horror

A Classic Horror Story (2021)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

C’era una volta, Italy was a world power … in horror. Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Michele Soavi, and of course my beloved Dario Argento were i re of horror cinema. But in the year 2021 … non così tanto. After all, there’s a reason that recent giallo throwbacks like Knife + Heart and Berberian Sound Studio don’t take place in Italy itself (the former) or, if they do, why they are set during the height of Italian horror exportation (the latter). When it comes to domination of the international horror market, Italy is a failed state.  So when Italy exported the recent Una classica storia dell’orrore, I was excited. And although A Classic Horror Story couldn’t live up to that legend, it does live up to its title. 

We meet young lawyer Elisa (Matilda Lutz) as she is preparing to return home to “visit” her parents, but in reality she is leaving her current city to seek to terminate her pregnancy and recuperate afterward with family before heading back to work. To get home, she is carpooling in a small camper with vacationing couple Mark and Sofia (Will Merrick and Yuliia Sobol), unfriendly doctor Riccardo (Peppino Mazzotta), and their driver, the nerdy and talkative Fabrizio (Francesco Russo). It isn’t explicit, but later dialogue between Mark and Fabrizio, in which the latter expresses annoyance with cultural assumptions that northern Italians make about southern Italians (in short, that everyone in the south is involved with the mafia), suggests that they are travelling from the north to the southern coast. Fabrizio plans to film parts of the trip for his YouTube channel, entitled “Friends of Fabrizio,” and asks the four riders to introduce themselves to the camera, saying that it’s important that his audience come to like them, even stocking the camper’s minifridge with beers to act as a social lubricant and get everyone to come out of their shells. Elisa is pressured into taking a sip but immediately falls ill, forcing them crew to stop by the roadside. While Riccardo argues on the phone with his recently estranged wife, a now inebriated Mark forces his way into the driver’s seat, and insists that he drive the rest of the way. The others accept that he cannot be talked out of it, and he does a fairly decent job for a drunk driver, even bonding with Fabrizio along the drive, until he swerves to avoid a dead animal in the road. 

It’s daytime when Elisa awakes, and the camper is now in a vast field, encircled by forest. Mark’s leg is broken and there are no signs of civilization other than a rustic cabin that also occupies the clearing. Riccardo and Fabrizio set out to look for the road, but seemingly trace a great circle instead, ending up back at the site where the camper and cabin are located. Another venture into the forest also results in the discovery of some kind of pagan altar to “three knights,” including pig heads on stakes. After their initial reluctance, the group (minus the still-immobilized Mark) enter the cabin looking for a way to contact or locate help when its door opens with a mysterious creak. Inside, they find ritualisting paintings that relay a local legend that Fabrizio summarizes: the tre cavalieri are Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, pagan deities who blessed local land in exchange for sacrifices, and that these sacrifices involve the ritualistic removal of individual victims’ ears, eyes, and tongue. The only other decorations in the cabin are photos of what appear to be generations of people wearing animalistic masks, or who perhaps have actual animal heads, as the result of their devil’s deal with the Cavalieri. When the clearing is bathed in a saturating red light while ominous sirens sound, Riccardo, Fabrizio, Elisa, and Sofia take shelter in the cabin’s attic, which gives them a bird’s eye view of three masked entities dragging Mark from the camper to the cabin and securing him to the table within and mutilating his eyes before killing him. As if this weren’t horrifying enough, they also discover a child in the attic in a cocoon made of sticks and straw; the group asks for her name, but she is unable to answer, as she has no tongue. 

The group makes another attempt to escape through the woods during the day, discovering a graveyard of abandoned vehicles that imply that this kind of sacrifice has been going on for a very long time. One of the vehicles belonged to the young girl’s family, and she reveals her name, Chiara, to Elisa by recovering her diary from within it. She also implies that they are all in some kind of inescapable purgatory, which is supported by their failure to escape the woods once again; worse, when they return to the clearing, the camper is gone. 

It’s all but impossible to talk about this much further without getting into major spoilers, so here ye be warned: spoilers abound from here on out. 

Elisa wakes in the night to discover that Ciara, Riccardo, and Sofia have been dragged out of the cabin and into the clearing, where a crowd of animal-headed cultists watch with rapt attention as Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso take the older victims’ eyes and ears, respectively. Elisa is rightfully terrified, and when Fabrizio reappears in the cabin saying that they have to escape, she all but collapses into an embrace with him. As they hold one another, however, she can hear a small, tinny voice … as it gives Fabrizio instructions over his earpiece. 

There is no sacrifice or ritual here, at least not in service of harvest gods. All of this has been of Fabrizio’s design, as he seeks to craft a classic horror story. He bemoans the state of contemporary Italian cinema, which consists entirely of insipid comedies and brainless YouTube fluff, and wants to make a new Italian classic. Oddly enough, he doesn’t invoke the names of the three giants of giallo cinema that I cited above, and instead draws on comparisons to extremely American representations of the genre: Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Titanic is also mentioned for good measure). The Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso that he mentioned are actually the supposed founders of the three Mediterranean crime families, tying back to his repeated references to the mafia, including a joke that he told to break the tension and lighten Chiara’s spirits during a particularly grim moment. Not that she actually needed this, of course; she’s still alive, and has been in on it the whole time. 

Fabrizio’s biggest problem is that, for all his supposed learnedness about the nature of horror, he forgot about one of the genre’s most important features: the final girl. After a brief interlude in which we learn that Fabrizio has the support (or at least the indifference) of local politicians and police, Elisa escapes from the wheelchair to which her hands are nailed, and she turns the tables on Fabrizio and Chiara, and she’s kind enough to film the whole thing before escaping into the woods and eventually finding her way to a beach, where horrified onlookers are briefly stunned by the bloody girl in their midst before they immediately take their phones out and begin to film her. 

The first hour or so of A Classic Horror Story isn’t anything to write home about, being more “serviceable” than “good.” But the final 35 minutes more than make up for the water-treading of the first and second acts. What’s also praiseworthy here is how much it fits with what I want to see more of in horror: wherein we are first led to believe that something supernatural is afoot, before we get the important reminder that all evil in this world is done by humans. There’s a genuine eeriness that permeates the proceedings as soon as the travellers find themselves in the clearing, especially with the apparent presence of pagan deities and sacrifices in creepy masks, as well as the strange lighting and the wailing sirens. Unfortunately, those elements suffer from appearing in a film that was released so soon after the higher-budgeted Midsommar, especially given that the source imagery from which both films are borrowing are similar. It’s not identical, of course, but neither are Garden State and Elizabethtown, which didn’t stop contemporary critics from making the same note about the short time between those similar releases. There are very similar scenes of an outdoor cultist feast with our heroine at the head of the table, and it’s even present in the various lodgings, which don’t look alike precisely, but which are both juuust unconventional enough to lend an air of uncanniness to the proceedings. 

I truly didn’t see that final act twist coming, and my opinion of the film took a sharp increase as it drew to a conclusion. It didn’t turn this into the instant horror classic that it was aiming for, and there’s an extension of its metacommentary into the end credits that I have mixed feelings about (it’s kind of dumb but the final moment of self-deprication amused me). That’s the element that I think will age the most poorly, but then again, only time will tell. A Classic Horror Story is streaming now on Netflix. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sound of Violence (2021)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I never want to fault a movie for being too ambitious for its own good; I really do love an overreaching mess.  The low-budget sci-fi body horror Sound of Violence tests the limitations of that love, though.  Maybe it’s because the film doesn’t trust the audience to keep up with its plentiful, competing ideas – explaining its basic premise & the definition of “synesthesia” twice, once in opening voiceover narration and once in a classroom lecture.  Maybe it’s because some of those ideas are inherently more exciting than others (a killer drum machine vs. an unrequited romance between twentysomethings roommates).  Maybe it’s because its budget can’t always match its imagination.  Whatever the reason, Sound of Violence is overflowing with creativity & gusto that it can’t quite mold into something fully coherent or commendable.  You have to squint past its flaws to appreciate what it’s going for, but it’s mostly worth the effort.

An experimental musician (Jasmin Savoy Brown) seeks self-therapy for her hearing loss and childhood PTSD by creating rhythmic beats out of the recorded sounds of violence, quickly turning her into a serial killer.  That violence also triggers synesthesia, causing her to see cosmic swirls of CG colors.  And she’s in love with her oblivious roommate.  And the kills involve increasingly bizarre torture devices that double as musical instruments.  And we spend some time with the cops on her trail.  There’s a lot going on here once you get past the embarrassing cheese of the childhood prologue and opening narration.  The only problem is that the Color Out of Space-style synesthesia swirls and the musical torture devices that trigger them are 1000x more interesting than any of the other narrative quirks competing for attention.  When our trouble antihero is “composing” (i.e. rhythmically torturing victims to death in preposterous contraptions while effectively tripping balls) you feel as if you’d never seen anything like it before.  The budget, premise, and runtime can’t sustain constant hyperviolence, though, so it loses its way filling in the sequences around them with tons of plot & character detail that you have seen before—many, many times over—and the whole picture suffers in that contrast.

Its budget is an obvious, constant limitation throughout, but Sound of Violence has Big Ideas that often push its already heightened premise into full-on delirium.  It’s the kind of mixed bag that’s worth wincing through its momentary misfires, since the payoffs are so uniquely deranged.  At its best, it’s a pure sensory horror, combining intense sound editing and mad-scientist visuals to completely overwhelm your sense of basic reality.  At its worst, it feels like a pilot for a primetime CW soap about a hip, young serial killer’s unconventional way of processing #trauma (a hot topic on television these days).  It begins and ends with its weakest moments, but there’s tons of wild shit in-between that you won’t find anywhere else – from a dominatrix-spanking drumbeat to a tender performance of “Amazing Grace” on a theremin.  It’s glaringly imperfect, but it at least it’s playful & eager.  There are plenty of films that are technically better made but don’t take any risks half this interesting.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Stoker (2013)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Korean provocateur Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, Stoker (2013) — a high-style Gothic melodrama modeled after Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.

00:00 Welcome

03:30 The City of Lost Children (1995)
06:35 The X-Files (1998)
10:40 The Unholy (2021)
13:24 A Perfect Enemy (2021)
14:34 Stowaway (2021)
16:12 The Toll (2021)
19:27 Saint Maud (2021)
21:30 Promising Young Woman (2020)
27:56 Psycho Goreman (2021)
37:17 Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
41:48 Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)
42:33 Pig (2021)
47:15 Hackers (1995)

49:40 Stoker (2013)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Unholy (2021)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I am a man who loves a haunted doll movie, as long as it doesn’t involve acting like the Warrens were anything other than scam artists. You can imagine my disappointment upon the realization that The Unholy, which I thought would center around a possessed toy, turned out to be something different entirely. That disappointment was tempered by the realization that, although I wouldn’t see an ancient doll wielding a knife against Papa Winchester, at least this would be a possession horror, which is another genre that I’m rather fond of. It’s pretty rote and paint-by-numbers, unfortunately, but the ending was sufficiently unconventional that I can’t say it’s the worst of its kind. Spoiler alert, I guess? 

Following a prologue set in 1845, in which a woman is hanged for practicing witchcraft and her soul bound to a doll, we find disgraced journalist Gerald Finn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) travelling to rural Massachusetts to photograph a supposed cattle mutilation. Disappointed but not surprised to find nothing more than a teen prank on a farm adjacent to a church, Finn notices the gnarled tree from the prologue and, within its hollowed base, the “kern” doll. Seizing the opportunity to spruce up his underwhelming story, he breaks the doll’s china head and takes its photo, unwittingly releasing the spirit of the witch. While intoxicated later that night, he’s driven off of the road by the appearance of a local girl, Alice (Cricket Brown), in front of his vehicle. He tails her back to the tree, where she speaks in tongues and collapses. When relaying this to the girl’s uncle, Father William Hagan (William Sadler), both he and Dr. Natalie Gates (Katie Aselton) express surprise; Alice has been both deaf and mute since birth. Soon, however, Alice demonstrates that she can not only speak but has gained the ability to hear, and says that “Mary” is speaking to her, and has healed her. 

This attracts the attention of the local diocese, including Bishop Gyles (Cary Elwes) and Monsignor Delgarde (Diogo Morgado). Before long, Alice garners national and international attention, as she heals a boy who could not walk as well as Father Hagan’s terminal lung cancer, and the small town of Banfield becomes an epicenter of pilgrimages. Also rehabilitated is Finn’s journalistic career, as he’s soon fielding calls from his former editor Monica Slade (Christine Adams), who mere days before was dodging his calls while citing Finn’s previous career-ending lapse of journalistic integrity. When Father Hagan discovers the truth about the “Mary” with whom Alice is communing, and that she is in fact the spirit of the executed nineteenth century witch Mary Elnor, this revelation costs him his life, but puts Finn and Dr. Gates on the right track to stop Mary’s ascension on the night of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. 

There’s a fair amount of water-treading going on in this 99 minute budget horror, which could easily have been trimmed to a tight 80 and gone straight to streaming, perhaps as a surprisingly star-studded episode of Into the Dark or some other horror anthology. First time director Evan Spiliotopoulos has been working in the industry for over two decades now, with some noteworthy (if not praiseworthy) writing credits under his belt: the live action Beauty and the Beast, for instance, as well as The Huntsman: Winter’s War and the 2007 CGI animated Battle for Terra, which I don’t think anyone has ever heard of except for those of us who’ve seen the unskippable trailer on every single Wolverine and the X-Men DVD more times than are reasonable to admit. One wouldn’t think that the man who penned Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning, and Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween Movie would be up for the reinvention of possession horror, and that assumption would be correct. This is a script full of dialogue that you’ve heard a million times before (Slade: “I know you; you would sell your soul for a story.” Finn: “I’m pretty sure I already did.”) as well as some painfully embarrassing attempts at being hip. For instance, when Finn makes a mix for Alice, he cites Tupac as “old school” but mentions cites Billie Eilish as contemporary youth music in the same breath as The Smashing Pumpkins, as if Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness came out in 2019 and not 1995 (sandwiched directly between Me Against the World and All Eyez on Me). It doesn’t strike me as being intentionally ironic, either, as Morgan is a fine actor and could have easily delivered a wry lack of self-awareness if that had been appropriate. 

Of course, that Spiliotopoulos wrote Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure may actually be important to this movie’s ending. After reviewing various plot synopses of the novel from which the film is adapted online, I can’t determine if this is new to the adaptation or within the book, but Mary’s ultimate defeat isn’t the result of an exorcism. Instead, Finn wields his sullied reputation to sow doubt about Alice’s supposed miracles among the mass of congregants who have made their way to Banfield, preventing Mary from sucking up their souls and sealing her infernal pact. Mary, like Tinkerbell, has the “clap if you believe in fairies” limitation that requires faith in order to fuel her return, and by inverting this, Finn and Gates are able to weaken Mary’s hold over Alice and the populace. Of course, since this is a movie, the demands of the modern viewer require that we still be subjected to a show-stopping climax in which Mary appears in the burned flesh and her worshippers flee before her, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the fact that the narrative, which was theretofore about as canonical as a film of this kind could be, took a bit of a left turn into using skepticism as a weapon. It’s still not great, but if you’re stuck with limited options, there are worse possession retreads to spend some time with. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Toll (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

CW/TW: Discussion of rape culture as a source of anxiety and sexual assault. 

Cami (Jordan Hayes) is not having a good day. She’s en route to see her father (James McGowan), and since her flight touches down at 2 AM due to delays, she tells her dad she’ll take a rideshare to his place instead of expecting him to pick her up. Her mood does not improve when her driver, Spencer (Max Topplin), makes awkward attempts at small talk that tend toward the sinister; he reveals that he’s a bowhunter and, when asked what he hunts, includes “humans” on the list as a bad joke. Or is it? Cami’s suspicions are further aroused when Spencer attempts to take a turn onto a rural road that Cami doesn’t recognize, and she is not assuaged to see that the turn is indicated on the rideshare app’s navigation screen. As their path takes them through a deeply wooded area, Spencer’s car suddenly breaks down, stranding the two of them alone . . .

A few years ago, I looked up the reader reviews for Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a book that I read on a flight in 2014, beginning my trip to New York with a good, hearty cry as the plane touched down at JFK. I was surprised by the negative reviews of it, until I dug a little deeper and saw that most of them were centered around the book’s length (178 pages) versus its cost (MSRP of $16.95 at the time). I had picked it up at the airport on my way out, so I knew exactly how much I was getting and at what cost, but it struck me as an immature (and grossly capitalistic) way to evaluate a piece of art. In fairness, during my more economically insecure (and less mature) days, I sometimes was affected by the same kind of thinking: “How can [band] charge full price for an EP that’s only 8 tracks?!” was a thought that passed through my brain more than once, and it fills me with shame to look back on it. It’s a toxic way of thinking, and from time to time I still have to remind myself of this, especially when it comes to movies. When I was a kid, movies (and of course books) were the only way I could escape an unhappy home environment for a little while, and when I was allowed to rent something from our local video store or borrow only one tape from the library, I felt cheated when it ended up being shorter than I expected. The anguish of wasting the one rental I was allowed that month in 1996 on a 45 minute tape of Carrotblanca that contained shorts I had already seen irrevocably changed my interaction with movies for the rest of my life; I still can’t pick up any form of physical media without immediately checking the run-time before I look at anything else. To me, the purported ongoing “bloat” of films to lengths greater than three hours isn’t a turnoff the way that it is for others; if anything, every time I see that a film is 150+ minutes, my interest is piqued like that Stan Kelly image that became a meme. This is decidedly not how Swampflix at large operates, where the “tight ninety” (™ Alli) is the preferred vision. 

All of that is (as is my wont) a needlessly and pointlessly indulgent digression and lead-in to the fact that I loved this 80 minute(!) thriller. Like Lucky, The Toll is a recent thriller that taps into —and unfortunately necessary—anxieties about existing in public spaces as a woman. In this month alone, my best friend expressed her concerns about parking in a pay garage so that we could meet her family downtown to watch the Independence Day fireworks; days later, she mentioned how fraught with danger it would have been for her to take the bus alone instead, and I have seen enough with my own eyes to know that her hesitancy is valid. Even without the benefit of hearing about the day to day horrors from countless first and secondary sources, as a man, I know how other men talk about women when they’re not around, and it’s terrifying. It’s easy to immediately sympathize and empathize with Cami, trapped alone in the woods with a stranger, even before things get “really” scary. 

Where The Toll plays with expectations is in what happens after the breakdown, which coincides with Spencer’s phone glitching and Cami’s dying. The audience watched as Spencer selected Cami specifically from a list of riders and this, along with our knowledge about the general shitshow that is patriarchal entitlement, primes us for where this story is presumably headed. However, once the characters are stuck in the woods, as they discover more and more reasons to mistrust one another, the audience is tipped off that something equally as pernicious but more ethereal is afoot. After several false scares, Cami opts to take off on foot towards the main road and leave Spencer behind, but discovers that there are now warning signs in the road that would prevent a vehicle from passing, warning of a road closure and graffiti’d with small notes and smiley faces that warn of the need to pay a toll of some kind. She soldiers on, and although she stays on the path, she finds herself back where she started, with one hiccup: she started walking away from Spencer back towards the main road from which they came, but she approaches him from the front, as if coming from deeper in the dark, dark woods. Spencer makes his own attempt to leave, but is likewise thwarted; in a beautifully underlit scene, he leaves the road altogether and sets off into the woods at a perpendicular angle, only to re-emerge from the forest onto the road from the opposite side. 

Other messages begin to appear as well. A warning about “The Toll Man” appears, written in the dust on Spencer’s back windshield. Cami discovers a cache of photos of herself in Spencer’s car, leading her to accuse him of stalking her and orchestrating the evening’s events, while he in turn is dumbfounded by this turn of events and accuses her of planting them; while neither are looking, the pictures disappear as suddenly as they appeared, as if they never existed in the first place. Assuming that someone in the woods is harassing them (The Strangers is mentioned), the two prepare to defend themselves, but they are eventually discovered by an older woman (Canadian treasure Rosemary Dunsmore) on a tractor, who offers to help them. When they relate their experiences, however, she realizes with horror that she will be unable to assist. “It’s been a long time; I’d forgot,” she says. “I’m not where you are. We’re looking at each other like we’re close, but you’re someplace else. You’re in his place. The Toll Man.” Like a malevolent fae, The Toll Man traps wayward travelers who have the scent of death if they should be unlucky enough to find their way onto his road; someone with suicidal ideation or bound for an accident is then diverted into his realm so that he can extract his toll: death. 

This has the potential to be more goofy than scary (The Bye Bye Man, anyone?), but in spite of its possible pitfalls, this one manages to work. I’ve recently been watching The X-Files for the first time, and although I know it’s a huge part of the show’s iconic imagery, every time Mulder and Scully go into the woods with their giant flashlights that are all-but-unnecessary simply because of how brightly backlit the trees are, I have to stifle a laugh (while watching the pilot, I turned to my best friend and almost shouted “Is that supposed to be moonlight?!”). That bled into the pop culture landscape a lot, and I’m pleased to say that the darkness that surrounds Spencer and Cami definitively looks like real, arboreal darkness. Their flashlight barely illuminates the first row of trees closest to them, and beyond that lies nothing but dread, inky blackness. The creepiness of it lingers, even after the Toll Man shepherds them away from the car and toward an isolated house, which contains other illusions that aim to warp their perceptions of reality, including images of Spencer’s dead mother (Jana Peck), who taunts her son with the secrets that she took with her to the grave when she killed herself. When the duo is separated, Cami is also confronted with images from her past; a canopy bed appears in the woods, where a younger version of herself is terrified after being assaulted by an “upstanding” young man (Thomas L. Colford); present-day Cami comforts her, but past Cami is in her head, and knows that although the wound is gone, the scar persists. A similar blending of indoor past and outdoor present was part of the visual language in The Ritual, and I loved it there as I do here. There’s something deeply uncanny about it, and as Cami is hounded by visions of the people who were present in the aftermath of her assault (very similarly to Lucky, although no one sings here), the impossible largeness of the darkness just beyond the treeline merges with the impossibly large weight of her past, while also descending on her in a way that can only be described as claustrophobic. 

The ending comes at the viewer fast, and I won’t spoil the conclusion here other than to say that the circle is fully closed. What we learn in those final ten minutes paints a new picture of everything that came before it, and this is the first film of 2021 that has made me feel like I’m already ready to rewatch it and see what I missed the first time. Although it feels like a Shudder release, it’s currently only available for rental or purchase, but when it comes to streaming, make sure to check it out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #139 of The Swampflix Podcast: Daughters of Darkness (1971) & Lesbian Vampires

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Welcome to Episode #139 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four stylish, retro horrors about lesbian vampires, starting with Daughters of Darkness (1971).

00:00 Welcome

03:00 Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)
04:20 Pig (2021)
08:20 Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
10:10 Zola (2021)
15:00 Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)
22:00 The Night of the Hunter (1995)
29:30 Disclosure (1994)
33:22 French Exit (2021)

39:50 Daughters of Darkness (1971)
1:00:35 The Vampire Lovers (1970)
1:11:42 Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
1:24:55 The Hunger (1983)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Cube³ – Cube Cubed

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the sequel & prequel to the high-concept Canuxploitation sci-fi thriller Cube (1997): Cube² – Hypercube (2002) & Cube Zero (2004).

00:00 Welcome

05:35 A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)
25:55 Black Widow (2021)
28:55 Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)
34:44 Karnan (2021)

37:30 Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)
57:50 Cube Zero (2004)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Episode #138 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Empty Man (2020) & Belated 2020 Discoveries

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

Welcome to Episode #138 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss the most noteworthy movies from last year they‘ve seen in the six months since they made their respective Top Films of 2020 lists, with a particular focus on the mainstream horror oddity The Empty Man. Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

01:50 Good on Paper (2021)
04:30 Mother’s Day (2016)
08:30 The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
09:20 Nobody (2021)
15:40 The Summer of Soul (2021)
22:20 Coyote Ugly (2000)
28:55 The Columnist (2021)

36:15 The Empty Man (2020)
1:04:20 Pinocchio (2020)
1:21:24 Ham on Rye (2020)
1:39:10 Babyteeth (2020)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Sator (2021)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There’s a thin line between dread & tedium and, unfortunately, the cheaper your film is the likelier it is you’re on the wrong side of it.  It used to be that horror movies set on spaceships post-Alien would struggle most with that conundrum, as they often failed to match the exquisite tension of their inspo.  Now we’re officially in an era where The Witch inspires that same mediocrity in bulk, just in a woodland setting.  It took a lot of decent-to-great movies to get here (Hagazussa, Relic, The Other Lamb, The Ritual, Apostle, The Head Hunter, It Comes at Night, etc.) but we’re finally at the point where we simply just don’t need any more low-budget ~atmospheric~ horrors set in the woods, at least not for a while.  I can pinpoint the exact moment that line was crossed too.  It’s in the opening credits of Sator, which repurposes the final shot of The Witch as an early moodsetter instead of a last-second cathartic release.  It’s literally picking up where The Witch left off, highlighting its diminished returns before it ever has a chance to stand out on its own.  We’re done with the woods for a while, folks.  Time to pack up the tents.

To be honest, even without the shadow of The Witch lingering across woodland-horror cinema at large, you’d have to dial the clock back to even before The Blair Witch Project for Sator feel fresh or exciting in any significant way.  Its most attention-grabbing details are in the circumstances of its production: a no-budget family affair written, shot, directed, produced, edited and scored by Jordan Graham.  You can tell this is a deeply personal project for Graham, not only because of his obsessively auteurist control over the entire production but also because of his casting his own grandmother, June Peterson, in a central role.  Like the grandmother figure in Trey Edward Shults’s similarly underfunded Krisha, Peterson appears to be suffering enough from dementia that she’s not fully aware she’s participating in a movie production at all.  The film is structured around several trips to grandma’s house in the woods, wherein Peterson pontificates about a local demon figure named Sator who possesses the bodies of the spiritually weak.  She discovered the existence of this demon through automatic-writing exercises, which provide most of the loopy, vaguely menacing atmosphere the film can muster through her mumbled monologues.  The film that Graham builds around that automatic-writing core is some pretty basic Indie Horror 101 material.  Grainy black & white tours of a candlelit cottage are crammed into a boxed-in aspect ratio, scored with cassette tapes of Peterson’s audio journals and occasionally interrupted by the mythical Sator – a cloaked humanoid figure in a deer skull mask.  As much as I admire the scrappy, D.I.Y. feel of its production values, I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve taken that exact haunted-cottage tour a dozen too many times in the past couple decades, if not just in the past five years.

My overriding thought throughout Sator was “Do I want a snack or am I bored?”  I ate some Ritz crackers, and the feeling did not go away.  In the abstract, I’m in love with the idea of automatic-writing exercises leading directly to demonic possession; I spent too many years chasing down a bachelor’s degree in Poetry for that premise not to appeal to me.  The actual text of those automatic-writing journals never feels specific enough in its mythology or iconography to land with any real impact, though.  They mostly just recall Bray Wyatt’s pro wrestling sermons when his in-ring character was Insufferable True Detective Fan.  They drone on with no clear sense of purpose, and the visual iconography that accompanies them never amounts to anything novel or substantial.  It’s likely not fair to single out this particular example of post-Witch woodlands horror as the subgenre’s tipping point, but hey, this is the one that dares to repeat the final image of Robert Eggers’s A24 Horror linchpin in its opening minutes.  Once that comparison is invited, it’s impossible not to look back to the steadily diminishing returns of the genre in the years since Black Phillip’s enticing offer of the taste of butter & a pretty dress and to long for the days when that kind of whispered oration felt goosebumps-fresh.

-Brandon Ledet

Skull: The Mask (2021)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

My biggest cinematic disappointment so far this year was the vulgar children’s horror comedy Psycho Goreman.  The novelty of an R-rated version of Power Rangers is something I would have drooled over as a shock comedy and monster movies obsessed ten-year-old, but the film’s So Random! sense of humor was too poisonously self-aware to land with me in my much more cynical thirties.  The practical gore effects of its various intergalactic monsters were fantastic, though, and I was frustrated that they weren’t deployed for a more sincere purpose.  I mention this because the Brazilian splatter horror Skull: The Mask is much closer to what I wanted out of Psycho Goreman: 80s-metal album cover badassery that keeps its winking-at-the-camera self-amusement to a respectable minimum. And yet I enjoyed it even less than PG.  I can’t say it was a bigger disappointment, since Skull: The Mask wasn’t hyped up nearly as much among friends & critics as one of the year’s shiniest genre gems, but it let me down in a very similar way: great effects wasted on a frivolous purpose.

To be fair, Skull: The Mask does at least take aim at a worthwhile political target (instead of just mining our nearly empty well of 90s retro nostalgia like Psycho Goreman).  It’s a film about colonialist museums claiming ownership over Indigenous people’s artifacts for the sake of their cultural prestige, removing them from their original, spiritual purpose.  In this case, that artifact is the titular mask: a ritualistic object that destroys the body of its wearer then transforms it into a vessel for a muscular, blood-spewing demon.  All of the kills are aces, featuring victims’ faces macheted in half, hearts ripped from their chests, intestines wrapped around their throats, and blood pouring from their eyes in impossible geysers of gore.  There just isn’t enough substance to the narrative tissue between those gross-outs to make the film feel worthwhile.  Even the initial excitement of watching colonialist museum collectors get their cosmic comeuppance fades as the film devolves into a go-nowhere police procedural investigating the grisly deaths as if their cause was a mystery.

There is so much I love about Skull: The Mask, at least in the abstract: galactic psychedelia, black magic rituals, lesbian goths, pro wrestling body slams, heavy metal gore, etc.  It’s a shame the movie is far too cheap and unfocused to stand out as anything exceptional despite all those individually badass details. It’s mostly recommendable as a practical effects showcase not as a Movie, which is starting to become a familiar kind of disappointment after recent genre titles on its budget level like Terrifier, The Void, and Aquaslash.  I wish I could promote it as a vital antidote to the irony-poisoned ROFLMFAO humor of Psycho Goreman, but it trips over itself in other ways despite that welcome tonal adjustment.  Psycho Goreman at least has an appeal as a primer for lifelong horror fandom among the kids who’ll manage to sneak it past their parents’ censorship filters.  By contrast, Skull: The Mask is only useful for its eventual YouTube gore reel, which will save you at least 90min of frustrating tedium.

-Brandon Ledet