For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss George Romero’s Monkey Shines, a psychological horror about a super-intelligent, super-murderous service monkey.
00:00 Welcome
10:30 Jawbreaker (1999) 19:45 The Coen Brothers 23:55 Nope (2022) 33:45 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) 38:15 Fire of Love (2022)
Every year I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself. It’s a small, often private ritual that I hold sacred, and it’s one I plan months in advance. Which version of Arnold am I going to celebrate with – the one who gets in gunfights with alligators?, the one who gives birth to a baby with his own adult face?, or maybe a double-trouble combo of Arnie clones? The possibilities are endless. This year, the decision was easy. I happened to find a used DVD copy of the nü-metal Schwarzenegger relic End of Days on a thrift store shelf a few months before my birthday, making my selection obvious. Then, just a couple days before this year’s Big Event, a tabloid new story came out about Schwarzenegger’s abhorrent behavior on the set of End of Days. Specifically, he was accused of deliberately farting in the face of his co-star Miriam Margoles during their fight scene. And did he apologize for this workplace transgression? No, dear reader, he laughed. Beyond confirming yet again that all millionaires are assholes, it was kind of a nothing news item, worthy only of a chuckle while scrolling though headlines on the old Twitter feed. It was the easily most press End of Days has gotten in this century, though, and its timing meant that this year I was celebrating my birthday with The Fart Movie.
Anyway, the Nü-Metal Arnöld movie holds up fairly well. There was once a time in my life where any vaguely gothy movie with a prominent KoRn single on its tie-in soundtrack was an instant 5-star classic in my eyes, so I can’t say I enjoyed it as much now as I did when it was a Blockbuster rental, but it’s still a hoot. End of Days is a product that only could have been made in that exact spiked-collars-and-wallet-chains era, marketing itself specifically as Y2k horror. Set “three nights before every computer fails,” the film dreads the approach of the year 2000 with the same dread Christian doomsayers approach the birth of antichrist. In fact, it directly links the two strands of paranoia. You see, the Mark of the Beast has been misinterpreted in modern translations of the Bible. That “666” has been flipped by mistake, making 1999 the Year of the Beast, when Satan would return to Earth to choose his bride and the mother of his world-destroying son. The oncoming worldwide computer crashes of Y2k appear to be coincidental, but they’re frequently cited by radio DJs in the background as a parallel end-of-the-world scenario. In case you don’t remember, Y2k never happened the way its biggest doomsayers promised, but Gabriel Byrne sure does arrive on Earth as a father-to-be Satan in this film, and there’s only one Austrian-accented supercop in all of NYC who can stop him before it’s too late: Jericho Cane.
End of Days takes the genre mashup “action horror” about as literally as it possibly can. Satan’s quest to become a father before the Times Square ball drops on Y2k positions the film as the 90s blockbuster version of Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s the 90s version of Rosemary’s Baby that would’ve been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Sure, there are spooky Catholic ceremonies behind every locked door in every NYC church, as the city’s priests wage a secret Good vs Evil battle with the Prince of Darkness. And there are plenty of CG demons, back-alley crucifixions, and Satanic orgies to keep the teenage edgelord KoRn fans in the audience drooling on their JNCOs. None of it is supposed to be especially scary, though. It’s all just badass, gothy set dressing for a standard-issue Arnie action flick, complete with helicopter chases and storefront explosions. Schwarzenegger plays such a cliché version of an action-hero cop that he borders on parody, especially in an early scene when he’s introduced pouring coffee, pizza, Pepto, and Chinese leftovers into a blender as a makeshift hangover cure – like a noir goblin. Luckily, that approach means he still gets to land some of his standard action hero one-liners despite the oppressive gloominess of the setting, like in a scene where he tells Satan, “I want you to go to Hell,” and Satan shoots back, “You see, the problem is sometimes Hell goes to you.” That’s some beautiful late-90s cheese, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
End of Days has a lot of problems. Its 2-hour runtime is super bloated for a movie with so few ideas. Its female lead, Robin Tunney, doesn’t have much to do besides wait around as a damsel in Satanic distress (and to vaguely resemble Brittany Murphy). Worst yet, Kevin Pollak was brought in as sarcastic comic relief, as if the producers weren’t convinced Arnie wasn’t funny enough on his own (despite being, hands down, the funniest action lead of all time) and somehow thought Kevin Frickin Pollak was the solution to that non-problem. Still, it feels like an essential artifact in both nü-metal & Y2k genre cinema, bridging the gap between two really dumb things I cared way too much about when I was 12 years old, with my all-time favorite action star at the helm (and sometimes on the cross). It has an interesting production history too. Both Sam Raimi & Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to direct before it fell in the lap of anonymous workman Peter Hyams. It was also written with Tom Cruise in mind to star, which would’ve changed the entire tone & meaning of the project. It’s the kind of what-could’ve-been scenario that really fires up your imagination . . . until the conversation is dominated by the fact that Schwarzenegger is a bully who farted in the face of Miriam Margoles. Oh well, at least he didn’t fart into an open flame, since flames & explosives were such a prominent aspect of its Satanic set decoration. A lot more people could’ve been hurt.
I once found half of a Criterion Collection boxset at a West Bank thrift store, and it felt like stumbling across gold on the sidewalk. Two of the four titles in Criterion’s “When Horror Came to Shochiku” set were collecting dust on the shelves at Thrift City USA, where I’m used to finding Hangover sequels and Season 3 discs of The O.C. Neither were the title I was most excited to watch from the Shochiku set, but it still felt like winning the schlock bin lottery.
“When Horror Came to Shochiku” collects four horror films produced by the Japanese studio Shochiku in the late 1960s, when they were best known for producing melodramas by the likes of Kurosawa & Ozu. The Living Skeleton is the only film of the batch that doesn’t feel like a market response to the supernatural disaster template established by Godzilla, so it’s the one that maybe hits closest to the studio’s usual tone. It’s also the one that’s seemed to earn the most critical praise since the set was released a decade ago. The Living Skeleton is a lot more subdued than the other three films on the set, telling an eerie, seaside ghost story in a literary whisper. Personally, I was a lot more excited by the vivid, volatile pleasures of the rest of the set, but I’m generally a more enthusiastic audience for that wildly expressive end of genre filmmaking than the average online film nerd. If you’re more likely to enjoy a respectful, traditional ghost story from a movie studio best suited for respectful, traditional melodramas, of course The Living Skeleton would be your favorite of the batch.
The X from Outer Space has the most adorably dorky monster in the kaiju canon. Genocide & Goke have an unpredictable, chaotic approach to narrative that gets to the heart of the cultural heartbreak of post-War Japan. The Living Skeleton is the only film in the set shot in black & white, which I think is an indicator of the more traditional, subdued version of horror it offers. It’s a very typical ghost-revenge story, with violent rape & murder committed by pirates in the first scene avenged by the arrival of a ghost in the same seaside village years later. Some of the black & white haunted house effects call back to the Poverty Row knockoffs of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” era, including toy bats bobbing on strings against a black background. Others are morbidly gorgeous, including an underwater garden of skeletons anchored to the seafloor and a dreamworld burlesque show worthy of David Lynch. It’s all well-crafted & effectively creepy, but none of it feels as memorably idiosyncratic as the other horror novelties made by Shochiku at the time – apparently to its benefit in the modern discourse.
If I’m only describing The Living Skeleton through its comparisons to the rest of the Shochiku boxset, it’s because I don’t have much to say about it any other context. There’s an antique quality to its visual patina that puts the more recent seaside horror The Lighthouse to shame, but there’s not much about it that you can’t find elsewhere in traditionalist ghost stories of its kind. Maybe I’m shallow for prioritizing novelty in this boxset of effects-heavy horror films, but novelty is exactly what makes the set so great as an overall group. In a time when so many Japanese filmmakers were rushing to replicate the exact zeitgeist-torching formula that made Godzilla so immensely popular, Shochiku took that inspiration into some far-out, unpredictable directions. With The Living Skeleton, they strayed the least far from their home turf, which makes its relative payoffs the most timid & contained. It’s still a solidly eerie ghost story on its own terms, though, and there isn’t one stinker in the entire collection.
Ranking the Criterion “When Horror Came to Shochiku” box set, just for fun:
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Hanna, Boomer, and Brandonwatch White of the Eye (1987).
Britnee: If you’ve ever wondered if a Southwestern giallo exists, I am here to tell you that it does, and it’s 1987’s White of the Eye. Its director, Donald Cammell, was a gifted painter, and his artistic eye makes every scene in White of the Eye a visual feast, the way you’d expect to see in gialli. Neon blood splattered across a white table, uncomfortable eyeball closeups, modern desert homes shot through a voyueristic lens; it’s all so mesmerizing. Also, his wife China Cammell co-wrote the screenplay (based on the novel Mrs. White by Margaret Tracy) and appears in the small role of Ruby Roy. I thought that wife/husband collaboration was sweet at first, until I realized that China was 14 when she met the 40-year-old Donald, so their relationship wasn’t really a healthy one. It turns out that Donald was a gross creep like so many other male directors (and like the villain of his own movie).
White of the Eye stars David Keith as Paul White and Cathy Moriarty as Joan White. They’re a young married couple who live in Arizona with their daughter, a 5-year-old who looks like a 30-something kindergarten teacher. David is the town’s go-to sound system installer. He has a bizarre gift where he hums to pinpoint the exact, perfect speaker placement in every room. At least that’s what I think he’s doing. There’s a lot going on in this movie that I can’t fully make sense of. As we peek in on the family’s daily routine, there’s something sinister going on in the background: a serial killer is brutally murdering wealthy women in the area, and there’s a strong possibility the killer is Paul. Cathy has to determine if her husband is really who she thinks he is or if he’s a psychotic monster. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but just know that it descends into pure chaos by the end and it’s fascinating.
This film has one of the wildest opening scenes. A well-to-do woman returns to her home after a shopping trip and is slaughtered by a killer lurking in her kitchen. During their struggle, there’s slow-motion headbashing, blood splattering, glass shattering and, most memorably, a tiny goldfish flopping around a raw rib rack on the kitchen counter. When I first saw this movie, I thought about that scene for weeks. To me, it’s the most impressive imagery in the entire film. Brandon, what are your thoughts on the camerawork in White of the Eye? Did any particular scenes stick with you after the movie ended?
Brandon: That opening, bloodspattered tour of a Southwestern suburban kitchen is, without question, the most visually striking scene in the movie, and it’s the one that’s stuck most in my mind as well. However, I’m not convinced it’s the camerawork that makes it such a stunner. If we’re going to contextualize White of the Eye as an American giallo, we have to acknowledge that it looks like a giallo shot by the TV crew behind Walker, Texas Ranger. Whether it’s a result of the sun-blazed setting or the Golan-Globus production funds, there’s a daytime TV cheapness to the look of White of the Eye that cannot be overcome through Cammell’s . . . unusual choice of imagery. Where he overcomes that cheapness isn’t in the camerawork so much as it’s in the editing, which is what truly gives the movie its unwieldy, dreamlike tone. There are isolated, static images in that kitchen sequence that look absolutely bizarre, but mostly because they’re presented as rapid inserts your brain doesn’t have enough time to fully interpret: flowers falling from the countertop, legs kicking in purple tights, that goldfish flopping on the raw meat, etc. I was likewise struck by the long, aimless establishing shots of the desert outside these suburban homes, which linger just long enough to breach into Lynchian territory of moody unease. Again, there’s nothing especially beautiful about those exterior shots’ composition or execution; they’re just edited into a flabbergasting sequence that I could never fully wrap my mind around (not least of all because they’re frequently repeated at full length). The entire movie borders on looking & feeling mundane, and yet it’s electrifying in its off-kilter presentation.
If White of the Eye is a giallo, it’s a knockoff giallo that gets lost in the American desert for a while, then emerges as a sun-dazed erotic thriller. It’s a high-style, low-logic murder mystery in the way most great gialli are, but it’s one that actually has something to say after the final reveal of its faceless killer, which most gialli don’t. That’s why I think it’s important that we do spoil the third-act twists of the plot in this conversation, since it’s largely what makes the film special. In the same year that the literal war of the sexes reached its misogynist fever pitch in Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, White of the Eye offered a much more realistic source of unhinged mayhem at the end of its erotic thriller rainbow: an entitled, woman-hating white guy. It turns out David is not only psychotic for the way he treats tuning audio systems into a spiritual ritual & guiding way of life; he’s also a violent misogynist with some very strange, far-out theories about why all women are evil and deserve to be murdered. Once White of the Eye fully devolves into a sunlit slasher in its final act, David starts ranting at length about the interplanetary war between Men (from Mars, duh) & Women (from Venus, obv) in a way that doesn’t sound too far off from the kind of unhinged babble you’d expect to read on modern subreddits for MRAs & “gender-critical” TERFs. Hanna, what did you make of David’s sudden swerve into hateful, faux-philosophical gender politics? Did it make him a scarier villain or just a more confounding one? And how does that choice of villain communicate with other war-of-the-sexes thrillers of this era?
Hanna: I was really torn on Paul’s turn initially, but I appreciate it the more I think about it. Despite all of the glaring signs to the contrary, I was somehow expecting some other candidate to pop up and pronounce themself the killer (maybe because Paul seemed too obvious, and unfortunately I’m a sucker for the kind of guy with an obsessive relationship with sound equipment). Initially I was disappointed because it wasn’t surprising, but ultimately I don’t think the film suffers for it. Of course the hot audiophile with a primal temperament sustains a lethal, cosmo-misogynist belief system, but it still took Joan almost the entire film to get to that conclusion, partly because he’s so dang charming and partly because she’s loved him for a decade.
As far as its relationship with other “Battle of the Sexes” genre films, I appreciated the different relationships presented between and within women. Fatal Attraction set up a war against a very particular type of woman (ambitious and career-driven with an angular, gender neutral nickname), while propping Beth up as the sweet, domestic caretaker in comparison; she wins her husband’s affections in the end and Alex is killed. White of the Eye shows major and minor competition between the various women of Globe, Arizona (e.g., Ann Mason’s affair with Joan’s husband, the petty gossip Joan and her friend share about Lisa on the Globe strip), but Paul is the equalizing destructive force. Not only that, but she is the winner of Paul’s heart, and it’s a horror rather than a triumph. I think that was one of the most interesting insights from this movie – I get the feeling that the kind of guys with Paul’s obsessively hateful and lustful ideology think that women should feel lucky to be the object of love and idolatry – that it should make women feel special and superior to other women – but in reality, it’s alienating and horrifying.
I do think that the turn was a little too jarring for me, though; he really goes from mysterious seducer to all-out zealot in the span of an evening. Maybe I was also seduced by the sound equipment, but I don’t feel like I got the sense of any of his crazed personality. Maybe that was part of the point, though, since we’re hearing this story from Joan’s point of view, who can’t help but see him as her partner and father to her child (and was also blinded by his bestial charms). I loved the explosion of chaos at the back half, but it definitely caught me by surprise. Boomer, do you think ending was deserved (narratively and politically)? Was the film cohesively simmering to this point throughout the runtime, or did it come out of nowhere?
Boomer: I have to say, this movie was a stunner. Maybe it’s just that all those Argento movies warped my brain, but I genuinely felt like this was one of the best movies I’ve seen in years … until the ending. I wouldn’t say that it was cohesive up to that point, per se; it’s certainly a film that captures verisimilitude in the sense that none of this feels like characters in a narrative so much as it feels like we stepped into a desert town full of eccentric people, all of whom have relationships and communication styles that are already in play and which we, as newcomers here, have to figure out with very little in the way of exposition. It feels like we’re missing some important information here, but it’s not in a “this screenplay is underdeveloped” way (like many giallido); it’s a hard concept to try and delineate in prose, but it’s as if we the audience are merely eavesdropping on the events of the film. In the same way that you can sit in a diner booth and hear the people at the next table—be they classmates who hate the same professor, lovers coming to the end of their time together, or a parent and adult child—and hear a fascinating narrative play out, but one which is inherently incomplete. That conversation isn’t being performed for you and therefore there are details that are left out and names that are dropped throughout and you just have to try and guess at the larger story from your small window into it, and White of the Eye feels like a film version of that. That having been said, I don’t disagree that the ending feels like a swerve. The film’s tone makes it clear that there’s an explosive confrontation that’s inevitable, but I didn’t expect that explosion to be so literal, or for things to change so suddenly.
There’s something strange happening here with regards to race. It’s not something that European gialli can’t do necessarily, but it is something that I don’t think we’ve ever seen them do: we have a white killer appropriating indigenous American myth. The Wikipedia page for the movie states that post-Jokerfication Paul “paints his face in a form reminiscent of both Kabuki and the blood pattern of diving headfirst into a deer carcass,” but it clearly has something to do with some half-remembered legend from the previous occupants of the lands before white men came. Detective Mendoza (Art Evans was also a detective in Fright Night, which always makes me want to pretend that they’re the same character) says to his partner, “What we have here, Phil, is an ancient Indian compass. This goes back before the Vikings.” As someone who grew up around and among hunters, there’s a bizarre familiarity to Paul; my family was steadfastly and fanatically Christian, so there was never any “soul of the kill” stuff happening with them, but there were plenty of people who hung around the deer camps who did happily participate in the easy self-justification that came from “honoring” their animal prey through a muddy mixture of various lores from a dozen different tribes with just a twist of New Age mysticism. Paul is like a weed dealer you met in college who believed a bunch of crazy conspiracy nonsense and had also convinced himself he has some kind of a special, even supernatural ability to really feel the music and where it “wants” to go, maaaaaan. Given how many of those folks have fallen for #stopthesteal rhetoric or fallen under the sway of algorithm-driven ragebaiting, it shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise that Paul looks like the QAnon Shaman by the end. Then again, maybe that’s verisimilitude, too. Inevitable, but at such a strange acceleration.
I’m going to have to say that I disagree with Brandon here, at least a little bit, and say that there’s a lot more going on with the camerawork than he’s giving credit. If you go back and watch that first kitchen-set murder scene, there are actually very few static images; there’s constant motion and change, not just in the editing, but in the composition as well. The shot that establishes the presence of a fish in the kitchen does so in a close-up that then zooms out and then takes in several other pieces of visual information: an orbiting shot of copper-bottomed pots, a pan up a refrigerator, etc. In those rare moments in which the camera stops moving, the frame is still filled with motion: glass falls into frame and shatters, a chunky tidal wave of something washes over a table and scatters the ephemera there in powerful kinetic motion, a pupil that fills the whole screen dilates. That sense of movement combined with the quick cuts is what gives this movie the overall music video aesthetic that really made it work for me. That Rick Fenn/Nick Mason collaboration on the soundtrack is an artifact that dates the movie just as much as all the customized stereo talk, but White of the Eye has the slick camera motion and quick-tempo editing that would dominate music videos of the next decade, combined with Cathy Moriarty’s performance, which is positively dripping with 70s New Hollywood energy (more on that in Lagniappe), and it renders the whole thing timeless.
Lagniappe
Brandon: If you want to see Donald Cammell fall even further down the erotic thriller rabbit hole, his next (and final) feature is a much more-straightforward entry in the genre. 1995’s Wild Side plays like Tommy Wiseau remaking the Wachowskis’ Bound, with a sublimely unhinged Christopher Walken in the Wiseau role, squaring off against Anne Heche & Joan Chen (Josie from Twin Peaks) as the undercover lesbians who upend his criminal empire. Cammell started his filmmaking career collaborating with prestigious arthouse weirdo Nicolas Roeg, and he ended it making trashy thrillers for the likes of Golan-Globus. He never lost his weird streak on that journey, though; the tonal & editing choices in White of the Eye & Wild Side are just as bizarre as anything you’ll see in the more respected Cammell titles Performance & Demon Seed.
Boomer: I love giallo, but I would also argue that this film fits into my other favorite genre: women on the verge. The desert setting called to mind 3 Women (another Britnee MotM selection), and there were moments in this where Cathy Moriarty is channeling Faye Dunaway in two of my favorites of her performances: Lou from Puzzle of a Downfall Child with her slowly unraveling peace of mind, and the title character of The Eyes of Laura Mars, in which she is confronted by the fact that (spoiler alert) the serial killer running loose in her social and professional circle is actually the man she’s taken as her lover.
This performance is powerful, and I loved every second that she was on screen. There’s an exhaustion that she exudes, but it’s the kind of contented tiredness of someone who’s found themselves in unexpected but nonetheless amenable circumstances, like she’s an angel who’s barely tethered to the earth. “You think I care what people think?” she asks Paul at one point, in the interrogation room. “I’m from the fucking city, I don’tgive a shit about small-town talk!” She’s like Sissy Hankshaw in Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, just this side of ethereal, who just can’t quit that dick. You know, queen shit.
Britnee: While I’m not super familiar with desert life (I’ve only visited New Mexico for a short time), it’s obvious that the weather during the shoot was extremely hot. What’s fascinating is that there are still multiple characters wearing luxurious fur coats in that scorching desert. Joan, who has exquisite fashion taste, sports a short fox fur coat while chatting it up with Mike at the gas station. She also wears a short peacock feather coat in the flashback scenes when she’s dating Mike and meets Paul. If I’m not mistaken, she puts it on again towards the end of the film in present day. Another fur is worn by Ann, another woman who’s extremely horny for Paul. She wraps herself in this massive floor length fur coat while sipping on a cocktail. It was such a great look that Brandon made it his Facebook cover photo!
Hanna: Every one of Cathy Moriarty’s looks is an absolute stunner, especially that peacock feathered jacket in the first flashback. I also couldn’t help being tickled by Paul’s hotdog explosive vest, one of the many outrageous fashion pieces on display.
There are a lot (a lot) of ways in which Netflix is one of the most frustrating, underwhelming streaming behemoths in the game, but I will give them this: they’re a useful conduit for international genre cinema. Most of the American-market content that floods that platform’s splash page is dull, overlit, purposefully disposable dreck, but if you know what you’re looking for, there’s plenty international genre gems lurking in the search pages – Indian action epics like RRR, Korean sci-fi adventures like Space Sweepers, Indonesian martial-arts romances like Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, and now the Taiwanese found-footage horror Incantation. Just three months after Incantation premiered to great commercial success in Taiwanese theaters, it was available to stream globally on Netflix . . . as long as you knew to look for it. That’s a remarkable turnaround when you think back to the video store days of the aughts, when horror nerds would spend years waiting to track down bootleg copies of then-obscure J & K-horror titles that fell through the cracks of American distribution (i.e. weren’t backed by Tartan Extreme). I don’t want to give the money-torching, art-minimizing, transphobe-enabling corporate chuds at Netflix HQ too much credit, but they can be a good resource when it comes to international genre pictures.
I honestly don’t know much about the general history of Taiwanese horror (which is partly why it’s cool to have it beamed directly into my living room like this), but it is easy to see why Incantation was such a runaway success – the biggest Taiwanese box office earner of 2022 so far and the highest-grossing Taiwanese horror film of all time. It’s spooky as hell. The movie does little to overcome the decades of post-Blair Witch found footage fatigue in its mood, look, or story, but it does craft some genuinely terrifying images that will soon be making guest appearances in the audience’s nightmares. Its writhing bugs, rotting flesh, flaming demons, dental mutations, and cursed Buddhist statues should shock even the most jaded viewers. There isn’t much to the central story of a single mother who “violated a religious taboo” in a sacred tunnel, then spent the next six years fearfully protecting her daughter from the evil “deity” that seeks revenge for the transgression. If anything, the movie deliberately obscures the rules & specifics of its mythmaking, explaining that “the more you know about it, the more it plagues you”. That makes watching Incantation feel like a dangerous risk in itself (à la Ringu), but it also frees it from having to fully sketch out the shape & boundaries of its central threat. There’s just a general curse hanging over our anti-heroine in distress, represented by a wide range of fucked up, bone-chilling images that linger in your mind way longer than the narrative that justifies them.
In theory, I’m all for Incantation using a bare-bones Evil Curse premise as a broad excuse for a loose collection of ghouls & scare gags. In practice, I was a little disappointed by how much it cheats on its own found-footage conceit, muddying its believability & narrative immersion with non-linear editing of dual timelines and preposterous camera placements that violate the basic rules of the format. The movie isn’t interested in working within the found-footage medium, so I’m not sure why it bothered, other than camcorder, smartphone, and CCTV security footage being cheap to replicate. At the very least, it could have shot the flashbacks to the inciting religious transgression in a found-footage format, while shooting the present-day fallout of that blunder like a Regular Movie, since it wanted to use multiple camera set-ups & professional editing techniques in those sequences so badly. Of course, this an embarrassingly nerdy thing to complain about, since the movie is spooky enough to (mostly) get away with ignoring its own premise. It’s just that I’m usually very forgiving to that kind of rule-bending, and even I thought it cheated a little too much to get by unnoticed.
Pedantic nitpicking aside, Incantation joins a lot of the better over-the-plate horror freak-outs of the past couple years, titles like The Medium, The Empty Man, and The Queen of Black Magic. It’s just as cool to be spooked by its tangential scare gags as it is to watch that strand of modern horror reach into a new cultural context most international audiences don’t often see onscreen. And those other titles were not nearly as substantial of cultural hits in their own countries (Thailand, America, and Indonesia, respectfully), while Incantation measurably resonated with its domestic audience. In its most ambitious moments, it asks its audience to participate in Buddhist prayer, actively getting further involved in a curse that gets exponentially worse the more you learn about it. I’ll never understand the full cultural significance of those prayers, but it’s the kind of big, abstract idea that cuts through the petty scene-to-scene concerns of its found-footage cheats. The eeriness of those audience participation prompts combines with the shock of its individual scares to make the film worth a look for any horror audience no matter where they live on the globe, and thanks to Netflix’s international genre acquisitions the entire globe has access to it while it’s still fresh.
I’m not much of a Foo Fighters fan, so I probably shouldn’t be reviewing something that could be described as Foo Fighters: The Movie. And yet, the Foo Fighters vanity project that somehow got pushed into wide distribution this year was a tribute to something I am a huge fan of: 80s metalsploitation. Studio 666 is a goofball throwback to metalsploitation classics like Trick or Treat, Shock Em Dead, and Rock n Roll Nightmare, complete with authentic plot tropes about backwards Satanic recordings & ancient incantations that open portals to Hell. It’s telling that even the Foo Fighters know their usual Dad Rock riffage does not hit the genre metrics of that tradition, so they traded their signature stadium sound for a thrash metal soundtrack under the pseudonym Dream Widow. They demonstrate a genuine, nerdy appreciation for vintage metalsploitation here, so even though I don’t care much about the band, I still think it’s cute they wasted everyone’s time & energy making a tribute to the genre, then distributing it as if it were a Real Movie.
Even if it is cute on a big-picture conceptual level, in practice Studio 666 is a constant battle between predictably awful one-liners and shockingly decent gore gags. There isn’t much plot to fill its expansive 106min runtime. A demon possesses Dave Grohl while he’s pushing the band to record their 10th studio album on location at a haunted house, so he slaughters his seemingly infinite bandmates one by one in increasingly gruesome ways. There’s a lot of dead air to fill between those kills, which is mostly gobbled up by Gen-X Dad Humor about how Dude Stuff like backyard grilling rocks and new age Chick Stuff like meditation sucks. The band slacks, cusses, shrugs, and mugs away the runtime, coasting on assumptions that the audience finds them adorable. Thankfully, their banter is occasionally interrupted by some spectacularly gnarly gore: hammers to the skull, decapitations via gardening shears, bifurcations of the chainsaw, etc. There’s no real invention or momentum to the kills, which punctuate the band’s hangout slacker humor instead of overpowering it, but they’re at least grotesquely tactile in a way that feels true to the splastick & metalsploitation traditions of olde.
I’m sure that dedicated fans of the Foo Fighters as the last true Stadium Rock Gods (give or take the Red Hot Chili Peppers) would find a lot more to chew on here. If nothing else, the recent passing of the band’s second-in-command musician Taylor Hawkins adds an extra layer of morbidity to the premise, especially considering the tabloid rumors concerning his exhausted relationship with the workaholic Grohl (shown here literally working his bandmates to death). Coming to it as a horror fan, I can’t say there’s much to mine here beyond a few retro practical effects shots and an out-of-nowhere endorsement from genre legend John Carpenter. Still, I’m amused that it exists – at least in the abstract. It’s charming that the biggest Guitar Rock band in the world spent their cultural capital reviving a dead horror subgenre from the Satanic Panic era, especially considering how fiercely Evangelical our culture is becoming at large (again). If it were 20min shorter & 200% funnier it might’ve even been Good.
It’s been four years since Ari Aster’s Hereditary and twice as long since Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, so we’re well past the point where it’s easy to take atmospheric horrors about grief, motherhood, and mental illness for granted. Already this year, I’ve seen Andrea Riseborough headline her own entry in that genre with Here Before and Sandra Oh do the same (to much lesser impact) in Umma. That’s why it’s difficult to get excited about the low-budget Irish indie You Are Not My Mother, which continues the trend with no flashy stars or gimmicks to set it apart with any freshness or novelty. Still, while You Are Not My Mother is far from the first (or best) Metaphor Horror about the ways mental illness can haunt multiple generations of a family, it is a solid one. It’s pure genre filmmaking in that way, and TV actor Carolyn Bracken does her best to keep up with the virtuosa mother-in-distress performances of Toni Collette and the like to make sure it meets the genre’s relatively high standards.
Boldly, this small-scale indie horror opens with a ritualistic baby burning, just so you know it’s not fucking around. That white-hot cold open is necessary to establish its genre boundaries, since the first act is essentially a domestic drama about hereditary mental illness, with no other clear signals that it’s a horror film. Three generations of depressed women occupy a small suburban home: a despondent grandmother (seen mysteriously burning a baby in the opener), her bed-sick daughter, and the granddaughter who can barely rouse those two caretakers for a simple ride to school. Things turn wicked when the typically reclusive mother disappears for days without warning, then returns a chipper, model parent with a newfound energy that does not feel true to her usual deflated self. The traditional horror markers ramp up from there, as the granddaughter confronts her mother’s sinisterly cheery imposter in the week leading up to Halloween, with the matriarch above them finally spilling her guts about why she burned that baby and who she failed to protect with the ritual.
The Halloween setting of the final act is more than just a horror mood-setter. You Are Not My Mother conveys a reverence for the Gaelic origins of Samhain unseen in the genre since 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. If it does anything to set itself apart from modern trends of Metaphor Horror about grief, mental illness, and motherhood, it’s in the way it retrofits that template into a folk horror tradition – drawing in faerie & changeling folklore to conjure a sense of Old-World dark magic. I suppose there’s also something novel about the film’s choice of POV, in which the mother-in-crisis is estranged as a monstrous Other, mostly seen through the terrified eyes of her freaked-out child. Otherwise, you know exactly what you’re going to get from a modern, slow-burn horror in this style at this point, so there’s nothing to really say about You Are Not My Mother‘s quality, except in comparison to other films of its ilk. In terms of new releases, it’s not as thrilling as Here Before but also not as dully generic as Umma; it’s middling.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of high-style, high concept horror films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, starting with Phil Tippett’s psychedelic stop-motion nightmare Mad God (2022).
He has not announced plans to retire, but if Crimes of the Future does end up being David Cronenberg’s final film, it would be an excellent send-off for the director’s career. Just as A Dirty Shame registers as the perfect marriage between John Waters’s early-career transgressors and his late-career mainstreamers, Crimes of the Future lands midway between the sublime body-horror provocations that made Cronenberg famous and the philosophical cold showers he’s been taking in more recent decades. It’s less of a complete, self-contained work than it is a loose collection of images, ideas, and in-jokes aimed at long-haul Cronenberg sickos. It’s got all the monstrous mutation & fleshy, fetishistic penetration of his classic era, which makes it tempting to claim that the body horror master has returned to former glories. It presents those images in the shape of his more recent, more talkative cerebral thrillers, though, as if to prove that nothing’s changed except that’s he’s grown out of a young man’s impulse to gross his audience out. Crimes of the Future is the kind of film that’s so tangled up in the director’s previous works that it makes you say things like “‘Surgery is the new sex’ is the new ‘Long live the new flesh'” as if that means anything to someone who isn’t already a member of the cult. And yet it might actually be a decent Cronenberg introduction for new audiences, since it’s essentially a scrapbook journal of everywhere he’s already been.
If there’s anything missing from Crimes of the Future that prevents it from reaching Cronenberg’s previous career highs, it’s not an absence of new ideas; it’s more an absence of narrative momentum. Much of it functions as a dramatically flat police procedural, gradually peeling back the layers of a conspiracy theory that never feels as sharp or as vibrant as the future hellworld that contains it. It’s a pure, playful exercise in complex worldbuilding & philosophical provocation, which are both major markers of great sci-fi no matter what narratives they serve. Cronenberg essentially asks what our future world will be like once we inevitably accept the New Flesh mutations of his Videodrome era body horrors, as opposed to recoiling from them in fear. He imagines a scenario where the pollution of accumulating microplastics in our bodies has triggered a grotesque evolution of new, mysterious internal organs that are hastily removed in surgery as if they were common tumors. Meanwhile, our new bodies have essentially eradicated pain, making the general populace a depraved sea of self-harming thrill seekers. A murdered child, an undercover cop, a network of paper-pushing bureaucrats, and a nomadic cult of proud plastic eaters all drift around the borders of this new, grotesque universe, but they never offer much dramatic competition to distract from the rules & schematics of the universe itself.
Crimes of the Future is at its absolute best when it’s goofing around as a self-referential art world satire. Its most outlandish sci-fi worldbuilding detail is in imagining a future where high-concept performance artists are the new rock stars. Viggo Mortensen stars as “an artist of the interior landscape,” a mutating body that routinely produces new, unidentifiable organs that are surgically removed in ceremonious public “performances.” Léa Seydoux stars as his partner in art & life, acting as a kind of surgical dominatrix who penetrates his body to expose his organic “creations” to their adoring public (including Kristen Stewart as a horned-up fangirl who can barely contain her excitement for the New Sex). Cronenberg not only re-examines the big-picture scope of his life’s work here; he also turns the camera around on his sick-fuck audience of geeky gawkers & fetishists. It’s all perversely amusing in its satirical distortion of real-world art snobbery, from the zoned-out audience of onlookers making home recordings on their smartwatches, to the hack wannabe artists who don’t fully get the New Sex, to the commercialization of the industry in mainstream events like Inner Beauty Pageants. Although it appears to be more self-serious at first glance, it’s only a few fart jokes away from matching Peter Strickland’s own performance art satire in Flux Gourmet, its goofy sister film.
I hope that Cronenberg keeps making movies. Even five decades into his career, he’s clearly still amused with his own creations, when there’s big-name directors half his age who are already miserably bored with their jobs. Hell, he doesn’t even need to create an entire new universe next time he wants to write something. Crimes of the Future‘s plastic gnawing, organ harvesting, surgery-fucking future world is vast & vivid enough to support dozens of sequels & spin-offs. It turns out you don’t even need much of a story to make it worth a visit.
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