horror

Head of the Family (1996)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Something Weird (1967)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

“When an electrical accident disfigures the face of Cronin Mitchell (Tony McCabe), he also acquires strange psychic powers.  He promptly makes a bargain with a witch who restores his looks if he will become her lover.  However, though the world sees her as a sexy cutie named Ellen (Elizabeth Lee), Mitchell’s new girlfriend is actually an ugly old crone.  After expelling a ghost from a funeral home, MItchell next tries to discover the identity of a small-town maniac.  However, the feds have also asked karate-chopping playboy Alex Jordan (William Brooker) to oversee the case, and Jordan schemes to have Ellen all for himself . . . but not before MItchell boosts his ESP with LSD, and Jordan is attacked by killer bed sheets.  Honest.”

Like every other Hershell Gordon Lewis cheapie I’ve had the mild misfortune of stumbling upon, Something Weird is impossible to describe without making it sound way more exciting than it actually is to watch.  I couldn’t personally craft a more accurate, concise summary of its plot events than the paragraph above, which I’ve copied from the back of the dusty DVD I recently picked up at my neighborhood Goodwill.  It’s the next paragraph where that ad copy goes off the rails, describing Something Weird as a “crackpot gem” and “one of the most bizarre and outrageous horror flicks ever made.”  If only it could live up to that hype.  Despite recalling genuinely mesmerizing vintage schlock of its ilk like Death Bed: The Bed that Eats and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, there’s nothing especially exciting about Something Weird beyond the promise of its title, poster, and premise.  That’s been consistent with all of my previous run-ins with Lewis, who seems to have come from the David Friedman school of carnival-barker movie promotion, where it doesn’t matter if the finished film is any good; it just matters if it’s marketable enough to sell tickets.  Not every old school B-movie producer was as creatively savvy as Roger Corman, who could actually churn out a decent picture while chasing an easy dollar; some were just straight-up hucksters.

I hope it’s apparent to seasoned schlock enthusiasts why I would pick up a used copy of Something Weird even though I’m so dismissive of Hershell Wizard of Gordon Lewis.  I was, of course, enticed by the film’s significance to the video store days of cult cinema, when it inspired the namesake of the distribution label Something Weird Video.  It’s difficult to articulate right now just how essential Something Weird Video was to schlock gobblers in decades past, since there are now dozens of boutique genre film Blu-ray labels that distribute the exact kind of subterranean cinema they specialized in.  I may not be grateful to Something Weird Video for exposing me to so many disappointing Lewis & Friedman titles back then, but I am extremely grateful to their similar platforming of much more earnestly enjoyable genre freaks like Ed Wood, Doris Wishman, and whatever Tennessee weirdos made Bat Pussy.  The DVD jacket ad copy quoted above is not only in line with Lewis & Friedman’s drive-in era style of overhyping shoddy product, but it’s also typical to the home video label’s continuation of the practice decades later.  They had a fun, flippant approach to cult cinema marketing, as indicated by this DVD’s menu choices of “Start Weirdness,” “Weird Scene Index”, “Weird Audio”, and “Weird Special Features.” 

In all honesty, I’m a lot warmer to Hershell Gordon Lewis’s low-effort, low-energy charms now that I was when I first plucked titles like Blood Feast & Two Thousand Maniacs off the Cult Section shelves of Major Video in the aughts.  I’ve always been on the hook for Something Weird‘s making-it-up-as-we-go-along approach to story, wherein a witch’s reluctant gigolo boosts his own psychic powers by experimenting with LSD so he can bring a Free Love serial killer to justice.  A couple decades ago, I just would have found it unforgivable that a film with that premise didn’t live up to its full potential as a Grade-A hippiesploitation freak show.  Watching it now, I’m more open to its merits as adorably quaint community theatre, with the laughably unconvincing karate demos and gratingly annoying witch’s spells now registering as a document of weirdos with limited talents attempting to put on a show instead of an opportunistic producer attempting to sell a flashy poster without a finished movie attached.  Lewis’s half-assed, monochrome imitation of a Saul Bass acid trip lays limp on the screen, but there’s something almost accidentally psychedelic about his sloppy, unenthused editing style.  It’s also fun to ponder “What was he thinking?” as he points a dirty camera lens at a cloudy sky while playing a classroom lecture about the science behind ESP or as a swanky cocktail party devolves into an out-of-focus living room seance.  Still, I can’t hold back my frustrations that the basic components of a much better B-picture are on full display onscreen but nobody cared enough to arrange them in a satisfying configuration.

I’m sure there are plenty of old-school genre nerds who appreciate Something Weird as a Hershell Gordon Lewis experiment in combining social unease around The Sexual Revolution with traditional “The World of the Unearthly” horror tropes. I’m also sure that I’ll end up seeing its drive-in double bill partner The Gruesome Twosome sometime before I die, despite knowing I cannot match that enthusiasm.  I fully understand Something Weird‘s value in the Something Weird Video catalog, though, since it’s the exact kind of title & logline that moves units off the shelves.  Hell, I just picked it up off a DVD shelf myself, even though it’s currently streaming free on Tubi, the rightful home of many Something Weird Video castoffs.

-Brandon Ledet

The Craft (1996)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

Two of my childhood-favorite horror classics from the year of our Dark Lord 1996 screened at The Prytania Theatre this month: Wes Craven’s teen-slasher renaissance sparker Scream and Andrew Fleming’s teen-witchcraft charmer The Craft.  Of the two, I only made time to revisit the latter, where I had the pleasure of sitting behind a row of giggling college students who were enjoying it for the very first time.  Repertory screenings of The Craft are a much rarer treat than screenings of Scream (as evidenced by only one of those titles also playing at The Broad this month), which makes sense given the stature of Scream‘s director within horror nerdom and given that it is still being kept alive by endless discourse & rebootquels well into the 2020s.  Both movies meant a lot to me as a wannabe goth young’n who never earned his eyeliner wings, if not only because I was the perfect age to look up to their much cooler, slightly older teen protagonists when the movies were fresh arrivals on the shelves of my local Blockbuster Video.  My anecdotal research (scrolling through my Letterboxd follows’ flippant one-liner reviews) suggests that The Craft is considered the much lesser of the two works, especially in recent years, which is the exact opposite opinion that dawned on me while watching it on the big screen for the very first time.  As a kid, Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics I needed to catch up with in future video store rentals, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years – a substantial, self-contained work that required no extratextual viewing.  Among the two slick ’96 teen studio horrors currently enjoying victory laps around the city, my heart clearly belongs to coven; praise be to Manon.

Pitting these two enduring sleepover classics against each other is mostly a game of 1-on-1 performance match-ups.  Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic in The Craft as Matthew Lillard is in Scream, but she’s much better dressed – sporting mega-goth bondage gear instead of oversized sweaters from The Gap.  Neve Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both, playing the genre’s most sensible Final Girl in Scream and the coven’s most vulnerable pushover in The Craft, where she cedes power to Balk, Rachel True, and Robin Tunney.  Skeet Ulrich is the deciding factor, then, putting in the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell in The Craft, which comes slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret in Scream.  It’s unlikely that these names mean anything to anyone born outside the Millennial age range of 1981 – 1996, but I can confirm from first-hand observation that Skeet Ulrich’s performance in The Craft still kills with the modern teenage crowd.  The row ahead of me was explosive with giggles every time he showed up at Tunney’s feet, adorably perplexed over why he was so magnetically attracted to her despite his usual aloof bad-boy demeanor.  Of course, a lot of the film’s current entertainment value is rooted in nostalgia for 90s pop culture aesthetics, whether it’s the extremely dated teen cast or the tie-in CD soundtrack that includes artist like Jewell, Julianna Hatfield, Letters to Cleo, Portishead, Elastica, and Our Lady Peace.  Even on that end, I’d say The Craft has Scream beat, since it’s only invested in setting a traditional witchcraft story within that 90s pop arena instead of simultaneously cataloging & restaging tropes from previous missteps & triumphs in its genre.

When I say that The Craft doesn’t require extratextual viewing the way Scream does, that doesn’t mean I didn’t immediately go home to watch all of the Special Features on my ancient DVD copy as soon as I left The Prytania, so I could prolong the pleasure of the experience.  There were some fun insights in its promotional behind the scenes “interviews”, mostly in the cast’s recollections of Fairuza Balk’s contributions as a true-believer Wiccan bringing authenticity to the production (along with hired outside Wicca consultants) and in Rachel True’s observation that as the coven’s magical powers grow stronger & stronger, their skirts are hemmed shorter & shorter.  Mostly, my extratextual journey outside The Craft was a horrified scroll down Letterboxd lane, where I found a lot of complaints from cinephiles I usually trust about a movie I’ve always loved.  Most reviews among mutuals range from 1-to-3 star ratings, with a particular disdain for the third-act dissolution of the central teen coven.  It’s true that the “Fuck around” section of the movie is a lot more fun than its “Find out” counterpart, as that’s when we watch goth teen witches confidently strut down their Catholic high school hallways to 90s pop tunes in defiance of their school’s usual social power rankings.  Once all four witches have solved their very simplistic personal issues at home (racism, body dysmorphia, the powerlessness of poverty and, least significantly, crushing on a bully) through dabbling in dark magic, there’s nothing left for the movie to do than to show what happens when they take their magic powers too far.  It’s a political blow to idealists looking to The Craft for depictions of feminist solidarity (who would be best served skipping the ending entirely), but it at least opens the movie up to other themes besides the allure of power to teen-girl outsiders: addiction, fear of losing social stature, the willingness to cower behind an overly bossy leader for convenience, etc.

Speaking of extratextual viewing, what’s interesting to me about the complaints over The Craft‘s third act is that someone did attempt to correct its political issues in a modern revision of the film.  Zoe Lister-Jones’s recent soft reboot The Craft: New Legacy smooths out a lot of the original film’s rough spots in representation, feminist solidarity, and third-act resolution, mostly by giving its own coven an outside enemy to fight instead of each other (David Duchovny as an MRA warlock) and by putting their hunk-bully stand-in for Skeet Ulrich under a “woke” spell instead of a love spell.  It might be a more politically sound film, but it’s also a thoroughly dull one, mostly because its poorly lit, dialogue-heavy teen drama registers more like a backdoor pilot for a CW series than a legitimate Movie.  Say what you want about the original, but it at least has a sense of style, something the recent remake only approaches when copying the exact occultist-imagery graphics of the original’s opening credits as lazy homage.  The Craft‘s style happens to be tied to a very specific era in commercial filmmaking that I happen to be susceptible to nostalgia for, but it still looks fantastic.  It probably serves me right, then, to see this same story warped into an extremely dated generational touchstone for a different era of potential horror nerds, so I can see how generic one of my childhood favorites looks to people who it didn’t hit at the exact right time.  To me, The Craft: Legacy is cute but inconsequential, which is seemingly what most audiences also think of the original, even among my peers.  So, maybe I should shelve my argument that there’s more overt queer sexuality in the suggestive wagging of Fairuza Balk’s fingers during the original’s iconic light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board scene than there is in the entirety of the deliberately inclusive Queer Representation remake.  I’m already risking sounding like an out-of-touch whiner about the good old days here, exalting the pop culture residue of my youth as if it were a sacred text.

-Brandon Ledet

Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

This month’s Classic Movies and Late Night oddities line-up at The Prytania has been, without question, the best run of repertory programming I’ve ever seen in New Orleans.  Even with the caveat that I came of age during the AMC Palaces’ total decimation of the city’s indie cinema scene, the wealth of classic horror titles on their October docket feels like an all-time great moment in local theatrical exhibition: Psycho, The Shining, The Craft, The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, Scream, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Dracula’s Daughter, Beetlejuice, The Black Cat, The Exorcist, The Creeping Flesh, Theatre of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors, and their regular midnight reruns of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  It’s such a staggering assemblage that I had to be choosy about which screenings to make time for, especially since The Broad was screening some of my favorite oddball horror sequels on the other side of town: Halloween III, A Nightmare on Elm Street III, and Friday the 13th Part VIII, all choice selections.  What a time to be unalive! Maybe it’s a little silly, then, that I treated The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Bell, Book and Candle as high-priority, can’t-miss viewing while I skipped out on a few screenings of classics I already know & love.  Bell, Book and Candle is a fluffy major-studio romcom about a lovelorn witch, establishing the 1950s middle ground between its 40s equivalent I Married a Witch and its 60s equivalent Bewitched.  It’s not an electrifying watch, but it is a cozy one, providing the same witchy-but-not-scary seasonal viewing most modern audiences find in Hocus Pocus instead.  While it feels a little puny in comparison to some of the all-time classics it shared a marquee with this month, its exhibition was more of a special occasion in some ways, since it has weirdly spotty home-video distribution right now, available only on Tubi or on DVD through the New Orleans Public Library.  More importantly, it fit in nicely with the usual programming of The Prytania’s Classic Movies slot, due to its unlikely connection to Alfred Hitchcock.

Part of the reason this month’s classic horror line-up at The Prytania feels so refreshingly adventurous is because the single-screen landmark usually only has the space in their schedule for a couple well-worn, widely beloved classics – more TCM (Turner Classic Movies) than TCM (Texas Chainsaw Massacre).  It’s still the most dependable repertory venue in the city, though, and over the years I’ve come to associate it with Hitchcock’s catalog in particular, since the director seemed to be a personal favorite of late proprietor Rene Brunet, Jr.  I’ve seen a good handful of Hitchcock titles for the very first time by attending The Prytania on Sunday mornings: To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Saboteur, Rope, Suspicion, Stage Fright, and Frenzy, to name them all.  Unfortunately, Hitchcock did not direct his own witchy love-spell romcom for The Prytania to program this month (they opted for Psycho instead), but Bell, Book and Candle does share some incidental similarities to his most critically lauded work.  It’s essentially the cutesy, witchy B-side to Vertigo. Both films feature Kim Novak putting Jimmy Stewart under a spell while his jilted, more socially appropriate love interest works out her romantic frustration by furiously painting on canvas alone in her apartment.  Novak’s given more to do here than play Stewart’s object of desire, since she initially holds all the (magical) power in their relationship and the vulnerability of their romance puts her in danger instead of him.  In either case, she is treated as a kind of fetish object by the camera. Here, she’s so performatively feminine that she’s basically feline, as indicated by the onscreen credit for the costumer who provided her furs.  There’s also an intense, Tarantino-esque focus on her bare feet, which is presented as a witchy character quirk but becomes outrageously obsessive by the time we linger on them slipping in & out of high heels.  The difference is that in Bell, Book and Candle she’s an aspirational figure for a lovelorn audience, while in Vertigo she’s a collectible figurine for an obsessive Stewart (and his directorial counterpart).

Novak plays Gillian Holroyd—a powerful young witch making waves on the Manhattan occult scene—whose loneliness & boredom at the top fixates her on the unsuspecting, nonmagical book publisher Shepherd Henderson, played by Stewart.  She’s careful to only share her powers with those she trusts: a bumbling hipster brother who’s smoked one too many jazz cigarettes (Jack Lemon, auditioning for his career-making part in Some Like It Hot), a kooky upstairs aunt (Elsa “Bride of Frankenstein” Lanchester), and the fellow witches & warlocks who drown martinis and talk shop at the magical dive bar The Zodiac Club.  Falling for her new neighbor and enchanting him to ditch his uptight fiancée is what unravels her usually careful approach to witchcraft, both because he’s a publisher who’s threatening to expose her coven with an upcoming book titled Magic in Manhattan and because falling in love means that she’ll lose her magical powers, according to The Rules.  Outside a couple scenes in which Novak and her witchy family (including the actress’s real-life pet Siamese cat) cast spells in her lavish apartment, there isn’t much genuine horror imagery in Bell, Book and Candle.  It’s just as much a precursor to Sex and the City as it is a precursor to Bewitched, with most of the central drama resulting from the witch’s disastrous, Carrie Bradshaw style attempts to “have it all” while living in The Big City.  It’s all very light, cozy, and unrushed, with only a couple jokes about the coven’s “Un-American activities” and what possible insults “witch” might rhyme with registering as anything especially risqué.  Still, it was wonderful to see on the big screen for the first time with a giggling crowd, and it was a wonderful middle ground between this month’s run of classic-horror obscurities at The Prytania and their Classic Movies series’ usual TCM-friendly fare.

While I’m fixating on Bell, Book and Candle‘s appropriateness as seasonal programming, I do want to note that it resonated with me as more of a Christmas movie than a Halloween one, despite all of its thematic & aesthetic focus on witchcraft.  Much of the early stretch of the film is set during Christmas rituals, including a Christmas Eve get-together at The Zodiac Club and Novak trading presents with her family around a modernist “tree” sculpture.  Halloween and Christmas both have cultural significance as liminal stretches of the calendar when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, so it makes just as much sense to me that this story about a young witch in love would be set during Yule as it would during Samhain.  It also makes sense to me that its Christmastime setting would be forgotten when choosing seasonal programming, especially as memories of the film get muddled with its better-remembered predecessor I Married a Witch.  Speaking personally, I’m grateful that I got to catch Bell, Book and Candle on the big screen for my first viewing, but I am mentally filing it away as a Christmas movie for future revisits.  As a life-long Scrooge, I’m always desperate for lightly spooky Yuletide movies that aren’t so saccharine they rot your teeth, while witchy Halloween movies are already more than plentiful. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

We are deep into Spooky Season now, folks.  We’ve officially reached the Halloween equivalent of whatever the I❤NOLA crowd refers to as “Deep Gras” in the last couple weeks of Carnival.  At least, that’s what occurred to me while I was taking an hour-long bus ride uptown to catch a long-forgotten Hammer Horror knockoff just because it was playing on the big screen.  After months of whining that there wasn’t much of interest screening around town, I had somehow found a new worthwhile horror movie to watch outside my house for seven days straight, bouncing back & forth between The Broad & The Prytania’s dueling repertory screenings of vintage #spookycontent.  Venturing out to see 1973’s The Creeping Flesh at The Prytania on a weeknight was the moment I realized how far I had slipped into Halloween Season mania.  The movie didn’t look especially remarkable, but the momentum of this month’s shockingly robust repertory programming made it feel like mandatory viewing anyway, and I ended up having a great time.  Whether it was my muted expectations or just the spirit of the season, The Creeping Flesh was exactly what I needed on that brisk October evening, praise be to the Great Pumpkin.

Whether Hammer, Amicus, or otherwise, 1970s British horror always makes for great Halloween Season programming.  They’re all decorated like creaky haunted houses and packed with lustful ghouls, but their low-key, faux-literary tone invites you to crawl under a giant Jack-o-Lantern patterned blanket with a warm mug of tea, more cozy than scared.  The same thing occurred to me the last time I saw Peter Cushing & Christopher co-headline a movie, watching the Amicus anthology The House that Dripped Blood in the lead-up to last Halloween.  The short-form EC Comics story structure of those Amicus “portmanteau” horrors is great for plowing through several single-idea tales of terror in a single go, where simple tale of evildoers being punished by their own wickedness can get wrapped up in just a few minutes’ time – like binging a season of Tales from the Crypt in a single sitting.  The Hammer films of that era are a little slower & stuffier in their delivery of the horror goods, dragging out their inevitable conclusions so they can spend more time lighting their haunted homes’ Victorian hallways with cobwebbed candelabras.  What’s genius about The Creeping Flesh is that it combines these two approaches to vintage cozy British horror in a single package: cramming several portmanteau-horror ideas into a single, messy narrative, so that you get to enjoy the narrative propulsion of Amicus and the atmospheric haunted house tours of Hammer at the same time.

While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent (produced by the generically named World Film Services) is overstuffed with nutty, gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd.  Cushing & Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using ancient proto-human skeletons and their own children as pawns in their sick game of professional one-upmanship.  Cushing is presented as the Good mad scientist, one who’s recently excavated a missing link in the chain of human evolution in the form of the 12-foot Home Depot skeleton.  He quickly discovers that exposure to water causes the skeleton to regenerate its long-dormant flesh, giving re-birth to the embodiment of Pure Evil – confirmed under microscopes by the wicked behavior of its re-activated blood.  On the other side of London, Lee is presented as his Bad mad scientist brother, who attempts to isolate that same Pure Evil gene in the patients at his crooked asylum, mostly by torturing them with electrolysis & weaponized hypnosis.  These dual research projects get out of hand when the brothers’ respective wards escape from their care: Cushing’s manically horny daughter (determined to live a debauched life in her dead, adulterous mother’s footsteps) and Lee’s most violent patient (determined to smash & grab every woman within his monstrous wingspan).  Of course, this gets even more complicated when the ancient Evil skeleton is drenched in a rainstorm, after one brother attempts to hijack the other’s research materials.

The Creeping Flesh is low-key madness.  It’s so stately & faux literary from scene to scene that you hardly have time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.  The stop motion & practical gore effects of its titular regenerative flesh are fantastic but wouldn’t make for much of a movie on their own, especially since the film is reluctant to let the audience get a good look at the fully formed, rain-activated monster.  Likewise, its measurable, scientific explanations for supernatural evil don’t have much to say about the original Frankenstein myth beyond the follies of “playing God” that have been underlined in every adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel to date.  So, it’s a wonderful gift to the audience that the movie doesn’t settle for its simplest, most streamlined narrative, the one where Peter Cushing accidentally unearths an ancient monster and gives it new life.  Instead, there are two mad scientists to contend with, each with their own escaped maniacs and monstrously unethical research projects to answer for.  Because it was the style at the time, the film also feels it necessary to deliver the last-minute “Gotcha!” twist of an Amicus vignette while it’s at it, just to give the whole overstuffed mess a vague sense of purpose. 

On my way to the theater, I wasn’t sure why The Prytania programmed this particular vintage British horror over more recognizable, accomplished options (Asylum, The Vampire Lovers, The Curse of Frankenstein, etc.).  I think I get it now; it’s like watching several of those classics Frankensteined together into one lovably misguided monstrosity.  Or maybe it was just the cheapest to license, who knows.  Either way, it was a wonderfully lopsided delight.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) vs. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss two literary horror adaptations produced by American Zoetrope in the 1990s: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).

00:00 Welcome

01:35 Eyes Without a Face (1960)
04:30 Prom Night (1980)
07:45 Multiple Maniacs (1970)
09:55 Exorcist III (1990)
11:55 The Infernal Cauldron (1903)
13:53 Sorry, Charlie (2023)
15:40 Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)
25:40 Lake Mungo (2008)
28:00 Life After Beth (2014)
33:20 The Brood (1979)
40:40 Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
45:22 Opera (1987)
50:11 The Creeping Flesh (1973)
55:02 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
59:48 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
1:04:28 Dicks: The Musical (2023)
1:07:48 The Cassandra Cat (1963)

1:13:00 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) vs. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

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

Dracula’s Children

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

Like all corners of the creative arts, Universal Picture’s classic horror period was overrun with nepo babies.  Carl Laemmle, Jr. kicked off the studio’s Famous Monsters brand by producing 1931’s Dracula after Carl Laemmle, Sr. passed down his studio-head executive position to his son instead of a more qualified protégée.  Lon Chaney, Jr. changed his name from Creighton Chaney to cash in on the name recognition of his early-horror legend father, making him a more credible, marketable Wolf Man.  Then, of course, there’s the case of Dracula’s children, who waltzed into power in Universal’s most prestigious sequels after their father’s untimely second death at the end of the first film in their franchise.  While The Wolf Man fathered no cubs to take over his sequels, and Frankenstein’s Monster only made it thirty seconds into his own marriage before burning down the lab, Dracula’s progeny did a good job making the most of their family name.  The Dracula kids don’t appear to have met or crossed paths, but their polygamous father did have multiple wives in the first film, so I suppose that doesn’t undermine the series’ narrative continuity.

Much like the goofier Frankenstein sequels from this early Universal period, 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is an absurdly direct follow-up to the Tod Browning original.  The film opens with Van Helsing being arrested for Dracula’s murder at the scene of the crime, and then spending the rest of the film convincing his jailers that actual, real-life vampires are afoot.  Dracula’s immediate replacement is his angsty goth-girl daughter, who is reluctant to continue the family business of draining innocent civilians of their blood despite it being the only thing she’s trained to do.  She’s rebelled by moving to the big city, where she stalks the streets as a bisexual vamp, picking up hungry artists’ models and lustful playboys to drain back at her spacious parlor.  Foretelling a lot of the later Famous Monster sequels, she feels incredibly guilty about this blood-addiction vice and spends most of the film seeking a medical cure for the family legacy that has shunned her from polite society & daylight – ultimately to no avail.  Inevitably, like all nepo babies, she ends up not being able to strike it out on her own after all and moves back to the family castle in Transylvania for some super traditional Dracula kills, meeting the same tragic end as her father.

Like the direct sequel to James Whale’s original Frankenstein movie, Dracula’s Daughter has earned more critical respect in recent decades than the film that precedes it.  Its reputation has largely risen due to the sexual transgressions of its lesbian seduction scene, in which the titular vampire convinces a young woman to expose her bare neck for the sucking by telling her she’s going to pose for a nude portrait.  Likewise, Bride of Frankenstein‘s gender politics have drawn a lot of attention with modern viewers for the concluding scene in which the titular monster takes one look at her assigned undead groom and decides she’d rather be dead (again) than mate with her “man.”  Of the two films, Bride of Frankenstein is the better direct sequel overall, since Whale was given unprecedented creative freedom to play up the stranger, campier elements of his original text in an anything-goes horror comedy free-for-all that doesn’t even bother to deliver on its central premise until the final three minutes of runtime.  By contrast, Dracula’s Daughter has the generosity of affording its titular villain plenty screentime & pathos, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters.  Like the Monster’s bride, she effortlessly, tragically cool, so it’s nice that we actually get to spend time with her beyond a few quick frames of celluloid.

While Dracula’s Daughter exemplifies the Famous Monsters sequels’ penchant for direct, narrative continuations set seconds after their preceding films’ endings, 1943’s Son of Dracula exemplifies their penchant for wildly recasting the central villains from film to film.  The most hilarious example I’ve seen is Bela Lugosi’s miscasting as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, a performance so laughably unconvincing that studio executives decided to remove his heavily accented dialogue from the final cut, fearing audience mockery.  Lon “Wolf Man” Chaney, Jr. made more visual sense as the Monster in the previous picture, Son of Frankenstein, but could not be tasked with sitting in the makeup chair for two separate monster performances in the same picture (not to mention the narrative contrivance of Lugosi/Igor’s brain being transplanted to the Monster’s body at the end of Son of Frankenstein).  Appropriately enough, that film was made the same year Chaney got his own laughably bad Famous Monster miscasting as the mysterious “Count Aculard” in 1943’s Son of Dracula.  The reason Chaney works so well in his tyepcast roles as The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Lennie from Of Mice and Men is that he looks like a sweet, lumbering oaf who doesn’t know his own strength.  That image doesn’t translate especially well to playing a debonaire European vampire who seduces women to their doom.

Despite Count Aculard’s ridiculous appearance and name (which registers among the all-time goofiest horror pseudonyms, like Dr. Acula in Night of the Ghouls, Jack Rippner in Red Eye, and Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), Son of Dracula is a surprisingly solid supernatural melodrama.  Unlike his rebellious daughter, Dracula’s son has enthusiastically taken to the family business of seducing young women to death, moving to a Southern plantation to hypnotize & marry its recent heiress.  Dracula’s daughter-in-law is a bit of a gloomy goth herself, and she attempts to manipulate the power of the Dracula dynasty for her own wicked profits, but the inevitable tragedy of the undead couple’s Southern Gothic surroundings makes a happy ending impossible.  For his part, Count Aculard adjusts to the Southern atmosphere incredibly well, literally becoming a part of it by materializing as swamp gas in his nightly rises from the coffin.  The movie carries over a lot of classic spooky set dressing of the original Dracula film despite this new locale, including a return to the flapping rubber bats that were missing from Dracula’s Daughter.  Still, it’s visually accomplished in continually surprising ways, including an early version of the double-dolly shots from Spike Lee’s playbook as Count Aculard glides over the marshes to drain his victims.

Pumping out cheap-o sequels to Universal’s most successful horror films was obviously more about doing great business than it was about making great art.  Through the tougher stretches of The Great Depression & WWII, the Famous Monsters that made Universal a major player in the first place were a near bottomless well for immediate cashflow.  Frankenstein & The Wolf Man got stuck with the goofiest, trashiest end of that rushed-to-market schlock production, and by the time their many crossover sequels brought an off-brand version of Dracula into the fold (in John Carradine), the character was so far removed from Bela Lugosi’s performance in the original that it could do no real damage to the Dracula brand.  Meanwhile, Dracula’s more direct sequels about his undead children are both very stately, handsome productions that hold up on their own among the best of Universal’s early horror run.  Dracula’s Daughter is certainly the cooler of the pair and has rightfully been reappraised as a great work by modern critics.  Son of Dracula would likely earn its own reappraisal too, if it weren’t for the goofy miscasting of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the titular vampire.  Unsurprisingly, nepotism is a double-edged sword, one that can open opportunities you’re not always the best fit for.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #197: The Wolf Man (1941) & Other Wolf Men

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Welcome to Episode #197 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four horror movies about werewolves, starting with Universal’s genre-defining classic The Wolf Man (1941).

00:00 Welcome

04:29 Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
09:50 Saw X (2023)
11:52 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
18:02 The Royal Hotel (2023)
20:07 Hotel Coolgardie (2016)

22:06 The Wolf Man (1941)
40:05 An American Werewolf in London (1981)
56:03 Dog Soldiers (2002)
1:10:06 Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975)

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

Beyond Dream’s Door (1989)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Most of my favorite art tends to get labeled as “Bad Movies” outright, as if “Bad Movies” were a legitimate, defined genre.  Snarky mockery of low-budget genre films accounts for a lot of movie-nerd culture in a post-MST3k world, without much thought to what the “Bad Movie” label even means.  Friends will gather for regular, celebratory Bad Movie Night rituals, and then log the films watched on Letterboxd with a half-star review that reads “I had the time of my life watching this! The most entertaining movie ever made.”  It’s driven me to the conclusion that what most people label as “Bad Movies” is really just underfunded outsider art. There’s a discomfort in stepping outside the systemic quality controls of a professional production, but those same controls can also dampen the personalities & idiosyncrasies of the artists behind those productions.  When someone says they love watching Bad Movies, there’s a cognitive dissonance between objective quality in craft and the subjective enjoyment of the audience.  To me, nothing made with ecstatic passion and highly entertaining results could ever truly be “Bad”; it’s just art that requires you to readjust what you expect out of Movies in general.  What good is consistency, coherence, and logic in a robust, mainstream production if the images feel limp & uninspired when compared to their no-budget equivalents?

Beyond Dream’s Door is A+ outsider art that I’m sure has made the rounds among the irony-poisoned Bad Movies crowd.  It’s an easy target for that kind of mockery, inviting laughter as soon as you hear the first few sitcom-level line deliveries from its subprofessional actors.  If you can stifle your snickering long enough to stick with it, though, Beyond Dream’s Door proves to be an ideal example of passion outweighing resources.  It recreates the nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences and waking “reality.”  The emotional & narrative logic behind its nightmare imagery isn’t especially deep or nuanced; it hinges its entire premise on the cryptic idiom “Beyond dream’s door is where horror lies,” and it contextualizes all of its action within a university’s Psychology program so it can make room for brief, vague lectures on “psychosis.”  It also relies on frequent dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream rug pull surprises, making it clear that nothing in the characterizations or story matters as much as establishing a consistently fun, unnerving sense of dream logic in its low-budget aesthetics.  At times, it’s transcendent in what it achieves within that seemingly limited frame, even recalling the headlights crime scene terror of a David Lynch nightmare (years before those exact images were echoed in Lynch’s Lost Highway).  And yet, it’s the exact kind of sub-professional production that instantly gets slapped with the “Bad Movie” label, while more venerated, traditionally trained artists like Lynch are afforded the benefit of the doubt.

The story of a Psychology student’s stress dreams breaking out of his skull to infect the reality of (and physically attack) his classmates isn’t sketched out with much detail, give or take his dreams finding a demonic mascot in the movie’s special guest star The Suckling.  Mostly, Beyond Dream’s Door follows its moment-to-moment whims to create movie magic on a college student budget.  Beyond posing a few dreamworld images in a blacked-out sound stage void, most of its action is staged in generic, practical locales.  The film attempts to make liminal spaces out of the mundane, Skinamarinking its suburban homes through confused geography and warping the empty halls of its academic institutions through video surveillance displays.  It conjures a literal demon through a college sleep study gone awry, but most of its horror is established in the uncertainty of where its dreams begin & end.  Lightbulbs explode in slow-motion close-up to punctuate the shock of being dunked back into a recurring nightmare.  Clear glass skulls fill with running water to erase the physical humanity of the characters navigating the dreamworld.  Disembodied arms rise from an open grave like time-elapsed flower growth, shot in psychedelic red & blue crosslighting.  The narrative may be simple, but the visual language is constantly surprising, never lazy or needlessly repetitious.  This is clearly the work of cinephiles striving to make the best possible movie they can with the resources they have within reach. It’s noticeably cheap, but it’s also thoroughly wonderful.

The main reason I love horror as a genre is because it makes this kind of dream-logic outsider art commercially viable in a way no other medium can.  If a group of college students made an avant-garde art film about the thin veil between dreams & reality, it’s extremely liable to have been forgotten to time (unless it was an early project for a director who later earned a mainstream fanbase, like Lynch).  By contrast, Beyond Dream’s Door has a kind of built-in, infinitely repopulated audience who will always be voracious for more nightmare-logic horror schlock, especially after they’ve run through the official Elm Street films a few dozen times.  It seems conscious of its debt to the larger horror genre in that way, reaching beyond the visual touchstones of an obvious Freddy Kruger knockoff to instead make allusions to Hitchcock’s Psycho and Steven King’s novel IT.  The need for scares & gore to attract an audience serves the film well structurally, giving it momentary goals to achieve beyond crafting artsy images with literal arts & crafts supplies.  The would’ve been just as great without its more overt horror elements, though; it would just also have far fewer eyes on it.  A lot of my favorite filmmakers fit into that same category: underfunded visionaries like Ed Wood, Roger Corman, and William Castle, who managed to make & sell wildly entertaining pictures on shoestring budgets by working on the B-horror margins.  They’re the exact kind of names that end up on lists titled “The Best of the Bad” instead of earning the label they truly deserve, “The Best Outsider American Filmmakers.”  I haven’t seen enough of Jay Woelful’s directorial work to say he belongs in that same conversation, but I can confirm Beyond Dream’s Door admirably continues the tradition.

-Brandon Ledet

The Severing (2023)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Without question, the strangest moviegoing experience I’ve had all year was attending a repertory screening of the 2002 supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies, presented by a formerly incarcerated member of the West Memphis Three in a series about ceremonial magick.  There was just something intensely odd about seeing such a flavorless, anonymous PG-13 Studio Horror presented as a deeply spiritual text.  And just a few months later, I am once again confronted with a bizarrely idiosyncratic presentation of director Mark Pellington’s workman-for-hire artistry.  Pellington’s filmmaking career peaked in the Y2k era with The Mothman Prophecies & Arlington Road, two serviceable thrillers with mainstream appeal.  His most recent feature, The Severing, is borderline avant-garde in contrast, enduring a slow-trickle rollout from smaller festivals like Slamdance to the public library-supported streaming service Hoopla.  It’s an abstract interpretive dance horror film made in collaboration between Pellington (whose involvement doesn’t make much sense) and Nina McNeely, the choreographer of Climax (whose involvement makes all the sense).  Like The Broad’s recent screening of The Mothman Prophecies, this really was one of the stranger viewing experiences I’ve enjoyed all year, and although neither were especially great films, they were at the very least memorable.

I guess this film makes sense within Pellington’s larger catalog if you know him primarily as a music video director, which is the side hustle that’s been paying his bills since well before his feature-length breakout in Arlington Road.  Shot with a small dance crew in a single, crumbling warehouse locale, The Severing is essentially a feature-length music video without much actual music to speak of.  Composer Peter Adams mostly works in light piano twinkles and long, droning tones, so that the interpretive dance artistry on display never convincingly builds to any kind of crescendo or catharsis.  However, if you hit the mute button and throw on your favorite Nine Inch Nails record as soundtrack replacement, it’s easy to see the spooky mood Pellington & crew were aiming for.  The dancers craft some gorgeous, upsetting images throughout, painted in full-body bruising that makes them look like rhythmically decomposing corpses.  Their movements are pained & frustrated, often stuck in repetitive, throbbing movements like looping .GIFs.  The warehouse locale is lit with the sickly fluorescent washes of vintage torture porn, recalling the haunted house your dirtbag cousin worked at on the weekends more than a professional movie set.  It’s eerie, it’s uncanny, but it’s mostly hung off the shoulders of the contorted dancers and their avant-garde choreographer.  Pellington’s generic-horror touches mostly just get in their way.

Replacing the soundtrack with your industrial rock album of choice would help cover up some of the ill-advised dialogue snippets that distract from the dancers’ onscreen movements, but the film’s high school goth poetry is still inescapable as constant, on-screen text.  Title cards & incoherent ramblings about how we shallow humans “move like lemmings” or how “sleep is a doorway to the 4th dimension” detract from the inherent tension & beauty of the dance choreography.  In a year when horror has been shaken up by slow-cinema abstractions like Skinamarink, The Outwaters, and Enys Men, it’s frustrating to see a formal experiment like this repeatedly ground itself instead of fully giving into its true, alienating self.  Since my familiarity with Pellington is as an openly, thoroughly commercial director, I’m assuming a lot of that normalized framing is his doing.  As such, this is more of a balletic echo of the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video than it is some jarring breakthrough in cinematic form.  It makes for great spooky background imagery for the Halloween season, but it’s frustrating that it couldn’t amount to more than that, since there’s some truly powerful artistry expressed through these tortured, writhing bodies.  A more daring, adventurous director would’ve matched the dancers’ artistic boldness in their own visual medium, but there’s something to be said for Pellington’s workman spirit getting this project completed & distributed at all.

-Brandon Ledet