horror

They Will Kill You (2026)

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I had mixed feelings upon first seeing the trailer for They Will Kill You, the first English feature from Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who previously directed two Russian language films that, based on their trailers, appear to have a similar tone and style as this one. At first, I was very excited for the film, since it looked like a lot of fun, but I was also annoyed that its advertising felt like it gave away too much of the movie’s plot. Although that’s true to a certain extent, I was pleasantly surprised that there were still many more twists and turns to come in the feature itself than the promotional materials let on. 

Ten years after nonfatally shooting their abusive father and failing to rescue her younger sister from his clutches, a woman calling herself Isabella (Zazie Beetz) appears at The Virgil, an extremely upscale Manhattan hotel, introducing herself as the new maid. After she’s given a brief tour of the maids’ floor by head of housekeeping Lily (Patricia Arquette), she’s ushered into her room, where she immediately barricades the door. In the night, several cloaked figures (including Heather Graham and Tom Felton) manage to enter her room a different way and attempt to kill her, alternately calling her a “sacrifice” and an “offering.” They quickly realize, however, that their latest lamb to be led to the slaughter is more than she appears, and that she’s not trapped in The Virgil with them; they’re trapped inside with her. 

“Isabella,” who reveals her name is Asia, has a motivation that’s pretty straightforward. After being paroled from prison, where she was incarcerated for the attempted murder of her father, she went to the place where her younger sister was last seen, in the hopes of saving her from whatever shenanigans were happening in the place. Some of the set up is a little flimsy, but it’s all just window dressing to get to the film’s purpose: showing Zazie Beetz going utterly feral against hordes of cultists with axes, machetes, shotguns, and any and every weapon she can get her hands on. It’s a gory splatterfest of decapitations, crushed eyeballs, impaled hands, exploding heads, screwdriver stabbings, and flaming hatchets, and it’s an objective success in the glorious violence department. 

The action choreography is extremely competent. After more than two decades of Bourne Identity-inspired shake cams and excessive editing, it’s refreshing to see that the dedication to craft that John Wick reminded everyone was possible continues to inspire successive action filmmakers. It’s that franchise that this film seems to draw a lot of inspiration from, especially with regards to the lead character’s virtually god-mode fighting prowess and the setting of a specialized hotel that comes preloaded with mythology, lore, and rules of engagement. Its other major inspiration seems to be the filmography of disgraced director Quentin Tarantino, most especially Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; its order isn’t necessarily anachronic in the same way that those films are, but the chronology of the story often stops for a scene or two to reveal some past event that informs the current scene, and there are certain moments where Asia’s movements and poses seem to be styled directly on Uma Thurman’s The Bride. 

Visually, the film has a lot of style. Although the film foregoes the Bourne Identity style, that doesn’t mean that the audience is watching these excellent action sequences play out statically. The camera is constantly moving, following characters around hotel corners and through crawlspaces and ducts on a moving track. There’s one really excellent oner that follows Asia and Lily facing off in a hallway that moves toward Lily, gives Arquette a moment to deliver one of her trademark bits of visceral vitriol, and then tracks back to the other end of the hallway to complete an orbital shot around battle-poised Asia before continuing back into the room she just exited. It’s really good stuff. The film also makes excellent use of empty/black space, as the film will sometimes “zoom out” to show only a hallway or a vertical tunnel so that we can track where every party is in The Virgil’s labyrinthine structure, and it looks fantastic. 

I don’t want to reveal too much about the multiple directions that this one takes narratively. I thought that the trailer gave away too much, but unlike recent spoiled-by-the-trailer films that come to mind like Abigail and Speak No Evil, this one makes you think you know too much about it, before pulling the rug from under you. It’s not that this is a plot that you’ve never seen before; you almost certainly have, but it’s worth remembering that the reason you’re here is to see Zazie Beetz bludgeon some Satanists into pulp, not to get caught up on loopholes and infernal contract law. That having been said, there are some things that it’s really worth keeping a secret until one can see the film themselves. This one probably won’t be in theaters too much longer, based on its current box office performance, but it’s worth seeing with others in a group setting to get the maximum fun factor out of it. Then again, I don’t blame you if you’d rather wait til it hits streaming so you don’t have to see the same jokes from The Devil Wears Prada 2 twice in both the film’s trailer and the “silence your phones” ad before the feature starts. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Nadja (1994)

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In 1987, Fisher Price introduced the PXL2000, a toy black and white camera that used audio cassettes to capture video images. It didn’t go over well initially, but 90s indie filmmakers apparently liked to futz about with them. After directing Twister—not the one that you’re thinking of, a movie released by Vestron and which I have seen the trailer for across dozens of their VHS tapes without ever stumbling across a cassette of the film itself—director Michael Almereyda made a fifty-six-minute feature using the PXL2000 in its entirety. For his third feature, Nadja, Almereyda decided to use the toy camera only intermittently. Theoretically, it was only for the shots that were supposed to represent the point of view of the title character, but in practice, I don’t think that’s the case. 

Nadja is, naturally, the story of Nadja (Elina Löwensohn), Dracula’s daughter via a serf somewhere “in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains.” When her father dies, having been killed at long last by Van Helsing (Peter Fonda, with grey hair almost down to his waist), she, alongside her attendant, Renfield (Karl Geary), claims his body and ensures that he will not rise again. Van Helsing, inexplicably released from prison despite being caught in the act of murdering someone, impresses upon his disbelieving nephew Jim (longtime Hal Hartley collaborator Martin Donovan) that Dracula’s daughter may still be at large in their unnamed American city; meanwhile, Nadja is in the process of seducing Jim’s wife Lucy (Galaxy Craze) into joining her in the darkness. Nadja’s other primary goal is to reunite with her twin brother, Edgar (Jared Harris), who has seemingly allowed himself to slip into virtual catatonia as a result of refusing to feed on humans, leaving him bedridden and attended to by his beloved Cassandra (Suzy Amis), who also happens to be Van Helsing’s daughter. 

Those parts of the film that are shot on film are gorgeous, and sumptuous. The periodic intrusion of “footage” from the PXL2000 is incredibly off-putting, even as a stylistic choice. It doesn’t hold weight conceptually, either, as it at first appears that it is supposed to be in use to indicate when a character is being affected by Nadja’s psychic powers, but it also seems to be used randomly at other points. In essence, the effect it creates is one that presages what it’s like to watch a high quality video online only for it to randomly buffer from 1080p to 120p for the duration of a scene, then cut back to crystal clarity. My neck was actually stiff from the contortions I made sitting in the arthouse theatre trying to clearly understand what was happening when Almereyda suddenly switched recording devices. It looked almost as bad as the version of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent that’s currently available on Hoopla, which is really saying something. When it would cut back to the actual film, it was a wave of relief, and I can only imagine that may have been the intention, but it did not make for a pleasant viewing experience. 

Narratively, there’s not much to the film. Fonda’s Van Helsing is bizarrely fascinating as he wanders into scenes full of energy that his younger co-stars don’t really seem to match, either because this was too far outside of Donovan’s wheelhouse or because Craze’s character was simply in the midst of one of her many dull sequences of being a mindless thrall. For most of the film, characters simply stand around and deliver exposition to one another, and while it’s nice that the screen is full of pretty people (and Jared Harris) when that’s happening, there’s very little plot to speak of. I’d have been much more entertained if the film had been more full of deadpan humor, but the really fun bits of dialogue are few and far between. After a brief cameo from David Lynch as the morgue attendant who falls under Nadja’s spell, the laughs are hard to come by, and one can never be sure just how much of the film one is laughing with instead of at. This was a packed screening, and I still often found myself the only one chuckling during scenes which I was certain were being played for humor. Surely, the idea of calling the communication between Edgar and Nadja a “psychic fax” was a joke, right? This also sets up the biggest laugh of the film for me, when Edgar puts his fingertips to his temple and says “I’m getting a psychic fax… [Nadja’s] on a plane… she’s dying. For a cigarette.” This did manage to get a guffaw from most of the audience, but I’m not sure that we were all aware just what we were in for. I can see this one developing a cult audience in the 90s, especially when it has a soundtrack that features both The Verve and Portishead, but it’s also a puzzling little oddity that I’m not sure I’ll remember much about in the months to come.  

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Forbidden Fruits (2026)

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A new contender for this generation’s Heathers has emerged, and it has the strongest claim to that championship belt of any movie that I’ve seen in the two decades since Mean Girls. We love Heathers around here (it claimed the #19 spot on the Swampflix top 100), and I have a fondness for it that is, perhaps, not entirely normal (I went to NYC in 2014 to see the off-Broadway musical adaptation in its original staging at a time when I was vehement that I hated musicals). We also reference it a lot; I used it as a plot reference when writing about 2022’s Do Revenge, Brandon discussed it in conversation with spiritual successor Jawbreaker, and both he and I have nominated a couple of potential options for the crown in recent years, with me throwing my weight behind Sophia Takal’s anthologized New Year, New You and Brandon offering up (the first half of) Spontaneous as a potential candidate. It’s time for all other nominees to pack their bags and go home, though, because Forbidden Fruits is here, and I think it’s here to stay. While we’re at it, we can knock off the search for this generation’s The Craft as well, since Fruits is just as suitable for that designation, too.

Apple (Lili Reinhart) is the most powerful person in all of the Dallas Highland Mall. She’s the highest ranking of the “forbidden fruits,” a trio of gorgeous women who run free eden, an Anthropologie-esque boutique, despite the shop nominally being managed by an unseen (until the epilogue) woman named Sharon. Under Apple’s perfectly manicured thumbs are Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a beautiful blonde airhead who dresses like Sabrina Carpenter, and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the more “alternative” one, which means that she’s just as supermodel-hot as the other two but dresses a little more glam-goth. Dallas newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) initially finds herself completely beneath their notice, but Fig takes a liking to her and convinces Heather Chandler—um, I mean Apple—to give Pumpkin a chance. The three Free Eden employees bring her on board and invite her to join them for “Paradise,” which is what they call the coven meetings that they hold in the upstairs changing area of the store. After some light hazing, Pumpkin finds herself part of the inner circle, and from there she begins to work toward the ultimate goal of dethroning Apple for something she did in their past. Unfortunately, despite the new age hippery-dippery of their beliefs and “ceremonies,” there may be some actual magic afoot, as a former member of the Free Eden crew, Pickle, seems to be suffering actual effects from a “hex” that the others placed on her for breaking Apple’s sacred rules. 

Forbidden Fruits wears its pop culture genealogy on its sleeves, just as openly and blatantly as it does its Biblical allegories. Pickle’s pre-breakdown beauty is described by calling her “Gorge-ina George.” During Pumpkin’s induction rite, each of the girls names the plant from which her fruit name grows (branch, vine, bush, etc.) and the season in which it ripens. With the addition of Pumpkin, whose fruit is harvested in autumn, they excitedly note that they now have all four seasons in their quartet, just as the witches of The Craft were delighted that the appearance of Robin Tunney’s Sarah meant that they finally had enough girls to “call the corners.” Although the Heathers influences are the strongest here, it’s not all a one-to-one comparison. Pumpkin is very much the Veronica of the narrative, but her being a member of the group with an ulterior motive to infiltrate and upend it is more like Lindsay Lohan’s Cady from Mean Girls. Apple is both Regina George and Heather Chandler, as the HBIC of the group who’s casually cruel and exerts undue influence over her underlings’ lives, but there’s no real analog to Heather Duke here, as neither of Apple’s flunkies is lying in wait to become the next queen bee should she be dethroned. Cherry is more like Amanda Seyfried’s Karen, although her ditziness is taken to such an extreme that Tara Reid’s Melody in Josie and the Pussycats is another clear, strong influence. 

That almost makes it seem like the character dynamics are more rooted in emulating Mean Girls than Heathers, but we can also pretty closely align them with the characters from The Craft: Apple is the Nancy, the biggest believer and the one with the nastiest traits buried underneath; Pumpkin is the Sarah, as previously mentioned; and Fig is the Rochelle, in that she’s fully capable of having a rich, full, fulfilling life if she just stopped hanging out with these troublemaking white girls. There’s even a little bit of a reverse Wizard of Oz happening here, as the film’s climax takes place in the mall while a tornado tears the building apart, and ironically it’s the wicked witch who survives that particular event (it’s not a spoiler if I don’t mention if anyone else was even around!). I won’t bother you with a complete recapitulation of the film’s use of Genesis-based iconography, as it’s pretty much all there on the surface: the store is Eden, Apple offers temptation, the coven’s enemies are “snakes,” etc., but the film keeps a light touch here as it does in its other homages, so it’s not distracting or heavy-handed.

All of this is to say that when I read that this was based on a play, I wasn’t surprised, as it had all of the telltale density of a story that was originally written for the stage. The play, which has the poetic and unwieldy title of Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (a slogan which is later emblazoned on a t-shirt that one of the characters wears throughout the third act), was penned by playwright Lily Houghton, who co-wrote the screenplay for Fruits with director Meredith Alloway. Both of them appear to be quite young, and I found the breathless wittiness of it all jubilant and refreshing, even when some of the darker elements start to intrude on this bubblegum world. Cinematographer Karim Hussain is doing great work here as well; a longtime collaborator of Brandon Cronenberg (serving as either D.P. or cinematographer on all three of his features), every shot here is perfectly composed and sumptuously photographed. Some of that energy can also be attributed to editor Hanna Park, who also worked on fellow Heathers descendent Bottoms. When it comes to the cast, everyone is a delight; I’m one of the dozens of people who saw Riverdale through to its conclusion, and although I was charmed enough by Reinhard’s brief appearance in Hustlers, her performance as Betty Cooper really undersold her potential to be the sexiest, scariest woman in her domain. Shipp’s Fig is the character we all wish we could be, the sweetheart in the bitter clique, and she’s warmly inviting and fun to be around. The person having the most fun, though, is Pedretti, who’s mostly developed a reputation as a scream queen following her leading roles in both of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting shows as well as the thriller series You. She really gets to let her hair down here and get into the flow of her character’s naive vapidity, and it’s such a delight that she essentially steals the show. 

This will soon see its streaming premiere on Shudder, but I went and saw it in a theater, and I would recommend that experience over trying to watch it at home by yourself. This was a very responsive audience, the perfect strangers & companions that you want to watch a comedy with because the jokes land on different levels for different people. Failing that, invite your coven over, make up a little chant about pressed juice and cowboy boots, and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mad Love (1935)

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This movie has everything. Bald-headed Peter Lorre hyperfixating on BDSM theater. Sad little orphans with weak spines. A condemned man praising the Hoover Dam. Evil hand transplants. Carnies being guillotined. One—and only one—Caligarian German Expressionist interior set. A wax Galatea. Drunken double vision cockatiels. Train derailments. It is a masterpiece. And not even seventy minutes long! 

Dr. Gogol (Lorre) is a masterful surgeon, a veritable miracle worker who spends his spare time occupying the same balcony seat for every performance at a “theatre” in which Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) is kinkily tortured, night after night, in a scene that perfunctorily depicts some historical event. When he learns that not only has Yvonne been married for the entire period of his distant infatuation but also that she’s leaving for England to be with her up and coming pianist/composer husband Stephen (Colin Clive), Gogol is bereft. As luck would have it, a train bearing both Stephen and a skilled knife-thrower being escorted to his execution gets into an accident; Stephen’s hands are crushed and require amputation, but a desperate Yvonne begs Gogol to save her husband’s hands, and he lights upon the idea of using the executed criminal’s appendages to save Stephen’s livelihood. Even after months of expensive physical therapy, Stephen finds himself unable to play like he used to, although he seems to have developed an acute ability to throw sharp objects, all while his temper seems to grow ever worse. 

I was looking for something to wash out the bad aftertaste of seeing Lorre in brownface in Secret Agent, and I could not have asked for a more perfect palate cleanser. Dr. Gogol is one of Lorre’s greatest characters, easily the equal of the impulsive, pathetic monster Hans in M or the perpetually sweating Abbott in The Man Who Knew Too Much, just an absolute freak whose gifted talent as a surgeon makes him a respectable member of a community that can never know just how much of a deviant pervert he is behind closed doors. Just when you think the film can’t get any more exciting, there he is in the distance putting a negligee on the wax figure of Yvonne he saved from being destroyed when her stage tenure came to an end. Then Gogol one-ups himself when a bid to frame Stephen for the murder of his own stepfather leads to a scene that features Yvonne coming face to face with this harrowing image, and all of us in the audience are close to crawling out of our skin. 

Of course, much of the film’s success depends on the masterful direction of Metropolis cinematographer and later The Mummy helmer Karl Freund. The film is hauntingly gothic in its imagery, even when the subject matter is lewd, manic, or quite funny. Even the opening credits get in on the action, as the film’s stars are listed on a pane of glass that’s shattered by an angry fist. The script is also a delight, with my biggest laugh coming in the moment that the condemned murderer, Rollo, asks for a moment to speak with a nearby reporter named Reagan who happens to be American; their discourse is brief but ends with Rollo’s underwhelming final words, “Oh well, so long.” I can’t even fully put into words how wonderful this one is; you’ll just have to see it for yourself. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Bride! (2026)

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There are many more direct sequels to James Whale’s Frankenstein than most people realize. Universal made eight Frankenstein movies in the famous monster’s original run across the 1930s & 40s, while most modern audiences’ experience with him stops at the second one: 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, also directed by Whale. Whale was already in a “Okay, now let’s do a goofy one” mood by the time he made Bride, sacrificing some of the haunting beauty of his first Frankenstein film for screwball antics and intentional camp. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new Frankenstein riff is largely going to be interpreted as a feminist reboot of that early Frankenstein sequel, since it directly references a couple of its more outlandish details: the living bell-jar specimens of the mad scientist’s lab and the fact that actress Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley (in the intro) and the titular monster bride (in the finale). Hot off her Oscar-winning performance as the violently grieving mother of Shakespeare’s children in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley is deployed to hit both of those goofball references in The Bride!, briefly appearing as a floating head in a bell jar and, more importantly, pulling double duty as both Mary Shelley’s ghost and the undead woman’s body she possesses. That decision to extend Mary Shelley’s screentime via body possession is part of what pushes The Bride! past its limitations as a Bride of Frankenstein modernization to instead reach the even more ridiculous heights of later Frankenstein sequels like The Ghost of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Gyllenhaal has effectively imagined an alternate timeline where Lanchester’s monster had continued to stumble through increasingly goofy Frankenstein sequels the way that Boris Karloff’s did in ours. Instead of spitballing, “Okay let’s put Chaney in the makeup this time, and now Lugosi’s Ygor plays a magical flute that controls him,” like Frankenstein producers of the past, she gets to riff, “Umm I don’t know, now she’s possessed by Mary Shelley’s ghost and we’ll dress up Fever Ray as The Joker or whatever. Let’s hit the road!” To be clear, this is why it rules.

Christian Bale co-stars alongside Buckley as the lit-famous Frankenstein, who assures the audience early on that it’s okay to call him that, since he took his scientist father’s name; for further convenience, he also goes by the nickname “Frank”. Having now roamed the Earth undead and lonely for over a century, he emerges from the shadows of 1930s Chicago to beg a mad-scientist woman in STEM (Anette Benning) to create a bride for him to love. True to the Frankensteins of old, he shows a surprising amount of tenderness & vulnerability for a monster, so the scientist eventually relents to what she initially sees as a piggish request. The corpse she revives as the titular monster bride is a recently murdered sex worker moll (Buckley), killed for her loudmouth blabbing about a local kingpin mobster’s evildoings after becoming possessed by the uninhibited spirit of Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Buckley). Once resurrected, she starts with a clean slate as a bratty agent of chaos who can’t remember much about who she is or why she exists, so she goes on a soul-searching road trip rampage with her newly assigned groom, acting like two giddy teenagers who just ran away from home . . . and who occasionally smash misogynist skulls along the way. They go to queer dance clubs soundtracked by a Jokerfied Fever Ray. They crash cocktail parties held by the wealthy elite, hiding in plain sight because no one would dare look directly at the help, no matter how grotesque. They kill any cops who try to stop their good times’ short, then feel immediate remorse for the transgression. Most importantly, they go to the movies. They go to the movies a lot, which is how they’re easily tracked down by an old-timey lady detective (Penelope Cruz) and her bumbling, good-for-nothing partner (Peter Sarsgaard). The Bride! is hyper aware of its temporal position in the long history of Frankenstein cinema, and it tracks the progression of the artform across a much longer timeline than what its 1930s setting should allow. Its character names are all inspired by Old Hollywood stars like Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers and, of course, Elsa Lanchester. Jake Gyllenhaal frequently appears as the onscreen avatar for that era, performing Busby Berkeley dance routines that Frank imagines himself dancing along to in his fantasies. It also introduces the 3D craze to its onscreen cinemas decades before The Bwana Devil did so in real life, frequently dips into New Hollywood homage and, in its most blatant effort to modernize the material, has The Bride shout “Me too! Me too!” during her climactic fit of rage. Just like its tone, the timeline of The Bride!‘s vintage cinepehlia is all over the place, as Gyllenhaal seems to be following her own whims scene to scene without worrying too much about whether the audience is following along.

Besides killing cops and hanging out at the movies, another thing these monsters do is fuck. Given that the film includes tender, heartfelt monster fucking and concludes on a needle drop of the Halloween season novelty song “The Monster Mash,” it’s entirely possible that Gyllenhaal’s initial inspiration was cracking up to the recurring “Monster Fuck” bit from Comedy Bang Bang and wondering whether it could be adapted into a feature-length screenplay. Other stylistic influences seemingly include the bratty supervillain goof-around Birds of Prey and the sour-taste supervillain thriller Joker, the latter of which The Bride! shares a composer (Oscar-winner Hildur Guðnadóttir) & cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) with, among 100(!) other below-the-line crew members. As much as they delight me, personally, none of these references are especially revered as recent cultural touchstones, so it’s presumptuous for the film to prepackage a readymade Halloween costume in The Bride!‘s design (crafted by industry legend Sandy Powell) that spreads as a fashion trend among 1930s molls within the film itself. The Bride! has been immediately disregarded as a financial & critical flop, with no way of telling whether it will be reclaimed as a cult classic or forgotten to time in the long run. Any criticisms of it as a shallow work of pop-art feminism will miss the mark on what Gyllenhaal is accomplishing here. Its Feminism 101 political talking points are more than welcome in a cultural climate where teens are constantly bombarded with manosphere & trad-wife propaganda, and I find the dismissals of those themes just as misguided here as they were in the more cynical dismissals of Barbie. More importantly, Gyllenhaal puts too much of her own personal interests & obsessions on the screen for the movie to be seen as pure political allegory. It’s a family affair, with her husband & brother invited along to play silly onscreen. She also gives in to her cringiest Theatre Kid shenanigans, allowing Buckley to run wild with the multiple personalities fighting for dominance in her character’s undead body: the ghost, the monster, and the woman. She also frequently gets lost in the geeky love story shared by her two famous monsters, bringing their Old Hollywood cinephilia into the New Hollywood era via a feature-length homage to 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde. She is suffering from a severe case of Hollywood actor brain here, but the resulting spectacle is so chaotic and so specific to her personal interests that I can’t imagine any other response to it than admiration & delight. It’s like a version of The People’s Joker where Vera Drew had $100mil to play with and grew up obsessed with Frankenstein instead of Batman. Bless her corny heart.

-Brandon Ledet

Undertone (2026)

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Undertone apparently began life as a radio play when it was first conceived by writer/director Ian Tuason, and it shows. It was also born out of his experiences taking care of his parents, who were both diagnosed with cancer in 2020; this, too, is apparent in the final film. It is, in many ways, deeply personal in a fashion that makes me feel bad giving it such a rotten rating, but while I hope that crafting the film gave Tuason the opportunity to process some of his grief, in so doing he created a piece of art for the public that treads no new ground and ultimately failed to connect with me on an emotional level, or deliver on much in the way of fear beyond the sufficient spooky atmosphere. 

Evy (Nina Kiri) is the co-host of a podcast that she hosts with her friend Justin (an entirely offscreen Adam DiMarco), in which he plays Mulder to her Scully as they go through listener submissions of paranormal encounters. Having returned to her childhood home, Evy has spent a year caring for her terminally ill religious mother, with the 3 AM recording times of episodes of The Undertone serving as the only thing she has to look forward to, other than occasional visits to her non-helpful boyfriend, Darren. As Evy’s mother enters her final days, The Undertone receives ten audio files via email that begin with a man named Mike recording his pregnant wife Jessa’s sleeptalking, before those recordings escalate into aural terror. 

There’s probably a really, really good short film in here. David F. Sandberg produced a no-budget short entitled Lights Out in 2013, which opened up the door for him to eventually make a feature of the same name in 2016. Smile and Night Swim followed suit as features that expanded creepy shorts into theatrical releases that have a decently functional core premise but which doesn’t have enough real substance to warrant a feature length picture. I was positive that this would prove to be the case for Undertone, but once I got home and looked it up, not only was this not based on a short film with a premise that was perfect for a 20ish minute runtime and which had imperfectly inflated to fill 90 minutes, but it also wasn’t a COVID-era script that spent the last half decade circling the drain in production purgatory (my other hypothesis about the film’s origins). It’s just a movie that looks, feels, and exhausts like one. 

There’s plenty to praise here. Critics and audiences alike are agog at the sound design, which is admittedly exceptional. One would expect nothing less from a film about podcasting and which was originally planned as an audio narrative, but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Although the most recent Oscars ceremony has just passed, this is a strong early contender for a nomination in the sound category right out of the gate for next year. Kiri’s performance is likewise laudable, as she, like Rose Byrne in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is present in virtually every single frame in the film; other than her mother’s prone body, no other humans are ever visible on screen. While Legs spent most of its time in long close-ups of Byrne, Undertone balances that intimacy with long stretches in which the camera is distant from Kiri, isolating her at her desk in a third of the frame while the rest of the screen is filled with dark, empty space. That void invites the enlightened viewer, who knows about the subtle faces and figures in the edges of the frame in Hereditary and Longlegs, to lean in, searching for those subliminal demons here. The film foregoes the cliche of having something leap out of the darkness in a jump scare, which is also a strong point in its favor, instead opting for the audio equivalent by having Justin’s shattering of a glass play too loudly in Evy’s headset and other unexpected noises at unreasonable volumes. All of that’s good, and I again have to reiterate that this would likely make for a four star or higher short film, but as a feature, it just doesn’t work. 

Despite Kiri’s strong performance, there’s very little to Evy. We know that she has a boyfriend, that she loves her mother, and that she hosts a podcast. Other than that we know she feels guilty about her exhaustion from being her mother’s caretaker and that she feels disconnected from her mother’s devout Catholicism, there’s not much to contemplate about her inner life. Evy’s lapsed sobriety is given an offhanded comment that doesn’t amount to anything at all, a Chekov’s gun hanging over the mantle, frustratingly jammed. Maybe her skepticism about the apparent hoax nature of the recordings bleeds out slowly as she tips the bottle more frequently, so that the fever dream of an ending represents her descent; leaving the loop unclosed on this character choice means that her first drink, followed by lying to Justin about it, just takes up space in the screenplay, irrelevant and dangling. It’s one of the textbook tells that the film doesn’t have enough ideas to hit the minimum time to be considered for theatrical release, as does the podcasting duo’s decision to listen to only a few recordings at a time. Rather than get through them in a single session (or a maximum of two), the film artificially and illogically stretches the virtual listening party out to four different recording sessions. The film’s repetition of (a) spooky recordings listened to/played with in an audio compiler, (b) Evy talks to a doctor on the phone, (c) Evy administers to her unconscious mother’s needs, (d) Evy has a spooky dream, then back around to (a) is repeated so many times that, when my bladder was full, I knew I only had to wait a few minutes until the film would lull again and I could make a quick run for the theater restroom. 

Another thing that feels unsustainable about the premise is the inherent goofiness of following the narrative logic of “What if nursery rhymes contain secret evil messages?” to its conclusion. It’s not a secret that a great deal of folkloric melodies are based on schoolyard rhymes about historical events (or are retroactively diagnosed by later historians and critics as having been so) or that history is full of violence and ignorance, but the spooky, evil recording of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” really is a bridge too far into the absurd. Justin’s mind is frequently blown by reading the “origin and meaning” section of a Wikipedia page and acting as if he just got encrypted access to a declassified file, so when he downloads and sends the recording to Evy, he gets spooked by the coincidence that the version he found online is the same one that is playing in Jessa and Mike’s audio files. I don’t know, man, kinda seems like you and whoever is pulling this prank just landed on the same link on the first page of Google results for “spooky Baa Baa Black Sheep.” I know that I’m here to review the movie I saw and not rewrite it into the movie I wish it was, but when a film has this much potential only to squander it, I can’t seem to help myself. Imagine if Justin had masterminded this whole thing, that he had created Jessa and Mike’s recordings and sent Evy a version of an old song that he had deliberately backmasked in order to rattle her skepticism. From there, the story could delve into a more malicious reason for him to want to gaslight Evy (maybe her baby is actually his?), or keep it supernatural by having his audience-entertaining prank turn out to have actually summoned a demon. Instead, we get something that’s frustrating in just how much it’s held back by having too much imagination to dismiss as easy schlock and not quite enough to move the story in a less obvious, familiar direction. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)

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Once in a while, one must turn to Tubi, The People’s Streaming Service, and check out what bizarre oddities are hiding in its servers. While attempting to track down a watchable version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen recently, I clicked on the Tubi link and couldn’t find the movie, even in my “to watch” list, before I realized it was because I had neglected to turn off my VPN and was only being shown films that were available in Mexico. One of the films that was accessible both from the U.S. and our neighbor to the south was the 1988 no-budget horror comedy Flesh Eating Mothers, made by a group of Baltimore locals. The film’s descriptions across different film-oriented websites vary, but all manage to touch on the major plot elements: across a small suburb, a series of women are all having affairs with the town horndog, eventually contracting sexually transmitted cannibalism, which the kids in the town must then try to cure. What that undersells is that this “cannibalism” is sentient, self-aware zombism in all but name, and also that the “kids” are, politely, not very convincing as high schoolers. 

For a movie that was clearly shot on weekends and around the full-time, adult work schedules of its actors, there’s a lot that feels more professional than amateur here. By the late eighties, there had been dozens of books about special effects that enabled anyone who had access to those texts and sufficient pocket money to acquire rubber cement and foam latex to at least attempt mounting their own Evil Dead with their friends. The gore is impressive, but it’s also not really the most interesting thing that happens visually. The film’s opening title sequence consists entirely of a slow pan all around what must have been a very large, time-consuming image of the town done in crayon. It’s inexpensive, but a less savvy amateur filmmaker would have had this play out over a series of smaller, static images rather than keeping the audience’s point of view in constant motion. It makes for a more interesting visual and maintains the film’s energy. 

The attention to detail is likewise striking; at one point, we see a couple of kids hanging out outside of a business that features an advertisement for barbecue chicken; later in the film, two of the “high schoolers” meet in front of this business, directly below the BBQ poultry sign. I was surprised by that level of attentiveness, especially given other places, especially in the musical score, which didn’t work at all. Most excitingly, every time the audience gets a peak at what’s under the microscope that the town’s only two responsible scientists are using to research a cure for the virus, what we actually see are very cute animations of slightly anthropomorphized cells and whatnot bouncing off of and fighting with each other. It’s not the C.S.I. zoom-in on fibers and flagella that one might expect, but more like a very basic educational short you might watch in a third-grade science class. That’s not to say that this is the kind of PG/PG-13 horror fodder that one could show to a child, however, unless you want to frighten them, as this film is utterly unsentimental about the lives of kids, with one scene memorably depicting the horndog’s “teen” daughter returning home to find her mother having eaten her baby brother. 

The plot’s fairly simple. Randy Roddy Douglas is sleeping with the proverbial town bicycle, deliciously named Booty Bernett, and even talks to his wife about having an open marriage, which doesn’t interest her. He hooks up with a couple of other women in the town, notably the mother of his daughter’s best friend, the mother of a different random “high schooler,” and eventually even “comforts” the abused wife of a local alcoholic, who also happens to be the mother of the town heartthrob. Meanwhile, Roddy keeps getting the all clear from the greasy doctor at the local sexual health clinic despite said doctor’s statuesque blonde nurse continuously asking him to review potential viral venereal diseases rather than just bacterial ones. Eventually, she teams up with the comically short, nebbish, effeminate coroner (imagine Corky St. Clair, then shave off half a foot), and the two make for a delightful mismatch every time they appear on screen with one another to try and develop a cure. A gaggle of kids who have gathered after seeing their mothers eating human flesh eventually collide with them, and they work together to try to save the day. 

I mentioned the school heartthrob above, and wanted to note that he is confusingly identified by his full-ish name “Jeff Nathan” in his intro scene. Later, he’s called “Jeffrey” by his mother and “Nathan” by his male classmates, leading one of my viewing companions to frustratedly interject “Who is Nathan?” at one point; this is a perfectly legitimate thing to quibble about, though, because where this film suffers is in an abundance of characters. There’s an entire additional plot line I haven’t even mentioned about the one-armed chief of police covering up the evidence that the mombies leave behind because he believes that the spreading disease is God’s punishment for his having committed adultery, which infected his wife who then ate his arm off before he killed her in self-defense. It’s not really narratively necessary and contributes greatly to the film’s overall muddled plot, which has too many different storylines happening, all featuring white brunet Baltimorians, such that it can become difficult to differentiate between them (one character dons a bandana at one point, and I was very grateful, since to that point I hadn’t realized he and the horny ice cream guy were different people). 

But the plot’s not what you’re here for, is it? You didn’t choose to watch something called Flesh Eating Mothers with the belief that you might stumble upon undiscovered poetry. The film delivers exactly what you expect it will from the title: moms eating flesh.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bones (2001)

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In the documentary Horror Noire, legendary cinematographer-turned-director Ernest Dickerson claims that his 2001 film Bones failed at the box office because distributor New Line Cinema insisted on marketing it as “a Black horror film” instead of just “a horror film,” emphasizing its cultural stereotypes instead of what makes it an oddball genre exercise in its own right. Having since caught up with Bones myself, I think that philosophical divide started long before New Line got involved. The film’s two white screenwriters, Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe, originally pitched Bones as a kind of prototype for Black Dynamite: a 2000s era spoof of 1970s Blaxploitation relics, with a supernatural revenge premise borrowed from J.D.’s Revenge and in-dialogue references to titles like Three the Hard Way (when one character offers the conspiracy theory that fast-food fried chicken batter has been chemically altered to make Black men sterile). The movie got greenlit as soon as they attached Snoop Dogg to star, since he does look remarkably good modeling 70s hustler fashions as a walking-talking homage to classics like SuperFly & The Mack. Watching through the DVD’s bonus-feature interviews, I get the sense that Dickerson’s hiring changed the tenor of the project dramatically. While everyone else gushes about what a dream it was to work with Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier in a throwback to that genre’s heyday (including a blushing Snoop Dogg, who was shy to kiss her on-camera), Dickerson instead goes on tangents about how excited he was to make a modern version of Mario Bava’s bug-nuts haunted castle movies like The Whip and the Body. The producers were thinking Blacula while the director was thinking Blood and Black Lace, muddling the central conceit beyond easy marketability.

Personally, I think the Bones marketing campaign failed because the title Ghost Dog was already claimed by Jim Jarmusch. The closest the film gets to a clear logline concept is in the earliest stretch when a hell hound with glowing red eyes is seemingly possessed by the undead spirit of a 1970s street hustler named Bones, played by Snoop Dogg in Blaxploitation-tinted flashbacks. It’s an easily digestible conceit that plays right into its star’s rap persona, and you can easily imagine how good it’d look on a poster if the core idea stopped there. Only, it turns out that Bones’s ghost isn’t only piloting the body of a rabid street dog; it’s also haunting an Old Dark House in the middle of the city, anchored there by the literal bones left behind after his murder in the 1970s. When the children of the traitors who stabbed him to death happen to discover this spooky mansion and plot to transform it into a hip nightclub, Bones is resurrected by feeding on their bodies one at a time, via his ghost-dog surrogate. However, even that conceit gets muddled by the time the house’s ghostly presence molests a sleeping teenager the audience knows to be Bones’s daughter. Is this a supernatural act of incest? Or is that heinous act carried out by one of the dozens of souls Bones has trapped in the house with him by adding them to his writhing, Cronenbergian flesh wall? Speaking of which, if he was only betrayed by several close friends, where did all of those extra souls come from to build that wall? And why is the dog still around after he gets his old body back? And what does it mean when that dog pukes a never-ending flood of maggots on the patrons of the underground nightclub that wakes him from his slumber? How does any of this work?

The answer to those questions might have mattered in pitch meetings and marketing strategies, but since Dickerson was pulling most of his inspiration from Bava-era Italo horror, no internal logic is required to propel the picture from scene to scene. Simon & Metcalfe establish a sturdily familiar structure to hang the film’s more impulsive ideas off of, marrying ghostly haunted-house revenge plots to a 70s Blaxploitation trope about the hero hustler who fights to keep hard drugs out of his community (seen both in classic titles like Disco Godfather and contemporary spoofs like Black Dynamite). Bones was murdered because he rejected a corrupt pig’s business pitch to poison his neighborhood with crack cocaine. So, when he gets his revenge from beyond the grave, he’s also fighting for the lost dignity of the community his former partners sold out for personal profit. What I don’t get the sense of here is that Dickerson cared about any of that while making the movie. He treats that familiar genre territory as a open playground where he can just try whatever surrealistic horror image comes to mind. In the earliest stretch, when Bones is still a disembodied spirit, Dickerson portrays him as a Nosferatu-style shadow creeping up the haunted nightclub walls in early-aughts CGI. Later, when he feeds on unsuspecting victims during that nightclub’s disastrous opening night, his body is rebuilt one layer of muscle at a time in grotesque stop-motion animation reminiscent of The Evil Dead. Once fully formed and walking around in his retro pimp gear, Bones starts making groaner quips about how he doesn’t need drugs because he’s enjoying “a natural high . . . a supernatural high.” There’s a uniform flatness to those one-liners’ delivery that again suggests the director was checked out from the written material, but you can also clearly see him having fun with Bones literally collecting heads during his quippy revenge mission, keeping his victims’ disembodied noggins alive & talking until they can be added to the flesh-wall soul collection in his inner sanctum.

There’s a glaring discordance between the playfulness of Bones‘s imagery and the going-through-the-motions drudgery of its dialogue, and that discordance is never more glaring than when we leave the haunted-house antics of the present to revisit the Blaxploitation homage of the past. The screenwriters had exactly one idea: casting Snoop Dogg as a vengeful ghost of a Blaxploitation hustler archetype. Inspired by free-for-all Italo horrors like Black Sunday, Suspiria, Burial Ground, Demons, Cemetery Man, and The Beyond, Dickerson put no limitations on his own ideas, throwing as many visual tricks and for-their-own-sake indulgences at the screen as the budget would allow. As a former cinematographer, you can tell he was having way more fun running around shooting the haunted house set from Bones’s ghost-cam POV than he was listening to anything Bones had to say. The movie would be a by-the-numbers bore without that gonzo anything-goes approach, but it is funny in retrospect to hear him complain that his distributor didn’t know how to market the resulting mess it left behind.

-Brandon Ledet

Dolly (2026) and the New American Grindhouse

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There’s a new low-budget horror film in theaters right now that’s main mission is to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of 70s horror classics like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That statement has been more or less constantly true since at least as far back as when Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses hit theaters two decades ago; there’s always a new horror film in theaters that aims to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as surely as the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Even so, the new film Dolly is grimier than most, torturing its audience with the squirmiest discomforts any Texas Chainsaw knockoff has delivered in a long while. Our Leatherface figure in this instance is the titular Dolly, a childlike behemoth who wears a porcelain babydoll mask and collects victims to play house with her in the woods of Tennessee. Like 1973’s The Baby, it toddles across the fine line between shock-value horror and age-regression fetish content, having its towering killer spank, bottle-feed, burp, and diaper her victims in-between her gory kills. It has its contemporaries in that particular mode of discomfort (most notably Zach Cregger’s Barbarian and the straight-to-Tubi stunner Match), but it decides to frame its fucked up found-family horror story within an older grindhouse tradition by shooting on 16mm film, instantly adding a layer of grime on top of its forced-dollification imagery. That choice elevates Dolly‘s sense of mise-en-scène, especially in sequences set outdoors in a woodland babydoll art-instillation piece reminiscent of Georgia’s Doll’s Head Trail. It’s also a somewhat safe, expected choice, though, since it excuses some of its budgetary shortcomings by hiding them behind a faux-vintage appeal instead of fully embracing the modernity of the ABDL horror story it tells.

Dolly‘s distribution rights were purchased by the online streaming service Shudder, so its accompanying theatrical release has been relatively small. In New Orleans, that means it is exclusively playing at the AMC multiplexes of the suburbs, since those venues tend to have more screens to fill than the smaller, choosier independent theaters in the city proper. Specifically, I saw Dolly at the AMC Palace 20 in Elmwood, which regularly offers the city’s widest selection of new-release titles . . . in the shittiest presentation imaginable. Outside its two “premium” (i.e., price-gouging) Dolby & IMAX screens, the other 18 theaters at the Elmwood Palace have been allowed to steadily decline into disrepair. The projector bulbs are all well past end-of-life, so that every movie is blurred behind a dark, purplish bruise hue that your eyes never fully adjust to. The bathroom floors are eternally gummy with piss, and every time you touch a handle with your bare hands it feels like you’re risking a life-threatening skin infection. I’m used to all of this, and I occasionally put up with it because of the unmatched breadth of the venue’s marquee offerings, ranging from woodland slasher throwbacks to niche-interest anime to Indian action epics to the latest Dinesh D’Souza doc about how Hilary Clinton is the antichrist; they have everything. My trip out there to see Dolly hit a new all-time low, though, in pure technical terms. Not only was the projection as darkly bruised as ever, but now the sound was equally muddled. Either the mixing in my theater was way out of balance or multiple sound channels were fully switched off, so that all dialogue was clearly legible but the accompanying music and foley effects were so muffled it sounded as if they were playing in another room. That’s a big deal for a horror film, since the genre relies heavily on music for tension and loud sound-effect stingers for jump scares. It’s a credit to the novelty of Dolly‘s costume & production design that I found anything to enjoy about the experience, since the theater stripped away everything else it had to offer.

Oddly enough, that abysmal theatrical presentation was historically authentic to the retro grindhouse experience modern horrors like Dolly aim to evoke. Grindhouses were a quantity-over-quality business, running exploitation films with shortened runtimes at a breakneck pace with little regard to the building collapsing around the projector. Anyone who’s ever waxed nostalgic about catching some vintage slasher or porno relic at a grindhouse cinema on 42nd Street always includes some anecdote about how the film was interrupted by rats crawling across their feet, or a public blowjob, or a projectionist who nodded off mid-film and had to be woken up to change the reels. The only thing that’s changed is that these used to be decidedly urban experiences, often adjacent to strip clubs & brothels in the center of a morally & physically decaying city. Now, that geographic dynamic has flipped. I get grindhouse-quality projections out in the decaying AMC Palaces of the suburbs, who could not give less of a shit about what they’re screening or how it looks & sounds, as long as they can grind through as many titles as possible. Meanwhile, the urban cinemas of New Orleans proper have been putting much more thoughtful care into their programming & presentation. The same week I saw Dolly in theaters I also attended a repertory screening of Sam Raimi’s 1987 splatstick classic Evil Dead II at The Broad, programmed by ScreamFest NOLA. In some ways, the original Evil Dead movies are the exact kind of high-style, low-budget woodland horrors Dolly attempts to emulate, with the major exception that Sam Raimi moves his camera like no other horror schlockteur before or since. In Evil Dead II, he escalates the cartoonish violence of his calling-card indie debut to a bigger, slicker production scale—beating Hollywood studios to the punch in effectively remaking his own film—but it’s still the kind of low-brow screen filler that used to be left to the drive-ins and grindhouses of old and is now lovingly presented in crisp, clean quality in urban cultural epicenters like The Broad, restored & reclaimed.

Even New Orleans’s dive bars are putting more thought & effort into their movie screenings than the AMCs of the suburbs, even though they’re not technically in the theatrical exhibition business. Siberia is primarily a music venue but has recently experimented with screening vintage genre classics with live music accompaniment. Typically, this means projecting the nu-metal relic Queen of the Damned behind unrelated live performances from local metal bands, but last week it meant presenting Mamoru Oshii’s surreal anime classic Angel’s Egg with an all-new, feature-length live score. Angel’s Egg is already the kind of inscrutable arthouse experience that offers gorgeous, evocative images that its audience can’t fully make sense of but continuously pulls emotional reactions out of us anyway. Rewatching it with live accompaniment from spooky, droning synths helped physicalize that emotional response, vibrating the audience’s bodies with crushing waves of sound while confusing our minds with haunting, post-apocalyptic imagery. The projection itself admittedly did not look especially great, to the point where half the audience were craning their necks at painful angles to read the more legible subtitles off the TV hanging over the bar (despite that dialogue doing very little to clear up what’s actually happening on screen). The sound was phenomenal, though, with a lot of care paid to matching each action onscreen to appropriate musical cues. Those communal screenings of Angel’s Egg and Evil Dead II felt extremely passionate & personal for the people who programmed them. In contrast, the AMC theaters just outside the city offer outright hostile moviegoing experiences, punishing their audiences with headache-inducing ad packages and the shittiest projection quality ever suffered by the human eye. When the AMC Palaces opened here in the 1990s, they put local independent cinemas out of business by crushing them under corporate-sponsored grandeur. They’re now a callous quantity-over-quantity business, the new American grindhouse. I can’t say I’m exactly grateful to have seen Dolly in that modern grindhouse context, but it was at least textually appropriate.

-Brandon Ledet

Twisted Issues (1988)

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The shot-on-video punk scene relic Twisted Issues is difficult to categorize with a solid, workable genre definition. The project started as a no-budget documentary about the local punk scene in Gainesville, Florida, and scraps of that initial idea make it to the screen in-tact, detectable in lengthy scenes of D.I.Y. punk showcases in dive bars & living rooms and in montages of kids lazily pushing their skateboards down endless suburban pavement. However, sometime during production, someone decided to actually make money off of this endeavor, and the project deviated into the most viable option for low-budget, low-talent backyard filmmakers to earn a spot on video store shelves: it became a horror film. One of the skateboarding slackers became a monstrous horror icon who could hunt & kill his buddies in standalone vignettes, fleshing out the monotonous punk-show footage with the kinds of goof-off gore gags that could later be strung together in the edit to tell a somewhat linear story. It’s in that post-production edit where director Charles Pinion mutated the project a second time into something much stranger and less definable than either its documentary or creature feature versions could’ve achieved on their own. He transformed it into an oddly surreal piece of outsider art, constantly teetering between happenstantial genius and total incoherence.

True to its initial pitch, a large portion of Twisted Issues illustrates songs from local punk acts like The Smegmas, Hellwitch, and Mutley Chix with ironic news footage clips, unrelated skateboarding footage, and staged acts of violence that match the images suggested by their lyrics. The non-music video portions of the film follow one skateboarder in particular, who’s murdered in a hit & run by car-driving bullies straight out of The Toxic Avenger, then resurrected by a Dr. Frankenstein-style mad scientist to avenge his own death. The undead skater picks up a sword, hides his disfigured face behind a fencing mask, and screws his foot to a wheel-less skateboard that gives him a classic Frankenstein limp. Once loose on the streets of Gainesville, he kills his former bullies one at a time in standalone scenes that could be assembled in any order of Charles Pinion’s choosing without affecting “the plot.” The most curious decision Pinion makes, then, is including himself onscreen as a godlike figure who watches all of this gory violence and punk scene tomfoolery on his living room television. His character is clearly part of the scene, as he sometimes shares dead-eyed interactions with buddies who he later watches get killed on the TV as if he were tuning into late-night cable creature features or the local news. He’s also clearly in control of the film’s reality in some loosely defined way, as if everything we’re watching is only happening because he’s observing it through the screen. Is Pinion the punk rock Schrödinger? If a skater falls off his board and no one’s around to watch it, did he really scrape his knee? Could God videotape a gore gag so gnarly that even He couldn’t stomach it? The omniscient television set is the only element of the film’s narrative that can’t be fully defined or understood and, thus, it’s the one that elevates the picture from cute to compelling.

Twisted Issues grinds its metaphorical skateboard straight down the border between sloppily incoherent slacker art and sublimely surreal video art. Given the means and circumstances of its production, that TV-static-fuzzed incoherence was likely the only honest way for these kids to make movies, considering that every single suburban experience in that era was mediated through beer cans & TV screens. The filmmaking is, to put it kindly, unrefined. Every dialogue exchange is dragged out by awkward pauses that double their length. Each vignette is harshly separated by a cut-to-black transition. When it comes time for an original score to fill in the gaps between local punk acts, sequences are set to the most pained, aimless guitar solos to ever assault the human ear. The undead skateboarder’s accoutrements and the weapons used to fight back against him are all props that appear to have been collected from the local nerdy Sword Guy’s bedroom (credited to Hawk, who plays a nerdy Sword Guy mystic in-film to maintain verisimilitude). The whole thing is very obviously a document of friends goofing around on the weekends between punk gigs & service industry jobs, which in a roundabout way fulfills its initial mission. The way Pinion pieces everything together through the all-seeing eye of his bedroom TV set is impressively surreal, though, and it abstracts the entire picture into something that can’t be outright dismissed as home movies of local punk mischief. He mixes his friends’ goof-off hangouts with war atrocity footage recorded off TV news broadcasts. He matches local bands’ lyrics to scripted scenes of violence to the point of verging on making an SOV movie musical. Most significantly, he likens the act of shooting, editing, and watching all of this footage to a kind of godlike omnipotence that underlines the plasticity of reality in all media. He made art out of scraps.

-Brandon Ledet