horror

Steel and Lace (1991)

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Do you remember that scene in RoboCop where RoboCop shoots a rapist in the dick?  RoboCop nails the guy perfectly through the thighs and skirt of a would-be victim, doubly traumatizing her before ineffectively referring her to a rape-crisis center so he can swiftly move on to enacting more police-state violence elsewhere on the streets of Detroit.  The straight-to-video sci-fi slasher Steel and Lace is essentially a feature-length remake of that scene, except with both the rape victim and the avenging cyborg embodied by one character.  Curiously, it plays that violent rape-revenge scenario with the softer, melodramatic tones of a Lifetime movie instead of the tongue-in-cheek humor of Verhoeven’s classic satire.  It’s no less violent than RoboCop, though.  Directed by special-effects artist Ernest D. Farino—who cut his teeth staging kill gags for the likes of Charles Band, Roger Corman, and Fred Olen Ray—its revenge robot’s body-destroying gadgets vary from scene to scene, depending on the momentary whims of the gore department.  As the title suggests, it’s a wild mix of hard & soft tones, a volatile sentiment that’s echoed by its original tagline: “She’s tough. She’s tender. She’s all woman. And all machine.”

Originally scripted under the title Lady Lazarus, Steel and Lace stars New Orleans local Clare Wren as a victim of sexual assault who loses her court case against her gang of business-bro attackers.  While the ponytailed yuppie scum celebrate their legal victory, she leaps from the courthouse roof to her death, becoming a victim of suicide as well as rape.  Devastated, her techie brother (Bruce Davison) brings her back to life as a rape-revenge Terminator that hunts down each of her Reaganite attackers one-by-one.  She bores holes in chests, she sets men aflame, she decapitates; she even sucks one deserving “victim” dry during penetrative sex, using his dick like a plastic straw.  She’s also a master of disguise, often appearing as single-scene characters before removing her face Mission Impossible-style to reveal the robo-woman beneath.  That shapeshifting ability lends a fun air of mystery to the film, as the audience is never fully sure which minor character is going to be revealed to be the Lady Lazarus robot next: the hot secretary, the hot lady at the bar, the male FBI agent who’s supposedly investigating the murders, etc.  The cops on her trail actually solving that mystery don’t add much to the movie (least of all David Naughton as Detective “Clippy”), but the inventiveness of the robo-murders more than make up for their bland asides.

Much like the dick-shooting scene in RoboCop, there’s an unshakeable sadness that settles on Steel and Lace once the novelty of its over-the-top violence wears off.  Wren recites the mantra “Pretty, very pretty” to each of the investor-bro villains before disposing of them, righteously spitting their own words from her attack back at them.  It’s a cathartic reversal of violence during the first couple of kills, but it gets increasingly sad the longer she’s forced to dwell on it, especially when her brother makes her replay each act of revenge on video so he can obsessively salivate over them like homemade pornography.  Worse yet, she doesn’t really seem to know who she was when she was alive and attacked, asking haunting questions like, “Who was I? Did I have friends? Was I happy?”  The only other woman of the note is the courtroom reporter who sketched her throughout her trial (Stacy Haiduk), whom she frequently locks robo-eyes with in an attempt to make a genuine social connection that has nothing to do with her former self’s rape or her brother’s revenge.  It’s likely silly to seek genuine pathos in this straight-to-video rape revenge RoboCop knockoff, but the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome did such a wonderful job restoring it to a Fine Art quality that I can’t help myself.  It’s just as visually crisp & thematically meaningful to me as the time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

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It was recently announced that self-appointed Stephen King adapter Mike Flanagan (usurping Mick Garris’s throne) will soon be adapting the horror author’s debut novel Carrie into a five-part miniseries.  If you’re not already onboard for Flanagan’s melodramatic, literary take on horror storytelling, it’s not an especially promising proposition.  On the page, Carrie is King at his most direct & succinct, barely breaking through the page count of a novella to tell a simple story of a bullied teenager who violently strikes back at her religious-zealot mother & high school tormentors with newfound telekinetic powers.  It’s a tragic tale without much room to expand, especially not over five hours of serialized television.  Brian De Palma already staged a book-faithful adaptation of Carrie in under 100 minutes nearly half a century ago, while also finding plenty room to bulk up the work with his showy directorial style – the opposite of Flanagan’s grounded interpersonal drama.  If anyone is going to expand the Carrie story without dragging out what’s already on the page with endless expositional filler, they’d have to deviate from the source text entirely and just make up their own thing . . . which is exactly what happened when Carrie was given a late-90s nu-metal makeover in The Rage: Carrie 2.

Written as an original screenplay titled The Curse, The Rage was only reworked as a Carrie sequel several drafts into its rocky production.  Its only tangible narrative connection to the original film is the return of Carrie White’s well-meaning classmate Sue Snell (Amy Irving, reprising her role from the De Palma film), who now works as a guidance counselor at the high school where she once watched all her friends get telekinetically slaughtered.  This disconnection from the original Carrie was a major red flag to director Katt Shea, who only reluctantly signed onto the project (filling in for another director who bailed at the last minute) once she secured permission to include clips of Sue & Carrie in flashback to make it a more credible sequel.  I’m not sure those clips would’ve meant much to the teens of 1999, since De Palma’s Carrie was released before they were born and only lived on through cable broadcasts & Blockbuster Video rentals.  If anything, The Rage‘s horror cinema callback that spoke loudest to that generation was a spoof of the “Do you like scary movies?” phone call from Scream, delivered in a mocking Donald Duck voice by the leader of a new crop of high school bullies.  The moody teenagers of the era were likely showing up to The Rage looking for something contemporary, not to check in on how Sue Snell was doing 20 years later.  To Shea’s credit, she mostly delivered it to them.

Emily Bergl stars as Rachel Lang, the de facto Carrie White in this somewhat-sorta sequel.  She’s a goth-girl loner who’s already grieving the loss of her single mother (Succession‘s J. Smith-Cameron) to institutionalization for schizophrenia when she’s hit with another loss: the sudden suicide of her only good friend (Mena Suvari).  That friend’s death is quickly linked to a small gang of football players who’ve made a point-system game of sleeping with and then immediately dumping as many virginal classmates as they can in a ripped-from-the-headlines plot befitting a Law & Order episode.  Unfortunately for those meathead degenerates, the school goth at the bottom of the social ladder happens to have immense telekinetic powers that could crush them at any time.  This all comes to a head at a homecoming game afterparty at a local rich boy’s house, when Rachel goes full Carrie and burns the entire senior class to the ground.  I hadn’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a horror movie that badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago.  The difference is that the bullies’ deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad, like in the De Palma film.  Rachel unleashes Hell at that party, killing her tormentors with everything from harpoons to flare guns to eyeglasses to Compact Discs.  It’s the kind of payback that makes you stand up & cheer instead of feeling sorry for everyone involved.

The Rage repeats many beats from the original Carrie but transforms the story into such a blatant goth-girl power fantasy that it’s much more closely aligned with films of its own time like Ginger Snaps & The Craft.  There are some very sweaty script-rewrite maneuvers that directly link the source of Rachel Lang’s telekinetic powers to the source of Carrie White’s, but for the most part Katt Shea does her best to distinguish The Rage as its own thing.  The harsh flashbacks to the original Carrie are highlighted in a blood-red color filter, echoed in the black & white, choppy frame-rate textures of Rachel’s telekinetic episodes.  Shea’s background directing erotic thrillers also leaks through, especially in a tender Cinemax-style sequence where Rachel sheds her virginity with one of the popular boys.  I just don’t expect to see that kind of source-text deviation or personal auteurism in a made-for-streaming take on Carrie.  If studios are only going to greenlight (or, in The Rage‘s case, complete) projects with built-in name recognition, the only path forward is for filmmakers to deliver in-name-only sequels that transform their source material into something entirely new.  It’s unlikely that a modern, five-hour version of Carrie will add much to the novel’s cinematic legacy besides digging into its individual character’s motivations & backstories, which means more dutiful homage to forgotten-to-time characters like Sue Snell and fewer novelty modernizations like the flying, throat-slicing CDs of The Rage – reminding you to buy a copy of the official tie-in soundtrack on your way out.  In other words, Mike Flanagan could never; Katt Shea forever ❤

-Brandon Ledet

Smile 2 (2024)

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I wanted to see a new-release horror on the big screen in the lead-up to Halloween, and the offerings are desperately thin.  There are no original horror films in wide release this week (give or take the last few remaining screenings of The Substance, which premiered over a month ago).  Everything on offer is reboots & sequels, continuing this summer’s trend of name-brand horror properties filling in the gaps left by the usual action/superhero fare that’s nowhere to be seen this year.  Among the few horror franchise extenders that did make it to theaters in time for Halloween, it was difficult to find one worth leaving the house to see. Besides being a novelty-Christmas slasher, Terrifier 3 simply looks too mean.  By contrast, Beetlejuice 2 & Venom 3 both look too goofy, to the point where they barely converge with horror at all.  Smile 2 was the obvious choice, then, since it falls somewhere between those tonal extremes.  I remember the first Smile movie being cruel in its messaging that the suicidally depressed should self-isolate to avoid scarring or infecting loved ones with their mental illness, but at least it wasn’t as violently, grotesquely misogynistic as the first Terrifier film.  I also remember Smile being silly in concept, never overcoming the initial cheese of building its horror around an evil Snapchat filter, but at least its sequel isn’t going to indulge in the self-aware schtick of a Beetlejuice or Venom sequel: echoes of you-had-to-be-there comedic properties that would’ve been better off abandoned as one-off novelties.  So, Smile 2 reigns supreme this Halloween, entirely by default.

I suppose Smile 2 is also superior to the first Smile film entirely by default, given that it finally comes up with a reason for The Smile gimmick besides it looking off-putting.  In the first film, the titular Smile is a body-hopping demonic curse that possesses the minds of the mentally unwell, driving them to suicide within a week, then transferring to a new host through the miracle of Trauma. It’s represented onscreen as the hallucinated smiling face of everyone the possessed victim meets, creeping the doomed soul out with a harsh face-altering digital filter that exaggerates their features (a gimmick borrowed from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, from which Smile 2 also borrows its ending).  You could meet Smile halfway by mentally reaching for some thematic connection in how it’s isolating to suffer a mental episode while everyone around you is seemingly, sinisterly cheery, but there really isn’t much to it beyond it looking creepy.  However, Smile 2 does justify The Smile visual gimmick in its narrative, this time following demonically possessed popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) as she prepares for a career-comeback tour after rock-bottoming as a drug addict.  Skye is outfitted to look like Lady Gaga in her onstage costuming, but her offstage struggle to please fans, staff, press, record label execs, and her micro-momager while maintaining a cutesy smile read as Chappell Roan.  Being grinned at by strangers & sycophants all day really does seem like a tough part of the popstar gig.  Usually, the millions of dollars in monetary compensation help make that discomfort worthwhile, but I can see how being stalked by a suicide-encouraging demon might tip that scale in the wrong direction.

Not that it’s easy to know exactly what poor Skye Riley is going through.  The demon’s main method of attack is to cause its hosts to hallucinate, confirming their fears that nobody cares about them, and they deserve to die alone (soon!).  As a result, roughly 90% of Skye’s onscreen journey happens entirely in her head, and the movie constantly pulls the rug from under her to reveal that she’s imagining things, often while humiliating herself in public.  It’s the kind of social cringe that makes you cover your eyes in embarrassment while watching a hack sitcom more often that it is the kind of unnerving horror that makes you cover your eyes in dread.  There are plenty of genuine scares, though.  This being a mainstream studio horror means that things get real quiet every time Skye is alone, only for a loud soundtrack stinger to startle the audience with an out-of-nowhere jump scare (punctuated by a creepy smile, of course).  Her luxury apartment is also invaded by a hallucination of her backup dancers doing a body contortionist routine straight out of Climax, revealing anxieties around how she’s passed around like a doll during her stage act.  Thankfully, no one stops the plot dead to recite search engine results for the word “trauma” like in the first Smile film, but there’s still plenty of brooding over topics like addiction, survivor’s guilt, and suicidal ideation, establishing a visual device where Skye chugs bottled water every time she’s triggered.  Just when you think all of this could be solved by the popstar-in-crisis admitting herself to a “health clinic” for “exhaustion,” though, the film reminds the audience that, yes, there is an actual, physical demon at work here – not just a metaphorical one.

In popstar-crisis terms, Smile 2 is about on par with Trap but oceans behind Vox Lux.  It makes good use of the inherently exaggerated music-video aesthetics of its setting but just as often strays from that world to dwell in the same drab, grey spaces most mainstream horrors occupy.  It’s clear that writer-director Parker Finn was funded for more creative freedom to play around as a visual stylist here than in the first film, and he uses the opportunity to make a name for himself as a formidable auteur before tackling his next ill-advised project: a modern remake of Żuławski’s Possession.  The results are mixed.  The high-gloss pop music aesthetic and sprawling 127min runtime suggest an ambitious filmmaker who’s eager to leave his mark on the modern-horror landscape, but by the third or fifth time he frames that landscape through an upside-down drone shot you have to wonder if he has enough original ideas in his playbook to pull off a name-brand career.  I’m not yet fully invested in Parker Finn as an artist, but I am grateful that he delivered a moderately stylish mainstream horror with a few effective jump scares during such an otherwise abysmal Halloween Season drought.  Smile 2 might not have meant much to me as cinema, but as a commercial product it supplied exactly what I demanded.

-Brandon Ledet

Rumours (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The SubstAnimator

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #224: Pitch Black (2000) & The Riddick Chronicles

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Welcome to Episode #224 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the many chronicles of Richard B. Riddick, starting with the sci-fi creature feature Pitch Black (2000).

00:00 We Love to Watch

06:53 Vin Diesel
21:30 Pitch Black (2000)
48:52 The Riddick Cinematic Universe

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

-The Podcast Crew

Celebrating 50 Years of Chainsaw Jerry

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Practically every cinema in town has offered a screening of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre this month, since the movie is currently enjoying its 50th anniversary and those Halloween-season marquees have to be filled by something.  No other venue rolled out as much novelty & ceremony for the occasion as The Broad, though, as they played host to Screamfest NOLA‘s Texas Chain Saw celebration.  The event was commemorated with appearances by an animatronic Leatherface outside, a cosplaying Leatherface indoors, free barbeque catering (to enhance the movie’s cannibalistic themes), and an operational replica of the van driven by Leatherface’s teenage victims.  Most importantly, though, the driver of that van was the guest of honor for the evening: actor Allen Danzinger, who plays Jerry, the discofied navigator who leads his fellow teens to bloody peril at the Louisiana/Texas border.  Danziger has apparently developed a horror-circuit side hustle signing autographs as a minor player from the original Chain Saw Massacre, branding himself as “Chainsaw Jerry” and selling official Chainsaw Jerry merch, like Chainsaw Jerry bobbleheads and t-shirts boasting Chainsaw Jerry’s famous catchphrase that we all know and love, “Quit goofing on me!”  It’s a little like how Paul Marco found a side career working horror convention booths thanks to his recurring Dumb Cop character “Kelton” in Ed Wood’s most famous films . . . except that Danzinger’s total screentime in Texas Chain Saw Massacre amounts to maybe ten minutes total, give or take his friends calling his name not realizing that he’s already been hacked to death.

To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  I’m just more of an 80s splatstick guy than a 70s grindhouse guy, even if I can appreciate that Texas Chain Saw is the 70s grindhouse movie – the one that everything in its wake sweatily scrambled to emulate.  Funnily enough, Allen Danzinger doesn’t care much for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre either.  He joked during the post-screening “Q&A” (a rehearsed stand-up routine mostly comprised of preloaded quips) that when Tobe Hooper asked him if there were any ways the movie could be improved, he replied, “Yeah, turn the seats away from the screen.”  His role as Jerry is mostly acting as comic relief in that same way, including a lengthy scene where he teases the scaredy-cat victim Franklin that he gave the unhinged hitchhiker they picked up (one of Leatherface’s loving relatives) his home address and his zip code (in an exchange that Danzinger recalls having mostly improvised).  He described Jerry as a kind of “smart aleck” version of Disco Stu.  When I asked if that disco costuming was true to how he dressed at the time, he reported that, yes, he wore his own personal wardrobe for the shoot.  Allen Danzinger is Chainsaw Jerry.  He’s a fun-loving goofball who doesn’t want to be involved in grisly gore-hound goings on of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre; he just wants attention and for you to buy a commemorative bobblehead.  The horror nerd audience at the Screamfest NOLA screening kept pleading for him to say something positive about any horror movie that he enjoys, since he wouldn’t cosign the all-timer quality of the film that made him subculturally “famous,” and he would only concede to two: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and his own upcoming stoner-comedy slasher The Weed Hacker Massacre.  That’s because there are only two things that Chainsaw Jerry loves to do: schtick & the hustle.

I highly recommend seeking out a Texas Chain Saw screening with Chainsaw Jerry in attendance, especially if you want to revisit the film even though it’s not entirely Your Thing.  Personally, Texas Chain Saw might not even rank among my Top 5 Tobe Hooper films, much less my top 5 horrors of all time, since he later went on to direct 80s classics that speak much more directly to my own over-the-top sensibilities: Lifeforce, Poltergeist, Invaders from Mars, The Funhouse, etc.  Seeing it on the big screen only confirmed that its proto-Terrifier style of shrill slaughterhouse violence isn’t entirely for me, even if I can appreciate the feel-bad brutality of its violence and the mise-en-scene of its taxidermy art installations.  My only new observation on this rewatch was that it just missed being titled The Texas Sledgehammer Massacre, given how much more often that instrument is used to take out Jerry’s doomed friends before the titular chainsaw hacks them to bits.  It helped tremendously to have Danziger at the screening signing autographs & doing schtick, then, since he brought a lot of cheeseball levity to the event that’s missing from the film itself.  Yes, he shared the same anecdotes about the grueling 6-week shoot and the stink of the animal-parts set decor that you’ll hear at every other Texas Chain Saw event, but he also told us that New Orleans local John Larroquette was paid in weed for his narration over the opening scroll.  I have no idea if that anecdote is insightful or even true, but it got a laugh out of me, which is exactly why you want to venture into the Texas Chain Saw Massacre with Chainsaw Jerry at the wheel of the van.

-Brandon Ledet

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970)

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A couple Halloweens ago, I was costumed as a creepy teddy bear and dancing to loud electronic music over cocktails at R Bar.  Being a helpless cinema addict and not on the hunt for a Halloween hookup, I remember fixating on the muted, subtitled giallo that was screening on the walls of R Bar, fascinated.  My body may have been politely gyrating to the DJ’s set, but my mind was racing trying to figure out what gorgeous giallo oddity was providing the party’s background texture, since it was one that I had not yet seen.  Some light googling on All Saint’s Day led me to the typically poetic, overlong giallo title The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, which soon enough mysteriously appeared on a used DVD at a local thrift store.  Is it the same copy they were spinning at R Bar?  Was I being stalked by a giallo?  What could this vintage Technicolor erotic thriller possibly want from me?  The answer, of course, was nude photographs.

In retrospect, it’s funny that of all the gialli in the world, the above-the-bar selection that Halloween night was Forbidden Photos, since it’s not nearly as pronounced of a Horror Film as some of the more obvious titles from a Bava, or a Fulci, or an Argento.  Director Luciano Ercoli is less of a household name because of that lack of horror fandom support, since this falls closer to the proto-erotic thriller end of the giallo spectrum than the proto-slasher end.  With an atypically focused script from Ernesto Gastaldi and a softly melodramatic score from Ennio Morricone, Forbidden Photos is relatively straightforward and emotional for a giallo – trading in throat slashings from a leather-gloved killer for amateur porno shoots & sadomasochistic acts of blackmail.   It’s stylish, swanky, sadistic and, ultimately, sad, with internal-monologue narration that invests in its female victim’s inner life more than most examples of the genre.

Dagmar Lassander stars as the tormented Minou, played with the sad, glassy eyes and stiff, vaulted wigs of a Cole Escola character.  While her wealthy businessman husband is away on a work trip, she is physically assaulted by a mysterious brute who claims to have evidence that her spouse is a murderer (through the ludicrous method of artificially inducing The Bends in a business rival, then staging their death as a drowning).  Drawn into the stranger’s web, she involuntarily sleeps with him to receive (and destroy) evidence of the murder in trade, then briefly becomes his “sex slave” once he produces photographic evidence of their tryst (i.e., her rape) which he again leverages as blackmail.  Seedy pornography seems to be the criminal’s livelihood, as he appears as a performer himself in illicit photos owned by Minou’s hedonist bisexual friend Dominique (Susan Scott, who steals every scene she’s in).  Only, he may not exist outside of the pornography at all. Minou quickly spirals as the master-slave relationship escalates until her blackmailer suddenly vanishes; she’s then unsure whether she’s being gaslit or losing her grip on reality thanks to her favorite snack & drink combo of cocktails & tranquilizer pills.  That mental breakdown is when the film fully tips into supernatural horror territory, finally justifying its Halloween Night background programming.

In his interview on the 2006 Blue Underground disc I picked up, Gastaldi credits Forbidden Photos‘s unusual sense of clarity & cohesion to Ercoli sticking to the narrative of his screenplay instead of using it as a flimsy excuse for whatever visual indulgence happened to catch the director’s attention that day, as was giallo tradition.  An incredibly prolific writer in his heyday, Gastaldi would know, having written over eighty produced screenplays – including such formidable titles as All the Colors of the Dark, The Whip and the Body, The Vampire and the Ballerina, and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.  If you’re looking for the version of Forbidden Photos that takes wild, stylistic swings at the expense of narrative & tonal control, I’d recommend Fulci’s maniacal erotic thriller The Devil’s Honey, which is much looser in its forced S&M plot.  Ercoli is more grounded & restrained in his approach, which means that this is the rare giallo where the reveals behind its central mystery (whether Minou is being blackmailed or experiencing a mental breakdown) actually matter to the audience, as opposed to being treated as a last-minute formality.

That’s not to say that Forbidden Photos is not dripping with classic giallo style.  All of its characters live in sparse, swanky houses, which operate more as minimalist art galleries than traditional homes.  When Minou reunites with her husband after her initial attack, he’s introduced through a pane of shattered glass, sharply calling his honesty & integrity into question.  When she first enters her blackmailer’s apartment, she has to peer into his seedy world through Lynchian red-velvet curtains, like entering a fairy tale realm through a theatre stage.  Her rape in that apartment is only visually represented in flashback, with the more salacious details punctuated by a severe “Chinese devil statue” that the brute keeps on display.  Even more important to the picture is Minou’s genuine sexual tension with Dominique.  Their first hangout together involves the two gal-pals browsing through a mountain of amateur pornography, much of it featuring Dominique herself.  Dominique is such an aspirational antidote to Minou’s torturous lack of confidence that you actively root for her not to be involved with Minou’s potential gaslighting plot, since the story would be much more satisfying if they could manage to stay “friends.”  I will not spoil the way that story turns out, but I think it says a lot that it’s a giallo with a mystery worth leaving unspoiled just as much as it’s worthy of being projected as a stylish Halloween Night mood-setter at a dive-bar dance party.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Destroy All Monsters (1968)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the kaiju battle royal Destroy All Monsters (1968), featuring Godzilla and all his best frenemies.

00:00 Welcome

01:09 The Craft (1996)
04:20 The Shining (1980)
07:26 Fight Club (1999)
14:47 Malignant (2021)
18:17 Civil War (2024)
19:36 It’s What’s Inside (2024)
28:52 Megalopolis (2024)
40:41 Look What Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976)
49:00 Christine (1983)
52:07 They (2002)
56:45 The Grudge (2019)
1:00:25 Mr. Crocket (2024)
1:05:17 Sex Demon (1975)
1:12:47 Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

1:19:13 Destroy All Monsters (1968)

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

Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

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Most scholars cite the 1945 British “portmanteau” film Dead of Night as popularizing the horror anthology genre.  No one would claim it was the first horror anthology film, since the storytelling format is almost as old as the cinematic medium itself, but it is credited for establishing the rules & tones of the genre that would eventually be codified in anthologies from Amicus, EC Comics adaptations, and the like.  That horror-history milestone puts the 1943 anthology film Flesh and Fantasy in a unique position.  Since the Universal Horror production precedes Dead of Night by a couple years, it avoids a lot of the typical trappings of a by-the-numbers portmanteau, delivering something so far outside the expectations of the horror anthology format that it almost doesn’t qualify as horror at all.  It’s a lot more handsomely staged and a lot less macabre than what most anthologies would become in its wake, often transforming its characters through supernatural phenomena instead of punishing them for their moral transgressions.  More genre-faithful titles like Asylum, Creepshow, and Tales from the Crypt introduce selfish, amoral assholes who get their cosmic comeuppance at the hands of otherworldly ghouls, while Flesh and Fantasy plays its horror with a softer touch.  We have immense sympathy for each of its hopeless protagonists, rooting for them to make it out of their darkly fantastic crises alive & improved.  The movie is not vicious enough to be chilling, but it is beautifully eerie throughout, and its three tales of “dreams and fortune tellers” each land with genuine dramatic impact (which is then somewhat undercut by a racist punchline in the final seconds because, again, it was the 1940s).

The first tale (read from a spooky short story collection over a nightcap between businessmen in the hotel-lobby wraparound) immediately sidesteps genre expectations in its chosen setting.  While there are countless horror stories set on the thin-veil-between-worlds holidays of Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, Flesh and Fantasy finds its own thin-veil fantasy realm in the final few hours of Mardi Gras night, just before the Christian calendar transitions from hedonism to Lent.  The story starts with the discovery of a dead body pulled from the banks of the Mississippi River, a victim of suicide by drowning.  Drunken, costumed revelers briefly sober up while gathering around the unidentified corpse, but then quickly return to partying the last few hours of Carnival away before midnight ends the fun.  Only one woman stays behind, sympathizing with the suicide victim a little too intimately and considering joining him in death.  She sees herself as too ugly to be loved or to even party with the rest of her community, as represented by harsh low-angle lighting that accentuates strange, scowling curves on actor Betty Field’s otherwise pretty face.  Just before she drowns herself, a mysterious mask shop owner offers her an It’s a Wonderful Life-style perspective shift on her miserable life, allowing her to be beautiful for the last few hours of Mardi Gras thanks to a yassified plaster mask.  She, of course, subsequently learns a Twilight Zone-style lesson about how beauty comes from within, but the enchantment of the mask and the magical costume shop that provides it still hangs over her all-in-one-night journey like a heavy, eerie fog.  The only death in the segment happens before the story even starts, and all of its supernatural imagery is derived from the Mardi Gras floats & costumes parading in the background.

Legendary noir actor Edward G. Robinson has a much rougher time in his segment, in which he plays a wealthy lawyer who’s told by a palm reader that he’s going to become a murderer in the near future, to his shock.  This, of course becomes a story about self-fulfilling prophecies, as Robinson’s obsession over his fate to become a murderer against his will is the exact catalyst that drives him to becoming a murderer.  It’s like a noir variation on The Hands of Orlac in that way, with Robinson having heated debates with his own reflection & shadow about who in his life would be most ethical to kill, just to get the weight of the prophecy off his shoulders.  The argument is rendered in creepy, hushed whispers, which are echoed in the clouds of urban steam that pour in from every corner of the frame.  Likewise, the third & final segment of the film involves a self-fulfilling prophecy about a tightrope walker (Charles Boyer, of Gaslight fame) who envisions his own death in a nightmare featuring a cameo from (Robinson’s Double Indemnity co-star) Barbara Stanwyck.  Only, he doesn’t actually meet Stanwyck’s noir-archetype femme fatale until after he sees her in his dream, and he ignores the déjà vu feeling in pursuit of romance, ensuring that the dream will eventually come true.  It’s the most surreal segment of the trio, featuring psychedelic double-exposure compositions in its multiple dream sequences that provide the only true effects shots in the film, give or take the rear projection of Tarnished Angels-style Mardi Gras parade float footage in the opening vignette or Robinson’s onscreen doubling in the second.  It’s also the gentlest in its horror elements, though, offering a much kinder fate to Boyer’s helplessly smitten tightrope walker than what Robinson suffers after his own doom & gloom vision of the future.

In one of the stranger deviations from typical horror anthology formatting, there’s no wraparound buffer between the second and third segments, which bleed right into each other.  Edward G. Robinson reaches the end of his rope outside the very circus where Charles Boyer is walking his rope, so that the two stories are daisy-chained together.  That narrative conjunction feels excitingly ahead of its time, but it also leaves the opening Mardi Gras segment feeling isolated & insular in comparison.  The thematic & narrative connections between the tightrope & palm reading segments are crystal clear, which leaves a haze over how they relate to the opener.  What’s really important, though, is that all three segments are solidly satisfying and entertaining on their own terms, so that even if the audience might walk away with a personal favorite, it’s unlikely that one would stand out as the stinker of the bunch.  That might be the biggest deviation from horror anthology tradition, since even the best examples of the genre usually include a throwaway story that provides convenient bathroom-break time between the bangers.  The only throwaway segments of Flesh and Fantasy are its wraparound story which, again, concludes on a casually racist quip about superstitious “gypsies”.  If a horror anthology is going to whiff on any of its individual segments, the wraparound is the ideal place to do so, since it doesn’t tend to linger in the memory as much as the stories it scaffolds.  As a result, Flesh and Fantasy does register as one of the all-time greats of its genre, often by virtue of not falling victim to that genre’s worst, yet-to-be-established tropes.

-Brandon Ledet