horror

Mommy Issues @ Overlook Film Fest 2023

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Film festival programming is a real-world Choose Your Own Adventure game where individual moviegoers can have wildly varied, simultaneous experiences at the exact same venue.  Overall, I had a great time at this year’s Overlook (an annual horror festival that’s quickly become the most rewarding cinematic Cultural Event on the New Orleans social calendar), but I weirdly frontloaded my personal programming choices so that the films I was most excited to see—Late Night with the Devil, The Five Devils, and Smoking Causes Coughing—were all knocked out as a rapid-fire triple feature on the very first day.  For the rest of the weekend, I wandered around Overlook in a self-induced daze, wowed by my Opening Night selections and hoping something smaller & more anonymous would match those early highs as I bounced between screening rooms at the downtown Prytania.  I can’t say I ever got there (at least not in the way other festivalgoers gushed about big-name titles like Renfield, Talk to Me, and Evil Dead Rise throughout the weekend), but I did find some clear thematic patterns in my personal program as the fest stretched on.  For instance, my entire second day at this year’s Overlook focused on the horrors of motherhood, a self-engineered happenstance I can’t imagine was the intent of the festival’s programmers, since they could not have known which exact Choose Your Own Adventure path their audience would lock ourselves into.  While nothing on Day 2 floored me the way buzzier titles had on Day 1, they collectively gave me a lot of squicky Mommy Issues to dwell on in the festival’s downtown shopping mall locale – a theme that, come to think of it, was also echoed elsewhere on the docket in Clock, The Five Devils, Give Me an A, and Evil Dead Rise.

The best of the motherhood horrors I caught that day was the prickly pregnancy story Birth/Rebirth, which will premiere on Shudder later this year.  In its simplest terms, Birth/Rebirth is a morbid little Found Family story where the family glue is composed of reanimated corpses & unethically harvested fetal tissue.  Let’s call it Women in FrankenSTEM.  It details the unlikely team-up of a brash, uncaring pathologist who experiments on reanimating dead bodies in her inner-city apartment and a warm, compassionate nurse from the same hospital who loses her young daughter to an aggressive bacterial infection.  The two women form a makeshift family when they inevitably bring the daughter back to “life” via a serum derived from prenatal tissue, harvested through a chemical process that eventually leads to desperate acts of violence to keep the experiment going.  There’s plenty of morbid humor in the film’s “Honey, I’m home,” “How was work?” domestic banter as this new family routine becomes more comfortable, but its tone & central themes are relatively heavy.  For all of its upsetting surgical imagery involving needles, spines, and wombs (sometimes made even grimier through found-footage camcorder grain), the film often just engages in a very thoughtful contrast/compare debate about the differences between science & medicine.  That debate gets especially heated when hospital staff maintain a cold, scientific distancing from their pregnant patients instead of treating them like human beings in need of compassionate care, a threshold that even the more humane nurse crosses in pursuit of keeping her daughter “alive.”  Birth/Rebirth is refreshingly honest & matter-of-fact about pregnant women’s bodily functions and the medical industry’s indifference to their wellbeing.  It’s not a great film (often lacking a pronounced sense of style or narrative momentum), but it is a satisfying, provocative one.

The worst of the motherhood horrors on my docket was the Mongolian axe-murder thriller Aberrance.  Aberrance may even be the worst feature I can remember seeing at any film festival, a self-programming mistake that became apparent as soon as its opening frames foreshadow its pregnant damsel in distress running from its axe-wielding killer under a veil of cheaply rendered digital snowfall.  Whereas Birth/Rebirth had smart, straightforward observations to make about how misogynist the medical industry can be, Aberrance instead follows a series of for-their-own sake plot twists that muddle any possible good-faith readings of its social messaging.  At the start, this vapid, cheap-o thriller pretends to be a domestic violence story about a heroic neighbor bravely standing up to the abuser next door, who keeps his pregnant wife locked away from the world in order to “protect” her from her own mental illness.  Several generic plot twists & mainstream horror tropes later, the movie appears to be asserting an extensive list of incendiary falsehoods that get more infuriating as they thoughtlessly pile up: Don’t be nosy about apparent domestic abuse conflicts in other people’s homes; don’t trust the medication prescribed to treat your mental illness; and, most importantly, if a woman is mentally ill, the best fix is for her to just have a baby.  While Birth/Rebirth has incisive things to say about women’s minds, bodies, and care, Aberrance doesn’t care at all about the pregnant victim at the center of its story.  She’s a mostly wordless vehicle for thematically inane, irresponsible plot twists and flashy, for-its-own sake camerawork that initially appears playful & inventive but quickly becomes dull & repetitive.  The only halfway interesting thing about the movie is the cultural specificity of its Mongolian setting, but that’s not nearly enough to compensate for its boneheaded qualities as a mother-in-peril story.

Lurking somewhere between the disparate quality of those two polar-opposite motherhood thrillers is the couture-culture body horror Appendage, which will premiere on Hulu sometime later this year (likely as part of their annual “Huluween” package).  Appendage‘s connections to the day’s unintentional motherhood theme are initially less apparent than the first two films’, unless you consider a woman growing a sentient, talking tumor on her hip to represent an abstract form of giving birth.  The story follows a young fashion designer whose professional stress over a highly competitive, demanding job manifests in a hateful, id-indulging tumor that grows on her body and gradually develops a life of its own.  It’s a fairly common creature feature set-up, especially in a horror comedy context.  Think Basket Case but make it fashion (or Hatching but make it fashion, or Bad Milo but make it fashion, or How to Get Ahead in Advertising but make it fashion, etc.).  The scenes featuring the rubber-puppet monster make for an adorable addition to that subgenre, but they also highlight how bland Appendage can feel when the absorbed-twin tumor is nowhere to be seen.  Except, I did find its connective-tissue drama interesting within the larger theme of the day, if only through happenstance.  By the end of the film, it’s clear that our troubled fashionista’s self-negging workplace woes are less about job stress than they are an echo of her uptight WASP mother’s overly harsh criticisms of her every decision.  As it chugs along, Appendage proves to have way more on its mind about its underlying Mommy Issues than it does about the fashion industry, which is mostly used as an arbitrary broad-comedy backdrop akin to the killer-blue-jeans novelty horror Slaxx.  The promise of the premise is that we’ll watch a young woman spar against the monstrously abnormal growth on her body, but instead we often watch her do petty, verbal battle with the abnormal monster who birthed her.

Birth/Rebirth was my favorite selection from the second day of Overlook by any metric, and it only grew in my estimation as the day’s incidental horrors-of-motherhood patterns revealed themselves.  Even so, there are brief moments of Appendage that make it recommendable as potential Halloween Season viewing, especially for anyone who’s delighted by throwback practical-effects monsters.  The same cannot be said about Aberrance, an entirely useless work as both a pregnancy narrative and as an axe-wielding slasher cheapie.  It’s admirable that Overlook programmed a low-budget no-namer from an underserved market like Mongolia but, much like me, they took a chance on a dud.  It still helped guide & flesh out my Choose Your Own Adventure programming choices for the day, though, even if only to make the other motherhood horror titles that bookended it appear even greater by comparison.

-Brandon Ledet

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

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It’s easy to get dispirited by the deluge of current pop culture product that’s just nostalgic regurgitation of vintage hits from decades ago.  If you dwell on how much of our current “creative” output is just a distant echo of pre-existing iconic works, you’re only going to see a culture in decline.  Not all pastiche is empty, though.  While most nostalgia bait cites past triumphs for an easy pop of recognition, there are plenty modern throwbacks that sincerely interrogate or subvert the artistic intent & cultural context of their inspirational texts.  For every Netflix special that drags the Power Rangers out of retirement for a nostalgia-stoker victory lap, there’s an absurdist French comedy that subverts & recontextualizes that same vintage 90s iconography into something wonderfully new & strange.  The same day I saw Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist Power Rangers parody Smoking Causes Coughing at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I also happened to catch a similarly subversive nostalgia piece in Late Night with the Devil, which dialed the pop culture clock even further back for even weirder effect (and won the festival’s Audience Award for Best Feature as a result).  Late Night with the Devil is vintage TV Land horror, a parody of a late-night 70s talk show broadcast that’s hijacked midway by The Devil.  It stokes vintage 1970s pop culture nostalgia as its initial hook, but mostly just uses that temporal backdrop for a sense of comfort & familiarity that can be stripped away for effective third-act scares once the titular Devil is conjured.  It’s also thematically purposeful in returning to that era because it has something specific to say about pop culture at that time, an embarrassingly low bar that isn’t cleared by more routine nostalgia cash-ins like the upcoming Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Once & Always.

David Dastmalchian stars as a late-night talk show host who teeters somewhere between the post-vaudevillian comedy of Johnny Carson and the cigar-smoke intellectualism of Dick Cavett.  After a faux-documentary prologue sketches out the basic outline of Dastmalchian’s fictional Night Owl talk show (including its imagined ratings war with Carson and its host’s personal dabblings in the occult), we’re submerged in a real-time Sweeps Week novelty episode of the show, supposedly broadcast on Halloween Night in 1977.  Even within that Halloween Special context, Late Night with the Devil mostly functions as a loose collection of 70s kitsch, touching on iconic-to-forgotten figures of the era like Orson Welles, Anton LaVey, and The Amazing Kreskin as if they’re all of equal importance.  Things get dicey when the Night Owl producers restage a real-life version of Friedkin’s 70s horror classic The Exorcist as a shameless ratings stunt, unwittingly unleashing a powerful demon that calls itself Mr. Wriggles onto the American public through live broadcast.  The demonic scares of the film’s back half allow its initial Nick at Nite nostalgia trip to go wildly off the rails in exciting, unpredictable ways.  It also opens the text up for direct, sincere criticism of the era’s professional machismo – interrogating the ways that men nearing the top of the corporate ladder were willing to exploit the vulnerable underlings below them (especially if they’re women) just to scramble up the last few rungs.  Sweeps Week desperation has never been so deadly, nor has inane talk show chatter about “current” events & the weather. 

If there’s anything holding Late Night with the Devil back from achieving greatness as a standalone novelty, it’s that there are so many nostalgia-critical genre throwbacks already out there to match or best.  In particular, its real-time simulation of an actual cursed, vintage TV broadcast is outshone by the Satanic Panic era news report parody film WNUF Halloween Special, which is also framed as a ratings stunt gone wrong.  Not only does WNUF have more politically incisive things to say about the cultural moment it time-travels to for cheap gags & scares, but it also fully commits to the bit in a way Late Night with the Devil doesn’t dare.  Instead of repeating the WNUF trick of breaking up its broadcast with parodies of vintage television commercials, Late Night cheats by bolstering its narrative with backstage drama & impossible “documentary” footage that distract from the verisimilitude of its premise.  It’s a frustrating indulgence at first, but the film eventually makes the most of it in a go-for-broke, reality-bending finale that’s worth forgiving the few shortcut cheats it takes to get there.  If you don’t mind a little logical looseness in your “found footage” horror novelties, Late Night with the Devil is perfectly calibrated Halloween Season programming.  It pulls double duty in both nostalgically calling back to vintage horrors past (which is especially welcome if you’ve already seen The Exorcist and its many knockoffs one too many times) and finds modern political & technological justifications in returning to those well-treaded waters.  It’s not nostalgia bait so much as it’s nostalgia perversion, which is a much more interesting angle than you’ll find most modern pop culture attempting.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #182: Rumpelstiltskin (1995) & Dark Fairy Tales

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Welcome to Episode #182 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of dark, horrific takes on classic fairy tales, starting with the 1995 creature feature Rumpelstiltskin.

00:00 Welcome

02:14 Finde (2021)
05:30 The Little Mermaid (1968)
08:37 The Cremator (1969)
16:40 The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
21:51 Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

26:41 Rumpelstiltskin (1995)
48:41 Beauty and the Beast (1978)
1:02:50 Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997)
1:16:00 Freeway (1996)

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

-The Podcast Crew

Scream VI (2023)

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Being born on the day that I was made for an interesting way of keeping track of time with regards to school when I was a kid. One of my dearest friends was born on October 27th, which meant that she spent her childhood believing that her favorite movies, which were all Halloween-oriented, came on television in honor of her, which leant her younger years a little bit of magic that was sorely needed. My birthday always landed during or after the last week of school, so much so that I turned 18 the day after I graduated from high school, and my college graduation was also exactly one day prior to my birthday. I know this will finally be the thing that dates me after I’ve played so coy over the years about how old I am, but I finished fifth grade in 1998, and one of my classmates came home with me for a birthday sleepover. My next-door neighbor, a girl a few years older than I was, secretly snuck me a VHS tape of a movie that she had recorded off of HBO, for us to watch on the tiny TV/VCR combo that I got for my birthday that year. I didn’t know it, but my whole world was about to change, not because I was turning 11, but because an extremely meta horror film was about to stab me in the brain and change everything that I thought I knew about how movies worked. It’s been 25 years, and I’m still just as in love with it, as well as (all but one of) the sequels it spawned in the intervening time. What’s your favorite scary movie … franchise?

Scream VI is a delight. After a fairly decent return to the world of Ghostfaces and voice changers in 5cream, this new installment lands on its feet despite the departure of the franchise’s main lead, Neve Campbell. Don’t get me wrong; I love Neve Campbell, and I love Sidney Prescott. In fact, I went to two separate screenings of Scream VI just 48 hours apart because I overbooked myself, and I wore a different Sidney Prescott t-shirt to each one, which is a testament to the fact that she is my favorite final girl. Somehow, despite her leaving this series after the last film, Scream VI manages to not only soldier on in her absence, but feel complete in spite of it; in fact, her absence is barely felt at all. This loss is mitigated by several mentions of her and the agreement between the lone veteran of the first film, Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and new lead Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) that Sidney “deserves her happy ending” with her husband and children far, far away from whatever Ghostface copycat shenanigans are happening in New York, to which I also whole-heartedly agree. It’s a shame that the studio wasn’t willing to meet her salary requirements (a friend asked me how much Campbell asked for and I have no idea what her fee would have been, but she is worth every penny that they refused to pay), but if she’s not going to be in it, I’m hard pressed to think of a kinder send-off than she got. The news that VI would bring back fan-favorite Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) was the only thing that kept me from writing this sequel off when it was in development last year, and her return is one of countless elements that make this film feel like it’s living up to the franchise’s legacy in spite of the loss of its star. 

It’s been a year since the events of the last film, in which Sam Carpenter returned to her hometown of Woodsboro, a town that’s rapidly heading towards overtaking Cabot Cove as the murder capital of small town America. After years of running from her past after discovering that the man who raised her was not her father and that she was actually sired by infamous serial killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich)—who, alongside Stu Macher (Matt Lillard) went on a spree in 1996 that formed the plot of both Scream and its in-universe adaptation Stab—Sam returned to the town to protect her sister from the latest killer(s) to don the Ghostface mask. In the intervening twelve months, she has become the subject of a widespread online conspiracy theory that she, as Billy Loomis’s daughter, was the true mastermind behind the 2022 Woodsboro spree and that she framed the guilty parties. Now living in NYC with her younger sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), who attends Blackmore University as a freshman, Sam is struggling not only with PTSD but the fact that it felt good to kill her tormentors, and she’s worried that it’s her father’s legacy still living inside of her. Also at Blackmore are Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding), twin niece and nephew of Sidney’s friend and classmate Randy, originator of “the rules.” Aside from these characters, introduced in the last film, we also meet: Quinn (Liana Liberato), the sex positive roommate of the Carpenter sisters; her father, Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), who transferred to the NYPD when Quinn went off to college because of his guilt over the loss of his son, her brother; Ethan (Jack Champion), Chad’s shy, nebbish roommate; Anika (Devyn Nekoda), Mindy’s under-characterized girlfriend; and Danny (Josh Segarra), Sam and Tara’s neighbor, whom Sam has been snogging in secret. 

After a fun and effective twist on the opening scene formula that I won’t spoil here, Sam becomes a primary suspect in the slaying of two of Tara’s classmates, including “chode” Jason (Tony Revolori), a noted Argento freak (he even dies wearing a 4 mosche di veluto grigio shirt). The sympathetic Bailey is heading up the investigation and reveals that the killer left a Ghostface mask at the scene of the crime, which forensic evidence indicates was one of the masks used by the killer(s) in the previous installment; he gets an unexpected assist from Atlanta-based FBI agent Kirby Reed, who shows off the scars that Ghostface 2011 gave her. Despite some bad blood between herself and the Carpenters as the result of portraying Sam as a “born killer” in her latest book, a major crack in the case comes from longtime Ghostface opponent Gale Weathers, who finds a shrine to all of the previous killers and their victims in an abandoned theatre. From there, bodies start to rack up and more Ghostface masks are left behind at the scenes like Easter eggs, counting down from the killers in Scream 4 to 3 to 2, etc., leading up to a climax where no one is safe and no one can be trusted. 

What is your favorite scary movie franchise? Obviously, mine is Scream, but that wasn’t always the case. For many years, I was a Nightmare on Elm Street kid, through and through. What Craven’s earlier franchise had that made it stand out from so many other slasher empires was an increased focus on the continuity of characters between entries. Even though Nancy Thompson didn’t make it out of Dream Warriors alive, she effectively passed the baton to Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette in Warriors, Tuesday Knight in Dream Master), who passed it on to Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), who becomes a final girl par excellence, in my opinion. The Scream franchise has remained one of the most consistent with regards to its core cast and with its content, with every film (other than Scream 3) being good-to-great and subverting the trend of recasting characters between films that was common in earlier slasher series (see above, re: Kristen Parker, but also Tommy in the Friday the 13th films, Andy in the Chucky movies, Mike in the Phantasms, Angela in Sleepaway Camp 2, and on and on). People didn’t go to the movies to see Jason Lives because they cared about the characters from A New Beginning; they went to see Jason Voorhees kill a bunch of teenagers. Scream isn’t about that; it’s about commenting on that phenomenon, and as a series, it’s important to remember that the ever-changing killer behind the infamous mask allows for Scream to reinvent itself by evolving its storytelling and maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the genre of which it is both text and annotation. Nightmare laid this groundwork by straddling this line, with Nancy and Alice as characters that one cared about alongside the primary franchise driver in the form of Robert Englund’s Freddy. Scream is this concept in culmination; 5cream being willing to kill off Dewey (David Arquette), a character who has been with us since 1996, not only reiterated that no one was safe but also that horror isn’t just about fright and suspense and terror and surprise, but also about sorrow. I won’t spoil anything, but Gale takes some real hard hits in this one, and because I’ve known Gale since I was a child, I felt a profound sense of possible loss, which isn’t something you can say about Dream Child or Jason Lives (or Hellraiser: Hellseeker or The Curse of Michael Myers or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, etc.). 

In the year since 5cream, one of the biggest complaints I’ve seen about the film had to do with Melissa Barrera’s purported lack of acting ability, and although I never participated in the spread of that complaint, I must admit that I agreed. I’m happy to report that I have no such complaints about her performance in Scream VI, where she really shines. Last time, Sam was wooden, unyielding, and didn’t seem to have chemistry with a single one of her co-stars; this time around, a large part of the film’s emotional weight requires a real sense of sisterhood between Ortega and Barrera, and the latter brought her A-game to the table this time. There’s a veritas and a humanity to the way that Sam worries about her younger sister’s refusal to process their shared trauma, and there’s just as much honesty in the way that Tara feels smothered by her long-absent sister’s overprotective return to her life; it would be easy for either character to seem unreasonable, but neither does, and that’s good conflict to find in the middle of this latest slasher sequel. It’s interwoven beautifully with the actual text as well, as, in the finale, both girls’ survival demands that Sam literally let Tara go, which is a nice touch. 

Overall, this is a strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Jethica (2023)

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Without question, the #1 annual film event on the New Orleans culture calendar is the Overlook Film Fest, or at least it has been since the once nomadic festival settled here in 2018.  Screening all of the year’s best horror titles on the top floor of the Canal Place shopping mall over a single weekend, it’s an annual vacation to genre nerd heaven.  Even while I’m getting stoked for the can’t-miss programming coming to Overlook at the end of this month (The Five Devils! The new Quentin Dupieux! A 30th Anniversary screening of Joe Dante’s Matinee!), I’m still catching up with titles I missed at last year’s fest – most recently the cheeky, supernatural stalker thriller Jethica.  To be honest, the microbudget horror comedy hadn’t jumped out at me as essential festival viewing at first glance, since its competition included Best of 2022 titles as formidable as Mad God, Deadstream, and Flux Gourmet.  But then I overheard and eventually chatted up Jethica star Will Madden as he was personally promoting the film in the screening room for the festival opener Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.  I recognized Madden from the teens-in-peril gun violence drama Beast Beast, an intense little indie that I wish more people had seen, in which he plays a lonely teen boy with a firearm fetish who gets radicalized by the wrong kind of attention online.  All of that weekend’s screenings of Jethica clashed with other movies I already had tickets for, but nearly a year later it eventually found its way to streaming on Screambox & Hoopla, and I got to see Madden perform again, this time in a slightly goofier register (without forfeiting any of his Beast Beast intensity).  So, even when I’m not looking forward to Overlook or enjoying myself at Overlook, I’m looking back to the other movies I wish I had made time for last Overlook.  Their programming is that trustworthy and that rewarding; it’s the very best in the city.

I was delighted to see even more overlap with the team behind Beast Beast in Jethica‘s credits, including that film’s director (Danny Madden, Will’s brother) handling the sound design and its MVP editor (Pete Ohs) taking auteurist control as writer, director, editor, producer, and cinematographer.  Ohs’s style is much more relaxed & upbeat here, trading in the frantic intensity of Beast Beast for an oddly warm, friendly tone, even in the face of Madden’s agitated stalker mania.  I don’t want to give away too much about the film’s central conceit, which is a fun novelty to discover in the moment, but Madden essentially plays the modern incel equivalent of Beetlejuice: a lonely young misogynist whose unhealthy fixation on a college classmate transforms him into a kind of supernatural ghoul.  He’s a very chatty ghoul, rattling off nonstop rants about the titular target of his desire (Ashley Denise Robinson), whose name he incessantly mispronounces due to a childish lisp.  Jessica teams up with an old friend (Callie Hernandez) to shake her It Follows/Lucky-level stalker for good, only to discover that the friend also has a lonely hanger-on of her own.  It’s essentially a dirt-cheap horror comedy about the bottomless, dangerous loneliness of emotionally stunted straight men.  It’s also literally dirt cheap, in that it was filmed in a vast wasteland of actual New Mexican dirt, so it feels like the central four players—the women and their respective stalkers—are the only souls walking the planet Earth, eternally struggling to break free of their social rut & rot until the stalkers find healthier ways to ease their loneliness.  And it’s all filtered through a post-sex chat in the backseat love nest of a Los Angeles parking lot, which combined with its 70min runtime makes it feel more like an amusing anecdote than a harrowing male-gaze nightmare.

Jethica is not quite the microbudget marvel of American desert madness that you’ll find in The Outwaters, but it sometimes gets pretty close while maintaining a prankster’s smirk.  Ohs amplifies Jethica‘s supernatural menace with the same howling desert winds and flashlit nighttime exteriors as Robbie Banfitch’s found-footage breakout, even though his own film is ultimately more of a joke.  Every element of horror is treated both with genuine tension and with wry comedic sarcasm.  When a quick montage cuts away from the relaxed quiet of the American desert to flash sinister glimpses of Madden’s stalker gear, the edits linger on his New Balance sneakers to emphasize his bland white-boy personality in self-amusement.  When his single-minded stalker mission transforms him into something more glaringly monstrous, the effect is achieved with low-effort laptop CG effects and a Party City makeup kit, outright shrugging off the pressure to look scary on a shoestring budget.  The real key to that balance is Will Madden’s manic performance as the stalker. He alternates between scary, pathetic, and weirdly sweet in rapid succession with very little interaction from his costars to help keep his energy up.  Jethica is the exact kind of low-budget, high reward genre novelty I’m always searching for at film festivals, and I’m grateful that Overlook’s programmers put it on my radar – even if it took me a full year to catch up with it.  I look forward to bouncing around Canal Place’s few, compact screening rooms in a vain attempt to see every one of this year’s offerings in a single weekend, then spending the rest of 2023 hunting down the many excellent movies I missed.

-Brandon Ledet

Day of the Animals (1977)

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I can’t believe I let this happen.  I got bored enough to wrestle the Cocaine Bear.  After finding its trailers punishingly unfunny, I still checked out Elizabeth Banks’s animal attack horror comedy on the big screen, both because Boomer gave it a glowing review and because there was absolutely nothing else of interest in theaters last week.  Cocaine Bear‘s violence is sufficiently vicious, and there’s some amusement in listening to Mark Mothersbaugh run rampant on the soundtrack trying to touch on every single style of 80s pop music except the one he was making at the time.  It’s just a shame about those jokes; yeesh.  I haven’t felt that alienated by an audience’s laughter since the last time I got dragged along to see a Deadpool.  The “Can you believe how crazy this is??!!!” meme humor of Cocaine Bear might’ve spoken to me in the past, when I enjoyed similarly bad-on-purpose schlock titles like Zombeavers, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Turbo Kid, but lately I’ve cooled on the genre.  My favorite parts were the brief flashes of sincere effort (the CG rendering of a maniac bear tearing into human flesh and the sounds of Mothersbaugh needlessly working overtime on the score), and I wish they were executed in service of something genuinely over-the-top instead of an incoherent 100-minute meme – the same complaint I recently had about the similar title-first-substance-second horror comedy All Jacked Up and Full of Worms.  So, I left Cocaine Bear starving for the earnestly bonkers animal attack movie it failed to deliver, which I immediately found at home in the 1977 cult film Day of the Animals.

Day of the Animals follows the same faintly sketched-out story template of Cocaine Bear, in which a group of bland archetype hikers are terrorized by extraordinarily violent mountain animals driven mad by man’s follies.  The titular Cocaine Bear goes on its own hyperviolent crime spree when it ingests large quantities of cocaine dumped into its habitat during a botched drug run.  In Day of the Animals, the murderous beasts are crazed by a hole in the ozone layer, which the opening credits explain “COULD happen in the near future IF we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature’s protective shield for life on this planet.”  Our hikers in peril are torn to shreds by owls, buzzards, mountain lions, dogs, wolves, and bears, oh my.  Besides the wider range of killer critters and the far more preposterous motivation for their bloodlust (I’ll leave it to you to deduce which of these two titles was inspired by a real-life news item), there isn’t much difference in the stories that Cocaine Bear & Day of the Animals tell.  Still, the tactility & sincerity of the animal attacks in the 70s film go a long way in making it worthy of the ambling journey, even if only as a schlocky novelty.  Leslie Nielsen’s casting as a violent, racist bully lurking among the chummier hikers is a great example of that difference, since after Naked Gun just one decade later his presence would’ve been reduced to a cheap, self-spoofing joke.  Instead, he’s allowed to be a chest-thumping macho terror that goes just as broad & ridiculous as his career-defining mugging as Frank Drebin in the ZAZ films but heightens the film’s absurdity & menace instead of undercutting them.  None of the dozens of disparate, disconnected performers in Cocaine Bear are given the same opportunity to play the scenario straight; they’re all tasked to repeatedly remind the audience it’s all just one big dumb joke with nothing more on its mind than the novelty of its title.

Director William Girdler knows a thing or two about bear attack movies, since his Jaws rip-off Grizzly is pretty much the standard bearer of the genre.  There is indeed a real bear onscreen here, one who wrestles Nielsen’s macho brute to death once he’s exhausted all the possible ways he could be cruel to his fellow human beings (presumably because the hole in the ozone layer has also triggered his own worst animal instincts).  There’s some humor in the dated staging of this attack, which includes shots of Nielsen aggressively hugging a stunt actor in a bear costume, but there’s also just enough legitimate bear-on-human contact to make it genuinely tense.  In general, there’s something unnerving about the way Girdler’s crazed animals appear to leap out of his nature footage inserts, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, their stunt doubles).  I’ve never been kept so on edge by Ed Woodian stock footage reels, since they’re usually so disconnected from the physical action of the main narrative.  So, yes, there are some laughably dated visual effects shots in Day of the Animals—most notably a moment of green screen surrealism as one archetypal character actor plummets off a cliff to her death while being pecked at by birds—but its mixed media approach includes enough frames of living, breathing animals sharing the screen with their actor & stunt double victims that the movie feels legitimately dangerous in a way that modern CGI never could.

No offense to Girdler, who between Grizzly and the blacksploitation Exorcist riff Abby has enough cult movie street cred on his own to dodge the comparison, but it’s incredible that Day of the Animals wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen.  Its mix of scrappy practical effects, dangerous on-set stunts, and a premise so gimmicky it’s near-psychedelic (especially in the early shots of menacing sunbeams piercing the ozone layer to torment the animals below) are all worthy of Cohen’s most unhinged classics, which I mean as a high compliment. All that’s missing from the Cohen formula, really, is a bizarrely inhuman performance from Michael Moriarty, a role that Nielsen fills ably.  If there’s anything that Day of the Animals might’ve benefited borrowing from Cocaine Bear, it might’ve been useful to smuggle some of its titular cocaine into the editing room. There’s an unrushed, stoney-baloney pacing to Day of the Animals that would’ve been much zanier & more streamlined just a few years later, if were made in the era when Elizabeth Banks’s film was set.  Otherwise, the superiority in quality flows in the exact opposite direction, with Day of the Animals exemplifying everything Cocaine Bear could have been at its best: brutal, bonkers, ballsy, blessed.  It is the genuine pop art novelty that Cocaine Bear attempts to reverse-engineer and, thus, is the far superior work.  Then again, I was the only member of the audience not laughing at all of Cocaine Bear‘s ironic, postmodern gags & gore, so what do I know?

-Brandon Ledet

Project Wolf Hunting (2023)

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Often, when movie buffs say “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” they’re lamenting the loss of movie-star vehicles, serious dramas for adults, or mainstream movies that include any visual depiction of sex.  The “They don’t make ’em like they used to” complaint could extend to much trashier tropes & genres that have disappeared from American multiplexes in the past few decades, though, and it occurred to me while watching the Korean gore fest Project Wolf Hunting.  There is no time in history when a major American studio would have produced a film as grotesquely violent as Project Wolf Hunting for wide theatrical release, but it still plays like a nostalgic throwback to the blockbuster days of 1990s Hollywood.  Specifically, it’s a revival of the preposterous prison thrillers of that era, titles like Con Air, The Rock, Death Warrant, Ricochet, and Alien³.  Back when movies used to be led by action stars instead of IP brands, there was a wave of grimy, idiotic thrillers set in futuristic superprisons, which repentant or wrongfully convicted dirtbags played by Jean Claude Van Damme or Nicolas Cage would have to escape via brute lone-wolf strength & communal riots.  Project Wolf Hunting wistfully calls back to that era in its chaotic “story” of prisoner cargo ship mutiny, but it also triples down on the genre’s hyperviolence with tons more blood & viscera than all its previous titles combined.  Tons.  It’s an exciting change until it’s a numbing one, and by the end I would have much rather returned to the dinky charm of its Bruckheimer Era predecessors than spend another minute slipping around in its red-dyed corn syrup slop.  They just don’t make over-the-top prison thrillers like they used to, and apparently they never will again.

It appears that even the team behind Project Wolf Hunting knows that the nonstop hyperviolence of its cargo ship prison break can be numbingly monotonous, since it only plays the scenario straight for its opening hour.  The premise starts simple enough, with a ludicrous prisoner-exchange transport returning all of Korea’s cruelest, most dangerous criminals from their Philippines hiding place for trial & punishment via one lone, vulnerable cargo ship.  Of course, their criminal buddies on the outside seize the opportunity to start a jail-break riot on the ship, and most of the first hour is nonstop slaughter of cops & prison guards at the receiving end of bullets & blades.  Just as the movie’s threatening to tire itself out halfway into its runtime, the prisoners accidentally free a new flavor of violent threat they didn’t know was being transported in tandem: a Frankensteined supersoldier that has been kept “alive” via sci-fi superdrugs since Japanese experiments in World War II.  The zombie monster among them has stapled-shut eyes, a mouth full of maggots, and a bottomless appetite for “extreme & indiscriminate violence.”  He’s an impossible intrusion into what starts as a fairly pedestrian prison break thriller, so you’d think he’d change the film’s rhythms & trajectory in an exciting way.  Not really.  All the invincible Frankenmonster really does as a late addition to the party is allow the bloodbath to continue after practically all the cops have been destroyed, giving the prisoners a single target to focus their fists, knives, and bullets on, now to their own peril.  The practical gore and close-quarters combat is impressively staged throughout, with all victims & villains spraying the supercharged blood geysers familiar to vintage martial arts films like Lady Snowblood (and their modern homages like Kill Bill).  Whether they’re impressive enough to justify two consecutive hours of “extreme & indiscriminate violence” is up for debate.

The #1 thing that would’ve made me more enthusiastic about Project Wolf Hunting is if it were made when I was still a teenage gore hound.  The #2 thing is if it had a more charismatic action-hero lead.  This is the kind of large ensemble-cast action thriller where the main objective is to pack the cargo ship with as many high-pressure blood bags as possible without bothering to assign any one of them much of a distinctive personality.  The range between the most sensitive, pensive criminal on the ship and the scariest, most violent one is pretty wide, and no one really matters between those two extremes outside the brutal novelty of their individual kill scenes.  Because they’re all professional scumbags & sociopaths, they don’t even have much motivation to distinguish personalities amongst each other.  In the aggro parlance of the film, everyone is either an “asshole”, a “bastard,” a “motherfucker”, or a “piece of shit” – all unified in their collective need to “shut the fuck up.”  I always find that kind of shouted-expletive dialogue to be the telltale sign of a weak screenplay, but I also don’t know how much that matters in this particular instance.  Project Wolf Hunting‘s greatest assets are its value as a revival of the preposterous prison thriller genre and its eagerness to overwhelm the audience with bone-crunching gore.  As someone with a baseline affection for any monster movie with a high-concept gimmick premise, I’m willing to overlook a lot of its narrative shortcomings to enjoy its practical-effects violence.  It’s a pretty good movie in that context.  All it really needed to be a great one was a charismatic action star to help anchor the audience amidst the sprawling mayhem.  Unfortunately, they don’t really make those anymore.

-Brandon Ledet

Calvaire (2004)

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I don’t have much affection for the wave of gruesome American horror films about torture that crowded multiplexes in the 2000s, but as soon as you slap the French language on their soundtracks I’m totally onboard.  Part of that might have to do with the assumed sophistication of European cinema vs the horror-of-the-week disposability of Hollywood schlock.  There honestly isn’t that much difference in the tone or staging of the ritualistic torture scenes of Martyrs and their Saw & Hostel equivalents.  Naive, juvenile pretensions aside, however, I do find the grim cruelty of the so-called New French Extremity more thematically thoughtful & purposeful than what I remember of American horror’s torture porn era.  A lot of our critical understanding of torture porn—mainly that it was an expression of guilt over post-9/11 War on Terror interrogation tactics—was assigned after the fact by film scholars searching for meaning in the abject, fluorescent-lit cruelty of the moment.  With the French-language New Extremity films, the political themes tend to be more up-front and recognizable in the text, which makes the excruciating ordeal of suffering through them more immediately worthwhile.  Which is why I jumped at the chance to see The Ordeal (original title: Calvaire) in its newly remastered & rereleased form on the big screen, ducking out of a sunny Sunday afternoon to watch hyperviolent torture scenes in the darkness.  It felt like I was venturing out of the house to participate in some high-minded cultural activity, like going to the ballet or the opera, when in truth I was just watching a Hostel prequel dubbed in French.

In retrospect, it’s amusing that Calvaire felt like a major New French Extremity blind spot, given that it has a muddy & muted reputation among critics and that its production was technically Belgian.  Since a few French-Canadian titles have also snuck into the loosely defined genre, I suppose that latter distinction doesn’t matter much.  As for the former, I do think Calvaire‘s quality speaks well to the superiority of Euro torture horrors over their American counterparts in the aughts, and this modern 2K remaster will likely boost its general reputation among the New Extremity’s best: Inside, Trouble Every Day, Martyrs, etc.  At the very least, I braced myself for it to be far more needlessly vicious than it was, given the wider genre’s fetish for grisly details.  Calvaire does a good job of implying instead of dwelling and, more importantly, of cutting its unbearable tension with gallows humor so it’s not all misery & pain.  Part of my amusement might have been enhanced by the two main characters being assigned names I associate with comedy: Marc Stevens (who shares a name with John Early’s grifter villain on Los Espookys) and Paul Bartel (who shares a name with one of the greatest comedic directors to ever do it).  Regardless, director Fabrice du Welz also amuses himself by framing this grim & grueling torture session as “the best Christmas ever” in its sicko villain’s mind, contrasting the hyperviolent hostage crisis the audience is watching with the delusional family reunion of his imagination in a bleakly hilarious clash of realities.  I don’t mean to imply that Calvaire‘s not also a nonstop misery parade, though.  It’s that too.

If I’m justifying my affection for Euro torture horrors by emphasizing their sense of thematic purpose, I suppose I should be discussing Calvaire as a horror of gender.  The aforementioned Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) is a traveling pop singer who performs kitschy love songs in a magician’s cape to the adoring women of small, rural villages.  The women throw themselves at his feet as if he were the most glamorous hunk in the world, not a struggling musician who lives in his van.  When he rejects them, they beat themselves up as “sluts” & “whores,” immediately shame-spiraling into self-laceration for being so desperate for affection.  While traveling to his next gig, Stevens’s van breaks down near an empty, isolated inn run by Paul Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), who is a little too overjoyed to have Stevens’s company for the upcoming Christmas holiday.  At first, Bartel’s instant affection for Stevens appears to be a reminder of his own glory days as a traveling performer – a hack stand-up comedian with little in common with the pop singer.  However, once you realize that Bartel’s wife has long abandoned him at the inn and he still keeps her remaining wardrobe around as an altar to her memory, that affection takes on a much more sinister tone.  Naturally, Bartel holds the younger, handsomer Stevens hostage as a replacement for his wife, swerving the film into a forced-feminization nightmare scenario that could not be eroticized by even the most desperate of fetishists in the audience.  The women in Stevens’s audience react to his rejection by punishing themselves.  Bartel reacts by violently lashing out, and it turns out he’s not the only man in his small, brutish village who’s been awaiting the “return” of “Gloria.”

Categorizing Calvaire as an example of the New French Extremity (or the New Belgian Extremity or the New Euro Extremity or whatever) is more of a useful marketing tool than it is a valid critical distinction.  There were many films being made all over the globe—including from, notably, America, Australia, and Serbia—at the time that similarly fixated on the physical torment & destruction of the human body for a wide range of varied cultural reasons.  Its place in the horror canon expands even wider from there once you set aside the era when it was made.  Du Welz stirs great tension in his audience through the pattern recognition of knowing where his story’s going as soon as you see Gloria’s abandoned wardrobe, as long as you’re familiar with the earlier grindhouse era of extreme-horror filmmaking in titles like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Two Thousand Maniacs!, and The Hills Have Eyes.  Still, grouping Calvaire in with the New Extremity “movement” is ultimately beneficial to its cultural longevity, as it’s not well known or even well liked enough to have survived the past couple decades without some kind of contextual anchor to distinguish it in the wider horror canon.  And I do think it’s well worth preserving.  It certainly lives up to the “extremity” promised in its assigned subgenre, provoking the audience with the pained screeches of farm animals and brief images of male-on-male rape.  It doesn’t linger on that pain longer than necessary to get its point across, though, and du Welz’s dizzying camerawork as a first-time showoff director aims more to disorient than it aims to dwell.  The torture is excruciating to watch, but it’s not the only thing on the movie’s mind.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so charitable to Calvaire if it were a mainstream American film made in the same era.  Maybe I’m assigning more meaning & thoughtfulness to its nightmare pageantry of forced gender performance and its distinctly masculine violence than the movie deserves.  All I can report that is that in the pub scene where the macho-brute villagers take a break from scowling at each other to dance as make-believe romantic partners, I laughed.  When Paul Bartel declares his “family reunion” with the new “Gloria” to be “the best Christmas ever,” I laughed again.  The hallmarks of its era in Extreme Horror are incredibly effective in creating tension, so a little humor goes a long way in providing some much-needed relief, no matter how bleak.  It also helps tremendously that the film is clearly about something other than the mechanics of the torture itself, something that doesn’t need to be ascribed by academics years after the fact. 

-Brandon Ledet

A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018)

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I have a huge soft spot for archival preservation of disposable internet ephemera.  Even from just running this blog, I’m constantly reminded how vulnerable online content is to digital rot, with most of our posts from over a year ago featuring dead links to nonexistent YouTube clips that used to bolster & illustrate our lukewarm film takes. Internet culture documentaries like The Road Movie (which archives Russian dashcam footage), Wrinkles the Clown (which chronicles the online hoax of real-world horror clown sightings) and We Met in Virtual Reality (which documents a community of VR enthusiasts navigating the early stages of the pandemic) aren’t widely beloved or even respected, but they are loved by me, and I believe their cultural value will only increase the further we get away from their subjects.  We spend a lot of our time online interacting with temporary, disposable imagery that will be lost to time without active, academic preservation of the user-interface hellscape we’ve trapped ourselves in. It’s a shame that most cinema is too timid to do that work, mostly out of fear of appearing cheap or dated.  This kind of serious, thoughtful archival work was especially hard to come by back in 2017, when I positively reviewed the HBO Doc Beware the Slenderman even while noting that it devolves into true crime exploitation and “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” fearmongering.  It turns out I should have just waited a year to see the definitive Slenderman documentary, A Self-Induced Hallucination, directed by Jane Schoenbrun before developing their breakout indie hit We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.  Comprised entirely of 2009-2018 YouTube clips, Schoenbrun’s document of the Slenderman creepypasta phenomenon is such a comprehensive, insightful record of its ephemeral online subject that it even includes criticism of & fallout from the exploitative HBO documentary that was released to a much wider audience & higher praise a year earlier.  It’s undeniably great that Schoenbrun has been able to graduate from D.I.Y. bedroom art to professional productions in the years since, but A Self-Induced Hallucination is not just background prep work for World’s Fair.  It’s a significant work in its own right, especially as an internet culture time capsule from one of the darkest moments in the history of memes.

YouTube is a brilliant catch-all for chronicling the full history of the Slenderman tragedy, which played out on much less cinematic (and only slightly more toxic) platforms like Something Awful, 4Chan, and Reddit before it was regurgitated as viral video content.  In the earliest stirrings of Slenderman creepypasta memery, a loose collection of juvenile “experts” explain to their small audience of YouTube subscribers exactly how & where the Slenderman legend spread online, and how you can tell that the “evidence” presented on the originating forums were fake (or real, depending on the poster’s perspective).  The meme evolves from that Slenderman 101 crash course to include Slenderman short films, Slenderman novelty raps, and Slenderman confessionals from World’s Fair-style loners desperate for online community.  There isn’t much to the tall, faceless, suited figure in either iconography or lore, which makes him the perfect blank screen for users to project meaning onto.  Of course, that memetic potency eventually proved deadly when two 12-year-old girls repeatedly stabbed a friend at the supposed command of the Slenderman.  That’s when Schoenbrun’s archival work gets really interesting, pushing beyond the rundown of basic creepypasta mechanics that you’ll find in Wrinkles the Clown & Beware the Slenderman to examine how real-life tragedy is digested into entertainment #content, both online and in traditional media outlets.  On the amateur level, YouTube creators casually discuss & dissect the details of the stabbing case while playing Minecraft and 1st-person shooter games.  Meanwhile, professional media turns the Slenderman stabbing into vapid news chatter and then, worse yet, fictional fodder for the aforementioned Beware the Slenderman documentary, an official Slender Man horror film, and a legally shaky “inspired by” Lifetime movie of the week: Terror in the Woods.  We catch glimpses of these Slenderman-branded true-crime cash-ins through Fan Reaction Videos to their various trailers and through YouTuber interviews with young actors making their PR rounds.  A Self-Induced Hallucination documents the full metamorphosis cycle of amateur content to real-world tragedy to professional product back to amateur content again that the Slenderman creepypasta uniquely traveled, only commenting on the phenomenon through the sequence of its presentation.

There’s something wryly funny about Schoenbreun’s editing style here, which simulates what it would be like if the Everything is Terrible! team remade Unfriended entirely through amateur YouTube clips (the same way they “remade” Holy Mountain with pet videos in Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez!). Its opening credits’ presentation as real-time screen capture of a word processor document, its full-spectrum omnibus of the embarrassing shades of YouTube Voice, and the throwback CG news recaps from TomoNews are all amusingly absurd, even if only in fits.  Mostly, though, A Self-Induced Hallucination is just deeply eerie & sad in the exact way that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair eventually proved to be.  If the heartbreaking isolation and vulnerability of the literal children posting about their personal experiences with Slenderman doesn’t hit you by the time one of those children are stabbed by their schoolmates, it’s certain to sink it during the end credits, where each featured video is listed alongside their view counts as of the film’s final edit in 2018 – typically millions of views for professional content like Sony Pictures’ Slender Man horror trailer and dozens of views for amateur users’ bedroom broadcasts into the online abyss.  As someone who regularly posts sincere diaries of my day-to-day Movie Thoughts for a near-nonexistent audience, I’m highly sensitive to that embarrassment & loneliness.  I assume Schoenbrun is too, or at least they were at the time of assembling this completionist’s archive of Slenderman lore & cultural fallout.  This is clearly the work of someone who’s submerged in online culture.  It’s both heartwarming to see that disposable culture taken seriously as its own cinematic texture and devastating to see how destructive & isolating it can be to users with no other outlet for social interaction.  There’s no doubt this earlier text deepens & enriches what Schoenbrun would later achieve in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, but in a lot of ways it’s a purer, more streamlined version of the same story, one that clearly deserves to be engaged with as substantial art regardless of its connections to its dramatic sister film.

-Brandon Ledet

Cocaine Bear (2023)

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I’m not sure how I didn’t recognize from promotional materials that Scott Seiss, best known online for his character of a retail employee who responds to F.A.C.s (that’s an acronym I just made up for “Frequent Asshole Comments”) the way that every retail employee wishes that they could, was the male paramedic in Cocaine Bear. He’s in pretty much every trailer! Further, I have no idea how I still didn’t put that together after seeing this video, in which he hypes Cocaine Bear in the same manner, noting that you don’t have to have done homework before seeing the movie and that there won’t be a dozen thinkpieces exploring the possible meanings behind the film’s ending. There’s no long-beloved intellectual property of which this is an adaptation (unless you count the actual 1985 events which very loosely inspired the plot), no secret clues about who’s going to be the villain in the next MCU feature, nothing to inspire a MatPat Film Theory video. Cocaine Bear is just a comedy-horror-thriller about a bear who does cocaine, and the people who find themselves caught in its freakout. And it’s a delight. 

Multiple story threads find themselves woven together from their disparate origins in the opening act of the film, as disparate parties are drawn together to Blood Mountain, a Georgia peak located in the Chattahoochee National Forest. After a drug drop goes south due to the delivery man bashing his skull on an airplane bulkhead while attempting to exit and parachute, a number of interested people become invested in trying to find the drugs that are missing on the mountain, as well as the law enforcement in pursuit of the traffickers. Kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta) sends his lieutenant Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) to the national park to find and recover the duffel bags, and tells him to bring along Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), Syd’s son who left the family business at the urging of his recently deceased wife Joanie, which the sociopathic Syd thinks means that his boy will be ready to get back into the trade. In Tennessee where the dead parachuter’s body has landed, Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr. of The Wire) leaves his new dog with Deputy Reba (Ayoola Smart) as he travels across state lines and out of his jurisdiction in pursuit of Syd, who he’s been chasing for years. Local middle schooler Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) skip school so that she can paint a picture of the park’s Secret Falls, an outing she was supposed to take with her mother Sari (Keri Russell) but which has been postponed due to Sari’s boyfriend inviting the two of them to Nashville for the weekend instead. At the park itself, Ranger Liz (character actress Margo Martindale) is preparing for a park inspection by Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), on whom she has a crush. And, of course, deep in the woods, there’s a mama bear who’s developing a taste for nose candy. 

As I was leaving the auditorium after the screening, a woman behind me declared, “Well, that sucked.” My viewing companion was also less than enthused on our drive away from the theater, although he was bemused by my passionate defense of the film. I’ve seen and heard criticism of the story, and while I wouldn’t exactly call the film’s composition an elegant puzzle box, it was very fun and moved at a great pace; I was never bored, and there was never a prolonged period of time between laughs. Not every joke landed for everyone in the audience, but there were some jokes that didn’t provoke a laugh from me while others produced a laugh only from me, and that’s a good balance for a comedy to strike. Maybe in future viewings I’ll find that some of the punchlines that didn’t land this time will land the next time, and I can say definitively that this is a comedy that I will watch again, which isn’t something that I say very often. I’ve long been a fan of campy, self-aware horror comedies, and long been opposed to movies that attempt to ape that specific genre and do it poorly; Cocaine Bear manages to walk that tightrope deftly, mostly by not calling attention to itself. 

I’ve lost count of how many movies and TV shows of the past decade attempted to cash in on nostalgia for the 1980s, but this film manages to capture the quintessence of movies from that era and combine it with the modern cinematic eye in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. With a 1985 setting, a lazier filmmaker would fill the soundtrack with songs from that year specifically and exclusively, but there’s greater verisimilitude in the text by including music that was recent and not just current. The film starts out with the Jefferson Starship track “Jane” (1979) and includes the 1984 track “The Warrior” by Scandal and featuring Patty Smyth, 1978’s “Too Hot ta Trot” by the Commodores, and even “On the Wings of Love” by Jeffrey Osborne (1982), which is plot-relevant in the scene in which it appears. It’s a small thing, but I appreciate it and the way that it evokes and inscribes its time period without worshipping it, like IT or Stranger Things. We’re not presented with an endless parade of 1980s pop culture or media—Remember Ghostbusters? Remember Nightmare on Elm Street? Remember G.I. Joe?—and, in fact, there’s very little reference to the media of the time at all. Outside of the use of actual contemporary media footage taken when Andrew Thornton landed, parachute undeployed, in an old man’s driveway and the appearance of a few of the era’s anti-drug PSAs, the only material reference to contemporary events comes in the form of the delivery of a new-and-improved Smokey the Bear stand-up to the ranger station. You’re not taken out of the reality of the moment because the period elements draw attention to themselves; you just exist there. There’s something that’s just so true about Keri Russell’s pink jumpsuit and the way that her purse strap has a big knot tied in it to shorten it; I don’t know what’s not to love. It’s grisly, fun, and campy, and I loved it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond