire horror comedy, Shrunken Heads feels like a slightly edgy kids’ horror that went straight to VHS, which is pretty much the speciality of Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment brand in general.

In the film, a trio of young lads upset the day-to-day business of a teenage crime  boss who acts like a slightly-too-old leftover from Bugsy Malone. Not one to be fucked with, he promptly has the pre-teen offenders murdered in a vicious hail of gunfire. They’re then promptly resurrected by a voodoo priest/newspaper salesman who turns their remains into magical, flying shrunken heads who zip around, avenging their deaths by murdering their mobster hitmen & raising them from the dead to attack the aforementioned teenage crime boss. And there you have it: zombie mobsters.

Of course, there are some glaring differences between Shrunken Heads‘ undead mafia & that of Innocent Blood. The most essential difference is that Innocent Blood‘s vampire mafia remained somewhat organized after their transformation while the zombie mafia in Shrunken Heads disassembles their crime ring in acts of undead mutiny. Still, the films’ basic undead mobster shenanigans & goofy horror comedy mayhem make them prime candidates for a tangentially-related double feature, one backed up by the nearness of their release dates. I don’t think Innocent Blood‘s vampire mafia aesthetic has been matched by any other slice of media, but I do think Shrunken Heads may have come to closest to hitting that benchmark.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, 1992’s Innocent Blood, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this snapshot of the vampire-crowded box office that buried it, and last week’s look at John Landis’ list of works in the horror genre.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Witch Hunter (2015)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

witch

three star

campstamp

So a witch, a priest, and an assassin walk into a bar . . . And if you want to see the punchline of that joke play out, you’re going to have to lend two hours of your time to The Last Witch Hunter. I guess the question is whether or not the movie is funny enough to be worth that effort. How do you even critique a film like this, really? Do you judge it based on its merits as a self-serious action fantasy ostensibly aiming to build a franchise that certainly isn’t coming? Or do you enjoy it for what it truly is: a trashy throwaway trifle you enjoy once & then immediately forget? I’ll admit to enjoying the film well enough as a one-time-use trifle, but your own personal mileage may vary by how much enjoyment you automatically derive from bloodthirsty witches & an immortal Vin Diesel wielding a flaming sword (an image so inherently metal I could practically hear Slayer playing in my head both times it appeared onscreen). For me, that’s a pretty easy sell.

I will say this much on The Last Witch Hunter‘s behalf: it’s cartoonish inanity is far from half-assed. The movie’s sense of self-mythology is amusingly complex, as if it were trying to squeeze in volumes of source material comic books into a single feature film. In fact, since the movie is flopping hard enough to guarantee that no sequels will follow (despite its desperate wishes), a comic book adaptation might not be the worst future for this property. The story begins in The Dark Days of the Witch where Vin Diesel’s titular witch hunter gets his start by stabbing his flame sword into the chest of The Witch Queen, an evil hag made of tree roots who plans to wipe out the human race with The Black Plague in order to make room on Earth to expand her personal garden (seriously). In her dying breaths, she curses the newly crowned witch hunter to live forever, which eventually leads to a truce between witches & witch killers and the establishment of The Axe & The Cross, a spooky UN-type organization meant to ensure that “The peace endures” (a phrase that serves as the movie’s version of “May the Force be with you.”). Of course, this all leads to Diesel’s witch hunter being Double Axed & Double Crossed in modern day NYC when a strange figure similar to WWE’s Bray Wyatt or an extra from the first season of True Detective upsets the status quo by reintroducing black magic into the world,  a force explained to be “beyond evil.”

I’m getting exhausted trying to capture everything going down here & I haven’t even touched on ideas like “dreamwalkers”, “The Witch’s Council”, “The Witch Prison”, or the fact that folks like Michael Cain & Elijah Wood somehow got involved in this silliness. And I’m pretty sure I’ve mostly just included concepts introduced in the first act. As a whole, the movie has the convoluted mythology of a years-old game of D&D (something Vin Diesel is reportedly a huge fan of). The film also has a somewhat complex visual palette depicting a magical version of NYC with the general ambiance of a metropolis-sized absinthe bar. This is sharply contrasted with the old world witchcraft of insects, tree roots, fire, and endless voids. It’s all too easy to root for the witch’s side of the equation here (as if it’s ever not), since their evil queen’s dream of a worldwide garden is much more appealing than modern magic’s much more frivolous uses of selling cupcakes & promoting witchy fashion shows. Also, when The Witch Queen reminds the witch hunter that since witches pre-date humans, “You are trespassers on our world,” it’s a very convincing argument.

In a way, that’s what’s wrong with The Last Witch Hunter in a nutshell: too much witch hunting, not enough witches. Instead of constantly depicting witchcraft in action, the movie is much more interested in serving as a temple to Vin Diesel’s awesomeness as a mumbly action movie god the same way films like Commando used to do for Schwarzenegger in the past. It’s a lot of fun in this way. Diesel plays the part as a buff, action hero David Blane. He seduces witchy women, winks at curious children, rocks a Cracker Jack decoder ring, and uses MacGyver-esque tools like a glass of water & a floating staple in his leisurely witch hunts. In a lot of ways his cursed immortality undercuts a lot of the film’s potential conflict, but The Last Witch Hunter cheats enough on that detail to make it work. This is a hopelessly dumb film, to be sure, but it’s also complexly, ambitiously dumb, making for a mostly amusing trip to the theater. If you’re into Vin Diesel, wicked witches, D&D, and flaming weaponry, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot, but I’d also recommend bringing booze.

-Brandon Ledet

Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Over the last few years the 2007 horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat has joined the ranks of titles like Hocus Pocus & The Monster Squad as one of the films folks in my age range dutifully watch every Halloween season. Curious about the hype, I finally gave the film a shot & was pleasantly surprised to find a mostly goofy, sometimes bloody horror comedy that turns the spirit of my second-favorite holiday (no offense; Mardi Gras is still king) into lore of urban legend proportions. Although the film is far from perfect in terms of consistency & tone, its reverence for Halloween as a social & spiritual institution makes it a perfect candidate for the annual revisits I usually reserve for The Monster Squad & The Worst Witch. As soon as one of the first characters introduced is brutally murdered for offense of griping, “I hate Halloween,” and talking down their decorations a day early, the film establishes its mission statement: to protect the sanctity of dressing up in costumes & eating candy at all costs.

One of my favorite things that Trick ‘r Treat does is punishing the grumps & chumps that casually disparage the sacred holiday of All Hallows Eve. All of the following transgressions against the most unholiest of holidays are punished in the film: ignoring the “take one” signs on candy jars, not costuming, couples bickering instead of having fun, curmudgeons refusing to hand out candy to trick or treaters, horny dudes using the occasion as an excuse to hit on girls in skimpy costumes, snot-nosed punk kids mindlessly smashing jack o’ lanterns, bullies taking scare-pranks a step too far, and (as mentioned) taking down decorations a day early out of fatigue with the holiday. There’s probably more offenses that I can’t even recall. The film takes the sanctity of its temporal setting very seriously. It also puts a lot of stock into the power of urban legends, constructing new legends like The Halloween School Bus Massacre and turning old traditions like the classic “trick or treat” rhyme into a deadly ultimatum. Even the candy that holds the whole holiday together is given an almost religious significance, sometimes saving lives (when dispensed properly) and sometimes ending them (through poison & razor sharp shards brandished as weapons).

There’s only a minimum amount of genuine scares to be found in Trick ‘r Treat, mostly achieved through the confusion of real life ghouls & monsters mixing in with the drunken, costumed crowd. The film’s much more concerned with trope play & subverted expectations than scares. Victims turn out to be killers; killers turn out to be victims; when you think you’re getting one kind of famous monster the film delivers another, etc. Also surprising is the way Trick ‘r Treat interconnects its vignettes so that they’re all smoothly part of one large narrative, a rare ambition for an anthology horror. As for the individual players in the story, only actor Dylan Baker stands out in his performance, building nicely off his dark comedy work in past films like Happiness & Fido. I guess it’s also remarkable that Anna Paquin was put mostly to good use here, as she is always eager to remind the world that she is, objectively speaking, a terrible, godawful, not good at all actress. I was also relieved that besides brief use of Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” the film avoids devolving into the late 90s-early 00s mall goth aesthetic that ruins films like American Mary for me. Instead, it builds most of its visual palette off of the inherent spookiness of the holiday (in details like blood moons & jack o lanterns) as well as the comic book framing that worked so well for classic anthology horrors like Creepshow & Tales from the Crypt in the past. What works most for Trick ‘r Treat, though, is the effortless reverence it shows for Halloween traditions & urban legends. That’s surely the aspect of the film that has opened it up to annual cinematic traditions, despite its tepid reception upon its initial straight-to-DVD release almost a decade ago.

-Brandon Ledet

Il fantasma dell’opera (aka The Phantom of the Opera, 1998)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

EPSON MFP image

halfstar

“When you hear my thoughts, you’ll know where to go.”

Oh. Oh my.

I was looking forward to Dario Argento’s 1998 adaptation of Phantom of the Opera with something like macabre excitement. After all, it was identified by TV Tropes, among others, as being widely regarded as the worst adaptation of that source material, in any media form, ever. Still, I expected that there would be something noteworthy or praiseworthy about it. After all, Phantom is a work with a huge body of reimaginings and revisions; Wikipedia lists twenty-eight different film adaptations (although some of these are homages rather than direct translations of the source), thirty stage versions, forty-six literary retellings, and an additional fourteen literary versions made for children. That doesn’t even include the radio plays, television shows, and comic books that retell or revisit the story. That’s no small feat, considering that the original novel was published barely over a century ago. Personally, I don’t quite understand the story’s enduring appeal, although that may simply be because I’ve never read the original novel, although I know the plot largely as the result of cultural osmosis through the various homages to the narrative that show up in other media from time to time. Such a large body of adaptations bespeaks a kind of fanaticism that made me question whether or not the “worst adaptation” moniker applied to Argento’s version was accurate or should be interpreted as a criticism on par with one made by Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. I expected that this might be the case, but I was wrong. I was so, so wrong.

Il fantasma dell’opera may very well be the worst Phantom adaptation of all time; I have not seen or read enough versions to say this definitively. I can say, however, it is the worst film of Argento’s that I have seen as part of this project, and is without question one of the worst movies I have ever seen, if not one of the worst movies of all time. I would dare venture to say it is one of the worst adaptations with regards to conceptualization as well, foregoing some of the most basic elements of the narrative for no identifiable reason (the Phantom isn’t even disfigured!). The acting is atrocious across the board, the overwrought dialogue is like something written by an overzealous student with delusions of grandeur (“Your perfume, your female smell–it pulses through me like the rolling ocean!”), and the direction so uninspired that I was shocked to learn that the stagey sets on which the film was shot weren’t sets at all, but the interiors of a real Victorian opera house in Budapest. It took me four attempts to make it through this movie without either falling asleep or losing interest completely. I have stared deep into the abyss of bad movies, and it gazed deeply into me also. Hell is this movie, and this movie is hell.

The film opens as a baby is placed in a basket and floats down the river, like a late-Nineteenth Century Moses. The basket washes up in some catacombs, where the infant is rescued by rats before the bassinet is able to flow over a waterfall. Some years later, three construction workers are dabbling in a well (I think?) when one smashes through the wall and accidentally discovers the series of catacombs. Christine Daaé (Asia Argento, in her third collaboration with her father) is a young ingénue opera performer who sneaks onto the deserted stage one night and sings; her impromptu performance is overheard by the Phantom (Julian Sands), who is immediately smitten with her, and she with him. Meanwhile, a character known only as The Rat Catcher (István Bubik) continues his crusade to rid the Opéra de Paris of all the rats hiding under its foundations. The Phantom, who was raised by the rats that saved him (and who taught him perfect English diction, apparently), takes offense at this and psychically forces the man to shove his hand into one of his own traps. A police inspector begins to investigate the strange occurrences that are credited to the Phantom, and is told that the specter is often accompanied by a cold wind and that he can compel people to perform actions against their will. (This features an interaction in which the investigator is informed of the temperature phenomenon by a seamstress, and then both of them rub their folded arms in the stagiest way possible while he asks “Did you just feel a sudden chill in the air?”)

Raoul (Andrea Di Stefano), the brother of a minor duke of some kind, is also infatuated with Christine, who has begun to fall in love with the Phantom. Their communiques take the form of telepathic conversations, meaning that most of this romance consists of Asia Argento staring into space and verbally responding to unheard directives, which somehow still sounds more engaging than it actually is. She is torn between her two unremarkable suitors, however, wondering if “Knowing nothing of love, [she has] fallen in love with both men at once.” Various minor characters make their way into the catacombs only to be dispatched by the Phantom, and there is meant to be some symmetry between the people who go below the opera house and the rats who ascend into it and how both are killed, but it’s not very important, considering that this would make the Phantom and the Rat Catcher mirrors of each other, and that’s not relevant in any other sense. There’s also a subplot about Degas and his fondness for underage dancing girls who take classes at the opera house; another man who is also obsessed with the young girls is killed by the Phantom when he chases a girl (who looks about ten) into the catacombs in an attempt to molest her. This, too, is completely irrelevant to the plot save that it shows one of the Phantom’s victims is deserving of his fate.

Christine eventually accompanies the Phantom to his lair, where the two sleep together. It’s not sexy; the tableaux in the scene where the Phantom bends over Christine with his long, greasy hair calls to mind the Peter Paul Rubens painting of Cronus devouring one of his children more than anything else. Despite her reasonable wishes not to be left alone in his rat-infested cave while he returns to the opera house, he leaves her so that he can frighten and injure the diva Carlotta (Nadia Rinaldi) so that Christine can take her place. Throughout these scenes, a subplot involving the Rat Catcher building a small vehicle (it looks like a steampunk Wacky Racer) that will increase his rat killing productivity. He and his heretofore unseen little person assistant take the rat-killer into the catacombs and do significant damage to the rat population before crashing accidentally; the Rat Catcher then climbs his way out of the catacombs, but not before witnessing Christine and the Phantom together. The Phantom returns to Christine, who wants nothing more to do with him, so he rapes her; while he thinks she is sleeping, she spies him cuddling with his rat buddies and escapes back to the opera house, where she takes the stage in Carlotta’s place. During the performance, the Rat Catcher finally reappears and makes his way onstage, where he interrupts the performance to accuse Christine of cavorting with the monster. Amidst the ensuing chaos, the Phantom abducts/rescues her, before he is mortally wounded by Raoul. The police arrive as he is dying, and he tells Raoul and Christine to abscond, fearing that Christine will also be killed. Looking back as he dies, she begs him not to leave her and… roll credits.

This movie is awful. Just terrible. The Phantom story is, in its way, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, filtered through some Beauty and the Beast archetypes and updated to what was a contemporary setting at the time of the novel’s composition. More than either of those, however, the narrative turns the heroine into a Bella Swann, eternally enraptured by a man who is creepy and possessive in addition to being a beast. At least in the novel and in other adaptations, the relationship between the two is founded on the Phantom’s instruction in the musical arts from which Christine benefits; here, he’s just a stalker who can communicate with her telepathically. There’s no reason for Christine to find him so appealing, even if this version foregoes the very important plot element that the Phantom is disfigured; here, he’s just Julian Sands with gross hair, psychic powers, and an affinity for rats. In the original novel, the affection between Christine and the Phantom never transcends to become physical; here, the two have consensual sex and then he rapes her (which makes her later declaration of love for him all the more disgusting). And the unnecessary subplots about Degas et al. and the Rat Catcher serve only to distract. There’s some decent gore, but there’s also some very bad CGI work (the scene where the Phantom sits on the rooftop and daydreams about a rat trap full of humans in particular) and much of the violence is irrelevant to the plot. There is nothing here to redeem this movie. Nothing. Avoid at all costs.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

American Mary (2012)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

twostar

campstamp

Maybe the reason that the late 90s, early 00s nu metal Hot Topic mall goth aesthetic hasn’t yet returned in any significant, nostalgic way is that it never died a proper death. Not that I’d recommend the experience, but if you tuned in to a modern rock radio station, you’ll notice that not much has changed in the last fifteen years. A couple outliers like Tame Impala & The Black Keys aside, a lot of mainstream hard rock sounds like the kind of dreck I would’ve greedily eaten up in my KoЯn/Slipknot/Limp Bizkit-loving days as a wee lad. That’s partly why the half-hearted, cheap-o slasher American Mary feels so awkwardly uncool. If it were released closer to 1999, it’d be a lot more likely to deserve a former mall goth cult following like the actually-pretty-great werewolf movie Ginger Snaps. Since it was released just three years ago, however, the film feels like stale leftovers from a nu metal yesteryear. It’s not just in the shitty soundtrack either. The whole film feels like it could’ve been jointly sponsored by Hot Topic, Spencer’s, The Family Values Tour, and Ozzfest. Obviously, there’s still a market for that aesthetic, but I personally found it difficult to stomach.

The titular Mary in this nostalgia trip to a time no one misses is a young medical student who falls down the bizarre rabbit hole of performing voluntary body modification procedures thanks to a strip club named Bourbon-a-Go-Go. Unable to support herself financially while attending medical school, Mary auditions to be a stripper at Bourbon-a-Go-Go & somehow the interview devolves into her performing life-saving surgery in her fancy lingerie, a ridiculous display I suppose was meant to be titillation for surgery fetishists. It certainly didn’t deliver anything valuable in terms of gore. Shortly after this strange turn in her life, Mary is drugged & raped at a mentor surgeon’s house party (a moment that feels grotesquely out of place in what is for the most part a horror comedy) and the film then briefly combines my two all-time least favorite movie genres: the rape revenge & the torture porn. Fun. All of this nonsense eventually leads to Mary finding a second life as an unlicensed body modification surgeon who specializes in tongue splitting, teeth filing, implants, gential modification, voluntary amputation, and the like. She spends the rest of the film trying to balance this newfound vocation with the day-to-day complications of a besides-the-point budding romance & police investigation. Gore-light, gothy hijinks ensue.

To her credit, the actress who plays Mary (Katharine Isabelle, who also played Ginger in the aforementioned Ginger Snaps, appropriately enough) is mostly charming here, with her mod goth bangs & ironic, Daria Morgendorffer-style sense of emotionally-detached humor. Other female characters, including a woman who’s had more than a dozen elective procedures in order to look like her favorite cartoon character & a fetish model who wants to become as flat as a Barbie doll to sidestep sexual objectification, are equally fascinating. What doesn’t work is the grotesquely macho world that surrounds them. The film’s tendency towards a meat head nu metal aesthetic opens it up to leering lipstick lesbianism, thoroughly unsexy fellatio, sexual assault, and trashy-at-best strip teases that ruin the good vibes that a few interesting characters here or there can’t sustain on their own. American Mary desperately wants to be an ironically detached horror comedy & sometimes it works. The fact that our lovely mod goth protagonist earns the moniker “Bloody Mary” is amusing, as are other tossed-off details like an early scene where a mentor praises her surgical skills with the line, “You’re going to make a great slasher.” Most of the film is far from self-aware in this way, though, and instead drags on endlessly through macho goth nonsense sure to please every thirteen year old out there who’s still rocking studded bracelets & wallet chains, but not many others.

For the morbidly curious looking to dive into this dated aesthetic, I recommend instead checking out the somewhat-similar-in-tone Starry Eyes, in which a young actress falls into the rabbit hole of Hollywood casting couch politics. Starry Eyes is far from a horror comedy, but its earnestness earns much more interesting, bizarrely grotesque results than American Mary‘s overbearing sense of detachment. Starry Eyes has a lot of American Mary‘s nu metal posturings, but puts them to much better use, going for full-on horror instead of this half-ironic, half-brutal, fully-tepid stinker with a late 90s hangover.

-Brandon Ledet