For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss The Great Satan (2018), Everything is Terrible!’s retelling of the story of the fallen angel Lucifer, conveyed in a hyperactive mixtape of obscure VHS clips.
I am greatly excited by the return of the New Orleans Film Festival this month, since I’m finally feeling confident enough about the city’s vaccination rates to attend a few screenings in person (as opposed to last year, when I watched Undine at an outdoor screening and the rest of the fest on my couch). There’s a total immersion in low-budget, scrappy art films that I only experience at festivals, where I emerge forgetting what a well-funded, market-tested studio film even looks like. My standards of quality shift from questions of technical craft to genuine engagement with films’ intents & ideas. I imagine most of the ecstatic praise for the nostalgia-poisoned horror indie Censor was a circumstance of that immersion in the Film Festival Brainspace. Censor premiered to strong reviews at this year’s Sundance (the festival that’s most notorious for hyping up films that play much cooler once they reach the wider public), but it’s proven to be divisive & middling as its distribution has spread in the months since – culminating in a quiet streaming release on Hulu this Halloween season. Imagining myself in Film Fest Brainspace, it’s easy to see how that hype deflated so quietly. It’s a movie with strong ideas, weak execution, and a stunner of an ending that leaves you on a memorable high note despite the hour of tedium that precedes it. I assume that if I had seen Censor in a festival environment, I’d be much more gleeful about its merits myself. Watching it at home amidst a flood of other horror indie streamers this October, however, I’m struggling to drum up that enthusiasm.
If nothing else, it’s easy to see how Censor landed such a high-profile distribution deal while so many other high-concept horrors on its budget level never make it past festival programs. It’s got a killer hook. Niamh Algar stars as a 1980s film censor during the UK’s “video nasties” panic, spending most of her days watching (and rejecting for public consumption) over-the-top gore gags & simulated acts of misogynist violence. Never mind the anachronism of British film censors actually watching the horror movies they banned in order to Save the Children, as opposed to glancing at VHS covers and making a snap judgement based on the title & artwork. The movie is more of an intimate character study about this one specific film censor rather than a history lesson on her profession. She is haunted by scenes & performances in the films she screens not because of their brutality, necessarily, but because they evoke long-buried childhood memories of her sister’s mysterious disappearance (and likely murder). Questions of how “real” these connections between the violent art she watches and the violence of her life are remain unanswered. Instead, we lose sight of the boundaries between art & reality altogether alongside our doomed protagonist, until those two versions of the “truth” directly battle for supremacy at the film’s thrilling, psychedelic climax. The murder mystery portion of the plot directly recalls the art-imitating-life murders of the similarly styled Knife+Heart—a daunting comparison to overcome—but the video nasty setting & aesthetic help distinguish it enough for it to feel like its own thing.
My main roadblock to fully loving Censor is one that a lot of low-budget festival entries suffer; it just doesn’t have enough going on to justify being a full-length feature. Even with a delicious 80min runtime, this takes way too long to get where it’s going. There’s a version of this movie where its anti-heroine’s quiet brooding and hazy childhood flashbacks create a throathold tension on the audience, but in the version we got they just feel like treading water. The reality-meltdown finale is a stunner (as long as you can stay awake long enough to get there), but I enjoyed the destination more than the journey, which is never a good sign. The movie is okay over all but great in flashes, inviting you to assess it on its ideas alone instead of its execution of those ideas, which is the quintessential film festival experience. I did not attend this year’s Sundance Film Festival—either online or in person—so I did not get the perfect Censor experience. Personally, I cannot wait to “discover” and overpraise some misshapen, almost-great indie at NOFF once my own critical facilities are overpowered by Film Fest Brain. I wish I could live in that loopy brainspace all year-round.
The movie is just alright, but Rebecca Hall is great: a tale as old as time. I always hear that Hall is a powerhouse performer, but I’m used to seeing her play low-key, anonymous roles in genre movies like The Gift, Transcendence, and Godzilla vs Kong, where she tends to support instead of outshine the ooky-spooky monsters & ghouls at centerstage. That likely says more about me than it says about Hall, though, since her fan-favorite performance as the titular role in the 2016 biopic Christine is widely available and I’ve yet to make time for it. Luckily, The Night House is willing to meet me halfway by casting Rebecca Hall as the dramatic lead in a straight-forward horror film about a haunted house, wherein she’s the central focus of every single scene. The movie itself is just okay, but her performance is fantastic, so I at least appreciated that it dragged me kicking and screaming into the Rebecca Hall fan club.
Viewed purely as a haunted-house movie, The Night House is only so-so. It’s overloaded with exciting ideas, teasing tangents of Lovecraftian blueprints for a dark-magic home, silhouettes of ghosts formed by the negative space in architectural details, erotic foreplay with said negative-space ghosts, and a cursed netherworld that can only be accessed through lucid dreams. Unfortunately, it’s frustratingly restrained in its execution of its most out-there concepts, only indulging in each for mere seconds before dragging the audience back to the dramatic reality they disrupt. That dramatic core is yet another It’s Actually About Grief metaphor that has become so standard in modern horror, with Rebecca Hall being both physically & emotionally haunted by her recent suicide-victim husband. In a decade, academics will have something smart & concise to say about why so many of our contemporary horror films are so fixated on the subject of grief, just as we’ve since explained away the early-aughts’ obsession with onscreen torture as a way to process American war crimes during the War on Terror. In the meantime, there’s very little room for individual entries in the Grief Horror canon to have anything novel to say on the subject, so all The Night House can really do is create a spooky mood while repeating images & concepts you’ve already been exposed to many times before. It is spooky, but I question if that’s enough of a draw considering how familiar its themes are.
The Night House is much more impressive as a showcase for Rebecca Hall’s screen presence, encouraging to flex her acting muscles in the same way the Grief Horror genre has already spotlighted Toni Collette in Hereditary, Elizabeth Moss in The Invisible Man, and Essie Davis in The Babadook. Hall plays a wonderfully prickly, sardonic widow who refuses to wallow in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide, instead choosing to prod at who he was and why he decided to stop being. She’s haunted both by the gun violence that ended his life—often finding herself hearing, touching, and Googling guns whenever her mind drifts—and by a spiritual presence in her now empty home, seemingly rekindling their doomed romance from beyond the grave. Weirdly, the movie often excels most when it’s not indulging in supernatural phenomena at all, chronicling Hall’s investigation into her husband’s secretive life outside their marriage and her wonderfully icy responses to the polite but condescending rituals of communal consolation that accompany all funerals. She’s hurt, she’s hurtful, and she’s fiercely opposed to the idea of fading away quietly after her marriage’s violent end, despite that feeling like the only path offered in her empty, cursed home. The movie asks a lot of Rebecca Hall as its emotional anchor, and she holds it all down with ease. It’s just a shame the movie around her couldn’t quite match her virtuoso performance with something memorable enough to make it a must-see entry in its genre.
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 Hanna made Brandon, Boomer, and Britneewatch Lisa and the Devil (1973).
Hanna: I didn’t know anything about Mario Bava the first time I saw Lisa and the Devil (1974). It was two or three Halloweens ago, when streaming services pepper their suggestions with every horror movie in their arsenals, especially Argento & Bava films from the 70s with irresistible, colorful covers. The film has persistently clung to my mind since then because of its totally bizarre ending and its resplendent, House of Usher-esque mansion. I don’t know if it held up for me on a second viewing, and it has a gross depiction of sexual assault at ~1:14:00 that I had completely forgotten about, but I still overall enjoyed Bava’s spooky dreamscape.
At the outset of Lisa and the Devil, Lisa—a German tourist played by Elke Sommer—is climbing off a tour bus in Toledo, Spain. The very first stop of the tour brings her group to a mural of the Devil carrying the dead away, with a face that “expresses a quality which reflects the very soul of pleasure and evil.” Lisa seems struck by this mural, and inexplicably leaves her friend behind with the tour group to go wandering through the small Spanish village alone. She’s drawn into an antique shop and finds herself mesmerized by a sort of box-less music box/turntable with six rotating figures (if somebody could tell me what this thing is called, I would be much obliged – it’s extremely cool). She interrupts the shopkeeper’s conversation with the lone customer in the shop, who’s fussing over the particularities of a large wooden doll, to purchase the object. The customer turns to look at Lisa, who realizes that he bears a striking resemblance to the “very soul of pleasure and evil” plastered on the mural. From that point on, Lisa is lost; she dashes from the shop and wanders hopelessly through the deserted streets of Toledo, finding it impossible to return to the town square and repeatedly running into the menacing man from the mural (played by Telly Savalas) and the human manifestation of his life-size wooden doll. Eventually night falls, and she’s picked up by a tense couple and their driver in a lovely green car. Lisa is hopeful that this is the end of her nightmare, until the car breaks down in front of a sprawling Spanish villa of an elderly blind countess (Alida Valli) and her odd son Maximillian (Alessio Orano). The villa is staffed, of course, by Leandro, who continues to drag around his giant wooden doll for a mysterious purpose.
The rest of the film slowly unfolds into a visually striking festival of murder. The long shots of Lisa wandering throughout the remote village and the rich, green grounds of the villa are fantastic, and the interior of the villa oozes with a thick, decrepit opulence (I love the rotting cake room). I mostly found the performances a little lackluster, especially Sommer (who, despite being the leading lady, has about 10 lines of dialogue), but Telly Savalas is a pleasure to watch as a puckish devil butler who’s perpetually sucking on lollipops.
Britnee, I think I’m a Bava newbie compared to the rest of the Swampflix crew. I’ve heard some people say that this one is especially strange and dream-like, but it was the first Bava film I ever saw, so I didn’t have much of a reference for his body of work. How do you think Lisa and the Devil stacks up against his other films?
Britnee: I’ve actually only seen a couple of Bava films, but there was something different about this one. The other films I’m thinking of—Blood and Black Lace (my first Movie of the Month choice!) and Kill, Baby…Kill! in particular—weren’t as dreamlike for sure, but even more so, none had a character as comical as Leandro. Bava’s characters tend to be dark, mysterious, and serious – just not the type of characters that you really connect with. In no way is that a bad thing, because I’ve never watched a Bava movie for the cast. Bava movies are beautiful, bloody treasures about creepy sickos, and I expect nothing more. Leandro caught me off guard because I expected him to be terrifying since he’s basically the Devil. I thought he was going to terrorize Lisa from the moment she ran into him in the antique shop, but he felt like more of a guide instead – guiding Lisa and the audience to and around the castle while making clever comments and sucking on lollipops. He felt more like a witty uncle than Satan.
My absolute favorite thing about Lisa and the Devil are all of the creepy mannequins. The first one we see that continuously reappears is a mannequin of Carlos, the dead lover of the dead woman who Lisa resembles. But we eventually get introduced into a room filled with them! It seems that everyone who’s murdered by this bizarre castle family is transformed into a mannequin. This becomes apparent when Leandro takes Lisa’s measurements after she faints. I was hoping for some satanic ritual where Leandro turns the dead bodies into mannequins before our eyes, but it never goes down that road.
The ending of this film is so unexpected. Just when we think that Lisa is free and leaving Spain, she’s trapped on a plane with corpses and Leandro. This is where she turns into a mannequin and essentially dies. Brandon, what are your thoughts on the ending? Should Lisa have lived or died on the castle grounds instead?
Brandon: I don’t have any strong opinions about whether Lisa should have survived this film un-mannequined, but I do appreciate that she got to escape from the castle grounds after sunrise. At first, the shifting geography of the city and Lisa’s role as a silent observer had me thinking of this movie as a dream-logic story, but her return to the modern world outside the castle helped me re-contextualize everything as fairy tale logic, which is its own distinct thing. The way the castle feels untethered to the modernity, the way its decadent food is used as bait to lure in outsiders, and the way Bava constantly frames its inhabitants through mirror reflections all feel traditional to fairy-tale storytelling – something that didn’t dawn on me until the castle receded back into its own temporal limbo at, well, dawn. I loved seeing Lisa emerge from that fairy tale realm to return to her modern-tourist reality, and by then I was pretty much down for however Bava wanted to wrap it up. Maybe she couldn’t fully escape the castle because she ate the food and drank the wine: a classic fairy tale blunder.
As always with Bava, Lisa and the Devil is consistently beautiful, and parsing out the whats & whys of ~what’s really going on~ in its plot is miles beside the point. What I love most about this film is how much it resembles a standard haunted castle horror movie (maybe with more shapeshifting mannequins than usual) but the longer you grapple with its internal sense of logic the less familiar it feels. The car troubles that lead a foursome of naïve passersby to the film’s haunted castle are clichéd almost to the point of conscious parody, and yet the Technicolor surrealism they encounter inside is something you’ll be hard-pressed to find in any of the Hammer Horror or Corman-Poe movies it recalls. Boomer, what do you think Bava brings to the creepy-castle horror movie as a genre? Is his filmmaking or storytelling style particularly suited for this generically spooky setting in any way?
Boomer: One thing that I thought was notable here is that, when we think about Mario Bava, we mostly think about his earlier directorial work, starting with 1957’s I, Vampiri, then peaking in the early-to-mid 1960s. That’s the era with perennial classics like Black Sunday (1960) and Black Sabbath (1963) as well as movies that we’ve mentioned above: Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Kill, Baby, Kill (1966). After that, we get things like Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1970), which I did not care for, and 1972’s Baron Blood, which I got on VHS many years ago and managed to sit through precisely once. When we talk about Bava, we always talk about him as a horror or giallo director, and although that makes up the bulk of his filmography, we rarely talk about his sword-and-sandals swashbucklers (Hercules in the Haunted World, Erik the Conqueror), his non-giallo crime thrillers (like Danger: Diabolik), or his westerns (The Road to Fort Alamo, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack), and even his non-horror sci-fi The Day the Sky Exploded usually gets lumped in with his horror sci-fi like Planet of the Vampires and Caltiki – The Immortal Monster. But what’s really missing from this list are references to his comedy pictures, like spy spoof Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and sex romp Four Times That Night.
Strangely, I think it’s the last of these that has the most influence on Lisa and the Devil, as it allows for a little levity in the proceedings. I don’t think any actor I’ve seen in a Bava film has been as magnetic and fun as Telly Savalas is here, hamming it up and clearly having a good time. The scene in which he bums a smoke from one of the visitors and then loudly chastises the man for smoking indoors when the blind countess enters the room is an inspired gag, as are his seemingly improvised moments, like when he dances with one of the mannequins. Italian horror movies are littered with scenes in which a person gives exposition to a bound or unconscious figure (Profundo rosso comes to mind), but Savalas manages to turn even this into a lively and comparably electric scene. I’ve often said that comedy and mystery “live” in the same mental space; what is a punchline if not a resolution that makes you laugh? What is the answer to a riddle if not the solution to a mystery? That Savalas is an American amidst these Europeans (most of whom probably learned their lines phonetically or were dubbed, both of which were in fashion at the time) also contributes to a separation between himself and makes him appear much more lifelike and composed. All too frequently, casting is treated as something that’s purely matter-of-fact in films; Dune is about the dangers of trusting a white savior and deconstructing that narrative of white messiahs, but that also means it’s about a white twink savior, so of course the current film adaptation has the whitest and twinkiest of currently working actors. Here, the casting of Savalas contributes to the tone, which I found fascinating.
To circle back on Bava’s storytelling style, the gothic is definitely where his powers reign supreme, and I don’t think that anyone else could have helmed this movie and captured that energy and atmosphere as well as he does here. Comparing this film to the body of work of his two major contemporaries, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, both of them made their own dreamlike haunted house stories within a few years, with Suspiriafor the former and The Psychic for the latter, although the reasons for the house/school being/seeming haunted in each of those films is decidedly different, both from one another and from Lisa and the Devil. Lisa is also a much more successful counterposing of the modern and the gothic than the aforementioned Baron Blood. In that film, a modern (for 1972) American co-ed visits his ancestral home in Austria and resurrects a murderous aristocratic forefather, while Lisa is a modern (for 1974) tourist thrust into a decaying relic of a home inhabited by murderous aristocrats. That they both exist, were released a mere 2.5 years apart, and that Bava wrote both in addition to directing them, says something about his interest in contrasting those two things later in his life, and I do wish we could have seen more of that before he passed away in 1980. Interestingly, although Suspiria is largely considered Argento’s masterpiece and The Psychic was a film I heard discussed in certain circles with frequency, Lisa and the Devil is one I had never heard of before this viewing.
Shudder’s interface describes this as “Bava’s strangest film” (emphasis added), presumably because it boasts a more dreamlike atmosphere than his other horror fare, but I can’t say that I necessarily agree. Although the ending leaves much to the imagination and interpretation, this is a film that makes explicit early on that the narrative takes place in a timeless non-time on a carousel that loops. We first see the animated music box thing in the shop as soon as Lisa wanders away from her tour group, and it immediately captivates her, with the six figures depicted representing the characters that we will meet as well as the fact that, although they may be in motion and constantly moving away from one another, they are nonetheless in a closed loop that ends where it begins. We are also let in on the fact that the ghosts or spirits that reside in the villa are not necessarily bound there, as Lisa meets Carlos for the first time far from the Countess’s home; it’s here that he drops his watch, breaking it in such a way that the clock’s hands do not lie over its face, cluing us in that not only is this a loop, but one in which time has no meaning. Full size mannequins weren’t really a thing until the mid-1750s, when they were made of wicker. Wicker mannequins gave way to those made of wirework, which were supplanted with papier-mâché mannequins, which were themselves replaced with wax figures, which eventually gave way to the plastic mannequins—with which we are mostly familiar—in the 1920s. The figures here appear waxen to me, which immediately pegs them as being outmoded and out of time by half a century in the film’s contemporary 1970s setting.
Lagniappe
Hanna: Besides the gorgeous, lustrous cinematography, I will forever treasure Lisa and the Devil as the only film I know of with a haunted European villa and a haunted plane. I would 1000% watch Lisa descend further into madness in a surreal plane-centric sequel.
Britnee: I thought Leandro was strangely similar to the bald, lollipop sucking detective from the popular 70s detective show Kojak. Well, it turns out that they’re the same person. Telly Savalas is both Leandro and Kojak! Kojak premiered shortly after Lisa and the Devil, so this lollipop habit crossed over between the two as they were most likely being filmed at the same time.
Boomer: Telly Savalas is best remembered as TV’s Kojak or as one of many Blofelds (he’s the one in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, for the record), but for me, he will forever be remembered as the stepfather from the Twilight Zone classic “Living Doll.” He’s also in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour‘s “A Matter of Murder” with Darren McGavin, meaning it’s the only time outside of their respective series that Kojak and Kolchak worked together, so stick that in your back pocket to whip out as trivia for your relatives at Thanksgiving this year.
If this film’s ending was a chiller to you, I also recommend the short story “Showdown,” by Shirley Jackson. Although spooky season as defined by the Gregorian calendar may be officially over, if you believe, you can carry it with you in your heart all year, and this short story, which was previously mentioned in our Lagniappe episode about 2020’s Shirley, remains one of the most chilling ghost stories to ever stir my soul.
Brandon: We cannot let this conversation go by without acknowledging the bizarre existence of 1975’s The House of Exorcism. Since contemporary distributors weren’t sure how to market Bava’s loopy nightmare in America as-is, they re-edited Lisa and the Devil into a cash-in knockoff of Friedkin’s wildly popular The Exorcist, titled The House of Exorcism. In that cut, the haunted castle sequences of Lisa and the Devil are recontextualized as hallucinations Lisa suffers while writhing in a hospital bed, possessed by Satan (there are also some additional nude scenes shoehorned in to up the titillation factor for the drive-in crowd). It’s a bizarre viewing experience if you’ve already seen Lisa and the Devil, simulating the horror of watching a shitty movie you remember being great – like revisiting the original King Kong only to find half the scenes replaced by clips from Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
Bava was rightfully appalled by the production of House of Exorcism, and successfully had his name removed from the project. It’s embarrassing as a standalone film, but I will say there’s a welcome novelty in seeing the horror master’s usual laidback pace properly sped-up in the edited-to-shreds clips it uses from Lisa and the Devil. It’s maybe the closest I’ve ever gotten to understanding disrespectful youngins who “speedwatch” everything at 1.5x.
Upcoming Movies of the Month December: Brandon presents Lifeforce (1985) January: The Top Films of 2021
There are plenty of recent horror gems that indulge in reverent nostalgia for the genre’s VHS era – from Censor to Rent-a-Pal to Beyond the Gates to the aptly-titled anthology series V/H/S. I doubt any could match the detailed authenticity of the found-footage horror anthology WNUF Halloween Special, though, which goes far beyond the tape-warp filters and Tim & Eric quirk humor that usually define the limits of modern horror’s VHS throwbacks. Inspired by the real-life War of the Worlds-style hoax broadcast Ghostwatch, the WNUF Halloween Special carefully simulates a local news broadcast from Halloween Night in 1987, complete with all the commercial breaks, fashion faux pas, and technical flubs you’d expect from that time & setting. Smartly, it sets its spooky news show in a fantasy world where only a couple commercials are miserably repeated every ad break instead of, you know, all of them. It also helps speed along the proceedings (and helps justify its wear-and-tear VCR tracking) by making its found-footage framing device a taped-off-the-TV VHS cassette instead of a live broadcast, allowing us to fast-forward past the more tedious, redundant segments that plague local news shows. More importantly, that POV choice helps underline the creepiness of its on-screen violence by raising uneasy questions about who is holding the remote control.
As its title suggest, WNUF Halloween Special is most satisfying as Halloween Night programming. It doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a last-minute reveal, well after its regular news segments bleed into a special investigative report inside a local haunted house. Until its sub-Geraldo reporter-on-the-street is tormented by murderous ghosts in the third act, the film is more about ~vibes~ than it is about story. There’s an eeriness to the way its supernatural terror (with a horrific history of familial tragedy) is treated as a cutesy human interest story by the news anchor hosts, but that unease is counterbalanced by adorably costumed locals and Halloween-themed commercials Until the film is ready to reveal what’s really going on inside its cursed suburban home, it almost plays like mood-setting background fodder for a Halloween house party; you can get away with chatting over beers with friends while only keeping one eye on the screen and not miss any of its core substance. It’s basically the movie equivalent of one of those Halloween sound-effects cassettes that used to come with spooky-season Happy Meals. I mean that as a compliment, as so much of what it’s trying to achieve is a time-warp nostalgia trip to Halloweens past. Mood & atmosphere are its entire point.
Even though the WNUF Halloween Special delays all progress of its narrative until the last possible minute, it does end up justifying its 1980s setting by actually having something to say about that era beyond how cool its ephemera looks in retrospect. A lot of the more inane, throwaway news segments in the early broadcast stoke the Satanic Panic moral craze of that era with a polite, irresponsible smile. As nostalgic as it can be for the look of 1980s cultural leftovers, it’s also sharply critical of the regressive, reactionary politics lurking under the surface of that microwaved nostalgia. If you’re looking for a purely goofy, reverent VHS nostalgia trip to vintage home video recordings, its recent spiritual successor VHYes wrings out just as many found-footage scares from its own sketch-comedy parodies. The WNUF Halloween Special is more honest about the real-world evils & idiocies of its temporal subject (even if it does spare you from having to watch the same local commercial more than twice). There are plenty of modern novelty horrors with a nostalgic eye for VHS tape warp & tacky 1980s fashion, but they’re rarely this fun to watch with friends or this thoughtful about what horrors really haunted our culture in that era. Plus, thanks to a (currently sold-out) home video release from Camp Motion Pictures it’s also one of the only examples you can actually view on its ideal VHS format.
As a fan of low-budget, over-the-top horror movies, I’m used to art I like being dismissed as frivolous, juvenile, and needlessly grotesque. When it comes to an exquisitely styled wet nightmare from David Cronenberg or a tightly constructed splatstick comedy like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, that kind of snooty dismissal of practical-gore horror as a lower artform can be infuriating. I cannot summon that same defensive fervor for 1986’s no-budget horror comedy Hallucinations, though. It is exactly the frivolous, juvenile grotesquerie that better funded, more thoughtful pictures in its genre get dismissed as outright. Not for nothing, it’s also a delight.
In Hallucinations, amateur gorehounds The Polonia Brothers stage a series of barely-connected gross-out gags in their mother’s suburban home. The gangly twin teens are best known for their surprisingly successful video store novelty Splatter Farm, but this unassuming follow-up gets their lizard-brain appeal across just fine. The plot is a direct echo of the production’s circumstances: three teenage boys are left home alone while their mother’s at work and “hallucinate” various goblins, ghouls, and gore gags. Sometimes, their nightmare vignettes are adorably low-tech, like when a spooky monk figure seems to have traveled back in time into the frame from Matt Farley’s Druid Trilogy. Elsewhere, their low-fi effect is genuinely horrific in its gross-out juvenile spirit, as when one of the brothers mysteriously shits an entire dagger(!!!) while the camera fixates on the resulting blood & viscera that collects in his tighty-whities. It’s alternatingly cute & gnarly with no sense of control or rhythm to that tonal pendulum, and most of its momentum is in the dread of anticipating where it’s going next.
I have no real context for how typical Hallucinations is to the Polonia Brothers oeuvre, as I have yet to see Splatter Farm or any of their other classic-era dispatches from the Pennsylvanian suburbs. This just happened to be the title from their catalog that’s currently free to stream on Tubi. Between the chainsaws, the puke, the loving nods to Herschel Gordon Lewis, and the VHS camcorder patina, I’d say its place in the larger horror canon lands somewhere between Things(’89) & America’s Funniest Home Videos, with all the charm & limitations of both amplified a thousandfold. More importantly, it’s a great opportunity to test the boundaries of your appreciation for practical-gore juvenilia. The film reeks of a teen boy’s bedroom, from the monster doodles drawn in the margins of otherwise untouched school notebooks to the moldy pile of mysteriously “used” athletic socks. If you have any stomach for this kind of for-their-own-sake practical gore showcases, here’s your chance to test out the claim that you have low-brow, undiscerning tastes. In my case, guilty as charged.
Considering its appeal as a vintage novelty horror about the evils of virtual reality, I had no choice but to enjoy The Lawnmower Man. The film opens with a gravely sincere title card warning that virtual reality will be “in widespread use” by “the turn of the millennium”, which despite its “millions of positive uses” could lead to “a new form of mind control.” It’s the exact kind of instantly dated cash-in on fad technology that’s dismissed for being embarrassingly obsolete in the years following in its initial release, but then ages wonderfully as a cultural time capsule of its era as the decades roll on. Listening to the radical computer programmers of The Lawnmower Man pontificate about how virtual reality is “a new electric dimension” that “holds the key to the next evolution of the human mind” is hilariously goofy in hindsight, especially when paired with the cutting-edge CG graphics of its early-90s video game VR. It’s also a great snapshot of how far-out & psychedelic the concept of immersive gaming was at that time, so that the film has just as much value as an anthropological record as it does as an accidental comedy. I had just as much fun revisiting it in the 2020s as a cultural relic as I had watching it as a totally normal cable-broadcast horror flick as a 90s kid. Still, it really pushed the outer limits of how much bullshit I’m willing to put up with to indulge in the precious Outdated Vintage Tech goofballery I love to see in my killer-computer genre movies. It turns out the answer is “way too much”.
Pierce Brosnan stars as a put-upon research scientist for the sinister corporation Virtual Space Industries, working to expand the capabilities of the human mind through experiments in virtual reality. He goes rogue when the company perverts his research to develop weapons instead of developing the human mind, leaving him jobless and bored. From there, The Lawnmower Man turns into a mad scientist story, with Brosnan continuing the VR experiments in his basement on an unwitting human subject. He establishes a Frankenstein-and-monster relationship with his neighborhood’s landscaper, a “born-dumb” “halfwit” played by Jeff Fahey. Luckily, Fahey plays the mentally disabled test subject as more of an overgrown child than a broad-strokes exaggeration of real-life neurodivergent tics; or at least it helped that I watched Will Sasso completely biff the same type of role in Drop Dead Gorgeous the night before. It’s still embarrassing to watch, though, and the only true saving grace is that his humble beginnings as a “poor idiot” don’t last long. The mad scientist’s VR research works way too well, in fact. The titular lawnmower man goes full galaxy-brain at an alarming speed, zooming right past neurotypical adult mental functions to becoming a self-declared “CyberChrist” with godlike powers over all minds and computers in his immediate vicinity. In his early kills as a virtual reality god, he uses telekinesis to launch his lawnmower at his former bullies’ bigoted faces. Later, he obliterates his enemies by pixelating them to death, erasing them from existence as if he were just deleting them from a hard drive. I don’t know that I could describe it any better than Letterboxd user LauraJacoves, who succinctly declared it “Flowers for AlgeTron“.
Of course, the ickiness of Jeff Fahey being asked to play mentally disabled is a huge hurdle to enjoying The Lawnmower Man, and most of the film’s problems are rooted in its depictions of reality-reality. If you can get past that discomfort, though, the movie is a hoot. It’s overloaded with one-of-a-kind vintage CGI sequences that attempt to blow the audience’s mind with the endless possibilities of VR but instead feel like a hokey tour of mid-90s screensavers. In one sequence, two virtual figures engage in literal cybersex then morph into a single dragonfly that soars over matrix-grid mountains. In another, the mad scientist crams physical illustrations of human knowledge directly into his pet project’s brain, which rumbles with brainstorms & brainquakes in stressed-out overload. It’s a true wonder, one that can only be described by the fake 90s slang the youngest member of the cast roadtests while playing the mildly psychedelic video games: “Sketched!” “Dudical!” It’s a shame that The Lawnmower Man couldn’t have been more immersed in its totally dudical virtual world, like a 1990s update to Tron. At the very least, it could have sidestepped the queasiness of the Jeff Fahey performance by sticking to Brosnan’s initial test subjects: chimpanzees. There’s an early sequence where militarized chimps are navigating the mad-sketched VR landscapes while armed with assault rifles as if this were a high-concept first-person shooter. I understand the Big City Tech vs. Rural Bumpkins dynamic the movie was aiming for, but it could’ve easily kept all of its best images if Brosnan had stuck to experimenting on himself and his chimps (minus the cybersex).
What’s really funny is that if The Lawnmower Manhad dropped its titular lawnmower man test subject, it also would’ve sidestepped a lot of unnecessary legal trouble. Horror legend Stephen King successfully sued to have his name removed from the film’s promotional materials and home video products, since it bares essentially no likeness to his original short story (about an occultist landscaper who answers to a new boss, Pan). If the film were instead about Killer CyberChimps or if the mad scientist character had become the killer CyberChrist himself the movie would almost certainly be a more widely beloved cult classic – one with fewer legal fees added to its production & distribution budget and, let’s face it, one with a much better title for a novelty sci-fi horror of its era. As is, it’s a lot of over-the-top vintage fun; you just have to put up with some totally unnecessary bullshit to enjoy it.
By the 1990s it feels as if the official Hall of Fame for iconic horror movie villains had already shut its doors to new inductees. If your movie monster hadn’t already earned one-namer status like Freddy, Jason, Chucky, or Pinhead, it only got exponentially more difficult to get a cloven hoof in the door. A few iconic movie monsters did fight their way into the official Horror Villain Hall of Fame that decade—Ghostface, Candyman, Leprechaun, etc.—but there were countless, blatant attempts to create new haunted-household names that just didn’t survive the Blockbuster Video rental era. You’re unlikely to find a more blatant attempt to create an all-timer movie monster that failed as decisively as Wishmaster. Yes, Wishmaster racked up enough box office and video store revenue to justify three sequels, but its goals were obviously much loftier and unfulfilled. It very obviously wanted its evil djinn antagonist to earn his place among the horror greats who slayed before him, and instead it feels as if the movie has been largely forgotten by horror nerdom . . . unless you’re like me, and happened to catch the film as an easily awed child who was technically too young to see it when it first hit home video.
When I say there’s very blatant reverse-engineering of an iconic horror villain going on here, I’m mostly referring to the staggering amount of Big Name horror talent who put their weight behind the Wishmaster‘s production and promotion. It’s not enough that hall-of-famer horror auteur Wes Craven produced the film, he also lent its VHS box covers the precious “Wes Craven presents . . .” seal of approval. Phantasm‘s Angus Scrimm provided the narration track. Surrealist special effects wizard Screaming Mad George produced oil paintings for its set decoration. The film also boasts a who’s-who of horror icon cameos in minor roles to help legitimize its place in the canon: Robert Englund, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, Ted Raimi, etc. Director Robert Kurtzman cut his teeth on special effects work in the horror industry, and that background shows not only in the film’s wildly imaginative practical gore but also in his Rolodex of horror legends he was able to assemble for the relatively meager production. Given the talent behind it, t’s a film that’s perfectly targeted at horror convention nerdom, but it somehow failed to make the leap from popular video store rental to T-shirt & Funko Pop mainstay in the decades that followed.
If Wishmaster made any obvious missteps in its bid to conjure a brand-new horror icon, it was in nailing its titular djinn’s look. The movie goes out of its way to say, “Forget Barbara Eden, forget Robin Williams”—stopping short of declaring “This ain’t your grandma’s genie in a bottle”—but at least those previous examples of wish-granting pop culture genies had instantly recognizable visual designs. You can’t sell a Wishmaster brand Halloween costume the same way you could market a bloody hockey mask or a striped sweater/fedora combo; there’s just nothing that distinct about his iconography. A leathery ghoul with elongated earlobes and a penchant for ragged cloaks, the Wishmaster himself is just about as generic as movie monsters come. His lethal promise of (extremely literal) wish-fulfillment to his victims is basically just Pinhead without the leather bar sex appeal, an absence that zaps the franchise of its long-term marketability. Luckily, though, while Wishmaster‘s imagination was limited & short-sighted in the design of its titular monster, it was much more actively creative in the djinn’s individual kills.
Wishmaster may not have succeeded as a launching pad for an all-timer horror villain, but it mostly holds up as a dumb-fun practical effects showcase. Its quality and sensibilities are pretty standard for trashy novelty horrors of its era, but its “Careful what you wish for” evil genie set-up allows its imagination to run wild from kill to kill instead of being limited to the generically “scary” visage of the Wishmaster himself. While on his wicked quest to grant three wishes to our Final Girl heroine (a living-single jewel appraiser who charitably coaches a girls’ basketball team in her spare time), the Wishmaster amuses himself by turning the puny peons in his way into skeletons, mannequins, snakes, and piles of cancerous tumors – granting their deliberately misinterpreted desires in exchange for their eternal souls. Some of these lethal wish-fulfillments are rendered in embarrassingly outdated 90s CGI, like when Kane Hodder is transformed into a pane of shattered glass. However, most of them are achieved in wonderfully grotesque, tactile gore, with Kurtzman & company showing off their deep horror industry roots with a genuine zeal for the nastier, practical details of the genre. The film’s tone, villain, and central drama can all feel a little deflated from scene to scene, but its actual kills are often a stomach-turning spectacle you won’t find anywhere else on dusty video store shelves.
Wishmaster makes total sense as a Wes Craven production, since the nightmre logic of the Elm Street kills work the same way as this series’ evil wish-granting surrealism (even if it does fall below Craven’s usual standard of quality). Its lack of a significant cultural footprint also might help make it feel fresh to new fans who missed it in its heyday and are on the hunt for a 90s nostalgia fix. At the very least, it felt refreshing to return to this as a real-deal specimen of the vintage media we only now see spoofed & homaged in goofy-on-purpose throwbacks like Psycho Goreman. The only thing it’s missing is a more distinct, compelling monster to help carve out its place in the Hall of Fame horror canon. Even if I end up indulging in all three of the Wishmaster sequels, I doubt I’d be able to pick the ghoul out of a line-up of generic demons from episodes of Buffy, Xena, or Power Rangers. That’s a pretty significant problem for a movie so clearly invested in weaseling its way into the Horror Hall of Fame, but it doesn’t detract at all from the grotesque novelties of its much more distinct, inventive kills.
Back in the before times, when I had a roommate with whom I could endlessly debate back and forth about what we wanted to watch, we had an informal rule of thumb that either one of us could veto a movie if, upon selecting it from the streaming service du jour, we saw the IFC Midnight logo. By the third year of our domesticity, we had, in equal measure, been both burned and delighted (and fallen somewhere in between) by films that attempted to forewarn of their middling budgets by either their hit-or-miss distributor or the lack of confidence in a theatrical release bespoken by having an NCTA rating instead of one by the MPAA. It’s been a long time since those days, both objectively and subjectively, but the 2021 release We Need to Do Something proves that, even if one has to film under pandemic restrictions, some of our old stalwarts can still get something into the consumer’s home that mostly hits, all while doing more with less.
Melissa (Sierra McCormick) is a teenage girl in a situation that goes beyond unenviable: sheltering in an (admittedly spacious and tastefully decorated) bathroom with her mother Diane (Vinessa Shaw, of Hocus Pocus and Clinicalfame) and father Robert (Pat Healy), as well as precocious younger brother Bobby (John James Cronin). As her desperate composition of text messages to her girlfriend Amy (Lisette Alexis) is continuously interrupted by automated tornado warnings as well as Bobby’s unhelpful recitation of the differences in various cyclone severity rankings, we get insight into the inner workings of this family and their various sins. Diane is clearly having an affair, as she keeps sending inbound calls to voicemail and, when asked about them, says that the calls are coming from “nobody.” Robert’s vice-like grip on his thermos speaks volumes to anyone who’s ever encountered a semi-functioning alcoholic, Melissa’s rebuffing of her mother’s concerned questions about her apparently self-inflicted wrist wound implies a self-harm habit that her parents have ignored, and, finally, Bobby is extremely annoying. Things become extremely dire when not only does an uprooted tree fall in front of the bathroom door, preventing it from opening more than a mere 6-8 inches and thus blocking the family’s egress, but Robert drops Melissa’s phone on the other side of the door while using it as a flashlight to check on this situation. Diane’s phone dies and Robert’s is non-functional in an unexplained way (although it seems like he’s just bad at using it), but Diane lovingly comforts her panicky son, promising that someone will come looking for them soon despite Robert’s agitation and lack of alcohol making the situation even more anxious.
Reviews for this one have been mixed to negative, which I suppose should come as no surprise, based on the track record of non-A24 indie horror lately, like Things Heard and Seenand What Lies Below. Given that the first two auto-fill options when typing the film’s title into Google are “we need to do something ending” and “we need to do something explained,” it’s clear that this is one of those films that has the misfortune to get noticed, but only by the worst kinds of viewers, those raised on a steady diet of C*nemaS*ns (et al) criticism and who need everything to be boiled down, pureed, and fed into their little infant mouths with a rubber-tipped spoon. With that in mind, that the film’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 41% isn’t surprising, but that it’s been a failure (55%) with professional critics as well is a bit of a shock. I’ll freely admit that there was a time when I was more likely to gravitate toward narratives with a more defined structure, but I was never someone who got upset about an open-ended and ambiguous ending. Unfortunately, the internet has really given voice to not only white supremacy, incels, and creeps in general, but also to people who would probably drag Frank R. Stockton into the streets and beat him to death, and also whatever the hell this is. Your brains are full of worms, folks, I’m sorry to say, and I think mine might be too. There’s a seemingly universal cry for more explicit storytelling, but to be honest, the worst parts of the film are the ones that center around the reasons why this is happening.
We get an early clue when Melissa is texting as the clouds roll in, when she types out that she thinks that the impending storm front may have “something to do with—” before her screen glitches. In flashbacks, we learn about her relationship with Amy, starting with how they met. Amy has an arm full of scars, implying that she’s a cutter, but there’s more to it than that. She actually has Cotard syndrome, and although the overlap of Cotard’s and self-harm is pretty rare, it’s not unheard of, especially when co-presenting with schizophrenia. Besides this, Amy also appears to be something of a teenage goth, and a witch to boot; Amy believes she “cured” herself of her Cotard’s by casting a necromancy spell on herself, which didn’t necessarily bring her back from the dead, but does appear to have broken her delusion. However, as the result of an odd series of events—which include the two teen girls’ attempts to get back at a literally out-of-focus bully who spreads rumors and digging up the corpse of the family’s dead dog Spot—they may have actually unleashed something otherworldly that is caused their misfortune. One could rightly argue that this is the least interesting thing about the film, even if it does highlight how one can continue to make a film despite restrictions (the scenes with Amy and Melissa are shot entirely outdoors—on sidewalks, behind buildings, seated on bleachers—so that the movie gets away with having only one bathroom set); these could be cut in their entirety and merely increase the tension and mystery, without opening the can of worms that comes with making two teens’ extremely teenagery “magic” unnecessarily powerful. If every angsty teen who carved a bully’s name into a candle summoned a demonic monster (even bearing in mind the potential presence of something living in Amy’s body post-spell), then a lot more abusers and shitty exes would be dead.
Even with that millstone around the film’s neck, it’s still powerful. I’ll grant that this could be because of some of my own psychological fears and damage contributing to the overall discomfort and anxiety that I felt during the runtime. Just asUnsane ended up as my number three film of 2018 by knowing where all of my fears live, so too does We Need to Do Something effectively and articulately seek out and find all of my weak points with regards to having been raised by an abusive father. There’s a scene late in the film in which Robert, driven mad by days without food (or booze), attempts to force young Bobby, first via psychological manipulation and then using physical strength, through the too-narrow space between door and jamb, and when Diane attempts to “interfere” and save her son from having his skull crushed, Robert turns on her with the kind of ferocity that’s all-too-familiar to anyone who were raised by a father with intense and unpredictable rage issues, especially if you had another parent whose entire life seemed to revolve around running interference to protect their child or children from the full force of that particularly banal evil. With all due respect to Jessica Kiang, who wrote in her review for Variety that Something “fails to capture the actual psychological awfulness of being trapped too near your nearest and dearest, with no end in sight,” this film captures that feeling frighteningly well. This one gets a big recommendation from me, although if paternal abuse of the verbal, psychological, or physical forms is a major trigger for you, you might want to sit it out.
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