horror

Gaia (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The danger of indulging in a steady diet of genre films is that it can dilute the taste of individual flavors, leaving only the impression of the bulk.  What I mean to say is that I had a difficult time appreciating the South African eco-horror Gaia on its own terms, since I had already indulged in the similarly-flavored British horror In the Earth just a few months ago.  Both films are about research scientists suffering foot injuries that leave them vulnerable in the care of eco-terrorists who’ve betrayed humanity in the man-vs-Nature divide, driven mad by psychedelic mushroom spores and their isolation in the wilderness.  In the Earth tells that story with the gusto of a video-nasty slasher about an axe-wielding maniac.  By contrast, Gaia aims for the delicate arthouse psychedelia of highbrow indies like Monos & Icaros.  As a pair, they speak to a modern cultural preoccupation with the spiritual corrosion of technology and our tenuous place in Nature.  Individually, they present a reductive “Who wore it better?” contest where the answer is as subjective as it is frivolous.

Gaia is wonderfully beautiful & strange.  Whereas In the Earth pushes its horror genre tropes to their extremes, Gaia finds its own extremity in its man-vs-Nature iconography.  Both films distort high-def nature footage into mirrored, kaleidoscopic freak-outs of time-elapse psychedelia, triggered by the mushroom spore-poisoned air.  Gaia goes a step further by melding those mushrooms with the human body, allowing Nature to reclaim human flesh as part of its organic, deep-forest tapestry.  Sometimes, those human-mushroom hybrids are oddly beautiful – like a multi-colored fungal bouquet.  Often, they’re grotesque mushroom-zombie creatures who blindly attack unconverted humans on Nature’s behalf.  Most of the film’s terror derives from Nature’s commands to the lowly humans beneath it, and the vengeful smiting that results when they stray from its plan.  Nature is closer to the Old Testament version of God in that way than the hippie-dippy spirituality implied by the film’s title.  There is a wisdom & a majesty to it that humans would be smart to obey, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a monster.

Despite its formal beauty, I’m surprised to say Gaia didn’t mean as much to me as the similarly themed eco-horror In The Earth, even though that’s the messier, trashier one of the pair.  It might just be that I had already done all my contemplation about the violent divide between Nature & modern living for the year in that earlier film, so all I had left to think about during this round was how pretty the mushrooms looked.  My only coherent thought about Gaia is that I think Björk would be very happy as a mushroom person, but I probably already knew that going in.  Otherwise, it’s a very good film that I might’ve believed to be great if I didn’t spend all my free time seeking out other genre pictures exactly like it.

-Brandon Ledet

Old (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I do not have a firm grasp on the current state of M. Night Shyamalan fandom.  It’s clear that Shyamalan has sparked a renewed interest in his gimmick-prone novelty horrors since his 2015 found-footage comeback The Visit. Since then, he’s had plenty of online defenders for each of his goofball genre experiments, even if that reclamation positions him as a “vulgar auteur.”  What’s unclear is if we’re retroactively extending that goodwill to Shyamalan’s most maligned “misfires” post-Sixth Sense, when he was making equally goofy movies with much slicker Hollywood Studio production values.  If so, I’d like to encourage fans of Shyamalan’s latest novelty horror, Old, to double back and give 2008’s The Happening a second chance.  The same clash of squirmy shock-horror and semi-intentional humor that makes Old so amusingly bizarre was already potent in The Happening. It was just scaled up to an epic eco-horror disaster thriller then, as opposed to his latest work’s stage play limitations.  Shyamalan’s latest set of earnest, go-for-broke horror absurdities are fun, but he has splashed around in these exact novelty schlock waters before, often to grander results.

The Twilight Zone premise and resulting drama of Old is so bar-napkin simple that it was its own standalone meme this past summer, separate from any individual moments or images from the actual film.  As you’ve likely heard, the unofficial title of this movie is The Beach That Makes You Old.  Once its smattering of vacationing families arrives on that magical beach, terror ensues. They’re trapped on The Beach That Makes You Old until they age out & die, confronted with the inevitable limitations & grotesqueries of the human body and the cruel relentlessness of time.  As with all of Shyamalan’s films, this schlocky premise is treated with a surprising amount of genuine, overreaching emotion.  Old is a purely parental horror.  It strays from that genre’s usual preoccupations with rotten children or grief over a child’s untimely death to instead dwell on how quickly all kids rapidly age into independent adults who don’t need you, as your own body decays into obsolescence.  Also, as with all of Shyamalan’s films, Old tosses in just enough overt goofball humor that you know it’s somewhat intentionally funny (including a caricature of a famous rapper who performs under the stage name Mid-Sized Sedan), while also making indecipherable choices that throws that tonal intention & control into question (like having every single character announce their name, occupation, and most prominent illness as conversation starters).  It’s a movie where archetypes make broad pronouncements instead of exchanging dialogue, but it’s also a movie that asks you to take their grotesque, time-elapse demises dead seriously.  It’s pure Shyamalan in that way.

I enjoyed the questions of tonal intent & control in The Beach that Makes You Old just as much as I did in other recent Shyamalan hits like The Grandma that Makes You Uncomfortable and The Superheroes that Make You Laugh.  Still, something about the stripped-down scale of this one made me nostalgic for the days when Shyamalan’s bullshit would be staged on epic blockbuster budgets.  There’s something special about Shyamalan using mainstream studio money to make post-Larry Cohen schlockbusters like The Happening, and I’m a little sad that we’ll likely never see those days again.  I’m even sadder that The Happening still has a reputation as a creative low-point in his career, while Old is being celebrated as one of his most precious gems.  To me, their volatile combinations of quirky character humor & grotesque bodily horror are remarkably similar, but The Happening happens to be a lot more memorable & fun.  Maybe it’s just a nostalgia for seeing Shyamalan work in a mainstream filmmaking context, despite his movies always having been an odd fit for the industry.  Hopefully all this whooping & memeing will eventually earn his way back into those large-scale money-torchers.  I wish nothing but the best for my goofball horror uncle.

-Brandon Ledet

Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Madman actor Nicolas Cage collaborated with madman genre filmmaker Sion Sono on a dystopian horror-Western set in the futuristic nuclear wastelands of Japan.  Everything about that team-up sounds like an easy slam dunk, but instead it’s a lazy layup that barely makes it through the hoop.  Prisoners of the Ghostland is overloaded with vivid pop art iconography, surprisingly effective creep-outs in its momentary stabs at horror, a plot bonkers enough to rival Hell Comes to Frogtown . . . and yet it’s somehow near-indistinguishable from most of Cage’s late-career goof-offs.  It’s amusing enough as a Nic Cagian novelty, but it’s shockingly inessential considering the pedigree of the director behind it (whose film Suicide Club is among my all-time personal favs).

In Hell Comes to Frogtown fashion, Nicolas Cage plays a violent criminal on a mercenary mission to retrieve a missing woman from the nuclear wastelands, locked into a security device that will explode his limbs, head, and testicles if he steps out of line.  His target for retrieval is a runaway sex slave (Sofia Boutella) who’s better off staying lost in the desert than under the thumb of the captors paying for her return.  Will the cold-hearted brute warm to his doomed captive and fight for her freedom instead of trading her in for freedom & cash?  The answer to that question is obvious, but it’s also obvious that the plot doesn’t matter as much as the vibrant comic book swordfights & gun battles that illustrate it.  They do look cool, but that’s about all they do.

Like a lot of late-career Nic Cage oddities, Prisoners of the Ghostland‘s major downfall is that it recalls too many of the actor’s previous stunt performances to stand out on its own as anything especially novel.  Between its echoes of the missing-girl mission from Wicker Man, the hotrod-revving macho posturing from Drive Angry, and the dystopian gloom of Mandy, Prisoners of the Ghostland plays like a Greatest Hits collection of Nic Cage meme movies.  The real shame about that is losing Sion Sono’s voice among the whispers-and-screams performances of Cage and his cast of fellow caricatures.  Sono’s visual iconography is gorgeously realized here—especially in the wasteland’s creepy mannequin masks and the village’s blood-spraying samurai swordfights—but it overall feels more like a Nic Cage movie than a 50/50 collaboration.  The two of them should make beautiful music together, but it ends up feeling like a solo project.

Nicolas Cage had an interesting year.  Instead of starring in a dozen DTV action snoozers and a couple genuinely interesting outliers, he appears to have been much pickier than usual when choosing his projects.  Cage only starred in three movies released in 2021.  Going into the year, Prisoners of the Ghostland promised to be his Mandy-scale knockout, but that honor ended up going to a quiet drama about the art of fine dining.  It also looked like it might be the most fun performance he’d put in all year, but even by that metric it was outdone by a single-location thriller where he fights killer Chuck E. Cheese style animatronics (a movie that appears to be very popular among furries, if my anecdotal observations mean anything).  Instead, it ended up being the mediocre middle ground between those two competing features, which is not at all what you want to feel about a Cage/Sono team-up.

For everyone playing along at home, here’s the official 2021 Nic Cage Movie Power Rankings:

-Brandon Ledet

The Redeemer: Son of Satan! (1978)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I love a cheap slasher.  There’s a grimy, D.I.Y. vibe to slashers that’s hard to find in horror genres that require more substantial budgets for special effects.  All you really need to make a barebones slasher is a few friends, a free weekend, case of beer, and a prop kitchen knife.  The bodycount murder-mystery template that most slashers follow provides just enough structure & purpose for what are otherwise hangout films, so that no-budget indies can somehow land regional, if not national distribution despite essentially being backyard movies.  Slashers don’t have to be especially cohesive or coherent to be worthwhile, since the draw of the genre is usually in the local, sub-professional quirks of their casts of victims.

The Redeemer: Son of Satan! pushes that disregard for coherence & cohesion past its breaking point.  As its more apt drive-in title Class Reunion Massacre suggests, it’s a loopy supernatural slasher set at a 10-year high school reunion, which is disrupted by a maniacal, possibly possessed priest.  The movie opens with an eerie shot of a fully clothed child emerging from underneath a lake with Terminator-level determination.  The mysterious child-demon coerces a local priest to kill unsuspecting alumni celebrating their class reunion, punishing them for the “sins” of adultery, alcoholism, and homosexual copulation.  The magical mechanics of that coercion remain a mystery, along with the origins of the lake-child and the priest’s connection to the class-reunion victims.  The result feels less like an actual movie than it feels like the dream you have after watching Prom Night.

The unexplained supernatural phenomena of The Redeemer establish an eerie mood before the film fully sinks into its slash-by-numbers formula, but they feel underdeveloped to the point of distraction & bafflement.  Disregarding the lake-child, the movie is basically about a Gene Parmesan style killer who wears a different generic disguise for each attack: priest robes, a clown mask, duck-hunter camo, etc.  Once you start trying to connect that killing spree to the priest’s extra thumb, his step-by-step tutorial of the face plaster process, his flamethrower-wielding puppet, and his supernatural child-boss, the whole thing unravels. All it really needed to do was set a maniacal preacher loose on victims he believed to be “sinners”, but instead it adds in a chaotic smattering of details from a more interesting movie that we’ll never get to see.

Regarding the local flavor of The Redeemer’s cast, there isn’t much to see here.  The film gets minor kudos for having multiple gay characters in its main roster, but it’s also a bodycount horror film so you can probably guess how that plays out.  Besides, the supernatural lake-child’s priest-hijack mission is too distracting for the central cast to stand out anyway.  There’s a wonderful sequence set in the preacher’s church, packed with candid shots of the locals in his congregation who fill the pews.  Otherwise, the movie doesn’t have much to offer except boredom, frustration, and bafflement.  It’s got an occasionally eerie mood and a few fun, scattered surprises, but it never really pulls itself together into anything solid.  I’d honestly be even more forgiving of those minor merits if it was just shots of drunk teens wielding a kitchen knife in the woods.  It’s almost worse that the movie teases more ambitious supernatural horror elements and then never does anything coherent with them.

-Brandon Ledet

There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Thanksgiving was last week, and if your family is anything like mine, you probably heard the phrase “social justice” sneeringly used as an epithet as if we were talking about something as vile as omnipresent police brutality or human trafficking. Look in the mirror, reader, we made it through that! We are strong. Although you and I have managed to prevent having our brains completely rotted by propaganda, seeing the way that corporations can attempt to co-opt (whoops, sorry, I meant to say “address”) issues of social justice in their digestible products and mangle those concepts horribly gives a bit of insight into what those issues look like once they’ve filtered down to the level of the largely-unengaged (or propagandized) consumer. And it’s not great! 

Makani Young (Sydney Park) is the most recent addition to the group of outsiders at a high school in small town Nebraska, having transferred just a short time prior. Also in the group are: Makani’s best friend Alexandra Crisp (Asjha Cooper); Rodrigo Doran (Diego Josef), who has a mutual unspoken crush on Alexandra; and Zach Sandford (Dale Whibley), an archetypical stoner kid and the son of “Skipper” Sandford, a wealthy farmer with aims to control the whole town by purchasing foreclosed properties, including those that were home to the families of his son’s peers, and is engaged in an ongoing effort to dismantle the local police force and set up his own privatized department in town. 

Also rounding out this group of outcasts is Darby (Jesse LaTourette), a trans and apparently gender non-confirming student whose hopes to get out of this small town mostly revolve around a NASA internship for which they have replied. As a side note, I’m using “they” here, but the film is never very explicit on this topic; a quick Google search for performer Jesse LaTourette returns results that describe LaTourette as an actress and which use she/her pronouns, while a search for that name with “trans” in the search line located this blog post which states that “a friend reached out and confirmed that Jesse LaTourette identifies as genderfluid, and uses any pronouns,” but I’m hewing on the safe side since I can’t corroborate that elsewhere. The half-assedness of the film’s inclusivity is manifest in the text: we the audience are never really told what Darby’s pronouns are; the only explicit mention of their gender comes when self-congratulatory student council president Katie (Sarah Dugdale) reads an excerpt from their college application essay, which begins with your typical “I didn’t really understand diversity/struggle until I met someone who was different from me” spiel. On the one hand, this is actually a pretty good piece of storytelling in the way that it demonstrates the tendency of white, cisgender people to not only co-opt non-white and non-cis narratives as their own but to do so for profit (or in this case, to get into college), but on the other, it amuses me that Netflix doesn’t see themselves reflected in this narratively vilified character. 

We don’t meet these characters right away, however. Taking a page from the Scream playbook, we have the film equivalent of a cold open here, as the school’s presumably teenaged quarterback Jackson Pace (the very twenty-eight-year-old Markian Tarasiuk) engages in some telephonic locker room talk that establishes that he’s a pig and that there’s a Big Game™ that night. Jackson awakes from his pregame rest to discover that his phone has been stolen and the front door has been left ajar, but before he can complete his call to 911, he finds a trail of photographs that depict his violent hazing of a fellow footballer (we learn after the opening credits that this supposedly teenaged victim was still-alive Caleb, played by the also-28 Burkely Duffield, but from the photos it looked like Jackson had beaten a kid to death, which is also part of this film’s storytelling issues). Jackson follows the path laid out by these photos to his bedroom closet where he is confronted by a hooded killer wearing Jackson’s face. While begging for his life, Jackson asks the killer if they want money and offers to Venmo them, which was actually a fairly inspired bit of dialogue that got a chuckle out of me; these pleas fall on deaf ears, and Jackson is killed, while his killer simultaneously sends the evidence of Jackson being an abusive psycho to everyone at the football game. 

After Jackson’s Drew Barrymore pre-credits death, we meet the above-mentioned main characters as they huddle up and extend an olive branch to Caleb, who never reported the hazing that happened to him for fear of being outed as gay, only to end up outed by Jackson’s death and facing exactly the kind of ostracization he expected (combined with paranoia that he might have been involved in Jackson’s killing for revenge, despite being on the football field at the time of death). Suspicion also falls on Ollie Larsson (Théodore Pellerin), the school’s resident trench coat kid with the requisite tragic backstory: alcoholic parents who died in a drunk driving accident, teased by others that mom and dad killed themselves because their son was a psychopath, and being raised by his older brother who happens to be a local deputy, which gives him plenty of opportunities to access “files” for red herring purposes. Other potential killers include the aforementioned Skipper, what with his expansionist desires, attempts to set up his own police, and his extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia (most of which Zach has turned into marijuana paraphernalia), as well as Dave (Ryan Beil), “the only Uber driver in town,” whose attempts at standard rideshare driver small talk could also be interpreted sinisterly. 

After the second killing, of previously mentioned overachiever Katie, who is murdered while setting up for Jackson’s memorial service and is outed as the host of an anonymous but virulent white supremacist podcast, the local police set up a curfew after ineptly and thus unsuccessfully interviewing the students from the high school, except Zach, whose father’s lawyer pulls the boy from the line-up. That night, Ollie and Makani try to sneak away for a tryst, but join the rest of the town’s teenagers in gathering at a large house party to reveal their most hidden truths to one another in the hopes that doing so will protect them from the killer, assuming that the victims are being murdered because of their secrets. During the party, however, Rodrigo is outed as a secret drug addict and killed, with the killer once again wearing a 3D printed mask of the victim’s face. Makani, still hiding the real reason that she was sent to Nebraska to live with her grandmother, fears that she is next, and although the killer nearly does her in, she’s rescued just in time, although not before her secret is revealed to her peers: when she and several other junior varsity girls were force-fed alcohol at a bonfire in a hazing ritual by upperclassmen, she pushed another girl into the fire in an inebriated rage, burning the other girl severely. Her friends forgive her, and tell her that Ollie is in custody. It seems all is well, unless the killer is still out there, ready to strike terror at the seasonal corn maze. 

There are a lot of fun ideas at play here, and I wish that they were in a better movie. I don’t think that any of the film’s failures, which ultimately make this film feel like less than the sum of its parts, can be attributed to any one individual. The lack of cohesion with regards to the killer’s motivation may have been better handled in the novel on which the film is based; I haven’t read it, but internal motivations can be more easily conveyed on the page than on screen, and I get the feeling this happened here. The killer’s final lines, and the lines that our heroine delivers to the killer regarding the incoherence of their stated motives, both feel like the dramatic equivalent of orphaned punchlines, as they’re portrayed as if they are capstones on thematic statements about privilege and the lack thereof, but these supposed elements aren’t as present throughout the text as much as the finale tries to convince you they were. It feels empty and postural, a cynical attempt to appeal to the social justice generation by assimilating its language without grappling with its intent or the meaning of that discourse. If this is what everyone’s dads think social justice is, no wonder they hate it so much. Special praise should be given to the direction and the cinematography, however; director Patrick Brice (Creep) makes some really great choices, and cinematographer Jeff Cutter supports them with some beautiful photography. The finale of the opening scene is particularly striking, as the typical drama of for-cinema American high school football plays out on the field while the stands fall deathly silent as everyone assembled receives a message with the details of Jackson’s bullying, with Caleb then turning triumphantly to the stands after a successful touchdown to find all attention elsewhere. The scenes near the end of the film that take place in a burning corn field are also delightfully composed and visually dynamic, and the idea of a killer creating a mask of the victim is also a stroke of genius and makes for several unsettling scenes. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to make this one worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #148 of The Swampflix Podcast: Shapeless (2021) & #NOFF2021

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #148 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by local film critic Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 32nd annual New Orleans Film Festival (which Bill also covered for The Bayou Brief), starting with the eating disorder-themed body horror Shapeless. Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

10:45 Shapeless

26:40 17 Year Locust
38:04 Blue Country
46:30 100 Years from Mississippi
54:15 The Laughing Man

1:07:20 Socks on Fire
1:18:05 Homebody
1:23:40 Memoria
1:30:31 C’mon C’mon
1:40:33 Red Rocket

1:49:20 Best of 2021 homework

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

Death Drop Gorgeous (2021)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The no-budget slasher Death Drop Gorgeous has the best drag-themed horror title since All About Evil.  That’s good!  It also has one of the worst laugh-to-punchline ratios in the genre since 2003’s Killer Drag Queens on Dope.  Ooh, that’s bad.  It packs a few truly gnarly kills that make you squirm in your knickers.  That’s good.  But those kills are spread thinly across an outright criminal 104min runtime.  That’s bad.  It’s one of the few horror movies I’ve seen in recent memory that features erect onscreen peen.  That’s good!  That mutilated cock was made of silicone, not flesh . . . That’s bad.  Can I go now?

Death Drop Gorgeous is a dirt-cheap regional horror set on the Providence, Rhode Island drag scene.  Its entire cast & crew appear to be staffed by drag performers & gay men, recalling the queer communal immersion of no-budget drag classics like Isle of Lesbos & Vegas in Space.  We join the Providence drag circuit at a point of generational warfare, when classic cabaret queens like the seasoned & embittered Gloria Hole are left clawing for the scraps of spotlight leftover by disrespectful newcomer novelty acts like Janet Fitness, a total brat with no respect for their queer elders.  That tension is escalated by a gloved killer who’s been slaughtering patrons & performers who frequent the local drag spots, draining them of their blood for a mysterious purpose.  Cops get involved, our protagonist ends up being a looky-loo bartender who’s barely involved in the main action, and the whole thing just ends up feeling overloaded with too many non-sequitur time-fillers that dilute its core entertainment value (including a wasted cameo from 1980s scream queen Linnea Quigley).

This film works best if you imagine you’re watching an early-00s SOV slasher and not its modern digi equivalent.  Its drone shots & Grindr jokes constantly drag you by the wig into a post-Knife+Heart world, where a glut of straight-to-streaming horror titles and queer #content feel more like a matter of course than a welcome novelty.  Twenty years ago, in a less crowded field, this might’ve stood out as something truly special, necessary even.  Its flat digi camerawork does a good job of time-traveling back to that headspace too, especially in the tasteless grime of its crueler kills: screwdriver stabbings, mirror shards smashed into faces, dicks fed to meat grinders, etc.  And it even conjures some singular images I can confidently say I’ve never seen elsewhere, like a goth drag queen playing the theremin or a slimy latex hand beckoning victims closer through a glory hole.  For the most part, though, Death Drop Gorgeous struggles to carve out its own unique space despite the specificity of its local cast & setting.

Still, I’m overall fond of this film’s let’s-put-on-a-show community theatre charm.  It might be the kind of regional slasher that earns its value as a cult curio over the years, especially for Providence locals as their drag scene inevitably changes with the times.  I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s already giddy to own any movie starring Gloria Hole on DVD, regardless of its overall quality.  Even as an outsider from 1,400 miles away, I appreciated that novelty myself.

-Brandon Ledet

Shapeless (2021)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

A common theme among my personal selections at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival was that every single movie felt oddly low-key & unrushed.  Beyond the obvious scaling-down that all film festivals have suffered throughout the pandemic, the movies themselves just felt unusually relaxed.  I expected that lack of momentum from filmmakers on the schedule like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but even the reliably frantic Sean Baker’s latest feel-bad comedy Red Rocket felt like more of a hangout than a nonstop plummet into chaos.  There’s no way to tell if that lack of narrative urgency appealed to the festival’s programmers when making their selections for this year’s docket, whether it reflects a communal headspace the filmmakers themselves shared as a response to the rapid escalation of global collapse we’re all suffering right now, or if it was just happenstance that I selected a few movies in a languid key this year.  What I do know is that the low-key vibe of the festival at large was most sharply felt in the local low-budget horror film Shapeless, which even indicates in its title a laidback formlessness that you wouldn’t expect in its genre.

Whatever Shapeless may be lacking in narrative momentum, it makes up for with a killer hook in its premise.  Kelly Murtagh stars as Ivy, a dive-bar lounge singer & street busker struggling to catch a break on the New Orleans music scene.  Her professional stasis is partly a result of working in a city that’s overcrowded with phenomenally talented musicians vying for the same spotlight (notably, in her case, a chill-as-fuck bartender played by The Deuce‘s Jamie Neumann).  Mostly, it’s a result of her personal struggles with mental illness, namely an eating disorder that isolates her from peers who are much more at ease around public consumption of food & drink.  Whenever Ivy’s not singing for tips or working her shitty day job at the dry cleaners, she shrinks away to the privacy of her apartment where she can binge & purge in peace.  Only, the longer she spends in isolation, the more damage her disorder does to her body – shredding her vocal cords and, most notably, mutating her into a Cronenbergian monster with excess digits & eyeballs emerging all over her body.

Translating eating disorder dysmorphia through body-horror genre tropes is a genius idea for a movie, but Shapeless isn’t especially interested in pushing its narrative past that starting point.  Its flashes of body-mutation gore are upsetting & wildly varied—including lesions, swelling, and the sudden growth of extra fingers & orifices—but there’s no discernible escalation of their severity as the movie drifts along.  After the initial discomfort of Ivy’s isolation & mutation settles in, I struggled to latch onto the tension the movie was trying to generate during its long stretches of eerie silence.  We spend a lot of time hanging around Ivy’s apartment waiting for her dysmorphic horror to exponentially escalate, but instead it stagnates – par for the course, considering the unrushed quality shared among every film I saw during this year’s NOFF.  However, I will admit that Shapeless really made me squirm in those long stretches of quiet discomfort, especially in scenes when Ivy was visually repelled by food.  One thing that will always be effective for me is when movies make the sights & sounds of people eating grotesque.  It gets me every time, and in this case that particular gross-out tactic was one of the main drivers of the plot.

Oddly, most of the outright horror programming selections I’ve seen at the New Orleans Film Festival over the years have been centered around the grotesqueries of eating disorders.  I’m thinking of 2019’s Swallow, and 2016’s Are We Not Cats?, to be specific.  Again, I will not speculate on whether that programming reflects a thematic preoccupation among the festival’s programmers or just a happenstance of the movies I personally have the time & money to seek out on my schedule.  I will say, though, that Shapeless is the least vibrant & energetic movie of that trio, so it fits right at home with this year’s festival selection at large – which leaned heavily towards low-key hangouts over shocking bursts of energy.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Lisa and the Devil (1973)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Our current Movie of the Month, 1973’s Lisa and the Devil, is a supernatural murder mystery set in a haunted mansion full of creepy mannequins.  As usual with Mario Bava, it’s consistently beautiful & eerie while wildly inconsistent in its central mystery’s internal logic.  Parsing out what’s really going on in Bava’s films is always miles beside the point; they thrive on vibes and vibes alone.  So, what really sets this loopy-logic Bava mystery apart from the rest of his catalog is its haunted castle setting, which vividly contrasts the moods & tones of his filmmaking style against other Gothic horrors of his era from The Corman-Poe Cycle and Hammer Studios.  It’s in that contrast where Lisa and the Devil‘s twisty dream logic and harshly artificial color gels really shine as something special.

I knew I was going to use November’s Movie of the Month selection as an excuse to clear out a few of my Mario Bava blindspots.  What I didn’t know is that so many of those major blindspots would also be set in haunted castles (as opposed to the bloody couturiers of Blood & Black Lace or the eerie alien landscapes of Planet of the Vampires).  As I dug further into Bava’s catalog this month, I really started appreciating how his haunted castle movies boast all of the spooky atmosphere of Hammer Horror at its best, boosted with a lurid Technicolor sleaze that satisfies in a way Hammer rarely does – if ever.  Nearly every one is a Masque of the Red Death-level knockout, which is rare for the genre.  To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more Mario Bava classics set in haunted castles.

Black Sunday (1960)

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Mario Bava spent so much of his career playing with camera equipment in spooky castles, since that setting is exactly where he made a name for himself at the start of his career.  Bava’s debut feature credit as a director, Black Sunday (a.k.a. The Mask of Satan) crams in as many haunted-castle spooks & ghouls as it can possibly fit in an 87min runtime: vampires, witches, Satanic rituals, an overachieving fog machine, etc.  Even in black & white—devoid of Bava’s trademark color gels—it clearly stands out as the very best of the director’s haunted castle horrors.  If anything, the harsh black & white lighting offers a vintage Romero sheen that feels like a novelty in Bava’s larger Technicolor catalog.

If actors dress up in ritualistic costumes and repeat the word “Satan” enough, I’m automatically going to be charmed.  It still helps when it’s someone as electrically intense as Barbara Steele.  In her breakout, career-defining performance(s), she stars as both a vampiric witch who’s punished for her allegiance to Satan and as the innocent descendent she plans to drain of her blood & youth.  Steele’s haunting screen presence (conveyed most fiercely through her intense eye contact) is what makes the movie enduringly iconic, but Bava’s background as a cinematographer heightens every frame with a stark beauty & terror.  It’s not Bava at his most idiosyncratic (given that it’s drained of his usual indulgences in color & disregard for plot), but it might be Bava at his best.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

Barbara Steele is not the only horror legend who cut their fangs working with Bava.  Christopher “Dracula” Lee collaborated with the Italo-auteur on both the dark fantasy epic Hercules in the Haunted World and in the haunted-castle chiller The Whip and the Body.  It’s The Whip and the Body that really leans into the strengths of Lee’s sultry screen presence, casting him as a BDSM ghost who haunts a modest seaside castle (and the masochistic woman he used to adulterize with when he was alive).  It’s never much of an exaggeration to say that Christopher Lee was pure sex in his handsome youth, but in The Whip and the Body that statement isn’t even a figure of speech.  He haunts the castle as the personification of sadistic sex just as much as he’s the ghost of a cruel pest who even his mistress despised.

The ghostly psychosexual terror of Lee’s kink-ghost is the perfect mechanism for Bava’s usual indulgences in atmosphere & aesthetics.  It’s customary for haunted castle movies to feature menacing gusts of howling wind, but here Bava gets to mix in sounds of Lee’s leather whip to pervert that trope into something freshly upsetting.  The film haunts a lovely middle ground between the classic gothic horror of Black Sunday and the Technicolor fairy tale horrors of Lisa and the Devil (complete with a dagger in a bell jar as its fairy tale version of Chekov’s gun).

Baron Blood (1972)

Like The Whip and the Body, Baron Blood is about a craven misogynist who haunts his family castle as a menacingly horny ghost.  Like Black Sunday, it even dabbles in an undercurrent of witchcraft for counterbalance; the sexist ghost is resurrected from the dead as revenge from a witch who wants to see him tortured for eternity instead being allowed to rest.  Unfortunately, this late-in-the-game middle ground between those two classics doesn’t stack up to Bava’s usual standard.  It’s conveyed in muddy 1970s browns, and the stoney-baloney pacing of that era is in no rush to get anywhere. 

So yeah, Baron Blood is by far the weakest entry of this haunted-castle Bava set.  It has its own laidback 70s charms, though, including occultist rituals, rusty torture devices, and a fiendish ghoul with sopping hamburger meat for a face.  All it really needed to be a Lisa and the Devil-level stunner was a peppier sense of urgency and a few color gels.  Save it for a lazy weekend afternoon, so it’s not such a big deal if you take a nap in the middle of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #147 of The Swampflix Podcast: Willard vs Ben w/ We Love to Watch

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

Welcome to Episode #147 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee & Brandon are joined by Aaron Armstrong & Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the melodramatic rat-revenge horror Willard (1971), its sequel Ben (1972), and its 2003 remake starring Crispin Glover. Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome
02:12 Spooktober recaps on the We Love to Watch podcast

13:43 The Seventh Curse (1986)
16:50 Over the Garden Wall (2014)
18:37 Angst (1983)
24:12 All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

30:13 Willard (1971) vs Ben (1972)
1:22:35 Willard (2003)

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 & The We Love to Watch Boys