horror

Run (2020)

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As we wind down toward the end of the year, it’s time for my annual “watch everything I can get my hands on because if I don’t I won’t be able to make a top ten list” tradition. It’s not a hot take to say that this has been a terrible year, and a lack of major studio flicks means there are going to be a lot more straight-to-streaming releases that end up making the rounds this year. Run is definitely one of these, as it’s a straight-to-Hulu movie that feels bigger than it really is.

Chloe (Kiera Allen) is seventeen and wheelchair bound, in addition to a host of other physical maladies that include but are not limited to diabetes, asthma, and arrhythmia. She is cared for by her doting mother Diane (Sarah Paulson), a substitute teacher, although she is excited about the possibility of leaving home to attend the University of Washington and anxiously awaits her acceptance letter. Chloe’s life is one of structure and routine devoted to academic study, building a 3D printer, and a regimen of medications and physical therapy. Life is sweet until Chloe, while trying to sneak some chocolates, discovers a prescription of her mother’s and catches Diane in a lie that unravels the seemingly solid world in which Chloe lives.

It’s easy to dismiss Run, and honestly, I’m trying my best not to dismiss it myself. It’s a deceptively slight movie, with a premise that’s worn a little thin. It’s not much of a stretch to assume that the film was inspired by the real life story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother Dee Dee, who came to national attention after the latter’s murder in 2015. It’s been a hot topic several times already: in HBO’s Mommy Dead and Dearest documentary in 2017, Investigation Discovery’s 2018 doc Gypsy’s Revenge, and fictionalized in 2019 in both the film Love You to Death starring Marcia Gay Harden as Dee Dee and the Hulu series The Act starring Patricia Arquette as the same. Run was initially conceived in 2018 as well, and began production that same year, with the intent to be released earlier this year to coincide with Mother’s Day (a deliciously macabre idea) before being pushed back due to (what else?) COVID-19.

But here and now, appearing with little fanfare a week before Thanksgiving in the twilight of the year, it feels a little tired and dated, especially in a year that already gave us powerhouse performances from Paulson in the gratuitous and wholly unnecessary Ryan Murphy joint Ratched as well as (I assume) Mrs. America. Run succeeds not on the strength of Paulson’s performance, although she’s as reliable as ever, but on that of relative newcomer Kiera Allen, along with deft direction by Aneesh Chaganty and some beautiful cinematography from Hillary Spera. With those elements removed, add a gauzy filter, and this becomes virtually indistinguishable from a Lifetime Original starring Tori Spelling as the lead in A Mother’s Folly or My Only Sin Was Too Much Love.

All that separates it from that fate is Allen’s Chloe, who projects a kind of strength that makes her a capable successor to James Caan’s Paul Sheldon in a modern Munchausen by Misery. That’s not a stretch either—it’s in the text of the film, as the automated recording that Chloe reaches when dialing 411 asks her to designate a city and state when she calls, and gives the example of Derry, Maine*; still later, she enlists the assistance of a pharmacist who is named only as “Kathy” in the film but is credited in full as “Kathy Bates,” per IMDb. And there’s a lot of Misery mixed up in here, down to the entrapped individual learning the shocking truth about their captor from a box of old photos and newspaper clippings. This, too, contributes to the general “Haven’t I seen this all before?” malaise of the film, although to his credit, Chaganty’s camera is more dynamic than Rob Reiner’s was; for its great performances, Misery is shot like a stage play, while there are many stand-out sequences in Run, but there’s something just a little … silly about them. I don’t want to spoil anything by going into why, but the final act reaches moments of complete absurdity among other scenes that are more grounded and thus more thrilling.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some of the ways that the film wrings drama out of the simplest of things: getting the mail, trying to Google something, hanging up the phone before getting a charge for calling 411, and even phoning a stranger. It’s also fully a 2020 film, as it revolves around being trapped inside and losing out on important milestones because of the selfishness of another person, as well as the fact that our lead’s two biggest heroes are a frontline healthcare worker and a postman (thanks for saving democracy, USPS!). But in the end, it doesn’t transport you anywhere or really serve as a new version of this story that we’ve seen several times now. It’s fine.

*Yes, I am aware that Misery does not take place in Derry or even New England, as it takes place in Colorado. Don’t @ me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #121 of The Swampflix Podcast: The Hunt (2020) & 2020 Election Cycle Satires

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Welcome to Episode #121 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss three recent satires that lampooned the 2020 presidential election cycle: The Hunt (2020), Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020), and Mister America (2019).  Enjoy!

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

Tito (2020)

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It’s difficult to describe Tito without overselling what it can deliver.  Seeking a middle ground between sensory-assaultive arthouse horror and broad stoner comedy, it’s often more of a genre experiment than a proper narrative film.  I almost want to describe it as the unlikely overlap between Josephine Decker and Cheech & Chong but, again, that’s probably overselling it.  If a no-budget genre mash-up that reeks of bong water & brimstone is the kind of thing you’d usually seek out (think Buzzard, Woodshock, Mangoshake, Ladyworld, etc.), then you’re just as much of a doomed soul as I am and will find plenty seeds & stems to catch buzz off of here.  However, anyone expecting the typical payoffs of either a typical arthouse horror or stoner buddy comedy will have their patience tested early & often.  Tito is a lot more interested in mood & process than it is in delivering the goods.

First-time director Grace Glowicki casts herself as an impossibly timid geek (the titular Tito) who’s drawn out of his cowardly seclusion by an idiot stoner who barges into his life uninvited (credited only as The Friendly Neighbor).  Meanwhile, vaguely menacing demons attempt to invade the frame but never arrive, sending Tito into constant panic attacks over a danger that no one else perceives.  That central performance is consistently entertaining, grotesque, and frustrating throughout, like babysitting Crispin Glover while he suffers a traumatically bad acid trip.  The genderfuckery of the casting does little to inform the text; Glowicki merely allows herself the space to improv the character quirks of a pathetic worm of a man.  It’s nearly the most off-putting performance I’ve seen all year, bested only by the grotesque child-creature in Vivarium.  The stoner neighbor is no more endearing, stomping through Tito’s hermetic home space as an overgrown, hedonistic toddler.  Their relationship is the sour, curdled leftovers of a typical stoner-buddy comedy dynamic: two mismatched losers who only become more obnoxious & mutually destructive the more joints they torch.  The demons don’t do much to break up that nauseating dynamic.  They don’t do much of anything at all.  They’re just around, unseen & in-wait.

If I’m being hard on the character traits of Tito in particular, it’s because I see too much of my own worst tendencies in his grotesque cowardice.  Watching the hunched over, perpetually petrified loser jump at every sudden noise and flinch at every microscopic sign of aggression from other men is too familiar to this socially anxious Indoor Kid, although absurdly exaggerated.  By the time Tito was cowering behind the one person he knows at a crowded bar, afraid to make eye contact with any of the strangers (or potential demons) that surrounds him, I found myself laughing just as much at my own social awkwardness as the off-putting quirks that are particular to the performance onscreen.  If Glowicki taps into anything solidly recognizable here, it’s the way that exaggerated social anxiety is reflected in both her performance and in the sensory overload of her editing-room tinkering.  Every one of Tito’s paranoid-stoner mood swings is married to a violent swerve in the soundtrack, so that the audience is equally tormented & unnerved even though nothing especially horrific is happening to him (besides being pressured to hang out with the world’s most annoying neighbor).  The music is Tito’s mood ring, distinguishing his content, idle cowering from his terrified, pants-shitting cowering, which would look pretty similar without that aural assist.

Beyond the film’s grotesque reflection of my own social awkwardness & cowardly response to macho aggression, I most appreciated Tito for its weird-for-weird’s sake pranks on the audience.  Watching Glowkicki puke up a flood of breakfast cereal, fall under the hypnosis of CGI porn simulators, and furiously blow a bright red whistle while her character’s stoner-bro foil shouts punishingly repetitive variations of “Dude!”, “Man!”, and “Brother!” was more than enough to justify the 70min time investment, even if just barely.  I can’t promise that most people will walk away from the experience feeling that same satisfied curiosity (or even promise that most people will make it to the end credits).  Again, I really am trying my best to not oversell it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Berlin Bride (2020)

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The no-budget surrealist oddity The Berlin Bride drifts untethered to a proper context or place in time. It’s clearly styled to look & feel like a 1970s Euro horror (or a 1970s lifestyle magazine, depending on the scene), but its cheap digital patina plants it firmly in the modern age in a way that betrays that intent. A 70-minute oddity uploaded directly to Amazon Prime by director Michael Bartlett himself, the film is letterboxed by CG red velvet theater curtains to fill a widescreen frame – something you’re much more likely to see in an illegal YouTube rip of vintage VHS schlock than in a new, officially sanctioned release. Anytime you manage to forget that this is a modern picture and not an authentic lost 1970s oddity, a flash of surreally cheap cut-‘n-paste CGI interrupts the illusion and jolts you back to a modern context. Mentally vacillating between those two disparate timeframes is a uniquely bizarre experience, one that only enhances the film’s dreamlike, absurdist tone.

The titular Berlin Bride is, in fact, a mannequin. Two reclusive 1980s Berliners split ownership over a mysterious shopping mall mannequin that’s discovered abandoned in a public park. One of the men uses her right arm to replace his own amputated one. The other treats the rest of her as his newlywed bride. Both relationships provide their challenges: the amputated lady-arm becomes sentient & nocturnally impulsive, while the “husband” of the rest of the mannequin becomes increasingly obsessive over that missing appendage’s absence from his newlywed home. The resulting clashes that resolve this tension are surprisingly violent, pushing the film into throwback Euro horror territory. Yet, for the most part The Berlin Bride feels like a bedtime fairy tale – stuck halfway between the understated surrealism of a Jan Švankmajer or a Michel Gondry picture, depending on the temporal textures of the moment. It’s a distractingly cheap, uneven film, but it’s also an endlessly fascinating one.

It’s tempting to apply some metaphorical reading to the modern fairy tale premise that unfolds here, maybe something about the possessiveness of masculine sexuality or the horror genre’s longstanding relationship with dismembered women. Neither of those thematic pathways are as satisfying as treating The Berlin Bride as a weird-for-weird’s-sake oddity, though. It’s unignorably contemporary to the modern digital self-publishing landscape, but it feels like it’s time traveled here from a previous era when movies could just be Weird As Fuck without having to justify that indulgence by Saying Something. Its closest modern equivalent is a no-budget, backyard version of Peter Strickland’s work, which I mean as a high compliment. Otherwise, I don’t really know what to do with the temporally dislodged fairy tale violence presented here, except to say that it pleased me.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wolf House (2020)

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My single-favorite film discovery so far this year is James Bidgood’s D.I.Y. porno reverie Pink Narcissus, a transcendent fantasy piece filmed almost entirely inside the beefcake photographer’s own NYC apartment. I like to think I’d have fallen in love with the gorgeous, hand-built artifice of that film in any context, but it struck a particular chord in the earliest months of the COVID pandemic when most of us were still adhering to strict social-distancing measures. The idea that you could construct your own beautiful dreamworld inside your cramped living space with just the right amount of artistic (and prurient) self-motivation was genuinely inspiring to me back in April, when the reality of how confined the next year of my life was going to be just started to sink in. And now, a few hellish months later, I’ve been confronted with Pink Narcissus‘s spiritual opposite in The Wolf House: a relentlessly grim, ugly film made under similarly confined domestic circumstances. Instead of reaching for artistic transcendence or beauty, it’s a D.I.Y. fantasy experiment that pummels you into the dirt with the communal cruelty, betrayal, oppression of the world as it really is: a confusing, alienating nightmare that only worsens the longer you survive it.

An experiment in stop-motion animation, The Wolf House filters historic atrocities committed by exiled-Nazi communes in Chile through a loose, haunting fairy tale narrative. It’s traumatizingly bleak, often difficult to comprehend, and I think I loved it. Contextualized as a “lost” classroom propaganda film warning locals against stepping on the commune’s toes (and commune members from attempting to escape its bounds), its paper-thin story is a simple tongue-in-cheek allegory about acceptable behavior in & around an exiled-Nazi stronghold. The Colony proudly reports itself to be an “isolated and pure” oasis in an otherwise menacing South American locale, and disparages a fictional young girl who dared to dream & play for her own amusement instead of working tirelessly to maintain The Colony’s glory. Thinking herself above subservience to The Colony, she runs away to play house with her disgusting pig children in a nearby shack, gradually starving to death without the sweet subsistence provided by the commune’s main export: honey. Meanwhile, wolves lurk outside the family’s door, waiting to devour them as soon as they step outside. This allegory is rooted in specific, real-life atrocities committed by German-Chilean communes like Colonia Dignidad, which can be difficult to fully digest without a post-film Wikipedia deep dive. However, it’s all anchored to two universally familiar cultural touchstones that cut through the confusion: Brothers Grimm fairy tales and the fact that Nazis are subhuman scum.

The Wolf House is much more immediately impressive in its visual craft than it is in its narrative. It recalls a cruder, less dignified version of Jann Švankmajer’s work, as if he were a reclusive serial killer rather than an erudite who went to art school for puppetry. Most of the film is quarantined in the pig-family’s dingy shack, with characters represented both as two-dimensional figures painted onto the walls & furniture (think Adventure Time‘s Prismo) and as barely-functional paper mâché grotesqueries. The entire three-dimensional space of their decrepit home is treated as a canvas, with objects being destroyed, painted over, reconfigured, and mutated in an ever-shifting, impossibly ugly nightmare. Every crudely animated movement within that hellish space is matched to an even more hideous sound cue: pig snorts, wolf breaths, wet smacks of paper mâché bodies breaking down & reforming, etc. It’s a relentlessly grotesque display, one that fully conveys the hideous evils of its fairy tale allegory’s real-life parallels even if you aren’t familiar with that particular pocket of fascism history. The Wolf House is one of those D.I.Y. art objects that feels more haunted than inspired, which is understandable considering the cultural history it’s attempting to process. It’s the ugly mirrorworld reflection of Pink Narcissus: a contained, domestic fantasy realm driven by pain instead of pleasure, grief instead of sensual exuberance. Its vision of domestic isolation is completely fucked, something that resonates deeply right now despite the film’s more alienating allegorical details.

-Brandon Ledet